"Here are my thoughts guys. Would've been nice if more people had voted on this debate, but here we are."
Thanks for taking the trouble to record your thoughts. Frankly I'm surprised anybody thought this was close. Making a debate where the thing you have to prove is only WORSE or BETTER without any standard for comparison essentially makes a debate subjective. If doing harm in the name of lies and bringing down America seems worse than just another summer race riot (and not even a top ten one of those) the PRO should lose every time. PRO's only argument was that all of the harms from all the protests of 2020 exceeded all of the harms done on Jan 6th but he deceptively, insistently needed to blame BLM. PRO blames 19 murders on BLM and then can't document a single instance where a BLM protester killed someone. One murder in August might be fairly attributed to a BLM protester but we were limited to the first two weeks. BY any objective measure, police killed and injured far more people than BLM did. Why not call them the Police protests/riots rather than the BLM protests/riots? Likewise, he failed to put a single BLM protester at the scene of any damage. The whole debate was ultimately one long dropped question: Why blame all (or even much) of the harm on BLM?
PRO has the BURDEN of PROOF to show that no LGBT have any cause for pride.
PRO cuts his own throat from the start by prohibiting logical fallacies while exhibiting an inferior capacity for reason generally and failing to define terms.
The only argument addressing LGBT generally is that PRO argues that heterosexual couples can have children, homosexual couples can't. Beyond the obvious falseness of the claim (I personally know many LGBTQ people with children- some adopted but mostly biological parentage), PRO never bothers to explain why childlessness should deny any possibility of pride. We are 8 billion humans on a planet with a maximum carrying capacity of 2 billion humans. Since non-reproducing couples are decreasing the demand on overstrained resources while reproducing couples increase the strain- it seems rational to this voter to take more pride in non-production. I suppose there are plenty of arguments for parental pride or non-parental non-pride to be made but PRO makes zero effort- he just makes a gigantic claim without offering one shred of evidence and then moves on.
PRO argues that gays and lesbians have nothing to be proud of because 1) Gay men suffer from one particular disease more than straight people 2) Lesbians suffer from one particular disease more 3) Lesbians lifestyles increase cancer risks, and 4) gays generally have a shorter lifespan. PRO weakens his claims significantly by offering a list of notable gay people killed by AIDS and then can only come up with one- strongly minimizing the impact he is promoting.
PRO argues that trans folks can't be proud because they have high suicide rates.
This voter reflects that US soldiers and NFL players also are suffer from higher rates of some diseases and have much higher suicide rates and shorter lifespans than average. If PRO's arguments are sufficient to disqualify any pride from LGBT then it follows that US soldiers and NFL players likewise have no cause for pride.
This voter ignores PRO's specific claims about asexual, non-binary, and pansexual people since those specific identities are irrelevant to our subject LGBT people, however much overlapping.
PRO's whole argument is chock-a-block with more logical fallacies then is worth counting, both formal and informal. Just for starters, PRO never once fully distributes any argument: some L are X, some G are Y, some T are Z, therefore no LGBT are A. PRO draws a negative conclusion from exclusively affirmative premises.
CON wisely begins by defining PRIDE and then intelligently argues that if pride itself can be shown to have value for LGBT people, then that value justifies PRIDE beyond PRO's claim of zero pride, zero value from pride. PRO effectively lays out two areas where LGBT demands for self-respect have resulted in positive change: mental health and civil rights politics.
CON devastates PRO's health argument with some basic rational inquiry but most effectively condemns the whole of PRO's argument with " Pro offers no warrants. He offers statistics, but never tells us why the material conditions of homosexuals throughout society should dictate whether they feel “pride.”
That's PRO's failure in a nutshell, repeated after Trans arguments: "even if the scientific evidence is wholly discounted, Pro never explains why, if gender really is a binary, it matters in respect to expressing and possessing pride."
PRO begins ROUND2 by stating that his religion considers pride to be both sin and mental illness- self-destructing his argument completely. If PRIDE is evil and PRO concludes that LGBT have none of that evil- well isn't that lack of evil itself something to be proud of? PRO makes no effort to improve or extend his R1 here but makes a large number of irrational, incredible, unverified generalizations: "Coming out doesn't exist," "the govt. does not get involved with people's bedrooms (this on the weekend that the US Supreme Court tore down fifty years of precedent for US right to privacy). " Our society is very, very accepting of gay people." (This after a week following major attacks on Pride parades in Oslo, Warsaw, and Coeur D' Alene). "Being gay isn't natural" (with disease and no children as evidence - therefore all people with disease or infertility are unnatural? Whew!) "Being gay is condemned by the bible," gays are often very promiscuous" etc. PRO seems to feel no responsibility to connect his bold unjustified claims to his thesis. Eating pork is condemned by the BIble, for example, shall all bacon lovers therefore be stripped of all PRIDE? JFK was promiscuous- did JFK therefore have no reason to be proud? CON shoots these wild claims down quite effectively in the lightning round.
PRO calls one of CON's arguments "a strawman" giving further evidence that PRO does not understand how logical fallacies work in spite of his prohibition against them. CON argued that since lesbians have lower HIV rates than straight people, doesn't it follow by PRO's reasoning that straight people likewise have no cause for PRIDE relative to lesbians? That is not a strawman argument, that is directly relevant and destructive to PRO's claim that gay men's increased HIV prevalence relative to straight people is disqualifying for any PRIDE.
In R3, PRO concedes the whole of CON's counterargument in his first four words, "self-respect is important" The remainder of PRO's R3 is repetition or irrelevant to thesis (biblical slavery, asexuality, etc).
CON effectively buries PRO's claims:
"Pro never articulates a clear metric for PRIDE" (or even bothers to define it)
" Pro’s pseudo-metrics contain double standards."
"Pro never comes up with an appropriate mechanism to weigh this debate"
PRO did give a few anecdotal reasons why the LGBT community is bad for society but never considered these in balance with the good LGBT people bring to society or the harms non-LGBT people bring to society.
PRO utterly failed to explain PRIDE or why LGBT might be entirely undeserving or by what authority such judgement was issued.
CON effectively demonstrates the lack of rational analysis in PRO's anecdotes and affirms PRIDE as healing mechanism for LGBT in terms of mental health and civil rights.
ARGUMENTS to CON
PRO uses 5 authentic scientific sources in reasonable context.
PRO cites the Bible eight times without once ever explaining why the literature of ancient middle-eastern patriarchs might prove relevant to a literate, educated, rational, post-enlightenment global society.
PRO cites two self-publishing sources that are identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups: Paul Cameron's Family Research Institute and Joseph Nicolosi's NARTH.
Paul Cameron's sampling of obituaries in 1994 for AIDS as a cause of death in not just NOT science, it is cherry-picking AIDS deaths at the height of the epidemic and then extrapolating life expectancies for all LGBT from the most pessimistic data possible. It's like extrapolating US life expectancies based on New Jersey nursing facilities in the Spring of 2020 at the height of the COVID pandemic before vaccines. Just pure shit in terms of scientific method.
