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Agree to Disagree

The phrase means different things to different people. By and large, it has been the way of the West of centuries. Put a different way, most areas of disagreement do not constitute separation.

We deal with this in the church all the time, where Albert Mohler divides theological arguments into three tiers. First tier issues being orthodoxy and worth saying “you are not a Christian” over. These are matters of heresy. Second tier issues are matters that divide denominations, such as paedobaptism. We agree that we are both Christians, but we might not be able to go to the same church together. Third tier are the, what I call, long-beard issues. These are topics that are fun to discuss and debate, but have no affect on our salvation.

I say this to say that we need to think about what hills are worth dying on and realize that the majority of hills are not worth such acts.

This leads us back to the phrase: agree to disagree. When we agree to disagree on a specific topic, sometimes that looks like leaving the topic lay, knowing there is disagreement and being okay with it. There are other topics to discuss, after all. Other times we respectfully continue conversation around the topic because of a mutual desire to understand people we disagree with.

But the truth of the matter is that the existence of agreeing to disagree means that there are topics we cannot agree to disagree on. See first tier topics. For a Christian, this doesn’t mean that you hate— or show any less love for— the person you disagree with, it just means the disagreement is on a topic important enough to cut certain ties— in the context of these disagreements, the tie is the church, this individual is not allowed to lead or participate in certain ways in one’s church and could see church discipline, for instance. For instance, sometimes a disagreement can be on a topic important enough to prevent an individual from being around your children.

These are healthy things to do, but one has to weigh the importance of topics. As a Christian, we have to weigh these things against the Bible and our duties therein.

As a Christian, we are to go and spread the Gospel. To do that, you will be encountering people that disagree with you on the topics that are of most importance to you as a Christian every single day. If I cut ties with everyone that believed that children with Down Syndrome should be rooted out in the womb and murdered, I would be cutting ties with a lot of people that need Jesus. This ends in me being Amish, sequestered to a hundred acres in Arkansas with no Internet, no phone, and no contact with the outside world. Just me, my woodshop, and lots of laughing kids. Actually, that sounds great. But my Lord commands that I engage with the world.

But that is the Christian worldview. Lovingly living alongside men and women that disagree with us is part of the plan. It’s how we spread the Gospel. The worldview that is spreading through the West like wildfire is almost Darwinian: destroy those that you disagree with. Why would you continue to love someone that disagrees with you? You don’t need that kind of negativity in your life. And the result is that the bar for what is worth destroying a relationship, or possible relationship, is much lower for many. What used to clearly fall into “you are Jewish and I am Christian, but we can still be friends,” now lands in “you are Christian and I am trans, so we cannot be friends and I’ll call your manager on Monday to demand that they fire you.”

This is a worldview difference that is stark as we enter into an era of post-Christian society. Where a couple decades ago the atheists followed Christian principles, the new atheists most certainly do not. For many of them, not only are they not okay with agreeing to disagree on their topics, they will chase you down and harass you until you agree. That will come in the way of threats of violence against you, threats against your job, threats to destroy your reputation, threats to go after your children, and worse.

Some of those reading this have seen this form of disagreement either personally or close friends. Others think I am being sensational and hyperbolic. I assure you I am not. All those types of threats I mentioned in the last paragraph I have experienced personally in the last year.

Please Christian, be aware that persecution is coming in the States. If your job hasn’t been threatened yet, it will be sooner or later. You will get a call from HR and be told to defend yourself against baseless claims. If your children haven’t been used as collateral to get your obedience yet, they will be sooner or later. Hold to your faith and show grace in these situations. Look to the martyrs of old. Don’t waiver in your faith or your testimony.

Understand, Christian, that we are dealing with worldview differences so often now that it is becoming normal. Try to be peaceable in all things and know that many in our modern world have no intent on doing anything of the such. You are now the counterculture.

Right to Not Be Offended

A major settlement of $80,000 was just granted to a local student who sued the college right up the road from where we live. Three fellow students saught out her social media presense and found posts they disagreed with about abortion, police, and more and filed no-contact orders through the school because they felt “harassed” and “discriminated against.” The school granted them without giving the accused graduate student a chance to defend herself. Now three professors will be taking mandatory free speech training and the school handbook will be updated to “ensure students with varying political, religious and ideological views are welcome in the art therapy program.”

