If you want to talk about arguing in good faith, it is essential to address and clear up any question of a defect in the logic of your position immediately if not sooner. This is imperative, not least because the logical structure of an argument is one of its critical components and not something to be given a waiver, or productive discussion is impossible.

I'm quite confident that most of this is just carry-over from the other thread. The first mention of "fallacy" ITT is from we're all fishes in post #6. lawdude's response is in post #20, where he starts to discuss "validity" despite informal fallacies, and his blowup is in post #26.

It could be because it's still quite hard to make sense of his actual argument. But more likely, I think it's because it's like a car crash in slow motion, and it's hard to stop watching.

I meant, "are you being charitable with lawdude and cutting him some slack, or did I misinterpret what he was saying and incorrectly noted a fallacy?"

It's extended a bit more than that. It's the inference of religions' unreliability (falsehood) from the unreliability of one (or more) religions' central claim, which is initially infered on the unreliability of religious figures' peripheral claims.

That makes n of us.

I read the argument basically the same way. From the title of the thread:

Now, setting aside even the question that these claims have been demolished (moral claims being "proven" false), or even the question of whether these claims are of religious importance (when religious people use their religious texts to make scientific claims), here's where the argument breaks down:

So because these "peripheral claims" have turned out to be false, we should therefore infer the remaining teachings (presumably, the central teachings) are also false.

If this were a person, it would read something like this. "Because the physicist did not pick the winning football team, it is appropriate to infer that his ideas about quantum mechanics are likely to be wrong as well."

Maybe it's not quite a fallacy of composition (strictly speaking, he's saying that a property of a part carries-over to be a property of another part), but it's extremely close to the same thing (if the property of falseness carries over from the peripheral to to central, then the entire thing is false).

He stops short of actually claiming the falseness of the central claims, by simply calling it "less likely."

But this whole project is incoherent (or unsupported or simply wrong) upon inspection of the details of the claims. In particular, what he means by "false" (especially in the context of "major moral precepts" being "wrong") and what claims are to be put under consideration (does the fact that some Catholics believed in geocentrism and that they found support for it in their Bible imply that Catholicism has geocentrism as one of its peripheral claims?).

All versions.

He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father

the resurrection of the body

Contextually challenged?

The myth is that the dead Jesus came back to life after three days, removed the burial garments, rolled back the stone, flew around the countryside, and spoke and appeared to a few selected people. He now "sits" at the "right hand" of the father.

The "book" of Revelation contains this specific claim ...

Revelation 4
Then I looked, and, oh!—a door open into Heaven. The trumpet-voice, the first voice in my vision, called out, "Ascend and enter. I'll show you what happens next."

I was caught up at once in deep worship and, oh!—a Throne set in Heaven with One Seated on the Throne, suffused in gem hues of amber and flame with a nimbus of emerald. Twenty-four thrones circled the Throne, with Twenty-four Elders seated, white-robed, gold-crowned. Lightning flash and thunder crash pulsed from the Throne. Seven fire-blazing torches fronted the Throne (these are the Sevenfold Spirit of God). Before the Throne it was like a clear crystal sea.

Prowling around the Throne were Four Animals, all eyes. Eyes to look ahead, eyes to look behind. The first Animal like a lion, the second like an ox, the third with a human face, the fourth like an eagle in flight. The Four Animals were winged, each with six wings. They were all eyes, seeing around and within. And they chanted night and day, never taking a break:

Holy, holy, holy
Is God our Master, Sovereign-Strong,
The Was, The Is, The Coming.

Every time the Animals gave glory and honor and thanks to the One Seated on the Throne—the age-after-age Living One—the Twenty-four Elders would fall prostrate before the One Seated on the Throne. They worshiped the age-after-age Living One. They threw their crowns at the foot of the Throne, chanting,

Worthy, O Master! Yes, our God!
Take the glory! the honor! the power!
You created it all;
It was created because you wanted it.

Which was a more embellished version of ...

Isaiah 6
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. 2 Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. 3 And they were calling to one another:
"Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty;
the whole earth is full of his glory."

