No true Scotsman would miss the opportunity!

But is it not true that all these sects mostly disagree on which parts of the doctrine(s) to ignore (or which parts to consider parables and morality tales rather than instructions, which amounts to the same thing)?
That is why I would say there are quite few "true Christians" (but probably not none), and likely the same goes for all other religions that contain differing sects/opinions. (EDIT:This made me realize that, while not a 'no true Scotsman' argument, it is a 'no pure Scotsman' argument, which is quite similar)

The fact that portions of the texts can be interpreted differently by different people is proof enough to me that none of them contain the "perfect word of god", because I think it could not be misinterpreted.

Absolutely....but you asked ME what I thought, not them. ;-)
I gave my opinion, which is often not the normal or accepted opinion.
There is a single, original text for each religion, the sects offer different interpretations and translations, but use the same originals. If you read the original bible in Latin (or whatever language the testaments etc. were first written in), you can interpret for yourself the exact 'words of god', not someone else's interpretation/translation.

As I see it, those you describe were/are religious, but if they stray from the text in any way, they are not (insert a specific sect of Christianity here). It's like the difference between a pick up basketball game and a professional one, they're both technically players of basketball, but only one is a "basketball player"
I have at least met many who SAID they thought that....but none that had the nerve to try it....but if your text says that's the prescribed treatment for an 'infidel' and you ignore it, you aren't following your religion, so aren't an (insert sect of any religion here).

I disagree that it's a 'no true Scotsman' fallacy, (EDIT: It's a "very few true Scotsman" argument) it's a strict reading of the rules of religions and allowing no personal interpretation or modification, as they all REQUIRE. Just because very few people (but not zero) actually practice religion as their texts prescribe doesn't change the rules for religion, it just makes them non devout...and I say, to me, that makes them not part of their chosen religion, but fans of it, since they don't actually practice it.
I do agree, that opinion is based on a far more strict interpretation of religious rules than most people's, but I can't understand how you can ignore a single letter of the "word of god" if you believe, so I can only believe that most people don't actually fully believe, so aren't devout, so (IMO) aren't "Christians" (or "Muslims", or "Jewish", etc).

EDIT: I certainly hope my environment as a child was the exception, I would hate to think that everyone went through that as a kid. It was a daily struggle living as a vocal atheist in Texas in the 70's.

Yeah, but even within religions people can't agree on the rules.

Within Christianity, you have catholics, protestants, baptists, pentecostals, eastern orthodox, evangelicals and god knows what else. All of whom disagree on various aspects of their religion (sometimes fairly major points).

Islam is the same (shia, sunni, etc).

There isn't one single religious text that is the definitive version.

And I grew up in catholic Ireland. Everyone went to church, everyone believed in god (hell, it was in the constitution) and even public schools actively participated in religious rituals.
You would find it incredibly difficult to argue these people weren't religious.

Yet, they ignored large parts of their religion from the minor (dietary restrictions, etc) to the major (sex outside marriage, contraception).

I never met a single person who thought the penalty for apostasy should be death. I still haven't.

Sorry, but @slickhead is right about this point. That's a No True Scotsman fallacy.

I think your environment was the exception rather than the rule.

Well, somehow the lesson you've taken from no true scotsman is that it's impossible to define groups, and that no statement can be made that applies to more than one person.

Now the irony for me is that I don't find that hilarious at all, because I don't think you're a waste of my time. What I believe is that there's a thinking person trapped inside you somewhere that might one day break free.

Ok, this is a waste of my time. The irony of you accusing me of not understanding no true scotsman or english is beyond hilarious.

This is unbelievably sloppy thinking. You have a woeful understanding of no true scotsman as well as, apparently, the english language in general.

There are divorced catholics because catholic doctrine is not that it's literally impossible to obtain a divorce. Catholics who get divorces don't suffer sudden existential collapse and wink out of reality. There are no catholics who doubt and despise the bible, who believe that there's no god or historical jesus, and who participate in no catholic tradition. That would be contradictory, and oh look, it's possible to construct a 'no true...' statement that is nevertheless correct. There are no pro-lifers who believe abortion is fine and should be freely available to everyone. There are no democrats who are republicans. There are no jews who believe jesus is the son of god. There are no peaceful muslims.

Put that aside for now. You're arguing for the end of all moral judgement and distinction. Humans are not consistent, therefore it would be outrageous to condemn a car thief for stealing a car. After all, look at all the times he didn't steal a car. Fuck off.

It's possible to make generalisations about arbitrarily large groups that share common attributes. People who steal things are thieves. Apples are fruits. Muslims are violent.

