American Christians Do Not Get Any "Home Field Advantage."

The action of the Israeli parliament overnight has me very disturbed.  I think it is almost a guarantee of injustice any time the courts of a country are under the control of the head of state.  Here in this country I have the same fear if Donald Trump is ever president again.  Of course, I happen to think people like Mr. Trump, Mr. Netanyahu, and Osama bin Laden are cut from the same cloth. Any type of nationalism seems morally heinous to me.  I do not think there is a bit of difference between Christian nationalism, Jewish nationalism, and Islamic nationalism,  If you put any religious group's name in front of the word Republic, I think that is a recipe for violence and moral trouble.  

Many American Christians think we have some sort of "home field advantage."  It cannot happen here, we think.  We think that somehow we are better.  People want to say our Constitution will protect us from something like that happening here.  I do not believe it.

American Christians for the past two decades have had a fear of Islamic terrorism, seemingly blind to Christian terrorism.  I do not see any moral difference between a tragedy like 9/11, and incidents where Christians have blown up abortion clinics.  In fact, the only difference between 9/11 and 1/6, morally, to me seems to which square on a calendar they occupy.

We  think we are better than we are.  I heard Lynne Cheney say one time that the US Constitution was the most important document ever written.  I thought at the time that was blasphemous.  And the Constitution itself is, in my view, flawed beyond repair.  I think the Constitution was the seed-ground for the institutional racism we are now grappling with.  When the disease permeates the cure people appeal to, getting better cannot happen.

Any Constitution which says that certain people are only 3/5 human is not the product of moral people. The people that were oppressed by those who led this country from the beginning were created in the image of God just as much as they were. 

A republic is not a moral thing. You cannot have a republic without some mechanism for minority rule. I have taught Plato and his idea of a republic was that a society be governed by an educated ruling elite. Minority rule is baked into the cake. Evidently the people who do not want a so-called tyranny of the majority are just fine with a tyranny of the minority.

So they set up a system where the minority has more power than the majority. That is unjust. That is morally wrong. I'm not saying minorities should not have rights and that the rights should not be protected. I'm saying that no time ever should a minority be able to impose its will on a majority.

At this point let me say too that there are times when a majority is wrong. So there should be some protection for minorities. But you have to frame it in terms of protecting rights. It is not about imposing anything. If you believe abortion is wrong, if you believe same-sex marriage is wrong, then don't do those things. But permitting them legally is not anyone imposing anything on you. If you prohibit them you are the one imposing your view on others. I remember when she was running for president, Elizabeth Warren had a guy at a Town Hall say he believed marriage was for one woman and one man. I loved her response. "Good for you. All you have to do is make sure you are only married to one woman."

I have said this before, and people don't like it. But it is nonetheless true. The founders of this country were not good people. They were evil people. If they had been good, there would have never been slavery. If they had been good, indigenous people would have never been forced off their land. If they had been good we would have had a system of one person, one vote. And women and people of color would have had the right to vote from the very beginning.

And let me add, you cannot say that this stuff takes time. The idea that we are working toward equality is a heinous idea. If you accept the idea that it just took time for gender and racial equality, that is hideous. Dr. King chastised the white Christian ministers who tried to say they were with him but these things take time. That is not an acceptable answer. If you think these things take time then you believe there is some ontological reason why white men who owned property deserved to go to the front of the line. Saying this takes time is a form of white supremacy.

There is no "home field advantage."  American Christians pretend there is one.  But that is patent nonsense.

Let's admit it once for all time.  There is no moral difference which allows our country to claim a moral high ground.  We cannot chide China for denying the rights of women, while our runaway Court is doing the same thing here.  We cannot say the Nazis were wrong to put Jews in concentration camps when, at the same time, we were doing the same thing to people of Asian heritage here. We cannot complain about how Uganda treats the LGBTQ community when people want to take freedoms from that community here.

We cannot say the racism of Nazism was wrong when our own founding document treated people of color here as 3/5 human.  We cannot say we are better than the people who have forced minorities into ghettos when we do that here.  There is not really any moral difference between the way people are forced into small spaces in Gaza and what we did here with indigenous people.  

