Bill O'Reilly: No True Christian would kill Norwegians.

Wicknight wrote: »

By me spending an awful lot of time refuting it. If you are just going to ignore this then what is the point in continuing?

You seem to be just wasting my time at this point. I'm back to the original conclusion that you are being highly disingenuous in this discussion.

Wicknihgt. You've made two posts since I first made those arguments. I've quoted the areas where you have responded to the argument. And then where you have responded to my response. You did not spend any time refuting anything.

You certainly have given a version, both of your notions of Christianity, what it means to follow Jesus, and what you consider someone trying or not trying is.

I reject all of this, and have explained why. Again if you are just going to ignore it I really can't see the point in continuing.

You keep insisting we are not at an impasse and then demonstrating otherwise.

You haven't really explained why either. With the trying argument, we were going along fine, and then you just thought to quote a single paragraph and say you don't like a sentence. I've taken that criticism on board, in that quoted paragraph there was some bad english. But no "doublespeak" and I stand by my use of " not 'not trying".

Malty T
Might, I suggest you gents forget about all the previous posts and start over on a clean slate. Sometimes it helps a discussion to start it all over again instead of nit picking over what was said and what was meant. Ye're only humans after all.

Thank you for the advice Malty T. We have already done this a few times. Wicknight was fairly resistent however, and simply assserts that he's addressed all the arguments. Even though the point was to restate them.

Could you do us a favour, and settle something. Look at the top section of my post #294. And then look at all wicknight's responses to this argument. You don't even have to read it in detail. Just enough for you to say whether or not you consider it to be a proper argument. This is only like 4 posts in, so it shouldn't use up too much of your time. Could you then tell us and me the extent to which Wicknight has refuted those arguments. And quote the his passages (This may be asking alot, but it's only 4 posts worth. My original argumet #294. Wicknight's #296 (there are only 2 sentences). THe top of my post #297. After this wicknight just satarts talking about "not not" and then in #303 I summarise the situation .

Just as a clean slate makes things more fresh, so too will someone else explaining the arguments make it easier. If you do think that he has refuted those arguments then I will accept that I should stop posting.

It's not my definition of trying at all. I've already told you, that I was saying "from an action alone we can neither infer that a person has tried, or not tried". There is a phrasing which doesn't use the comical "not not" but it's completely equivilent to it. "booking the holiday is not trying, but it is also not 'not trying'. That means the same thing as the sentence up there. I don't think you've actually read that post at all wicknight.

Why do you keep making these contentless points which completely ignore everything in the posts preceding them? Is it to push your other obviously wrong statements off the page?

I pointed out that your examples were not similar to your statement about christians. The Christians you've met have "not loved you", you've explicitly said many times, that you did not mean that they were nasty to you, or anything like that, but just that there were no visible manifestations of their loving you.

Their not loving you is in no way mutually exclusive to their trying to love you. That is the whole point of the word "try". As in you can "try to do something" but still not do it. Again, this was actually already said in all those posts up there. Perhaps you have forgotten, but many times you said that the Christians simply did not love you. You rejected all notions that they were unpleasent or that they hated you, or that they were arrogant or any of those things.

It's patently obvious now that you didn't read the above posts. You must have been too busy quoting single sentences to point out as funny sounding for the likes of Ant there. And it's extremely rude for you to now go calling "my notions" stupid, when you have clearly demonstrated that you didn't follow the arguments or perhaps even read them.

So, if you accept that it's possible for someone to try to do something without actually accomplishing that thing, then what did every Christian that you have met do that was mutually exclusive to their trying to love you? Even if you don't accept it you can answer that question actually. And why do you think that every chrisitian you've met considers you their enemy? (this is the meaning we can easily infer from your singling out "love your enemy" and your statement that you only meant those few specific teachings of Jesus)

And also remember that I pointed out, if those Christians you've met were at least nice people, then that would be positive evidence that they were at least on the path to loving you, which would in turn imply that they might be trying to love you. But for the moment you can just go ahead and answer the question.