By definition, all muslims share first the belief that mohammed was a good person and second the conviction to follow his example and instruction. By necessity, all muslims share the guilt for the evils of that man, and the evils brought into the world as a result of his legacy.

The statements are trivially disprovable. I know several peaceful muslims. There, done. Your statement is false.

You couldn't find a better example of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy if you tried.


"Followers of violent ideologies are not peaceful".

Here's a thought exercise for you, since you seem to pride yourself on not being afraid to think.

Humans are not perfectly rational or consistent. They are, in fact, capable of holding two opposing positions at once. This is called cognitive dissonance (you're a good example of this yourself, in that you are engaging in a logical fallacy while upholding the virtue of rationality).

Saying "there are no peaceful muslims" is like saying there are no divorced Catholics, when such things self-evidently exist.

So, to sum up:
You are not right - your "factual statement" is incorrect.
You are not just - you are making a sweeping generalisation about 1 billion people.
You are not rational - you are engaged in a logical fallacy.

@Jinx

hey thanks for keeping this conversation going and not just making assumptions and allowing us both to come to a better understanding.

though i am not really surprised,i am gladdened.

in my opinion,i think this situation may be a problem with indentifying with labels and maybe putting too much weight on them to convey complicated and complex human interactions.

i would call myself a social justice warrior,but i would never identify as those who behave is the extremists do.but to imply that the responsibility is on ME,or any other critic,to redefine these radical social justice warriors as somehow not being representative of the majority,is a false dynamic,because that is how they define themselves.

basically the "No true scotsman" fallacy.which is employed ad-nauseum by these extremists.that somehow if you do not adhere to their radical agenda you are somehow not qualified to label yourself:feminist,anarchist (this has been directed at me),socialist, etc etc.

this is just a silly and binary way of breaking down peoples complex human perceptions and understandings to fit a narrow,and restrictive narrative,in order to achieve an agenda.

so while we all viewed GW bush's "if you're not with us,you're against us",as an inane and utterly stupid statement.how come there is little push back when the EXACT same tactic is used to silence someone who may not be 100% on board with a certain agenda?

does me posting this video automatically translate to me being "anti-social justice warrior"?

of course not! that is just silly,but in todays climate that is exactly how some people view complex situations,and it HAS to stop!

you brought up police.
good.
lets use that as an example.
the fact the americas militarized and dysfunctional police force has accounted for more police shootings than soldiers have died in iraq.do we REALLY need to be told that it is not ALL cops.

of course not.again,that is silly but it DOES mean that maybe there is a problem within the institution that needs to be addressed.

here is a perfect case for social justice warriors to bring this corruption and rot to the surface,and here we have black lives matter.which is receiving mixed coverage in the media,but they have gotten people talking and even some incremental reforms in the woks AND,just recently..6 cops fired from a cleveland precinct for shooting civilians.this is where social justice warriors are not only necessary but vital!

but what if.....

those cops who were feeling threatened,or intimidated by the criticism and examination of their institution coming from black lives matters decided to use a tactic right out of these extremists playbook?

maybe some doxxing?
exposing personal information about the protesters?
how about a few false accusations of rape?
maybe personal harassing calls to friends and family members of the black lives matter movement?
how about some false charges of harassment and sexual discrimination?

that would effectively shut down the black lives matter movement within weeks,and how would we respond to that kind of underhanded tactics?

we would be outraged.
we would be furious at the absolute abuse of power.a power bestowed by the state.

and our outrage would be justified.

do you see where i am coming from here?

in the example i have given,which may or not be the best analogy.we can easily see the abuse of power as a form of bullying to get a group that is a dissenting ideology..to shut..the fuck..up.

freedom of speech is NOT just speech you or i agree with,or happen to support,but it also speech that we may dislike,disagree and even find offensive.

but by allowing those we dislike or disagree to say their piece,allows us and everybody else to examine,discern and ultimately discard as ridiculous.or,converesly,find some merit that was previously hidden from us,due to our lack of knowledge or understanding.

i realize i am reiterating my previous point,but i think it is so very important.

free speech allows the free flow of ideas and dialogue and allows good ideas to be absorbed into the body politic and the bad ones discarded into the trash bin.

but there MUST be the allowance of the free flow of thought!

so when i post a video such as this i am not ridiculing actual socially conscious people.i am exposing bad ideas,supported by narrow minded people who wish to impose THEIR sense of how a society should be and attempt to circumvent the very slow process of discussion,argument and debate by hijacking the conversation and shutting down all dissent and disagreement with the most fascist tactics possible.

up until a month ago i was fairly ignorant to things like gamergate and whatnot.i thought i had a pretty fair understanding of what a social justice warrior was,and even included myself as one.