I do not think we can say we are better than Nazi Germany or pre-apartheid South Africa when we have the same racist foundations here.  The imaginary "home field advantage" has lulled Americans into thinking we are exceptional.  But American exceptionalism is an idolatrous heresy.  History shows there is not significant difference between us/US and the most oppressive of regimes.

Pearl Harbor was tragic.  But 80 times as many people died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Can a moral person really claim one American life is as valuable as 80 Japanese lives?  The Holocaust was demonic and damnable, but we forget that the westward expansion of this country led to the death of millions of indigenous persons here--I have read it is estimated to be 100 million.  I think this is the national form of a log in our own eye versus a speck in someone else's eye.

One time they asked Hitler where he got his ideas and he said from the United States and how they treated the indigenous people and the slaves. We are deceived if we think our society is any more morally just than Germany in the 1930s or South Africa before the end of apartheid. The United States is no better than that, and while I'm at it, neither is Israel.

There is no "home field advantage."

Why Critical Race Theory Matters

I was astounded the other day to see that in some states, of which Florida is the preeminent example, there is an attempt to totally whitewash history--pun intended--and eliminate discussion of race.

The specific example which appalled me was a comment from someone in the DeSantis administration in Florida who suggested Florida school children be taught about the Montgomery bus boycott without any mention of race. That is impossible to do! The entire reason for the boycott had to do with race! I thought--what on earth are they thinking?

In the first place, Critical Race Theory (CRT), which conservatives are legislating not be taught in K-12 schools, is already NOT TAUGHT in K-12 schools.  It is taught in law schools, and in some theological schools.  I remember the first time I learned about it was as a seminarian studying Christian Social Ethics under Dr. Wilmer Cooper at the Earlham School of Religion in 1983. 

In general, my impression is that those who think CRT is being taught to schoolchildren do not really even understand what CRT is.  They complain that they don't want white children to feel a lot of guilt.  I happen to think that is short-sighted.  I think white guilt is an essential component to correcting the injustice which is a direct result of the white supremacy which is this country's rai·son d'ê·tre.

Critical Race Theory is a theory of how racial differences have consciously and even subconsciously effected law and society.  The idea is that racism is so "baked into the cake" that it is there even when people do not have a conscious awareness of being racist personally.  It deals with things like disparities in education, healthcare, employment, wealth, and housing policies.  It is about things like redlining, and what happened in Tulsa 100 years ago.  It is about things like the Montgomery bus boycott--and the policies of the bus company which caused it.

Because CRT looks at systemic racism, white folks should welcome it.  Rather than deny that systemic racism exists--which I think basically everyone knows is not true anyway--a realization that the problem is systemic and not personal should motivate people to do two things:

1. Realize that they do not have to feel bad, because they are living as beneficiaries of a racist system they did not create, and
2. Work to dismantle the racist system of which they are beneficiaries, even though they did not create it.

This is why the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action is so disturbing.  Affirmative Action strikes a blow at the real problem, which is systemic in nature and not personal.

I get really upset when people try to say we need to turn to Jesus (which we do) and have Jesus change our hearts (which we need) with the view that the problem is what is in the human heart. That view is naïve, and inaccurate.  Racism in the heart is not the problem.  Not even close.

When it comes to bigotry, systemic bigotry is always the real battlefield. The guy down the street from you with a beer belly, wearing sleeveless white T-shirts and using offensive slurs for some groups of people is not the real problem here.  He is a problem, I am not saying he is not.  But he is not, nor are all the people like him, the root cause of inequality and injustice.  

The policies which make it more difficult for people of color, or the LGBTQ community, or any other class of minority or disadvantaged persons have a more difficult time in education, economic well-being, and so on, are FAR GREATER A PROBLEM than the Archie Bunker type of guy who lives near you, or is your uncle or something like that.   It is far easier to take that guy as some crazy old coot and write him off, than it is to "make something of yourself" while you are not afforded the same economic or educational opportunities as some other groups.  It is the POLICIES, the systemic racism, doing harm.  The heart stuff is far less problematic because, like I said, some crazy bigot is not the cause of the major harm.