Ok ,that's not true, and I could go through your posts and show you why, but to avoid another "I have my own definitions of all those words". Could you just tell us what those visible manifestations of their not trying to love you were? What has every christian you've met done which is mutually exclusive to their trying to love you?

Edit: Regarding your edit, did you not see the questions I included in the post there? You have not once given us any examples of "manifestations of non-love" other than the likes of "you're strawmanning me, that's one". So is it that every christian that you have met has disagreed with you in some way? Did you actually only read the first paragraph?

Edit2: And I can accept perfectly that there can be manifestations of their not loving you that aren't along the lines of them being nasty. But since you have given no others, and not responded to my arguments relating to "being nice would be evidence that they may be trying to love you" then I can come to no other conclusion.

So far you have given "dishonest strawmanning" as an example of something which would be an instance of their not trying to love you. In fairness, we could easily describe this sort of thing as nasty, but that's another matter.

Wicknight wrote: »

Detailing every encounter I've ever had with a Christian would be a time consuming and some what pointless excerise.

So in the interests of brevity lets just us you as an example.

You have purposely misrepresented what I've said in order to gain a debating advantage

You have called my statement bigoted based on a false assumption, and when corrected about this false assumption continued to use such heated terms.

You have continuously refused to listen to clarification of points or statements.

Well Wicknight, I can only categorically say that this is not true. And you probably know as much. Since this is not the first time that I have pointed out this back tracking tactic (that is not only in this thread) of yours, and I'm not the only one to have ever pointed it out.

Many times in the debate I gave you a chance to use more precise language, but I could not then, and will not now, accept that the words you used meant what you said they meant. Again, if you'd like to , we could take the first statement ("active pursuit of behaviour contrary") and the second (The one that starts with "certain" and which could perhaps be modifed to "abandonment of loving wicknight because they have strawmanned him") and take then to an impartial english speaker and see if they think the two statements mean the same thing.

When given the option of two assumptions based on what I've said you have consistently chosen the more negative assumption rather than giving me the benefit of the doubt or asking for clarification.

When given the opportunity to move on to different topics and drop topics that are going no where you have consistently strove to have the last say, even if such statements were merely to point out to me how you were actually right all along.

Your motivation in this discussion has clearly been to win points often at the expense of the accuracy of your representation of my position, often resorting to cheap attempts to humiliate me.

And so on and so on.

Now of course I don't for one minute expect you to agree with any of this, but then that is the problem isn't it. You aren't trying to agree with it, you aren't trying to see my point or trying to accept what I'm saying. You aren't trying to love me, or trying to treat me with the respect you would treat someone you do love.

While the details will be different for each and every encounter I've had with other Christians, the over all theme of these encounters remains the same.

If you want to claim that throughout this entire debate you have been trying to love me, go ahead. But I think that will do little more than raise the laughter of anyone who is still reading this very off topic discussion.

Anyway, the rest is a matter of reading comprehension. Which I have more than once given you the oppurtunity to stop discussing. And you'll notice that we have stopped discussing it. You gave me a clearer statement, and it is that one that I have stuck with and quoted. You can perhaps accuse me of being slow on the uptake but you can't say that I have refused clarification everytime it was given.

So, just like this argument. Every time you've had an argument with a christian they have straw manned you deliberately. Is that what you mean when you say "every christian I've met has abandoned following the principles of Jesus"?.

This is still an absurd thing to say. Since you obviously don't mean "true christian", since if you did the sentence would be tautological, then that's alot of people. It's not a possibilty that every christian that you've met has engaged you in debate and strawmanned you. Obviously this isn't waht you mean. Even still, it's not really possible that all the internet christians you have met have just strawmanned you over and over.

Why are you assuming this is deliberate? The reason I chose the interpretation I did is that the other was logically inconsistent. I tried to show you that in some of the longer posts, where I was accused of "having a conversation with myself".

