That’s not it. The thing is that you treat her like an unintellectual kid
I didn’t treat her like a kid at all. I treated her like an equal who made a claim. I asked for the source/reference. If you claim that someone wrote something, and use it to prove a point, then you’d better be able to give the reference so that it can be checked.
I would have said precisely the same thing to anybody who made a claim like that. you do NOT make a claim like that and then say ‘you go look it up.’ You make the claim, you provide the resource. If Kimmie is old enough to participate on this forum, then she’s old enough to learn that very fundamental lesson of debate.
That’s when she finds information that you could have found a lot earlier because it is on the official website of your church. If you cannot find the official information spread by your church how can you portray it in any way?
I’m not the one making the claim, Janet. She is.
This is how it works, both in the academic world (even in middle school or high school!) and in any other sort of debate between adults; the one who makes the claim has to provide the references. The whole thing. If you say 'Abraham Lincoln said this…" and you get asked to show WHERE Abraham Lincoln 'said this," then you’d better be able to show where he said it.
If you claim that Elder Russel Nelson said something, and someone asks you where it is written or when he said it, then you’d better be able to give the journal, the article, the publication date and the page number…EXACTLY the way you would if your teacher or professor asks you for the reference for something you quote in a paper. EXACTLY the way a newspaper would have to provide the references for quotes they use.
Anyone can say that Elder Nelson said something—but how would I know that they were telling the truth? A basic principle of debate is; you make the claim, you back it up. It is NOT the job of your opponent to prove you wrong. EVER, except in one very special case:
If you make a negative claim…such as, oh…“there has never been a fertile male tortoiseshell cat,” then all your opponent has to do is find one fertile male tortoise shell cat to prove you wrong.
However, if you make a positive claim, like…“Percy is a tortoise shell cat who has fathered nine litters” then it is NOT my job to prove that no Percy ever existed. It is YOUR job to show me a picture of Percy and the DNA evidence of his offspring.
In this case, Kimmie claimed that Elder Nelson said that we did genealogy work for the following reasons:
kimmilittle:
to Their teachings teach that by ‘binding’ and ‘gathering’ The Twelve Tribes Of Israel…It will cause a Biblical prophesy to occur.
They are trying to count everyone on earth AND "bind’ “gather” them to LDS to account for the Ten Lost Tribes…
In that same post, she accused Mormons of being dishonorable, dishonest and secretive–and all I did was ask for the reference. She has no basis to be offended, and neither do you, at least, not reasonably.
As to her being just ‘a kid,’ well…how am I supposed to know that?
Oh, well, if she is, she has just learned something important about formal arguments and the rules of debates.
