nameandnature | Bad arguments about religion: part 2: homosexuality and mixed fibres: the Bartlet gambit

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Bad arguments about religion: part 2: homosexuality and mixed fibres: the Bartlet gambit

To give the impression that I'm fair and balanced, this time round I'm looking at a bad argument which is usually used by atheists.

There's a scene The West Wing where President Bartlet tears a strip off an evangelical Christian talk radio host. In the scene (you can see it on YouTube, or read a transcript), the evangelical tells Bartlett that the Bible says homosexuality is an abomination. Bartlet then launches into a series of rhetorical questions, asking how he should carry out other Old Testament rules which we'd now find ridiculous, if not downright evil: "My chief of staff, Leo McGarry, insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly says he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself or is it okay to call the police?"

Let's call this the Barlet gambit: the President's argument seems to be that it's inconsistent for evangelicals to say "homosexuality is wrong because the Bible says so", because they're not also keeping these other rules which are also found in the Bible. The gambit is a favourite with people who argue with evangelicals about homosexuality: sometimes they even quote Bartlet.

Unfortunately, the Bartlet gambit fails as an argument.

What's wrong with it

Evangelical Christians have reasons why they're not keeping the Old Testament laws despite regarding the Old Testament as scripture. The question comes up in the New Testament itself, once we reach the Acts of the Apostles, where we read of the first non-Jews converting to Christianity (up to that point in the story, what will later become Christianity is still a movement within Judaism, although a few Gentiles are impressed with Jesus in the gospels). The Council of Jerusalem ruled that Gentile Christians are allowed to eat shrimp and wear mixed fibres and, luckily for penis owners, don't have to be circumcised.

So, according to Acts (which, like the rest of the Bible, is inerrant, remember), Christians sorted this stuff out in the first century AD. They aren't going to worry about atheists calling them hypocrites for wearing cotton/polyester blend while "hating the sin and loving the sinner".

Perhaps Barlet is specifically objecting to the evangelical's use of Leviticus, which does put homosexuality on a par with things which aren't kosher, rather than with things which are morally evil. Alas, even without Leviticus, there are other Bible passages which can be pressed into service against the gay, and you can rely on evangelicals to know most of them, because the issue has become a defining feature of evangelicalism. We could argue that these passages don't apply to modern committed homosexual partnerships, but evangelicals don't find these arguments impressive.

What to do instead

In the UK, many rank-and-file evangelicals are educated professionals. They didn't get into religion to give gays a hard time, and, unless they've completely disappeared up their own sub-culture, they tend to be a bit embarrassed by the anti-gay stuff. Still, because it's "what the Bible says", they feel they're obliged to go along with it anyway, even if the Guardian wouldn't approve (the evangelical jargon phrase for that sort of thing is that it's a "hard teaching" where you'll just have to "trust God").

If I were a gifted orator like Barlet, I think I'd appeal to their sense of justice. Is there perhaps something odd about the way churches accept straight couples who are openly in their second or later marriage (something about which Jesus had some strong words to say), but wouldn't be happy with an openly gay couple? Some hypocrisy there, maybe?

Or we might try empathy. There's the problem that, as Valerie Tarico says, evangelicalism "can re-direct our mother-bear instincts away from protecting vulnerable individuals and toward protecting the ideology itself. Believers may come to feel more protective of their religion than they are of actual human beings." Still, it might be worth a go: is it fair to say that gay people cannot form committed romantic relationships? Imagine yourself in their shoes. If you obey the evangelical rules, it seems rather a lonely place.

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luckily for us guys, don't have to be circumcised.

It's not just you guys. A foreskin is double-sided. Makes about 3 inches of vagina. If you've not got one the surgeon needs to salvage scrotal tissue instead, which is hair baring, so you need to have electrolysis on the scrotal sac to have the hair removed first.

Good game, good game.

Amended to "penis owners" per the 5th Pronouncement of Saunt Yudkowsky.

Also... ouch.

Heh! I wasn't trying to call you out - I just enjoy recounting grim tales about gore ;-)

Fear not, I did not feel called out. Still, penis owners is funnier, although possibly ambiguous:

scribb1e reckons she has a 50% share. This turns out to be Biblically sound, too.

