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Archive for the ‘Reason’ Category

White House Soteriology: Praying daily makes one a Christian

19 Aug
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"The president is obviously a Christian. He prays everyday."

In an attempt to redirect attention from recent polls about up to 25% of Americans believing President Obama is a Muslim and less than 40% believing he’s a Christian, the White House declared:

“The president is obviously a Christian. He prays everyday.”

If the statement was just “The president is obviously a Christian,” that would have been the error of mere assertion: Merely because you assert something is true, that doesn’t make it so. Luckily, they offered a proof: “He prays everyday.”

There’s a few problems of course:

  • Not everyone who prays everyday is a Christian. Muslims pray every day, for example.
  • One isn’t a Christian on the basis of how much one prays.

While prayer is part of being a Christian, you’re not a Christian because you pray. By “Christian” I mean someone who is following the biblical model of following Jesus.

Becoming a follower of Jesus has to do with living out one’s belief that Jesus is master (Lord) of your life. It is evidenced by what grows out of your life, what actions you exhibit. It has nothing to do with being perfect except that a Christian will, over time, change on issues as (s)he lives more as Jesus as their master.

While Obama’s family is Muslim, and while he has Muslim names, anyone who believed he was a Muslim for those reasons already thought so during the election, and that doesn’t explain the dramatic increase in those numbers. That has to do with Obama’s actions:

This isn’t necessarily new to Obama – there have been questions about previous presidents faiths. Whether or not Obama is a Muslim isn’t the point of my writing. The point here is the flaw in reasoning and the glaring misconception of faith.

Praying daily does not make it obvious that someone is a Christian. Saying so makes it obvious that you have no idea what you’re talking about.

Clearly White House overall has no idea of what it means to be a Christian. No wonder they misunderstand Christians so much!

How do you feel about the White House defining Christianity this way?

Another issue here is that the media are declaring the state of a person’s soul – the article linked to above states:

The number of Americans who believe — wrongly — that President Obama is a Muslim has increased significantly since his inauguration and now accounts for nearly 20 percent of the nation’s population.

Can you imagine an article beginning: “The number of Americans who believe –wrongly — that the Tea Party movement contains extremists…”?

Why is it necessary for reporters to be inserting this commentary? Even the punctuation around “wrongly” makes it the word that stands out most. This isn’t reporting. This is commentary.

“The president is obviously a Christian. He prays everyday.”

 
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Posted in How to Fail at Arguing, Politics, Spirituality

 

How to Fail at Arguing #6: As others do to us

28 Jul

A 15 story mosque and Islamic community center has been approved within blocks of the site of 9/11. Naturally many New Yorkers and others are outraged because this is the site of a national tragedy and those who attacked civilians there did so in the name of Islam. Planting a mosque at the site seems incredibly insensitive and offensive to the memory of those who died on 9/11. The leader of the mosque project has said 9/11 was America’s fault and at least somewhat justified, refuses to call Hammas (not to be confused with hommus) a terrorist group, and the project is being funded from Islamic groups in Islamic countries. There’s a lot of reasons people are concerned.

That’s the story, here’s the argument I keep hearing:

We’ll let mosques be built anywhere when every Muslim country lets churches and synagogues be built freely.

Mosque at Ground Zero Protesters

Image from article on Politico.com

Whatever the right thing is, it is not to lower our standards, as a country that champions religious liberty, to those of countries to not allow religious liberty.

By justifying your actions by those of another, you’ve walked away from your own principles. If the above argument is all you have, you’re saying you want to belong to an anti-freedom country, though you condemn them.

This failure in arguing happens frequently, thanks in part to the short length of political terms (though it isn’t limited to politics).

That Democrats manipulated Republican primary elections is not, in itself, reason for the Republicans who champion ethics and character to manipulate elections. That liberals expand government is not justification for “conservatives,” who champion smaller government to expand government.

If you violate the principles you claim as your own, you lack character. Your choices are not justified by comparing them to those who don’t claim to hold the same principles you do.

There are legitimate reasons for wanting this Mosque moved to another location. But the more conversations and airwaves are filled with poor arguments like this, the less likely real dialog is possible.

Edit: Added new image and fixed some typos. (8/18/2010 – Second Jon)

 
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Posted in How to Fail at Arguing, Politics, Spirituality

 

Jello is Racist Part 2: And so are you! (The Shirley Sherrod story)

26 Jul

Yesterday’s post, Jello is Racist, was a response to the name-calling frenzy of the NAACP, the White House, and Howard Dean. Here’s what happened. Later this week with what this means for US culture and politics.