At least Nicolosi's anecdotal website made no pretense at science.
At one point PRO just links to Youtube in place of making an argument.
By contrast, CON has many more sources, all relevant to argument. The science PRO sourced appeared to be peer-reviewed, objective, and published in major journals. None of CON's sources appeared to be discredited by the APA as unscientific or by the SPLC as hate speech.
SOURCES to CON
I was tempted to award CON conduct in light of PRO's prohibition against logical fallacies which he violated with impunity while CON carefully avoided any glaring inconsistencies or irrelevancies but since all other conduct was otherwise fair I think I'll let that drop.
False. Most philosophical debates argue for the truth or non-truth of a statement independent from bias, emotion, perspective. If we can't agree on a common ground of objective reality than debate is just people talking about their feelings about shit.
"This was a philosophical debate."
By your "just talking about my feelings" definition, probably so.
"Rap battles are subjective. This was not a rap battle."
agreed
"The DART rules you are semantically trying to apply to this debate were intended for rap battles"
That's a lie. The rules I am following cover SUBJECTIVE COMPETITIONS of which rap battles are but one example among many. Since you (wrongheadedly) insist that this debate is a SUBJECTIVE COMPETION then at your insistence, non-moderation is the applicable rule.
Why is this so difficult for you?
It's not. I'm 100% clear.
"What is so difficult about understanding why we would judge a philosophical debate differently than a rap battle? "
By definition, all the debates on this site are philosophical (i.e. the study of knowledge). You have created your own little definition of philosophical debates and created your own little rules for those debates that are nowhere reflected in the rules for this site.
"What is so complicated about this that explaining it inn your view amounts to subterfuge? "
It is hard to believe that you genuinely don't understand fundamental concepts like the definition of SIMPLY or the definition of SUBJECTIVE or PHILOSOPHY or the rules for SUBJECTIVE COMPETITIONS. Seems like you're just looking for an angle, any angle that let's you sell this as a win.
@Double_R No semantic bullshit here. I am literally just believing you when you wrote, "The resolution makes this debate SUBJECTIVE by definition."
When I challenged that characterization, you doubled down and said "should implies subjectivity" (talk about semantic bullshit) Is this a SUBJECTIVE debate as you have declared? Yes or no? Please answer yes or no directly without subterfuge in your next post.
Unsurprisingly, Double_R can't answer a simple yes or no question about his own writing (Should your argument be judged OBJECTIVELY or SUBJECTIVELY?) because either answer make him a liar. He clearly wants folks to apply the DART standard for OBJECTIVE debating but he retreated to a SUBJECTIVE appeal at the end of his R2 and when called out on it, babbled some ridiculous BS about SHOULD always indicating a subjective debate.
So long as Double_R continues to cower from this basic question, I think VOTERS can fairly treat this debate as non-moderated and vote however they wish.
"Will I get banned if I plagiarize for this debate? I prefer to quote primary sources verbatim to make my argumentation more coherent so I will probably use little of my own writing for this debate."
You won't get banned necessarily but you'll likely get trashed in the voting. Having lots of good sources is good. Cut and pastes in place of an argument counts as no argument at all in my book.
"He is right. Right wing should be defined basically as anti statist and left wing should be defined as pro statist...."
Uh....but my definition is rooted in history and is defined true to the maker's intent at coinage- whereas your definition was merely shat out of you on impulse without consultation of any standard work of reference. And you yourself are a notoriously unreliable, anti-dependable fake news fountain of toxic bullshit. So....
When you ask questions like "should government intervene here or should people have freedom" the left always chooses government intervention at the cost of negative liberties
Hmm... so when I ask if government should intervene in my vagina or should people have the freedom to choose who grows in their body when your saying it's the leftists outlawing my personal autonomy?
Hmm....so when I ask if government should intervene in our American right to vote or should people have the freedom to choose their president by majority every four years, you're saying its the leftists trying to illegally hold on to the White House?
I am just using Wikipedia's definition. Why make it more complicated than that unless you are trying (as most do) to redefine the terms to suit your own bias?
"There is a reason why out of all highly developed nations, America is the one (or certainly tied joint last with others, at best) with the least provision for its poor."
I don't buy this factoid. Of the 66 nations the UN calls highly developed, US ranks 17th in human development and socioeconomic sustainability- worse than Germany, better than France, same as Canada.
Furthermore, I challenge the notion that liberty and equality (the measure of leftism) necessarily imply maximal provision for its poor. The poor of Singapore enjoy better food and shelter than US poor but they are far less free and equal than the US poor.
I don't think you can legitimately define CHILD SEX ABUSE as voluntary or consensual. The American Psychological Association states that "children cannot consent to sexual activity with adults", and condemns any such action by an adult: "An adult who engages in sexual activity with a child is performing a criminal and immoral act which never can be considered normal or socially acceptable behavior."
I'm pretty close to libertarian which is about as right wing as it gets and
We have established before that you remain willfully uneducated regarding standard definitions in political ideology. Read a book some time.
"Libertarianism originated as a form of left-wing politics such as anti-authoritarian and anti-state socialists like anarchists, especially social anarchists, but more generally libertarian communists/Marxists and libertarian socialists. These libertarians seek to abolish capitalism and private ownership of the means of production, or else to restrict their purview or effects to usufruct property norms, in favor of common or cooperative ownership and management, viewing private property as a barrier to freedom and liberty."
"by your definition that would make Republicans (the conservative party) liberal."
The Republican Party was founded as the most Liberal party in US history. Abolition and Suffrage were primarily Republican causes until Teddy Roosevelt broke the Progressives off and made them Democrats and the Civil Rights movement broke the Dixiecrats off and make them Republicans. There is no definition of politically Conservative that matches or describes the modern Republican Party, but traditional American Leftism was perfectly compatible with traditional American Republicanism.
"-->@oromagi
I am sure the past rednecks and blacks alike would have something to say to your BS. That is ignoring the raped and slaughtered natives."
But to make your false claim of "as right-wing as it gets" hold any water, you would have to show that US treatment of Native Americans was objectively a greater enforcement of hierarchies (right-wing) than the Spanish Casta system or the French elite/noirs system in Haiti or the castration of slaves in the Chinese and Ottoman Empires, etc. I would not claim that the US has always been the most Left-Wing of governments but to say that America has always been the most Right-wing suggests profound ignorance of much of modern world history. There has never been a time in the past 300 years when China, India, Russia, were more left-wing than the US contemporary to that time. America was not the first nation to criminalize slavery but it was ahead of most non-Western nations. America was not the first country to enfranchise women and racial minorities but it was ahead of most other countries.
-->
@oromagi
America has been as right-wing as it gets throughout most of its history.
This is objectively false. The Frenchmen who coined the term Left-Wing literally, explicitly coined the term to mean "Let's be more like the Americans and their Revolution for human liberty and human equality."
DART VOTING POLICY: "Some debates by their nature, or pre-agreement between the debaters, are not eligible for normal moderation..... Examples of non-moderated debates include...