If people understood CRT, they would welcome it, I think.  I think people should welcome it no matter who they are because it properly places the focus on where the real harm is occurring.  This is not about emotions, it is about justice.  CRT should be something white people welcome because, if they understood it, they would know the problem here is not a heart thing, it is a legal thing. And laws should be easier to change than people's hearts.

The people who say the problem is in the human heart are right about one thing...there is a HUGE problem in their hearts.  They LIKE systemic racism and the privileges appertaining thereto.  I know this because many of the same people espouse REPLACEMENT THEORY.  For them, the goal of some insidious groups which, racists they are, the identify explicitly (one of the most often cited is "the Jews") are trying to bring in so many non-white minorities as to make this country a majority minority country in which the political power of white persons is severely eroded. I do not think this is anything more than a conspiracy theory.  But the people who oppose CRT are all for it.  One can oppose CRT and be totally down with REPLACEMENT THEORY, and evidently the irony of the hypocrisy of this is lost on them.

Anniversary Blessings and Haunting Memories

 

Today is the 38th anniversary of my wife Gay and myself.  We were married on July 14, 1985 at the Caldwell Chapel of Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, with Rev. Gordon Lilly officiating, while I was a student at the Southern Baptist Seminary across the street.  I knew of other Southern Seminary students who went across Lexington Road to get married because Southern's Chapel was maybe four or five times as big as the one at "Prez." I took a course over there, in Historical Theology, while at Southern.

I have written about this experience on Facebook, but I wanted to write about it here this year.  It was almost a miracle that I ever was married, because at the time I was  in what I now call a cult group, Revival for Our Day under the leadership of Rev. Loran Helm.  Rev. Helm claimed to be an apostle.  I came to believe over time he was a false apostle, and I actually now even question whether he really served Jesus Christ at all.  While claiming to love everyone in the world just as Jesus does, he exhibited toward me, and I think toward others, a meanness and hatefulness and judgementalism which were the exact opposite of what he claimed.

Rev. Helm thought we should always rely on God's direct guidance and never on human knowledge.  His scriptural exegesis was awful.  And there never was any kind of liturgy or order of worship in his meetings.  He would literally ask God to reveal to him, step-by-step, what should be next in the service, Scripture, preaching, prayer, testimony, music, offering.  He said we cannot do it according to our own ideas.  Every moment in a worship service has to be God's direct leading. Looking back, I believe liturgy is what God ordained and what pleases God most.  I think Helm did the very thing he accused others of.  He took his own ideas for the mind of God.  He was a dangerous man.

He wrote a book entitled A Voice in the Wilderness.  I wrote  about the spiritual abuse I went through at his hands and in this group, which were meted out by him, and by his right-hand man, who happened to be my pastor, Oliver C. Hogue.  My book about my time in this group is available on Amazon.  The title, playing off his book title, is The Wilderness I Left Behind.

What this guy would do is tell people what "God's will" for them was.  This was in spite of his saying, in his book, a spiritual person never tells people what to do.  But he would tell people where "the Holy Spirit" has revealed they were to go college, what career to pursue, who to marry, (sometimes people broke up with someone they had been dating, and married someone else in a few days time, just because they were told the Lord had revealed to the leadership that this was God's will.)  The divorce rate in this group was astronomical!  

I have been with this guy when he ran his fingers over a vending machine, asking God to reveal to him what soft-drink he should drink that day.  I have been with him when he would look at someone in the congregation and say, "God has called you to preach the Gospel."  And they would be in a ministry role within a  few days sometimes, with no formal preparation at all.  This approach left a string of physical, emotional, and spiritual carnage.  He destroyed some persons' lives.

I knew I was called to ministry before I met this guy and got involved in the group.  But he and my pastor both said they did not believe I was.  I was told that because of my cerebral palsy I was not suitable for marriage.  When Gay and I got married he was so offended he had no use for me after that.  He had actually forbidden me to marry without his personal approval.  When the Lord made it apparent to me that I was to marry Gay, I was not going to give him a veto.  I was not going to even consult him.   He got an invitation to our wedding and he was offended that I was getting married.  He called another minister to ask about the situation but did not have the decency--he was not man enough--to call me.  I think if he had called, and had told me not to do this, I would have by then told him where he could shove that idea.

