This house believes churches should not involve themselves in political campaigns.

I can’t be bothered to make this round look pretty. “Moreover, saying that churches have to act in x way is nonsensical because there's no resolutional warrant for this.“ This is equivalent to saying that the statement “If one wants to get to New York from Virginia, one should drive north” does not imply that one has to drive north to get to New York, or that “If one wants to draw a square, one should draw four sides” does not imply that one must draw four sides to draw a square. The only difference between these examples and the resolution of this debate is that the “if” was not specified, which is not a problem, given that my first proposition was solely devoted to proving that the only goal one could hold in doing politics is to adhere to rational principles, thus giving us “If one wants to build politics on rational principles, churches should not be involved in politics”, wherein the specific “if” specified was the only one logically coherent and possible. Note: This is not a new argument because the entirety of premiss one (and the debate as a whole) led to the formulation that “If political systems should be based on reason [...]”. “His entire argument resides on the assumption that "this is just what it means to be a church"” This is blatantly absurd - imagine a debate on the validity of “A = A”. If Pro said that A must equal A because, well, A is just defined as being A (i.e. when one says “A”, the sentence would retain its meaning if one had replaced it with “A”), and Con responded by saying that it was “unfair for Pro to restrict me to holding that A is defined as A, since I think that A is really B”, he would be disregarded completely. My argument is completely tautological in nature. “Church” is synonymous with “A group of people with one factor in common: faith”, so, when I say that “A church is a group of people with one factor in common: faith”, what I am really saying is simply that “A church is a church”, which, unless my opponent wishes to resort to equivocation to argue against my position, is obviously true and not “unfair” by any reasonable standard. Note: this is not a new argument, considering my previous rebuttals explicitly set out to prove this synonymity. I’m merely reproducing the argument in different terms in order to reiterate why Con is wrong on all counts. “It goes entirely dropped from his last round.” I did so because none of their actual implications were dangerous. I could accept both of Con’s observations (which, if you actually look at Round 2, were only that I have the BOP and that the resolution does not specify any specific type of involvement, both of which pose no problems) without my case being harmed at all. “by saying that they should not participate in politics, that restricts their ability to vote (i.e. participate) if they're a member of the church.” This is a total misinterpretation of my point. I specifically addressed the fact that there is no such violation of autonomy by analogy to one who “may argue that one should not regularly inject heroin while still holding that one should be free to do so.“ Let me remind the reader that my opponent has not substantiated how freely choosing not to do something is equivalent to not having been able to do that thing in the first place. “He also responds by saying that if his case is true then autonomy via belief in faith cannot lead to benefits, but first he's not actually winning on his case so this doesn't matter” And if I am winning on the case, it definitely does matter. “Autonomy isn't a means to a better end, rather it's an end in and of itself. Autonomy is the benefit, which is coming from the first part of the paragraph I cited.” Extend the principles behind Prop 1.31: “ If [a thing] were not worthwhile, there would be no reason to be involved in it (or to even care about it in the least), thus making any interest [in it] itself irrational (making discussing its issues worthless to begin with, which is contrary to the premiss of debate (by debating, we ourselves are asserting the importance and therefore rational value of [that thing]))” “Insofar as he isn't, and since I'm arguing that it does lead to a reduction of human worth, if there's clear negatives to removing it, we have no reason to remove it.” Extend Prop 1.2, in addition to the idea from Prop 1.31 that by even discussing this we place some importance on the issue: “For one to advocate something which is not in-line with reality, one must advocate something which cannot be, making the advocacy useless and self-contradictory.” “Then, extend out the second part of my case.” If my negations stand, then this is pointless, so I will only ask the readers to focus on whether or not I have successfully negated the relevance to the debate of his argument. “My argument is that if you affirm, then this will happen.“ My opponent’s bridge between his arguments and the resolution totally nonsensical. Quoting myself: “Taken in the abstract, the resolution is only referring to churches generally - there are only two factors to consider here: abstract politics and abstract churches. My opponent’s attempt to concretize the resolution fails for this reason [...] just because the removal of the Republican party now would result in devastation does not mean that the removal of the Republican party in itself is a bad thing.” “The entirety of my advocacy in the negative case (All members of a religious church will have the right to vote in elections for political office.) is literally the status quo.” Ok. So? “There's nothing theocratic about having the right to vote.“ My initial round proved that any church in politics must be acting on the basis of faith (and what is theocracy other than rule on the basis of faith and religion rather than rights or justness?). “even if he wanted to contest this, he doesn't actually give us any kind of reason as to why this would be bad.“ Premiss 3. “Theoretical ideas, as he concedes his case is, are only valuable insofar as they have real-world implications and reasons to prefer the ideals.” Let me go over this once again. I first showed that “If something was useful, it would be useful in reality, making it in-line with reality and therefore not irrational”, which means that if something was irrational it must inherently not be useful (if something was irrational and useful it would be as logical as a square circle). I then proved that faith was irrational. The conclusion is plain: faith can never be useful under any circumstances, negating all of my opponent’s attempts to assert otherwise. “Extend the three responses I make to the 2.1 section of his case.” I’ve dealt with all of this in my last round. “We can change the way we perceive churches.” Referring to different things using the same name is called “equivocation”. You can’t just randomly redefine terms in the middle of a debate when your opponent can’t respond. “by definition churches are defined as such based on their beliefs, not their actions, so the actions they take are irrelevant to their defining as a church.” I’ve dealt with this by showing that belief is an action. “He also argues that there's a distinction between belief and action, but this is absurd.” No, I argued that there is no such distinction. Belief is action. “I may believe that murder is okay and justifiable, but that doesn't mean I'm going to go shoot up a shopping mall” I never made the claim that you would. “He makes the argument that belief affects our future decision making, but never provides any kind of warrant for this.” I did explicitly give warrant for this - “[T]he “believer” is not a hypocrite [when it comes to holding faith] [( If he was,]he would no longer be able to be considered part of a church, by my opponent’s definition, since he would have shown that he does not truly believe))“, thus showing that one must always make the choice to have faith in faith and act in accordance to faith in order to remain a part of a church (which is a blatant example of what I meant). “Until he provides a warrant [...] he can't sufficiently warrant this point, and thus can't win the debate.” I have shown that every member of a church must hold the conviction that reason is invalid. Therefore, every action done by a church is done by people who do not believe in reason and are operating on the most basic assumption that reason is unimportant. This is all that my argument was meant to show, no more, no less. “He's not warranting why if God is infinite he can't be comprehended.” I’ve done so absolutely through syllogism, and, if one reads it in anything but the least charitable way, keeping in mind the common definitions of the words that I use, one will see that my argument is immune from and already deals with all of the points my opponent brings up. “He assumes his argument is true and uses that truth to defend his argument.” Quoting my last round: “My response is that, if my argument holds water, it is literally impossible for any of those theorists to be right, and, [...] their fallibility is not impossible while the falseness of a sound syllogism[is.]” If my opponent doubts the soundness of my syllogism, I advise him to read my defence of it once more. ”I've already outlined several scenarios where faith and reason co-exist” Let me just reiterate (from P.1) that, if a conversation operates under the assumption that it is only rational to say A is A, saying “A is really B” is totally incoherent and self-defeating, no matter what. Self-negating statements must be thrown out. Summary: My opponent reminds me to not make any new arguments and believes that this will leave his assertions unscathed. He fails to realize, however, that literally everything he says was contradicted by something I’ve said previously. The voter must only read my arguments (in specific, my main syllogism and its justifications) carefully, with an eye for detail and nuance, to realize that I have completely filled my burden of proof.