So while I do disagree with your estimation of me, is what your saying that "Every christian I've met has been dishonest when debating about anything". Of course statements of the kind "all religious people are dishonest" are very common around here, based on the pervailing set of assumptions used, but I don't think I am straw manning you when I say that your statement was of a different kind.

And just an extra, I've said asked you "Is this statement based on the fact that christians have disagreed with you on the internet?". From your response here it appears that it is.

A further point is that if you look at why they were strawmanning you, you still come up with some pretty negative statements.

They lied and misrepresented you to make themselves feel good at your expense. - Selfish, dishonest, not nice.
They lied and misrepresented you to make you feel bad from losing the argument. - Nasty, dishonest, they don't like or hate you, etc.

So either way you have not nice, nasty etc. as the general theme of your interaction with christians.

Again, I think your problem is that you aren't able to recognise the logical or probabilistic implications of what you say. I've pointed that out before.

Also hilariously "mutually exclusive to loving you" is pretty close to your original meaning of "opposite to loving you". So, thanks to how wonderfully close your argument was to being circular, you've completely contradicted almost everything you've said, and undermined your starting statement.

Not only was I not strawmanning you, but your saying that I was strawmanning you was the basis for your bigotted little statement in these latter posts. So first of all, you don't know I was strawmanning you, this is definitive proof that I wasn't, and furthermore, this casts doubt on your saying that every christian you've ever met has strawmanned you.

You knew what you meant from the start, changed your meaning to suit yourself, and engaged in a whole host of other sophist tacits, only to come back with "mutually exclusive to loving" and an example which shows that this does indeed mean "nasty things such as dishonest trickery".

Here is the clip in question.


"No one believing in Jesus commits mass murder."

Wicknight wrote: »

As I've explained, it doesn't.

If you want to claim you are actually being nasty fire away. But I would not assume you were being nasty just because you did these things. I would assume that, just like most people on an internet forum, you are focused on avoiding conceding anything and avoiding humiliation, even at the cost of accurately representing my points.

That does not require you to be nasty, just focused and prideful, neither of which I would consider nasty.

Furthermore, if you really have a problem with that, and you haven't given any arguments to say that dishonesty isn't nasty. And many people can easily consider dishonesty nasty, I certainly do. I consider dishonest trickery which would make someone else looking falsely wrong as nasty.

But that doesn't matter. You can say that every christian you've met has "either been dishonest, nasty etc." I did make this clear in my posts. Anyway, in your post here you are not really addressing my arguments, but picking and choosing sentence long springboards for irrelevent passages. I'll go more into this towards the end.

Now, just to mark out the difference between my making arugments where "you're not addressing my arguments" is the conclusion, and your asserting that I am wrong. I very clearly gave you the reasons.

No usage of the term nasty can say that you cannot use the term nasty to describe dishonest and disrespectful trickery in a debate, for the sake of self aggradisment, or for the sake of humiliating your opponent. So, more on these matters towards the end. Just remember that in my posts I left lots of room for the subjectivity of the term nasty. You again chose to ignore this in your post, and focus instead on trying to present my argument as being "dishonest= nasty, under all circumstances". Whether or not this is the case my argument stands.

Again you can be nasty doing all this stuff, but I would not assume that of you.

Well it's not much of a distinction, certainly not one I would recognise. But someone who does nasty things is what I would consider a nasty person. And it's perfectly acceptable to say something like "that was a nasty waitress" without meaning that he/she was inherently and always nasty. What is important is that you are saying that every christian you've met has done something "mutually exclusive to loving you". Be this dishonest trickery nastiness, etc.

