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Prime
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Objective answers (say, no ad hominems) only, please
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CHESTERTONRULES
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Within Christianity, yes.Objective answers (say, no ad hominems) only, please
As a philosophical concept, no.
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Prime
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Let me narrow down the question.
I learned that many years ago, Protestants were against abortion and contraception but changed their views in recent years to the opposite end of the argument.
Therefore it shows that what was wrong before has become acceptable in a few years of ‘empirical’ changes in morality.
The question is ‘why?’
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MarkBrown
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couple of points.
Please do not lump all protestants into one group. Not all support abortion, actually probably most, are opposed to abortion.
Though the Church teaches against contraception, I know many Roman Catholics that practice it, and unfortunately get it right.
Most Roman Catholics voted for President elect Obama. While the Church opposes abortion, 54% of Roman Catholics said “so” and voted for Obama.
Protestants and Roman Catholics are infested with relativism/secular humanism. Voltaire was Roman Catholic. Not a good one allbeit. Just as Schleiermacher was not a good Lutheran (I believe Lutheran as he taught in Berlin).
Did it begin with the reformation? No. It began before then and exploded in the “enlightnment”. St Peter, Jude and St John in scripture denounced various principles of relativism. Councils such as Nicea denounced as heresy pelagianism, semi-pelagianism and Arianism. To which portions of the church said “so”. The sin of relativism/secular humanism can even be found in the Old Testament writings.
It has been around much longer than protestantism or the Roman Catholic Church.
As to your last post asking why protestants now embrace abortion and contraception. Not all do. Many protestant churches actively teach against abortion. Unfortunately contraception is not as actively taught against.
I do believe if you can answer the question as to why some Roman Catholics approach the teachings of the church in a relativist way, it would help you understand how some protestants can be relativistic.
Please do not lump all protestants into one group. Not all support abortion, actually probably most, are opposed to abortion.
Though the Church teaches against contraception, I know many Roman Catholics that practice it, and unfortunately get it right.
Most Roman Catholics voted for President elect Obama. While the Church opposes abortion, 54% of Roman Catholics said “so” and voted for Obama.
Protestants and Roman Catholics are infested with relativism/secular humanism. Voltaire was Roman Catholic. Not a good one allbeit. Just as Schleiermacher was not a good Lutheran (I believe Lutheran as he taught in Berlin).
Did it begin with the reformation? No. It began before then and exploded in the “enlightnment”. St Peter, Jude and St John in scripture denounced various principles of relativism. Councils such as Nicea denounced as heresy pelagianism, semi-pelagianism and Arianism. To which portions of the church said “so”. The sin of relativism/secular humanism can even be found in the Old Testament writings.
It has been around much longer than protestantism or the Roman Catholic Church.
As to your last post asking why protestants now embrace abortion and contraception. Not all do. Many protestant churches actively teach against abortion. Unfortunately contraception is not as actively taught against.
I do believe if you can answer the question as to why some Roman Catholics approach the teachings of the church in a relativist way, it would help you understand how some protestants can be relativistic.
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Steadfast
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Many philosophers see the roots of what we usually mean when we say “relativism” in the work of Roman Catholic priest and philosopher William of Occam, and it is certainly true that the Nominalism of Occam and Biel informed a good deal of the thought and piety of northern Europe during the period leading up to the Reformation. It may even be true to say that Luther was a Nominalist, at least in some degree though it seems unlikely that he would have liked being called that.
But it is probably worth asking what the OP means when it says “relativism”? It’s one of those words that gets thrown around a lot.
Nominalism, as I understand it, held, in contradiction to the received Aristotelian idea, that things as we encounter them phenomenologically were what they were and were not therefore types of an ideal, they shared certain commonalities but beyond that all we did was name them. Thus the name for the philosophical school: Nominalism.
It is debated whether Occam really was a Nominalist, at least in the full blown sense, but his successors certainly were, particularly Gabriel Biel, also a Catholic priest.
The charge of relativism arises when we consider that the Nominalism admits no noumenal reality in things themselves.
I am recalling all this from my youth so please forgive me if I am not entirely accurate and I welcome insight from others more freshly learned in the subject.
Edwin?
If nothing else some immersion in the matter may help us to realize that ideas often have not only consequences but intricate bloodlines and that epistemologically, the Reformation was rooted in a very Catholic, though post-Scholastic philosophical outlook.
But it is probably worth asking what the OP means when it says “relativism”? It’s one of those words that gets thrown around a lot.
Nominalism, as I understand it, held, in contradiction to the received Aristotelian idea, that things as we encounter them phenomenologically were what they were and were not therefore types of an ideal, they shared certain commonalities but beyond that all we did was name them. Thus the name for the philosophical school: Nominalism.
It is debated whether Occam really was a Nominalist, at least in the full blown sense, but his successors certainly were, particularly Gabriel Biel, also a Catholic priest.
The charge of relativism arises when we consider that the Nominalism admits no noumenal reality in things themselves.
I am recalling all this from my youth so please forgive me if I am not entirely accurate and I welcome insight from others more freshly learned in the subject.
Edwin?
If nothing else some immersion in the matter may help us to realize that ideas often have not only consequences but intricate bloodlines and that epistemologically, the Reformation was rooted in a very Catholic, though post-Scholastic philosophical outlook.