So here we are, 38 years later.  I earned two seminary degrees, served as pastor of five congregations in three states, was a college professor and dean, a Christian publishing executive editor, and an author.  We own our own home and my credit rating is in the 98th percentile nationally.   God has blessed is with two wonderful children, who have been a physician and  a college professor.  (In fact she was a professor at the place where Loran Helm graduated.  God has a sense of humor.)

Gay and I have a wonderful marriage.  Not easy, but wonderful.  I am not easy to live with, having cerebral palsy and  Parkinson's disease and diabetes and an INTJ personality at the same time.  I am not always in a good frame of mind, and not always in good humor, but Gay has been a rock.  She has loved me and supported me and stuck with me when many would not have.  Loran told me he did not know of a woman godly enough and holy enough and loving enough to love me, and he was right--because he did not know Gay.  But he had no business telling me that stuff.  I believe the way he treated me--alone--is enough to prove he was a  liar.  He did not love everyone the way Jesus did.  Jesus would never had said such things to me.

And even though he died 17 years ago, he still has a devoted cult following.   That is so painful for me to realize.  I wish everyone who knew him would denounce him.  He is as much an abuser as any Catholic priest ever was, even if he did not commit sexual abuse.  If his memory is washed away that would suit me fine.

 

Good Evangelicalism vs Toxic Evangelicalism

 I am a former evangelical.  I no longer wear that identity, after having become Roman Catholic 12 years ago.  But prior to that I spent decades as an evangelical Quaker pastor.

This post is a follow up to my previous post, Why Every Christian Should Repudiate Biblical Inerrancy.  These thoughts gelled pretty quickly as I responded to a Patheos blog piece by my good friend, Rev. Rob Schenck.

Rob was addressing how evangelicals have become, in my words, "truth-challenged."  His opening sentence to his piece said, "American evangelicals have a problem with the truth."  I think I might go farther than Rob does.  I think American evangelicals have repudiated the very idea of truth.  

When Kellyanne Conway made her infamous "alternative facts" comment shortly after the Trump inauguration in 2017, I was mortified.  Ms. Conway was known in evangelical circles and in the pro-life movement as a leader and spokesperson.  With a background in philosophy, and an awareness of the importance of the law of non-contradiction, which is the principle that two contradictory statements can both be false but they cannot both be true, I considered the statement about "alternative facts" to be the most offensive and dangerous statement I had ever heard.  I wrote this at that time:

This alternate reality did not begin with the inauguration of a new President.  It did not begin with his campaign in the summer of 2015.  It has been with us for a while, as the popularity of radio personalities like Alex Jones attests.  I believe the reason we ended up with a post-fact President is that we have been becoming, for some time now, a post fact society…where “I have my truth and you have your truth.”  That statement is blasphemous to me, I think it rapes the word truth, and renders it practically useless.  Francis Schaeffer, a philosopher with whom I mostly disagree, said one thing which I think any thinking person should agree with—we need to be able to talk in terms of what he calls “true” truth!

I think there is a direct connection between evangelicals being "truth-challenged," and therefore being willing to live in a world of "alternative facts" and the very definition of evangelicalism.  In one decade of my life, I saw that definition dramatically change.  I want to contrast what I will call "Evangelicalism One" with what I will call "Evangelicalism Two."  Because of the two seminaries I attended, I had a front-row seat to see this shift which made good evangelicalism into toxic evangelicalism.

I learned what "Evangelicalism One" was as I was a student at Earlham School of Religion.  ESR was not explicitly evangelical but there were some evangelical students.  I was under the tutelage of the Quaker philosopher D. Elton Trueblood, who was as he put it, an evangelical because of the fact that his faith was Christ-centered.  In the sense of evangelicalism he offered, through the ministry of Yokefellows International, in which I was quite involved, you could be an evangelical no matter what your faith tradition, whether you were involved in a liturgical church (even Roman Catholicism), or a more free-church tradition, or even an unprogrammed Quaker meeting.  This kind of evangelicalism was grounded in the good news--the evangel--of Jesus Christ.  Anyone who was centered on Christ was an evangelical.  It could be someone like Francis Schaeffer, D. James Kennedy (who spoke at one of our annual conferences), James Dobson, or even someone like Karl Barth or William Sloane Coffin.  

