Equipped for Life Podcast

Josh and Rachel discuss a new outreach table question that the ERI team tested during a college visit in South Carolina.

Visit the blog to read the article and see the abortion fact sheet they used: http://blog.equalrightsinstitute.com/how-college-students-responded-to-questions-about-3rd-trimester-abortions

During Josh's speaking trip in Ireland he sat down with Ben Conroy and Muireann Lynch from The Minimise Project, an awesome young pro-life organization. They talk about how abortion recently became legal in Ireland, dealing with different factions of the pro-life movement, and an awesome story about using the Equal Rights Argument to stump a bunch of students,

Excuse the lower than usual audio quality. We did our best with borrowed equipment in a borrowed room. :)

Read The Minimize Project's blog: https://theminimiseproject.ie/

Podcast: The Minimize Project's podcast including their interview with Josh hasn't been published yet. Keep an eye on their website and/or social media feeds for it.

Josh and Rachel look at a research article published by the Association for Psychological Science (APS) in 2019, Perspective Taking and Self-Persuasion: Why "Putting Yourself in Their Shoes" Reduces Openness to Attitude Change, and discuss how it should influence the way we make pro-life arguments.

Standford Business article about the study:

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/why-putting-yourself-their-shoes-might-backfire?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=stripes&utm_content=06132019&fbclid=IwAR1gJOnOhwf2vLSzaXlql--Rbds4YF-ImvxR8qfyfVwcBKqXKnWEyuyHXmg

"Perspective Taking and Self-Persuasion: Why "Putting Yourself in Their Shoes" Reduces Openness to Attitude Change":

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797618822697

Shownotes:

• 4:00 Summarizing the research.
• 15:16 How ERI develops new apologetics arguments.
• 28:33 Personality research from Jordan Peterson points to reasons behind political disagreement.
• 37:45 Does perspective-taking help with empathy but not creating arguments?
• 42:46 Shared values help to move persuasion forward.

Josh Brahm was invited to address a group of future clergy as well as some of those who train clergy at a Lutheran Seminary during his last speaking tour in Canada. After sharing a little about his background and the focus of Equal Rights Institute, Josh focused his talk on what pastors and priests can do to prevent abortions in their congregations. He then took questions from the audience.

Four months later he published this article on the subject, and we would strongly encourage you to share it on social media so we can spread the word about this idea!

Questions:

• 22:32: Do you think adding this concept to a website or various church websites would help spread the word?
• 23:52: Comment about how it would be even better if pastors were also willing to offer financial assistance to unwed, pregnant women, "putting their money where their mouth is."
• 24:45: These practical dialogue tips you speak of, are those on a website?
• 29:02: What are common ways that pro-life people misunderstand pro-choice people?

The audio cut out shortly after Josh finished answering that question, so unfortunately we don't have the last few minutes of the Q&A session.

Related Links:

• Josh Brahm for the ERI Blog: One Thing Every Pastor Can Do to Prevent Abortions in Their Congregation
• ERI Blog Archives page (Bookmark this!)

Josh stumbled upon a pro-choice Reddit thread reacting to Tim's Autumn in the Sovereign Zone article and decided to get Tim and Rachel's spontaneous responses live on the podcast.

Afterward, they talk about how to respond to people who say that it's only wrong to take Thalidomide if the mother is going to have an abortion anyway because then they're not really causing suffering to this "potential person."

Related Links:

• Timothy Brahm for the ERI Blog: Autumn in the Sovereign Zone: Why "It's My Body, I Can Do What I Want" Won't Do
• This landing page links to all of our main content outside the Equipped for Life Course on bodily rights arguments.
• Learn more at equippedcourse.com in Equipped for Life Course – Module 7: Bodily Rights Arguments
• • Lesson 1: Understanding What Pro-Choice People Really Mean
  • Lesson 2: The Sovereign Zone Argument
  • Lesson 3: Right to Refuse Arguments [Advanced]
• Timothy Brahm for the ERI Blog: Why Pro-Life Advocates Are Not Responsible for the Planned Parenthood Shooting
• Josh Brahm for the ERI Blog: Why it Would be Wrong for Pro-Lifers to Drive Abortion Clinic Vans Under False Pretenses
• Timothy Brahm for the ERI Blog: Pro-Lifers Aren't "Forcing" Women to Stay Pregnant
• Josh Brahm for the ERI Blog: When and How You Should End Unproductive Conversations
• Equipped for Life Podcast #14: Relational Apologetics – Personal Stories & Reflections
• Josh Brahm for the ERI Blog: Two Bad Pro-Life Responses to Bodily Rights Arguments
• Alan Guttmacher Institute: Reasons U.S. Women Have Abortions: Quantitative and Qualitative Perspectives (PDF)
• Learn more at equippedcourse.com from the Equipped for Life Course Lesson: Use Filler Sentences

Josh, Tim, and Rachel respond to a pro-choice video on illegal abortions in El Salvador. Click here to watch the pro-choice video we're responding to.

The show begins with a discussion of our favorite Pixar movies. If you want to get straight to the main topic, you can skip to 10:23 in the episode.

