Antinatalist Jim Crawford has posted yet another final(?) final response.
Actually, a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ pretty much covers what I was looking for, with perhaps the added codicil in place (which I also posted)-
It may well cover everything he was asking for. However, Crawford acts as though he wrested a fatal concession from our lips. As if that’s sufficient to dispatch Christianity and establish antinatalism.
That’s because ‘normative’ in the context of the reply falls short of ‘objective’ or ‘universal’, a fact I expanded on by saying “ If your personal standard is that a child is better off being tortured for eternity originating in your decision to procreate, then any of my arguments simply don’t apply to you.” It was always a question of personal standards; thus, no equivocation. Normative simply describes a moral position that (I believe) most people subscribe too, a position that I feel stands against the desire to procreate.
i) To say the damned are “tortured” is another key assumption of Crawford’s position. That’s why procreation is too risky. The stakes are too high.
But Crawford needs to justify his assumption that hell is equivalent to “torture.” Where’s the grammatico-historical exegesis?
ii) “Normative” moral standards don’t typically mean person-variable standards. And if Crawford is going to redefine “normative” in such relativistic terms, then he forfeits the right to be judgmental about damnation.
Imaginary people don’t require empathy. Isn’t that rather obvious?
No, it’s not. The speciously obvious appearance is a rhetorical trick. Use a word like “imaginary,” with its fictitious connotations, to make the idea seem ridiculous. But potential kids are hardly equivalent to imaginary people like, let us say, Aurora in Sleeping Beauty.
This and all that follows seems irrelevant, since if a child is never born, she neither is harmed nor brings reason for punishment upon herself. Again, the whole exercise here isn’t meant to question the veracity of your God’s form of justice, but simply to point out that, from their own ideological standpoint, Christian procreationists are automatically exposing their offspring to the threat of eternal Hell, and to explore their justifications for doing so.
It’s scarcely irrelevant to distinguish between harming and wronging a person when, as I pointed out, a major argument for antinatalism is the claim that existence is harmful, and therefore wrongful.
Unless it’s wrong to expose our offspring to potential damnation, Crawford has nothing else to appeal to except mere sentiment.
Granting a disagreed-with position for the sake of a hypothetical argument is pretty standard fare in argumentation, and certainly presents no dilemma for me. The ‘given’ is, after all, part of the argument.
I didn’t object to that. Crawford has insulated my previous statement from my follow-up statement. But they go together. The problem is not that Crawford is attempting to generate a Christian dilemma from Christian theological assumptions. Rather, the problem is that he’s arbitrarily selective about which theological assumptions he allows to feed into the dilemma. The dilemma is a false dilemma, by artificially restricting the range of theological assumptions he permits us to take into account.
This is a SUPERB example of how people can disassociate themselves from feelings of guilt for doing terrible things, simply by saying “Oh, well, God told me to do it, so it must be right.” It’s the crossroad where religion and pathology meet. Empathy short-circuited by edict.
No. This is a superb example of Crawford’s demagoguery:
i) Having initially said he was merely appealing to the “personal sensibilities” of the Christian, rather than “objective” moral standards, he now abandons that posture and proceeds to attack Christians for doing “terrible” things and “pathologically” disassociating themselves from their (alleged) feelings of guilt.
So he’s dropped all pretense of critiquing Christianity on Christian terms, and is now openly attacking Christianity on antinatalist terms. But in that event, the dilemma implodes, for the dilemma can only be generated by factors internal to the position under review.
ii) Indeed, he’s done a complete about-face. He was originally faulting Christians for the (alleged) failure to remain consistent with their theological assumptions. But now he’s faulting Christians for fanatical consistency with their theological assumptions.
Yeah, I did assume that, didn’t I? Naturally, I’m aware of the apologetical backflips contrived to somehow fashion a feeling that all the children of Christians are automatically saved, all without quite coming out and saying it (because, after all, that might be going TOO far).
Except that I questioned his assumption by presenting an argument to the contrary. How does Crawford respond? Does he present a counterargument? No. He resorts to more fist-pounding rhetoric about “apologetical backflips” or “cut-and-paste bible reading.”
Yes, it’s quite comforting to realize we can eventually be hardened to the knowledge of our children's suffering, isn’t it?
i) Of course, the word “child” is trades on sentimental overtones. Fond connotations of children at play. A child’s laughter.
Only a bad parent would be “hardened” to his “child’s suffering.” I guess that’s supposed to conjure up the image of a sick child. Or a child who’s weeping over the death of a puppy or pony.
But suppose your “child” is Ted Bundy or Jeffery Dahmer. That doesn’t ring quite the same dulcet reverberations.
ii) He seems to be using “harsh” as a value judgment to condemn those hard-hearted Christian parents. But in that case he once again ditched the appeal to the “personal standards” of the Christian, and is now appealing to his antinatalist standards.
Yet not only is that diametrically at odds with his initial argument, but if he’s going to invoke his own moral standards, then he needs to argue for his own moral standards. Do these represent objective moral norms?
iii) Finally, why does an antinatalist make so much of childhood? To be sure, many people look back on childhood with great nostalgia.