Then I transferred to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville.  Elton told me he thought I was going to the best seminary in the world.  It was wonderful.  But a few months in, a storm began brewing as Southern Baptists began their civil war over the inerrancy of the Bible.  Last week I explained why an inerrant Bible is an immoral idea which every Christian should repudiate. 

As  time went on, the inerrantists got the upper hand and complete control of the seminary and the convention.  This led to what I will call "Evangelicalism Two."  No longer would it be enough to profess faith in Christ.  Now you had to believe in Christ AND the inerrancy of the Bible or you were not even considered Christian. 

The big problem is, as I said last week, placing your faith in a book instead of in the person and work of Jesus Christ is  a  house of cards.  I have heard people say you have to be able to take the whole Bible literally or you cannot trust any of it.  I think that is balderdash.  As we made our way through the COVID epidemic, conservative, evangelical Christians were largely anti-vaccine and anti-mask.  My good friend I mention above, Rev. Rob Schenck took a great deal of abuse from his fellow evangelicals for encouraging people to mask and to be vaccinated.  Rob was right though, the command of our Lord to love our neighbor as ourselves required us to get vaccinated unless there was a physical health condition which indicated vaccination could harm the recipient.  

No religious objection to the vaccine could be justified. This is not like conscientious objection to war. The conscientious objector to war is trying to follow Jesus' teachings and love her neighbor as herself. The anti-vaxxer or anti-masker is trying to love himself at the expense of his neighbor.  Anti-vaxxers wanted to let people turn their bodies into weapons of mass destruction, and anti-maskers wanted to let them indiscriminately point those weapons at whoever they came in contact with.

I think the root of this resistance to science in Evangelicalism Two is a direct consequence of things like the Scopes monkey trials.  In the name of biblical literalism, a seed of distrust of science was planted, and the response of Evangelicalism Two to the pandemic is part of the fruit of that seed.

I have seen people I once respected move from Evangelicalism One to 
Evangelicalism Two, and it is one of the most heartbreaking things I have ever witnessed.

I love Evangelicalism One.  I do not think Evangelicalism Two can be redeemed.  I think it has put itself beyond the reach of even the grace of God.  I think the only way for those in Evangelicalism Two to find redemption is to realize their prodigality and get up from the pig-pen and return home.

Why Every Christian Should Repudiate Biblical Inerrancy

I was a student at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the mid-1980s as the Southern Baptist Convention had its war over the inerrancy of the Bible.  People at the school who knew me, generally thought of me as someone who had friends, and talked with people on both sides.  I tried hard to do that, even though I saw clearly that what the conservatives were doing was wrong.  I think it was wrong academically and also wrong morally.

The current president of the seminary, R. Albert Mohler, was a student when I was there, and was on the moderate side of things.  He became a conservative when he saw that as his path to the seminary presidency.  I do not trust Al or have any respect for him whatsoever.  I think he sold his soul.  As one of our classmates said about him in a documentary, "Al Mohler is not a fundamentalist.  Al Mohler is an opportunist."  

The seminary went through a profound and dramatic change, and not for the better.  I am retiring from teaching philosophy of religion and ethics at a community college in just about three weeks.  I remember my supervisor came to me one time with a transcript for a potential adjunct faculty member and said, "See, this guy went to the same school you did.  What do you think?"  I said, "No, he did not go to the same school I did.  Same name, same campus, but a vastly different school."

In 1985, when I transferred to the seminary after leaving Earlham School of  Religion, a Quaker Seminary in Indiana, my mentor, D. Elton Trueblood told me he thought I was going to perhaps the best seminary in the world.  I make a joke of this fact, I grew up Baptist, went to a Quaker seminary, transferred to a Baptist seminary, and became a Quaker pastor.  The seminary, after I was there, went from being a world-class theological seminary to being a third-rate indoctrination mill.  I do not think it is any better now than Luther Rice Seminary.  I told my supervisor, when he showed me the file of the potential adjunct I mentioned above, that when I was there, the seminary was like Yale or Harvard, and now it is like Liberty University.  It makes me grieve.

