Perhaps someone can diagnose the fallacy, but I simply describe what happens.
If we take the legendary (though younger than often realized) “TULIP” of “the five points of calvinism,” the fallacy deals with the fourth point.
Irresistible Grace
Writing to persuade readers to act is not pure logic. Sometimes this raises suspicions. What are those manipulative writers up to? Why not just make the case and be done without all that emotional rhetoric and red type? (I’m just being hypothetical without implying anything good or bad about red type.)
So here is a true story. I know a man who had a job interview involving a weekend trip to meet his potential supervisor and get acquainted with the workplace. He had a great time and, after he returned, he quickly sent a thank you note to the boss. The boss responded to him that he seemed like a great candidate and had performed well in the interview. Nevertheless, since the candidate had signed the note, he took it upon himself to do some lay handwriting analysis. And he decided on that basis that the candidate was completely unfit for the job.
This is an extreme example, but it is an example of something that happens all the time.
I suppose in some sort of strange society where everyone was trained to only respect strict syllogisms, sales writing might be able to restrict itself to a logical argument with nothing else. But in the actual world, you can’t escape the presence of factors that our outside of logic. The “irrational” is always there to subvert your logic and bypass your arguments.
No writer can afford to ignore this fact–not when he or she is writing for human readers.
Also posted on my business blog.
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Link for those who can’t see the video
My personal hope is that Bush is letting the Iran stuff drag on just as a favor to the oil industry to make sure they have a place for him when he leaves office. He can’t possibly want to an another undeclared war, can he?
There is a story told of C. S. Lewis, as a small boy — about six or seven, I think. One day he announced to his father,
“Daddy, I have a prejudice against the French.”
“Why?” asked his father, not unreasonably.”
“If I knew that,” replied the precocious youngster triumphantly, “it wouldn’t be a prejudice.”
He was quite right, of course. The point about a prejudice is that it’s what you have when you are “pre-judging” a case: making your mind up before you know the facts.
Now of course there are many halfway stages between naked prejudice and completely well-informed opinion. Frequently we back up our prejudices by finding out just enough facts that support our case, and conveniently ignoring the rest. Bad historians, clever politicians, and lazy theologians do that all the time.
Acts for Everyone, p.161-162
So “capitalism” in America largely means corporate welfare and other government favors for corporations. But don’t these groups hide what they are doing behind the capitalism banner. It seems to me that opposing the fascist state in the name of capitialism still makes sense. We want capital to be privatized. We want this raving beast to be forced survive without jillions in subsidies for an fuel that is more expensive and inefficient than oil and that is driving up our food prices (*).
Maybe we need a new name (one that doesn’t pull us into all the problems of “libertarian” ethics). Maybe. But I would mind raising my fist in the name of “capitalism”–and demand that ADM be brought to its knees along with any number of other socialist institutions that are currently called “corporations.”
Honestly, when one looks a lobbyist, government contracts, local governments claiming imminent domain for Bass Pro Fascists, and the way politicians go to high corporate positions, is there really even any intelligible reason to talk about a “private sector” in the US? The “private sector” of the economy is the public sector. The difference is illusionary.
So maybe we have to give the devil (the Marxists) their due in equating capitalism with fascism. But it still seems a debatable point to me.
Is it really any less utopian to work for better government than to work for a better society in general? Would it take any less of a miracle for the Federal Government to serve the good of the commonwealth than it would to get everyone in your neighborhood loving each other and looking out for one another?
Doug Wilson’s quick and obvious response to the RPCNA’s official shamelessness brings to mind how their deliverance is similar to the Libertarian case against war: police shooting into a crowd to get the bad guy. Here is the same principle into our ecclesiastical condemnations. “Kill’em all; let God sort’em out”
Thing is: God will sort this out.
OK, as much as I was impressed with how Jandy used the wordpress template, I’m even more impressed now when I realized I didn’t have time to figure it out. Instead I sat down at my keyboard with the free tacohtml app and spat out this web “business card” with the help of a few purchases from istockphoto.com.
I probably need to edit my image tags with more information because right now the pictures are laggy. Maybe providing dimensions will help.
Obviously, the site needs a lot more. But I had to begin somewhere. So I did. Scrollquill.com goes to the same site.
Been awhile since I addressed the topic of preaching on this blog. But if a picture is worth a thousand words, I think this video is more efficient than anything I could write on the subject.
You’ve been warned!
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Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “There is no religious denomination in which the misuse of metaphysical expressions has been responsible for so much sin as it has in mathematics” (Culture and Value). But has anyone committed as much sin against grammar as the professional “anti-FV” theologians?
The latest work of real genius is that one can be called a heretic for calling obedience to the Gospel imperative…. obedience.
Here is some therapy for whoever wants it.