In the degradation of discourse that came with the new atheism fad of the 00s the absurd dodge of "The True Scotsman" was given as a dishonest argument and was elevated to a kind of folk "logical fallacy" when it was, itself logically fallacious.
One of its most popular uses was when someone, such as myself, pointed out that the evils done by those professing Christianity (or other religion) and, at times, even in the name of religion were, themselves, in opposition to the core definition of Christianity. If you pointed that out you could count on some online dolt out of their ersatz erudition crying "No true Scotsman" as if that clinched their argument.
I used to try to reason with such people pointing out that if someone violated the teachings of Jesus, Christ, then they could not be doing anything but violating the very definition of what Christianity has to be to be anything.
There are categories of identity in which there are absolutely discrediting and disconfirming behaviors because the identity of someone in that category must be dependent on their conformity to the defining character of that identity.
That you cannot be a Christian unless you believe that Jesus was a real person would be one such definitive requirement.
You cannot be a Christian unless you accept the teachings of Jesus, especially those moral commandments which are reliably attributed to him as morally binding on you.
In the case of Christianity, of being a follower of Jesus that characteristic requirement is especially evident because the Gospels have many cases in which Jesus, himself, defined that following him, of obeying his moral commandments, of putting his teachings into practice was a definitive condition for being what would come to be called "Christianity".
That, alone, makes the "No True Scotsman" dodge as used by atheists logically and intellectually incompetent because being a "Scotsman" is not defined by adherence to a moral code or any kind of adopted code of conduct, it is a condition of biological heritage like being male or female or a member of a species or other taxonomic category of biology. What is absurd about a "No True Scotsman" is the very claim that being a "Scotsman" is conditioned on adherence to a code of conduct when it is a biological categorization or one of legal definition of citizenship.
That the "No true Scotsman" dodge was given one of its greatest boosts in the degraded pop-culture of the new atheism fad was by a professional biologist, P.Z. Myers is evidence of the degradation of science in the post-war period. That anyone who was a self-designated champion of science and reason, no less, to make such an irrational argument into an ersatz principle of logical argument when it so obviously didn't apply as used is a rather definitive disconfirmation of their own self-identity as such a champion. And they are legion on the internet these days.
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Here I should like to speak not only to Christians but to non-Christians also, as well as to the many people who simply doubt. Perhaps Christians and non-Christians alike can agree initially on three important points.
- In the present crisis of values, most people are convinced that without the minimum degree of consensus about systems of values it is impossible for human beings to live together at all. Without the minimum degree of consensus about received, basic norms and attitudes (and these things are certainly under serious discussion in the different political parties today), it is questionable whether even the state can function, in view of all the conflicting interests. We can assume that there is agreement about one point at least --- that there can be no civilized society and no tate without some system of laws. But no legal system can exist without a sense of justice. And no sense of justice can exist without a moral sense or ethic without basic norms, attitudes and values.
I'm breaking in to ask if this, two and a half years into
Trump and the shattering of the post-war "free world" order, the dysfunctional - non-functional United States government, if this passage
resonates more than it might have in 1986.
In a dictatorship, all of those go by the wayside to one extent or another as the will of gangsters rules. I think that in the amoral order that I am beginning to suspect is, at least sometimes, a guaranteed result when secularism leads to a dereligionization of societies, as in the West, especially in the post-WWII era, you can count on that being more and more the normal thing to see. They are, of course, the basis of all regimes of inequality in which laws apply unequally and, inevitably, to the harm of groups which are subjugated by those who have power.
I think that will always happen when there is an absence of a sense of divinely imposed requirement to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I think the moral consensus that Hans Kung expected when he wrote that has decayed in the areligious secularism that has gained the upper hand in dereligionized societies. That is true even among those people whose nominal devotion to
Christianity, nevertheless, was matched by a rejection of what I wish
people saw as The Equality Commandment which is absolutely binding on
those professing Christianity and, in fact, on everyone, equally. I think that we are seeing in the United States that the loftiest expressions of secular "civic religion" (to use Sandra Day O'Connor's putrid slogan) is no substitute.
As we see all over Europe, the reliance that alleged de-religionized European civilization is as unreliable a guarntee of that as it was before WWII. If the commandments of Jesus are in imperfect grantee of peace and decency, free trade and open boundaries and man-made law are going to be even less perfect guarantors of it.
- If (as I have suggested) it is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to justify ethics purely rationally, then we cannot recklessly ignore the significance and function of the phenomenon which for thousands of years has offered the justification for an ethic and for the basic values of men and women. That is to say, we cannot put religion aside without accepting the consequences. We must accept that there is no unconditionally binding obligation to perform a particular humane action without the acceptance of an unconditionally binding authority which lays that obligation on us. There is no unconditionally binding moral, human action and no unconditionally binding ethic without religion. And if it is not true religion which performs this function, it will be pseudo-religion or quasi-religion. But for true religion, the sole authority which is permitted to claim absolute, unconditional obedience is nothing humanly conditioned at all; it is the Absolute itself, to which we give the name of God.
I think in the United States, in Britain, and elsewhere, perhaps especially in the English speaking countries, we have seen an experiment in pretending that secularism can replace religion in the role it has had, however imperfectly, in the past. I think in every way we are seeing the failure of that idea of putting secular law, of a vague sense of good and bad, of the idiotic idea that morality is conditioned on social consensus or the even stupider assertion that it is a product of natural selection is obvious.
