Stop ruining good debate with bad arguments

I have not always been a fan of debate. When I was younger I had the mistaken belief that if you disagree with me, then you don’t like me. This meant that any healthy debate was seen as an unhealthy quarrel in my naive eyes.

I think I was healed of this by the family that I married in to. When I first started dating The Huz, he and the Huz-in-law would constantly debate about religion, sport, politics, everything! At first I thought they must have a really bad relationship. But slowly by watching and listening, I learnt to appreciate the beauty of a healthy argument.

Having said that, there are some arguments that should no longer see the light of day.

I want to be clear that I’m not saying that a debate over any of these issues should be put to rest, just some of the rationale people use to try to win that debate.

Here is a list of arguments that are anything from weak to idiotic, and they can either annoy me or enrage me. I’ll leave it to you to decide which is which.

“I didn’t have it when I was young so neither can you”

I have to confess that I have said this to my kids a few times, but I realised that it was a weak argument when it was used in my presence once.

Two shop assistants were having a conversation close to me. One said to the other that she always parks in parent and baby carparks because she didn’t have them when she had her kids, so why should parents today have them.

I wisely took a deep breath, refrained from hitting her with my pram and left the store to avoid making a scene. How does the fact that she didn’t have parent and baby carparks when she had kids make it ok for her to deny me of them?

How far do you go with that argument?

Do you think it would be ok for my mum to give her grandkids a balloon each for Christmas just because that’s all she ever got? Of course not, because that would make her rather self-involved and selfish, which is how you come across when you use the ‘I didn’t have it so neither can you’ line.

“If you like them so much, then why don’t you live there”

This is as effective as saying ‘If you love it why don’t you marry it’.

I heard Murray Deaker say this about someone who wanted Ireland to win in the second test against the All Blacks recently. This is disappointing, even by Deaker standards. Think it through Murray! Just because I prefer a team to win a sports match, doesn’t mean I’m willing to uproot my life.

I have to point out that Mr Deaker is not the sole reason for this needing to be put to rest. It was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. In fact I hear it a lot on American news channels when they talk about what is done well in other countries. Americans are so patriotic that in some circles it is an insult to say that England has a better education system, or Germany has better health care.

Can we all just admit it is possible to like something about another country and still love our own? Even if we did hate our own country, or city for that matter, sometimes uprooting your whole life just isn’t practical. There are the implications for family, friends, work, and also the underlying feeling that perhaps it’s just the old ‘grass is greener’ complex.

Eventually you realise you’re better off staying where you are. It’s why I, and I’m sure thousands of others have been in Auckland so long.

“Gay marriage is wrong because marriage is sacred”

Ok, now I’m in controversial territory and might be a bit out of my depth, which kind of scares me but give me grace and bear with me for a while.

I am no theologian, but I am so uncomfortable with this argument when that is all that is said. Marriage is sacred. End of.

The problem with this is I would not call a lot of marriages today sacred at all. There is abuse, violence, adultery, divorce, lies, loneliness…so many problems can exist within heterosexual marriage. Just because a man and woman get married, there is no guarantee that that marriage will be sacred.

Look at people who can get married. Elizabeth Taylor married eight times. Even Hitler got married. It seems that as long as they are consenting, unrelated heterosexuals it is fine.  And yet a gay couple, who want to commit their lives to each other, perhaps even before God, are denied.

This is why I am uncomfortable with the shallowness of the ‘marriage is sacred’ argument within this debate.

Some people may say that what has happened to marriage just proves that it needs to be protected. Perhaps that’s true, but I still feel that if you are going to use the ‘marriage is sacred’ argument as your reason for being against gay marriage, you need to back it up with consistency and depth that addresses the fact that there are probably more heterosexuals in our society destroying the sanctity of marriage than there are homosexuals.

“You are pushing your beliefs on me”

Can someone please tell me, how one goes about pushing one’s beliefs on to another person? One would imagine that a poor innocent atheist has been tied up in a sound proof room and muzzled while the gospels are played at the highest possible decibel. Or they may be held down, while the original stone tablets that the Ten Commandments were written on are being smashed onto their head, giving the true meaning to the phrase Bible-bashing.

But no, most of the time, actually you would hope all of the time, these are not the actions that are taking place to evoke the ‘Your pushing your beliefs on me’ response.

There are two scenarios where I have heard this used recently. The first was in the always rage inspiring ‘What’s Your View?’ section of the TV Guide, where some sad person wrote in to complain about the TV Guide’s  Easter crossword because it had too many references to Christianity.

Are you kidding me here? It was Easter. It was only a crossword. But apparently this person thought that by having a crossword with questions about Christ was offensive as it might naturally cause him to become a Christian against his will. (I didn’t know that the TV Guide was edited by Gideons International.)

The other story was from a friend of mine who was stencilling on a traffic island. (That’s a nice way of saying he was doing graffiti in the middle of the road.) The picture he was creating was of Jesus as a football goal keeper with the words ‘Jesus Saves’. A passer-by disapproved of this but she didn’t say, ‘My council rates will be paying to clean that up you know’, or ‘This is my community can you please not draw on it’. Instead she rebuked him for ‘pushing his beliefs on her’.

I’m sorry whoever you are lady. You may be a very intelligent, wonderful person – but that is one of the dumbest things I have ever heard! Anyone would have thought he painted the words on your face. Actually, even painting it on would not be sufficient because you can wash paint off. If he held you down and tattooed it across your hands so that every time you look at them you will be slowly brainwashed into knowing that Jesus Saves – then you may have had an argument.

But he didn’t do that did he? I suppose you think that the people who put up theTui billboards are trying to brainwash us all to say ‘Yeah Right’. They are pushing their belief in their beer and their catchphrase on to you aren’t they? Let me give you a tip – don’t go to New York and stand in Times Square because you will be surrounded by signs pushing their belief in musicals on to you – and then who knows what might happen. You might end up singing and dancing all the way home!

In case you hadn’t noticed – I really think this argument is particularly stupid.

“Evolution proves there is no God”

People who spout this argument forget about faith, which is all about believing in things unseen. People of faith are not looking for proof, so straight away by saying that anything proves there is no God, only proves that someone does not understand the creation story as told in The Book of Genesis, or the faith of the person they are debating with. It is basically a lazy argument.

David Attenborough says that a he does not feel that evolution is against a belief in God, but he does have more meaningful reasoning that we can learn from:

“My response is that when Creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds, or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things. But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, [a worm] that's going to make him blind. And [I ask them], 'Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child's eyeball? Because that doesn't seem to me to coincide with a God who's full of mercy'”

Some people look at the worm and say there is no God, while others look at the hummingbird and say there is a God.

Many people of faith I know believe in evolution and also believe that we live in a fallen world, and actually God may have had little to nothing to do with creating the worm or the hummingbird.

Evolution and the discoveries of science are further proof to those who don’t believe in God that there is no God, while at the same time it proves to people who believe in God, what an amazing God He is.

I fear that these two sides, as often happens in debates, will just have to agree to disagree.