I grew up with a belief in biblical inerrancy, and part of the reason I took a year and a half off, and then transferred seminaries, is because learning to read scripture and interpret it, and realizing it is not inerrant, precipitated a real crisis of faith for me.   It was without doubt the darkest and most painful time of my life.  But I needed to go through this in order to see how flimsy my own faith was, and what I needed to do about it. It was one of the best things which ever happened to me.

When the topic of Scripture comes up in my Philosophy of Religion class, I do not permit Scripture quoting, at all, in student written work, because I realize that just because something is in the Bible, that does not insure its truth or accuracy.  In fact we know there are historical inaccuracies in the Bible. One cannot get past the second page of the Bible without realizing this, as we see in this chart:

Now this was painful for me to realize.  It called my entire faith into question, which is part of why, for any of my readers who may have known me at Earlham School of Religion, I left.  It took me many months to figure out that I had placed my faith in a book, in a written word, instead of Christ, the Word of God.  A faith based on a book is a house of cards.  Pastors and teachers and churches have done a disservice to congregants by presenting this kind of faith.  It is like the song we made fun of this kind of faith with, on the other side of this experience. "My hope is built on nothing less than Scofield's notes and Moody Press."  That is sad but true, it is the kind of faith I grew up with, and it does not withhold intellectual scrutiny well.  So churches set many of their youth up for disillusionment and that is lamentable.

Like I said, I don't even permit Scripture quotes when I teach Philosophy of Religion, because instead of looking at the philosophical arguments for God's existence, we could get into a spitting contest about whose verse trumps whose.  Does my passage from the Book of Mormon trump your Old Testament quote?  That cannot be answered philosophically because if you have book A which claims to be the Word of God, to the exclusion of other books, and book B, which makes the same claim, there is no intellectually credible way to adjudicate that dispute.  The only way it can be done is by presupposing one's own view is right.  I think presuppositional apologetics is a moral and intellectual disaster.  That might be a future topic for this blog.  But saying something is true because the Bible says so is like this:

People often ask me why I am so passionate about this?  There are two reasons.

First, I do not want to contribute to people needlessly hanging on to a false idea of what the Bible is, longer than they need to.  I love the Bible as much as anyone I know, and have spent as much time in it as anyone I know.  I began reading Scripture intensively in 1974, and basically have not missed a day of Bible reading since, except maybe 2 or 3 days where I was really sick. I  figure I am closing in on 18,000 days of Bible reading.  But it was so freeing to get past what I had been taught so that I could see/hear what God was saying, with more comprehension.  I wish that for others.

Second, I think this is a moral issue.  I do not think the Bible only has historical inaccuracies, but moral ones too.  I think there are times when they thought they knew what God was saying to them, I mean the biblical authors, but just like us, sometimes they got it right and sometimes they got it wrong. I think Jesus saw this clearly.  In the Sermon on the Mount he says over and over, "You have heard that it was said...but now I say to you..."  He knew much of what they thought God had revealed to them did not reflect the heart of God, and he had to set the record straight.  I was taught in my fundamentalist, literalist upbringing that the Sermon on the Mount did not apply to Christians, it only applied to Jews who would live in Israel in a future millennium.  Well, there is no millennium, and this way of handling the Sermon on the Mount amounts to giving people a pass to be unloving.

I do not think God ever commanded anyone to kill anyone.  I do not think God ever wanted anyone plundered.  I do not think God ever intended women to be subordinate to men in anything.  I do not think God ever forced anyone to do anything against their will. I do not think God ever approved of the awful treatment all through history LGBTQ+ people have received.  I think God made some of us that way, just like God made some of us with blue or brown eyes. I do not think God ever favored one nation above another.  None of these are consistent with God being a God of love.  

