Grizzly

Hello everyone,

1) please stay on topic. This is a discussion of premarital sex, not whether Darwin or Christianity inspired Hitler.

2) There seems to be a rampant misunderstanding of what an ad hominem attack is. Here's a definition.

Translated from Latin to English, "Ad Hominem" means "against the man" or "against the person."

An Ad Hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument. Typically, this fallacy involves two steps. First, an attack against the character of person making the claim, her circumstances, or her actions is made (or the character, circumstances, or actions of the person reporting the claim). Second, this attack is taken to be evidence against the claim or argument the person in question is making (or presenting). This type of "argument" has the following form:


Person A makes claim X.

Person B makes an attack on person A.

Therefore A's claim is false.

The reason why an Ad Hominem (of any kind) is a fallacy is that the character, circumstances, or actions of a person do not (in most cases) have a bearing on the truth or falsity of the claim being made (or the quality of the argument being made).

From <a href="http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ad-hominem.html" target="_blank">here</a>

An attack on Christianity or what Christians believe is not an ad homenim attack. It could possibly be a strawman, if incorrect, but not an ad hom. An Ad Hom is a personal attack on someones character, which is typically irrelevant in the veracity of the knowledge claim a person is making.

dk

Hey Grizzly,ss
I agree but must add
An attack can be both a Strawman and an ad hominem circumstantial. In this thread I have been attacked on the circumstance of religion, even though I’ve refrained from the use of religious language. It is also a Strawman because the attack tries to make religion not premarital sex the issue. To the extent a positive argument made by a Christian is minimized as transcendental moonshine, the argument is ad hominem. To the extent religion is brought up to evade a stronger argument it’s a Strawman.

In either case we run amok from the central topic.

dk

In response to Primal I did stray off topic. I should have noted his fallacious appeal to authority.
First evolutionary biologists and historians aren't subject matter experts on premaritial sex, morals or ethics.
Second Experts in the field disagree.

I apologize for offering a fallacious argument in response to a fallacious argument. Evolutionary biologists and historiens are not generally fascists, social Darwinists or eugenicists, nor do they have any expertise in such matters.

Ted Hoffman

Where is the evidence for this?

MadMordigan

The problem is that people are persons ill suited to such treatment.

Any ladies want to treat me as a sex object and disprove dk's claim?

brighid

Don’t we already do that? But I suppose you are asking for some actual sexual objectification, perhaps the kind that can be video taped and shared on II as scientific proof that you aren’t ill suited to being sexually used by one or more lovely, infidel hotties!

Brighid

ImGod

All I know is if the government wants to get involved in my sex life, please aske me for my minimum standards. Don't try to send someone like Janet Reno. John Ashcroft is definately not my type.

I have a list of preferences I could email to the Justice Department.

dk

The evidence is everywhere, to objectify a person essentially dehumanize them. To psychologically prepare to abuse, use, exploit, torture and even murder another person (group of people) the actor must first dehumanize the target as a mere object. The US enslaved Blacks as sub-humans, then justified Jim Crow Laws on the basis of cultural inferiority. The NAZIS dehumanized Jews as parasites and Slavs as genetically impure. Colonial Empires dehumanized indigenous populations as savage, uncivilized and pagan. Social Darwinism was/is attracts Robber Barons, blue bloods and ‘elite opinion makers’ because the philosophy fundamentally justifies (orders the underlying reality to rationalize injustice) the ruthless exploitation of others by striping them of their humanity (peronality). People reduced to a mere object can be used as a “means to an ends” with a clean conscience. When [wo]men materialize [wo]men as sex objects they are empowered to take whatever liberty presents.

dk

The government gets involved in people's sex lives because people don't take care of their families. Unfortunately the carnage spills from the home to taint the entire society.

Clutch

Just one misshapen clod in the avalanche of non-sequiturs that is dk.

The frequency of abortion comments at most indirectly upon the reliability of preventative birth control, unless you control for the failure to use birth-control -- as a result, say, of being too ignorant or ashamed to use it, due to the censoring efforts of hysterical prudes like... well, dk.

(And, as always, still waiting for an explanation of how logical positivism caused the moral decline of America. Once dk finally can be shamed into retracting that bit of idiocy, we can move onto the next of the 4000 non-sequiturs he's spewed since then...)