As always, I’m glad to see courts uphold the constitutional rights of Conservatives, even if their beliefs are counter-cultural.

Seeking a no-contact order because you are offended is an abuse of no-contact orders. Seeking out the offensive material makes it even more so. Let’s just say I have some experience here. You are not required to read someone else’s social media posts, their personal blog, or anything else they do online. You can block and unfollow them.

Let me put it this way: you do not have a right to not be offended. That isn’t a right recognized by law or the constitution of the United States. However, others have a right to free speech. People are allowed to say things you disagree with. Folks are allowed to say things I disagree with. Their freedom and mine are intertwined. I cannot block their freedom without blocking my own. I can disagree with what they post and even respond publically to it, but I cannot run to the courts and remove their rights to post it.

Let us instead engage in debate and dialogue. If you are incapable of that— trust me, many are— you can go the other way. Don’t engage. There are plenty of topics that I have opinions on but am not capable of engaging in debate on. I don’t know enough or it actually isn’t worth the debate. It has taken me a very long time to get to this point, to know that not every hill is made for dying. To avoid appearing pugnacious, quarrelsome.

My rule typically is if an argument is not going to move a discussion forward or better our understanding of each other, it likely isn’t worth it. And that is okay. Disagreement and leaving disagreement alone is fine and healthy. Not all disagreement needs to fuel endless, fruitless debate.

Fewer Words

Fewer words and more intentional questions go a long way in conversations and debates.

In both, conversations and debates, your intent should be to understand one another.

In a conversation, you want to understand one another so that you are not in disagreement and you get closer.

In a debate, you want to understand one another so that you can find what you disagree on and lay a persuasive argument.

All too often I see online debates and conversations starting with assumptions and arguing from there. Often wordy, long-winded, hard-to-follow exaltations. Sometimes the assumptions are right, but usually, they are simply strawmen. An assumed position for your opponent.

The foundation of debate is the definition of terms. Without an agreed-on definition, one can— and often does— disagree semantically and think they are disagreeing on the topic.

So my recommendation: Use fewer words and ask more intentional questions. Understand one another first. You cannot disagree with what you don’t understand.

Should All Scientists Be Militant Atheists?

When Lawrence Krauss says that no true scientist starts assumptions of God, he’s committed a fallacy called a No True Scotsman.

A No True Scotsman argument is an ad hominem fallacy, targeting the person making the argument instead of the argument at hand.

It goes as follows:
“Scientists have to be militant atheists to do their job,” which gets the response ”Michael Faraday was a believer in God and used Scripture as a source to discover electromagnetism,” to which the one bad at arguing says, “No true scientist believes in God.”

It’s a way of distracting from the argument at hand and poor form, for sure.

When Lawrence Krauss does this, he ignores the wealth of scientific understanding that has come from Christian men and women that started with the Bible as their authority.

As previously stated, Michael Faraday was the father of electromagnetism.

In a book on Faraday and electricity, Brian Bowers writes that ‘it seems likely that his religious belief in a single Creator encouraged his scientific belief in the “unity of forces”, the idea that magnetism, electricity and the other forces have a common origin.’ Faraday went on to show that the electricity produced was the same regardless of how it was produced—by a magnetic field, by a chemical battery or as static electricity.

Michael Faraday—God’s Power and Electric Power

The father of Thermodynamics, too, was a devout Christian scientist. James Joule, who is credited with Joule’s Law. Isaac Asimov called his First Law of Thermodynamics, “one of the most important generalizations in the history of science”.

But don’t forget Pascal, Pasteur, and even Newton. Much of early science was pioneered by Christian creationists, but even modern science is seeing major discoveries from creationists, such as the inventor of the MRI, Raymond Vahan Damadian.

To set a pseudo-requirement that scientists mustn’t believe in God is just another attempt to silence faith in today’s world. Because tolerance.

Response to All Scientists Should Be Militant Atheists