When I was a Quaker pastor in Iowa, in 1998, I interviewed with a group  of United Methodist district superintendents about becoming a Methodist pastor.  One of the superintendents, an impeccably dressed, handsome, dignified African-American man, took me to the story of Noah's sons and asked me what I thought about people using Genesis to justify the way his people had been treated--did the "curse of Ham" justify racism?  I told him, first of all, I do not take that Genesis story literally.  Secondly, St. Paul says Jesus, in his death, delivered us from the curse of the law--I think Jesus came to deliver us from all curses.  He told me he liked my answer.

Biblical literalism leads straight to moral injustices like racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, nationalism, ableism.  All of these and more have been "justified" with the selective use of Scripture by people who do not know how to handle Scripture. The founder of the Quakers, George Fox, tells a story of preaching somewhere and the church members were so upset at his message they took a huge pulpit Bible and hit him in the face with it until he bled.  People still hit each other over the head with the Bible. Giving some people the Bible to weaponize is as dangerous as giving a toddler a hand grenade with the pin pulled.

People who put their faith in a book, instead of the one who the book is supposed to point us to, end up with a poor knowledge of both the book and the Word.

The Failed Logic of the So-Called Pro-Life Movement

I have been thinking for some time about the poor logic used by the Christian Right in the so-called pro-life movement.  I say "so-called" because I do not think for a minute this movement is really pro-life.  Their singling out of abortion as the only issue they focus on is one reason why.  I know someone from my own Catholic parish who said that they will turn to the other "life" issues, guns, a living wage, universal healthcare, a sustainable environment, clean air and water, and capital punishment and war, after the repeal of Roe v. Wade. Yet, here we are, a full year after Roe is struck down, and this movement is still fixated on this one issue.

I have a good friend who was at one time one of the main movers and shakers in the movement, who has now moved to a pro-choice position, not because he is in favor of abortion itself (as indeed I am not), but because he could no longer live with the political hypocrisy of the movement.  He says he was in the room when pro-lifers and Republican politicians cut deals.  "You back our tax cuts and we will give you your pro-life judges."  I always thought something morally fishy was at play in the movement, and so, even as a Christian pacifist, I have denounced it.

But I want to take this opportunity not to talk about the political hypocrisy of those who call themselves pro-life, although I believe there is ample hypocrisy to be found there.  I think the whole movement is disingenuous, deceptive, and manipulative,  Because I believe in the sanctity of life, I have denounced the pro-life movement.  This movement, and the conservative Christians comprise it, are, at best, in my view, SELECTIVELY PRO-LIFE. It is something I wish to have nothing to do with.  As foul and offensive as abortion is, I believe forced birth is even more so.

But this evening I want to write about a logical problem the movement has, a problem which has become clear to me in the past week or so, but not one I have seen anyone put into words.  In short, any form of an anti-abortion argument which says we know when  life begins is based on a serious logical flaw. My own son, who is a medical doctor, when I shared this idea with him, said this is why he is a scientist and I am a philosopher.  I have used the hypothetical I am going to put before you in this piece dozens of times in the classroom, but the full impact of it has not hit me until recently.

It is a fundamental principle of logic that no conclusion can ever be drawn from a single premise.  In fact, any argument based on just one premise must be rejected.  The reason is an argument which is based on one premise only is not deductively valid.

Valid is a term which many people throw around even though they have no clue what it means. Saying something is valid is not like saying it is a legitimate point of view.  Saying something is valid is not like saying someone makes a good point.  Valid is a technical term.  If an argument is valid, it means the form of the argument is such that it is impossible for the conclusion to be false if the premises are true.

The way I explain this to students is that good logic has to have two things going for it.  It has to have correct factual assertions, and they have to be in the correct form.  When the form is correct, the argument is called valid, and if the information is correct, and  in valid form, the argument is called sound.  The main pro-life arguments that abortion is the taking of  a human life are neither valid nor sound.

PLEASE DO NOT MISTAKE ME HERE.  I am not saying abortion is good.  I am not saying abortion is something we should broadly advocate for.  It may well be that abortion is always morally wrong.  I AM JUST SAYING THE PRO-LIFE MOVEMENT FAILS TO MAKE THAT CASE, no matter what definition one chooses for the beginning of life.

