Where else would we go?

Today I was stacking piles of books that need rides to Mexico with us next week. The piles are high, and still the bookshelf is full. On top I laid three books I got for Christmas, including one called Bad Arguments. It’s an illustrated book that explains logical fallacies, and I plan to show the cartoon examples to my students next year when we are evaluating arguments. As I flipped through the book, of course, the fallacies that caught my attention were the ones I’ve run into most recently. One of them, called the Slippery Slope, goes like this: “If you let Muslim refugees into your country, next thing you know, they’ll all radicalize and shoot and rape your kids.” They will not all radicalize and shoot and rape your kids.

Another similar fallacy that caught my eye was the Appeal to Fear. This one I heard in this form: “If you don’t teach your kids a particular interpretation of a certain passage of the Bible, and if you don’t answer all their questions on this topic correctly and immediately, then they will walk away from the church.” They will not walk away from the church simply because you didn’t answer some of their questions about a passage of the Bible. In fact, my guess is that the facts point in quite another direction: that it’s this kind of dogmatism (definition: the tendency to lay down principles as incontrovertibly true, without consideration of evidence or the opinions of others) that will turn kids away from the church. In this day and age, I bet what they want to hear from us is that we might not know everything after all; we might have doubts, too. When will we learn this?

The harshest fallacy thrown at me recently was the False Dilemma. This is when you are falsely presented with only two possible positions on an issue. If you reject one position, you are assumed to hold the other. It’s also called Either/Or and, also, Unwarranted Assumption. This is the form that it took at first: “You have a gospel with no teeth because you don’t share my interpretation of Genesis 1 (the painful part of this accusation was that it was shelled out by a friend before I’d even said anything. It was based on hear-say.) Now I finally understand where my friend’s assumption lay because I just heard this False Dilemma fallacy again more recently. The assumption about me is that if I believe a certain way about Genesis 1, then I cannot believe in the fall. Hence the weak gospel. Wow. False. I have told the gospel story, beginning with creation, to hundreds of people, and the fall of man weighed heavily in that story every time. There are not just two positions on how Genesis 1 relates to Jesus.

John, when he first set pen to paper, called Jesus the Logos. The Reason.  The Logic. The living Word spoken by God. God is the source of all clear thinking, all reasoning, and all logic. Satan hates reasoning and logic, so he constantly lies and twists things, and logical fallacies and dogmatism are strictly his domain. (C. S. Lewis, who shares my interpretation of Genesis 1 and does not hold a weak gospel, showed a demon-possessed man in one of his novels using reason as a tool to tempt someone. But once he was finished, he dropped it and returned to his true nature, repeating and repeating and repeating inanities.)  One of the reasons I teach English is to train myself and my students to catch the enemy’s fallacies. I miss dozens of them all the time. Just ask my husband. But I want to be like Jesus, my Logic, my Reason.

Here’s the most excusable of the fallacies: the Argument from Consequences (Example: Nuclear holocaust is unthinkable; therefore no one will go there). Jesus had given people some hard words, and many abandoned him. Jesus asks his friends, “Do you want to leave me, too?” Peter protests, “Where else would we go?” The thought of leaving Jesus was appalling, the consequences of losing him unthinkable, even with the hard things Peter didn’t get. So he just holds on, drowning, begging for help. This was the love cry of a desperado, so Jesus let the fallacy slide. I like this guy. I’ve said those words, too, drowning.