Response to Ben Douglass #2

Total Depravity, Suspicion, and Misreading Motives

Another possible explanation for his behavior is that it's congenial to his theology of the total depravity of unregenerate men. I mean, unregenerate men are by nature children of the devil, and hence liars, and Catholics such as, oh, Steve Ray and Dave Armstrong are unregenerate men.

Therefore, well, one should expect them to be liars, and hence one is perfectly justified in publicly declaring that suspicion and setting a very low evidentiary threshold above which one might, safely and morally, declare that suspicion to be satisfied.

Or you could recognize that in the vast majority of my debates this issue has never come up, and so this is a complete canard, and that it really is doing nothing more than wasting bandwidth making accusations against someone's character.

That's another possibility.

Anyway, that was basically my theory as to James White's thought process until April 8th, when I read him subject Steve Gregg to the exact same sort of treatment. Dr. White had recently debated Steve Gregg on the radio, and he publicly suggested on his blog that Steve Gregg had deliberately determined to talk over him in the hopes that his connection to the radio station would be stronger than Dr. White's, so that way the audience would only hear what Steve Gregg was saying and not hear what Dr. White had to say.

That suggestion was just absolutely gratuitous.

The Radio Debate With Steve Gregg and the Problem of Talking Over Each Other

What is actually gratuitous is Ben Douglas' misrepresentation of written material that anyone can go to the website and actually see. I brought up the entry, let's see, this is from, let's see here, 4 -8 -2008, if you'd like to go look at it, and this was about the fourth program in the debate with Steve Gregg, and this is where Steve Gregg had tried to do some interaction without any rules, and what had happened was we ended up talking over each other, and I objected because that would mean that people would not be able to follow what we were saying, and that the people listening to our side, the webcast, would only hear me.

The people listening to his side would only hear him. We wouldn't be able to hear each other because the nature of the connections that we have, we wouldn't be able to tell what the other one was saying, and hence it would destroy all meaningful communication, and what I guess he's referring to is, after discussing this a number of times, responding to a fellow by the name of C. Thomas, I said the following, now Steve Gregg said he wanted to start having some interaction.

I was provided no specifics, but I signaled Rich to keep the microphone open. We had been closing it during his portions. Nothing happened for quite some time, and when we finally did start interacting, it became quite clear that he intended to use the, I will ask a complex question, say it isn't, cut him off after a short period of time, and continue on with another question that is predicated upon whatever answer I want to attribute to him, routine.

Ironically, my very first response to him ended up confirming that his Romans 1 cannot be separated out from 2 and 3, and together they proclaim the Apostle's case of universal simpleness. So, I honestly do not, to this point, know what his objections actually were.

That's part of the problem of talking over folks. The sound quality, given that Steve Gregg, as far as we can tell, is not actually at a radio station, is marginal on our end already. If you start talking over someone, you can't even tell, in my headphones anyway, if the other person is still talking or has stopped talking, and you surely struggle to follow what is being said.

So, if you care about the audience, you just can't keep talking over each other. It did not take long for me to conclude that Mr. Gregg was going to ask a question, give me a brief time to start a response, and then cut me off, perhaps thinking his connection to the studio would trump mine, possibly?

And so I objected to the methodology. If Mr. Gregg seriously wishes to try to convince the audience this means I was unwilling to answer serious questions, well, I can only point to decades of putting myself out there, in far more difficult contexts than in a much wider context than Steve Gregg has, as more than sufficient reputation of such a cavil.

So, it was talking about one point in the debate, it was talking about what, was that maybe four minutes, five minutes of five days worth of material? So why does Ben Douglas have to misrepresent it so badly when the documentation is right there on the website?

I don't know, but it's a pretty weak argument and a pretty weak example to try to substantiate this, well, what do we have here? I guess it's mind reading, heart reading, soul reading, something like that?

And I don't know why people bother with this. Why don't we just deal with the arguments I put forward, rather than trying to psychoanalyze me and doing so very poorly in the process? I don't understand it, but that's what we have out there in Roman Catholicism.

