"Conservatives"

[fpb]

http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/british-mp-urges-government-to-force-churches-into-same-sex-unions?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=4aa5467bd0-LifeSiteNews_com_Intl_Headlines09_08_2011&utm_medium=email

What is breathtaking is that no British news medium seems to have given this any attention.

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The amount of intellectual and logical mistakes in these few sentences is breathtaking.

1) "My personal feeling" is wholly irrelevant. "My personal feeling" is that certain people should be exposed in the stocks and pelted with rotten fruit. So what? I indulge the fantasy when I am particularly angry, then go away and deal with the world as it is.

2) "It does with some religions" - So does jihad. So does incest. So does urine-drinking. There is no worse argument on Earth than "many people think" or "many groups do". Rick Perry bragged, in a presidential election debate mind you, of having signed 234 death warrants. That was part of his claim to be the right kind of person to be made President; and "many people" in America would agree with him. Does this make the death penalty respectable or tolerable? Not to me it does not. But if you argue that the fact that "some religions" include practices that are at odds with morality, then you must, in consistency with your own position, accept Thugee and Aztec mass human sacrifice. Luckily, I don't have to deal with that little bit of necessary consistency. The fact that something that calls itself a religion demands that you should screw your sister and even calls it the highest kind of marriage under Heaven and a certain destroyer of demons (and Zoroastrianism does exactly that) no more inclines me to sympathy for incest than the fact that an artificial and modern "religion" has artificially and recently decided to follow a different but equally absurd faddish definition of marriage.

3) "already". This means a certain prediction that in the future everyone will do as you do. Who died and made you a prophet? In actual fact, "paganism" and the other fad-religions of post-protestant Europe and America are not only numerically exiguous (the Pope can call to Madrid more young people than there are "pagans" in the whole western world) but receding. Islam, Catholicism, and Evangelical Christianity are the three religions that are advancing across the world. Current trends, at least, make your prophecies sound quite dubious.
(There is, besides, the whole issue of historicism being a piece of logical nonsense. I suggest you read some Karl Popper.)

4) The appalling provinciality that assumes that what is faddish - I won't say popular, because you have to demonstrate to me that any large group of the British population has any interest in it - among the British upper and middle classes should therefore prevail seems to neglect the small matter of Britons being less than one hundredth of the world's population. Most religious groups in Britain are local emanations of transnational bodies, and except for a few parishes on whom even their local Bishops have given up, it is wholly unimaginable that Catholics, Anglicans, Baptists, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs or Buddhists would ever accept such an imposition in such a small and irrelevant part of their field of action. Yes, I include the Anglicans. The old Anglican church, based on squire-run villages, is dying; the few congregations left are in their seventies, and village church after village church is being closed or reduced to a plurality. But there is a new Anglican Church that is growing: the immigrants, mostly black and Indian, in the cities, evangelized at home by Evangelical missionaries and closer to Baptists and Pentecostals than to Oxbridge bishops in their thinking. Already an African Anglican is the second man in England; as for the worldwide Anglican communion, it is absolutely dominated by Africa. These people are going to laugh in your face if you tell them that the future belongs to gay marriage. The future, so far as the Anglican communion is concerned, belongs to them.

[sabethea.livejournal.com]

"My personal feeling" is wholly irrelevant.
No it isn't - certainly not in my case: my personal feelings about issues of legality affect my behaviour. For example, my personal feeling about the terrible 'Criminal Justice Bill' in this country ended with me going on protest marches to complain about it. It is the vocalising of personal feelings which are imperative towards persuading laws to be changed - or at any rate, it is to a small degree and should be far more important.

"some religions" include practices that are at odds with morality,
WHOSE morality? My morality, and that of millions of people, say that refusing to give homosexuals equal rights is immoral. But you're arguing in favour of that.

this means a certain prediction that in the future everyone will do as you do
Actually, I think it is likely that things will change and Pagans will get the chance of being married legally in their religion. But my point was that given that it is NOT a 'legal right' for all religions to be able to carry out marriages, there's no particularly good reason why it should be legal for some and not others.

post-protestant Europe and America are not only numerically exiguous (the Pope can call to Madrid more young people than there are "pagans" in the whole western world) but receding.
You are good with facts, as we agreed on my LJ - I am not, therefore, arguing this but I would like very much to see where you have got these statistics from, please.

seems to neglect the small matter of Britons being less than one hundredth of the world's population.
Um, very much NO! You are dealing with a BRITISH law, not a law which is going to be worldwide. Therefore, the point of the matter is not to do with the effect on the world population, but on the people in the country for whom this law is going to apply.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Morality is only a matter of feelings when the whole notion of making sense of it has been driven out. If feelings were in any way a reliable guide to morality, the vast majority of mankind's "yuck!" reaction to homosexual acts would totally overshadow the small minority who don't suffer from such instinctive reactions. The only thing that kept the whole gay movement from being squashed and silenced with little effort is that people silenced their own feelings and listened to argument. Feelings are irrational and dangerous.

