@Derek_Baumgartner

2 years ago

Most fallacies are ways to avoid the content of an argument. They may not realize they're 'dodging' - they may legitimately think they are making a good point. Poor thinking tends to lead to more poor thinking.

If someone's dodging your points, you're justified in refocusing them. (this doesn't mean 'be rude', mind!)

Put another way, here's a quote from Albert Einstein, in response to a book "100 Authors against Einstein":
"Why 100? If I were wrong, one would have been enough."



If someone refuses to understand (this can happen on both sides: we generally want to stick with views we find comfortable!), it's sometimes best to just move on (in a single conversation), or gently but firmly seek an opportunity to speak and state the facts (in a more open dialogue where people are listening to you) before bowing out.

Greg Koukl's book "Tactics" covers things like this quite well, and probably better than I do.

---
Ah, and another note comes to mind before I wrap up: sometimes in really short-form dialogues (such as news channel interviews with really limited time windows), it may be good to have quick 'comebacks' to common rhetoric. Spent some time writing up the below.

-Transgenderism
="Gender dysphoria is a horrid thing to live with, and people suffering from it need our love and support. However, the suicidal ideation (at a horrendous 40%) from people suffering from such dysphoria is not helped by transition surgery or hormonal treatment: in fact, it may even get worse, and transition surgery has a roughly 70% complication rate, to boot!
Transitioning doesn't help people: it hurts them, and I can't support something proven to be not only dangerous to perform, but deleterious in its effects even if it succeeds without 'complication'."
="Ought we not teach people to love themselves for the way God made them, rather than telling them to enter into incredible debt seeking hormonal treatment/transition surgery in order to pretend to be something they're not?"
="If someone has a different form of dysphoria or mental problem (anorexia, for example), we've seen that affirming the mental issue never has been the solution. The more we learn about gender dysphoria, the more it seems like it's not an exception to this rule: shouldn't we love them for who they are, and help them to accept themselves for who they are, rather than validating the negative thoughts their dysphoria gives them whilemutilating their bodies to do so?"

----
-Abortion
="Right to choose!"
=="Choose what?"
=="Murder is never a valid choice."
=="Killing the baby is a permanent solution to a temporary situation. Pregnancy doesn't last more than 9 months, and murdering someone is wrong, even if it's to get out of the consequences of one's actions."
=="I'm for women's choices too: adoption, abstinence, contraception, or motherhood. Murdering someone isn't a choice I support for anyone, man or woman."
=="Most women believe they have no choice: according to Heartbeat International, about 64% of women who have had abortions were coerced, and 67% of women who had abortions did not receive counsel, and 79% did not receive information about available resources. Why is the abortion industry keeping women ignorant about the life of the child? Why is the abortion industry keeping women ignorant about other options available to them, such as crisis pregnancy centers (which roughly outnumber abortion clinics 2-to-1, in the U.S.)?"

="My body, my choice!"
=="We have laws against murder, speeding, even suicide - would you see a woman standing on an edge considering suicide, start to move to help her, then remember 'my body, my choice' and let her die?" [I've spoken with someone who supports abortion who said 'yes', to this, sadly: abortion leads to eugenics, and support of of suicide clinics and elderly euthanasia is spreading because of it.]
=="It's not her body: women don't have two hearts, two brains, two different blood types, and two different sets of DNA."

="Forced pregnancy!"
==(if the topic is rape) "We don't even have the death penalty for rapists in the U.S. (though we probably should), yet you'd say it's okay to kill the child for what their father did? Both the mother and the child are already victims: don't make it worse by shedding innocent blood instead and pretending that actually is a way to help the mother."
==(outside of the topic of rape) "If a woman chooses to have sex, she is choosing the possibility that someone will come to live in her womb temporarily. She's free to choose to have sex: she's not free of the responsibilities that sex brings, just as a man is not free to avoid child support - unless you think men ought to be able to say 'my wallet, my choice'."
===If this garners interest, note that a great number of men support abortion due to this very reason. Women whose lives were threatened by their boyfriends if they didn't get an abortion, or women whose boyfriends said they'd leave unless she killed her kid, etc. Live Action has good resources here.

="Women's health!"
=="The Dublin Declaration, signed by over 1,000 obstetricians, gynecologists, doctors, etc., has stated quite clearly that abortion is never needed for a woman to receive the maximum level of healthcare."
=="Ectopic pregnancies aren't abortions. Abortion clinics in the U.S. aren't even equipped to deal with ectopic pregnancies - it's a 'cutting problem' resolved by a laparoscopy or a laparotomy. Any ER in the United States can perform these procedures, but sopher clamps, dilators, digoxin, pills, and vacuums, which you find at a Planned Parenthood clinic, cannot resolve this issue."
=="Late-term abortions take days to perform, and the baby has to be delivered anyway! If it's a crisis during a late-term pregnancy, a C-section (which takes minutes, not days) is needed: taking the extra steps to poison the child, stab their head and vacuum out their brains, or drown them, is a waste of time when it comes to saving the woman, and it's time spent murdering the child!"
[I was a C-section baby, by the way. Hi!]

="The child may have a bad life!"
=="EVERYONE has difficulties in life. EVERYONE suffers. If you think someone is going to have a rough time in life, murdering them isn't the solution!"

="You don't do enough to support children and mothers after they're born!"
=="Murder is always wrong: murdering someone because of social difficulties is not a valid solution. We can discuss societal issues after we get that fundamental issue of 'murder being wrong' dealt with: if we cannot agree that murder is wrong, then nothing I have done, nothing I can do, and nothing I will do, will please you on this front."
(it can be tempting to point out pro-life charities assist, how pregnancy care centers outnumber abortion clinics 2-to-1, etc.: but the fundamental point is that the child is a human being, and that murder is wrong. Getting the topic onto 'helping mothers after their children are born' is to distract from the murder that abortion causes, and make the topic a different problem than the horror that is the genocide we see being performed)

====
Thanks for this: keep up the good work!

19 |