instructions: For each argument below,  a short paragraph explain-…

CoachMusic10111
instructions: For each argument below,  a short paragraph explain-…

instructions: For each argument below,  a short paragraph explain-
ing the author’s main reasons for holding the view, even if you disagree

with the view.

for example or Sample:

Question: “You never heard of a Presbyterian going crazy on religion. . . . We get up of a
Sunday morning and put on the best harness we have got and trip cheerfully
downtown; we subside into solemnity and enter the church; we stand up and duck
our heads and bear down on a hymn book . . . when the minister prays; we stand
up again while our hired choir are singing, and look in the hymn book and check
off the verses to see that they don’t shirk any of the stanzas; we sit silent and grave
while the minister is preaching, and count the waterfalls and bonnets furtively, and
catch flies; we grab our hats and bonnets when the benediction is begun; when it

is finished, we shove, so to speak. No frenzy, no fanaticism—no skirmishing; ev-
erything perfectly serene. You never see any of us Presbyterians getting in a sweat

about religion and trying to massacre the neighbors. Let us all be content with the
tried and safe old regular religions, and take no chances on wildcat.”

Mark Twain, “The New Wildcat Religion,” The Golden Era,
Mar 4, 1866, http://www.twainquotes.com/Era/18660304.html
Answer: I think Twain’s key line is: “You never see any of us Presbyterians getting in a sweat
about religion and trying to massacre the neighbors.” Of course, he overstates, for
humor, and today would probably offend many people. I’m not going to agree that
Presbyterians are necessarily insincere and inoffensive robots or that emotional or
activist forms of religion—Christian or other, whether I agree with them or not—are
“crazy” just for that. Still, I can agree that Twain has a serious point. “Massacring the
neighbors” literally can happen when religion gets intense—both historically (e.g., the

Crusades, alas) and too often even in today’s world. One challenging point Twain
would probably want to make today is that some forms of Christianity may be just as
prone to “go crazy” as the prevailing stereotypes of Muslim extremists. Thanks, Mark!

Twain was a famous skeptic about many things, and a master of ironic and satirical argu-
ment. When others make light of something that you take very seriously, it’s easy to get upset

and dismiss the reasons they give for their view. This response sets aside the provocative parts
of the satire to focus on Twain’s substantive point.
Can you think of satirists in today’s media who argue in similar indirect but sharp ways?
Can we bring ourselves to thank them, too, even or especially when the satire hits close to
home?

Questions:

1. “Only religion can say all fetuses are instantly human; any scien-
tific understanding exposes this incontrovertibly as just crazy talk.

But abortion rights don’t depend on fetuses not being human at
all. If you want to take the argument off the religious turf, you
have to acknowledge that there is no moral instant when a fetus
becomes human—science can’t locate that transformation more
precisely than sometime between conception and birth. For that
matter, there is no moral bright line between human and animal

as far as suffering and death, that separates a human from a chim-
panzee from a pig from a dog. . . . There is moralizing, but not

morality, in approving the grotesquely cruel slaughter of billions of sentient animals for convenience or any reason at all, while labeling women who abort sixteen-cell fetuses as murderers.”

Philip N. Cohen, “Abortion Is Not a Holocaust, and Feminism Is Not About Convenience,”
Family Inequality, Apr 13, 2018, https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2018/04/13/
abortion-is-not-a-holocaust-and-feminism-is-not-about-convenience/

2.”I have yet to meet anyone who can point out from who or what
we evolved from. Sure some say we evolved from apes; well if
that’s true; wouldn’t all apes have evolved to humans? There’s
some that say we evolved from a fish; wouldn’t all fish eventually

have evolved to human? Yeah, it’s the easy way out to try and ex-
plain we came from something that was already here, but there

has never been any exact science to prove your theory . . . I’ve
worked in the science field almost my entire adult life and I can
tell you nothing evolves without a human’s touch. Not a single cell

will do anything without the intervention of someone or some-
thing feeding it or programming it. Could you imagine evolution

actually existing? You have a pet fish in an aquarium tonight and
tomorrow you wake up with a man or woman sitting on your
couch . . .”
Cottontop, Web comment on “Evolution vs. Creationism,” CreateDebate, 2011,
http://www.createdebate.com/debate/show/evolution_vs_creationism

3. “Despite the most hostile and corrupt media in the history of
American politics, the Trump Administration has accomplished
more in its first two years than any other Administration. Judges,
biggest Tax & Regulation Cuts, V.A. Choice, Best Economy,
Lowest Unemployment & much more!”

Donald J. Trump, Twitter post, Mar 10, 2019, 8:02 AM,

4. “Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million
years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was
done for. I suppose it is, I dunno. If the Eiffel Tower were now

representing the world’s age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-
knob at its summit would represent man’s share of that age; and

anybody would perceive that the skin was what the tower was
built for. I reckon they would, I dunno.”
Mark Twain, Was the World Made for Man? (1903); repr., What Is Man?:
and Other Philosophical Writings, Vol. 19 of Mark Twain, Works, edited by
Paul Baender (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993)

5. Journalist: “What do think of Western civilization?”
Mahatma Gandhi: “I think it would be a good idea.”
Adapted from: “‘What Do You Think of Western Civilization?’ ‘I Think It
Would Be a Good Idea’,” Quote Investigator, Apr 23, 2013,