Being prideful is not mutually exclusive to loving you . Again you are just hiding from what you actually said. So you are firstly just assuming the truth of our earlier argument which you for so long wanted to move on from, and second you are avoiding talking about what is actually in question. Even though it's very clear now that I haven't strawmanned you once, and clearly supported every interpretation of your posts with text, and even though you were caught red handed in one of your "I never said thats", and have now been caught again saying something which amounts to as much as what I said you were saying earlier. Your desire to maintain that I have strawmanned you, though irrelevent to the present discussion, can only be to lay this impression on the minds of those people who haven't even read the thread but perhaps are glancing over these last few pages. That is a very "dishonest" debating tactic.


We are not talking about the end goal for which people may or may not be nasty or dishonest. But that they were nasty. This doesn't mean permanently, or inherently, it just means that in the ligth of your statement every christian you've met has actively engaged something nasty or dishonest to you.

They are also separate human characteristics.

Someone with a single minded mission to avoid admitting they were wrong, or a single minded mission to make their position sound more reasonable or someone they disagree with more unreasonable, is not necessarily being nasty.

If you disagree fair enough. We have already established you have some, er, peculiar notions that I do not share.

Yes, of course not necessarily. Again, it's really a worthless piece of sophistry to assume the truth of an earlier argument which you were demanding we move on from and using this to support your claims here. It's also a worthless piece of sophistry to try to support your general statement with reference only to this one statement, about which you cannot make such claims of certainty.

So, to say that I am prideful and trying to win points is one thing. I wouldn't accept it straight off the bat, but it's true of most people at most times. The difference is that you think that all christians you've met have had to lie or deceive you. One way of being prideful and showing my position to be reasonable would be to use reasonable arguments. Some people are pridefully because they genuinely have reasons to be. And some people actually use reasons in arguments. And you'll find alot more reasons and supported arguments in my posts than in yours.

In yours we have baseless assumptions predicated on the hope that people won't go back and read your posts. However, you know that I've read those posts. So coupled with the fact that you have often said "I'll let the other people decide whose right" you have demonstrated , more than once that it is infact you who are interested in point winning. What you are doing now is assuming this of everyone else. - Just notice something here, I've supported this claim with an argument. An argument based on things you actually definitely said. This is different from you just making assumptions about peoples intentions.

Now, while it's a possibility that I may be trying to "defend Christians" or "make myself look reasonable", I can tell you that my main desire in posting in this thread was to change your bigotted opinion.

If you had just admitted at the start that you were not interested in listening to me but had instead already made you mind up as to what you believe I must mean, irrespective of whether I mean it or not, you could have saved us an awful lot of time.

Once again we find ourselves at an impasse, where you simply refuse to accept what I'm telling you. Again can you explain the point of continuing if you are going to be like this?

Please tell me what it is you think that I haven't accepted? The only thing I don't accept are non standard usages of words. And that's not really an impasse, but rather a deliberate tactic of yours when your little tin man cycle reaches its finish.

You go-
-Statement- I didn't say that - I didn't mean that- those words don't mean that - And then it normally ends on some weird definition of a word. (the first time this word was contrary, and now it's try and now it is nasty (an example of that is where you say that you have to know someone to be nasty to them, feel free to verify the incorrectness of htis with a dictionary). In both cases you were wrong, and I showed you with arguments. Arguments to which you did not respond but simply did things like "that's ridiculous" "we're at an impasse", "that's a mathematical forum".

For example, I could continue to show you why your usage of try is wrong, but you'd rather just assume the truth of your position.

Anyway, we're not at an impasse, we can go to the dictionary to determine who is using which words correctly, and if you would stop just doing things like assuming the unsupported truth of your statements and then giving reasons why people would believe these obvious mistruths then things would go alot more smoothly.

So , I also noticed you didn't really address those previous two posts I've made, but just launched into this sophistry. So if you'd like to continue the argument, you can continue back at those posts. And not pull the classic "write loads of irrelevent material on the screen so the people you're trying to impress don't see the actual arguments that you are avoiding addressing".