Photo of racist jello

Part 1: NAACP overreacts without basis: calls tea party racist

  • July 14: The NAACP officially condemns “racist elements” within the Tea Party Movement and the “Tea Party’s continued tolerance for bigotry and bigoted statements.”
    Keep in mind that there has never been any documented bigotry or bigoted statements within the Tea Party movement. This was simply the NAACP, without evidence, calling a large segment of the US population racists. Meanwhile, the Tea Party members have never tolerated racism or bigotry, and routinely repudiate it.
  • July 14: Various groups of Tea Party members responded.  The “St. Louis group fired off to the NAACP the statement demanding the organization withdraw its “bigoted, false and inflammatory” resolution.”

Part 2: NAACP video released

  • July 19: Andrew Breitbart, conservative Internet journalist released a video he had on file of a woman being cheered on as she told a story of withholding help from a white man who asked for it, sending him instead to one of his own kind – a white person to help him. NAACP audience members cheer her on for what she did, but she goes on to say she later learned it’s not about race, it’s about class warfare. Here’s the video – you can skip to about the 1 minute mark:
    YouTube Preview Image
    She’s not the problem here. She went on to learn and change – now she’s a Marxist not a racist. I still don’t agree with her, but she’s not the one cheering for racism. It’s the NAACP members that are. While there’s no documented evidence that people associated with the Tea Party movement are racist, this is evidence that the NAACP’s charges are true of themselves!

Part 3: NAACP, White House overreact without basis: Fire & Condemn Sherrod

  • July 19: The White House decided that instead of reacting to the true story – the racism within the NAACP, they’d make Sherrod the fall guy, and their demanded her resignation.
  • July 19: The NAACP harshly condemned Sherrod. Here’s an exerpt

Her actions were shameful. While she went on to explain in the story that she ultimately realized her mistake, as well as the common predicament of working people of all races, she gave no indication she had attempted to right the wrong she had done to this man.

Unlike the tea party, there was actually documented racist reactions from people in their organization. Did they condemn themselves and their continued tolerance of this? No. They said, “The reaction from many in the audience is disturbing. We will be looking into the behavior of NAACP representatives at this local event and take any appropriate action.” Their own actions pale in comparison to what they demanded the tea party do.

  • July 19: After the White House had fired Sherrod and the NAACP condemned her, Fox News Channel first reported on the story.

Part 4: NAACP, White House reverse course, overreact without basis: Blame Fox – They’re Racist too!

  • July 20: Glenn Beck first reports on the story on Fox News, and takes Sherrod’s side.
  • July 20: In a full reversal, the NAACP changed their minds. They say they were “snookered by Fox News.”
    The full video showed that she had learned over time not to be racist – but they already knew that, as they had written it into her condemnation the previous day. Also, remember – the condemned her after  the White House demanded her resignation. They acted BEFORE Fox News Channel reported on it.
  • July 22: The New York Times blames Fox News.
  • July 22: Shirley Sharrod blames Fox News, and says she was fired because the Obama administration was afraid that she might appear on Fox News.
  • July 25: On Sunday Howard Dean, former DNC chair, appeared on Fox News parroting the talking point: It was Fox News’ fault, and they’re “absolutely racist” too. When asked by the fox host Chris Wallace if he knew that Fox didn’t even report the story until after she was fired, he just pressed further, calling people racist.
 
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Posted in Politics, Reason

 

Ayn Rand Part 1: Ayn Rand, John Piper and Christian Objectivist Love

23 Jul

This is Part 1 of a 1956 Ayn Rand interview with Mike Wallace. This was, according to the Youtube video description, her first television interview.

I watched it for the first time today, and would be interested in your thoughts.

Below are some excerpts from the end of this video and related thoughts.

YouTube Preview Image

Wallace: What’s wrong with loving your fellow man? Christ, every important moral leader in human history has taught us that we should love one another. Why then is this kind of love in your mind immoral?

Rand: It is immoral if it is a love placed above one’s self. It is more than immoral, it’s impossible.  Because when you are asked to love people indiscriminately, that is to love people without any standard, to love them regardless of the fact of whether they have any value or virtue, you are asked to love nobody.

Wallace: … isn’t the essence of love that it’s above self-interest?

Rand: Well, let me make it complete for you. What would it mean to have love above self-interest? It would mean, for instance, for a husband to tell his wife if he were moral, according to conventional morality that “I am marrying you just for your own sake. I have no personal interest in it, but I am so unselfish that I’m marrying you only for your own good.” Would a woman like that? … In love, the currency is virtue. You love people not ofr what you do for them or what they do for you. We love them for their values, their virtues which they have achieved in their own character. You don’t love causes. you don’t love everybody indiscriminately. You love only those who deserve it…

Wallace: … There are very few of us then, in this world, by your standards, who are worthy of love.

Rand: Unfortunately, yes. Very few. But it is open for everybody to make themselves worthy of it, and that is all that my morality offers them: A way to make themselves worthy of love, although that is not the primary motive.

