Wednesday, October 1, 2003

'Nonjudgmental' position is self-contradictory

In Mr. T.J. Parker's article, ["Bible has been used and misused through millennia," The Citizen, Sept. 17, 2003] he takes Pastor Keith Turner to task for being "keen to judge," "dogmatic," "a minister of propaganda," "prejudiced," and for being, well, un-Christian. It seems not to have occurred to him that his article, just like that of Pastor Turner, is based on a point of view which presupposes his own set of standards for right and wrong, what is moral and what is not, and how people are to behave when they express themselves in public debates.

Clearly, Mr. Parker believes that Pastor Turner is wrong, in a moral sense, to hold the positions that he does and that it is his own view that is the correct one for people to hold.

Sadly, the content of Mr. Parker's diatribe, apart from being logically self-defeating, dogmatic, and incoherent, leads to skepticism. Also, it is slanderous and mean-spirited, and does little to advance the debate surrounding the morality of same-sex marriage, which is what started the series of articles in the first place.

I have little doubt that by venting his criticism of the Turner article, Mr. Parker acquired a certain amount of self-satisfaction. But, by his use of strident and abusive language, Parker has betrayed the time-honored practice of civil discourse which has as its objective the advancement of truth for the common good of all citizens.

As an example of abusive language, Mr. Parker slanders Pastor Turner by implying that he is a Nazi when he refers to him as "Herr Turner." And yet, by such slander, Mr. Parker vilifies Pastor Turner in the very same way that the Nazis vilified the Jews as they moved them along a path to the gas chambers.

Recall that Pastor Turner presented a series of what he said were definitions of certain words or ideas and that those definitions had been altered over time and that the new definitions stood in stark contrast with the original ones.

Mr. Parker summarily dismisses all of this on the grounds that what Turner offered as definitions were not, in fact, definitions at all. And then having arbitrarily and without explanation dismissed the basis for any conclusions being made by Turner, Parker calls into question all of the rest of what Turner had to say.

Even if Parker is correct in asserting that the definitions were not definitions at all, he misses the whole point that Pastor Turner was trying to make. Clearly, the point was that the meanings of the words and phrases mentioned were being altered, not in some natural way as when words become obsolete because the things being signified fall from common usage, but rather by the deliberate design of those who reconstruct language to accomplish a political or social agenda.

But, by failing to address the point of Turner's article, Mr. Parker is guilty of exactly what he accused the pastor of doing, i.e., "set the reality, pose the premise, and pre-load the conclusion." Rather than addressing the meaning of what the pastor was saying, Mr. Parker, with simple rhetorical élan, eliminates the entire basis for his argument and by doing so, sets his own premises and pre-loads the conclusion.

Mr. Parker says that he noticed that Pastor Turner was "keen to judge" and refers him to Biblical verses which command Christians not to judge. Aside from his faulty interpretation of Scripture, Mr. Parker fails to recognize that the entire content of his article is based on a judgment that he made concerning the merit of the article he is responding to. It must not have occurred to him that he himself is judging the validity of the arguments made in the Turner article.

But, clearly his is since from his own analysis, he concluded (judged) that Turner was being, among other things, judgmental.

If Mr. Parker believes that somehow we go through life without making moral judgments about the behavior of others and that such judgments derive from sources of divine command as well as the common sense of his fellow citizens, then he is deluding himself and denying the truth.

Implicit in every moral choice that a person makes, whether it concerns abortion, same-sex marriage, premarital sex, the use of illegal drugs, or whether or not to engage in extramarital sex, is a judgment that one way of behaving is morally acceptable and the other is not. We all make these judgments concerning ourselves, or children, and, yes, even our neighbors.

In every political election voters make judgments as to which candidate best reflects their economic, social, and moral point of view. The very founding of this country was based on the judgment of the Founders with respect to the rightness or wrongness of the behavior of the monarchy that ruled over them.

