This is going to seem ungenerous at best. But. Part of the difficulty in engaging someone over the issue of the "truth" of their faith can be frustrating, especially when they leave the path of the rational, the demonstrable, the philosophical, the metaphorical, often ending up with a claim that…
The other day, two nice ladies of the Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on my door. This was, in fact, their third visit. On the previous two, they had spoken with my wife, who was polite and nice and somehow left them with the idea that they had a potential convert here. They had left literature and apparently decided to return. This time, they got me.
I don’t like proselytes. I don’t like telemarketers either. I see them as essentially of the same species of intrusive “you don’t know what you want because you don’t know what I’ve got to sell you” school of bullying. I don’t like aggressive salesmen. If I’m wandering through a store, and someone approaches with a polite “Are you finding everything okay? My name’s Mike, if you have any questions…” That’s fine. If I have questions, I’ll go find Mike or whoever and ask. If I don’t, and he approaches again, my inclination is to leave. He’s stepped over the line as far as I’m concerned. Telemarketing is worse–I’m not even in their showroom–and religious proselytes are from one of the circles of hell.
Here’s the deal: to knock on your door and present you with salvation, they have to make a basic assumption–that you have no clue about the nature of reality and even if you think you do, you’re wrong, because they know the skinny on god’s plan. In other words, they have to assume you’re stupid, ignorant, or tacitly in league with evil.
If …
Many years ago, a fellow employee and I got into political and philosophic discourse weekly, sometimes daily. One of our basic disagreements had to do with abortion. She was Irish Catholic, and a very bright woman. Her position was consistent with her church. But she was not so dogmatic as to be incapable of engaging the debate without getting so defensive as to shut off her brain.
One day we both heard a news report about a statutory rape case in England. The girl–14–was pregnant. The judge ordered her to have an abortion. The circumstances were bizarre and extreme. Naturally, though, the debate at work that day was about abortion.
“I suppose,” she said to me, “you agree with the judge’s order.”
“No, I don’t,” I said. She blinked, dismayed, and asked why. “Because it’s supposed to be a matter of choice, for Pete’s sake. Choice. Why is it so hard for you to get that? It’s not the court’s decision, it’s her decision, whether to keep it or get rid of it.”
She had a hard time with that–with both aspects. The idea of abortion and my support of a woman’s right to keep her fetus.
An earlier post elicited some responses dealing with the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, one of which asserted that there is no explicit statement in the Constitution separating church and state. As far as it goes, no, there isn’t, but the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment lays a logical basis for first …
With the obesity epidemic at its current rate, we can easily conclude that a lot of people have a lot of truly excellent excuses not to eat properly and exercise. In my experience, two particular excuses take the cake, so to speak: "I don't have time" and "I can't afford…
Primatologist Frans De Waal has spent much of his career pointing out how incredibly similar the emotional and moral behavior of human animals is to the behavior of many other animals (he focuses especially chimps and bonobos). In this post, I will comment on De Waal's 2005 work, Our Inner Ape, where De Waal substantiates his stunning conclusion (well, stunning to those who just can't bear to acknowledge that humans are animals - see here and here and here) that the precursors of morality are easily seen in animals other than human animals. More specifically, De Waal demonstrates that there is a well-substantiated continuity between the proto-moral behavior of chimpanzees and bonobos and the full-bloomed sense of morality that we see in human animals. De Waal is clearly frustrated that people consider only human aggression to be "animalistic," but not human empathy. De Waal describes studies clearly demonstrating empathy in many animals, ranging from rats to the great apes. Children as young as one year of age naturally reach out to comfort others. Household pets such as cats and dogs can become upset (just like children do) when family members feign distress. Empathy therefore develops even before language. This would seem to demonstrate that top-down rule-based (therefore language-based) versions of morality don't capture the essence of what it means to be moral. [More . . . ]