Why It’s Hard to Dialogue With Secularists and Leftists

[Michie]

#1
8-24-13

My blog title, Little Catholic Bubble, is a bit tongue-in-cheek. I love my faithful Catholic friends, but I also enjoy engaging the left, mostly secular humanists, in cultural debates. Three main frustrations, however, make it hard to have a productive discussion.

The first frustration is the tendency by many liberals to duck out early. I take a pseudo-Socratic approach to dialogue, asking a series of questions in an attempt to follow an argument to its logical conclusion, and often my opponent quits right at that threshold. It might look like this:

Me: Do you think the unborn are as human as you are?

Abortion Advocate: No, I don’t.

Me: What do you think they are?

AA: They are potential humans.

Me: At what moment do they become fully human?

AA: At viability. {Other answers include: brainwaves, heartbeat, the second trimester, birth, three months after birth, sentience, etc.}

Me: Is that objectively true, or is that simply your opinion?

AA: After deep inquiry and thought, that’s my conclusion.

Me: Okay, well, how do you pinpoint the exact second that humanity begins, so that we don’t accidentally kill any innocent people?

AA: We can’t pinpoint an exact second, but it’s a good estimate.

Me: Isn’t that arbitrary and subjective?

AA: Well, we have to draw the line somewhere.

Me: Why do we have to draw the line anywhere? Death is irrevocable. If we might be killing innocent people, shouldn’t we always err on the side of life?

Suddenly, silence. One of numerous unanswered questions on my blog.
If a thread doesn’t end in silence, it might end in the next frustration, which is an irrational explosion of raw emotion, either offensive (“You racist, sexist, patriarchal, judgmental, pedophile-protecting, bigoted, homophobic fetus-lover! You hate the poor, you rape the earth, and you don’t care about children after they’re born!”) or defensive (“You think I’m evil! You don’t think I have any morals! You are calling me a monster!”). Not to mention myriad other choice phrases and obscenities that cannot be printed here.

Continued- Why It’s Hard to Dialogue With Secularists and Leftists‏ : Catholic Stand

 

[AMDG]

Great article. Oh wow! The author is Leila Miller! If it's the one I'm thinking of, I "met" her on Catholic Exchange years ago. Her story was in the book "Prodigal Daughters".

 

[Wolseley]

Some Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole moments:

Many secularists proclaim that, except for genitalia, there is no difference between men and women. At all.

I’ve been told often that mothers and fathers are “interchangeable” to a child, so having both is not needed.

A sex educator informed me that she and her husband leave out “judgmental words like ‘marriage’” when teaching underprivileged school children.

I’ve been scolded by a recent college grad who has a “big issue” with my “assumptions about women, that their bodies were made to breed and sustain other people”. (Biology, anyone?)

A science major told me that although “it’s true” she started life as a single cell, “that zygote that I started out as wasn’t me”.

A college atheist couldn’t say whether a fully-formed baby girl aborted in the third trimester deserved love or was literally a piece of trash. She looked at the dead girl’s photo and said she would need to know the “circumstances”.

Two undergraduates told me that torturing, raping and killing a six-year-old girl to spare the lives of fifty people “would be the only moral thing to do” (though “moral principles aren’t necessarily easy to live out”).

An abortionist mocked me for imposing my “mystical, spiritual beliefs”, after I presented strictly secular pro-life arguments based on biology and civil rights.

A homosexual activist and his boyfriend staged a “mock civil union” on campus to challenge traditional marriage laws, yet when I asked him to define “marriage” he admitted he’d never thought about it.

These are just typical examples of the way the liberal mind works; they think with their hearts instead of their heads, and far too often, their cockeyed ideas about "fairness" and "tolerance" win out over plain common sense.

But there is another category of discussion that I can respect, even as I recoil: When a secularist is consistent, willing to push his idea all the way to its logical conclusion.

Take for example the young atheist wife and mother who admits that since love is “just a series of random chemical reactions in the brain”, she and her (currently beloved) husband should, and will, divorce should those chemicals shift.

Or the academic who conceded when pressed that adult siblings (homosexual or straight) should be allowed to marry: “If two siblings really, really want to get married and enjoy a happy relationship – then go right ahead.”

Or, famously, Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer, a supporter of both abortion and infanticide who rightly argues that the two acts are not different, and that birth is an arbitrary line drawn by abortion proponents to make themselves feel a distinction where none exists. Singer understands that “birth does not mark a morally significant dividing line” when it comes to killing infants.