[sabethea.livejournal.com]

vast majority of mankind's "yuck!" reaction to homosexual acts

Again, I am not denying that this may be true, but this is such a wide statement that I'd appreciate evidence of it. (It is ridiculously far from anything I've ever thought myself, but then humans do a lot of things which are far from anything I could contemplate, so I certainly wouldn't take my own experiences as 'truth'.)

listened to argument

And again, I am opening a can of worms which I should have more sense than to open... but what are the rational, scientific arguments for religion; and particularly for Catholicism being the 'correct' religious view?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Now you want me to bring you "evidence" that 60 or 70% of seven billion living people - let alone the dead - have an instictive reaction of disgust to the idea of homosexual sex acts? Let's just forget it, shall we?

[sabethea.livejournal.com]

The thing is, I have twice asked for evidence and twice you have not given it. I have never ever said that your facts are wrong, but I have asked for evidence that the numbers of Pagans are dwindling and that the vast majority (incidentally, I would not count 60% of people as a VAST majority) of people immediately think 'yuck' at the idea of homosexual activity. Also, you have not responded to my request for rational, scientific arguments for religion, and for Catholicism as the one-and-only-true-religion.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I did not say that actual pagans are dwindling, although I admit that what I said could be read that way. If I did, I withdraw it. What I wanted to say is as follows: first, the population from which the Politically Correct world is drawn is not growing, and is certainly both growing older and growing smaller as a percentage of total mankind; second, Islam, Evangelical Christianity, and Catholicism, are certainly growing; third, even not considering relative levels of growth, the difference in sheer numbers between the one and the other is such that, compared to these three groupings, paganism barely registers.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

And I have responded to your request for etcaetera. Perhaps you haven't read my answer yet.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

As for the "rational scientific" arguments for Catholicism: first, this is plainly unacceptable as a concept. Reason cannot be reduced to science, and rational does not mean scientific. As for scientific arguments for religion, that is simply nonsense. You might as well ask for arguments for Catholicism out of football or stamp collecting. Science only measures the perceptible world; since religion is by definition about metaphysical realities, to claim to use science to assess the validity of the category of religion as such means to ask science to do what science is incapable of doing. As well ask a man to eat his own head. That does not mean that science cannot disprove certain religious claims. The creationist account of physical reality is a particularly curious case, since it was effectively invented long after it had been disproved. Working in concert, historical investigation, geology, and paleontology, had already by about 1830 wholly disproved the notion that the world had been created 6000 years ago; but the series of publications that made this a matter of faith - called "Fundamentals", hence "Fundamentalism" - were only published in America in the last years of the nineteenth century. But science also disproves the Buddhist account of an ever-existing world in which mankind has existed at roughtly the same level of civilization for millions upon millions of years - an account which is fundamental to Buddhism, because otherwise it would have no space for its vast mythology of previous Buddhas and Bodhisattvas - and historical research, if not science, contradicts the historical claims of Islam. These are things that science can do; but to ask science to judge about the validity of metaphysics itself is utter nonsense.

As for reason as such, I happen to be a thoroughgoing and devoted rationalist. And being very firmly rationalistic, I reject, for instance, those superstitions that place illogical restrictions upon God - as if God, for instance, could become incarnate in a human being but not in a piece of bread. Logically the two things are exactly on the same level, since ontologically a human being is not much closer to God than a piece of bread. Or that accepts the existence of God but not the possibility that God might make miracles. These are irrational notions that reason ought to reject. But reason cannot be the judge of the existence or otherwise of God, because reason can only work on objective reality. Reason can tell you - in fact, that is all that reason ever does - that A is not non A, that you can't have a thing or its contradiction, that you can't have your cake and eat it; but reason can't tell you whether you have a cake or not, or whether A exists.

You might try to ask me whether I have any historical reasons to believe in the Catholic account of things. After all, I am a historian, not a scientist. But that is way too long a story and I will not discuss it here.

[sabethea.livejournal.com]

I put a comma between 'rational' and 'scientific' which you have removed. This makes a difference to what I was saying. I was asking about rational OR scientific arguments. And as you say, when it comes to science it is nonsense. And you do not explain why your metaphysical viewpoint is more valid than any other - and to be honest, you could do so and I could pick holes in it, and you could defend those holes from now until eternity (were eternity to exist).

But there is no rational nor scientific nor, indeed, historical reasons to say "I can demonstrate that my Catholic God exists and therefore that my view of morality - mostly, albeit not entirely, based on what the Catholic God allegedly tells me - is correct."

