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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   28485 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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If this is how one thinks of the Christian ban on euthanasia, then it makes sense to say "sure, as a Christian, your faith forbids you from performing euthanasia; but surely your conscience still allows you to see that had God not forbidden it euthanasia would be a good thing?".

"canst neither deceive nor be deceived"

In the one, true, Catholic faith, God's laws are not arbitrary. They may be impossible to fully comprehend in our limited mortal brains and may, very frequently, be exceedingly frustrating. They are not, however, arbitrary.

Turning your argument around just a little bit, it would be very refreshing if people of faith could look at atheists and secularists doing atheist and secular things and simply go, "lulz, enjoy hell." But we are called to love all men and to strive to look out for their benefit. Now, don't take this to an extreme and propose that all good Catholics start trying to hand out rosaries at San Francisco BDSM dungeons. But, in terms of voting for legislation, it isn't enough to be a Catholic in San Francisco and go "yeah, okay, they can make fentanyl legal. I just won't do it personally." No, you have to vote your conscience (i.e. against sin) and, to the extent you are compelled, try to organize the best you can even if it is an obvious losing effort. Remember, starting with Roe V. Wade, Catholic America waged about a 50 year campaign to over turn it. It is not as if, during that time, millions of Catholics were aborting babies left and right.

All of this is to say that faith and conscience aren't really separable if you take them both seriously. "Cultural Catholics" (Biden, Pelosi) aren't actually Catholic. Secular pro-lifers might have really ornate and air tight arguments against abortion, but they aren't operating in the realm of metaphysical faith. This does not make their arguments somehow more "valid" in a political context than people of faith. If that were the case, we'd have a weird situation where everyone would be in a rush to prove how atheist they are while also borrowing heavily from moral theology. It's actually kind of comical to think about - "Look at how excellent my purely rational reasoning is. DON'T LOOK AT THE GOD SHAPED HOLE"

In the one, true, Catholic faith, God's laws are not arbitrary. They may be impossible to fully comprehend in our limited mortal brains and may, very frequently, be exceedingly frustrating. They are not, however, arbitrary.

Maybe this is the case in Catholicism; clearly it wasn't the case in Lewis's understanding of Anglicanism. The idea is also, of course, pretty mainstream in Judaism. I never meant to claim that God's laws are always viewed as arbitrary in all religions, which would be silly, only that there are cases where we can reasonably expect some religious people to distinguish between things they do out of conscience, and things they do out of faith alone; and that euthanasia might be one of them; and that this may be what the interviewer had in mind in that particular instance.

This does not make their arguments somehow more "valid" in a political context than people of faith.

According to much 1st Amendment jurisprudence, and the popular understanding thereof, it absolutely does.

If that were the case, we'd have a weird situation where everyone would be in a rush to prove how atheist they are while also borrowing heavily from moral theology. It's actually kind of comical to think about - "Look at how excellent my purely rational reasoning is. DON'T LOOK AT THE GOD SHAPED HOLE"

As I see it, this perfectly describes the post-Puritan offshoot that is Wokism the Ideology That Will Not Let Itself Be Named, and how it rose to prominence. America, as a predominantly-Protestant country, developed a legal tradition of treating "religion" as being defined first and foremost by one's beliefs about God(s) and the supernatural, and in the doctrines derived therefrom; and so developed "antibodies" against religious "establishment" along these lines. Thus, the first dogmatic, crusading faith to ditch all that, make all their metaphysical priors as implicit and unspoken as possible, (yes, even with the glaring "God-shaped hole") was able to to get it's moral doctrines established without tripping the metaphorical immune response (like a virus mutating to shed a critical antigen), and become our unofficial official religion.

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