Yeah; these are classic examples of "detatched" thinking. Robert Jay Lifton wrote a book about it. These are the people who are so indoctrinated with a concept that both rational thought and human empathy disappear or are suppressed to make way for the concept; this type of psychological device is what allowed the Nazis to operate their camps and murder people by the hundreds of thousands. Peter Singer would have made a splendid Nazi---he is cut from the exact same bolt of cloth that gave us Reinhard Heydrich, Theodor Eicke, Rudolf Hoess, Franz Stangl, Amon Goeth and Adolf Eichmann: smug, superior, completely certain of himself, and absolutely, utterly devoid of all human compassion and feeling.

 

[LoAmmi]

I find it hard to believe that so many people can't express their views consistently. Heck, I've been around for a while and I've always asked for people to point out inconsistency in my views.
My views:
Fully human at birth as that is when I believe we receive a soul. However, the process of gestation should not be interrupted except in the case to save the mother's life.

I've stuck to that view on abortion on this forum for as long as I can remember. (The people who like to call me simply pro-choice or assume I believe certain things when I have never expressed them make me laugh at this point.)

I guess people don't think about their views enough to answer the tough questions.

 

[catholicbybirth]

I find it hard to believe that so many people can't express their views consistently. Heck, I've been around for a while and I've always asked for people to point out inconsistency in my views.
My views:
Fully human at birth as that is when I believe we receive a soul. However, the process of gestation should not be interrupted except in the case to save the mother's life.

I've stuck to that view on abortion on this forum for as long as I can remember. (The people who like to call me simply pro-choice or assume I believe certain things when I have never expressed them make me laugh at this point.)

I guess people don't think about their views enough to answer the tough questions.

Or not answer the tough questions honestly. I love the Socratic method of learning. Taking everything to its logical conclusion.

Janice

 

[Fantine]

I imagine that if the tables were turned Ms. Miller would have some trouble answering some of the liberals' questions, too.

Dialogue involves active listening with the heart--as opposed to an interrogation, which is what Miller appears to be doing.

So perhaps her statement should be changed to: I enjoy interrogating liberals....

a more accurate accounting, which would leave her time to contemplate why no one wants to be interrogated.

 

[catholicbybirth]

I imagine that if the tables were turned Ms. Miller would have some trouble answering some of the liberals' questions, too.

Dialogue involves active listening with the heart--as opposed to an interrogation, which is what Miller appears to be doing.

So perhaps her statement should be changed to: I enjoy interrogating liberals....

a more accurate accounting, which would leave her time to contemplate why no one wants to be interrogated.

Go ahead, quiz us.

Janice

 

[hsilgne]

There are 4 countries in the world where it is legal to have abortions through out the full term of the pregnancy.

China
North Korea
USA
Canada

Gee... that's some attractive company we're hanging with there. The two most prevalent human rights violators in the world.

Yet the media continues to label us pro-lifers here as the 'radicals'...'right wing extremists'...

Excuse me?

WE are the radical extremists??

.... I don't think so scooter.

 

[Fantine]

Go ahead, quiz us.

Janice

I don't want to quiz other people and I don't want to be quizzed. I think that the basis of productive dialogue is when the listener can really understand the speaker's point of view. This happens in the therapeutic activity of "active listening" and giving feedback by repeating what was said by the speaker in order to ascertain whether the listener has truly understood the speaker.

By using the Socratic method, she is assuming the role of 'teacher.' She has the unexpressed point-of-view of "I'm going to teach these pro-choicers a thing or two..." I can even picture her scowling and lifting her shoulders as she contemplates trying to beat some sense into the heads of those she imagines are numbskulls.

I, on the other hand, respect your spiritual journey. I recognize that your cultural and spiritual experiences have brought you to the place you are right now, and that mine have brought me to the place I am right now. God isn't finished with either of us yet. If God wants me (or you) to change, He will place experiences on our paths that will change us.

 

[AMDG]

If God wants me (or you) to change, He will place experiences on our paths that will change us.

Snipped to portion addressed.

Maybe HE already has and she is it.

 

[catholicbybirth]

I don't want to quiz other people and I don't want to be quizzed. I think that the basis of productive dialogue is when the listener can really understand the speaker's point of view. This happens in the therapeutic activity of "active listening" and giving feedback by repeating what was said by the speaker in order to ascertain whether the listener has truly understood the speaker.

By using the Socratic method, she is assuming the role of 'teacher.' She has the unexpressed point-of-view of "I'm going to teach these pro-choicers a thing or two..." I can even picture her scowling and lifting her shoulders as she contemplates trying to beat some sense into the heads of those she imagines are numbskulls.

I, on the other hand, respect your spiritual journey. I recognize that your cultural and spiritual experiences have brought you to the place you are right now, and that mine have brought me to the place I am right now. God isn't finished with either of us yet. If God wants me (or you) to change, He will place experiences on our paths that will change us.

So, you believe that everyone is believing what God wants them to believe?

