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Actually, I think the differences lie to a greater degree in how one understands the process of knowing something such that one would be capable of willfully rejecting something known.

[I note in passing that gbcdoj in this posting once more uses "Catholic Church" generically, without specifying when he is talking about the formal, visible Catholic Church and when he is not. I think this ambiguous use of "Catholic Church" makes conversation on these points difficult.]

I am not an indifferentist. For God's sake, had I been an indifferentist, I would never have become a Catholic with all the attendant costs in loss of friends and family and the professional costs it brought me.

But precisely because I am a Catholic convert and have spent many hours trying to convey the seriousness and importance of accepting the Catholic Church's claims to those I know well and love dearly but who cannot even seem to grasp the issues at hand, I have, I think, some understanding of how we humans often talk past each other.

FR threads are a very good example of how someone can have an idea or set of ideas spelled out clearly, held in front of his nose, yet not even begin to make the epistemological steps necessary to even entertain the possibility of being persuaded.

Surely political conservatives, such as I assume all of us on all sides of this thread are, should be able to recognize how hard it is, when arguing for a position one holds but is rejected by one's opponent, to reach even a starting point for persuasion. If in every case of such "talking past each other" one of the interlocutors is willfully and knowingly refusing to accept the other one's arguments then we're all in heap big trouble for being obstinate in the face of truth that has been presented to us.

I cannot simply dismiss those who do not agree with me as being obstinate, willfully ignorant fools. I recognize from long experience, from 25 years of marriage, from countless FR threads, and a host of other conversations, how often the failure to persuade the other rests not on the inadequacy of the arguments or the blockheadedness or willful idiocy of the other person but on the way that pre-judices he is unaware of, misinformation, misunderstood information (what he had for lunch a hour ago--just kidding), etc. contribute to invincible ignorance.

I could write off all my friends, my wife (who gets all her political information from NPR), my liberal colleagues (with whom I cannot get to first base in political, cultural, even religious, conversation because they get all their information from a completely different set of sources than I do) as headed for hell because they willfully refuse to listen to the truth claims that are so obvious to me. After all, how many times have I told them that their universe of knowledge derived from NPR and the New York Times and Commonweal is a parochial, narrow, misinformed universe of knowledge and that, if they'd only read the recommended set of blogs I give them and listen to Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager regularly they'd see how they have tunnel vision and would then come to the light.

I even had one colleague who honestly wanted to dip her toe into this other universe of knowledge with regard to the Terry Schiavo case (she was getting all her information from the NYT). I fed her some stuff from WorldNetDaily and Empire Journal etc. She did the standard, "but this stuff is flawed in its reasoning etc." I argued that, having lived my life both in her universe of knowledge and in mine, whereas she had only lived in one of the two, she needed to do a lot more "converting" and opening up to entertain honestly the information from my universe of knowledge than I had to do to honestly entertain hers. She couldn't see the point. Finally, when I offered what I thought was an axiom that any intelligent observer of American history over the past 40 years could agree to, as a possible starting point for a real conversation, namely, that more than anything else, the cultural shifts of the last 40 years resulted from court rulings, not from representative elections, instead of stipulating my point then arguing that some of these court decisions nonetheless were good and necessary, she simply refused to accept the premise, rambling on about all sorts of other causes of the major cultural changes. (All of which are traceable back to and therefore indirectly caused by the courts decisions, in my view.) I realized at that point we stood no chance of ever even getting to a starting point for discussion. So I stopped trying. She seemed to have realized the same thing, since she stopped seeking conversation.

Some of the people I know who simply cannot even entertain as a possibility the fundamental principles needed in any conversation about Catholic claims are people who genuinely love Jesus Christ, would give their lives for Him, are honest, selfless, generous people. I cannot in honesty call them willful and knowing rejecters of Catholic claims.

I recognize that some people are vincibly ignorant. I regularly teach C. S. Lewis's Last Battle and point out to students that the dwarfs willfully refuse to trust anyone after having been betrayed and hoodwinked once. They end up in hell, which in Lewis's account involves them sitting in the open air and beautiful sunlight of paradise but incapable of seeing paradise around them because they have willfully closed their minds to truth: the "dwarfs are for the dwarfs" and will not trust anyone again. But notice that their sin is a sin against charity, a refusal to trust anyone, having been taken in by a truly untrustworthy, lying Ape. In the same book, the very son of the heathen, pagan captain, because he is full of lived truth (Emeth) and has charity/selfless love in his heart, is admitted to heaven even though he did not know Aslan or the claims about Aslan.

Now, C. S. Lewis was not a formal member of the visible Catholic Church and I don't claim magisterial authority for his books which were written for children after all. Someone like him who certainly knew all the claims of the Catholic Church and whose theology was Catholic in virtually every way except his submission to the Roman Pontiff, he, according to my rigorist brethren, is a prime candidate for the fires of hell. I'm sorry, I can't accompany you folks down that path. For the life of me I can't see why Lewis could not have taken the final step to Rome. Books have been written speculating why (anti-Catholic prejudice from his Ulster childhood etc.). I could care less about speculating why. I just know he did not and I can well imagine him invincibly ignorant despite his great knowledge of all sides of the Catholic/Anglo-Catholic/Protestant debates. Perhaps he did willfully and knowingly reject Catholic claims and is right now suffering in hell. But for my part, I will cut him some slack and say, I don't know

Call me what you wish, but I am invincibly ignorant of the truth of the rigorist position that declares these people damned to hell for not listening to my forthright and (I thought) utterly clear presentation of the truths of Catholicism. And so I entrust them in my heart and my prayers to the mercy of God who alone knows whether they are being willfully, damnably, knowingly, vincibly ignorant or whether they are invincibly ignorant.

I am not an indifferentist and I truly wish that my rigorist fellow Catholics would stop implying that I believe in a sort of cheap grace.

And, since this conversation has apparently reached the point of mutually exclusive invincible ignorances on the two sides of the argument, I will wander off in my invincible ignorance and attend to other matters.