On Guilt By Association

“Cancel Culture” operates based on the logical fallacy of “Guilt By Association.” In other words, instead of duking it out in the battle of ideas, if you can smear your opponent by playing Six Degrees from Kevin Bacon, and finding someone “linked” to one’s opponent who used a bad word or holds some unpopular opinion, then you can treat your opponent as if he himself is guilty. Instead of discussing ideas, you can effectively shut down your opponent by essentially lying about him.

In our case, one of our writers penned something a few weeks ago that was criticized by someone. Our writer addressed the critic by responding to his criticism while including a link to his page where he criticized Gottesblog. In response, a gal with a clear ax to grind against Gottesdienst “linked” us to our critic, dug up something unscriptural that our critic had said, and then “asked” if we agree with the critic’s unscriptural views.

I kid you not.

She is really insistent with the “have you stopped beating your wife” line of questioning. And of course, her comments have been treated with the dignity that they deserve (in other words, they went right in the you-know-what can).

Unfortunately, this is the way a lot of argumentation seems to take place today. We are living in the movie “Idiocracy.”

We have also been criticized elsewhere for interviewing Doug Wilson (yawn). I thought it was a great interview, and all the guilters-by-association can just go pound sand. I think we should do more interviews with him.

If your congregation sings a hymn by Bernard of Clairvaux or Thomas Aquinas, are you somehow worshiping Mary or advocating for transubstantiation? If a scholar makes use of Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, does that make him a Nazi sympathizer? If someone shares a quote from Charles Spurgeon, does that mean he does not believe in baptismal regeneration?

And speaking of guilt-by-association and Doug Wilson, this is how you deal with such nonsense: read and enjoy!