SUBJECTIVE COMPETITIONS
Differentiated from normal debates, rap battles, poetry slams, talent shows, and the like, are too subjective to a different standard than what these rules are designed to enforce."
DOUBLE_R (instigator of this debate) on whether or not this debate is SUBJECTIVE:
"Full Resolution: The definition of atheism should be accepted as merely "a lack of belief in a god"
The resolution makes this debate SUBJECTIVE by definition."
At PRO's repeated insistence, this debate is non-moderated.
"Right-wing politics is generally defined by support of the view that certain social orders and hierarchies are inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable."
" Left-wing politics is the support of social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy.["
Pretty simple. If you believe (as Americans do) that all people were created equal you are a traditional leftist. If you believe that some sexes, races, classes of people are superior to others, you are a rightist. All kings and dictators throughout history are right wing by definition. All democracies are left wing by definition.
"Ok, I see we've reached the part of the conversation where you stop being serious, presumably because you know where this is going."
I am quite serious when I say that as soon you switched to "oh, this is just a subjective debate" at the end of your second argument, you surrendered any rational grounds for complaint about how people voted on your proposition. Are you taking back the part about this being a subjective debate or are your disagreeing with DART rules about how to handle subjective debates?
"The answer is yes, you give credit for the argument if it's ignored. It's called a concession, and it's one of the most basic rules of judging debates."
I have never studied or participated in any formal debating. The rules I go by are printed here: https://info.debateart.com/terms-of-service/voting-policy
"Goes to the side that, within the context of the debate rounds, successfully affirms (vote pro) or negates (vote con) the resolution. Weighing entails analyzing the relative strength of one argument or set of arguments and their impacts against another argument or set of arguments. Weighing requires analyzing and situating arguments and counterarguments within the context of the debate as a whole."
You had the Burden of Proof and gave me two silly and unconvincing arguments that together added zero affirmation, zero strength to your thesis. CON's argument did not address your unconvincing proofs, true, but negated effectively by demonstrating popular, recent, and effective use of the word ATHEIST in the strict sense.
'It's not about whether you buy the argument, it's about whether it was properly refuted."
So your argument could just read "boogers" and if I did not come back with a proper refutation of "boogers" (unboogers, I suppose) than the guy who just said "boogers" automatically wins? I think I'm glad I never tried formal debating.
Let's note that Wylted found an anecdotal story about an ATF agent pushing a camera at Waco a compelling example of government corruption but failed to mention police violence against anti-police protests in the Summer of 2020. The Guardian documented 148 cases of unprovoked violence by US police officers on working journalists during the first five weeks after George Floyd- including 40 shootings and 34 physical assaults. By contrast, no journalists reported any cases of unprovoked violence by BLM protesters on working journalists during that same five weeks.
"I'd argue the BLM riots did nothing but spread misinformation and then get idiots riled up and angry acting on the misinformation. "
What misinformation, specifically, did Black Lives Matter spread?
"This was probably done because the left wants a federal police force instead of local police forces."
Left-Wing politics means "prioritize human rights over property rights." By definition, left-wingers tend to be skeptical about police, imprisonment, institutional force. Police forces almost universally tend to be right-wing institutions.
9/11 had a lot of instances in the direct aftermath of NY city police over stepping....
NYPD is local govt., not Federal.
"Hell just after the Boston Bombing the government mandated...."
False. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick asked people to stay at home with doors locked on a voluntary basis and the commonwealth's willing participation was close to unanimous. No State or Federal mandates were issued and to say as much is to give lie to great respect for private lives the govt demonstrated that day.
"Just after the Aurora Colorado shooting. The police lied to the shooter's lawyer and held him up from getting to his client and advising him."
Her client. Holmes' first lawyer was a woman.
Aurora Police are local, not Federal.
Police did ask for her permission to question Holmes about the bombs and booby-traps he had laid out for police in his apartment. When she denied them permission, Aurora Police proceeded with questioning anyway since they felt that preventing a large explosion in a residential area seemed like the priority. Holmes did not keep her as his lawyer and was assigned a public defender (also a woman) 3 days later.
"For example the shootout in Waco. A member of the press was filming the ATF in retreat and one of the ATF agents was annoyed and shoved their camera. "
I can find no evidence supporting this account.
"It's understandable why the agent did it. He probably just had a couple of friends die in that shootout and felt the camera was disrespectful, but the laws are set up to definitively determine the rights of people in those stressful times."
In fact, a loud-mouthed cameraman had unintentionally tipped off the Branch-Davidians that the ATF was coming. 4 ATF agents were killed and 16 injured in the resulting ambush. The Waco TV station WXTX settled out of court with the Feds for $15 million and neither that cameraman or the TV reporter with him ever worked in journalism again. The only "retreat" that took place at Waco on either side was the initial cease-fire 45 minutes after the ambush, when both sides collected their dead and wounded. The WXTX cameraman and reporter were the only journalists on site at the time and considering that it was already known that WXTX had made the ambush possible it seems at least possible that a camera got punched.
"The JFK assassination kinda exposed a lot of corruption in government. They did stuff like illegally remove JFK'S body from Dallas and almost got in a shootout with the local police because of it." A lot of people will excuse the behavior of the feds and secret service because in the initial moments after this occured there was a lot of uncertainty about just what was going on. It's a bullshit excuse though. Laws, particularly laws that outline roles and responsibilities of different bodies of government are created mostly for our of the ordinary circumstances like in the after effects of unusually catastrophic events.
Coroner Earl Rose was correct to insist on a local autopsy and he did stand in the doorway of Parkland with one officer hoping to blockade the Secret Service but stepped aside after some loud argument. "Almost got into a shootout" is silly bullshit.
Corruption seems like an unjust conclusion considering that there is zero evidence of fraud, deception, or self-gain in the Secret Service's action. They were under direct orders to deliver the body and Jacqueline Kennedy to Air Force One so that the new President could be sworn in. The Dallas Police were famously corrupt and the city famously disliked Kennedy so there were some legitimate security concerns in the first hours after the assassination.
Federal law has since been updated to give the Secret Service full authority regarding any presidential assassination post-mortem.
it was your burden to substantiate that only the broad definition of Atheism should apply"
No, it isn't.
First of all, just step back and think about what you're saying... Almost no one ever changes their mind after reading one debate.
That's why it's called a burden. If you don't think it's your job to convince me the voter that you're right, then I am unlikely to find your argument persuasive, am I? If we're just judging form than the majority of debates are roughly even. I don't have to be convinced to find your argument more persuasive but I do have to convinced you're trying to persuade.
"No, it's not and if you think it is then we have identified why you lost this debate. Should does not indicate subjectivity. Should is used in conjunction with a predicate to indicate an instruction or policy recommendation. If you are adding correctly, 2 + 2 should always equal 4"
"Origami, I've read many of your posts and have come to respect you as a DART member, "
thanks! .... It's oromagi.
"this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard you say."
well then, not too many posts then.
