eChurch Blog

Dr. Taylor Marshall has an excellent blog post up identifying 7 popular diversion strategies employed in discussions relating to philosophy and theology.

Diversion number 5 particularly caught my attention:

5. Ad Populum Diversion – ad populum means “to the people”. This diversion appeals to the masses or what everybody does.

“Contraception cannot be sinful. Everybody does it. Even Catholics.”

“How can Catholicism be the true religion? There are billions on earth who aren’t Catholic.”

“Abortion isn’t wrong. The UN sanctions it.” (This is also an ad verecundiam diversion)

I suspect this will resonate with many of us.

This got me to thinking. Very often Christians are belittled for being ‘out of date’ or ‘not with the times’ in issues of morality and ethics and what have you.

However, just because the majority of modern society deems something as acceptable, does this mean it is so?

Well, we could appeal to democracy as our gauge and argue that we have a society based on principles that most folk adhere to. But what of the dead?

I mean by this of course, tradition.

If we live in a democracy that is favourable to undermining traditional values, then do we not at the same time deny our forefathers their democratic say? In undermining our ancestors view on morality and ethics, are we not simply casting them aside as in error?

But were they in error, or are we?

I’ll hand over to Chesterton at this point to clarify my meaning.

This is taken from Orthodoxy which I’ve just finished reading and am now moving on to The Everlasting Man. In Chesterton I can finally say I have met my Catholic Spurgeon.

But there is one thing that I have never from my youth up been able to understand. I have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record.

The man who quotes some German historian against the tradition of the Catholic Church, for instance, is strictly appealing to aristocracy. He is appealing to the superiority of one expert against the awful authority of a mob.

It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad. Those who urge against tradition that men in the past were ignorant may go and urge it at the Carlton Club, along with the statement that voters in the slums are ignorant. It will not do for us.

If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is no reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable.

Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.

Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father. I, at any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition; it seems evident to me that they are the same idea. We will have the dead at our councils. The ancient Greeks voted by stones; these shall vote by tombstones. It is all quite regular and official, for most tombstones, like most ballot papers, are marked with a cross.

I have first to say, therefore, that if I have had a bias, it was always a bias in favour of democracy, and therefore of tradition. Before we come to any theoretic or logical beginnings I am content to allow for that personal equation; I have always been more inclined to believe the ruck of hard-working people than to believe that special and troublesome literary class to which I belong.

I prefer even the fancies and prejudices of the people who see life from the inside to the clearest demonstrations of the people who see life from the outside. I would always trust the old wives’ fables against the old maids’ facts. As long as wit is mother wit it can be as wild as it pleases.

I think we cast aside traditional thinking on morals and ethics at our peril…..

That’s the question being raised by European Dignity Watch.

According to a report published by European Dignity Watch, Planned Parenthood Federation and Marie Stopes International – the two biggest abortion providers in the world – have been receiving tens of millions of Dollars of EU tax payer funding.

The funding is being provided through the European Union’s Development Aid and Public Health budgets, for projects related to ‘sexual and reproductive health’.

The problem is that the term ‘sexual and reproductive health’ as defined by the EU explicitly excludes abortion.

And so the question becomes: Are these funds being used to promote abortion in developing nations contravening EU legislation, and if so, is this deliberate or negligence?

To date, not all of the information requested from the EU in answer to these questions has been disclosed, and so EU Parliamentarians have been asked to investigate further and take action.

You can read the report here in PDF format; in the meantime here is the conclusion:

The European Commission, as established by the principles of conferral and subsidiarity, by the position assumed by the Commission itself, and by the requirement of unanimity on foreign policy matters, does not appear to have the legal authority to fund abortions. Still, it seems as though it is doing so under the rubric “sexual and reproductive health” as part of the Health section of the Development Cooperation Instrument. It also seems that the Commission cannot legally award grants to organizations providing “SRH” services if the Commission is unable to prevent the funding of abortion by its contributions. If the Commission is awarding such grants and the funds are being used to perpetrate abortion, as appears to be the case, the Commission would be forcing Member States to pay for abortions. Even if some Member States would consent to such a decision of the Commission, all Member States within the Council have not done so. While there is wide consensus among Member States as well as in society that the EU should provide aid to developing countries, there is no consensus that this aid should include the provision of abortions. Indeed, one is tempted to wonder whether in the current situation the EU’s development policy is not “fighting the poor” rather than “fighting poverty”, or whether development aid should not be directed at providing food, drinking water, health, and education, to children in need, rather than reducing their numbers through abortion.

