kiki5711 wrote:FBM wrote:kiki5711 wrote:Convincing to rationalist? Everyone who thought OJ was guilty was a rationalist. What do you think they were? All crazy? All billions of people were just too damn emotional?
At one time, most of the human population thought the world was flat and rested upon an infinite series of turtles. Did you read the info about the
argumentum ad populum fallacy? That's what rationalism is all about, not which group who believes what has the most members. Rationalism is about utilizing one's evolved reasoning capacity to moderate what one's unbridled emotions suggest. Without it, we'd all be in the Dark Ages still, praying to this or that favorite deity in hopes of eternal bliss. What I'm saying is nothing new. It's been around for centuries. Granted, it's largely ignored even today.
There's other lawyers , thousands, who could argue very well against Derschowitz "interpretation" and conclusion.
They would be relevant authorities, also. Let's hear from them. Got any links?
Bringing ancient history into this matter does nothing but saddlebags the subject. We are talking about today, not 100 yrs ago.
What it does is to bring hundreds of years of advances in rational thinking to bear on the present, from Aristotle on. Ignoring those advances is the very reason mobs still hold sway in such places as Afghanistan, Libya, Israel and, well...the US. The rejection of theism(s) is based on this, and to abandon rationality as it applies to everyday life, rather than just in abstract situations, is at best myopic.
kiki, please understand that I have nothing against Martin, Zimmerman, black people, Latinos, white people or you. But I do have something against sloppy reasoning, and I take every opportunity I can to urge people to educate themselves in rational argumentation. Why? Maybe because I'm a Philosophy major, but beneath that is a larger desire for a more rational way of living for everyone, minus the vigilante justice/religious crusades/nationalism/racism, etc etc. Emotions have their place, but so does reasoning. Emotions require no skill, but reasoning does, and neither emotions nor reasoning should be given unbridled reign. Instead, each should be afforded its proper balance in everyday life. I don't mean this as an insult, but you seem to be driven almost exclusively by emotion, and therefore commit one logical fallacy after another in an effort to convince others to share your emotional convictions.
Yes, I agree that racism is bad, murder is bad, etc, but I'm unwilling to commit an inductive fallacy and claim to know more about what happened on the night Martin was killed than I actually do. You have Zimmerman tried, convicted, sentenced and executed on mere rhetoric and slivers of evidence. You don't know what happened on that night, you don't know Zimmerman's nor Martin's actions nor motivations, and neither do I. How about foregoing hasty judgements and letting the evidence speak for itself? All you're doing is giving racists fuel and ammunition due to your repeated logical fallacies and refusal to acknowledge what the skeptical/rational/intellectual community acknowledges as basic reasoning and argumenation skill. Please do yourself and those for whom you're stumping a favor by educating yourself on the basics of logical reasoning, beginning, I'd suggest, with familiarizing yourself with the most basic and well-known logical fallacies. Wiki has them listed and explained.
"A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it." ~ H. L. Mencken
"We ain't a sharp species. We kill each other over arguments about what happens when you die, then fail to see the fucking irony in that."
"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion."
