If you have a guy saying that he's gonna make a rational argument, but then he actually says that he could make a rational argument, but he's not going to, does that make it logic?
Chapter 8 of the book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious by Ross Douthat, has the title chapter, A Case Study: Why I am a Christian, but it isn't a case study. It's just Ross Douthat, the author, writing a bunch of stuff, kind of almost at random about what he thinks about his own religion, which is a kind of Christianity, Roman Catholicism. The chapter might as well be called why I am Roman Catholic.
Let me take you to pages 190 and 191. In these pages, Ross Douthat is trying to tell you that you should be a Christian, and in fact, you should be a Roman Catholic, but he's not going to tell you why. He's not going to tell you exactly why you should, but you just should believe him.
He could make that argument, he says.
Let me just give you Ross Douthat’s words here.
“Since this isn't a work of Catholic polemic. I'm not going to go through those doctrines one by one and defend each one's fittedness to reality.”
Oh, really? This is not a work of Catholic polemic? That's all that it is.
Why bother to write a book about why you should believe, only to announce at the end that you're not going to go through and actually compare the doctrines that you want people to believe in with reality.
Ross Douthat is telling you here that he's not going to even try to explain why the religion he's telling you that you should be a part of matches reality at all.
How is that reasonable? How is that rational? How is that logical? It's not.
It's Ross Douthat all but admitting that he has no ability to justify his religion.
Look, this book is just a little bit over 200 pages. He has room. He could write another 50 pages in which he's talking about the doctrines of his religion.
This is a chapter that is supposedly dedicated to why you should be a Christian, and he's not even really writing about why you should be a Christian.
Then we come to the really specific stuff, which, again, he does not have the rationale to support. He just asks you to believe.
“I think there are many visions and miracles and compelling mystical experiences that speak to the credibility of Christianity. Further, there are some specific arenas where I could make a case that Christianity, generally, and Catholicism, especially seem to exert unusual power relative to other spiritual traditions, over certain inhuman seeming forces, (Yes, I'm talking about demonology, and the occult, reading deeply about possession, and exorcism, or talking to people involved in the more intense cases is one of the best ways to inspire yourself to get to Sunday Mass every week) but I do not have a complex regression analysis to prove that Christianity gets you more miracles, more healings, more super than all its major rivals.”
Ross Douthat is saying he thinks that, boy, there are a whole bunch of supernatural thingies that really give Christianity credibility, but he can’t prove it, actually.
Here at the end of his book, Ross Douthat’s writing just falls apart into blathering nonsense. He says that he's going to tell us why he's a Christian, and why we should be Christians too. Then he says, well, he could go get the evidence, he could go get the facts, he could go get the proof that his religion is better than anyone else's except, well, he didn’t bring it with him, and he’s not going to do that right now because he’s not going to be polemic, you know, but still, you should believe and everyone on earth should believe this religion.
This is not a book that engages in rational discussion. It's a desperate floundering around for any kind of justification for belief in absolutely nutty things like the belief that there are evil spirits that are gonna get you if you don't obey the priests, if you don't do what the churches tell you to do.
That is the most lame, pathetic, childish attempt at social control that I have ever seen. You know what's even worse than that? For 60% of the American population, it works.
Not everyone believes Ross Douthat, but as for the rest of you: Why, why does anyone believe a word that comes out of Ross Douthat’s mouth?