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I wonder if any of you sometimes feel that someone of the outgroup just made a good move or just a good point (in other words, produced useful propaganda) in the culture war that takes you by surprise. A long time ago I noticed some liberals quoting a statement from a Christian pastor regarding abortion and I now decided to trace it back to the original source. According to Snopes it’s from pastor Dave Barnhart of the Saint Junia United Methodist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 2018:
"The unborn" are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don't resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don't ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don't need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don't bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It's almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.
Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.
I have to say that even though I doubt I’d ever agree with him on these issues, it sounds kind of…witty? Snappy? Clever? It all comes across as on point. It feels like I wouldn’t know how to respond to it. If I had to find something about it to nitpick, the only thing I can come up with is that the people who usually resent the patriarchy, condescension and political incorrectness are normally suburban middle-class college-educated white liberal culture warriors and their mulatto allies of similar backgrounds, not any of the groups the pastor mentioned, especially not widows. I can’t even tell why he brought them up at all; maybe it seemed to be a better idea than to bring up single mothers. And I might also argue that yeah, advocating for groups that are morally complicated as hell is probably not a good political move. Which also makes me sound kind of an asshole though.
Even having to play devil's advocate, the response seems pretty easy to me, because the argument Dave Barnhart made is incredibly self-refuting. He's not listed good reasons to support abortion. He's listed good reasons to oppose abortion and inexplicably framed these good reasons as bad.
"Thank you for pointing out how easy it is to advocate for the unborn. How undemanding they are. How morally obvious. And how even those without money, power or privilege are just as capable of advocating for and protecting the unborn as the rich, powerful and privileged are. But this only raises the question of why you, despite recognising how easy and morally uncomplicated it is to advocate for them, still fail to do so."
Yeah this could do with some editing to make it slightly snappier but it's not my argument, so that's best left as an exercise for an adherent.
As for the second paragraph, it would be less snappy, but you can just respond to that by saying there's no reason to only care about one thing. Does someone who cares about the poor therefore not care about the sick? No. So why exclusively apply such reasoning to someone who cares about the unborn?
I suppose the basic message here is that there’s neither bravery nor value in doing things that are easy. Difficult and worthy endeavors are to be taken up precisely because they are difficult. Or something like that.
If Barnhart thinks that a cause has to be difficult and brave to be worthwhile, then maybe he should switch to an even harder, more controversial cause than the poor, sick, or homeless. So why not advocate for Nazis instead? In reality, nobody, including Barnhart, decides what causes to support on that basis.
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From which it logically follows that advocating for a group which is easy to advocate for in addition to a group which is difficult to advocate for is more difficult than advocating for just the latter group and paying the former group no mind.
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I mean, I certainly think people on the other side of the culture war make rhetorically strong points that are likely to resonate with other people, but I don't know if that ever "surprises" me.
More often, I find myself disappointed with the zingers people on "my side" are making, even if they make for good propaganda.
I'm slowly coming to the view that the only "legitimate" way to argue with another person is to engage with their "highest" human self as far as possible, and not to use cheap tricks. I heard about a friend trying to reach their anti-covid-vaccine parents, who had been talked into that position by Facebook video drivel, and that friend tried everything but found the most success in just sending pro-covid-vaccine Facebook video drivel. I suppose if all you care about is manipulating your parents to get a vaccine, because you genuinely think that it is best for them and for society, you might be able to justify that to yourself, but I felt a sense of discomfort with it.
I don't just want to find the right psychological levers to make other people believe what I want them to believe. I want to convince the human in them that what I believe is the case - or to similarly be convinced that I am wrong.
I find it surprising inasmuch as it doesn't repeat the usual known pro-choice talking points. I assume.
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This is one of those leftover Redditisms that just refuses to die.
No, actually, the religious people advocating for the unborn actually do also do a TON of work for all sorts of people. The society of Saint Vincent De Paul, for instance, or Covenant House.
Because: these people are actually consistent in their beliefs. They care about people, including the unborn, and dedicate substantial parts of their life and work to caring for them. All that stuff they talk about at Mass every Sunday, they actually believe it. It’s not for show.
