He finds a piece by an atheist ex-Christian excoriating Christian torture apologetics which reads, in part:
“The first half of December 2014 was painful to many moderate American Christians who see their God as a God of love: A Senate inquiry revealed that the CIA tortured men, some innocent, to the point of unconsciousness and even death. As is common, evidence suggested that this torture extracted no lifesaving information. And yet, a majority of Americans responded by giving torture the thumbs up, with the strongest approval coming from Christians, both Catholic and Protestant. Faced with moral outrage, including from within their own ranks, Christian torture apologists took to the airwaves and internet, weaving righteous justifications for the practice of inflicting pain on incapacitated enemies.”
Then he notes:
Not surprisingly, the New Atheists are now calling out us Christians on our hypocrisy over torture. Sadly, the shame and embarrassment is deserved. What bothers me, though, is how many young people will turn away from the Gospel of Christ because Dick Cheney has been misrepresented as one of the four evangelists.
Here is my prediction: The online Christian apologetics community likely will miss the point in responding to pieces like the following. Fundamentalists will prooftext the Bible under the mistaken assumption that young people appalled by torture still consider it authoritative. Similarly, many online Catholic apologists will present hyper-rationalist based arguments while pooh-poohing the “emotionalism” of their opponents.
Yet my experience with young people today tells me they are much more holistic in their thinking. Which is why they reject the Borg pedagogy of pro-torture Christian apologists. Unfortunately, it also makes a convenient excuse for rejecting Christ.
It’s why I’m grateful that there are people like Pete Vere and Phil Lawler and sundry other actual real prolife Catholics (many of them right here in my comboxes fighting the good fight) out there who really do uphold the *whole* of the Church’s teaching on the dignity of human life and who do not simply use the unborn as human shields for a far deeper commitment to the defense of sadism and a cowardly rejection of the *real* teaching of Holy Church: that torture is, just like abortion, gravely and intrinsically immoral.
God speed the day when those attempting to evangelize for the glorious gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ and his Holy Catholic Church do not have to contend with the embarrassing spectacle of Real Catholics loudly trumpeting their orthodoxy and fidelity while blasphemously dressing Jesus up as a cheerleader for mortal sin.
