15. Logical Fallacies

An author with the username NMCDONAL writes this intriguing article. He starts off by saying that being a Christian means that one will eventually have to get into arguments about faith and moral issues, and too many people do it the wrong way, which can make them lose the argument or undermine their religion. The author adverts against attacking another's character, wrongly describing a type of person, using false analogies, arguing for extremes, and assuming that confusion equals cause (science can't explain something, so the cause is God). He also advises against assuming that two simultaneous occurrences are correlated, assuming that the audience is unbiased, making false dillemmas, comparing different moral events (like abortion and the holocaust), meaningless questions (if un unstoppable force meets an immovable object), consequence arguments (if it's unpleasant, it's false), red herrings (changing the argument), begging the question (assuming premises rather than explaining them), and appealing to ignorance.

The greatest logical fallacy I ever heard involved moral equivalence and begging the question. A little boy, son of some acquaintances, was sad that his pet rat (which he'd owned for less than a week) died. He overheard his older brother saying he missed his friends who'd been away for years, and the boy retorted by saying that his pet's death was worse because the rat was cuter than his friends. It would be funny if the little boy weren't so adamant on his point.