If you don't want to do that, but rather would like to respond to this post with repeated assertions of the truth of your arguments (and I've already shown you the unreliability of the truth of these arguments via the arguments about he nature of christianity, which I asked Malty T to confirm) then I am finished with the thread. I will take this non treatment as your tacit acceptance that you are wrong, and these later posts as simply confirmation that all these irrelevent "preserving your pride through trickery" were just you assuming that everyone else operates in the same way you do.

Wicknight wrote: »

Yes, that is my point. :rolleyes:

It's not one that anyone who speaks english would recognise.

It could be nastiness, it doesn't have to be. As I already told you

Wow. Just from a glance over It seems your entire argument is predicated on my saying that it has to be nastiness. You have again ignored my post completly. I mentinoed a million times and in that paragraph you chose to ignore that what you said amounts to saying that every christian is either:

Dishonest, nasty, not nice, etc. I.e that they all do things that are mutually exlcusive to trying loving you.

Here is from post #319:

raah!
Well Wicknight, what is important, and this was the point of my argument, that just as strawmanning, insofar as it is something "mutually exclusive to trying to love" is something which is negative nasty or dishonest. So too will any other statement you can say which is "mutually exclusive to trying to love".

And it's also clear that I had been saying this even earlier. You chose to continue on for all these pages despite very clearly being informed that you were mistaken.

Who exactly are you trying to convince of this? Me, yourself or those reading?



If you believe that I'm at a loss how to explain to you that isn't the case. It is not my position though and if you have to invent my position to try and demonstrate my bigotry this speaks some what to the weakness of your argument.

You might as well claim if people in Ireland brush their teeth they are racist in order to support the argument that Ireland is a racist country :rolleyes:

Do you think these are arguments? Refutations?

I'm sorry but are you genuinely not reading my posts? Cause I've told you already that they details relate to you specifically, not my interactions without Christians.

You have a talent for misunderstanding things but I've said this as clearly as one can twice already.

Actually wicknight, you clearly said that:

While the details will be different for each and every encounter I've had with other Christians, the over all theme of these encounters remains the same.

So this is pretty much the 6th or 7th time you've been caught directly lying about this "you're strawmanning me " nonsense.

Furthermore, I've pointed out to you, more than once that it doesn't matter. All that is necessary is the statement of yours that "they were engaged in behaviours mutually exclusive to trying to love". It would appear that this is another manifestation of your failure to understand any logical steps relating to an argument beyond the mere statement of a position. This is also reflected in your "arguments" which consist primarily of assertions.

So here is a summary of your tactics over the last few pages:

-You say that every christian you have met has engaged in behaviours mutually exclusive to their trying to love you. You cite "strawmanning" as an example of this. You cite dishonest and disrespectful relations with you on a forum as factors governing the overall theme of your interaction with christians. You've already contradicted what you've said earlier.

- I say, that while I would consider even this strawmanning to be nasty we can accomodate your twisted view of the word. We can just use the words you've used. It's dishonest and disrespectful.

-You without any argument whatsoever, start saying that (a) strawmanning is not nasty. And pretending that (b) My argument was based entirely on strawmanning and being nasty being hte same thing.

-I point this out to you, you still don't provide any arguments, but use smiley faces.

The point stands (whether or not strawmanning can be considered to be nasty, as I've pointed out a million times) that you have said that every single christian you have ever reacted with has in someway engaged in behaviours "mutually exclusive to loving you". While this does not mean that "they've all strawmanned you" it does mean that every christian you have met has struck you in some negative manner. Be it their being nasty, arrogant, not nice. Things which are "mutually exclusive to trying to love you".

You contradicted your whole "that's a strawman, I never said contrary" (you did) and your follow up of "contrary doesn't mean opposite" (it does), and the other follow up of "I didn't use it to mean opposite" (we can now see that you did, or at least that you used it in such away that would make no difference to the arguments made by me if you had used the word opposite).

So just to be clear, all that matters is that you said "behaviours mutually exclusive to loving you". If you'd actually like to attempt an argument, you can show how this does not imply something negative about every christian you have met. That's bigotted.