The obvious next question was which 50%.

The outside, I think :-)

Which, of course, is both sides of a foreskin. Isn't this where we came in?

Yay grim tales about gore :-)

Yup. Did I mention the conversation I had with my fine Australian team leader, a couple of years ago, when we shoulder-surfed our Director's lunchtime reading?

A bit of background: she was over from the New York office, and everything that you'd expect a lady banker from New Jersey to be: focused, workaholic, direct - no the word is abrasive, loud, and very, very smart indeed.

Every day, she set aside half an hour for Daily Bible Readings from the Southern Baptist Convention.

"Roight Nile...", Said The Ozzie: "That thing you're working on for the Correlation traders is not an 'Evolutionary algorithm', it's an 'Iterating optimiser'. And I'm from Coonaburra."

"Coonaburra", Said yours truly... "That's a suburb of Darw-"

"No. Coonaburra. Which is Coonaburra, full stop."

Lucky there were no openly gay members of the team. Although, in an investment bank, I don't think there's anyone who places their religious convictions ahead of the goal of making money. Actually, I remain unconvinced that there are any Evangelicals (and Southern Baptists in particular) who matter who would actually put principles ahead of profit. They are all happy enough to invest in armaments and warfare, and the touchstone issue for openly evangelical politicians isn't abortion evolution, or homosexuality (there's always something in their voting record you can catch them out on there): they always, without exception, vote against environmental legislation.

Poke an evangelised 'educated professional' on their environmental attitudes, see if you can get support for science and evidence-based policy out of them. It's a gateway to the sort of critical thinking about moral issues that will eventually undermine their attachment to religious dogma. At the very least, you have a way of discrediting their political leaders.

Are evangelical churches really happy about second marriages? It's only recently that the Church of England even allowed the possibility of remarriage in church while the first partner was still alive, isn't it, and as I understand (hedging here because I'm not an Anglican so this is hearsay) it's still at the discretion of the vicar, so would a strongly Evangelical parish not also refuse to remarry?

The question of whether it's fair that gay people cannot marry comes down, of course, to the definition of 'marriage', something I am sure you will be covering in future.

S.

I'm not sure what the evangelical position on performing second marriages is. My point is that the church's attitude to people who are in second marriages (regardless of whether those marriages were performed by the church) is not consistent with the teaching those people are in an ongoing adulterous relationship. If a remarried couple and a gay couple turn up to an evangelical church, which will be more welcome?

Christians might argue that it matters whether the first marriage was performed in church or while the people taking part were Christian, but they will then run into further trouble: if civil ceremonies or ceremonies before conversion don't form marriages, some of their congregation are fornicating.

I'm not particularly interested in debating what "marriage" really is: I'd say it's a social convention which can be amended. Marriage was made for man, and not man for marriage, if you like.

Edited 2010-01-24 16:14 (UTC)

I suspect in the sort of church where there's tutting, there'd be tutting at both couples.

You may not be interested in debating what 'marriage' really is, but you're not going to get very far with your argument if you are not interested in understanding how the other side uses the word, either.

S.

From my former church and from the uk.religion.christian thread discussed in my previous posting on this topic, my impression is that evangelical churches are much more willing to welcome remarried divorcees than gay people. There's a difference between a bit of tutting and getting the church leadership together to expel the evildoers from among you (not that I've seen the latter happen, but I can't see how evangelical churches would do anything else, though it might be the end of a protracted process).

I've changed "is it fair to say that gay people cannot marry" to replace marry with "form committed romantic relationships", because I know many churches define marriage as being between a man and a woman. If it turned out that they could support some sort of union between two men or two women, they might not call that marriage.

Like I said, I don't know that much about Anglicans. Maybe they are open to remarriages. It wouldn't exactly surprise me, let's put it that way.

As for your change, the problem is that the Bible/orthodox Christian thought doesn't say that the place for sex is within 'a committed romantic relationship', it says the place for sex is within 'marriage' (leaving parents, becoming one flesh, mirroring God a la Gen 1:27). So the question of whether two people of the same sex can form a committed romantic relationship is, with the best will in the world, irrelevant to the other side's argument.