Further, those judgments were very publicly articulated without the slightest fear that the speaker would be accused of being judgmental. Right or wrong, they never shied away from arguing in support of their moral beliefs or from giving justification for those beliefs. Had Lincoln and his fellow abolitionists adhered to the, "judge not lest ye be judged" credo advocated by Mr. Parker, slavery might have persisted for much longer than it did.

This brings me to the next point that I would like to make. Mr. Parker seems to be offended by the moral implications of the Turner article. He suggests that Turner is a closet homophobe because he uses the term, "lifestyle choices" and implies that homosexual behavior is perverted. Parker goes on to suggest, however, that the source of such behavior is at least mysterious to him because such men, "opt for a 'lifestyle' that puts them at odds with most of society" in spite of, "the fine curvature around them."

By his own observation then, homosexual behavior is a minority behavior within the general population. Nevertheless, Mr. Parker raises high the banner of privacy as protective cover for such behavior when it is between consenting adults. This is clearly a moral judgment that he is making; i.e., any sexual act between consenting adults has on its face the moral approbation of society and having such a sanction, it is morally wrong for the state to interfere with it.

In this argument, what seems to have been missed by Mr. Parker is the absence of any justification, in the absolute sense, for his claim that such behavior is right behavior in the moral sense, either with respect to the participants or on the part of the state.

On what principle or axiom does he ground his claim then? He offers little more than an appeal to tradition by pointing out to us that, "in the West we believe in personal privacy and a natural outgrowth of that belief is the gradual relaxation of prejudices (there's that judgment thing again) against private, adult, consenting sexual behavior."

But, what Mr. Parker fails to address is whether or not such a "gradual relaxation" is a morally good trend. Perhaps this is because by appealing to privacy as the ground for his moral claim, he logically removes from any further analysis the behavior which is being shielded behind that privacy.

Pastor Turner attempts to place the grounding of his moral claims in Biblical Christianity. Whether or not one believes that Biblical Christianity is the ultimate ground for all moral truth, his appeal to such a ground is at least a reasonable one. If Christianity is true, then what Scripture teaches with respect to the moral behavior of humans is also true, in the absolute sense.

Mr. Parker, in spite of his profession that he is a Christian, makes no such link between his moral claims and their justification. It seems clear that he is not relying on Biblical injunctions for such grounding. In fact, he seems to be agnostic on the issue by admitting that he, "does not know if your (Pastor Turner) book (the Bible) is infallible."

So, if he can not rely on the Bible to ground his moral claims, what can he rely on? One can only conclude that Mr. Parker relies on little more than his own opinion. And yet he feels so strongly that his opinions are the correct ones that he is willing to go on record and state that Pastor Turner is little more than a fear-mongering Nazi.

Such strong positions should be made of weightier stuff than mere opinion. But, here once again Mr. Parker contradicts himself. When he reminds Pastor Turner that human beings are fallible, especially when they lay claim to moral truths found in the Bible, he apparently fails to realize that he, as a human being, is subject to the same fallibility, even with respect to his claim to be a Christian.

For if a fallible human being reads a book which may itself be fallible, and if that book is the basis for that fallible human being to claim that he is what the book commands him to be, then how can he know with certainty that he is what he claims to be?

By his own assertions, Mr. Parker denies himself the very ground for claiming to be a Christian. And, given his premise of fallibility, he has to admit also that all of his assertions, all of his reasoned conclusions, and the basis for each of his personal attacks on Pastor Turner might be based on a fallible understanding of the way things really are and, as such, might very well be wrong.

In other words, Mr. Parker, by his own logic, has placed himself in the position of a skeptic. And as such, he has lost the authority to make any claims whatsoever with respect to moral truths. In fact, by virtue of being a skeptic, he must remain agnostic concerning the very existence of absolute moral truth and fall back into moral relativism, the logical conclusion of his position.

Randy Hough

Peachtree City, Ga.