It happens to be election day and I happen to be absolutely burnt out on the types of advertisements that are entering my consciousness via television, radio, mail, and strangers on my front porch. I don't care much what one candidate or their supporters have to say about the other, so most political advertisement is of no use to me. Their tactics are silly and really shouldn't be effective. Sadly, all too often, large groups of people buy into silly and illogical propaganda purporting one extreme view or another.
It is hard to differentiate one from the other, but I think I have a favorite type of scare tactic: the slippery slope.
The basic idea behind this is to take one small step or subtle change in course and extrapolate it to the ludicrously extreme. I like this one because it gets used outside of politics quite a bit and seems to be a special favorite of religious folks.
An example:
If we allow for gay marriage, we are taking a dangerous step onto a slippery slope that will inevitably lead us to a reality where ministers are forced to officiate these ceremonies and where eventually humans and animals will be allowed to enter into this once holy union.
Since this isn't actually a blog about that subject, I will spare you my views to a large extent. Regardless of what you believe, you have to admit that there is a wide space between gay marriage and animal husbandry... One can also recognize the difference between allowing a minister to officiate a ceremony and forcing him to do so in order to avoid prosecution.
A actual slippery slope would necessitate a clear series of closely linked steps in a progression from one point to another.
All too often, using the term slippery slope is a total cop out for not recognizing and directly debating a difficult and potentially dangerous truth. Dangerous to our current reality, the status quo we are currently enjoying, not so much dangerous to truth itself.
I read a book about covenant theology a few years back and really enjoyed it - which is strange because that sort of reading can be hard to really enjoy. The book was "Far as the Curse is Found" by Michael Williams and was recommended by a friend who was studying at a school that favored that view.
I mentioned the idea to another friend who was studying at a different school who favored dispensational theology. The second friend didn't use the slippery slope statement himself, but mentioned what a professor had said about it. Without going into great detail about the actual topic, I will note that the subtitle of the book is "The Covenant Story of Redemption," and the professor suggested that taking that view is dangerous and can become a slippery slope towards classifying scripture as analogy, and eventually, fiction.
Again, you may note the wide space between reading Scripture as a story with overarching themes and defining it as nothing more than a story with overarching themes. To be fair, some people purposely carry the idea in that direction, but for a person to name that as the natural progression is to take a huge and unnecessary step, changing the idea as it was originally presented.
Historically, the Pharisees may have been the originators of the slippery slope argument. They took every law and applied it to the extreme. The spirit of the law was largely ignored. Their reasoning, I suppose, was that if each law wasn't taken to that point, everyone would fall down the slippery sin slope and end up marrying animals or something. Again, not a statement of my views on same sex marriage.
Jesus came along and listened to what God actually said, not what everyone else said about it. He came up with slightly different answers than the Pharisees.
When I think of a slippery slope, I always imagine it as a cartoon strip. Average Citizen is walking down the street and steps on an Immigration banana peel, slipping and falling into a pit of terrorists and undocumented workers taking money directly from his pockets.
I watched an episode of the TV show MythBusters and it turns out that slipping and falling on a single banana peel is implausible. It took a them running haphazardly across a platform blanketed with peels.
Natural progressions into a worse situation aren't fictional, but we need to be careful which ones we believe in. Small sins turn into more sins and more serious sins. A bad idea will gain steam and become a worse idea.
If something is a bad idea, it is going to be a bad idea in and of itself, not just because of what it could potentially lead to. Abusing alcohol is a bad idea. Alcohol isn't is not fundamentally evil, but abusing it is unwise because it is inherently harmful, not merely because it could potentially lead to poor decisions and the use and abuse of other substances.
It seems that for such a disastrous sequence of events to occur, it would take something more like a Rube Goldberg device than a slippery slope.
Take notes for next November, political campaign people.
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