Apologies for occasional wonky audio in this episode. We're playing around with some new post-production techniques that, once dialed in, will improve the audio quality of the podcast. But not everything is totally dialed in yet, so this episode has some occasional mic bleed. Thankfully, we were able to mix most of it out.

Related Links:

• Now This Her: Criminalizing Abortion: Serving 30 Years For A Miscarriage
• Josh Brahm for the ERI Blog: Pro-Choice Redditor Models Honest Reasoning by Exposing Media Bias Over Feticide Story
• Equipped for Life Podcast: Should Women be Prosecuted if Abortion Becomes Illegal?
• Learn more at equippedcourse.com in Equipped for Life Course Module 2, Lesson 1: Trot Out the Toddler – The ERI Approach
• Rachel Crawford for the ERI Blog: What If Abortion Weren't a Possible Choice?
• Timothy Brahm for the ERI Blog: Bodily Rights Arguments Necessitate Extremism
• Timothy Brahm for the ERI Blog: How to Turn the Tables on Four Pro-Choice Arguments
• Josh referenced the first two episodes of "The Confession Tapes" on Netflix.

Josh, Tim, and Rachel answer more questions from Ian McGinniss, the president of Dukes for Life at James Madison University.

Questions:

• 01:02: What do you guys think is the distribution of pro-choice beliefs on campus?
• 14:20: What is your take on the Don Marquis Future of Value Argument against abortion?
• 58:07: Do you think there is a way to restructure the Marquis argument into one that's more interactive?

Related Links:

• Equipped for Life Podcast Episodes 14 and 15 on relational apologetics
• Don Marquis for the Journal of Philosophy: Why Abortion Is Immoral (PDF)

Equipped for Life Podcast: That James Franco Video

Josh, Tim, and Rachel answer more questions from Ian McGinniss, the president of Dukes for Life at James Madison University.

Questions:

• 00:00: Is A Quiet Place a pro-life movie?
• 02:28: What is your approach when pro-choice people say that they don't want to be forced to stay pregnant?
• 09:12: How did all three of you get involved in the pro-life movement?
• 20:24: What would you say to groups who are dealing with pushback from their campus administration about doing pro-life events? How would you handle those issues yourself?
• 23:43: How would you describe the difference between legality and morality, especially for Christians who sometimes think that everything that is morally wrong should be against the law?
• 30:59: What do you do when you're talking to a passive listener who doesn't really want to explain their beliefs?

Related Links:

• Timothy Brahm for the ERI Blog: Thanos Would be Pro-Choice
• Timothy Brahm for the ERI Blog: Pro-Lifers Aren't "Forcing" Women to Stay Pregnant
• Rachel Crawford for the ERI Blog: Stop Using "Trust Women" as an Abortion Trump Card
• Timothy Brahm for the ERI Blog: On Virtue-Signaling
• Josh Brahm for the ERI Blog: My Pro-Life Journey Began in Front of This Abortion Facility
• Amazon: Politically Correct Death: Answering the Arguments for Abortion Rights by Dr. Francis Beckwith
• Alliance Defending Freedom's Legal Request Page | 1-800-835-5233
• Equipped for Life Podcast: Responding to Free Speech Violations on Campus – An Interview with Casey Mattox from Alliance Defending Freedom
• Timothy Brahm for the ERI Blog: Dialogue Tip: Tell Them That They Can't Offend You

The Amazon link on this page is an Amazon Affiliate link, which means that if you click the link and then buy the book, ERI will get a small kickback from Amazon.

Josh, Tim, and Rachel answer questions from Ian McGinniss, the president of Dukes for Life at James Madison University.

This episode includes an intro to epistemology (theory of knowledge; the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.) So this is a pretty philosophically heavy episode, but it's worth it. Just thinking about epistemology can really help you to think more clearly in general!

Questions:

• 8:56: How long do your outreach conversations usually last?
• 11:18: How would you describe ERI's approach to dialogue?
• 15:02: Is it intellectually honest to start with one conclusion to bring us to another? For example, in the Equal Rights Argument, it is assumed that infants are persons. Is that fair?
• 35:28: How do you initially respond when you realize that you're talking to an extreme skeptic?
• 47:05: So if you know you're about to go into "philosophy hell" with someone because there aren't any other people to talk to, how do you approach that?
• 53:32: When discussing this with my club, it was pointed out that it feels like an argument to convince someone that elephants should have more rights.
• 58:22: Do you think some animal rights activists overly anthropomorphize animals that can feel pain?

Related Links:

• Timothy Brahm for the ERI Blog: Circumventing Philosophy Hell
• Equipped for Life Podcast Episode One: When They Bite the Bullet
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Gettier Problems
• The Cove Documentary
• Black Fish Documentary
• Timothy Brahm for the ERI Blog: On Virtue-Signaling

Josh, Tim, Rachel, and Jacob conclude their discussion about their most common dialogue mistakes.

Email us your most common dialogue mistakes so that we can talk about them on a future episode!

Related Links:

• Timothy Brahm for the ERI Blog: Don't Dialogue Like Hamilton OR Aaron Burr
• Skillet: "Awake and Alive"
• • Spotify
  • YouTube