Tag: debate

More like this: Wendy Francis meets SameSame

I have two more ACL posts to write. Including this one. And then I’m done on this round, and we’ll return to normal programming.

A big part of the problem with how the ACL does business is that they go in to situations with a hostile posture and things go down hill – situations like TV debates, university debates, interviews where they’re forced to defend something they’ve said or argue about how something has been interpreted – because they adopt an adversarial posture the conversation is immediately off the rails and unlikely to produce productive results.

They’re remarkably better when that’s not the case – it’s much easier to have a gracious and winsome conversation if you’re having a conversation. Which is exactly what happened when Wendy Francis sat down with SameSame editor Chad St. James. They had a civil conversation – and St. James has reported it with polite empathy. It’s a nice read. It humanises both of them.

Wendy provides an interesting account of the blow up that followed a tweet sent from her account by a PR person.

“But I think the very concept of child abuse is always linked to sexual abuse, well in my mind it is anyway. That was the real tragedy of that whole tweet. If the staff at the office had tweeted legalising same-sex marriage is taking a way a child’s right away to have a mother, then I probably wouldn’t have been so upset about it. But I was livid and really, really upset about it. My children were upset about it. Because it certainly inferred sexual abuse I think. So that just unforgivable. But I don’t think I handled the media well afterwards. But looking back I don’t think I know how I could’ve avoided it.

I can 100 percent promise you, I had nothing to do with that tweet. I hated it, I absolutely hated it. I wished I hadn’t been out of the office so I could’ve been there. I immediately sort of went into melt-down mode wondering what it was all about.

I was fuzzy with the responses afterwards, not really knowing what to. I had all these people advising me what to say. I had people ringing me saying “you should really go with that, that’s a great comment” and I was saying I can’t possibly go with that, it’s an awful comment.”

So that’s nice. She does a really nice job of making her position on the GLBTI issues a product of social concern, rather than homophobia, and leaves St. James feeling vaguely sympathetic for her position. So that’s nice. My one concern comes from her answer to these two questions…

What does the Australian Christian Lobby stand for?

It stands for being a voice for values. We see that there is a value set, that Australia has traditionally been built on, and that is the Judeo – Christian heritage. And that’s like a lot of the west has been built on that as well. And the some of the policies that we have, if you look at what is at the heart of them its things from the Christian faith such as “do unto others as you would have them to do unto you” and the good Samaritan.

Those sort of things are built into the Australian psyche, the whole good Samaritan, going a further mile, all of those things are from a Christian heritage. As we moved as a society away from being just Christian, and I don’t begrudge that, I think as we have had new immigration from other countries. In Brisbane for instance we celebrate Ramadan, we celebrate Buddha’s birthday, we celebrate Christmas. So we have this really good multicultural link, but as we have moved away from any one faith-base then we’ve got a bit of a void of where our values are based. So for me that is what I believe the Australian Christian Lobby is doing, seeking to keep us on track with the value system that has stood us in really good stead.

What does Wendy Francis stand for?

Wendy Francis is a mum and a grandma, a wife. I have always felt strongly about justice issues, I also feel very strongly about children. I think as our society has changed, one of the things that have changed for me the most is that we used to do whatever we do was on the best interests of the child. I think that’s changed, I think it’s now very “me”.

Mind you, I have to say I think your generation is turning that around a little. I think your generation is sick of that. I think it’s the baby boomers who are a much more me generation. We’ve had it very good. We’ve all got houses, and now houses are out of reach for a lot of the younger ones. I think that “me, me” has impacted how we look outwardly.

So for Wendy Francis, I think a lot of my motivation is coming from getting back to what is best for children. If we look at what is best for children, then I think that’s going to be what’s best for society.

If you want to be the Australian Christian Heritage Lobby, or the Christian Values Lobby, that’s fine. But if you call yourself the Christian Lobby, and you say you’re on about Jesus – which I’m sure Wendy is – I think these are the questions where the gospel comes in naturally. Rather than the moral framework that Christianity has produced in our legal system.

There was also this bit…

“You operate on a set of beliefs, and I do, and both of us are vitally important in what we call democracy, because if we’re going to have a true democracy every voice has to be heard. So I think it’s vital that the Christian voice is heard because we represent a large part of the constituents. In the latest census I think there were 62 percent of people that identify as Christians. It doesn’t mean that they’re all practising Christians, it’s probably more like 20 percent that are practising Christians, but still there is 62 percent identify in that way. So it would be ridiculous to think that there wasn’t some sort of input from what people believe into our parliaments.”

They need to decide if they represent the 20% or the 62% – and if the latter, they need to change their name and to stop pretending they’re speaking for the church.

