fallacy

The atheist, agnostic, or secularist ... should insist on the need to engage in a meaningful debate on the entire issue of the truth or falsity (or probability or improbability) of religious tenets, without being subject to accusations of impiety, immorality, impoliteness, or any of the other smokescreens used by the pious to deflect attention from the central issues at hand.

I had become too accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one. This vulgar method, which is now the norm and the standard in much non-Left journalism as well, is designed to have the effect of making any noisy moron into a master analyst.

If proof were the standard of truth, fallacies would constitute the ultimate reality.

Most people have some appreciation of mathematics, just as most people can enjoy a pleasant tune; and there are probably more people really interested in mathematics than in music. Appearances suggest the contrary, but there are easy explanations. Music can be used to stimulate mass emotion, while mathematics cannot; and musical incapacity is recognized (no doubt rightly) as mildly discreditable, whereas most people are so frightened of the name of mathematics that they are ready, quite unaffectedly, to exaggerate their own mathematical stupidity

For Paley, a watch is purposeful and thus must have been created by a being with a purpose. A watch needs a watchmaker, just as a world needs a world-maker__od. Yet both Wallace and Paley might have heeded the lesson from Voltaire's Candide (1759), in which Dr. Pangloss, a professor of "metaphysico-theology-cosmolonigology," through reason, logic, and analogy "proved" that this is the best of all possible worlds: '"Tis demonstrated that things cannot be otherwise; for, since everything is made for an end, everything is necessarily for the best end. Observe that noses were made to wear spectacles; and so we have spectacles. Legs were visibly instituted to be breeched, and we have breeches" (1985, p. 238). The absurdity of this argument was intended on the part of the author, for Voltaire firmly rejected the Panglossian paradigm that all is best in the best of all possible worlds. Nature is not perfectly designed, nor is this the best of all possible worlds. It is simply the world we have, quirky, contingent, and flawed as it may be.

We are most often inspired and motivated by fallacy rather than logic.

Every barber thinks everybody needs a haircut.

It does bear emphasis that slippery-slope arguments are notoriously invalid.

Yesterday I got a credit card application from a major bank with a variable rate of 12.99% to 20.99%. Such a deal. And what if I fall on hard times and lose my job? So, I wrote them a return letter:Dear major bank, Thank you for the opportunity to express how I really feel about your corporation. What I do appreciate, is that there is no stamp required for your return envelope. After tearing off all my personal information, so some dumpster diver doesn__ fill out your application for me, and find out he picked the wrong target; I just wanted to make one comment: Your practice of usury is despicable, along with crashing the global economy.Danny - I think I have my grandmother__ charm and wit. Too bad she__ not here to share it with. Maybe if every disgruntled person would use that free envelope and apply their creative talent, they might get the picture that we__e tired of this bullshit. Marcie, there are so many people you could visit and test your information extraction program on, so what are you people doing here? Is this just a practice run? Well, you wanted to know what I was thinking. And you wonder why I look to God for solutions. Wake me up when it__ over.Marcie - You are a crazy SOB. You want me to use my system to play Robin Hood.Danny - You__ make an excellent Robin Hood, make sure you get your merry band to sign on. Maybe that__ the reason we were connected by design. How much materialism do you really need? Some people take what they need from the orchard and other people pick the orchard clean.Marcie - You__e wondering what I__ thinking. I don__ want to mess your mind up with what I__ thinking, so let me simply say, I don__ approve of what some of these people have been doing for decades. Who do you think I am?Danny - Someone who frustrates me, don__ we have enough guessing games in life?Marcie - Marcie is a miracle worker, so what does that tell you? You do not even know what to make of me, someone who keeps coming back for you, someone who won__ let go of you.Danny - Why is it that there__ only a handful of words for truth and over 100 synonyms and derivatives for deception?Marcie - Are you surprised?Danny - It puts it in a different light when you start reading through the list. You may as well add amygdala hijacking.Marcie - Has Danny been bamboozled?Danny - You picked one with an unknown origin.Marcie - That is the best way to start a mind game.Danny - Okay, just for kicks, try saying synonym - cinnamon 10 times as fast as you can.From - "The Mind Game Company - The Players

Some people take what they need from the orchard, and other people pick the orchard clean."From - "The Mind Game Company - The Players

As if it were Injustice to sell dearer than we buy; or to give more to a man than he merits. The value of all things contracted for, is measured by the Appetite of the Contractors: and therefore the just value, is that which they be contented to give.

One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority'. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.)

I've spent a life-time attacking religious beliefs and have not wavered from a view of the universe that many would regard as bleak. Namely, that it is a meaningless place devoid of deity.However I'm unwilling simply to repeat the old arguments of the past when, in fact, God is a moving target and is taking all sorts of new shapes and forms. The arguments used against the long bow are not particularly useful when debating nuclear weapons, and the simple arguments against the old model gods are not sufficient when dealing with the likes of Davies et al.For example, the notion that God didn't exist, doesn't exist but may come into existence through the spread of consciousness throughout the universe is too clever to be pooh-poohed along Bertrand Russell lines. And if I had the time I could give you half a dozen other scientific theologies that will need snappier footwork from the atheist of the future.

It hurts so badly when you grow up and understand that everything you believed in and devoted yourself were just fallacy and stupidity.

The greatest moral appeal of the doctrine of the Blank Slate comes from a simple mathematical fact: zero equals zero. This allows the Blank Slate to serve as a guarantor of political equality...[I]f we are all blank slates, the reasoning goes, we must all be equal. But if the slate of a newborn is not blank, different babies could have different things inscribed on their slates. Individuals, sexes, classes, and races might differ innately in their talents, abilities, interests, and inclinations. And that, it is thought, could lead to three evils. The first is prejudice: if groups of people are biologically different, it could be rational to discriminate against the members of some of the groups. The second is Social Darwinism: if differences among groups in their station in life...come from their innate constitutions, the differences cannot be blamed on discrimination, and that makes it easy to blame the victim and tolerate inequality. The third is eugenics: if people differ biologically in ways that other people value or dislike, it would invite them to try to improve society by intervening biologically -by encouraging or discouraging people's decisions to have children...or by killing them outright. The Nazis carried out the final solution because they thought Jews and other ethnic groups were biologically inferior. The fear of the terrible consequences that might arise from a discovery of innate differences has thus led many intellectuals to insist that such differences do not exist...

Experience teaches effectually, but brutally. It makes us acquainted with all the effects of an action, by causing us to feel them; and we cannot fail to finish by knowing that fire burns, if we have burned ourselves. For this rough teacher, I should like, if possible, to substitute a more gentle one. I mean Foresight. For this purpose I shall examine the consequences of certain economical phenomena, by placing in opposition to each other those which are seen, and those which are not seen.

I cannot give up on my values and beliefs for the sake of respecting someone else__ values and morals. Because those values explain who am I. I prefer struggling and even dying for what I believe and what I don__ believe. Silence is not respect; it is not condemning brutality and cruelty, and neglecting your own existence as human being. I will be killed and so many others because of standing against the fallacy and misleading notion of religions. They will torture us and cut us in pieces alive and even won__ stop disrespecting our death bodies; that is how these monsters have been governing for hundreds thousands of years.

People strive hardest to save face, when the beauty they value is solely extrinsic.