S.

StAG is more evangelical than Anglican, I'd say, and the uk.r.c thread referred to an independent charismatic church, I think.

If the church does decide that committed gay relationships are OK, it will either called them marriages, or not. If it does, it'll change what "marriage" means, if not, it'll change the requirement that sex takes place only within marriage. Saying that the church cannot change either of these things is not useful: it's the church's choice.

mirroring God a la Gen 1:27

Are you a creationist, then?

But don't those you're trying to persuade think that it precisely isn't the church's choice -- it's to do with how God made the world? They don't see themselves as defining marriage, but as recognising something present in the universe's blueprint. So you can't hope to persuade them by saying they can redefine marriage; you'd have to either persuade them that they are wrong about what 'marriage' means, or that there is no such thing written into the universe.

S.

My advice to atheists is to engage Christians on their sense of justice and of empathy. I give that advice in the hope that Christians themselves would work out how to accommodate gay relationships.

I don't want to get into close Bible study on this because Christians do not accept such studies coming from atheists: many of them have the idea that non-Christians cannot interpret the Bible correctly, and this idea provides a theory of justified dismissal for any interpretation from an atheist which they don't like (you can see that on the uk.r.c thread: Mark Goodge wasn't interested in engaging my interpretations specifically because I'm an atheist and so don't have to abide by what the Bible says).

So, it's much better if Christians themselves come to an accommodation, even tacitly, as many of them have on divorce. No doubt if they did reach such an accommodation, it would have been written into the universe's blueprint all along: after all, there are no lies in religion, as Ken Macleod tells us.

Edited 2010-01-25 20:53 (UTC)

Ah, I'm just pointing out why that advice won't work, because it doesn't actually address their point at all.

S.

How many organisations are there aimed at getting divorced people into reparative therapy, in order to pretend they don't hate each other any more so they can remarry?

I don't know. I don't quite understand your point, which seems to be based on a double-negative. Your orthodox Christian view would be that divorced people shouldn't remarry (in line with Matthew 5: 31-2 and Mark 10:11-2), so I don't see why there would be organisations aimed at getting them to remarry.

S.

OK, let's try this.

How many evangelical Christian groups spend their time campaigning for divorce to be illegal with the same vigour many of them campaign for homosexuality to be illegal, or at all?

Well, I don't know of either that campaign to be either to be illegal. Which ones are you thinking of?

S.

I'm guessing you missed the whole Uganda thing, for a start.

Ah, I was thinking of the UK. I don't know much else.

So which UK groups were you thinking of?

S.

Oh, I didn't realise it was OK for evangelical Christians to be raging hypocrites and bigots as long as they're yanks.

I don't know anything about evangelicalism in the rebel colonies, really. As I said, I'm not even an Anglican, so foreign evangelical groups are doubly outside my orbit.

Though, isn't Uganda in Africa? What has that to do with America?

So were there any UK groups you were thinking of, or not?

S.

Though, isn't Uganda in Africa? What has that to do with America?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=uganda+evangelical+christians+anti-gay

Oh, three Americans evangelicals went to Uganda. Right, that's the connection, obviously.

So, leaving aside two foreign countries, which were the UK groups you were thinking of?

S.

Are you being deliberately obtuse?

I never said anything about limiting this to "UK groups" - religious extremism seems to care very little about national boundaries.

And your caricature of the US religious right's apparently highly successful campaign to get gay people forced into the ccloset, or into ex-gay programmes in Africa, under threat of imprisonment or death as "three Americans evangelicals went to Uganda" is frankly offensive and does you no credit.

The point remains that nobody is doing anything like this when it comes to divorce. Your implication that they're equally frowned upon is absurd. Any minor disapproval of divorced members of their own flock is in no way equivalent to the systematic and organised campaigns of abuse and persecution directed at LGBT people by Christian churches around the world, but especially in the US.

And regardless of whether that takes the form of highly damaging "reparative" "therapy", into which people are duped and coerced, active campaigns to deny us marriage rights, colonial lobbying in 3rd world countries to enshrine the persecution of LGBT people in law, or just plain going out, finding a few gay people and beating the crap out of them, if you had a shred of human decency and integrity to you, you'd at least try to do your bit to encourage your religion to own its shit over this, rather than playing dumb.

