Runa216 said:
GameOver22 said:
Runa216 said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
How is the OP a straw man? Sounds like a pretty accurate representation of religion to me. perhaps not all religious people, but by the sounds of it, it seems like that the OP is only complaining about the types of religious people described in the OP. The repeated insistences of "you can believe what you want" would indicate that, as long as you're responsible about your faith you should be allowed to practice it without fear of persecution. Sounds to me like the complaint is specific to people who try to use God as an argument to hate, judge, or restrict something. In which case, the argument is sound.
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Generally, if you want to criticize someone's argument, you take the strongest form of their argument and criticize it.....if you don't, you committ a straw-man fallacy because you are criticizing a weaker form of the argument. As you said, not all religious people subscribe to the views expressed in the OP, and the gay rights argument that is presented is clearly a straw-man.....because some religious people accept gay marriage and others who don't support gay marriage just don't utilize that argument, which really limits the validity of this claim:
"The issue is that religious arguments require so many leaps of faith and sometimes flat out faulty logic to get to the conclusion they do. Take the gay rights argument"
As I said in a previous post, taking a non-literal translation of the Bible actually solves most of the OP's criticisms of the gay rights argument (except #4,#5, and #8)......and interestingly, the fundamentalist strains of Christianity are relatively new. People as far back as Thomas Aquinas advocated for non-literal translations of the Bible, and these interpretations tend to provide better representations of religion. The OP fails to take this into account. That's why its a straw-man argument.
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I may be mistaken, but Im pretty sure the OP wasn't going for "you can't prove gay is bad through the bible", more like "You can't use the bible to prove anything, here's an example." The argument wasn't against the gay debate, it was against the idea of using the bible as evidence, and simply using the gay debate as an example.
In which case, it's not a strawman at all.
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Maybe....if it was, it was quite unclear because there are quite a few times where the OP is making a broad-brush strokes, such as in the title of the thread, where it says "this is why I don't like debating religion".....which applies to religion in general, not just a fundamentalist conception of it.
There is also at least one time in the thread where the OP just flat-out accused someone of being a Biblical literalist with no real justification.....where she was subsequently corrected. It kind of raises the question of whether she recognizies the difference between religious belief and fundamentalist religious belief.