This is true. It is also true that there are a lot of people (according to both my casual observation, and traditional Protestant doctrine on this point, far more than the first group) of unsaved sinners who tick the "Christian" box on the census as a way of expressing their secular tribal identity, but do not accept Jesus Christ into their hearts as their Lord and Saviour. And that group are somewhat involved in anti-abortion activism, and not at all in any of the other stuff. In the American political context, this group of "Christian" hypocrites is particularly significant because they vote a major political party exists to represent their interests.
So the correct Arminian interpretation of Barnhart's sermon is "If your Christianity is causing you to advocate on behalf of the unborn, but not any of the other disfavoured groups that Jesus mentions in the Bible, then you are doing Christianity wrong and need to do some repenting" and the correct Calvinist interpretation is "If you see a group of self-identified Christians advocating on behalf of the unborn, but not any of the other groups Jesus mentions in the Bible, then you are looking at a group of fake Christians."
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I imagine it's meant to be an attack on the average anti-welfare GOP politician, not on (mostly) Catholic charities.
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It has not gone unNoticed by wrong-thinkers there exists a large segment of the white religious right (and mainstream conservatives as a whole) that forms an unholy alliance with progressives when it comes to simping for women and non-Asian minorities. After all, it wasn’t irreligious members of the right self-flagellating and washing the feet of blacks while BLM was going strong. Someone on the Motte or the culturewarroundup subreddit once wholesomely referred to members of such a segment as “lefty Christ cucks,” for sharing the values of one group of people that hates them and bending the knee (in the aforementioned case, literally) for another that also hates them.
This segment is united with progressives in maintaining that Women are Wonderful, and are more than happy to punish and vilify men for women’s coffee moments. Instead of thot-patrolling girls and young women, they’d rather blame boys and men. Instead of reducing the freedom of girls and women as a tradeoff to increase the protections afforded to girls and women, they’d rather keep or increase female freedom, increase female protections, and reduce both the freedom and protections afforded to boys and men. See, for example, the excommunication of Trevor Bauer—who as the result of false rape accusations—got relegated from the Los Angeles Dodgers to the Yokohama DeNA BayStars and now wears a red hat as a scarlet letter for the Diablos Rojos del México.
This segment is united with progressives in blank slatism and being unaware of or being outright hostile to HBD. The alliance believes in the psychic unity of mankind, that differences between individuals and groups of people are only cosmetic, that every criminal and Person of Unhousedness can be redeemed if we just tried harder, that the poor are only poor due to bad luck and thus deserve extra help and wealth transfers. Blank slatism has been long referred to as “liberal creationism” for a reason. This segment also sometimes attempts to play the DR3 card in discussions about abortions, since blacks get abortions at disproportionate frequencies.
I suppose the most relatively novel part is claiming that being Allies for the unborn is morally convenient compared to being Allies for prisoners, immigrants, the sick, the poor, widows, orphans and accusing those who advocate for the former but not the latter groups of picking off low hanging fruit, taking the easy road, and not Doing Enough as Decent Human Beings. However, as someone who is pro-abortion (because I really support women’s choice and stuff, of course) and not exactly a devoted advocate of the latter groups, I find this unmoving (shocking, I know). It reminds me of “it’s not enough be non-racist, you have to be anti-racist.” Additionally, this attitude of you should also be an advocate for X2, … , Xn if you’re an advocate for X1, because being an advocate for just X1 is too easy, reminds me of Calvin’s dad and Misery Builds Character.
I wouldn't be surprised if pro-abortion becomes the mainstream view of the religious right in a decade or two, or if the unborn become but one group among many that warrant advocacy and compassion, without extra distinction. The unborn and the unhoused, side by side in the priorities of the religious right. Such a shift in views has happened before. For example, in just eleven years among white evangelicals, support for gay marriage has increased substantially, looking like a graph of stock markets going up. As of 2017, support for gay marriage among young white evangelicals was already nearly at parity, so it's likely the majority now. Catholics and mainline Protestants as a whole are already above parity. So it appears the conviction of the religious right was never all that strong about marriage being a sacred union between man and woman. The saying that conservatives are but progressives driving the speed limit comes to mind.
