Welcome back to Shemis Popery. I'm Joe Heschmire. And today I want to explore five bad arguments

that we as Catholics need to stop using in our conversations with our Protestant brothers and sisters.

These are arguments that I've heard and sometimes made and they're bad arguments and we can do better.

So before I get there, I want to actually lay out a few kind of positive tools, because I think it's important in kind of laying the foundation here to say if this is how we're not going to evangelize, if this is how we're not going to debate, if this is how we're not going to proceed, how should we proceed?

I think if you have a positive vision of how to do the thing

right, it becomes more obvious which argumentative moves are mistakes and are missteps. And it

becomes more obvious to know, oh, you shouldn't have done it that way. You should do it this way instead.

So I'm going to give you five replacements for these bad arguments. But before I get there, I want to

give you just a

handful of helpful tools to hopefully help you argue, evangelize, debate, persuade better. So this is

going to be, you know, as I suggest, useful in Catholic Protestant discussions or in

evangelizing atheists or in anything in life where you might be called upon to persuade someone

else to do something different than they're currently doing. So hopefully this will be

pretty useful across the board. The first tool is really simple. As much as possible, ask, don't tell.

And the reason for this is really easy. If I tell you the answer and you don't want to listen to it,

you can just ignore me. But if I help to lead you into the right answer, well, it's much harder to ignore yourself.

Blaise Pascal puts it like this in the panseilles.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered

than by those which have come into the mind of others.

And so one way you can approach this is by using something called the Socratic

method. If you're not familiar, Socrates was famous, not for making bold proclamations on

the nature of the virtues, but rather for having dialogues, for asking other people what they

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