Just this morning I had to point out that an anti-religious woman, Rebecca Watson, had a practical experience of that in going up against the scientific-atheist male establishment which rejected her assertions of not only equality but to basic personal safety and integrity. There is nothing in her scientistic atheism that can defeat the sexism of Richard Dawkins or the guy who calls himself Thunderf00t. Not even invented schemes of natural selection which have, with absolutely nothing surprising about it, reinforced and strengthened claims of inequality as part of the natural order.
If the atheist use of "No True Scotsman" is dishonestly irrational, attempts to tease claims of equality (or any other assertion of morality) from that engine that runs on inequality, which is natural selection, is totally dishonest and irrational.
Even if the atheist, secularist, were to acknowledge the niceness of claims of equality there is nothing in their atheist secularism other than possibly suspecting they couldn't get away with it to inhibit their practice of inequality, there is nothing in either that could inhibit anyone who really wanted to and who figured they could get away with it from practicing anything. The very concept of equal rights is dissolved in the general amorality of secularism. Science has been giving excuses to such people since the time of the slave-owning champion of "equal rights" Jefferson and those like him even earlier.
- Whether or not we are Christians, we have to admit that the purely humane, basic norms and values of the past were always Christian in character. And this was entirely for the benefit of human happiness and well-being. It was the Christian mind and spirit that enshrined the values of human dignity, liberty, justice, solidarity and peace. Without the Christian content, they would be, and are, equivocal concepts, manipulated at will in both East and West. (It is not only the Peoples' Republics and George Orwell's 1984 which make that plain,) Moreover, whether we like it or not, the Christian message does not offer merely a theoretical band abstract answer to questions about basic norms and values. It is a practical and concrete answer.
I am sure that there will be a knee-jerk reaction against this passage because it could be pointed out that other religions have those values. Though I think in the West, especially, the sense of fairness, of equality, that makes this passage seem unfairly exclusive is, in itself, the vestigial inheritance of what Habermas called the "universal ethic" of Christianity.
I think it is fair to state that in terms of modern egalitarian democracy Kung's statement is a fact of history. In modern politics, the milieu in which the concept of egalitarian democracy arose, it was a direct consequence of the serious and rigorous address of the teachings of Jesus, the expression of the Mosaic-Prophetic tradition by Jesus and, it has to be added, Paul, James and the others who wrote books included in the New Testament. I am totally convinced that the egalitarian strain of American government is a direct result of the Bible commentary of Calvin as found in the Geneva Bible, the Bible which James I sought to suppress because it challenged the divine right of kings, what led to the production of the King James Version. The Bible has always been a huge problem for those who benefit from inequality, from injustice, from the differences in wealth and destitution, freedom and slavery. But even using the King James Version, the Black Church became, first, the primary force behind abolition and after the end of de jure slavery, the foremost engine of equality. Even King James and the racist churches that supported slavery couldn't suppress the force of the Golden Rule and the teachings of Jesus.
There have been entire sects, denominations and movements calling themselves "Christian" which must ignore or deny teachings of Jesus in order to justify their benefiting from inequality. Right now, in their support of Trump, white "evangelicals" are an anti-Christian heresy of that kind, turning "Christianity" into something exactly like the most putrid form of Roman paganism under the recently self-deified Trump, the kind of religion which the Gospel is set against, even to the point where it killed the Jesus they claim to worship and whose teachings they pretend to hold have the force of divine command. Jesus, certainly, meant just those kinds of false prophets when he gave ways to discern disqualifications for being one of his followers.
I will continue with Hans Kung on the distinction between real and phony Christianity tomorrow, I won't answer the inevitable cry of "NTS", I've done that too many times already, those guys never learn a thing.
Update: It is snarked that one can be "culturally Scottish". Well, I doubt that would stand the accusation of "cultural appropriation" or be widely acknowledged to be the test of "a true Scotsman". If that's what it takes to be one, then a. it makes the designation of someone being "a true Scotsman" meaningless, b. it reinforces my observation that something which cannot be defined by biological and family inheritance, Christianity, would have to be consistent with behaviors that must be met in order to be a "true" one. The claim that being a "Scotsman" is a matter of adhering to a set of behaviors must, also, mean that those who don't adhere to those behaviors can't be a "true" one. While those behaviors are not set down in absolute statements in the way that the commandments of Jesus such as "The Golden Rule" the requirement to do to the least among you as you would do to God, etc. Jesus, himself, gave absolute means of determining when someone was not being a true follower of Jesus, what came to be called a "Christian". And one of those requirements would be that the words of Jesus in such regard are absolutely definitive.
You can count being casuistically dishonest among those definitive disqualifications, I'd think.
It's not for me to talk on it but I think the practice of meaning both someone who is an observant follower of the Jewish religion as being Jewish but, also, that someone is Jewish if they are the children or even just remote descendants of those who did has been rather problematical in that regard. There are Mosaic commandments that used to define who was Jewish and, in some cases those are still enforced. I have always thought it was irrational that someone who was Jewish who converted to be a Christian or a Muslim were banished from being considered Jewish but someone who converted to atheism, even vehement anti-Jewish atheism was still to be considered Jewish. Clearly the word is used to mean both of the kinds of identities I mentioned above. Christianity and Islam, whether you like it or not, are the two major vehicles through which any of the substance of The Law of Moses entered into general world culture. I think in light of some of the most un-Christian of the history of nominal Christianity, Christianity is only safely seen as a branch of Hebrew religion - Muslims will have to speak for Islam. Materialism is an absolute denial of the Hebrew tradition, the very thing which the earliest records of what became Judaism was defined through, when God told Abraham that from him God would make a great nation. But that's not for me to have a say in, though that doesn't mean I can't think about it. The absolute vulgar materialism of American-Brit, Las Vagas, Hollywood, etc. pop culture is even more poisonous to it.
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