"DEFINITIONS ARE NECESSARILY SUBJECTIVE. Why? Because every word ever uttered in human history was made up by a person, and definitions change over time based on how society chooses to use them. That's literally the definition of subjective.
SUBJECTIVE is
"Formed, as in opinions, based upon a person's feelings or intuition, not upon observation or reasoning; coming more from within the observer than from observations of the external environment."
To the extent that lexicographers earnestly strive to observe and accurately report semantic content and change over time, dictionaries are reasonably objective sources for defining commonplace understandings of words and terms. Certainly, Wiktionary is a more objective source than the atheist's handbook or whatever because Wiktionary is not striving to make a point about atheism. Dictionaries are of little help to people trying to get around the common understanding of words.
Let's note:
"A subjective claim, on the other hand, is not a factual matter; it is an expression of belief, opinion, or personal preference. A subjective claim cannot be proved right or wrong by any generally accepted criteria."
That is, once you have claimed that this debate is SUBJECTIVE, you have forsworn any objection to the basis for any vote.
DART Voting Policy:
For non-moderated debates, Winner Selection voting is strongly encouraged.
Examples of non-moderated debates include...
Subjective Competitions
Differentiated from normal debates, rap battles, poetry slams, talent shows, and the like, are too subjective to a different standard than what these rules are designed to enforce.
"Perhaps you are unfamiliar with Hume's "IS (vs) OUGHT" problem (also known as "Hume's Guillotine")"
Hume would be the first to point out Double_R's is/ought'ing here.
strict atheism is logically incoherent therefore atheism should be redefined to its broadest sense. (Where is the value that logically incoherent concepts must be removed from the lexicon?)
strict atheists are functionally indistinguishable from broad atheists therefore atheism should be redefined to its broadest sense. (Where is the value that performatively similar ideologies must be condensed under the same name?)
If you really want a word to address an active belief in the non-existence of any dieties, there is already a term widely used for this: anti-theist.
Oops, You should re-read that definition for better comprehension.
opposed to belief in the existence of a god or gods
"anti-theism is the philosophical position that theism should be opposed."
"When [atheism is] defined narrowly as denying the existence of gods, the compatibility between atheism and anti-theism may appear more likely. If a person cares enough to deny that gods exist, then perhaps they care enough to attack belief in gods as well — but not always."
An agnostic has absolutely no way of knowing "that all conceivable gods are UNKNOWABLE".
When Thomas Huxley coined the term in 1869, he made no claims about the unknowable, only the known. " It simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe. Consequently, agnosticism puts aside not only the greater part of popular theology, but also the greater part of anti-theology"
" what word will you apply to people who actively disbelieve in any deity? You are going to need a new word for that but you fail to offer any suggestions"
First of all, I never offered any suggestions because that's not relevant to the resolution.
Of course it is. You argued that the strict sense of the word is not useful but then refuse to show how we could live without it.
Second, it's not a redefinition. Nearly every dictionary includes lack of belief as one of it's definitions of atheism.
but throwing out the other definition as incoherent and useless would definitely count as redefinition.
I pointed this out and provided an example in the debate. I could have provided many more but didn't because Con never challenged it, he just ignored it as if the point was never made. If he didn't challenge it then the point stands regardless of whether you accept it. That's how debates work. If you say that the word bark should only apply to trees and never to dogs, you are changing the polysemous definition of the word.
"Third, agnosticism does not mean lack of belief. Agnosticism addresses knowledge. I explained this in detail in the debate. Did you read it?"
Yep. Agnosticism is the objective conclusion, Atheism is the subjective conclusion.
"Lastly, of you really want a word to address an active belief in the non-existence of any dieties, there is already a term widely used for this: strong atheist."
But you can't define the word strong atheist without using the strict sense of the word atheist. You have just refuted your case.
" So why you think it's incumbent on me or anyone else to provide a new term for it?"
Because you are the one who wants to change the way things work now.
No, it's not and if you think it is then we have identified why you lost this debate. Should does not indicate subjectivity. Should is used in conjunction with a predicate to indicate an instruction or policy recommendation. If you are adding correctly, 2 + 2 should always equal 4. There's nothing inherently subjective about should.
How do you objectively determine what something should be?
By considering the facts without deference to personal feelings or interests. If all goes well, the sun should rise in the east tomorrow.
"That's nonsensical."
Nope.
"That's not how debates are judged. "
https://www.butte.edu/departments/cas/tipsheets/thinking/claims.html
" A subjective claim cannot be proved right or wrong by any generally accepted criteria."
To say that your debate is subjective is to argue away any rational expectation of righteousness. I can vote on a subjective debate any way I feel, by definition.
"It's not my job to convince you that I'm right, it's my job to make arguments that my opponent failed to refute. I did, because not only did he not refute them, he barely even addressed them."
False. It was your job to convince me you are right. As the initiator of this debate, it was your burden to substantiate that only the broad definition of Atheism should apply. PRO did show that plenty of proper atheists correctly apply the strict definition of the term and that was enough to refute. I agree that CON did little to address your cases but I don't buy that a strict atheist must individually reject every possible theory of god in order to reject them categorically and nobody should buy your argument that the strict definition is less useful than the broad definition. We can always say we mean atheism in the agnostic sense but we can't say we mean agnosticism in the atheistic sense. Your preferred meeting is more fungible and therefore less inherently useful then the indispensable meaning of the word. CON didn't do a great job of convincing but in this case, he didn't have to- the burden was on you.
Which makes "semantic change" aka "how people use the word" more important than how the dictionary defines the word.
Academics and scientists rely on dictionaries to document that semantic change and so "how people use the word" is pretty much the same as the dictionary definition in common English usage. Certainly, among debaters, the dictionary usage is going to count as a manifestly superior source to personal observations.
3RU7AL: "I have never argued in favor of NOT including both definitions."
Also 3RU7AL: (defining atheism)" Atheism is one thing: A lack of belief in gods. Atheism is ***not*** an affirmative belief that there is no god nor does it answer any other question about what a person believes.
If we eliminate the use of ATHEISM in the first, strictest sense, what word should we then use to talk about theories that deny the existence of god altogether?
"Here are my thoughts guys. Would've been nice if more people had voted on this debate, but here we are."
Thanks for taking the trouble to record your thoughts. Frankly I'm surprised anybody thought this was close. Making a debate where the thing you have to prove is only WORSE or BETTER without any standard for comparison essentially makes a debate subjective. If doing harm in the name of lies and bringing down America seems worse than just another summer race riot (and not even a top ten one of those) the PRO should lose every time. PRO's only argument was that all of the harms from all the protests of 2020 exceeded all of the harms done on Jan 6th but he deceptively, insistently needed to blame BLM. PRO blames 19 murders on BLM and then can't document a single instance where a BLM protester killed someone. One murder in August might be fairly attributed to a BLM protester but we were limited to the first two weeks. BY any objective measure, police killed and injured far more people than BLM did. Why not call them the Police protests/riots rather than the BLM protests/riots? Likewise, he failed to put a single BLM protester at the scene of any damage. The whole debate was ultimately one long dropped question: Why blame all (or even much) of the harm on BLM?