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Did you read what I wrote? I said that reason cannot prove or disprove the existence of ANYTHING, even a blade of grass! Reason, that is the use of logic, works only with things already existent and known. Reason is the thing that tells you that you can't have your cake and eat it, that you can't say yes and no of the same thing, that A is not non-A. You can't prove by reason that your own young boy exists; a sufficiently smart arguer could easily convince a third party that you are delusional about Mouse's existence. EVERY ACTUAL FACT CAN BE BOTH PROVED AND DISPROVED BY REASON WITH EQUAL LIKELIHOOD; and it follows that we absolutely must limit the ambit of reason to things whose existence we know on the grounds of experience. In actual fact, many kinds of insanity are very rational indeed.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

As for there being no HISTORICAL reasons to believe in Jesus and in the Church - speaking as a historian, that is plainly false. There are enough for me.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

No, you are dealing with a British attempt to force worldwide bodies to accept a British fad for British reasons. The notion that a Baptist or Hindu body, not to say a Catholic one, could imagine having one definition of marriage in most of the world and a quite different one in Britain is utter rubbish. Besides, there is an international dimension to this: the campaign to force the religions to change their definition of marriage would not stop in Britain.

[sabethea.livejournal.com]

On the one hand, Brits are such a tiny population that our views should not count; on the other hand, we will affect the entire world's opinion on marriage?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

As you know perfectly well, the campaign for these things is international. It still represents a small and faddish percentage of the world's population, but it is also a rich part thereof. If you want to question the accuracy of this remark, I have nothing more to say. I will not accept to be asked to prove that the sky is blue.

[sabethea.livejournal.com]

Good. Quite regularly the sky is NOT blue.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

A witticism proves nothing.

[sabethea.livejournal.com]

The reason, incidentally, that I suspect that some disagreements you've had in the past have turned into flame wars, may be something to do with the fact that you add personal insult to your point of view.

I have no problem with almost everything you've written here (apart from that I think you're wrong, but I have no problem with differences of opinion between people: there are vehemently child-free people on my flist, and I am obviously not in sympathy with their POV, but we co-exist quite happily).

But... Who died and made you a prophet? is actually entirely unnecessary for your argument, which is based on a number of other, very well expressed, explanations. It seems a pity, when you can argue so well, that you should get into childish name calling.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Actually, I did not think that was insulting. I am sorry you felt insulted, but it was merely an (admittedly aggressive) attempt to draw out what your statement really said - whatever you wanted it to say. You said: "already" some bodies which claim a religious identity practice these things. That "already", in that position, only means one thing: that in a coming future, either all or a vast majority of the rest of religious bodies will follow them; in fact, that the fact that the rest of religious bodies will follow them is a predictable and "already" certain fact. That is the only meaning that "already" in that position can possibly have in English. When a sportscaster says that "three athletes have already crossed the line", s/he only ever means that the rest of the field will soon follow them; s/he does certainly not mean that a few more may, if they feel like it, and if they don't get distracted along the road by clumps of flowers or pretty girls. So what you said - I am making no inquiries into what you meant - is that the Catholic Church, among others, was certainly going to accept gay marriage. And the only way you could possibly be making such a risky prediction, and making it it in the "already" form, is if you were given prophetic knowledge of the future. Elisha became a prophet after Elijah passed away; who did the same for you? This is the reductio ad absurdum intended here, for, even though I don't intend to read your mind, I feel certain that you did not intend anything so arrogant or so ridiculous.

[sabethea.livejournal.com]

three athletes have already crossed the line", s/he only ever means that the rest of the field will soon follow them

Not necessarily; it might be followed by "and five others have dropped out, leaving six still to finish".

Indeed, if we take what I said: "It does with some religions already"... that actual sentence could finish "and it looks like three more religions are going that way as well, which might mean that Christianity became left as the only religion who could perform legal marriages".

Or, indeed "It does with some religions already; however, that may be subject to change in the near future".

Either of these are potential meanings, and neither end up with your version of events :) It suggests that things are subject to change - but it doesn't specifically make any predictions of the direction in which that change might happen.

ETA
Also, though - why be aggressive? If you acknowledge that it's an aggressive comment - why make it? The argument didn't need it.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You did not add any such specification, however, which means that the meaning of the sentence remains as I constructed it.

[sabethea.livejournal.com]

Nonsense. If a commentator said "welcome to a game, and both sides have already scored" there would be no implication that there might be further scores. You made an assumption which you are now defending in linguistic terms... after telling me you're a terrible linguist.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

"both sides have already scored" is not the same kind of statement as "some religious bodies already have gay marriage". It is only comparable in that the goals already scored are final events, that cannot be revoked or altered. When you say that "some religious bodies have already accepted gay marriage", you mention only one thing that has already taken place, that is final, that cannot be altered; the one thing that you do not anticipate is that the score might in any way change against that particular decision.

[sabethea.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, I have come to the following conclusion:

If aggression is needed to defend your argument, you do not have a good argument.

If aggression is not needed but you use it anyway, you do not have a good arguer.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

And if I allow you to define me, I am indeed not a good arguer. Incidentally, you just said that Jesus, Demosthenes and Cicero were not good arguers.