Communication requires effective listeners
A lot of the time, people hear me mention one thing, and then I'll mention another thing, and they'll think that I'm saying those two things are the same. For example, I might say "I think the weather will be good today, so I'm going to go hiking. Or maybe I'll go fishing." And someone will hear this, and respond, "Are you trying to tell me that hiking is the same as fishing? You must be out of your mind!" But anyone with half a brain *should* be able to see that the only thing I said was that both are things to do in good weather.
Most recently, someone responded to a letter to the editor of mine that made it into The Daily Campus, and in doing so made this same mistake. I had said that the ethics of natural law were heavily flawed, and fell into the fallacy known as Natural Fallacy, named so for the fact that it deals primarily with the ethics of natural law. See, what happened is that the most common source of my ire, Nicolas Tomboulides, tried to back up Christian morals with the ethics of natural law. In turn, I pointed out that natural law doesn't work, cited Natural Fallacy, and mentioned that it's the same thing that backed up Hitler's idea of greater and lesser races.
What then happened is that some other fellow named Brandon Devine criticized my comments, stating that I had said that Christian morals support the Holocaust. Now, it's true that I could argue that the anti-semitism stemming from the whole "Jews killed Jesus" battle-cry could easily be something that was supporting the Holocaust(Note that the population of Germany at the time was all Catholics and Lutherans). But that wasn't even what I was arguing! I was only arguing that you can't back something up with natural law, because it is plainly evident how things that have been backed up with natural law in the past have been abominable.
It should also be clear how I was not stating that ethics (such as natural law) and morals (such as Christian morals) are the same. In the lead-in post to this, I discussed the differences between ethics and morals. You can back up a moral with ethics, assuming the ethics are sound, but they aren't the same thing. In fact, the system would be stronger if it were just the ethics, without the morals muddling up the process of deciding what is right and what is wrong.
I'll close with another story of people confusing two different things for one same thing. When I was applying to college, there was a registration fee that could be paid by check. At the same time, I wanted to re-up my WoW subscription, which requires a debit or credit card. Now, I had no money to speak of, so I asked my mom to help out with these. First she wrote out a check for the registration fee, and I mailed it out, no problems. Then she told me her credit card was a sort of no-name bank card that wouldn't be accepted for online transactions, so my WoW account wouldn't get renewed. Oh well, at least I got the important one done.
Shortly thereafter, my father was going ballistic. He was pounding on my door and screaming as loud as he could about how I couldn't go to college because the registration fee hadn't been paid. That's right: My mom had told him that she wasn't able to pay for something with her credit card, and somehow completely forget that she had already paid the registration fee with a check. It took a full fifteen minutes to explain that the registration fee had in fact been paid. All because people can't seem to understand that two different things are not the same just because they get mentioned within a few minutes of the other.
Most recently, someone responded to a letter to the editor of mine that made it into The Daily Campus, and in doing so made this same mistake. I had said that the ethics of natural law were heavily flawed, and fell into the fallacy known as Natural Fallacy, named so for the fact that it deals primarily with the ethics of natural law. See, what happened is that the most common source of my ire, Nicolas Tomboulides, tried to back up Christian morals with the ethics of natural law. In turn, I pointed out that natural law doesn't work, cited Natural Fallacy, and mentioned that it's the same thing that backed up Hitler's idea of greater and lesser races.
What then happened is that some other fellow named Brandon Devine criticized my comments, stating that I had said that Christian morals support the Holocaust. Now, it's true that I could argue that the anti-semitism stemming from the whole "Jews killed Jesus" battle-cry could easily be something that was supporting the Holocaust(Note that the population of Germany at the time was all Catholics and Lutherans). But that wasn't even what I was arguing! I was only arguing that you can't back something up with natural law, because it is plainly evident how things that have been backed up with natural law in the past have been abominable.
It should also be clear how I was not stating that ethics (such as natural law) and morals (such as Christian morals) are the same. In the lead-in post to this, I discussed the differences between ethics and morals. You can back up a moral with ethics, assuming the ethics are sound, but they aren't the same thing. In fact, the system would be stronger if it were just the ethics, without the morals muddling up the process of deciding what is right and what is wrong.
I'll close with another story of people confusing two different things for one same thing. When I was applying to college, there was a registration fee that could be paid by check. At the same time, I wanted to re-up my WoW subscription, which requires a debit or credit card. Now, I had no money to speak of, so I asked my mom to help out with these. First she wrote out a check for the registration fee, and I mailed it out, no problems. Then she told me her credit card was a sort of no-name bank card that wouldn't be accepted for online transactions, so my WoW account wouldn't get renewed. Oh well, at least I got the important one done.
Shortly thereafter, my father was going ballistic. He was pounding on my door and screaming as loud as he could about how I couldn't go to college because the registration fee hadn't been paid. That's right: My mom had told him that she wasn't able to pay for something with her credit card, and somehow completely forget that she had already paid the registration fee with a check. It took a full fifteen minutes to explain that the registration fee had in fact been paid. All because people can't seem to understand that two different things are not the same just because they get mentioned within a few minutes of the other.