I love how RationalMadman never lets a lack of comprehension impede his compulsion to shitpost.
Thanks for voting!
Thanks for voting!
RFD:BEING LGBT is NOTHING to be PROUD of
PRO has the BURDEN of PROOF to show that no LGBT have any cause for pride.
PRO cuts his own throat from the start by prohibiting logical fallacies while exhibiting an inferior capacity for reason generally and failing to define terms.
The only argument addressing LGBT generally is that PRO argues that heterosexual couples can have children, homosexual couples can't. Beyond the obvious falseness of the claim (I personally know many LGBTQ people with children- some adopted but mostly biological parentage), PRO never bothers to explain why childlessness should deny any possibility of pride. We are 8 billion humans on a planet with a maximum carrying capacity of 2 billion humans. Since non-reproducing couples are decreasing the demand on overstrained resources while reproducing couples increase the strain- it seems rational to this voter to take more pride in non-production. I suppose there are plenty of arguments for parental pride or non-parental non-pride to be made but PRO makes zero effort- he just makes a gigantic claim without offering one shred of evidence and then moves on.
PRO argues that gays and lesbians have nothing to be proud of because 1) Gay men suffer from one particular disease more than straight people 2) Lesbians suffer from one particular disease more 3) Lesbians lifestyles increase cancer risks, and 4) gays generally have a shorter lifespan. PRO weakens his claims significantly by offering a list of notable gay people killed by AIDS and then can only come up with one- strongly minimizing the impact he is promoting.
PRO argues that trans folks can't be proud because they have high suicide rates.
This voter reflects that US soldiers and NFL players also are suffer from higher rates of some diseases and have much higher suicide rates and shorter lifespans than average. If PRO's arguments are sufficient to disqualify any pride from LGBT then it follows that US soldiers and NFL players likewise have no cause for pride.
This voter ignores PRO's specific claims about asexual, non-binary, and pansexual people since those specific identities are irrelevant to our subject LGBT people, however much overlapping.
PRO's whole argument is chock-a-block with more logical fallacies then is worth counting, both formal and informal. Just for starters, PRO never once fully distributes any argument: some L are X, some G are Y, some T are Z, therefore no LGBT are A. PRO draws a negative conclusion from exclusively affirmative premises.
CON wisely begins by defining PRIDE and then intelligently argues that if pride itself can be shown to have value for LGBT people, then that value justifies PRIDE beyond PRO's claim of zero pride, zero value from pride. PRO effectively lays out two areas where LGBT demands for self-respect have resulted in positive change: mental health and civil rights politics.
CON devastates PRO's health argument with some basic rational inquiry but most effectively condemns the whole of PRO's argument with " Pro offers no warrants. He offers statistics, but never tells us why the material conditions of homosexuals throughout society should dictate whether they feel “pride.”
That's PRO's failure in a nutshell, repeated after Trans arguments: "even if the scientific evidence is wholly discounted, Pro never explains why, if gender really is a binary, it matters in respect to expressing and possessing pride."
PRO begins ROUND2 by stating that his religion considers pride to be both sin and mental illness- self-destructing his argument completely. If PRIDE is evil and PRO concludes that LGBT have none of that evil- well isn't that lack of evil itself something to be proud of? PRO makes no effort to improve or extend his R1 here but makes a large number of irrational, incredible, unverified generalizations: "Coming out doesn't exist," "the govt. does not get involved with people's bedrooms (this on the weekend that the US Supreme Court tore down fifty years of precedent for US right to privacy). " Our society is very, very accepting of gay people." (This after a week following major attacks on Pride parades in Oslo, Warsaw, and Coeur D' Alene). "Being gay isn't natural" (with disease and no children as evidence - therefore all people with disease or infertility are unnatural? Whew!) "Being gay is condemned by the bible," gays are often very promiscuous" etc. PRO seems to feel no responsibility to connect his bold unjustified claims to his thesis. Eating pork is condemned by the BIble, for example, shall all bacon lovers therefore be stripped of all PRIDE? JFK was promiscuous- did JFK therefore have no reason to be proud? CON shoots these wild claims down quite effectively in the lightning round.
PRO calls one of CON's arguments "a strawman" giving further evidence that PRO does not understand how logical fallacies work in spite of his prohibition against them. CON argued that since lesbians have lower HIV rates than straight people, doesn't it follow by PRO's reasoning that straight people likewise have no cause for PRIDE relative to lesbians? That is not a strawman argument, that is directly relevant and destructive to PRO's claim that gay men's increased HIV prevalence relative to straight people is disqualifying for any PRIDE.
In R3, PRO concedes the whole of CON's counterargument in his first four words, "self-respect is important" The remainder of PRO's R3 is repetition or irrelevant to thesis (biblical slavery, asexuality, etc).
CON effectively buries PRO's claims:
"Pro never articulates a clear metric for PRIDE" (or even bothers to define it)
" Pro’s pseudo-metrics contain double standards."
"Pro never comes up with an appropriate mechanism to weigh this debate"
PRO did give a few anecdotal reasons why the LGBT community is bad for society but never considered these in balance with the good LGBT people bring to society or the harms non-LGBT people bring to society.
PRO utterly failed to explain PRIDE or why LGBT might be entirely undeserving or by what authority such judgement was issued.
CON effectively demonstrates the lack of rational analysis in PRO's anecdotes and affirms PRIDE as healing mechanism for LGBT in terms of mental health and civil rights.
ARGUMENTS to CON
PRO uses 5 authentic scientific sources in reasonable context.
PRO cites the Bible eight times without once ever explaining why the literature of ancient middle-eastern patriarchs might prove relevant to a literate, educated, rational, post-enlightenment global society.
PRO cites two self-publishing sources that are identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups: Paul Cameron's Family Research Institute and Joseph Nicolosi's NARTH.
Paul Cameron's sampling of obituaries in 1994 for AIDS as a cause of death in not just NOT science, it is cherry-picking AIDS deaths at the height of the epidemic and then extrapolating life expectancies for all LGBT from the most pessimistic data possible. It's like extrapolating US life expectancies based on New Jersey nursing facilities in the Spring of 2020 at the height of the COVID pandemic before vaccines. Just pure shit in terms of scientific method.
At least Nicolosi's anecdotal website made no pretense at science.
At one point PRO just links to Youtube in place of making an argument.
By contrast, CON has many more sources, all relevant to argument. The science PRO sourced appeared to be peer-reviewed, objective, and published in major journals. None of CON's sources appeared to be discredited by the APA as unscientific or by the SPLC as hate speech.
SOURCES to CON
I was tempted to award CON conduct in light of PRO's prohibition against logical fallacies which he violated with impunity while CON carefully avoided any glaring inconsistencies or irrelevancies but since all other conduct was otherwise fair I think I'll let that drop.
And oromagi worships dictionaries.
"Définissez les termes, vous dis-je, ou jamais nous ne nous entendrons." -Voltaire
Two days left.