A few links I found interesting for one reason or another:

British Religion in Numbers – Honour Crimes

Get Religion – Got news? Destroy all churches!

Society & Religion Today – Why Doesn’t Narcissism Make Skeptics Less Ethical If It Makes (Even Nominally) Religious People Less Ethical?

A Grain of Sand – Isn’t The Arab Spring Wonderful?

Conservative Home – Those in favour of gay marriage should show tolerance towards those opposed

One in Four – Where are the talking heads?

Through a Glass Darkly – Two Articles on Neuroscience and Free Will

40 Days for Life (40DFL) has arrived in Britain from America with something of a bump.

The essence of this pro-life movement is to hold a “prayer vigil” outside abortion clinics. Sounds great.

Yesterday, a controversy erupted related to allegations that 40DFL had been filming women attending the clinic, which would constitute unacceptable psychological pressure and harassment. There’s been a great degree of flip flopping in response to this allegation, with flat denials, suggestions that cameras are used to protect the protesters from aggressive members of the public, and finally today, on BBC Radio 4, that the filming was carried out by a Christian news channel.

I’m sad to say that I received two private messages from two highly respected Catholic pro-lifers, stating they had received reliable information indicating the person filming the women was indeed known to 40DFL, and is known widely within the pro-life movement. I’m not prepared to reveal anything further on this issue.

British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) have become so concerned with the tactics employed by 40DFL, they have raised their concerns with the Department of Health.

Well, we all know that abortion advocates can be vociferous and so I awaited a fair debate on BBC radio 4 this morning, which included a report on the campaign, and interviews with the 40DFL leader Robert Colquhoun, and Ann Furedi, chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service.

What I heard did not fill me with confidence.

I have been told over and again that 40DFL is not a ‘protest’ but simply a prayer vigil. But the BBC Radio 4 interview did not bear this out for me.

There are written reports by the women attending the clinic stating they feel harassed and harangued by the protesters. One woman was followed by a man to the door of the clinic trying to give her a leaflet and asking why she would not speak with him.

There was an admittance that a protester has been positioned at the door of the clinic with leaflets and directly engaging the women with questions asking if they need help. Even though this was defended with the comment that one singular person cannot surround and harass a woman, I beg to differ.

I don’t even know what to make of the accusations that literature being handed out by protesters from 40DFL, directs women to the Central London Women’s Centre, which has been accused in a recorded exposé of making some astonishing claims.

This doesn’t sound like a prayer vigil, but a protest. And this all serves to undermine the pro-life movement.

Oh yes, granted, nothing illegal has taken place, but does that make this right?

I do not want these vulnerable women feeling intimated and harassed, as I feel this is counterproductive, a poor witness, and unethical.

Caral4Christ Tweeted the following which I think sums up my feelings:

Let’s pray and hope @40days4lifeUK will now change tact, and explicitly ban filming, and ensure women are not followed or questioned.

Cardinal O’Brien’s now [in]famous comments on gay marriage reported in the Telegraph included these comments:

Redefining marriage will have huge implications for what is taught in our schools, and for wider society. It will redefine society since the institution of marriage is one of the fundamental building blocks of society. The repercussions of enacting same-sex marriage into law will be immense.

[.....]

If same-sex marriage is enacted into law what will happen to the teacher who wants to tell pupils that marriage can only mean – and has only ever meant – the union of a man and a woman?

Interestingly, a few weeks before this article was published, the European Court of Human Rights handed down its first ever ruling on anti-gay speech, which revolved around the following leaflet being put into the lockers of secondary school children in Sweden:

“Homosexual Propaganda”

In the course of a few decades society has swung from rejection of homosexuality and other sexual deviances to embracing this deviant sexual proclivity. Your anti-Swedish teachers know very well that homosexuality has a morally destructive effect on the substance of society and will willingly try to put it forward as something normal and good.

