Comments for Religious and Secular Arguments at http://www.thecatholicthing.org , comment 1 to 7 out of 7 comments http://www.thecatholicthing.org Mon, 20 May 2013 03:23:50 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/religious-and-secular-arguments.html#comment-13857 The popular distinction between secular and religious argument does lead some to claim that arguments in accord with religious faith are unacceptable in public discourse. The solution is to point out the distinction between morals and ethics. Ethics delineates human behavior as that which anyone, thinking rightly of human nature, judges to be appropriate. Morals are ethics with the stamp of approval of faith. It is ethics which is the guide to public policy to the MINIMAL extent that unethical behavior may not be sanctioned by government. - Robert E. Drury Sat, 13 Oct 2012 10:29:20 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/religious-and-secular-arguments.html#comment-13848 And "entertainment" is designed for man-child sensibilities. Popular entertainment used to be called a wasteland. It is now a waste pipe. TV and movie scripts are clever, sometimes ingenious, and funny the way a child’s first dirty joke is funny. - Other Joe Sat, 13 Oct 2012 03:09:30 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/religious-and-secular-arguments.html#comment-13843 If you don't believe in authority -- as most secularists and post-modernists say they don't -- then one way to approach this is to ask why their authority is superior or inferior to any other. When did do your own thing become you can only do our thing? It's the incoherence of contemporary and establishment thinking that irritates me. At the end of the day it is impossible to have a conversation. It always dissolves into absurdities. Which is why I compare most 21st century thinkers to children. Children can surprise you with their intelligence and cleverness -- just don't mistake it for thoughtfulness or wisdom. The baby boomer man-children who still dominate the institutions are as humorless and inappropriate as their gray ponytails. Unfortunately they still get to make decisions and past decisions have maintained their momentum with no detectable entropy in sight. The frenzy of geriatric panic remains. Along with the damage to the rest of us. When they finally let go what will remain? - Graham Combs Fri, 12 Oct 2012 19:18:43 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/religious-and-secular-arguments.html#comment-13841 This morning on New York Public Radio I heard the commentator, Brian Lehrer, upon replaying both Biden's and Ryan's replies to Ms. Raddatz's question to each on their personal feelings on abortion, comment that "shows the Catholic Church is not monolithic." There you have it. A practicing Jew looks at the Church and reports accurately what he observes. Some years ago a bishop in Louisiana excommunicated one or two Catholics for racial comments or behavior. Catholics in government have facilitated 54 million abortions and now aberrosexual "marriage" and they have nothing to worry about. Every week they are at the place where the altar rail used to be to receive Communion. - Manfred Fri, 12 Oct 2012 06:57:36 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/religious-and-secular-arguments.html#comment-13839 If anything it is the non-religious arguments, when it comes to value debates, that should be considered the least intellectually grounded because how can any "should" or "ought" be considered without the notion of a Deity in the background. This is a CS Lewis 101 concept. - Sue Fri, 12 Oct 2012 03:46:28 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/religious-and-secular-arguments.html#comment-13837 I believe the notion of “secular argument” stems from a debased version of Kantianism (which Kant himself would have indignantly rejected) According to this view, there are truths of facts (the empirically verifiable, the realm of the natural sciences) and the realm of “values,” (the realm of morality and religion). This distinction was one eagerly embraced by Modernists, both Catholic and Protestant, as insulating religion from the attacks of its Rationalist critics. Philosophers as different as the later Wittgenstein and Quine in his “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” have destroyed whatever plausibility this distinction may once have had. That is before we turn to the criticisms of the notion of “objective” or “neutral” knowledge of facts by Post-Modernists like Derrida and Foucauld. “Secular argument” should be decently interred, along with Logical Positivism, of which it is an off-shoot. - Michael Paterson-Seymour Fri, 12 Oct 2012 01:36:27 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/religious-and-secular-arguments.html#comment-13835 If only the secularists were as familiar with religious thinking (not necessarily adherents, just familiar with our tradition) as we are with secularist thinking, then they would perhaps see that reason is not alien to one's religious beliefs and practices. Reason has its place alongside faith. It is a ruse when "Catholics," in Cuomo-esque fashion state that they are "personally opposed to abortion but would not inpose their religious beliefs on others." Catholics should be clear about this: we uphold the sanctity of human life from the point of conception. not because our Catholic faith teaches it, but because our human reason leads us to the knowledge that this is a human person deserving of our protection. That's the compelling argument it seems to me, not our affiliation with the Catholic Church. Even the secularists are not wholly dispossessed of reason. They, too, can reach the same conclusion if they allowed it to happen. Even those attending Georgetown U! - Deacon Ed Peitler Fri, 12 Oct 2012 00:51:51 +0100