@oromagi
"Philosophical debates are subjective. "
False. Most philosophical debates argue for the truth or non-truth of a statement independent from bias, emotion, perspective. If we can't agree on a common ground of objective reality than debate is just people talking about their feelings about shit.
"This was a philosophical debate."
By your "just talking about my feelings" definition, probably so.
"Rap battles are subjective. This was not a rap battle."
agreed
"The DART rules you are semantically trying to apply to this debate were intended for rap battles"
That's a lie. The rules I am following cover SUBJECTIVE COMPETITIONS of which rap battles are but one example among many. Since you (wrongheadedly) insist that this debate is a SUBJECTIVE COMPETION then at your insistence, non-moderation is the applicable rule.
Why is this so difficult for you?
It's not. I'm 100% clear.
"What is so difficult about understanding why we would judge a philosophical debate differently than a rap battle? "
By definition, all the debates on this site are philosophical (i.e. the study of knowledge). You have created your own little definition of philosophical debates and created your own little rules for those debates that are nowhere reflected in the rules for this site.
"What is so complicated about this that explaining it inn your view amounts to subterfuge? "
It is hard to believe that you genuinely don't understand fundamental concepts like the definition of SIMPLY or the definition of SUBJECTIVE or PHILOSOPHY or the rules for SUBJECTIVE COMPETITIONS. Seems like you're just looking for an angle, any angle that let's you sell this as a win.
@Double_R No semantic bullshit here. I am literally just believing you when you wrote, "The resolution makes this debate SUBJECTIVE by definition."
When I challenged that characterization, you doubled down and said "should implies subjectivity" (talk about semantic bullshit) Is this a SUBJECTIVE debate as you have declared? Yes or no? Please answer yes or no directly without subterfuge in your next post.
Unsurprisingly, Double_R can't answer a simple yes or no question about his own writing (Should your argument be judged OBJECTIVELY or SUBJECTIVELY?) because either answer make him a liar. He clearly wants folks to apply the DART standard for OBJECTIVE debating but he retreated to a SUBJECTIVE appeal at the end of his R2 and when called out on it, babbled some ridiculous BS about SHOULD always indicating a subjective debate.
So long as Double_R continues to cower from this basic question, I think VOTERS can fairly treat this debate as non-moderated and vote however they wish.
"Will I get banned if I plagiarize for this debate? I prefer to quote primary sources verbatim to make my argumentation more coherent so I will probably use little of my own writing for this debate."
You won't get banned necessarily but you'll likely get trashed in the voting. Having lots of good sources is good. Cut and pastes in place of an argument counts as no argument at all in my book.
"He is right. Right wing should be defined basically as anti statist and left wing should be defined as pro statist...."
Uh....but my definition is rooted in history and is defined true to the maker's intent at coinage- whereas your definition was merely shat out of you on impulse without consultation of any standard work of reference. And you yourself are a notoriously unreliable, anti-dependable fake news fountain of toxic bullshit. So....
When you ask questions like "should government intervene here or should people have freedom" the left always chooses government intervention at the cost of negative liberties
Hmm... so when I ask if government should intervene in my vagina or should people have the freedom to choose who grows in their body when your saying it's the leftists outlawing my personal autonomy?
Hmm....so when I ask if government should intervene in our American right to vote or should people have the freedom to choose their president by majority every four years, you're saying its the leftists trying to illegally hold on to the White House?
You are defining right-wing so simple-minded btw.
I am just using Wikipedia's definition. Why make it more complicated than that unless you are trying (as most do) to redefine the terms to suit your own bias?
"There is a reason why out of all highly developed nations, America is the one (or certainly tied joint last with others, at best) with the least provision for its poor."
I don't buy this factoid. Of the 66 nations the UN calls highly developed, US ranks 17th in human development and socioeconomic sustainability- worse than Germany, better than France, same as Canada.
Furthermore, I challenge the notion that liberty and equality (the measure of leftism) necessarily imply maximal provision for its poor. The poor of Singapore enjoy better food and shelter than US poor but they are far less free and equal than the US poor.
I don't think you can legitimately define CHILD SEX ABUSE as voluntary or consensual. The American Psychological Association states that "children cannot consent to sexual activity with adults", and condemns any such action by an adult: "An adult who engages in sexual activity with a child is performing a criminal and immoral act which never can be considered normal or socially acceptable behavior."
No semantic bullshit here.
I am literally just believing you when you wrote, "The resolution makes this debate SUBJECTIVE by definition."
When I challenged that characterization, you doubled down and said "should implies subjectivity" (talk about semantic bullshit)
Is this a SUBJECTIVE debate as you have declared? Yes or no?
Please answer yes or no directly without subterfuge in your next post.
"You're literally categorizing the philosophical debate we just had along with rap battles, poetry slams, and talent shows. Wow."
I am literally just believing you when you say, "The resolution makes this debate SUBJECTIVE by definition." Wow.
I'm pretty close to libertarian which is about as right wing as it gets and
We have established before that you remain willfully uneducated regarding standard definitions in political ideology. Read a book some time.
"Libertarianism originated as a form of left-wing politics such as anti-authoritarian and anti-state socialists like anarchists, especially social anarchists, but more generally libertarian communists/Marxists and libertarian socialists. These libertarians seek to abolish capitalism and private ownership of the means of production, or else to restrict their purview or effects to usufruct property norms, in favor of common or cooperative ownership and management, viewing private property as a barrier to freedom and liberty."
"by your definition that would make Republicans (the conservative party) liberal."
The Republican Party was founded as the most Liberal party in US history. Abolition and Suffrage were primarily Republican causes until Teddy Roosevelt broke the Progressives off and made them Democrats and the Civil Rights movement broke the Dixiecrats off and make them Republicans. There is no definition of politically Conservative that matches or describes the modern Republican Party, but traditional American Leftism was perfectly compatible with traditional American Republicanism.
"-->@oromagi
I am sure the past rednecks and blacks alike would have something to say to your BS. That is ignoring the raped and slaughtered natives."
But to make your false claim of "as right-wing as it gets" hold any water, you would have to show that US treatment of Native Americans was objectively a greater enforcement of hierarchies (right-wing) than the Spanish Casta system or the French elite/noirs system in Haiti or the castration of slaves in the Chinese and Ottoman Empires, etc. I would not claim that the US has always been the most Left-Wing of governments but to say that America has always been the most Right-wing suggests profound ignorance of much of modern world history. There has never been a time in the past 300 years when China, India, Russia, were more left-wing than the US contemporary to that time. America was not the first nation to criminalize slavery but it was ahead of most non-Western nations. America was not the first country to enfranchise women and racial minorities but it was ahead of most other countries.
-->
@oromagi
America has been as right-wing as it gets throughout most of its history.
This is objectively false. The Frenchmen who coined the term Left-Wing literally, explicitly coined the term to mean "Let's be more like the Americans and their Revolution for human liberty and human equality."
DART VOTING POLICY: "Some debates by their nature, or pre-agreement between the debaters, are not eligible for normal moderation..... Examples of non-moderated debates include...