But Rand’s illustration of a husband and wife does make sense. At minimum, many types – perhaps the strongest types of love are not devoid of self-interest. You’d be dead inside if you got nothing out of your love for a spouse, or a child. Per Rand, love isn’t love if you get nothing out of it.

This objectivist view of love stands in total opposition to the current political moves that declare love means each of us should make sacrifices of ourselves for “the common good,” even when we get nothing out of it. We are to be completely devoid of self-interest.

Is this love? Can love ever be devoid of self-interest?

My initial reaction is opposed to the objectivist idea – what about the good Samaritan? What about loving your neighbor as you love yourself? If people have to make themselves worthy of love, how can we love children? What about a child born with Down’s Syndrome? What about an elderly person with Alzheimer disease? This has always left me wondering if any form of objectivism can be merged with a Christian worldview*. Perhaps the answer is in the order of Jesus’ commands: Love God, and love your neighbor. Perhaps loving our neighbors is not the purpose in itself, but we love them because we love God. Loving strangers is, then, be part of loving  God.

But what about loving God? Is our love for God devoid of self-interest, or do you get something out of our love for God as we do from loving your spouse?

Question 1 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism:

Q. 1. What is the chief end of man?
A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.

This basic statement of the purpose of humankind declares we are purposed to get something from God – our own enjoyment.

John Piper builds off this in what he calls “Christian hedonism,” in his book Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist, and through his ministry.

Piper seems to agree with Ayn Rand! About Love for God, Piper writes:

Hebrews 11:6 teaches, “Without faith it is impossible to please [God]. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.” You cannot please God if you do not come to him looking for reward. Therefore, faith that pleases God is the hedonistic pursuit of God.

Ok, what about loving our enemies? While we are to expect nothing earthly in return, Piper writes that “we are given strength to suffer loss by the promise of a future reward.”

Throughout the Bible we are in fact commanded to store up for ourselves treasures in heaven. To seek God who will give us the desires of our heart – who rewards those who seek him.

Ayn Rand’s view actually aligns with the biblical idea of following God, loving our neighbors and even loving our enemies. The politics of socialism do not.

* Ayn Rand does state in this interview that she is opposed to the Judeo-Christian traditions and opposed to churches, but that doesn’t mean that everything she thinks is wrong or that everything she thinks is incompatible with Christianity. While I haven’t studied Rand at lengths, she believes that reality is objective, and our moral guide is to use reason. If objective reality is Christianity – if biblical Christianity has the most reliable truth-claims and is the most reasonable view of reality, then Christianity and objectivism could work together.

 
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Posted in Culture, Politics, Reason, Spirituality

 

How to Fail at Arguing #5

20 Jul

radioOn my way home tonight I heard Randi Rhodes of Air America. In her very loud rant, she kept repeating two lines for the duration of my 10 minute drive.

First, she was responding to charges that the Democrats under Pelosi and Obama have grown the size of government. She listed the dozens of government departments that were created under the 8 years of Bush, totaling hundreds! I agree Randi, Bush shouldn’t have grown government so much. And conservatives said so at the time.

How to fail: Take the 2nd grade “I am rubber you are glue” approach.

When someone says your party is growing government bigger, respond with, “Your party grew the government bigger!” Randi’s response didn’t deal with whether a bigger government is good idea or a bad idea. Presumably Randi is in favor of the bigger government that her party is bringing, so her response is meaningless. All someone has to say is, “I don’t like that Bush grew the government by so much either,” and her argument is totally deflated.

Here’s how the argument could have gone:

Obama is growing the government! That’s bad!

Bush grew the government by huge amounts!

Right. That’s one of the ways Bush wasn’t very conservative. I agree that Bush expanding the government so much was a problem. I said so at the time.

Then the conversation could have gone somewhere productive, like talking about what the government should or should not do.

I think this usually happens when someone knows the negative claim against their position is true. Instead of explaining or justifying where they’re coming from, they simply deflect and say, “You too, you too!”

Another example I heard recently was in response to concerns that Obama could use the oil spill for a government power-grabs, to enforce huge new government programs. The response?

What – like Bush’s illegal wars against countries not even related to 9/11?

The original concern is still valid, but what’s worse is the double-standard. It’s good when Obama takes sweeping action in response to a crisis, but bad if Bush does it? How can there be any logic with such inconsistency? To respond by insulting when Bush did it is to say that it is a bad idea. If a power-grab during a crisis is a bad idea, it’s a bad idea.

Don’t say something is a bad idea when one person does it, but when another person does it, it’s pure righteousness.

 
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How to Fail at Arguing #4

15 Jul

Often heard in political, theological, and other arguments is the line “That just doesn’t make sense.”

