Tag Archives: dialogue stories

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Do Pro-Choice People Make Me Angry?

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Estimated reading time: 4 minutes.

I have a great pro-choice friend who is both a careful thinker and very open-minded. I think we’ve exchanged about 100 emails to each other so far, and we’re far from finished. With her permission, I want to share with you a few questions she asked me this morning about getting angry, as well as my response to her. It gave me the chance to clear up a few common concerns and misconceptions that pro-life people have about my work.

She wrote:

I feel like kind of a jerk.  I was defending one of our mutual pro-life friends to some of his pro-choice friends and they were being really difficult. I ended the conversation by basically calling them idiots and saying that talking to them was a waste of time. I feel kind of terrible about it.  Have you had any similar experiences?  How do you avoid getting angry?

This was my reply:

I definitely think there are times where it’s time to graciously end the conversation. I spent about eight minutes talking about that here.

I haven’t seen the thread, but I’m proud of you standing up to pro-choice people defending a pro-lifer. I’ve definitely done the same, defending pro-choice people around jerky pro-lifers. For example, if I’m on campus mentoring new pro-life volunteers, and the volunteer is not listening to the pro-choice person or straw-manning their argument, I will step in and explain what I see happening, and give the pro-choice person a chance to re-articulate what they’re saying. There’s even been a few times where I’ve pointed out the problems with the pro-life persons argument. I’m going to publish a blog post that includes one of those stories soon. That’s pretty rare if I’m mentoring a volunteer on a college campus, even though I see volunteers making poor arguments often. It would just be overwhelming for them if I jumped on them at every opportunity. They’re new and they’re hanging out on a campus doing what practically NOBODY that calls themselves “pro-life” are doing: physically talking to pro-choice people.

angry manMy pastor asked me recently about whether I get angry when people make logical pro-choice arguments, even arguments like Michael Tooley’s that permit infanticide. I responded that those arguments don’t make me angry, because the pro-choice person is trying to make a careful and consistent argument. I get more annoyed when I give a bunch of great arguments, the pro-choice person has no counter-arguments, and then says something like, “that was all very interesting. Well, I’m still pro-choice. Good bye.” That’s just intellectually lazy, and it does annoy me. But what REALLY ticks me off is when I see Christians being jerks. There hasn’t been a day in the last year or two of abortion-related work that has made me more frustrated and wanting to cry and yell then the events of this day.

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What We Can Learn from Hateful Street Preachers

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Estimated reading time: 10 minutes.

Update: 3/25/13: This article has gone viral. Thanks to Abby Johnson, Live Action News and LifeSiteNews for running it. The article has been shared all over Facebook with thousands of views, likes and comments. I hear it’s been discussed all over Fresno State University, even among non-Christians. Thanks so much to everybody that shared it.

Update: 7/2/13: I just published a follow-up post with three excellent points on the topic of angry street preaching from Stand to Reason.

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Today was a weird day. While at Fresno State University, I witnessed the worst street preaching I’ve ever seen. I also witnessed what God can do with a few humble servants that want to show love while preaching truth to a crowd of disgusted atheists, Mormons, Muslims, and at least one Catholic guy. While telling the story, I’m going to write some things that have been going on in my heart lately as I think about communicating effectively to people who are different from us.

I was at Fresno State with my colleagues Gabi Vehrs, Kyle Goddard and Clinton Wilcox with hopes of engaging the students on the issue of abortion. We haven’t had a lot of success with Fresno State’s busy students in the past, so we set up a small JFA exhibit that we hadn’t used before at FSU as an R&D test, and just invited a few seasoned pro-life advocates to join us and test the outreach tool and its effect on FSU students.

A few decent dialogues later we heard some loud noises coming from the Free Speech Area. We looked over, and I saw three street preachers yelling at the students, some of whom stopped to listen.

Before I describe what they were saying, I should say something. I don’t think all street preaching is bad. I think people like Ray Comfort can be very effective, but he’s a seasoned evangelist who has gained some very helpful skills and a lot of experience. I generally prefer relational evangelism, because most people are going to take the words of a friend much more seriously than the words of a stranger. That being said, a thoughtful street evangelist can get some people thinking about religious ideas, and obviously that’s a good thing.

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Does NASA’s Definition of Life Conflict with the Pro-Life Position?

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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes.

I had a conversation with a pro-choice person this year that was unique enough that it bears repeating, in case you ever hear a similar argument.

We set up some poll tables and Justice For All‘s new “Where Do You Draw the Line” exhibit at Fresno City College.

Photo courtesy of Justice For All.

Photo courtesy of Justice For All.

A student walked up, and I engaged him, asking him what he thought about abortion. “Mark” responded by saying something I almost never hear on college campuses: “I don’t agree that the unborn is alive.”

I responded the way JFA’s Steve Wagner trains people to respond when someone says something like “no one knows when life begins!” I asked a clarification question: “Do you mean biological life, or something more philosophical, like when a person with rights and value begins?”

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Effectively Responding to Moral Relativism

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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes.

This post was first published at Life Training Institute’s blog. The resource links at the end were updated in October, 2017.