I put this hypothetical to my students.  Say you are outside an abortion clinic and someone yells out, "ABORTION KILLS A HUMAN BEING, THEREFORE ABORTION IS WRONG."  That may be true, but put this way there is no obligation to accept this position, because, as I said above, this is an attempt to draw a conclusion from only one premise.   This argument is invalid.

Much of the time, an invalid argument can be fixed, made valid, by supplying the missing premise.  Nearly always, the missing premise can be supplied by an "if...then..." statement.  For example:

Premise 1: Abortion is an act that kills a human being.

Premise 2:  If abortion is an act that kills a human being, abortion is morally wrong.

Conclusion:  Therefore, abortion is morally wrong.

Now we have an argument which is logically valid.  Whether it is sound will depend on whether one can show that both premises are true. 

In an argument like this one that leads to three possibilities.  Perhaps none of the premises are true, or perhaps only one is true, in which case the argument is valid but not sound.  Perhaps both premises are true in which case the argument is BOTH valid and sound.  Or we may not be able to demonstrate one or more premises are true or false, in which case we still know the argument is valid, but we do not know if it is sound.  I am suggesting pro-life arguments are in this third category, as I will explain below.

Recently a dear friend shared with me that abortion is murder because from  the moment of conception there is unique DNA.  I would suggest this is shoddy reasoning which no one should find persuasive.  I am not saying my friend is wrong to say abortion is murder, I am saying my friend is trying to draw a conclusion from only one premise.  This friend's argument goes like this:

From the moment of conception there is unique human DNA, therefore abortion is murder.

To illustrate what I am getting at, I am going to "fix" the argument in the same way I did above.

Premise 1:  From the moment of conception, there is unique human DNA.

Premise 2: If, from the moment of conception, there is unique human DNA, then abortion is murder.

Conclusion:  Therefore, abortion is murder.

Now, we have an argument which we can at least intellectually work with.  We have an argument in valid form.  This allows us to move on in the process to see if the premises are indeed true.

In this instance, I think Premise 1 is impossible to deny.  We do know that there is unique DNA from the moment of conception.

The problem is Premise 2.  I need another argument to show me that the presence of the DNA from Premise 1 means life has begun.  I do not think anyone can demonstrate that, all they can do is stipulate it.  Saying it is so does not make it so, and philosophically we need far more than what is here to make the case.

And the interesting thing is, if I drop the DNA argument and substitute some other proposed definition of the meaning of when life begins, I have the same problem.  If I substitute a heartbeat, or viability, or the ability to feel pain, I have the same problem.

I am not saying none of these definitions of when life starts is true.  I am saying you cannot expect someone to just accept them as true. It is necessary to demonstrate they are true instead of just stipulate or assert they are true. The bottom line then is, I think it is philosophical hubris to say we know when life begins, and it is philosophical humility to admit we do not know.

Specks and Logs: It is the church who needs repentance more than the world.

Someone posted this to the social media account of a dear friend and brother in prophetic ministry this morning.

I found this quite offensive.  It seems to me we are so often confused about who Jesus was and why he did what he did.  I think any time we spend time with people as a means to an end, we run a grave risk of seeing people as objects instead of subjects.  I think too many Christian ministries even do their works of social concern with an eye to "converting" people instead of just because we see them as people with needs, and ourselves as able to help with those needs.

Jesus DOES want us to be inclusive and tolerant and accepting, because JESUS IS ALL THAT. If he was not, none of us would have an encounter with him because we ALL need to be included, tolerated, and accepted.  I think much of evangelicalism has become apostate because we view people as means and not ends.  When we count the number of "conversions," the number of meals served, homes repaired, etc., there is a subtle danger which comes from patting ourselves on the back too much.

Our Catholic daily mass gospel reading one day recently included this from the beginning of Matthew 7:

Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?  Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? (Matthew 7:2-4, NRSV-CE)

I think it is unmistakably true that if we think someone else has the log and we have the speck, it means, of necessity, WE ARE THE ONE WITH THE LOG.

It would serve us all to remember the old gospel song:

Not my brother...not my sister...but it's me, O Lord...standing in the need of prayer.