Poisoning the Well is Not an Argument - 2

In today's episode Carrie returns to her favorite tactic in her quest to make the Catholic Church look bad: poisoning the well. Once again, she has ripped a quotation from context, and put the part that is certain (without proper explanation) to scandalize the Protestant's sensibilities in bold type. The quote:

Through Luther, although Calvin seems to have been the first to announce Monobiblicism clearly, the Bible became the arm of the Protestant revolt. A dumb and difficult book was substituted for the living voice of the Church, in order that each one should be be able to make for himself the religion which suited his feelings.

The words "A dumb and difficult book" are in boldface - though obviously they are not so in their source, Orchard's A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture.

In the first place, it is obvious why she has bolded these words: she hopes to make the Church look bad, so that Protestants will share her own hatred of Catholicism.

In the second place, however, anyone who thinks about the matter for even 60 seconds will see that to call the Bible "dumb" (in the sense of "unable to speak") and "difficult" is about as controversial as saying that the sun is bright. Books don't talk. And 2000-year-old books are not easy to understand. But perhaps the Protestant will say that the Bible isn't hard to understand.

Unfortunately, Protestant history exposes the truth of what Orchard writes in the quotation above. But this is only to be expected: sola scriptura is irrational, since there is no good reason to accept it.

This sort of post is why I stopped bothering with commenting on Carrie's blog. No matter what anyone says in response to them, she invariably says, "That wasn't my point" - but then, she never tells us exactly what her point is. But it helps to remember her stated mission, which has nothing to do with discussion. She does not blog in order to question honestly, nor to debate. She blogs in order to get other Protestants to believe the same errors about the Catholic Church that she holds. The word she uses for this is "educate," but posts like this make it entirely clear that education is the furthest thing from her mind. She resorts to sophistical and demagogic methods that are the furthest thing from either presenting the facts or enabling others to think intelligently about the subject.

She might deny this is the case, but I think her use of bold face, and of quotations without explanation, makes it quite clear what she is doing.