SUBJECTIVE COMPETITIONS
Differentiated from normal debates, rap battles, poetry slams, talent shows, and the like, are too subjective to a different standard than what these rules are designed to enforce."
DOUBLE_R (instigator of this debate) on whether or not this debate is SUBJECTIVE:
"Full Resolution: The definition of atheism should be accepted as merely "a lack of belief in a god"
The resolution makes this debate SUBJECTIVE by definition."
At PRO's repeated insistence, this debate is non-moderated.
"Right-wing politics is generally defined by support of the view that certain social orders and hierarchies are inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable."
" Left-wing politics is the support of social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy.["
Pretty simple. If you believe (as Americans do) that all people were created equal you are a traditional leftist. If you believe that some sexes, races, classes of people are superior to others, you are a rightist. All kings and dictators throughout history are right wing by definition. All democracies are left wing by definition.
https://www.debateart.com/forum/topics/7664/post-links/331173
"Ok, I see we've reached the part of the conversation where you stop being serious, presumably because you know where this is going."
I am quite serious when I say that as soon you switched to "oh, this is just a subjective debate" at the end of your second argument, you surrendered any rational grounds for complaint about how people voted on your proposition. Are you taking back the part about this being a subjective debate or are your disagreeing with DART rules about how to handle subjective debates?
"The answer is yes, you give credit for the argument if it's ignored. It's called a concession, and it's one of the most basic rules of judging debates."
I have never studied or participated in any formal debating. The rules I go by are printed here: https://info.debateart.com/terms-of-service/voting-policy
"Goes to the side that, within the context of the debate rounds, successfully affirms (vote pro) or negates (vote con) the resolution. Weighing entails analyzing the relative strength of one argument or set of arguments and their impacts against another argument or set of arguments. Weighing requires analyzing and situating arguments and counterarguments within the context of the debate as a whole."
You had the Burden of Proof and gave me two silly and unconvincing arguments that together added zero affirmation, zero strength to your thesis. CON's argument did not address your unconvincing proofs, true, but negated effectively by demonstrating popular, recent, and effective use of the word ATHEIST in the strict sense.
'It's not about whether you buy the argument, it's about whether it was properly refuted."
So your argument could just read "boogers" and if I did not come back with a proper refutation of "boogers" (unboogers, I suppose) than the guy who just said "boogers" automatically wins? I think I'm glad I never tried formal debating.
Thx for voting!
Thanks for voting!
Thx for voting!
Let's note that Wylted found an anecdotal story about an ATF agent pushing a camera at Waco a compelling example of government corruption but failed to mention police violence against anti-police protests in the Summer of 2020. The Guardian documented 148 cases of unprovoked violence by US police officers on working journalists during the first five weeks after George Floyd- including 40 shootings and 34 physical assaults. By contrast, no journalists reported any cases of unprovoked violence by BLM protesters on working journalists during that same five weeks.
"I'd argue the BLM riots did nothing but spread misinformation and then get idiots riled up and angry acting on the misinformation. "
What misinformation, specifically, did Black Lives Matter spread?
"This was probably done because the left wants a federal police force instead of local police forces."
Left-Wing politics means "prioritize human rights over property rights." By definition, left-wingers tend to be skeptical about police, imprisonment, institutional force. Police forces almost universally tend to be right-wing institutions.
"The COVID protocols, many where illegal and exactly what government protections are set out to prevent."
pretty vague and most protocols were not Federal and most of the large Federal actions got struck down in Federal court.
9/11 had a lot of instances in the direct aftermath of NY city police over stepping....
NYPD is local govt., not Federal.
"Hell just after the Boston Bombing the government mandated...."
False. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick asked people to stay at home with doors locked on a voluntary basis and the commonwealth's willing participation was close to unanimous. No State or Federal mandates were issued and to say as much is to give lie to great respect for private lives the govt demonstrated that day.
"Just after the Aurora Colorado shooting. The police lied to the shooter's lawyer and held him up from getting to his client and advising him."
Her client. Holmes' first lawyer was a woman.
Aurora Police are local, not Federal.
Police did ask for her permission to question Holmes about the bombs and booby-traps he had laid out for police in his apartment. When she denied them permission, Aurora Police proceeded with questioning anyway since they felt that preventing a large explosion in a residential area seemed like the priority. Holmes did not keep her as his lawyer and was assigned a public defender (also a woman) 3 days later.
"For example the shootout in Waco. A member of the press was filming the ATF in retreat and one of the ATF agents was annoyed and shoved their camera. "
I can find no evidence supporting this account.
"It's understandable why the agent did it. He probably just had a couple of friends die in that shootout and felt the camera was disrespectful, but the laws are set up to definitively determine the rights of people in those stressful times."
In fact, a loud-mouthed cameraman had unintentionally tipped off the Branch-Davidians that the ATF was coming. 4 ATF agents were killed and 16 injured in the resulting ambush. The Waco TV station WXTX settled out of court with the Feds for $15 million and neither that cameraman or the TV reporter with him ever worked in journalism again. The only "retreat" that took place at Waco on either side was the initial cease-fire 45 minutes after the ambush, when both sides collected their dead and wounded. The WXTX cameraman and reporter were the only journalists on site at the time and considering that it was already known that WXTX had made the ambush possible it seems at least possible that a camera got punched.
"The JFK assassination kinda exposed a lot of corruption in government. They did stuff like illegally remove JFK'S body from Dallas and almost got in a shootout with the local police because of it." A lot of people will excuse the behavior of the feds and secret service because in the initial moments after this occured there was a lot of uncertainty about just what was going on. It's a bullshit excuse though. Laws, particularly laws that outline roles and responsibilities of different bodies of government are created mostly for our of the ordinary circumstances like in the after effects of unusually catastrophic events.
Coroner Earl Rose was correct to insist on a local autopsy and he did stand in the doorway of Parkland with one officer hoping to blockade the Secret Service but stepped aside after some loud argument. "Almost got into a shootout" is silly bullshit.
Corruption seems like an unjust conclusion considering that there is zero evidence of fraud, deception, or self-gain in the Secret Service's action. They were under direct orders to deliver the body and Jacqueline Kennedy to Air Force One so that the new President could be sworn in. The Dallas Police were famously corrupt and the city famously disliked Kennedy so there were some legitimate security concerns in the first hours after the assassination.
Federal law has since been updated to give the Secret Service full authority regarding any presidential assassination post-mortem.
"If Pro makes an argument that you do not accept but Con ignores it, do you give Pro credit for the argument?"
When voting on a subjective debate, no such criteria need apply.
My bad, Oromagi.
lol. everybody does that. It's Oro+Magi as in Spanish for gold + Latin for Zoroastrian wizard/king (i.e. the three magi)
it was your burden to substantiate that only the broad definition of Atheism should apply"
No, it isn't.
First of all, just step back and think about what you're saying... Almost no one ever changes their mind after reading one debate.
