Reductio

I was going to start this latest blog entry with the words, “I believe …” but then I thought about the fact there’s a distinct difference between belief and understanding so I’m going to restart this post as follows, enjoy:

I understand the fact that once one accepts a set of practices or beliefs, one also and without choice (at that point) accepts the consequential or corollary beliefs or practices as well.

You can choose to jump in front of a speeding locomotive, for example, but you can’t choose to have that train jump its tracks and veer around you. These are the “laws” of nature, (mostly) inviolable.

So it never ceases to astound when I see people attempt the impossible: accept an idea but refuse to follow that idea to its natural consequences. Once you pick up that rope, you have to follow it, hand over hand. There is only one other choice: drop it because unfortunately, you don’t get to stand there, rope in hand.

By the way, David Hume reputedly loved the rhetorical tactic of reductio ad absurdum. By showing the holder of an argument that following that argument to its logically consistent destination results in an absurdity, the shock is usually so profound as to cause a derailment. It is indeed, as I have demonstrated in the past, a very powerful argumentative strategy.

Not that I ain’t guilty of such myself. Ahem.

I have now read enough by Nancy Pearcey to know she owns a lucid, forceful mind. Her books, Total Truth and Saving Leonardo are beyond-words-excellent. I read anything she writes with thirst. Here’s a snippet from an article:

… “I’m a bit fuzzy on why it matters what a person does in the privacy of his or her bedroom, as long as it doesn’t affect me.”

But it does affect him — and everyone else. Every social practice is the expression of fundamental assumptions about what it means to be human. [Emphasis mine] When a society accepts and approves the practice, it implicitly commits itself to the worldview that supports it — all the more so if the practice is enshrined in law.

If America accepts practices such as same-sex “marriage,” in the process it will absorb the accompanying worldview — the redefinition of human personhood as a purely social construction — which opens the door to unlimited statism, because there is no human nature that an oppressive state could possibly offend.

Those who resist will be compelled by the state to go along, or face penalties for “discrimination.”

That article is found here.