My favorite blog is "Debunking Christianity" it has unseated the MLive MSU Football Forum as my Internet diversion of choice. I like it because it has introduced me to the idea of fallacies and how they operate. Watching atheist skeptics and Christian apologists debate God's reality has helped me realize how faulty my reasoning skills are.
An example of this is my new appreciation for the fallacy of equivocation. I appreciate this fallacy because I love words and their precise use. The fallacy demands one define terms if they are making a challenging argument. I like paradox also so, in the past a phrase such as, "One should be skeptical of a skepticism" would delight me.
I am a skeptic and therefore of course am skeptical of skepticism but that doesn't make me doubt my skepticism because I now understand the importance of fallacy.
4 comments:
The DC blog has become one of my favorites as well. It's a hoot, really, to see how John Loftus skewers the 'faithful' with his insightful posts.
Your topic, that of a new fallacy, is a hoot, too, because how can one pin a 'fallacy' on delusion? It's like stapling a note to a balloon.
Poof!
I like to lurk DC from time to time; it's cute to watch Modernist Atheists and Modernist Christians doing Modern debate and devolve from time to time into flame wars.
Overall, Loftus does us a service as he shows Modernist Xians how their cherished fictions regarding inerrancy etc. are thoroughly untenable. But, as with most New Atheists, he has little to offer in the way of constructive thinking.
Oh well, even blunt instruments serve a purpose, I guess.
Tom,
I'd agree with you regarding the "blunt instrument" comment but, religion's first amendment protections create for it an artifical benign character. I think the only thing to shake people up to the immoral implications of certain Christian beliefs is to expose theology to harsh common sense.
paradoxes are my favorite. has anyone heard of the Zeno paradoxes? The paradoxes are closely related to those studied by mathematical set theorists. Some of these paradoxes make you wary of relying on logical arguments of proof as means to TRUTH. The ancients sophists were very conscious of this fact: training as a sophist included learning how to argue effectively in defense of false propositions
Post a Comment