That's why it's called a burden. If you don't think it's your job to convince me the voter that you're right, then I am unlikely to find your argument persuasive, am I? If we're just judging form than the majority of debates are roughly even. I don't have to be convinced to find your argument more persuasive but I do have to convinced you're trying to persuade.
"No, it's not and if you think it is then we have identified why you lost this debate. Should does not indicate subjectivity. Should is used in conjunction with a predicate to indicate an instruction or policy recommendation. If you are adding correctly, 2 + 2 should always equal 4"
"Origami, I've read many of your posts and have come to respect you as a DART member, "
thanks! .... It's oromagi.
"this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard you say."
well then, not too many posts then.
"DEFINITIONS ARE NECESSARILY SUBJECTIVE. Why? Because every word ever uttered in human history was made up by a person, and definitions change over time based on how society chooses to use them. That's literally the definition of subjective.
SUBJECTIVE is
"Formed, as in opinions, based upon a person's feelings or intuition, not upon observation or reasoning; coming more from within the observer than from observations of the external environment."
To the extent that lexicographers earnestly strive to observe and accurately report semantic content and change over time, dictionaries are reasonably objective sources for defining commonplace understandings of words and terms. Certainly, Wiktionary is a more objective source than the atheist's handbook or whatever because Wiktionary is not striving to make a point about atheism. Dictionaries are of little help to people trying to get around the common understanding of words.
Let's note:
"A subjective claim, on the other hand, is not a factual matter; it is an expression of belief, opinion, or personal preference. A subjective claim cannot be proved right or wrong by any generally accepted criteria."
That is, once you have claimed that this debate is SUBJECTIVE, you have forsworn any objection to the basis for any vote.
DART Voting Policy:
For non-moderated debates, Winner Selection voting is strongly encouraged.
Examples of non-moderated debates include...
Subjective Competitions
Differentiated from normal debates, rap battles, poetry slams, talent shows, and the like, are too subjective to a different standard than what these rules are designed to enforce.
"Perhaps you are unfamiliar with Hume's "IS (vs) OUGHT" problem (also known as "Hume's Guillotine")"
Hume would be the first to point out Double_R's is/ought'ing here.
strict atheism is logically incoherent therefore atheism should be redefined to its broadest sense. (Where is the value that logically incoherent concepts must be removed from the lexicon?)
strict atheists are functionally indistinguishable from broad atheists therefore atheism should be redefined to its broadest sense. (Where is the value that performatively similar ideologies must be condensed under the same name?)
If you really want a word to address an active belief in the non-existence of any dieties, there is already a term widely used for this: anti-theist.
Oops, You should re-read that definition for better comprehension.
opposed to belief in the existence of a god or gods
"anti-theism is the philosophical position that theism should be opposed."
"When [atheism is] defined narrowly as denying the existence of gods, the compatibility between atheism and anti-theism may appear more likely. If a person cares enough to deny that gods exist, then perhaps they care enough to attack belief in gods as well — but not always."
An agnostic has absolutely no way of knowing "that all conceivable gods are UNKNOWABLE".
When Thomas Huxley coined the term in 1869, he made no claims about the unknowable, only the known. " It simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe. Consequently, agnosticism puts aside not only the greater part of popular theology, but also the greater part of anti-theology"
All right, no response. I am going to proceed as I would with any undefined R1.
" what word will you apply to people who actively disbelieve in any deity? You are going to need a new word for that but you fail to offer any suggestions"
First of all, I never offered any suggestions because that's not relevant to the resolution.
Of course it is. You argued that the strict sense of the word is not useful but then refuse to show how we could live without it.
Second, it's not a redefinition. Nearly every dictionary includes lack of belief as one of it's definitions of atheism.
but throwing out the other definition as incoherent and useless would definitely count as redefinition.
I pointed this out and provided an example in the debate. I could have provided many more but didn't because Con never challenged it, he just ignored it as if the point was never made. If he didn't challenge it then the point stands regardless of whether you accept it. That's how debates work. If you say that the word bark should only apply to trees and never to dogs, you are changing the polysemous definition of the word.
"Third, agnosticism does not mean lack of belief. Agnosticism addresses knowledge. I explained this in detail in the debate. Did you read it?"
Yep. Agnosticism is the objective conclusion, Atheism is the subjective conclusion.
"Lastly, of you really want a word to address an active belief in the non-existence of any dieties, there is already a term widely used for this: strong atheist."
But you can't define the word strong atheist without using the strict sense of the word atheist. You have just refuted your case.
" So why you think it's incumbent on me or anyone else to provide a new term for it?"
Because you are the one who wants to change the way things work now.
"That's literally what the word "should" means. "
No, it's not and if you think it is then we have identified why you lost this debate. Should does not indicate subjectivity. Should is used in conjunction with a predicate to indicate an instruction or policy recommendation. If you are adding correctly, 2 + 2 should always equal 4. There's nothing inherently subjective about should.
How do you objectively determine what something should be?
By considering the facts without deference to personal feelings or interests. If all goes well, the sun should rise in the east tomorrow.
"That's nonsensical."
Nope.
"That's not how debates are judged. "
https://www.butte.edu/departments/cas/tipsheets/thinking/claims.html
" A subjective claim cannot be proved right or wrong by any generally accepted criteria."
To say that your debate is subjective is to argue away any rational expectation of righteousness. I can vote on a subjective debate any way I feel, by definition.
"It's not my job to convince you that I'm right, it's my job to make arguments that my opponent failed to refute. I did, because not only did he not refute them, he barely even addressed them."
False. It was your job to convince me you are right. As the initiator of this debate, it was your burden to substantiate that only the broad definition of Atheism should apply. PRO did show that plenty of proper atheists correctly apply the strict definition of the term and that was enough to refute. I agree that CON did little to address your cases but I don't buy that a strict atheist must individually reject every possible theory of god in order to reject them categorically and nobody should buy your argument that the strict definition is less useful than the broad definition. We can always say we mean atheism in the agnostic sense but we can't say we mean agnosticism in the atheistic sense. Your preferred meeting is more fungible and therefore less inherently useful then the indispensable meaning of the word. CON didn't do a great job of convincing but in this case, he didn't have to- the burden was on you.
Which makes "semantic change" aka "how people use the word" more important than how the dictionary defines the word.
Academics and scientists rely on dictionaries to document that semantic change and so "how people use the word" is pretty much the same as the dictionary definition in common English usage. Certainly, among debaters, the dictionary usage is going to count as a manifestly superior source to personal observations.
By what mechanism do you believe dictionaries change their definitions ?
By observing and reporting semantic change. What definition of AUTHORITATIVE suggests that dictionaries can't be updated?
3RU7AL: "I have never argued in favor of NOT including both definitions."
Also 3RU7AL: (defining atheism)" Atheism is one thing: A lack of belief in gods. Atheism is ***not*** an affirmative belief that there is no god nor does it answer any other question about what a person believes.
(iff) dictionaries ARE considered AUTHORITATIVE (then) the definitions of words can never change
says who?
If we eliminate the use of ATHEISM in the first, strictest sense, what word should we then use to talk about theories that deny the existence of god altogether?