Widows make one question patriarchy all right, albeit in the manner opposite of which the pastor presumably intends. Women have always been the primary victims of their husbands working harder, enduring more stressful lives, and dying earlier. While already Stressed and Traumatized, these poor women have to perform the physical and emotional labor of managing the estates that their stupid husbands let behind, or hiring/appointing someone to do so.
Investment companies often deploy this angle when advertising their portfolio management and financial advisory services to widows (a selfless act of compassion, naturally, at the modest fee of 1% of AUM yearly). Some employees at these companies are likely cynical and self-aware as to what they’re doing (to which I say: slay, kings!) but some are true believers of widows being the primary victims of their husbands dying earlier. Thus, here we even have a three-party unholy alliance between the religious right, progressives, and the financial services industry.
I want to ponder a couple of your observations a bit more, because I have some thoughts to untangle. But as a religious righty myself, I would encourage you to distinguish three groups:
In particular, I think that the growth of the second group is distinct from drift within the third group. That doesn’t imply that the religious right proper isn’t changing at all, because it is, but if you try to plot its course by following, e.g., Russell Moore, you are going to be confused.
I was somewhat using religious right as a metonym for white Christians, in a descriptive sense rather than a personal judgment call as to what's left or right.
Things certainly may change, but in ${CurrentYear}'s popular discourse, the religious right and white Christians are pretty much office_pam_its_the_same_picture.jpg—or at least the latter is generally considered a subset of the former. If you're (you in the general rather than personal sense) white, religious, and anti-abortion, most people across the political spectrum would consider you firmly on the right, even if you exhibit progressive views toward women, non-Asian minorities, and the 2SLGBTQI+. After all, being a good Ally for Vulnerable Groups is neutral, non-political, and just doing the Bare Minimum.
The religious right is not a monolith and Not All White Christians Are the Same (NAWCATS), hence why I pre-empted with "a large segment of..."
However, there may also be some element of No True Scotsman when hypothetically splitting a putative religious left from right. No True Religious Righty would ${XYZ}.
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There is an actual religious left- EG James Martin- but it usually doesn't openly push against the pro-life movement. This guy reads more like a progressive wearing Christianity as a skinsuit(and to be fair, a the UMC certainly has a reputation for being worn as a skinsuit by whoever feels the need to wear a Christian skinsuit that week).
Yes, by the religious left I mean what early twentieth century Protestants called modernism. (I think that contemporary Catholics had a different, broader definition of the word.) It’s what you get when you accept the tenets of secular progressivism and try to rebuild Christian practice on top of them. It’s not really Christian.
That said, I’ve always understood James Martin to be in this camp. Roman Catholic ecclesiology didn’t allow the fundamentalist-modernist controversy to take the form it did among Protestants, so the divide isn’t as obvious; at least that’s my take.
If you are ever inclined to do related effortposts, I’d love to read about the dynamics (positive and negative) created by having the likes of Martin and Vigano in the same institutional church, as well as how tradcaths have reacted to Francis’ papacy and the loss of the Vatican’s social role as a countercultural bulwark.
Fr. James Martin is 100% serious and a true believer. He doesn't actually compromise on abortion, he just thinks gun control is an equivalently serious pro life issue. He's wrong about that, obviously. But he actually literally believes this. His response to criticism over closeness to democrats, because they support abortion, is not to try to write nuance into the abortion issue where none exists; it's 'both sides bad and democrats are the lesser of evils because XYZ'. Both he and his followers are Old, and the vision of the church he promotes is not generally very appealing to people who aren't already part of his bandwagon- either because of the liberalism or because of the Catholicism- but he is definitely a true believer Catholic. Progressive activist priests who aren't tend to leave the church.
Vigano is not actually part of the Catholic church. He has been excommunicated and no one disputes this, including Vigano himself. He has crossed lines that would have been associated with sedevacantism(a fringe phenomenon nobody likes, despite its popularity on DR twitter) prior to Vigano going on Alex Jones and is more or less associated with the SSPX resistance, a group kicked out of the SSPX for either being batshit crazy(the SSPX's story) and possibly child abusers(everyone else's story) or for criticizing the SSPX leadership for compromising with modernism(their story). The farthest-right segment of the church(which includes traditionalists, but also lots of people who think Vatican II/many associated things were ill-advised, but can't be fully reversed) is actually led by Cardinal Muller, whose red hat allows him to cause plenty of chaos if he so chooses. He has previously threatened to do so to veto the appointment of bishop Heiner Wilmer to the position of doctrinal chief and gotten away with it.