Well the problem here, for my theory at least, is that Steve Gregg is a Protestant whom Dr. White regards as a brother in Christ. So apparently Dr. White makes rash statements about the honesty, even of men whom he doesn't regard as unregenerates.

So maybe it's back to the drawing board for my theory. Well, on the other hand, Steve Gregg had also gratuitously questioned Dr. White's honesty, so maybe that explains this particular instance.

Well, I'm at least thankful that he recognized the gratuitous nature of some of the things that Gregg had said, and the fact of the matter is, in responding to that, I was talking about one particular incident during the debate.

But again, my suggestion is, let's not worry about making up theories like this. How about, you know, I'm going to get to the Ignatius stuff eventually, but since he's put this out here, hopefully there's some educational benefit at the very least, as to why this almost, well, gratuitous seems to be the word of the moment, gratuitous and somewhat insulting psychoanalyzing of people.

I mean, I could be sitting here looking at Ben Douglas and going, wow, look at the size of that, that's their statue, you know. What would ever be accomplished if all we did is, wow, Ben Douglas has a huge statue behind him, I wonder what it means.

Who cares? Let's talk about DOSO, the future form of Matthew 16, 19, and do something meaningful with all this. In the next section, which is fairly lengthy, Ben went into a long thing about how we are to be charitable in regards to other people's actions, gave an example about not posting stuff when he said he was going to post it, and all the different conclusions you could come to.

While that's fine and dandy, and I don't know that that's necessarily relevant within an apologetic context, especially if we're not necessarily talking about fellow believers, but all that aside, I am often considered to be naive by certain people on my side of the fence as to how long it takes me to become convinced that someone on the other side of the fence is, in fact, drastically dishonest.

And people have to give me evidence of it first. No matter what Ben says, Ben has not walked in my shoes. Ben has not sat in chat channels anonymously watching Catholic apologists talking about how they could get hold of information on Protestant apologists' families.

Ben has not found letters written to his wife by Catholics with no return address trying to convert his wife. Ben has not been the object of the kind of, well, just go over to the Catholic Answers web boards, go over to the Catholic Answers forums, and look me up in the archives.

I would not even recognize myself if my name wasn't attached to many of the outlandish, absurd personal attacks, misrepresentations, and bold-faced lies that are found all through there. Now, I could hope Ben is out there swinging the sword and saying, people, we can't do this.

No one's told me he's doing that, but if he's going to be consistent, that's probably where he should be, because that stuff's out there. And might that make me a little bit quicker to assume that if someone comes in and they start repeating the same lies that I've heard over and over again, that maybe they're going to continue along those lines and continue with the lies?

Do I have possibly the right to think that way, maybe, Ben? You've not walked the mile in my moccasins, that's for certain. And I think if you had, you might be a little slower to be lecturing the way you're lecturing.

Ignatius of Antioch, the Eucharist, and the Charge of Straw Man

So let's examine how James White could do a better job of living by these principles. In the interest of time, I'm only going to examine one particular incident, which, incidentally, will lead us to the third and final part of this video series.

A while ago, James White posted some videos on YouTube in which he argued that another Ignatius, Ignatius of Antioch, believed that the Eucharist was a mere memorial of Christ's passion and not his physical substantial presence.

Now I'm going to take some of Ben's advice here and try to put the best spin I possibly can on being misrepresented yet once again. Actually, what I did is I posted a dividing line, the audio from the dividing line, from 2004.

And I posted it specifically in response to Steve Ray going on Catholic Answers and making these wild claims about Ignatius. And what I argued was that what he was talking about has nothing to do, in fact, with the entire debate over transubstantiation.

That's not part of his context. I did not argue that he viewed it as a mere memoriam. I didn't even address the subject. So why would Ben present a straw man? Did he just misunderstand? Was there too much information?

Don't know, but it's still a straw man, and it's still inaccurate. And unfortunately, this is very common amongst Roman Catholic apologists that we deal with over and over again.