Abortion not allowed

[downbeatplumb]

He's talking about guarantees though. There is no guarantee that the chair will hold him. That's where faith comes in. We have faith in the chair, based on the fact that they usually don't let us down. It's a shock when they do, with often funny consequences.

That's the problem with what he's saying though: we're fully aware, I would think, that we don't have a guarantee that the chair will hold us. But the way Carm is talking is entirely binary, as though with either have total certainty that the chair will hold us, or we have no evidence that the chair will hold anything at all. He says he "has no facts that show the chair will hold hold him." But of course he does, they just aren't sure shot, magic bullet concrete objective truths.

If he really is talking about guarantees then he's working from an absurd false dichotomy, at the end of the day.

To be fair, He could be massive, requiring specially made reinforced chairs.

Isn't he American?

[DramaQueen]

Nah, he's just a tiny potatofish :p (was that insulting enough?)

[fr0d0]

I'd just be happier without the equivocation between faith based on reasonable expectations, and faith based on absolutely nothing. It's the false dichotomy I object to; if you want to define faith as a lack of certainty then... whatever. I just want people to not pretend that this makes every kind of faith exactly equal.

You can never know for sure with the chair. Certainly in every day scenarios. The chair shows that there are varying degrees of faith. Faith based on absolutely nothing isn't faith at all. There has to be some basis. Misplaced faith might be overconfidence.

[Esquilax]

I'd just be happier without the equivocation between faith based on reasonable expectations, and faith based on absolutely nothing. It's the false dichotomy I object to; if you want to define faith as a lack of certainty then... whatever. I just want people to not pretend that this makes every kind of faith exactly equal.

You can never know for sure with the chair. Certainly in every day scenarios. The chair shows that there are varying degrees of faith. Faith based on absolutely nothing isn't faith at all. There has to be some basis. Misplaced faith might be overconfidence.

I guess the broader point there is that every belief has some external referent to work off of, and that no idea comes to be accepted without some form of outside stimuli to inform and reinforce it.

The trouble with people who make the chair analogy is that they're doing it in order to make it seem like every belief therefore has the same level of justification. Saying I have faith in chairs holding me up is fine, but that's not a defense of what Carm was talking about before, and yet I suspect he was expecting us to just look down and shuffle our feet before retreating, had we accepted his premises.

[fr0d0]

Accepted.

[Mister Agenda]

Yes, a human is, but not a human being.

hu·man be·ing
noun
a man, woman, or child of the species Homo sapiens, distinguished from other animals by superior mental development, power of articulate speech, and upright stance.

per·son/ˈpərs(ə)n/
noun
1.a human being regarded as an individual.

I'm not the one trying to muddy the discussion.

You seem to be doing it again. I doubt anyone thought I meant human 'being' as in more that a member of the human species. You're being pedantic.

You're ignoring the crux of what matters in the discussion.

How wouldn't it be immoral? What thought process could possibly guide you reasonably to the idea that I or Esquire wouldn't consider it immoral?

Thanks for agreeing with me.

Thanks for being pointless.

Why should either of us consider something wrong merely because believers think God considers something right? Do you suppose our position is to always think the opposite of whatever God is supposed to think? I believe you're capable of deeper thinking than this.

That's not what I meant. I won't call you a liar. I'm not Esq. If you find yourself on the same side of an argument as God does not mean that you followed what you think God represents without thinking for yourself.

I'm still not following you, but that could be me, and I'm not sure it's a major point you were trying to make.

I doubt you're accurately representing Esquire.

Well that's for him to defend don't you think. If you don't know, then why are you defending him?

Because I don't like to see people misrepresented.

See how those two sentences are at odds with each other? Doesn't sound like Esquire. It certainly sounds like you, misrepresenting him though.

Again, you're defending something that you don't know. That's exactly Esq's argument as far as I can see. Let him put that straight if he disagrees.

I don't see any reason at all to refrain from challenging people who seem to be reframing other people's words to suit their agenda. You seem to be having some kind of feud with Esquire. It's annoying on both your parts, and if you're going to have it in public, I'm not going to stay out of it.

It leaves my point where I put it. I think it can be just. Esq and other people are arguing that it can never be just to take life.

Maybe if the two of you could agree on what you mean when you say 'life', you wouldn't be talking past each other. It's pretty evident to me from context that Esquire isn't including microorganisms and plants, for instance. It wouldn't hurt to ask what exactly he means when he says 'it can never be just to take life' instead of running with it as a gotcha.

We're wired to care about our fellow humans more than other animals, just like chimps and gorillas are wired to care more about their fellows dying than other animals. That doesn't mean we should. I like moral agency as a divider between what we treat as murder and what we treat as mere killing, but in light of obvious reasons to be biased, I have to wonder whether that is just a cover to justify unfair moral sentiments.

Then you agree with me.

It seems to mean a lot to you to be able to say that about me. I'm flattered.

Or so you imagine.

So I deduce. I believe in God and this is what I deduce his position to be, if, as I believe, he can know everything.

You can deduce anything you like by picking premises that lead to that conclusion. Your deductions are mere opinion if your premises aren't supported. Though if you're deducing, could you show it in syllogism form so we don't have to assume your conclusion really follows because you say you deduced it? At least then I could agree for the sake of argument that if X is true then Y is also true.

---

You have to understand that I didn't accuse anyone of killing babies I just found out that you support the killing.

Does me not thinking killing kittens and puppies is murder mean I support the killing of kittens and puppies? If, for some reason, I support it, does it follow that I like it? I don't think you actually believe this, I think you made an attempt at appeal to emotion. The problems with such an appeal are that it does not change the chance that I'm wrong a whit, and it's not actually true that I support killing babies. Fetuses aren't babies. I'm not happy about fetuses being killed, but I'm even less happy about forcing women to bring them to term against their will. I know it's a terrible pun, but it's literaly forced labor. It's not that I like abortion. It's that I dislike forcing women to give birth against their will and presuming that I have the right to make such a profound decision for them.

If every man who was vocally against abortion got pregnant, the vast majority of them would shut up P.D.Q.

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If you think you don't have facts regarding the probability of a chair you're about to sit in breaking, you haven't thought your statement through at all.

I don't have any facts any where saying that my chair will hold me.

Hm. I'm trying to figure out how you could justifiably say that. A fact is something that is indisputably the case.

Fact: Chairs are made to be sat on and designed to support a heavier-than-average person.
Fact: Out of the inumerable times the average Westerner has sat on a chair, very few of them can count on more than the fingers of one hand the number of times a chair has failed to support their weight.

Based on these facts, you are justified at any given time that a chair will support you, barring evidence to the contrary (you weigh over 500 lbs, the chair's wooden legs have obvious termite damage, or somesuch).

Maybe you can think of an example of us trusting something for which the certainty that we can actually trust it isn't close to 100%, and for which no facts are available to indicate the trust is justified.

---

Have you never seen a chair break because some one sat on it?

Yes, I have. It happens so rarely that the risk is effectively negligible. But sit on the floor if you don't think the facts justify optimism that a chair will hold your weight.

---

Faith in a chair is faith nonetheless. The point of the exercise is to demonstrate how faith works. In that it succeeds.

So we've established that faith is believing in something where the evidence and facts establish that it's nearly 100% certain to be the case, barring a few well-understood exceptions? I guess faith is pretty reasonable after all. And that in the interest of honesty and consistency, you and C4RM will cease using that term to describe your religious beliefs in future.