Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Waldron quote of the day
In the paper I linked to earlier today, Jeremy Waldron challenges secularist premises regarding the nature of religious argument on controversial political issues:
The secularist view seems to be that a person of faith engaged in a political debate will – if he is allowed – simply cite some verse of scripture which he finds dispositive of the issue and then stand pat, impervious to argument.
[However, w]hen I read the Catholic case against gay marriage, for example, I am not convinced by it; but I find there is very little Leviticus-quoting or invocation of papal authority. What I read are elaborate tissues of argument and reason, open to disputation and vulnerable in the usual way to quibble, rejoinder, and refutation. . . . [A]ctually what’s infuriating about people like Finnis is not any adamantine fundamentalism but their determination to actually argue on matters that many secular liberals think should be beyond argument, matters that we think should be determined by shared sentiment or conviction. My experience is that many who are convinced of the gay rights position are upset more by the fact that their argumentative religious opponents refuse to take the liberal position for granted than they are by the more peremptory tactics of the “bible-bashers.”
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2010/12/waldron-quote-of-the-day.html
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the
comment feed
for this post.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), there aren't many John Finnises arguing on Catholic blogs! It does seem to me that the religious arguments against same-sex marriage (or homosexual sex) all boil down the assertions that God made certain things for certain purposes, and we can tell from a kind of simple observation what those purposes are, and ignoring those purposes is an offense. Often the implication (especially on blogs) is that everything is so self-evident that if you claim to be unconvinced, you are either self-deluded or you are lying. The same lame arguments come up on Catholic blogs as anywhere else ("permit same-sex marriage and soon there will be no stopping brothers from marrying sisters or men marrying their dogs"). And then we find absurdities like this:
**********
"The goal of gay marriage, as I have said many times, is to create a legal basis for persecuting and, if possible, legally suppressing the Catholic Church. That's the goal." -- Mark P. Shea
**********
http://markshea.blogspot.com/2010/12/thomas-peters-writes.html
See the thread and accompanying comments on Vox-Nova
http://vox-nova.com/2010/12/11/it-ain’t-all-about-us/
titled "It Ain't All about Us," in which some begged to differ that it IS all about us. For example, here's the first comment:
**********
The goal of the movement to gay marriage is to make opposition to the gay agenda tantamount to hate. And we know what happens to official haters. they are ostracized and chased from the public square. They are not allowed in certain jobs. They are persecuted. Is this the goal of each and every homosexual who wants to get married? no. But it is the goal of the professional homosexual movement.
**********