Pope Francis himself protects liberals and progressives as much so that he can play the two factions off of each other as out of ideological sympathies. He favors jesuits, who tend to be liberal, and fellow latin americans, who also tend liberal. But he seems to prefer moderates from both, and the college of cardinals retains a conservative plurality large enough to maintain a functional veto. Martin is a true believer in what he says, but he's very very careful about coloring inside the lines and not taken seriously as a threat due to the age of his followers(mostly old enough to have adult children who left the church over homosexuality, often their own, long enough ago for their parents to have accepted it as irreversible). Bishops are still promoted reasonably meritocratically, and simply due to the pool of seminary graduates ~20 years ago, are trending more conservative every year. Bright spots for the church in the first world are almost invariably driven by conservative leans and the natural alignment of the RCC is with the establishment right of whatever society it finds itself in(often in ostensibly non-political ways; the Catholic church will tend to drift into cultural and vaguely aesthetic/institutional alignment with the things establishment conservatives do. But also, the federalist society would not be so successful without Catholic schools, specifically. Trump's appointments trend really Catholic. The RCC is on the right for the forseeable future; becoming episcopalians 2.0 is simply not in the cards) and everyone knows it. There are(mostly older) progressive Catholics who find this confusing, and there are bubbles where progressive Catholicism dominates. But there's not a lot of doubt about the general direction. Are both sides willing to play dirty? Yes, they are. But it stays at a lower level. These are institutionalists who see gentlemanly behavior as very important; liberals know that setting a precedent for hardball will blow up in their faces and conservatives know that there's no real need to play hardball.
Tradcaths themselves mostly haven't. JPII may have been sympathetic and Benedict a frequent ally, but they were not our friends in the way Muller has reinvented himself as. Rather, the mainstream position among people whose opinions matter to SSPX and FSSP leadership(as an aside- the SSPX/FSSP split is overstated. They prefer to make a show about ignoring each other and most of the criticism is for realpolitik. Most FSSP priests recognize Lefebvre as a saint and most SSPX priests praise the orthodoxy of FSSP priests- all behind closed doors in both cases, of course) is to build parallel institutions which by merely existing create room in mainstream church institutions for sympathizers and fellow travelers to rise until they predominate, and this is viewed as a generational task by people who literally and unironically think in terms of generations, plural. And at least in the first world, this has delivered some results.
Explanations for pope Francis have centered around 'sometimes you get a bad pope(and he actually is bad at things other than doctrine)' and 'he lets liberal friends run amok but tends to refrain from endorsing their conclusions'. Traditional Catholics who actually matter simply do not think in terms of years or decades and so the current pope is viewed as a temporary and ineffectual roadblock.
Thanks. Reported as AAQC.
I know that OP brought up abortion, but I wasn’t thinking of abortion here: I was thinking of Martin’s approach to sexual sins, particularly homosexuality but also various kinds of cohabitation. He seems to prefer having a group of massgoers in unrepentant grave sin over the kind of call to repentance that would split them into a smaller group of repentant massgoers and a larger group that eschews the faith entirely. If that reading is correct, it’s hard to see how he isn’t at odds with the gospel.
I suppose that your understanding of Martin’s motives is much better informed than mine, which is largely limited to social media and reading him in quotation. But man, the pattern match is strong.
Interesting. I did not know this.
The contrast to the evangelical experience in twentieth-century America is really striking here. In the early twentieth century, evangelicals in many denominations realized that all of their institutions – seminaries, universities, missions boards, denominational leadership – had come to be controlled by modernists. They fought back, still not realizing how badly outgunned they were, and in all the big denominations they lost.
But of course we evangelicals aren’t permanently tied to any hierarchy, so they were free to build new institutions and leadership structures. In the middle of the century there was a renewed debate about how those ought to relate to the mainline churches, which still had some orthodox believers in them. In 1979, conservative Southern Baptists realized that modernists were beginning to gain control of their denomination and used the convention to begin their own march through the institutions. After his appointment to lead the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1993, theological conservative Al Mohler famously (and controversially) purged the faculty.
