The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.
George EliotTags: thinking assumptions fallacy
Whenever we want to combat our enemies, first and foremost we must start by understanding them rather than exaggerating their motives.
Criss JamiTags: reason purpose war enemies strategy understanding argument fallacy battle debate exaggeration motives unbiased fallacies biased straw-man straw-man-fallacy strawman strawman-fallacy tactic
Most people have some appreciation of mathematics, just as most people can enjoy a pleasant tune; and there are probably more people really interested in mathematics than in music. Appearances suggest the contrary, but there are easy explanations. Music can be used to stimulate mass emotion, while mathematics cannot; and musical incapacity is recognized (no doubt rightly) as mildly discreditable, whereas most people are so frightened of the name of mathematics that they are ready, quite unaffectedly, to exaggerate their own mathematical stupidity
G.H. HardyTags: music stupidity math fallacy mathematics
After all, is our idea of God anything more than personified incomprehensibility?
{Said in a letter to Voltaire}
Tags: fallacy voltaire personification god-of-the-gaps incomprehensibility voltaire-letter
To be acknowledged that we do not believe in their misleading notion and fallacy, today, tomorrow and forever even if it costs us our life. They have suffocated people for hundreds of years and if we don’t stop them today no one else would do it tomorrow.
M.F. MoonzajerTags: religion atheism believe fallacy notion misleading
For Paley, a watch is purposeful and thus must have been created by a being with a purpose. A watch needs a watchmaker, just as a world needs a world-maker—God. Yet both Wallace and Paley might have heeded the lesson from Voltaire's Candide (1759), in which Dr. Pangloss, a professor of "metaphysico-theology-cosmolonigology," through reason, logic, and analogy "proved" that this is the best of all possible worlds: '"Tis demonstrated that things cannot be otherwise; for, since everything is made for an end, everything is necessarily for the best end. Observe that noses were made to wear spectacles; and so we have spectacles. Legs were visibly instituted to be breeched, and we have breeches" (1985, p. 238). The absurdity of this argument was intended on the part of the author, for Voltaire firmly rejected the Panglossian paradigm that all is best in the best of all possible worlds. Nature is not perfectly designed, nor is this the best of all possible worlds. It is simply the world we have, quirky, contingent, and flawed as it may be.
Michael ShermerAs if it were Injustice to sell dearer than we buy; or to give more to a man than he merits. The value of all things contracted for, is measured by the Appetite of the Contractors: and therefore the just value, is that which they be contented to give.
Thomas HobbesTags: economics fallacy free-market freedom-to-contract just-price
I've spent a life-time attacking religious beliefs and have not wavered from a view of the universe that many would regard as bleak. Namely, that it is a meaningless place devoid of deity.
However I'm unwilling simply to repeat the old arguments of the past when, in fact, God is a moving target and is taking all sorts of new shapes and forms. The arguments used against the long bow are not particularly useful when debating nuclear weapons, and the simple arguments against the old model gods are not sufficient when dealing with the likes of Davies et al.
For example, the notion that God didn't exist, doesn't exist but may come into existence through the spread of consciousness throughout the universe is too clever to be pooh-poohed along Bertrand Russell lines. And if I had the time I could give you half a dozen other scientific theologies that will need snappier footwork from the atheist of the future.
Tags: truth atheism argument bertrand-russell fallacy russell god-of-the-gaps moving-the-goalposts
The atheist, agnostic, or secularist ... should insist on the need to engage in a meaningful debate on the entire issue of the truth or falsity (or probability or improbability) of religious tenets, without being subject to accusations of impiety, immorality, impoliteness, or any of the other smokescreens used by the pious to deflect attention from the central issues at hand.
S.T. JoshiTags: truth atheist fallacy debate libel agnostic secular red-herring
It hurts so badly when you grow up and understand that everything you believed in and devoted yourself were just fallacy and stupidity.
M.F. MoonzajerTags: stupidity religion atheism devotion fallacy
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