On 9/17/21 6:36 PM, olcott wrote:
> On 9/17/2021 5:11 PM, Malcolm McLean wrote:
>> On Friday, 17 September 2021 at 19:41:45 UTC+1, olcott wrote:
>>>
>>> A straw man (sometimes written as strawman) is a form of argument and an
>>> informal fallacy of having the impression of refuting an argument,
>>> whereas the real subject of the argument was not addressed or refuted,
>>> but instead replaced with a false one.
>>>
>> I wrote a book called "12 Common Atheist Arguments (refuted)" where I
>> presented 12 common arguments made by atheists, and refuted them.
>> Inevitably I was accused of presenting "strawman" argments. However
>> when I asked "how has that argument been weakened and why is the
>> case I presented weak?" I didn't get many sensible replies. I did get one
>> for the "Evil Bible" argument. A chap on alt.atheism used to post
>> scriptures
>> such as the ones demanding the extermination of the Amalekites.
>> He said that his posts were an argument against God as most Christians
>> conceived Him, but not a God of grandeur and vengeance as the Ancient
>> Israelites conceived Him. But he did concede that his goal was to show
>> that
>> God didn't exist.
>>
>> So he kind of had a point, but not a very strong one.
>>
>> If you can't explain how your arguments have been weakened, and why the
>> weakened versions are weak, but the corrected versions are stronger,
>> then you can't really plead "strawman". It's rhetorically a dangerous
>> plea,
>> since it involves conceding that there are weak arguments that can be
>> advanced for your case.
>>
>
> I don't really care whether others understand that none of what has been
> presented as a rebuttal can accurately be construed as such mostly
> because hardly anyone here really cares about that. Their goal is to
> look like that have provided a rebuttal to others here.

Then why do you keep on making the claim.

Either you care, and are working on cleaning up your proof, and thus
need to take into account the refutations, and either show how they
don't actually refute your statement or fix your proof so the
refutations don't apply.

or, you don't care, and think you are done, so then you should just
write the paper and submit it.

You are basically falling into Einstein's definition of insanity.

>
> Of the people here you may be the only one that has any serious interest
> in the actual truth.
>
> If you pay very close attention you will notice that when I make a point
> that X is proved by A,B,C, every rebuttal always changes the subject
> away from the exactly precise proposition of X into another proposition
> entirely that is very subtly different than X, hence an actual case of
> strawman.
>

Normally thats because the X that A, B, C prove isn't the X that you
claim to be true due to proof.

Also, normally at least one of the A, B, C aren't actually true if read
in the same manner as needed to combine to prove your claimed X.