It would cut 30 minutes off my driving time if I would drive the wrong way on the freeway and down 0ne-way streets…but it would be wrong to do so. In much the same way, using personal definitions in a public conversation is wrong.
Please stop.
If everyone else uses a word one way (correctly) and you make up another definition, you are guaranteeing people will be confused and that you’ll have to do a bunch of explaining. Or else you’re turning their arguments into something else for your own convenience, which is more or less strawmanning.
So, if 2 people out of a jury of 12 believe that someone is guilty, despite much evidence to the contrary, then that person should be found guilty in a court of law?
I’m guessing the Chewbacca Defense features heavily.
I like it fine, or I wouldn’t be posting to this thread.
However, it’s a stretch to call what you’re doing ‘arguing’. You don’t address other peoples’ points or answer their questions, you leap from topic to topic, and you substitute your own definitions of words, in place of those the rest of the world uses.
It makes it harder for others to follow yours, though.
Thus, Semmelweis’ argument that antiseptic procedures prevented infections was irrational? Because it wasn’t accepted until years after he died.
Should he have stopped his research, since no one believed it had value?
I agree that science isn’t an arbiter of ethics. It doesn’t claim to be, and isn’t used for that purpose. Science “organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.” That’s it, no more and no less. It won’t help you solve moral quandries, beyond perhaps helping you calculate likely outcomes.
That said, you’ve implied by this that your original argument, that an intelligent being created the universe, or that it designed the human body, is an ethical question. It’s not. It’s an explanation about the universe. Which makes it the realm of science.
If the ethical question is something like “How should I treat others?”, then religion can provide you an answer, and science cannot. If the question is “How did the human body develop its current characteristics?”…that’s not an ethical question, and religion cannot give you a truthful answer. It’s important to be able to make these kind of distinctions.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with your religious beliefs or lack thereof. It has to do with your near total inability to communicate clearly and string together a comprehensible argument.
No the actual definitions are helpful and not an annoyance. Here’s the problem, the definition of logic and rational are fairly close in proximity. So I simply made it clearer in my own mind what the difference was. Normally, I do use your definitions.
Also, I consider most of the arguments made by posters to be rational and I apologize if some people don’t think my arguments aren’t. Also, I apologize for not being able to respond to some questions because of time constraints.
Right, you “made it clearer” by doing something you’ve had to spend probably a dozen posts explaining. Stop trying to redefine words, and stop explaining why you’ve done it. Try to use plain English. Imagine all the time you’ll have for answering actual questions once you’ve stopped this ridiculous behavior.
In other words, the words are just a popularity contest. So it becomes impossible to discuss anything rationally or logically. Your version of the words amount to “who made the best emotional appeal, and got the greatest numbers of unthinking emotional followers.” As you use the terms, logic and reason are useless in examining and learning about the world around us. They are only useful in grading the popularity of ideas, which may or may not have any actual correspondence with the real world.
Relativity was irrational in 1916, was rational in 1945, and is logical now. The words have no useful meaning with those definitions.
But the OP has cleverly shifted the discussion to a merry go round pedantic discussion of semantics and word definition and away from the original discussion about intelligent design verse An Accident. 
Are you suggesting that was an intelligent design or an unintelligent one?
But there is no original discussion until we determine what the OP was actually putting forth in the first place.
Someone once asked Lincoln, “If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a horse have?”
Lincoln responded, “Four, calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg.”
You know I can’t answer that without getting Mod smacked. 
After 8 pages I think that the hope of clarification is sadly misplaced. 
In case this was muddy, I should point out I was attempting to make a crack about the design of the thread, not the intelligence of pchaos.
That’s where belonging to a church is important. It’s important that the church has a rational view of Christianity and helpful people. Once you start sharing your experiences with God, you begin to have a better sense of God’s nature.
[/QUOTE]
Since you’ve now explained that you’re using “rational” to mean “believed by a significant minority of people,” I’m kinda unclear on how this fits in with the comment that sparked my reply in the first place:
So (a) what’s been revealed to you would be of dubious value – except you’ve run it by other religious people, each of whom is as fallible as you; and (b) it now turns out that you were speaking for other religious people, since your claim that it’s “a rational view of Christianity” rests solely on them agreeing with you? Have I got that right?
Religion can’t give you an answer any better than science can. All religion can do is make up an answer, and scientists can make something up just as easily. It won’t be very scientific of them, but their moral opinion is just as valid as that of some priest or pope; more so, probably. Being religious doesn’t give you a special edge in moral judgement (if anything it’s a handicap); “science can’t do it” doesn’t mean that religion can.
nm
I responded too soon with my last one. I should have read the rest of the posts since last night. There are some really interesting ones to respond to, by comparison:
Can you tell us what state you practice law in, so we can reassure ourselves that we’re not one of your clients? I wouldn’t want to wind up in prison because my lawyer thinks that the prosecutor’s successful emotional appeal to the jury makes it ‘logical’ to conclude that I’m guilty, regardless of ‘empirical’ evidence to the contrary. Basically this other poster’s comment is apropos:
My lawyer is a devout Catholic. I don’t have a problem with that, because he argues like a Jesuit. But my fundie Baptist Brother-in-Law can argue his creationist views with less gratuitous redefinition of words in his favor than you are engaging in.
By your redefinition of ‘rational’, perhaps, but not on the actual definition of the word.
Not at all. Friar Ted, for example, makes excellent arguments for his faith. The atheistic posters don’t buy his arguments, but at least they are ‘logical’ and ‘rational’ by the dictionary definition of those terms. From my perspective as an ex-Catholic, who studied my religion, to the point of learning to read the NT in Koine Greek, and reading Aquinas, Polycarp (hey, there’s another religious guy on this board who took that as his user name, and could argue logical rings around you), Thomas More, etc. etc., before rejecting my former faith, you can’t argue your way out of a wet paper bag. Relying on the popularity of an idea, to determine its ‘logic’ or ‘rationality’, renders your arguments illogical and irrational, by the actual definition of those words, as they are actually used, by people who actually use logic and reason to examine the real world.
Except for the fact that it makes utter hash of the arguments you claim to be following. Other than that, you’re following them quite well. :rolleyes:
I suspect that was his intent. And he alledgedly studied at UC Berkely. I guess that makes me smater than a Berkely grad. I feel so smate. Worship me. I are Smate!