Rant
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Burden of Proof (In Detail)
I don’t mean to beat the proverbial dead horse, but I want to explain in more detail what the Burden of Proof (BoP) is, and why it matters. Every opinion or belief has a reason, even if you’re not aware of it. You may be right, but if you can’t prove it, its not justified. The BoP is a way of getting people to believe you. Now, if you don’t care if someone believes you, then fine. You can skip reading this. But, if you do want people to believe you, then this is the best way to do it.
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The Epicurean Paradox
I recently pointed out that it’s not my job as an atheist to disprove the existence of gods. While this is true, it is a fun mental exercise. My favorite is the Epicurean Paradox. First, let’s examine the claim of a god’s existence. Most theologies attribute God with three traits. He is omnipotent (all powerful), omniscient (all knowing), and omnibenevolent (all loving). Some schools of thought add or remove from these three, but these are generally agreed upon by monotheists. Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh…
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Bad Arguments: Shifting The Burden of Proof
The misunderstanding of the burden of proof is one of the biggest reasons logical arguments with theists fail. The person making the claim has the burden of proof. That’s how it works. It’s your job to prove your point, not their job to prove you wrong. If you can’t defend your argument with proof, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wrong, but it does mean that there’s no reason to believe you.
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Yet Another Short Story About Me
People sometimes ask why I complain all the time. They usually mistake my chronic whinny lamentations as genuine unhappiness. This isn’t the case. It’s just my super power. Some people are math geniuses. Some are able to rebuild almost anything. I can deconstruct and bemoan anything.
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Bad Arguments: Personal Incredulity
Welcome to another edition of Bad Arguments. Today’s topic is Personal Incredulity, which is a subset of the the logical fallacy, Argumentum ad Ignorantiam (Argument from Ignorance). This is usually phrased as, “Well how else can you explain (insert topic that isn’t understood by the person)?”
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Why Is This News: Katy Perry vs. Islam
*sigh*. This is the first time that I’m tired of a story and I haven’t even started ranting about it. The only reason I’m even talking about this is because it is the perfect story for me. Everything about this story is utterly ridiculous. At no point in my life would I have thought I’d see “Katy Perry” and “Islam” in the same sentence. It’s like every pronoun in this story was an ad lib. The only good thing about this story is that it gave me an excuse to do a Google Image search for “Katy Perry.” That said, I have a lot to talk about, so let’s get…
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Minirant: Evolution vs. Creationism
With the Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham debate yesterday, I wanted to clarify one HUGE problem that never gets addressed. Creationism is not the rival to evolution. It’s the rival to the Big Bang and abiogenesis. In Mr. Ham’s opening argument, he accused schools of “imposing molecules to man evolution as fact.” That’s because it is. It also has nothing to do with the origin of the universe.
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Personal Awareness
By request, I’m going to complain about people who just seem out of it. You know, the type that don’t seem to know where they are or who do things that don’t make sense in their current situation. The analogy suggested to me was people who honk in traffic jams.
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Bad Arguments: Pascal’s Wager
Over the last few years, I’ve really started studying apologetics. For those who are unfamiliar with the term, “apologetics” is the discipline of defending a position, usually, religious positions. Anytime you hear someone defend or give a reason for their faith, that is called apologetics. This is a practice that has gone back as long as… well as long as people have defended their opinions. In general, and for this article, I’m limiting it to the defense of religious beliefs. Actually, I’m going to limit it even further, and talk about one argument, Pascal’s Wager.
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In Which I Try To Say Positive Things
If you’ve spent longer than 5 minutes on this site or in my company, you know I complain about everything. For the sake of challenging myself, both creatively and as a writer, I asked my friends to name topics about which I had to say nice things. The goal here was for them to take things that are generally bad or have negative connotations, and I had to find the bright side in them. I only got three suggestions, the first one being ridiculously easy. So to fill in this article, I picked my most common complaints to see if I could say nice things about them too. Well let’s…
