It is truly astonishing to me how poor the arguments against profanity found in Christian circles are. Ask, and you shall receive--receive overtly fallacious reasoning offered as justification for anti-profanity lifestyles. Although I already addressed this issue once before, I want to again defeat the arguments raised to defend a hollow tradition of legalism.
The inconsistency of these Christians is astounding. They will often declare on one hand, especially with regard to issues like homosexuality, that if something is wrong because it contradicts God’s nature, the only metaphysical source of good, then it does not matter what any society or individual thinks; the truth about values remains unaffected by their perceptions and preferences. Then they will turn around and, after soundly rejecting belief in moral ideas on the basis of societal conditioning, proceed to explain that using certain words like "damn" or "shit" is objectively evil just because our society defines them as a class of speech called "profanity."
But is something truly "profane" and wicked simply because a culture decides it is? Of course not! Christians seem to forget this fact when it comes to issues like profanity.
Now let me demonstrate the pure subjectivity of calling a word immoral to begin with.
I go to a Christian college, one where certain students object to profanity and believe it is objectively immoral. If I went up to them and said "poop," I am fairly certain they will not object. If I instead say "shit," they might correct me for my ostensibly unholy speech. If I tell them, "For heaven's sake, you scared me," they will likely not mind. But if I say "For hell's sake, you scared me," they might scold me for my sinful mouth! If I walk up to a Christian and utter "Dang it," I probably won't receive any scolding. But if I walked up and said, "Damn it," the Christian might object.
Do you see the utter subjectivity of this? This reasoning is nothing more than an appeal to emotion, an appeal to cultural ideas about morality, and a fallacious instance of begging the question. The arbitrary, relativistic nature of calling profanity wrong is only heightened when one remembers that words change meaning over time. In fact, no particular sound we can make with our tongues and mouths has any inherent linguistic meaning whatsoever. We define words as we need or want to in order to express objective ideas and concepts.
At this point Christians may say that we shouldn't use profanity because it may offend people. Not only does this assume that people in general are offended by these words, especially assumptive because people don't even entirely agree on what words are profanity to begin with, but, by their own standard, if people are not offended by certain words than there can be nothing wrong with saying them in their presence to express anger or shock or confusion. And since I am not offended by such language, anyone cussing in my presence is not sinning.
God condemns blasphemy (Leviticus 24:16). He condemns cursing your father or mother (Exodus 21:17, Leviticus 20:9). The Bible's many condemnations of pride by direct extension condemn words of arrogance or words motivated by pride. Since Mosaic Law condemns degrading another human, even convicted criminals (Deuteronomy 25:3), we should never degrade or seek to degrade others with out speech. Words intended to provoke or unjustly belittle are not loving. But never once does God state that a society can randomly and subjectively assign a meaning to a word it invented or inherited and then make use of that word become morally wrong. And to claim that such words are sinful is to add to God's moral standard, something he explicitly prohibited in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 4:2) and something that Jesus personally criticized in the New Testament (Matthew 15:3-9).
Is profanity sinful? No, at least apart from using profanity to attack someone with malicious motives ("Bitch!"; "Bastard!"). When Christians sidestep the morality God instructs them to uphold, all while inventing subjective moral preferences and then defining them as objectively binding, they have forfeited rationality and a correct understanding of Biblical ethics.
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