–Tell them that HIV and AIDS appeared early with the homosexuals and that their promiscuous lifestyle was one of the main reasons for this modern-day plague gaining a foothold.

–Tell them that homosexual lobby organisations are also trying to play down paedophilia, and ask if this sexual deviation should be legalised.”

Suffice it to say that a Swedish court found against the ‘perpetrators’ under: “agitation against a group of persons with allusion to sexual orientation”, and the convictions have been upheld in Strasbourg.

The Strasbourg Court ruled that Article 10 (the right to freedom of expression) of the applicants had not been violated, even though they had not committed “hateful acts”.

So, not hate speech, but not allowed under freedom of expression.

This European court ruling recognises the State’s ability to limit anti-gay speech, at least in schools.

All the legal arguments and details can be found here (Article sympathetic to ruling).

The paper which first appeared in the Journal of Medical Ethics (now removed) sought to argue the case for ‘After-birth abortion’. I wrote a brief rundown on the piece, which gives you the general gist and can be found here.

Predictably, the response was one of total outrage and I must admit that the paper left me positively cold; however, to respond with threats of death and abuse aimed at the authors is to be absolutely condemned.

Anyway, I reproduce their open letter below:

When we decided to write this article about after-birth abortion we had no idea that our paper would raise such a heated debate.

“Why not? You should have known!” people keep on repeating everywhere on the web.  The answer is very simple: the article was supposed to be read by other fellow bioethicists who were already familiar with this topic and our arguments.  Indeed, as Professor Savulescu explains in his editorial, this debate has been going on for 40 years.

We started from the definition of person introduced by Michael Tooley in 1975 and we tried to draw the logical conclusions deriving from this premise.  It was meant to be a pure exercise of logic: if X, then Y.  We expected that other bioethicists would challenge either the premise or the logical pattern we followed, because this is what happens in academic debates.  And we believed we were going to read interesting responses to the argument, as we already read a few on this topic in religious websites.

However, we never meant to suggest that after-birth abortion should become legal.  This was not made clear enough in the paper.  Laws are not just about rational ethical arguments, because there are many practical, emotional, social aspects that are relevant in policy making (such as respecting the plurality of ethical views, people’s emotional reactions etc).  But we are not policy makers, we are philosophers, and we deal with concepts, not with legal policy.

Moreover, we did not suggest that after birth abortion should be permissible for months or years as the media erroneously reported.

If we wanted to suggest something about policy, we would have written, for example, a comment related the Groningen Protocol (in the Netherlands), which is a guideline that permits killing newborns under certain circumstances (e.g. when the newborn is affected by serious diseases).  But we do not discuss guidelines in the paper.  Rather we acknowledged the fact that such a protocol exists and this is a good reason to discuss the topic (and probably also for publishing papers on this topic).

However, the content of (the abstract of) the paper started to be picked up by newspapers, radio  and on the web.  What people understood was that we were in favour of killing people.  This, of course, is not what we suggested.  This is easier to see when our thesis is read in the context of the history of the debate.

We are really sorry that many people, who do not share the background of the intended audience for this article, felt offended, outraged, or even threatened.  We apologise to them, but we could not control how the message was promulgated across the internet and then conveyed by the media.  In fact, we personally do not agree with much of what the media suggest we think.  Because of these misleading messages pumped by certain groups on the internet and picked up for a controversy-hungry media, we started to receive many emails from very angry people (most of whom claimed to be Pro-Life and very religious) who threatened to kill us or which were extremely abusive.  Prof Savulescu said these responses were out of place, and he himself was attacked because, after all, “we deserve it.”

We do not think anyone should be abused for writing an academic paper on a controversial topic.

However, we also received many emails from people thanking us for raising this debate which is stimulating in an academic sense.  These people understood there was no legal implication in the paper.  We did not recommend or suggest anything in the paper about what people should do (or about what policies should allow).