I'm done here.

Edited 2010-01-25 01:01 (UTC)

'Around the world' but not, apparently, in the UK, unless you're thinking of some UK-based groups but deliberately not mentioning them for reasons of your own?

I'm not entirely sure how I can be held responsible for the actions of some unknown citizens of a foreign county in a third country, but if it helps you to hold me so, go for it.

S.

Oh, and 'Three Americans went ot Uganda' is what came up when I clicked on your link. If you wanted me to see something else maybe you should have linked to it?

S.

In America they actually do devote some effort to making divorce more difficult (the "covenant marriage" laws), although certainly not with the same fervour that they oppose gay marriage, and a lot of "Christian counselling" for couple is in fact anti-divorce "reparative therapy" putting a lot of pressure on the couple not to divorce (and usually on the woman, who is almost certainly not "submitting to the headship" of a man she wanats to divorce).

Ugh. There's a reason I live in San Francisco and go back to West Virginia only when someone I'm related to is near death or has just died.

Putting pressure on people not to divorce isn't quite the same as trying to get the *divorced* back together though - the claim was that *divorced* people and gay people were similarly discriminated against by the churches, which is different from those considering divorce.

And I think this part of your quote:

although certainly not with the same fervour that they oppose gay marriage

...is the most important part - there's absolutely no equivalence between the way they treat divorcees and the way they outright persecute LGBT people - they're on completely different scales.

Pretend to stop hating each other, or stop pretending that they hate each other? I guess either will do.

I think that this line of argument is what you end up with if you take moral relativism too seriously: since you can't argue that someone's morals are wrong, the only line of attack you have left is to show that they are inconsistent. You may not be able to say which of their morals is wrong, but you can show that at least one of them must be.

If it were phrased right, it could be seen an attempt to leave a line of retreat for evangelicals, by arguing that if you already don't do a bunch of things the Bible allegedly says you should, changing your mind on homosexuality won't cause the sky to fall in.

This may be more effective than surrounding them with arguments for atheism, or calling them bigots, or whatever: those sorts of things are likely to produce dissonance with the idea that Christianity is good and reactions which ease dissonance by the path of least resistance, which is probably to write the opposition off as blinded by Satan.

Unfortunately, if you do it Bartlet's way, it comes off as a charge of hypocrisy. There's a way to ease that which works because it's a very old one: Christians already know they don't need to keep the OT law.

Edited 2010-01-24 21:26 (UTC)

Also: have you been reading Neal Stephenson? That's Finkel-McGraw's point from The Diamond Age.

I have read much of Stephenson, including The Diamond Age. Maybe I got the observation from there, but I like to think I noticed it independently.

The place I've noticed this tendency most strongly is Private Eye. This is an organ that you wouldn't think of as a bastion of relativism, but they are particularly keen on stories which contrast someone's shameful deeds with their own pious words. Perhaps it's fear of libel suits that means they avoid direct accusation; or maybe the writers believe it's makes for more effective satire to have the accused condemn themselves with their own words. But when the tactic is used week after week it starts to give the impression that the fault being criticized is purely the hypocrisy of saying one thing and doing another, and if only the person had got their story straight they would have been fine. (An example.)

Bout all you have shown is that Christianity always was a cafeteria religion. Choose the easy ways out and go to heaven

If Christianity has always been a cafeteria religion, then people who want to get as close as possible to the original Christianity (as evangelicals usually do) won't be worried by accusations that the original Christians picked the bits of Judaism they liked, because as far as evangelicals are concerned, the original Christians had the authority to do so. So the Bartlet gambit is no help when arguing with them.

I don't think calling Christianity a cafeteria religion is that useful, because in the sense you're using it, all religions which started by modifying a previous religion are "cafeteria religions". The "cafeteria" term usually refers to people who say they're part of a well-established religion but don't follow some of the major doctrines, not to the establishment of new religions.

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Bad arguments about religion: part 2: homosexuality and mixed fibres: the Bartlet gambit

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Cafeteria Christianity

Re: Cafeteria Christianity