Different evangelical institutions have taken different stances over the years. Those that accommodate liberal theology in their ranks usually have an easier time dealing with secular institutions, and their leadership may be able to stave off mission drift for a generation or so. But those which play hardball with theological liberals have done a much better job staying on mission across generations. As evangelicals have come to realize that we live in negative world, the Southern Baptist approach has become more popular.
In the first draft of my reply to Sloot, I began to speculate that evangelicalism will become more theologically and politically conservative, and that it will at the same time shrink to become less politically relevant to the secular right’s interests. But of course I cannot say for sure.
A dear friend of mine is Roman Catholic, though by no means a traditionalist. It is remarkable to me just how many things her social environment within the RCC accepts as valid Catholic positions because of the lack of disciplinary boundary drawing from the hierarchy. It’s an ongoing source of temptation to her, made all the more subtle because she doesn’t recognize it.
Of course, I hope that you all come to your senses and convert tomorrow. Failing that, I hope you are right that theological liberalism in the Roman church is just a passing phase. But if the time to wait it out is measured in generations, then the cost must also be measured in generations.
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Thanks for the look into a community I'm almost completely in the dark on.
I did notice in my very leftist area there's been a Catholic revitalization that the old lib faction isn't entirely happy about, led by a conservative firebrand woman with 5 kids. But I don't get to hear anything about the actual institution aside from the difficulty of getting/sharing a local priest.
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The counterpoint being that those other people can advocate for themselves and can show gratitude to you for helping them, two things that an unborn baby cannot do. And the circumstances are obviously different. It’s like saying in 1942 Germany “it’s easy to advocate for the Jews they don’t want anything except to survive. The poor are harder, they want you to feed them and give them money.”
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Like a lot of these political and cultural debates it's just people grappling with Philosophy 101 concepts without the tools or vocabulary needed to really engage beyond a surface level (maybe intentionally). In this case it's a motivated rehash of "Doing vs. Allowing Harm" https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/doing-allowing/
The classic example is:
The abortion case is only complicated by the question of whether or not destroying a fetus is "doing harm". If you agree that it is, then an abortion is clearly morally wrong as just about every ethical system agrees that "doing harm" is wrong.
It's practically a non sequitur to bring up "allowing harm" to try to make an accusation of hypocrisy here as it is in no way obvious that doing and allowing harm are morally equivalent. Philosophers have spilled oceans of ink debating the question, and it's extremely unlikely that people who disagree on whether an abortion is "doing harm" or not will agree on the "Doing vs. Allowing Harm" question.
I don't think that last part is true.
Virtually every ethical system allows for "doing harm" in a number of circumstances, whether it is a doctor cutting off an arm to save a person's life, a military killing enemy combatants, or killing animals to eat them.
In fact, the most famous philosophical thought experiment around abortion, Judith Jarvis Thomson's violinist is specifically constructed to argue that even if abortion is doing harm to a human being, it would be morally permissible. (Personally, I think the thought experiment really only succeeds in arguing for abortion in the case of rape, but that's neither here nor there.)
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It is illegal to kill the poor, and in point of fact the pro-life movement is fighting(and, it must be said, generally losing this fight) against the killing of the elderly and chronically ill. There is nothing inconsistent about being pro-life; this is simply a very progressive man dressing up his progressivism in the guise of Christian religion. There’s nothing particularly unique about this; lots of people wrap their ideology in the trappings of local religions. There’s also little that’s particularly Christian; no doubt this pastor would point out, accurately, that Jesus wants us to be better people. But so does Confucius and Kant and Aristotle and president trump and, presumably, Chuck E. Cheese. Jesus also wants us to believe in Him and bring all nations to belief in Him, and I doubt this pastor mentions that part much.
Not on its own, but few people are "pro-life" and nothing else. Very, very few people try to follow all of their beliefs to an "optimized" conclusion.
