Premises
Before You Read
Four claims sit underneath everything else here. Grant them and the rest follows. Refuse them and the rest will read as arbitrary, because the real disagreement is further up than whatever policy is on the table.
You should be a Christian.
Civil government is an office God created, and Scripture says so in the plainest terms available.
“for it is a minister of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword in vain, for it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices evil.”
The magistrate who carries the sword is called a minister of God twice in one verse. That makes every political question a moral question in policy clothing: what a person is owed, what the state may take from him, whose life counts and when. Those answers come from somewhere.
So if yours come from somewhere else, we are not going to have the same argument. We might land on the same conclusion now and again by accident, and we will never land on the same reason. Paul says why the gap runs deeper than the evidence on the table.
“But a natural man does not accept the depths of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually examined.”
Neither of us is standing on neutral ground, and this site does not pretend to.
The whole law hangs on two commandments.
“And He said to him, ‘YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. And the second is like it, ‘YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.’ On these two commandments hang the whole Law and the Prophets.”
That is the standard every position on this site is measured against. Where one of mine fails it, the position is what changes.
Love rejoices with the truth.
So everything turns on what love means, and Paul defines it in 1 Corinthians 13 rather than leaving it to sentiment. The definition runs for four verses. One of them governs this site.
“It does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth.”
Love is bound to what is actually the case. A claim does not become true because believing it is kind, and it does not become false because it wounds. I can feel that three cookies instead of four is unfair. The feeling is real, and it settles nothing. Much of our politics runs on that confusion, where a policy is defended by how it makes its advocates feel rather than by what it does to the people living under it.
If nothing could change your mind, there is nothing to discuss.
This one follows from the last. If love rejoices with the truth, then wanting the truth means being willing to be corrected by it. Someone who cannot name a single thing that would move him is not holding a conclusion. He is holding a position he has stopped examining, and no argument will reach him, because arguments are not what put him there.
“The first to plead his case seems right, Until another comes and examines him.”
That is why every position on this site has to meet the strongest form of the case against it before it has earned anything. So the question worth asking before an argument starts is what would change your mind. If the honest answer is nothing, we are not going to have a discussion. We are going to take turns talking.
That cuts at me, and it should. Ask what would falsify what I believe and the answer was published before I was born.
“And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain. … And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins.”
Paul stakes the whole faith on an event in history and names the condition under which all of it collapses. That is what a claim looks like when the person making it means it. A position no possible evidence could touch has stopped saying anything about the world. I hold the positions on this site the same way: bring the argument, the text or the number that breaks one, and it changes.
You can read every page here without granting any of this, and you would be reading an argument that begins somewhere you do not, which is worth doing. Arguing back requires the fourth one.