Suppose you want to defend something the Church plainly says is gravely and intrinsically evil, like abortion. How do you distract yourself and your audience from this fact so that you can plunge ahead and do something as stupid and contrary to both the good and common sense and still persuade yourself that you are a stand up kinda guy? There are lots of strategies for this, of course, but one of the most popular is this:<\/p>\n
If Mr Shea really believes that nobody should ever do what Jesus wouldn\u2019t do, let him have the courage to advocate the abolition of medicine. Jesus wouldn\u2019t be a surgeon, a clinical researcher, or an orderly in a hospital either.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Note the various techniques of obfuscation at work in this post. First, of course, I haven\u2019t made any arguments about \u201cwhat Jesus would do\u201d since I don\u2019t think they are particularly sound. The fact that Jesus was a carpenter does not mean carpentry is the only legitimate profession. Second, the question is not whether the particular surgical technique of abortion renders all medicine illegitimate. It is the question of whether abortion is gravely and intrinsically sinful or not. Holy Church is quite clear that it is. So we should not support it.<\/p>\n
Most people of reasonable intelligence can understand this sort of moral reasoning, if they are not deliberately choosing to make themselves stupid in the service of sin. Oh, and such stupid consequentialist tricks are not, of course, limited to the defense of abortion<\/a>.<\/p>\n