This is why no Catholic has ever decided to become a mass murderer and kill as many baptized infants as possible to maximize the number of people in Heaven. (Maybe the murderer is damning his own soul, but it's just one damned soul against hundreds or thousands of souls that might go astray and commit mortal sins if they're allowed to grow up. And in the end, if he can manage to truly be contrite about it, even he might end up in Heaven.)
It is also why no pro-life Catholic has tried to put together monetary funds to get hospice patients hooked up to as many machines to keep their body technically alive as long as possible. They're pro-life, but only up until a point. They have other values that trade off against their pro-life stance.
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I don't know what pro-life people Pastor Barnhart knows, but the ones I've known are the same people doing a bunch of stuff to help out single mothers ("widows," lol), and adopt or foster abandoned children ("orphans" would be way easier to help, there's a lot of court input around the kids that is a huge drag on these relationships. My impression is that actual orphans are usually immediately adopted, often by relatives).
Balancing the needs of the current community and the needs of lawbreakers is indeed complicated, and I'm not surprised that what is mostly a coalition of mothers or would be mothers doesn't have a good solution for that.
Once I tried going to an Arab church, where the pastor spent the whole homily complaining about men who prefer to smoke hookah with their friends, rather than going to church. He didn't seem to be addressing them directly, so I suppose they were not there that morning, either. Did he think their wives and daughters would go home and shame them, and they would start coming again? Seems unlikely. We didn't go back. This feels like that. Somewhere, there are probably some people who might be like he describes. It's a big country, with a lot of different flavors of hypocrite in it. But aiming sermons at someone, somewhere, hoping it'll be shared on social media until they find it seems... bad. Immoral, maybe. In dereliction of his duty as a pastor. My impression of him as a pastor, based on this, is very, very poor.
Earlier this year my aunt shared a Facebook post from Dan Rather saying something like, "Last time I checked, pro-lifers weren't lining up to adopt children."
Having higher standards than Dan Rather, I took a few minutes to look it up, and found, as I expected, that evangelicals do adopt a lot of children, but also that the media have been running occasional hit pieces on evangelical adoption for at least a decade.
Yeah, even in the 90s that take was significantly behind the times in the US, when Christians were adopting toddlers from Korea, Africa, and former USSR countries, but then there were scandals about how many of those children weren't actually "unwanted" either, their relatives were lied to by adoption agencies.
I've known several families try to adopt, and one ended up with a toddler after many years in the process, another ended up with a surrogate carrying an IVF fetus from another family, and one still hasn't succeeded at adopting, despite being willing to adopt older kids, siblings, and go through the court process with parents who are unable to keep them.
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What's the "good point" here? This is just the conservative heatmap meme with some liberal keywords thrown in.
In fact, most "owns" on abortion in particular tend to be insipid. Not sure why.
Perhaps that's a sign that there's a deep disagreement we can't resolve beneath it all. So all owns must caricature the opponent or be unsatisfying since they can't fully resolve the issue with the level of certainty and decisiveness desired.
I mean, you could also argue that most people who buy into these sorts of ideas don't relinquish their "privilege" either, despite rhetorical concessions.
In fact, they use these concessions to better abuse their less enlightened fellow citizens. You'd think a pastor would be aware of the issues around ostentatious piety.
Or that well-meaning but ultimately harmful policy is not a good idea for governments. No matter what Christians do in their private life.
I think it’s cynicism. It’s like you can’t quite except that the people you disagree with are reasoning honestly from moral priors and thus they must somehow be choosing to act on a belief but perhaps not some other one out of a calculated social standing perspective. To be fair, there are vanity beliefs and issues that people choose for the purpose of securing a place in the social hierarchy, but at the same time, there are genuine believers in almost any movement.
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This quote just shows how little anti-abortion activists demand. Only wanting it to be illegal to intentionally kill a member of some demographic is a lowest standard of human rights one could possibly demand.
If someone identified as a pro-criminals, pro-druggy, pro-poor, pro-widow, pro-orphan or pro-illegal advocate, solely on the basis of wanting to criminalize murder of a member of that demographic, other advocates for it wouldn't accept them as that belief is assumed to be universal in a non-totalitarian state.
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Fetuses can't be leftists, yes. This is why I love them.
(You can borrow this response, if you'd like. Chad face gif is optional.)
