Is Mise,

While Jesus was an immense improvement over Mohammed, I’d stop short of saying that there’d be no problems if everyone followed him.

Yes, loving one’s neighbour as oneself, the golden rule, turning the other cheek, and smashing up the business setups of those who exchange currency in temples are all good and well (okay, maybe not that last one). But if we were to all follow the divisiveness in Jesus’ teachings (Matthew 10:35-38, John 14:6), and his apparent endorsement of the problematic and immoral notion of vicarious redemption, then we could be in a lot of trouble.

Indeed, these have caused immense problems over the ages.

Dear Josephus,

You wrote;

“You fail to recognise current facts, true followers of Christ take no slaves in war.”

Oh please.

One of the most famous Christian hymns is Amazing Grace. Beautiful song about salvation through revelation. The only problem is the author John Newton kept captaining slave ships for another 3 years after that. Why? Because so called salvation was for him and not the other human beings he inflicted so much misery in. He was part of a Christian trade supplying the Church of England slave plantations in the West Indies where they were branded C of E on their chests.

Let's not forget the priest in the Christian Southern US churches who used NT passages to claim legitimacy for their slavery practices.

There is a very good case to be made that the Christian US prison system is just slavery in another guise with prisoners responsible for billions of dollars in economic product.
http://returntonow.net/2016/06/13/prison-labor-is-the-new-american-slavery/

Hi AJ,

Reductio ad absurdum ?

You seem keen to catch me out on a fallacy there, Joe.

Good luck with that. I take great care to avoid fallacious reasoning, and so far, that's served me well.

As for the reductio ad absurdum? No, I didn’t commit it because I didn’t draw any absurd conclusions, let alone based on false assumptions. The logical form of the reductio ad absurdum is as follows:

Assume P is true.
From this assumption, deduce that Q is true.
Also deduce that Q is false.
Thus, P implies both Q and not Q (a contradiction, which is necessarily false).
Therefore, P itself must be false.
(http://goo.gl/7Otr3S)

An example of this is a creationist trying to disprove evolution by claiming that if evolution were true, then we’d see monkeys giving birth to humans.

What I did do, however, was trace and attribute the origins of our values back to more ultimate causes that don't suffer from the chicken-and-egg dilemmas that proximal causes suffer from.

You think so ?

" ...... the Christian US prison system is just slavery in another guise ...... "

The US prison system is a Christian prison system ? How ? And even if it somehow was, so what ? [Straw man] What has that to do with all the spin-offs from the interaction and development Hellenic, Judaic and Christian ideas over a few thousand years, that included the Enlightenment ? [Teleology] Are you suggesting that the Enlightenment is responsible for the US Christian prison system, or is that my own reductio ad absurdum ?

Hmmm. Now I’m not sure who you are (or have been) talking to, Joe.

Anyway, I’m encouraged by your attempts to identify logical fallacies. More people should do it. The discussions around this place would be far more intelligent and productive if we were all aware of the common fallacies and took care to avoid them. Just try not to get too zealous with it all and start seeing fallacies where they don’t exist. People like that are really irritating:

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=5547&page=0#151714

(Funny spoiler: He commits the Courtier’s Reply fallacy two posts later.)

On another note, I had to chuckle at one of the examples of the Reductio ad absurdum that the page I linked to provided:

Example #2:
If everyone lived his or her life exactly like Jesus lived his life, the world would be a beautiful place!