Yet it’s central to the antinatalist position that bringing a child into the world is child abuse. You’re harming the child by dragging it into this horrible world without prior consent. Since, therefore, the antinatalist lacks those wistful feelings about children and childhood, how can Crawford honestly attempt to exploit the warm, fuzzy connotations of the parent/child relation?
When you can demonstrate how an imaginary person can be deprived in any way that actually impacts that imaginary person, would you mind getting back to me? I’m more than curious.
Of course, that’s a gimmick. Sure, the potential child qua potential can’t be actually impacted by some deprivation.
But that’s not the issue. Keeping the potential child merely potential is, itself, the deprivation. The lack of actuality is the deprivation.
UPDATE: Reading back through this, I can't help but be tickled by the utter lack of shame some of these apologists have. Or perhaps more kindly, their ability to pull pat answers out of their backsides to fit any occasion, even contradictory premises. I'm reminded of a post I wrote on my anti-apologetics blog exploring the 'why doesn't God heal amputees?' problem. Invariably, the answer from the apologists came in two parts:
1. Who says He has to?
2. Who says He doesn't?
Talk about covering your bases with a load of nothing! LOLOL! Steve of Triablogue does something similar here regarding the children of Christians who go to hell:
1. Who says they DO go to Hell?
2. Even IF they DO go to Hell, their parents will eventually come to not give a damn about it.
This is equivocation of the highest order…
Not at all:
i) To begin with, if we’re dealing with questions where we lack certainty, it’s entirely appropriate to explore different possibilities. If I don’t know for sure which answer is the right answer, it’s entirely reasonable of me to consider more than one potential answer.
ii) Moreover, when dealing with an opponent’s objections to your position, it’s completely kosher to:
Both:
a) Grant his assumptions for the sake of argument in order to evaluate his objections on their own merits
As well as:
b) Evaluate his objections according to your own assumptions.
There’s nothing even slightly equivocal about how I’ve proceeded.
iii) Fact is, it’s quite possible, even within families, for attitudes to change radically over the course of a lifetime. Two brothers may hate each other when they are kids, but become very close after they grow up. Conversely, two brothers may love each other as kids, but drift apart or become estranged after they grow up.
Take Jim and Jeff. Jeff is a Marine. He has to do a six-month tour of duty oversees. So Jeff entrusts his wife to the safe-keeping of his beloved brother Jim. He expects Jim to look after he while he’s gone.
Unfortunately, Jim is a little too attentive. Jim and Jeff’s wife have an affair behind Jeff’s back.
When Jeff finds out, love instantly turns into hatred. Betrayal can have that overnight effect.
Or take the devoted son who loves his parents. They are his loved ones. He can’t imagine life without them.
But he then falls in love with a girl from the wrong side of the tracks. One thing leads to another and they become engaged.
But his parents disapprove. Why can’t he marry a “respectable” girl from the “right” sort of family?
They oppose the engagement, and they succeed in pressuring her to break up with him. Maybe they blackmail her in some underhanded way.
Had they supported the relationship, or at least not actively opposed it, our devoted son would continue to love them as before. But because of how they mistreated the woman he loves, they have alienated his affections. They cease to be his loved ones.
iv) Conversely, it’s also possible to miss someone, but be forever enriched by knowing them. Indeed, it’s because you were enriched by knowing them that you miss them. You’re sorry that they’re gone, but you’d be even sorrier if you never had the chance to know them. Indeed, that is, I daresay, a commonplace of human experience.
…and is fashioned to blunt the harshness of my premise (some children of Christians will go to Hell) by hinting at THE POSSIBILITY of an escape clause, while at the same time offering (a rather lame) option for those who just can't buy the 'Christian Parent Exception' as being scriptural. Actually, the 'immunity' question is floated around quite a bit amongst Christians, for obvious reason. Everybody wants an edge, it seems, and if they have to procure it through rather imaginative exegesis, so be it :)
All he’s done is to characterize my response in pejorative terms without attempting to disprove anything I said.
DOUBLE UPDATE: Now that I think more about it, this 'all children of Christians are saved' means that, once one person is saved, all his progeny, and his progeny's progeny, and his progeny's progeny's progeny on down the line from 2000 years ago up to today, are one and all and without exception, Christians! I wonder how that premise holds up to analysis. Quite poorly, I'd wager.
Keep in mind that I’m discussing the children of Christian parents because that’s the way Crawford chose to cast the issue. How can a Christian parent do that to his child?
However, at the risk of stating the obvious, family members aren’t interchangeable with loved ones. Suppose your father was a violent, drunken lout.
Fact is, you can live happily without him. Indeed, the only way to live happily is to live without him. You leave home as soon as possible and never look back.
The emotional force of the antinatalist argument depends on the tacit assumption that family members can’t stand the thought of spending eternity apart from each other. But that’s another dubious assumption which overstates the reality of the situation.
Here’s where I’ve stated my position in more detail:
Crawford might try to say Christian families ought to be eternally inconsolable over the loss of their unbelieving member of their family. But then his dilemma would collapse from within. And he’d also need to defend his moral yardstick.
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