You can take this response elsewhere.
One week ban for yet another low-effort zinger. Just because it's snappy doesn't mean it actually adds value.
The hammer symbol is how people can tell it connected I guess.
You're doing the thing again.
For one brief moment I thought maybe my plea to step back and try engaging in good faith had not fallen on deaf ears.
So, let's be explicit here: if you want to accuse mods of banning people for tribal/ideological reasons, you'd better come heavy, and by that, I mean be prepared to defend your proposition with evidence and well-formed arguments. Not these kinds of low-effort sneers that pretty much every one of us is fed up with.
You haven't been banned because we are loathe to ban someone just for being a jerk to us. But since you seem to be taking advantage of this fact, you've now heard from multiple mods who are about ready to ban you because we really don't need to keep taking shit from you.
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I am pro-choice, but it seems like pro-lifers have a number of easy retorts to this argument:
Most pro-life people do care about and help prisoners, immigrants, the sick, the poor, etc.
Why would it make sense to prioritize the wellbeing of "morally uncomplicated" unborn children lower than the wellbeing of "morally complicated" people (i.e. people who bear a non-zero amount of responsibility for their circumstances)? Shouldn't the former be a higher priority, or at least an equal priority?
He is making an apples-and-oranges comparison. It is already well-established and widely agreed that it is wrong to kill prisoners, immigrants, the sick, the poor, etc. Pro-lifers simply seek to extend these protections to unborn children. If the law permitted the killing of immigrants or poor people without due process, I am sure pro-lifers would be just as upset about this as abortion, if not more so.
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I'm not a Christian so my opinion here is pretty meaningless. What strikes me about this quote is just how thoroughly drenched in progressive language it is. "Chronically poor", "question patriarchy", "challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege", "re-imagining social structures", "making reparations." There is nothing explicitly Christian in the quote, the only reference to Jesus mentions him only to demonstrate the hypocrisy of Christians. This post could have literally been pulled from /r/atheism. I don't think it would be inconsistent (what do I know) for a Christian to believe the above, but wouldn't a believing Christian and pastor generally phrase it in a Christian way? Where are the Bible quotes? The parables? References to God or Jesus? This guy just reads like Jean Meslier
After the reformation there's not a central authority that defines Christianity or who is allowed to be a pastor, and there are many churches that are completely progressive. This is a big fight currently in church denominations that were Christian enough to send missionaries internationally 100+ years ago, the international churches are still Christian and the US churches are progressive and they fight over the denominational statements.
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Wow, I literally just saw this copy-pasted 3 times in the same reddit thread. Maybe it will finally overwrite the dialogue tree for the paradox of tolerance quote or "the cruelty is the point"
I'm never surprised when the massive propaganda machine churns out a good zinger. Billions of dollars and man-hours go into it, and some of it is very good at manipulating the carefully-instilled guilt complexes normies suffer from.
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I don't know anyone in real life who is both pro life and anti those other things. I know people who are pro life and also believe in helping the poor and immigrants. I know people who are anti immigrant but fine with abortion. That these people happen to be part of the same coalition is due to the relative strength of their convictions on the different issues. Pro life are VERY pro life and weak on the other issues. Etc.
You could make a similar criticism of the pastor's position along the same lines. "You can advocate for bringing in criminals and low class immigrants and taxing the wealthy because you live far away from the lower classes and don't have to worry about crime, you work in a nepotistic industry that takes decades to assimilate into so you're not threatened by immigrant labor, and you are paid in esteem rather than cash so taxing the rich doesn't affect you. Very convenient that your political positions are both morally correct and don't force you to make any sacrifices in your own life." With a little wordsmithing that would be just as persuasive as what the pastor said.
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The attack almost feels like category error, and I can't think of many people who would feel chastened by it or feel the need to respond to it. Christians are often doing a substantial portion of the charitable work in any given community. In my experience, the people running food banks, taking meals to shut-ins, visiting prisoners, and finding resources for single mothers are affiliated with one church or another. They might agree that some nebulous others are being bad Christians who only care about people they don't have to think about, but certainly none of them exist at their church and to the extent the people being targeted by this criticism even exist they aren't serious in the first place and aren't listening.
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