Is Christianity to Blame for Atlanta Shootings?
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From her website:
I’m a linguist at the University of Sheffield, where I research and teach on religious language and other kinds of discourse. My main methods are corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. I also write about the Bible and issues affecting vulnerable people within Christianity.
Hobbs is the author of “An Introduction to Religious Language: Exploring Theolinguistics in Contemporary Contexts.”
I suspect that, like all heresy hunters, Hobbs has succumbed to the siren song of seeing her evil foe everywhere. I read the sermon transcript linked in her article. It’s benign, plain vanilla teaching, with a good ‘ole boy Southern vibe I don’t particularly like. The pastor doesn’t understand the Trinity. There’s nothing controversial about his sermon, other than the fact the pastor chickened out and didn’t explain 1 Tim 2:13-14. Though, to be sure, if there is a passage from which one must run, maybe it’s that one (hee, hee)!
Tyler is a pastor in Olympia, WA and works in State government.
Given the intensity of this young man’s apparent faith, I think it’s fair to ask whether that faith, or a perversion of it, contributed. He seems to have had the notion for sure that his sins were incredibly serious, to the point of needing to take radical action. Doesn’t justify murder, of course, but we ought to take a look at that. It’s worth noting here as well that his troubles seemed to worsen through what appears to be something of a faith based treatment approach.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
The easiest error of all to make/hardest to avoid: assuming the points that are the most in need of proving. In this case, start out with the conclusion that purity culture is [some definition] and that it’s causing all sorts of other ills. Then you just multiply alleged examples.
It’s easy to do with almost any cultural feature. Giving the boogeyman a new name helps.
So, let’s say we want to blame the idea that ‘people should marry one individual and stick with the bond for life’ for lots of social ills. Change is progress and that’s an old idea. So, give it a new catchy name: “monogamy culture.”
Then all you have to do is find examples of people who have enduring marriages but are doing bad things. Presto, “monogamy culture” is causing [fill in list.]
I forget what the name of this fallacy is, but the reasoning is that if two entities share a characteristic, then they must share any other characteristic I want to name if one of them is known to have it.
- Guy influenced by ‘monogamy culture’ kills his wife
- Wife killers kill their wives (obviously)
- So wife killers must be the influenced by monogamy culture
You could also look at it as a cum hoc fallacy: the causation fallacy that says “this thing is often seen with this other thing, so it must be caused by this other thing.”
Either way, the most important and hardest-to-prove part of the claim is usually assumed instead.
The author’s belief that patriarchy is evil and causes all sorts of other problems is a priori … and sort of built into the definition. Likewise with “purity culture,” which is certainly not a good name for the belief that women only exist to gratify men (her definition). … that really has more to do with Playboy and the old-school porn industry than it has to do with patriarchy and complementarianism.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
This is an example of the Never Let A Tragedy Go To Waste fallacy. If you oppose christians, republicans, and anything else conservative, blame everything on them. Here you have a man who was clearly troubled. He has some psychological and social issues. Rather than say this guy was a sandwich short of a picnic, you use the tragedy to advance your agenda. Here the author blames misogyny and a patriarchal culture. President Biden and VP Harris are blaming anti-Asian racism. Whatever the case, you blame fully what you aim to destroy. It isn’t a logical fallacy. It’s deliberate. And it often works.
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