I understand that the "creed" is not specific when they dutifully chant "I believe in ... the resurrection of the body", but I don't believe the story is that Jesus left his rotting corpse behind when he disappeared.

They Bible specifically states that the Lord "sits" on a "throne". To the goat herders this was considered, in the vernacular of the peasantry, "Balla". We also know from the Holy Bible that he likes the smell of burnt animals.

Do you distance yourself from any of this fanciful prose?

The answer is "yes."

1. Are the visions an illusion?
   
2. Are the visions a metaphor?
   
3. Does the Lord sit on a throne?
   
4. Was the body resurrected?
   
5. Does the Father have a right hand?
   
6. Does the Lord wear a robe?
   
7. Is the Pope Catholic?

Answer as many as you can.

On the fallacies crap:

There is nothing remotely fallacious about inferring that persons OR organizations who got a lot of stuff dreadfully wrong are more likely to get other things wrong as compared to persons or organizations with better records at getting stuff right. And the people denying this are LYING, because they surely apply the same standard, including, as VPIP pointed out, while playing poker.

Also, Aaron's claim that you can't say religious authorities got moral questions wrong is basically a justification for evil. As I said earlier, sure, opposing Stalin's purges is an opinion, but that doesn't mean it is contestable. If you think it is moral to deny condoms and divorce to women married to HIV positive men in Africa, you need to defend that. If you can't, then yeah, it's wrong.

Perhaps we can call this the "it works in poker" fallacy. Because if it's true for poker, it must be true for any situation imaginable. (Have you figured out why these are called logical fallacies yet?)

You might want to consider what "moral" and "evil" mean. For example, if morality is simply a socially constructed concept, then you can say "it's wrong" but then it can only be wrong from your social perspective, and not wrong in some sort of universal sense. In which case, you can continue to argue "it's wrong" but you won't have anything beyond a bare assertion.

But if you have an universal sense of morality, you need to figure out where it comes from and how you intend to justify its universality.

Either way, good luck.

The funny thing is, if you are talking strictly as a matter of "logic", as you claim you are with your BS dishonest scumbag "fallacy" talk, what works in poker SHOULD work in life, in the sense that if predictions and explanations of human behavior at a poker table are long run +EV, they cannot, by definition, be fallacious, because a fallacious techniques would never more than randomly reach a correct result.

Of course, there's a lot more to life than logic. (As the great Oliver Wendell Holmes said, for instance, the life of the law isn't logic, it is experience. And that is true of a great many things other than law. Indeed, it's true about religion too-- this discussion involves a bunch of people using logic traps to justify beliefs that other people just hold on faith. And those other people are actually smarter than you guys are, as well as being less arrogant.)

Aaron, you are, again, a complete imbecile and a liar. You are quite aware of the existence of secular moral philosophies. You only pretend not to be for purposes of argument.

But leaving that aside, as I said, it's actually pretty self-evident that denying a condom or divorce papers to an African woman married to an HIV-positive man is a death sentence. So if you want to argue that this is moral, you have the burden of proof, just as you would if you want to discuss Stalin's purges.

Now, I want to get one more thing out of the way, since you brought it up.

The most arrogant jerks on the planet are the religious people who think that atheists and agnostics have no basis for morality. Like we have to believe in your stupid little sky fairies to be able to figure out what to do. Not only do we have better things to do, but we are able to figure things out without relying on an invisible dictator to order us around.

If you want people to think that Christians are intelligent and good people, please, please, stay away from this insulting and disgusting smear.

Rant over.

LOL -- You just quoted me discussing secular moral philosophy. (If you didn't know, those are precisely the questions that secular moral philosophy must grapple with.) It's like you don't even know what you're reading.

This is yet another demonstration that you are the one who is the serial overclaimer in this conversation. Until you learn how to address the actual argument at hand, you're going to continue to look like an idiot. (Hint: Repeatedly calling someone a liar and other such names, especially without generating an argument for yourself, weakens your position as the one who is supposedly the reasonable voice in the discussion.)

Thanks for proving my point:

Shorter Aaron:

Me: "Stalin's purges were wrong, because they killed millions of people."

Aaron: "you can continue to argue 'it's wrong' but you won't have anything beyond a bare assertion."