What’s Wrong with Asking Questions?

Readers below are asking. And the answer is, “Nothing, in principle.” However, it should also be noted that conversations do not happen in a vacuum. So, for instance, there’s nothing wrong with asking “Is it really the case that every action which causes a fetus to die is an ‘abortion’?” Legit question. And there’s nothing wrong with asking, “Is it really the case that fertilized egg (or a zygote or embryo) are properly what the Church means by a ‘person’?” Another legitimate question. You can also ask, “Didn’t Thomas Aquinas believe that ensoulment took place on the 40th day?” or “Isn’t it the case that there is not absolute unanimity in the Fathers about whether abortion was ‘murder’?” or “Have you ever noticed that Scripture is silent and never uses the word ‘abortion’?” or fifty other “legitimate” questions.

And yet the mildly perceptive reader can’t help but notice that such a line of questioning has a certain goal in mind, a certain point that is being made, a certain, ‘ow you say?, agenda?

Likewise, questions which, when piled up, tend always to be frog-marching us in the direction of “How close can I get to committing grave evil?” while studiously ignoring “How can I avoid the near occasion of sin?” also accumulate and form a rather obvious mosaic.

So, when somebody looks around at a culture drowning in abortion and says, “Hey! I’m just asking questions!” while *only* asking questions which aim to justify abortion and minimize opposition to it, they are not “just asking questions”. Same deal with the ongoing drive among combox attempts to “just ask questions” about the legitimacy of torture–particularly when they studiously attempt to ignore and minimize the obvious teaching of the church on human dignity and the necessity of treating prisoners humanely. Continuously invoking remote emotionally-charged hypotheticals such as ticking time bombs (statistically far less likely than the beloved “incest/rape/tubal pregnancy” so beloved by Catholic abortion apologists) and playing definition games (“But *is* a fetus a “person”? *Is* subjecting somebody to simulated drowning really ‘torture’?) is, when the evil is being practiced in the here and now, virtually always a determined push to err on the side of cruelty rather than mercy, not “just asking questions”.