but then,quite by accident,i fell upon a few stories that highly disturbed me.one ,in particular was the case of greg allen elliot who was being criminally prosecuted for harassment on twitter.

now the case was finally resolved,and elliot was found not guilty.
so hooray for justice right?
free speech won in the end right?
or did it...did elliot actually win?
i am not so sure.

you see.
he was a web designer.
and once he was charged 3 years ago,he was banned from any internet use.so effectively he was jobless.
on top of that his defense cost 100k.
sounds like a loss to me.

now let us examine stephanie guthrie.a prominent toronto feminist and tedtalk speaker:
1.she made the accusation of harassment and brought the charges.
2.even though this all started with a man who created a game where anita sarkesians faced was punched,and was the supposed imetus for all this fuss,guthrie never laid charges against the creator of the game.though she did,along with her followers harassed and bullied this man until he closed down his account.so chock one up for feminism? i guess?
4.what guthrie found so reprehensible about elliot was that he had the audacity to question guthries rage and called for a calm interaction.(mainly because there are literally 100's of face-punching games).
5.guthrie and her followers found this call for calm offensive and doxxed elliot and proceeded to harass his employer,his family and ffirends.
6.elliot lost his job.his employer could not handle the harassment.so feminist win again? i guess?
7.when guthrie blocked elliot on twitter she continued to publicly accuse him of misogyny,bigot and even a pedophile.
8.she then brought accusations against elliot for criminal harassment,and that she "felt" harassed.
9.guthrie has paid ZERO for her accusations.she has suffered no accountability nor responsibility.

now the court case is over,and elliot has been vindicated and free speech is still in place for today.

but lets look at the bigger picture.
and let us imagine how easily this situation could be abused.
can we really look at guthrie vs elliot as ANY form of justice? or is it MORE liekly that guthrie was abusing a court system to punish a man she happened to disagree with?with ZERO consequences.

now maybe you agree with guthrie.
maybe you are one of those people that believe in your heart that words are weapons and people should be held accountable for those words.they should be stripped of wealth,work and home..they should be punished.

ok.
thats fine.
maybe you agree because it is a matter you support?
a racist pig loses a job for saying racists things.
or a bigot gets kicked out of his apartment for being a bigoted asshole.

but how about this..
hypothetically:
a devout chritian woman is protesting an abortion clinic with her children in tow.

and lets say a pro-choice atheist comes over to her and starts to berate her i front of her children.ridiculing her for her beliefs and saying jesus was a zombie.that she is a horrible person for believing in such a tyrannical deity,that this so-called all-loving entity punishes all no-believers in a lake of fire for all eternity.that as a mother,teaching her children to worship such a god is tantamount to child abuse.berating her so badly that her children begin to cry?

now what if that interaction was filmed?
then posted to youtube?
what if a "social justice warrior" of the religious flavor decided that berating person needed to pay for his words?
what if that person got doxxed?
and the end result was he loses his job (because corporations are notoriously controversy allergic),and maybe his landlord is notified and he is kicked out of his apartment?

would you be ok with all that?
because that is the EXACT same metric that radical social justice warriors use!

and what about false accusations?
you dont even have to be actually offended and /or harassed,you just have to accuse and the rest takes care of itself.

are you ok with that kind of creative abuse?

so when i bring things like this to the forefront and attempt to expose the underlying idiocy.what i just wrote is where i am coming from.

and yes.these radicals and their underhanded tactics need to be exposed and all the attention brought to them the better.

why? because what and how they are behaving is anti-democracy anti-freedom and anti-liberty.

and i am all for debating specific issues,and will gladly do so..with glee,but i will not and cannot respect what the radical elements are doing to an otherwise worthy cause.

and YOU should be calling them out as well.

i know this is long and i probably lost the plot somewhere,but this is very important,becuase it threatens all of us and if we simply ignore these nimrods they will just become even more entrenched,self-righteous and arrogant in their own little bubble worlds.

that bubble needs to be popped,and soon.

anyways.thanks for hanging (if you made it this far)
there will be danishes and punch in the lobby!

@gorillaman, I admit I'm veering close to the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, but equally, I never claimed that all feminists were sane and moral people.

The difference is, I think most people these days are reasonably feminist and I think the vast majority of them are not man-hating nutjobs. There's undoubtedly a lunatic fringe, but that's the case for every group/ideology.

I also agree that meanings change over time. "national socialism", shorn of its historic baggage, doesn't sound that terrible. But we know that what it actually signifies is actually national fascism, racism and other abhorrent concepts.

The question is at what point the lunatic fringe comes to represent the whole. For example, at one point the Republicans were once the party of small government and fiscal conservatism, but it's becoming increasingly more difficult to describe them as anything other than the party of religious nutjobs and idiots.