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Steadfast
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Then again, if all we’re talking about is convenient morality, well, that’s been with us since Cain slew Abel.
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Prime
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Please bear with my amateurish opinion. I have no intention of lumping all Protestants together no more than what hard data do point out. But according to statistics gathered by Alan Guttmacher Institute which was reported in July of 2001:
37.4% of all abortions are performed on Protestant women; 18% of all abortions are done on born-again Protestants. 10 “Born-again” believers constitute about 30% of the American adult population, and are thus under-represented among those women having abortions.
The abortion index by religion during 1994-1995 was found to be:
Protestants: 0.69 (69.0%)
Followers of a non-Judeo-Christian religion: 0.78 (78.0%)
Catholics: 1.01%
Jews: 1.08%
Persons who do not follow an organized religion: 4.02%
The above is just a sampler in the area of morality of abortion. My question is still left unaswered.
So again, why the shift?
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ralphinal
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I think that it would be fair to say, and I doubt that many Protestants on here would disagree, that Relativism within religion really took hold during the Age of Enlightenment. Now, can we say that the Age of Enlightenment was set into motion by the acts of the Reformation? Perhaps. Can we say that the AoE had some good results? Yes. However, we cannot deny that relativism, in the broadest sense, is a bad thing. At some point, when you become a relativist, you say “everyone is ok and no one is really sinning.”
And you end up in California
And you end up in California
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Prime
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And that’s not because it’sI think that it would be fair to say, and I doubt that many Protestants on here would disagree, that Relativism within religion really took hold during the Age of Enlightenment. Now, can we say that the Age of Enlightenment was set into motion by the acts of the Reformation? Perhaps. Can we say that the AoE had some good results? Yes. However, we cannot deny that relativism, in the broadest sense, is a bad thing. At some point, when you become a relativist, you say “everyone is ok and no one is really sinning.”
And you end up in California
where Hollywood is?
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ralphinal
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I was thinking more that the inmates had taken over the asylumAnd that’s not because it’s
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reteeks21
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It seems by your statements in the post that you already know your answer to the question, so why ask it?Objective answers (say, no ad hominems) only, please
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Prime
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Frankly speaking, I don’t know what your answer is.
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reteeks21
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Ok, my answer is no. Now, can you answer my question, please?Frankly speaking, I don’t know what your answer is.
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Prime
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On what account do you say no?
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reteeks21
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Because there is nothing concrete that can “prove” your assertion. How in the world can you prove that protestants started relativism? You can’t. You can just throw out abortion stats. How about the majority of catholics in the who voted for the most pro-abortion president in our history? Wait. Let me guess: they are just innocent victims of portestants who started relativism, right? What is your point with this whole thread?
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Prime
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You can’t sweep away facts like that.
Abortion stats that you wanted to throw away is just one of the areas where protestantism showed relativistic behavior. If you take alcohol abuse, gay marriage, euthanasia, premarital sex, etc, they all show similar statistical trends. What other statistics would you want to throw away?
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a_mirror_dimly
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I don’t dispute those statistics, but I find your interpretation of these abortion statistics quite interesting. To put them in the proper perspective one must compare them to fraction of the population that each groups constitutes. From the Guttmacher Institute (guttmacher.org/tables/3422602t.html#t1)), we have the following distribution of 15-44 year old women in the US population in 2000:
Protestant: 51.0%
Catholic: 27.5%
Other: 5.4%
None 16.2%
Compare that with the % of each group among those that actually received abortions:
42.8% Protestant
27.4% Catholic
7.6% Other
22.2% None
Given that the data show a lower prevalence of abortion among protestants than catholics, I’m uncertain as to what kind of conclusion you’re trying to draw here. Certainly it does not support the assertion that Protestants take a more lenient attitude toward abortion than Catholics.
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Prime
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Please bear with me as I’m not a statistician but your data does not match. The data shows lower incidence for Catholic.
Besides, there will always be different sets of data from different surveys. The fact of the matter is: there are more abortions now among Protestant women than there are among Catholics.
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a_mirror_dimly
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No, incidence it the rate of abortion within the group. In that data Protestants account for more abortions in absolute terms, but that’s unsurprising because there are almost twice as many Protestants as Catholics in the US. Abortion rate corrects for this difference by giving you the incidence of abortion. In this case it’s generally expressed as abortions per 1000. That is, for every 1000 women belonging to some group, how many of them had an abortion in the past year.
From the table I linked, the rates are as follow for the year 2000:
Protestant: 18
Catholic: 22
Other: 31
None: 30
That is, for every 1000 Protestant women between the ages of 15 and 44 in 2000, 18 of them had abortions. For every 1000 Catholic women between the ages of 15 and 44, 22 had abortions. In absolute terms, there were more Protestant abortions than Catholic abortions, but that is because there are more Protestants in the US period, not because Protestants are more likely to seek an abortion (the data shows that the reverse is true).
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reteeks21
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a_mirror_dimly said it perfectly. Convenient that you either left his statistics off or didn’t bother to research them at all. This whole thread is a just your nice little way of bashing protestants. I could easily skew statistics and bash the rcc but I have better sense than that. Bickering and attacking gets us nowhere. At least have the decency to just come out and say you think protestants are responsible for relativism instead of asking others for their opinions.
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