Patrick Mitchell brings up quite a few points in Friday’s column: the biology of homosexuality, a comparison to racism, changing sexual orientation, etc.
What specific logical fallacy is being committed when drawing a distinction between ideological radicalism under the veil of religion and authentic Christianity? I think the perceptive reader would see that there isn’t one. Hidden under the writer’s weak use of non sequitur is a faith-based claim to ultimate epistemology, of which there is little time for discussion here.
I consider Patrick, “The Coffee Shop Atheist,” a friend and talented conversationalist. We attended the same church a couple years back, so I am frequently surprised and disappointed at what seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding, or a deliberate misconstruction, of some of the basic doctrines of the Christian faith. Patrick writes, “Is it worth making people deny their identities just because you feel that’s what God wants you to do?” Indeed, the whole point of Christianity is that we deny our identities only to find them! This is the great paradox of the Gospel.
Christians believe that the only way to find one’s true self is to lose it. As C.S. Lewis concludes in his magnum opus, Mere Christianity, “The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up your self, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it ... Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
This is a profound mystery and a conversation for another time.
— John Brewer Eberly, Jr.— third year biology student