We apologise for offence caused by our paper, and we hope this letter helps people to understand the essential distinction between academic language and the misleading media presentation, and between what could be discussed in an academic paper and what could be legally permissible.

Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva

A few links I found interesting for one reason or another:

Alton Abbey – Revamped website asked for a plug

Crooked as Corkscrews – We have a duty to married people today, and to those who come after us…

BRIN – Faith on the Move

Dr Calvin L Smith – Confusion at the Checkpoint?

Bishop Nick Baines – Cross words (again)

The Blaze – Nigeria: A suicide car bomber attacked a Catholic church Sunday in the middle of Mass, killing at least 10 people

Deacon’s Bench – The “twilight of Christianity” in Iraq

Psychology Today – A Definitive fMRI Test for Narcissism

Today, High court judge, Mr Justice Charles, has ruled that Tony Nicklinson, suffering from locked-in syndrome, may proceed with his legal challenge to allow a doctor to end his life.

Peter Saunders has a good rundown and background on this case, which is worth reading.

I blogged on the ‘legal conundrum‘ surrounding a similar case last month, when an “exceptional” legal declaration was sought and obtained protecting lawyers and doctors involved in the case from prosecution under section 2 of the Suicide Act 1961.

I’ll keep my eye on some of the legal blogs for their response to today’s ruling, and will link here if of interest.

As tragic and heartrending as these cases are: Hard cases make bad law.

Gillan Scott – God and Politics Blog – has written a four part review on the Clearing the Ground report published by Christians in Parliament, which I blogged on here.

Here are the links:

Part 1: Religious illiteracy is strangling freedom of belief

Part 2: The Equality and Human Rights Commission is not fit for purpose

Part 3: How to turn the tide against the myth of secular neutrality

Part 4: If the Church doesn’t defend liberty and justice, who will?

I’m no proponent of “gay marriage”.

Having said this, what follows may surprise and even disappoint a few folk.

I have already reached the point whereby I am utterly wearied by the “gay marriage” debate. I don’t think there is an argument or counter-argument I haven’t read.

The Christian Interweb is absolutely awash with this issue, day in, day out, and yet I do wonder if the average pew sitter is as absorbed with this.

In terms of “gay marriage” I have now reached the point where I no longer feel strongly either way. I feel that there are more important issues, and if homosexual folk wish to marry civically, then so be it. As long as there are no legal challenges to force the church to solemnise these unions under “equality” legislation, then I won’t be losing any sleep over it.

I believe that the political will is now in place for “gay marriage” and I don’t think there is any stopping this momentum now.

Call me pessimistic if you will, but I believe this is a reality that Christians must face head on.

I feel that in some respects the church’s mission has been subverted into a cultural war that detracts from her true purpose; namely, the Kingdom. By this, I mean the kingdom not of this world, but of the one to come, and that indeed is already amongst us, and growing at a furious and unprecedented rate globally.

By this we should be encouraged, not despairing.

It is not the church’s mandate to impose a ‘regenerated’ morality on the heathen (I use this tongue in cheek), but to declare the wonder of our God.

I don’t believe that my reality, or that of many others, will change due to “gay marriage”. In fact, I think that most folk will carry on viewing the institution of marriage in exactly the same way as they always have. I don’t believe the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony will be affected in the slightest.

Regardless of the outcome of the consultation on “gay marriage” proposals, orthodox Christians will continue to view “gay marriage” as an oxymoron, irrespective of cultural shifts, or legislation.

I feel that getting sucked into the vortex of the cultural wars is exactly what those most opposed to the Church would wish for, and we play into their hands.

Sadly I believe that the relaxed attitude on divorce in some quarters of the Church has helped to precipitate the situation we now find ourselves in.

Perhaps it would be more appropriate for orthodox Christians to direct their ire at those liberal minded Christians that have publicly declared their support of gay marriage, and those clerics that will happily solemnise these unions, rather than at the government.

Whatever the outcome, we all still need to live together.

That’s just how I feel about it all right now.

My views may change.

Let me know your thoughts.