So, John21652’s thoughts are definitely interesting to me. But because I’m not looking for a debate, I’ll just keep giving my own thoughts and relating my own experiences.
The emphasis here demonstrates, again, your subjectivism.
It’s not really accurate to say that ‘I repudiated *everything *I was ever taught about right and wrong.’ That’s something of an exaggerated claim. What is accurate is that I rejected what I’d been taught about sexuality, and the truth of orthodox Catholicism. Many other very important values – such as respecting my neighbor and valuing the truth above everything else, among others – have very much stayed intact. In fact, it was my own pursuit of truth that led me away from Catholicism.
Your own persuit of truth should read ‘the persuit of my own truth’, because there are some glaring inconsistencies in what you have been telling people.
In
post #108 you wrote
- “Remember, the burden of proof is on the person making the extreme claim. (Right? Otherwise you’d have to believe every alien abduction or miracle story that comes your way.)” As I pointed out to you, your rejections of catholicism, of what your parents taught you and of societies norms means the burden of proof is upon you, just like it is upon those who say they were abducted by aliens and who claim miracles, as you correctly pointed out. In the paragraph above you tell how you reject what you were taught about sexuality and the “truth” about orthodox Catholicism. Yet you immediately demonstrate how you still embrace other values inherent in orthodox Catholicism. It seems you are selective in those “truths” you identify as being untruths.
Just one thought on the “extreme claims” issue… once I started to find irreconcilable problems with one doctrine here, and another there, and started to look more and more at the scope of Christianity as a whole, and the evidence to support it as a whole, the more I came to a rational conclusion that the claims it makes about the world really are objectively extreme.
In
post #145 you wrote
“…I’m hopelessly addicted to truth – and reason…” If, as you claim, you had thought all this through, you would not be able to find evidence that Catholicism is ‘extreme’, or that there are glaring inconsistencies in Church doctrine. You seem to be aware of the fact that one of the pillars of Catholicism and Christianity itself, is the Natural Law. It is an objective philosophy and grounded very much in the use of reason. It has a long history of intellectual enquiry that stretches back to Aristotle and the Stoics and was championed by Aquinas. If you have been true to the persuit of ‘truth’, using your reason, then you would realise that Natural Law enquiry mounts arguments against your chosen lifestyle. In
post #141 you wrote "…
I thoroughly have extensively considered the Catholic arguments against homosexuality for a long time, and came to the conclusion that they were unreasonable." That means, of course, that you are an expert in Natural Law morality and are the first person in millenia to find unreasonableness in what is a renowned philosophy based on reason. It is this objective morality which gives Catholicism its coherency and cogency, so I fail to see how you could possibly arrive at the conclusions you do. As you wrote in
post #109 “…The natural law argument didn’t make much sense to me…”. It sounds very much like you have suspended your reason to arrive at your own self serving conclusions. If you were as true to the search for truth and remained true to the use of objective reasoning, you could not possibly, logically, write and think and live as you do.
…
And yeah, I was pretty selective about what evidence I accepted. My thinking was that if a courtroom is selective about what evidence it admits to a trial, then I ought to be selective about what evidence I admit when I consider the truth of Christianity’s claims.
Courtroom battles include the use of ‘tactics’, like any secular war, be it of words, or physically. In
post #108 you wrote
“… I found that the evidence was severely lacking…”, yet here you admit to being very selective about what ‘evidence’ you accepted. Obviously the evidence wasn’t lacking. You just chose to ignore it. In
post #105 you wrote of yourself
“…as a believer in objective truth…”. Here, you have made it very obvious that you have betrayed your own intellectual beleifs.
If you had been true to the use of reason, and of a search for truth, as you claim, then you would not have been selective about what evidence you accepted. That is a betrayal of reason and you cannot arrive at any truths other than those you personally desire. That is moral relativism writ large once again. As a result, your conclusions reek of hedonism and we all know hedonism is the antithesis of morality of any kind.
Finally, of course my experiences are limited, and yes, I’m young. I’m just speaking for myself.
P.S., I’m not a hedonist. I value things equally to happiness, like truth, and will sacrifice momentary happiness in pursuit of truth, as I think my history attests to.
Your history attests to an abandonement of objectivity, despite your claims to the contrary. That was your first step onto a hedonistic pathway.
(having realized that the moral issue of abortion utterly trumps everythng else that’s happened in the last 40 years of history.)
are. I hate inaccuracy. I fight ignorance, and the continual replaying of falsities for any purpose – for reasons of acceptance by certain groups (fear of rejection), or whatever the reason is, including a false fear of being viewed as “intolerant,” even though a scientific observation is not an indication of intolerance. That’s why misstatements are “important” to me. Myths which become absorbed into propaganda and then Urban Legend or (Un)conventional “Wisdom” are important to deconstruct no matter what their origin or their sphere. Whether it’s sexuality, parenthood, politics, education, law, or religion.