Pro-Life Organizations: Are the Secular?
Awhile back on Punkassblog, I said I was going to do some investigating into Pro-Life Organizations. Unfortunately, Wordpress seems to not like me, so this post will be exclusively here where it all began, Teller of Truths.
The only pro-life organizations I looked at were groups in the United States on the national level, that were on the Wikipedia pro-life organization list.
The first thing I checked was whether or not the organization was secular, or explicitly Chrsitian (none of the organizations claimed any other kind of religious affiliation). They were considered to have ties to Christian organizations if they had three articles that spoke from a Christian perspective, and/or linked to five Christian organizations.
posted by Goddess Cassandra @ 6:58 PM
6 comments
6 Comments:
there were four organizations that did not get classified in this list; were they secular or not?
Thanks, that was an earlier image. The problem is fixed now.
Antigone/Cassandra:
I saw your comments on the Internet Monk abortion post. I'm not sure if Tom contacted you, or where best to put this...
I am a presuppositionalist, so this may be a new approach to you...
I believe that our most basic assumptions determine the outcome of our reasoning.
That is, if you believe you can know truth without God, you will come to the conclusion that there is no God. But if you acknowledge that you cannot, that you need God to know truth - then you will know God, and the truth.
Does that make sense?
Nedbrek-
I am familiar with presuppositionalism, having read CS Lewis. But, being a semi-naturalistic persuasion, find it completely contrary to my life and how the universe actually works.
The scientific method yields repeatable, testable and joint information and truths. I could, if I wished, repeat the experiment of any scientist, and get the same result as them. If I don't, rather than sticking to a "truth" that is found to be false, the knowledge expands and grows.
The scientific method is for excising one's biases, not for reinforcing them (in theory). The idea that you should stick to your biases (or presupposition) as opposed to trying to examine them and working around them is insane to a person who studied communication, and how easy it is for people to believe things that are false.
Try applying that kind of thinking to something besides god (like, that the United States is the best country in the world) and you are going to ignore evidence to the contrary, and have a horrible result (like a foreign policy that leads to dead people).
You're beginning statement "You can come to truth without god you will think there is no god, or you will know god and then come to a truth" is not only an excellent example of circular thinking, it is also a false dichotomy.
So, while I understand the concept of presuppositionalism, it's not going to yield any kind of real truth.
Do you believe there is such a thing as (real, true, absolute) truth? (Or is truth whatever we agree it is?)
Now, see that's an interesting duality you set up: suggesting that if we agreed on something that would make reality, as opposed to being evidence that that IS reality.
The idea of an objective truth is something that at it's core something that is probably true BUT it runs into the problem that any and all reality that I perceive will have to be filtered to thorough my senses. Therefore, it seems likely that if multiple people perceive it, it means that there is more evidence to suggest it's existence (objectively). If I can see a tree, and you can see a tree, then it is fairly likely that there is a tree there. HOWEVER, since it is very possible that we are both viewing something through shared biases, it is better to a) have multiple senses verify that something, is in fact there, and b) have more people witness this and c) have a verification though some level of independent means. The ball of things that constitute "tree" (and I guess I'm floating into the "hollow sphere theory" of things) includes the ability to touch it. If I go up to the tree, and I can't touch it, I might change my experience of "tree" to "hologram" or "picture". If I take a sample of the tree and find out, it is in fact dead, than that changes my definition of "tree" as well, and the objective reality of the situation.
Of course, this is like I said something that works better on large things than smaller. I'm running off the assumption that my observation of a thing does not change the reality of the thing: the tree does in fact make a sound if it falls and no one is around to hear it. Yet, our observations of a thing can effect the thing to a huge degree, in some ways "Making reality (Re: Skinner's Cat, The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and some of the new experiments with the LHC).
So to boil I down this, possibly muddled line of thought down (and my parents said those philosophy classes wouldn't be worth anything): there is an objective reality, however, our ability to 100% engage in that objective reality is limited by our own perceptions. To combat this, we arrive to conclusions from other people's perceptions and independent means, which not dis-positive in and of itself, but more likley.
Clear?
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