I’ll not speculate on your religion, though I will say that my last confession was less than two weeks ago, and that the brown Scapular, Miraculous Medal (“Regina Sine Labe Originali Concepta”), and Rosary are never far from me. I find it interesting that you feel so confident in your own version of Catholicism that you reject mine without knowing anything about me.
What I keep having to reiterate is that I’m not trying to argue for any particular course of action, but to begin the discussion. If you look at my post on how thinking about insurance matters, up a few pages, you’ll see that my biggest emphasis is engaging in honest, rational discussion about the best course of action. I think we just need to have all the information on the table, be honest about what we know and don’t know, reveal our biases, and be humble enough to accept it when whatever analysis we do doesn’t confirm our initial assumptions.
Should we avoid discussing the matter altogether, when there are quite a few scientific papers suggesting that pesticides, for instance, do have adverse effects?. To me, it reflects pride in being overly certain of the rightness one’s one actions, and a lack of humility that considerations other than the routine are worthwhile. It would also be prideful for anyone to also assert that just because one paper says that there’s a link with adverse effects, that we KNOW there’s proof. We all need to be honest with the likelihood that any statement we make is a “false positive” or a “false negative,” (or Type I/Type II error in statistical terms).
I’m absolutely willing to admit that any particular course of action I suggest is wrong, but to put it statistically, I also recognize that there’s a non-zero probability that harms accrue indirectly from my actions. All other things being equal (which they never are), I would try to reduce those indirect harms. However, the real world involves tradeoffs. I would evaluate, for instance, whether the additional cost that using, for instance, locally-produced wheat, might impose on churches, whether that would adversely affect their operating budgets and the ministries they fund. I would also look at the “actuarially expected” harm that current practice holds, accounting for the relatively low probability that the pesticides used in producing any one host may do harm, along with the expected magnitude of that harm.
In my eyes, that’s called bringing all truths out, and acknowledging that there are areas we know or don’t is another form of truth. Integrity demands that we admit where we lack confidence.