While working last week with the Justice For All exhibit at Kennesaw State University, I got into a conversation with two students, Justin and Teesha, about moral relativism. There are few topics more difficult to discuss than moral relativism. This is partially because it’s a complicated topic already, but also because few people are open to changing their views on relativism. Even if a person is typically open-minded, the whole concept of relativism is that we can have differing views on a subject, yet we can both be right.

When I train students to respond to moral relativism, I tell them to start by asking a clarification question. Steve Wagner of JFA points out that there are two different types of relativism, so it’s best to ask, “do you believe morals are relative to individuals or cultures?”

If the person believes morals are relative to cultures, I’m going to ask, “then how can you judge the Nazi’s decision to slaughter the Jews?”

If the person believes morals are relative to individuals, I’m going to say, “then you can’t distinguish between a father who feeds his daughter and a father who molests his daughter, can you? They just have different preferences.”

I’m going to share with you an excerpt of my dialogue with Justin and his friend Teesha, in hopes that it will give you some “tools for your toolbox” to use the next time your friend says “morals are relative.”

relativism

Justin:   There is no such thing as objective truth.

Josh:    Is that a true statement?

Justin:   Well, it’s true for me.

Josh:    I understand that, but is it true for me too, or is it just true for you?

Justin:   I don’t know, but it’s definitely true for me. There are some things I believe are wrong, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong for everybody.

Josh:    Okay, well do you think we could agree that there are some things that are objectively wrong? Like rape, for example. Wouldn’t it be wrong for someone to rape Teesha?

Justin:   Well, it would be wrong for me.

Josh:    I understand that, but when I say ‘rape is wrong,’ I mean that there is something inherently evil about the act of rape itself. It seems that when you say ‘rape is wrong,’ you’re simply stating a personal preference.

Justin:   Yes, it’s wrong for me, but who am I to judge someone else?

(I could tell by Teesha’s body language that she was slowly coming to grips with the natural consequences of Justin’s worldview, and it was making her a little uncomfortable, but she didn’t say anything yet.)

Josh:    What about child prostitution? It happens all around the world. Can’t we at least agree that that’s really messed up?

Justin:   Well, I personally don’t think that’s right…

Josh:    Yeah, but some people do. Some people think it’s okay to sell little girls’ bodies for sex with adult men. Isn’t that just wrong?

Justin:   Well, some people grow up with different parents and in a different culture than me. So I definitely wouldn’t do it, but who am I to judge another culture?

Josh:    I definitely agree people’s worldviews are partially shaped by their parents and culture, and that we should strive to think freely and clearly, and not just adopt whatever our parents taught us. (Justin nods approvingly.) But couldn’t an entire society be wrong about the “rightness” or “wrongness” of paying to have sex with 7-year-old girls?

Justin:   I think it’s wrong, but it might be right for them.

(Teesha interrupts that she disagrees with Justin. “Well I think that would be wrong!” she replied.)

Justin:   Something can be wrong to me, but that doesn’t make it wrong for someone else. Maybe it’s right to them. There is no objective right and wrong.

Josh:    Look, everybody used to think the earth was a flat disc on the back of a giant sea turtle. Were they right?

Justin:   It was right for them.

Josh:    Yes, but were we ever actually on the back of a giant sea turtle?

Justin:   *pauses / stammers*

Josh:    Do you understand the Law of Non-Contradiction? It is not possible that something be both true and not true at the same time and in the same context.

Justin:   But there is no truth!

Josh:    See that?! You just made a truth statement, that there is no truth! I don’t even have to refute that. Your argument is refuting itself! It committed suicide. It was Dead On Arrival.

Teesha laughed, and we moved on to another topic, and went our separate ways a half hour later.

Why was I able to be so quick on my feet in that dialogue? Because I had already prepared for that kind of conversation. I read books like “Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air” by Frank Beckwith and Greg Koukl. I listened to CD’s over and over on this topic, so I could master the material for myself. A lot of my responses were not even original! But they were tools in my toolbox, ready to be taken out when the opportunity came up.

I also chose to describe some of the most despicable acts I could think of. (I purposely left out the more graphic descriptions in this article, but suffice to say, I left little to the imagination.) I did this because it’s one thing to stand on a college campus and say there is no objective right and wrong, but it’s another thing to hear what it’s like for a 7-year-old to be forced to have sex with an adult man. There’s a reason we have a negative gut instinct when hearing things like that. It’s the kind of thing bioethicist Leon Kass refers to as “the wisdom of repugnance.”

So start preparing yourself for conversations like this! One way to do that is to subscribe to this blog or subscribe to our podcast, or even better, purchase our systematic course on pro-life apologetics, Equipped for Life: A Fresh Approach to Conversations About Abortion. Then you can be ready the next time someone tells you, “fetuses aren’t persons,” or “I’m personally pro-life but I wouldn’t tell someone else what to do with their body,” or even, “There is no truth. Morals are relative.”

Whatever you do, find a way to get involved. Moral relativism is one of the most destructive worldviews of the century. It’s become so popular that it’s even creeping into our churches unnoticed. It’s important that pro-lifers are able to combat it respectfully but effectively.