Truth is not dictated*

An important year-and-a-bit in my journey from deeply Calvinist to... not that... was spent on the CARM forums. Someone special to me was Catholic, I had accrued a deep and wide knowledge of Catholic apologetics and theology, and so the part of the forums I spent my time on was debating Roman Catholics.

As I said then, and it's true now, the single most frustrating part of Catholicism is not any single bizarre dogma, it's their attitude to truth. If one is a dogmatic thinker, then that's the opposite of being open to new views, the opposite of being open to challenging one's own views. Nothing that is believed dogmatically has any right to be called "truth" because it's unfalsifiable, no standards have been applied at all to test the claim. It's merely dictated, and the sincere Catholics in the pews believe it. They genuinely believe that by being unswervingly committed to the claim that the believe without evidence that they are being virtuous and "putting truth first". But let me reiterate: truth is not dogmatic. It's the opposite of dogmatic.

But seeing the right-on-the-surface problems with Catholic epistemology provided cover for all the Protestants on the forum attacking them. After all, we Protestants don't swear blind featly to a Magisterium, we are not so blind. We think critically! But... reality is more complicated. My retired parents who read 365 Days With Calvin (no, wait, that was last year, this year it's 365 Days With Newton) as a devotional every day have no more thought critically about what they believe and why than the Catholic who is under the Magisterium. Religious belief itself is the thought-stopping technique. It doesn't require the overt dictatorship and authoritarianism of Roman Catholicism.

But in my Protestant apologetic days on the forum (from whence the title come from) I was fumbling around for the right words. It's much better expressed as "Truth is not dogmatic". And it doesn't take Catholic ecclesiology to be dogmatic; Protestants are too. But my choice of "dictated" is a reflection of where I was and who I was addressing. It's meant to be a critique of the Catholic attitude to truth which could never apply to me.

And that's a big part of what wore me down: realizing that it was hard to critique the other side with something that couldn't possibly apply to me. The more I cared about their shoddy attitude to dogmatic truth, and the more I wanted to be intellectually honest and take the high ground over them, the more apparent it was that the people on my side were just as uncritical and dogmatic and the things I was saying applied to my team too.

Truth is open to other views.