Or do you think that no one can resist to change if God wants someone to change? I believe that people can resist God, for that is where sin comes in.

Janice

 

[Fantine]

In the first place, I think that God sees us wholistically, whereas Ms. Miller sees people as needing to pass some litmus test.

I personally know both pro-choice and pro-life people who are wonderful, committed, and compassionate, each in their own ways.

I try very hard to see people as God does, wholistically, and, with the exception of gun owners and gun rights activists, I think I succeed.

My extreme aversion to gun ownership helps me to understand the point of view of militant pro-lifers like Ms. Miller better, because I express my love for human life through my desire to have a gun-free nation. And so you see it serves a positive purpose.

 

[eastcoast_bsc]

In the first place, I think that God sees us wholistically, whereas Ms. Miller sees people as needing to pass some litmus test.

I personally know both pro-choice and pro-life people who are wonderful, committed, and compassionate, each in their own ways.

I try very hard to see people as God does, wholistically, and, with the exception of gun owners and gun rights activists, I think I succeed.

My extreme aversion to gun ownership helps me to understand the point of view of militant pro-lifers like Ms. Miller better, because I express my love for human life through my desire to have a gun-free nation. And so you see it serves a positive purpose.

So can we extrapolate from your comments that there are some "doctors" who perform 3rd trimester abortions who are wonderful and delightful individuals?

 

[Fantine]

I see you're trying to use the Socratic method, like Ms. Miller.

I try not to define members of any groups by their most extreme examples. I wouldn't identify most pro-lifers with people who bomb abortion clinics, either.

 

[eastcoast_bsc]

I see you're trying to use the Socratic method, like Ms. Miller.

I try not to define members of any groups by their most extreme examples. I wouldn't identify most pro-lifers with people who bomb abortion clinics, either.

Your using obfuscation.

 

[MikeK]

There are 4 countries in the world where it is legal to have abortions through out the full term of the pregnancy.

China
North Korea
USA
Canada

That is a false statement. It is based on a based on an oft-repeated and somewhat factual (if misleading, likely intentionally) statement that only those 4 countries allow abortion-on-demand for any reason at any stage of a pregnancy. What this statement fails to account for is that fact that countless countries allow for what amounts to the same result, though they require the mother to make a statement indicating that she is exhausted or depressed or suffering from financial difficulties. That kind of sounds like every 3rd trimester pregnant woman I've known.

 

[Fantine]

Your using obfuscation.

people

This post is about Ms. Miller's article. I question the entire basis of her article, because she is not trying to engage people in dialogue. She is trying to interrogate them.

Dialogue takes two parties willing to engage in conversation in a respectful and mutual self-disclosure.

The reason why people don't put up with Ms. Miller's interrogations is self-evident.

 

[AMDG]

I think she is trying to engage people in dialog, just as she says. At the same time she does not think of the people so poorly as to accept half arguments. She instead, rather gently, asks questions that allow them to state their beliefs (and consider those arguments taken to their logical conclusions probably for the first time in their lives.)

I don't think the article was a defense of what the Church and science believe (which obviously she accepts), but simply a statement of some of the things said to her by those on the left. IMO her blog title, "the Catholic Bubble", sort of almost humorously "admits" that to be Catholic is to be counter-cultural and that these are the usual arguments against life and for abortion that Catholics normally have to listen to if they too engage the left on this controversial subject.

 

[MKJ]

That is a false statement. It is based on a based on an oft-repeated and somewhat factual (if misleading, likely intentionally) statement that only those 4 countries allow abortion-on-demand for any reason at any stage of a pregnancy. What this statement fails to account for is that fact that countless countries allow for what amounts to the same result, though they require the mother to make a statement indicating that she is exhausted or depressed or suffering from financial difficulties. That kind of sounds like every 3rd trimester pregnant woman I've known.

It also does not necessarily give a clear view of what is going on in those four countries. I don't know about the other three, but Canada has not exactally got a law saying women can get an abortion at any point. Rather, there is a lack of a law - after the old laws were struck down, no one has been able to come up with something most people can agree on. That is not good, but also not the same as an agreement that it is good to have 3rd trimester abortions for no real reason.

You would also be very hard pressed to find a doctor to provide a 3rd trimester abortion without real medical reasons to do so - probably near impossible. PEI does not even have a doctor that does abortions at all - women have to go out of province.

So that it is allowed does not really indicate that there are a lot of it going on.

 

[MikeK]

I don't have any real difficulty establishing a dialogue with leftists or secularists or athiests or Catholics or Muslims or Jews or Jawas (toohenee!). I have a hard time with cowards who do not wish to be challenged and prefer to hide in a cocoon of agreeable compatriots, but these folks live all over the political and religious spectrum.