I don't feel feminism has been hijacked to the same extent. I believe there are still a lot of normal rational people who describe themselves as feminists (I'd like to think I'm one, for a start).

Finally, I'm with Joss Whedon.... "feminism" is a terrible word, but ultimately, "You either believe women are people or you don't. It's that simple."

@VoodooV: "Every one of these youtube crusaders are comfortably enjoying the perks of a system they despise."

What perks? Like roads and firemen? You know, it's not like we couldn't have those things without government. And those kinds of services are only a small portion of the federal budget. In fact, from all the excise taxes collected on gasoline, tobacco and alcohol, they'd cover the roads completely, which costs around $60 billion annually. In fact, things like the EPA, Dept. of Trans, NASA, Dept. of Edu, all cost less than the revenue the federal government categorizes as "other." Look it up: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/historicals

So what about all the wars and militarism? Is that, too, a perk? And the prison industrial complex that locks up 1% of our population? What are these perks you speak of?

Even Ayn Rand took gov't assistance.

I love it when statists bring this up. I personally am not an Objectivist, and find lots of flaws with their ideology, but this is a cheap blow. Obviously it shows the economic illiteracy of most statists. For one, she's forced to pay into social security, so therefore why shouldn't she receive some of it back? And second, if you spend more than a couple seconds reading about U.S. monetary policy, you'd know that the purchasing power of the dollar is reduced over time due to inflation, and hence savings are always impacted. This should alarm you instead of excite you.

The whole thing is infested with logical fallacies: false equivalencies, ad homs, strawmen, and even a no true scotsman thrown in for shits and giggles.

By all means don't take any time to point out which things he said were these things. No, that'd be helpful, and we wouldn't want to cloudy any appeals to emotion with pesky things like fact and well thought out rebuttals.

they spend all this time criticizing the problems of gov't and NEVER ONCE demonstrate how it would work without these systems.

I think there are plenty who do. It's just that statists don't accept those answers, or any answers that don't emulate the current status quo systems they're accustomed to. I'm not interested in replacing public schools with another bureaucracy.

Wow. I actually did make it through the whole thing The whole thing is infested with logical fallacies: false equivalencies, ad homs, strawmen, and even a no true scotsman thrown in for shits and giggles.

And that ignoring the standard problem with the Libertarian\Anarchist viewpoint where they spend all this time criticizing the problems of gov't and NEVER ONCE demonstrate how it would work without these systems.

And this idiot's answer to the education system is to just point everyone to Google?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!

Nonsense.

If you were a true Christian, you'd follow the laws of the old testament too.
I presume you don't go into town everyday and put people of other religions to the sword?

I want to address this scripture quotation first:

Matthew 5:17

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.

You have fundamentally misunderstood what Jesus is saying here. What do you think He is talking about? What do you think He means when He said He came to fulfill the law? Please elaborate.. This, however, is what He was talking about:

John 19:28 After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst.

He fulfilled what the law and prophets said about Him on the cross.

Luke 24:44 And he said unto them, These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me.

What did they write concerning Him?

Luke 24:25 And he said to them, "O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!

Luke 24:26 Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?"

You need to understand what was written about Jesus and how He fulfilled it before you can understand what He was talking about.

Your misunderstanding of the gospel and Old Testament law not withstanding, a true Christian is not under the old covenant, they are under the new covenant.

Romans 10:4-10 For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.

For Moses writes about the righteousness that is based on the law, that the person who does the commandments shall live by them.

But the righteousness based on faith says, "Do not say in your heart, 'Who will ascend into heaven?'" (that is, to bring Christ down) "or 'Who will descend into the abyss?'" (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead).

But what does it say? "The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart" (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim);
because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.

The old covenant is for Israel, the new covenant is for the whole world. Christians are not under law, but grace.

Romans 6:14 For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.

So you can drop the "no true scotsman" fallacy....

It's funny you would invoke this fallacy, yet state earlier "If you were a true Christian.." Yet, according to Jesus, there are true and false Christians:

Matthew 7:21 "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.

A true Muslim follows Allah, and Allah has instructed his followers to exterminate all of the nonbelievers.

Nonsense.

If you were a true Christian, you'd follow the laws of the old testament too.
I presume you don't go into town everyday and put people of other religions to the sword?

So you can drop the "no true scotsman" fallacy....

Keep in mind, I'm pretty sure Bill is coming at this from a viewpoint that all religion is bad. This one is just moreso.

There are moderates and radicals in every religion. You don't get to just white wash the radicals away with a "no true Scotsman" fallacy.