As the web-weavers of mendacity twine ever new word-tangles of confusion, ever-changing ways to deceive, it is necessary to find ever new ways to explain old truth.
In one way this is like an arms race: As each side adds new weapons to its arsenal, the other side tries to counter.
In another way it is different from an arms race: The assumption of equivalence fails to hold. Each side has certain permanent advantages in resources, and certain permanent disadvantages as well. When I say "permanent," I mean as to the duration of this world.
To the permanent advantage of evil is that it can rationalize. To its permanent disadvantage is that it must -- for it has no good reasons, only sham ones.
To its further advantage is the fact that the ordinary people who oppose it are equally tempted to make nests for their sins in the spreading branches of moral law. So often it seems just to do wrong. But to its further disadvantage is this: That the ordinary people it ensnares are equally loved by God, and cannot by any magic but free will be placed beyond the possibility of redemption.
Those who seek good have a permanent advantage in the ultimately inescapable facts of the human moral design. They have a greater advantage in the indestructibility of that part of the design called synderesis or deep conscience, which, like a signal buoy, keeps rising. And they have an illimitable advantage in the Designer Himself, who is not a remote intelligence but a God who hears their prayers: Who cannot be defeated, cannot be caught by surprise, and acts beyond apparent defeats in ways they do not see.
Perhaps the greatest permanent disadvantage of those who seek good is that through the sheer horror of devastation, their opponents can tempt them to despair. This is a burden. But they have a permanent advantage in the virtue St. Paul calls hope, for their confidence, unlike the bravado of their opponents, is not presumption; it does not rest in their own small strength, but in the strength of the One whom they serve
I am reminded of a debate in which the pro-abortion speaker grew impatient. "Don't you people understand that you've lost?" she demanded. "The fat lady has sung." Her opponent replied, "It's not over when the fat lady sings but when the angel blows his horn."
This sort of thing will not get into any course on rhetoric; it is not about tropes and forms of argument, important as those are. It turns on the structure of the universe.