In this interview Wendy Francis has the second part of 1 Peter 3:15 sorted, the ACL still needs to work on the first…

15 But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect…

September 7, 2012

Poe’s Law

I love satire. Of most colours. I like it when Christians satirise our own culture, and when non-Christians do it too. Satire is revealing. It is good for teaching. It makes me laugh.

LarkNews is one of my favourite satire sites, I know of a few people who have fallen for its satire in the past…

People reposting satire as real news is pretty funny – like when a couple of mainstream news outlets picked up an Onion piece that reported the moon landing was fake.

Poe’s Law didn’t make the Wikipedia list of eponymous laws I mentioned previously – but you can read it on this page – RationalWiki’s page.

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won’t mistake for the real thing.

It’s one of those Internet subculture things particular to debates with atheists (along with the No True Scotsman Fallacy) that comes up all the time. It’s a shorthand thing that prevents any real discussion taking place springing from an extreme position. The problem is that sometimes extreme positions may be correct. This is my biggest problem with all the conversational threads I’ve read on the atheist blogs I follow. If it turns out that God exists (as I believe he does) they’re going to look like idiots. This is the problem with Occam’s Razor, and in fact any other eponymous law that becomes common parlance. There are times when there’ll be a complex explanation for something that is true while a more simple explanation with less steps may be wrong. There are times when it’s appropriate to reference Hitler in an argument (Godwin’s Law). There are times when someone will be claiming to be a Scotsman when they’re not (the No True Scotsman Fallacy).

Using these laws in conversations who don’t know about them makes you look like a prat. Especially if you end up quoting them and being wrong.

I’m going to posit my own eponymous law – and I’d like it to catch on. Campbell’s Law. It states:

“As the length of argument on the internet increases the probability of referencing an irrelevant eponymous law or incorrectly identifying a fallacy approaches one.”

I’ll posit a second law.

“Just because someone, somewhere, has described a common phenomena as a “law”, it does not necessarily render the practice a transgression.”

September 18, 2009

Economies of scale

You may have missed it… but friend Izaac and I have been arguing the merit or otherwise of Sydney’s oversupply of evangelical churches and full time ministry workers back at this post of links – where I threw in a little comment that a densely populated map of Anglican churches in Sydney was a cause for concern not celebration.

This is what I said…

To me, this pretty much sums up the problems with the Sydney Anglicans – so many churches in such a small geographical space. It’d be interesting to plot the number of evangelical churches around the rest of the country in comparison.

It has sparked an interesting discussion. I think. Check out the discussion (and join in) here… Should church planting and/or evangelism be considered in the framework of economics? I think so…

May 28, 2009

Video kills the local preacher

Well, not literally. But the second post in the debate on video preaching over at toph-online has just been reposted after a hiatus (first post). I wrote a long comment on this post. I was a little bit angry – but it’s a helpful discussion.

Here’s the final summary of my thoughts on the matter on that post. Which you should read – along with the previous posts, and the comments. I think.

“Video preaching driven by the preacher is inherently arrogant, and video preaching driven by adherents is inherently idolatrous.”

As you can see, I’m not a fan. But there’s a lot of interesting points made on both sides of the debate.

April 4, 2009

Repealing Godwin’s Law

Dont mention the law

Don't mention the law

I mentioned Godwin’s Law in the last post. It’s an interesting law – originally coined by Mike Godwin in 1990 to address the trend of usenet users throwing Hitler into arguments.

Originally expressed Godwin’s Law read:
“As an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or to Nazis approaches 1”

The basic application of the law was that the first person to mention Hitler lost the argument.
Godwin has an interesting explanation of his side of the story here.

“Although deliberately framed as if it were a law of nature or of mathematics, its purpose has always been rhetorical and pedagogical: I wanted folks who glibly compared someone else to Hitler or to Nazis to think a bit harder about the Holocaust.”

“I understood instantly the connection between the humiliations inflicted there and the ones the Nazis imposed upon death camp inmates—but I am the one person in the world least able to draw attention to that valid comparison.”

The problem with people blindly accusing people of breaking Godwin’s Law is that they’re going by the letter and not the spirit of the law. This probably only happens to me, because I engage in frivolous discussion with art studenty type geeks people… the kind of people who know what Godwin’s Law is to begin with.

There’s another article on pretty much the same thing here. That argues the repeal on the basis that Hitler should be fair game as a test case in arguments.

“The rules of snippy online debates, though, are nothing compared to public discourse. The Anti-Defamation League has beaten the hell out of anyone who’s dared use a Nazi analogy over the last decade. ”

“Thus, despite all efforts at regulation, the market has repeatedly decided in favor of the N-bomb. There simply isn’t any other tableau, in history or fiction, that offers the same variety of evil and oppressive examples as the Third Reich. Why compare some propaganda to 1984 and some slaughter to Srebrenica when you can double down and link both of them to Nazism?”

December 24, 2008