Cain and Abel: Explanation Please. Pretty Pretty Please!

[Thumpalumpacus]

When my son was seven, I caught him writing the word "fuck" in chalk on the sidewalk in front of our apartment. This was obviously bad behavior. Now, I could have thrown him into the oven set at 475F for eternity -- or until my gas bill got too high -- but I instead chose to have him scrub the sidewalk, restricted him to his room for three hours, and made him apologize to our neighbors in the apartment complex.

What is the lesson you draw from this parable?

Did you have to bleed him or sacrifice his pets in order to forgive him? Gotta have blood on your hands if you're gonna truly love someone and forgive them!

I ended up settling on nailing the neighbor's child to a cross. That seemed fair, to me.

---

not true. A bad analogy does not include any parallels. If one parallel exists the analogy is valid.

Here's the definition of a flawed analogy:

False Analogy

Definition:

In an analogy, two objects (or events), A and B are shown to be similar. Then it is argued that since A has property P, so also B must have property P. An analogy fails when the two objects, A and B, are different in a way which affects whether they both have property P.

Examples:
Employees are like nails. Just as nails must be hit in the head in order to make them work, so must employees.
Government is like business, so just as business must be sensitive primarily to the bottom line, so also must government. (But the objectives of government and business are completely different, so probably they will have to meet different criteria.)

Proof:
Identify the two objects or events being compared and the property which both are said to possess. Show that the two objects are different in a way which will affect whether they both have that property.

References:
Barker: 192, Cedarblom and Paulsen: 257, Davis: 84
26 May 1995

http://www.onegoodmove.org/fallacy/falsean.htm

Note that the definition explicitly states that flawed analogies can still share some properties.

You're new to this reasoning stuff, aren't you?