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Notes -
A poster here recommended a book to us all called “Introduction to Christianity”, by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (who would go on to become Pope Benedict XVI) a few weeks ago. I recently got a copy of it.
I wanted to share with you all the first few paragraphs from the book, because I found them very interesting:
I’m sure we’ve all felt like that clown at some point or another. Especially with regards to ideas like “just kids on college campuses”.
Here’s a quote, this one from Saint Anthony The Great, one of The Desert Fathers (Early Christian precursors to Christian monks who lived in Egypt in about 300AD).
Anyway I think the relevance to the culture war is obvious here, and could be taken any of many directions. I just read this today and wanted to share. To pull on one culture war thread (perhaps one of the oldest culture war) it is profoundly depressing to me that these parts of our history, especially the history of The Catholic Church, seem to be suppressed or at the very least ignore in modern western society.
If you have a thousand years of history behind you, there are going to be people on your side who say clever things.
These quotes are saying very cleverly "people just won't listen to the truth". And since they're not arguments, they're just people being clever, anyone who wants to say "people who don't think like me won't listen to the truth" can use them against anyone they want. I suspect that in context, I'd vehemently disagree with how these very clever statements are actually applied.
The quote that the pope used from Kierkegaard is from Either/or and is actually about that entire premise. That there exists a metaphysical space beyond the comprehension of human beings that is completely out of the bounds of empirical rationality, and can also never be accepted through rational explanations. One that is ultimately the most important decision of ones life and which there is no real evidence in either direction. In many ways your comment is exactly the type of person he explains is laughing at him.
Which is poisoning the well.
The claim is that there’s a defective pattern of reasoning. How is it poisoning the well to say that a certain way of reacting to the claim is itself an instance of that pattern? That’s a substantive question, not a fallacious inference.
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