You have made a straw-man. You are trying to make it appear that I was making an absolute statement transcending all conditions. This is not true.
I have not intentionally misrepresented your argument; I don’t think that I misrepresented it at all. You began this thread with the statement “[t]his is an argument i [sic] have made supporting the legality of gay rights.” You did not prove this. I don’t concede that you proved anything. But let’s say that you did. Your conclusion is a conditional statement: if we support separation of church and state, then we must support gay rights. What if we don’t support separation of church and state?
An argument is valid if and only if its conclusion is true whenever its premises are all true. An argument is sound if and only if it is valid and its premises are true. Is your argument valid or sound?
Fine, I won’t dispute your intent; you did not, however, make your intent clear. So, you did get the conclusion that you want, but you didn’t get it in a valid way. Moreover, your premises are not beyond dispute: you need to justify them.
A set of statements is logically consistent if and only if it is not possible to derive a contradiction from them. Thus, consistency is essentially the bare minimum you want in a theory.
No, for a number of reasons, among them:
First of all, I really don’t care if you agree with the argument or not. Secondly if you don’t want me to think you are a deceptive person you will refute my argument as it really is, instead of giving a false representation of it and then saying that its false. If you don’t support the separation of church and state then obviously the argument doesn’t apply to you, and I never said that it did.
I also don’t care if I agree with it or not. That’s not the point. The point is validity and soundness. No one will take an invalid argument seriously. Validity is independent of context. It makes no sense to “agree” or “disagree” with an argument. On the other hand, soundness is dependent on context. The premises may or may not be true. You have to convince your audience that they’re true. It’s not necessarily their fault if you fail to convince them.
I have not given a false representation of your argument. In fact, in my original analysis of your argument, I made an effort to interpret your premises fairly–I even pointed out objections to my objections. In any case, you err in thinking that an argument can “apply” to some people but possibly not to others. Again, it’s either valid or invalid.
I don’t care if I fail to convince them. Its not relevant to its validity if they don’t understand the argument.
:yawn:I encourage you to do the same. Also read up on how to avoid making strawmen; then you won’t have to make up excuses after the fact.
This is not a debate. You have turned it into a circle-jerk.
If this was a real debate, you would have started out by explaining why marriage is a right. This a point you have steadfastly ignored.
There is only one place where it seems to me that your argument falls through, which is that the separation of church and state does not NECESSARILY mean policies must be promulgated on utilitarian grounds.
Thank you.
Why would you post an argument to a public message board if your aim was not to convince people of it?
I haven’t made any “strawmen” (which, technically, isn’t a logical fallacy anyway).
Its irrelevant. If there is a split between state and religion, then a state cannot rationally make judgements according to religious concepts or beliefs. It cannot enforce one belief system over an another. Just because you believe something is wrong doesn’t necessarily mean that its wrong. They can however make pragmatic inferences that benefit society in terms of survival; and if those inferences happen to coincide with religious ideas then this fact is purely coincidental.
Its irrelevant. Unless you can give a pragmatic reason for why the state should support state marriage in general but not give that opportunity to gay couples your argument will fail because your belief or conscience to contrary is really irrelevant. The secular state has no true knowledge of objective moral values, and thus cannot rationally act upon them (even though perhaps they do). It has knowledge of pragmatic benefits only.
Moral retardation was inevitable as soon as there was a split between church and state. however, given that the church was prone to corruption given state power, perhaps it was the lesser of two evils.So excuse me, I have not been following this thread since it began. Is it your position that you reject the Catholic Bishops’ efforts to halt the movement of our society toward a state of moral retardation because that would not be pragmatic?
Its an informal fallacy.Like I said, a strawman, strictly speaking, is not a logical fallacy; it’s a misrepresentation of an argument. I don’t think that I’ve done this.
If you have difficulty understanding what that means…here is a wiki
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
What ever floats your boat.
No, I’m serious. Was it your intention to show separation of church and state inevitably leads to support of “gay rights”, and that consequently we should reject separation of church and state?