This insults the person making the argument – how foolish they must be to believe in something that doesn’t make sense. But this isn’t just an insult, not just an ad hominem attack.

It insults idea itself. Some ideas don’t make sense – but this is not shown by calling an idea stupid – it’s done by working through the argument with logic.

Usually an idea does make sense – at least from a certain perspective. If any thinking person has ever believed the argument, it made sense to them.

For example, anyone who says the idea of believing in God doesn’t make sense is judging some of the smartest minds in the history of the world. If brilliant minds believe it, it must make sense to them.

If you can’t understand how an idea could make sense to others, the first problem is with you, not the idea.

If you can’t understand how an idea makes sense to someone else, how can you ever think you could argue against that idea?

It pays to seek to understand before seeking to be understood.

 
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How to Fail at Arguing #3

14 Jul

Dole vs. Clinton

In 1996, senator and military veteran Bob Dole ran against Bill Clinton, who fled the country to avoid the draft at the time Dole was serving. We elected Clinton after being told that military experience was irrelevant, and it wasn’t a big deal that Clinton dodged the draft.

Eight years later, veteran John Kerry was running against George W. Bush, who served in the reserves and never saw combat. The same people who discounted military experience and defended draft-dodging in ’96 were now saying military experience mattered, and that Bush serving in the military wasn’t good enough.

This brings us to How to Fail at Arguing #3:

Reverse positions as it suits you.

It’s a quick way to lose credibility and make everything you say irrelevant.

W. Bush vs. Obama

Do you remember this picture of Bush and McCain with a cake during the Katrina days? How dare he eat a piece of cake during a disaster?! What about Bush playing golf, as villainized by Michael Moore in a documentary as shown in this clip (it seems an insult to the word “documentary,” but that’s what it was called):

YouTube Preview Image

And now, only two years later, Obama is excused for spending all sorts of time throwing parties and playing golf – in fact more golf already than Bush played during his 8 years in office – all while saying he “wont’ rest” until the Gulf of Mexico disaster is resolved.

If you criticized Bush for golfing but you don’t criticize Obama for the same thing, you fail at arguing.

 
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How to Fail at Arguing #2

09 Jul

My copy of A New Kind of Christian is full of notes in the columns of all the times Brian McLaren fails at making his argument. Here’s the first one that caught my eye when I read the book:

Claim unquestionable authority for your argument.

God’s Unquestionable Authority

This isn’t often in the form of “God told me to tell you this,” but often God’s unchallengeable authority is bestowed on one’s self of, as in McLaren’s case, a fictional character invented to be McLaren’s mouthpiece but with divine authority.

Neo said, “My pastor at Saint Tim’s tells me that I have the spiritual gift of putting into words thins people already know but didn’t know they know – or didn’t want to know. On several occasions I’ve offered to return the gift to the Lord…. It’s not always a pleasant job. People often don’t thank you for it.” – A New Kind of Christian, Chapter 1. (That’s not an added ellipsis “…”, it’s how McLaren wrote it in the book.)

For the rest of the book, Neo’s words are absolute truth. To deny Neo’s words is to deny God’s gift.

Certainly there are arguments where Divine authority can be claimed, at least in a conversation between Bible-believers – when you’re making an argument from scripture. Then again, most of the time when this happens, we’re assigning our interpretation and eisegesis God’s authority, which is another way to fail at arguing.

Experts’ Unquestionable Authority

Outside of religious circles, how can you claim unquestionable authority? One way is to exalt “experts” to godhood. ‘

global warming - the globe is burning, according to experts

We’re told global warming is true because experts say it is. We’re told children are raised better by schools than parents because experts say so. Often experts are invoked with unquestionable authority because the conclusion drawn from these experts contradicts common sense.

If you can’t convince someone without pulling out the sledge hammer of unquestionable authority, you’ve got a lousy argument indeed.

 
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How to Fail at Arguing #1

08 Jul

My ears perk up when I hear people fail at arguing.  It happens all the time by many people, though I notice it most from self-described left-wing “progressives.” I see this as being an ongoing series on this blog with examples as I see or hear them.

screen capture of facebook comments

How many times can he fail in one conversation?

Here’s a clip of a recent attempt at a conversation on Facebook. The article linked was the one I wrote about earlier about NASA’s new mission.

How to fail in argument as Tice did here:

  1. Simultaneously express agreement, skepticism, and disagreement about the same thing.
  2. Avoid talking about the issue at hand altogether.
  3. Call the other person names.
  4. Insult the source instead of the facts being reported, or the factworthiness of the report.
  5. And a bonus combo of the above: Agree with a source, then attack the source and say that anyone who agrees with them is stupid.

Yes, he just called himself stupid. Gold star. That’s how to fail at arguing, first edition.

Have you seen someone recently fail at arguing? Leave me a comment or drop a note.

 
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