This specimen using the nym ‘matriarchy’ keeps trying to derail this thread.

(And it’s clearly confused about the difference between sententiam ad hominem and argumentum ad hominem)

I remember attending a service where a young person asked about how to strengthen their faith because it was so hard to believe all that stuff. The preacher then proceeded to describe how you could get the confirmation of the holy spirit: take a scene from the bible, imagine yourself in the scene, picture it clearly enough to feel real. Then you’ll get the confirmation from the holy spirit.

He described the exact method for how to produce an emotional response from imagination and I don’t think he even realized it. Nor do I have any doubt that it would work. It works with any other fiction, why not that one.

Recognizing the power of your imagination would undermine much of religious faith. Once you realize that you can get the same emotions by imagining things that you know are fictional, you just can’t help but questioning the reality of your doctrines.

It works well for the local mormon infestation.

I think what happens when people are using it in the sense of “insult”, it hasn’t really become an accepted and normal usage to them, but is more like they’re trying to emulate a higher-register academic usage, i.e. they’re using the word as a fancy term for “insult” in order to sound more erudite. This can only be determined by analysing the person’s speech in detail, but I think this is often what other people perceive.

I and my siblings got into it in the early 80s, my elder brother and his friend worked and saved for months to afford a full set of the rule books, only to have our mother and the mother of the neighbor kids we were playing with freak out and take all of the books after they were told how ‘Satanic’ the game was.

What it ACTUALLY did was drive the first of many wedges between both sets of children and their parents, as they learned the extent of their parent’s hypocrisy. They’d lecture us on the value of a dollar and hard work, but if we actually worked hard and saved those heard-earned dollars for something we truly wanted, they had no compunctions at all about taking it all away from us and informing us that -everything- we earned or were given until we were 18 actually belonged to them – and they weren’t going to reimburse a penny of the money that we’d so carefully saved.

I’m not talking about allowance money, either, none of us ever got an allowance. We mowed lawns and shoveled sidewalks, babysat other people’s children, etc. The original AD&D rulebooks were freakin’ expensive, when you had to earn every cent at $3 an hour or $5 a lawn/driveway.

That certainly taught us a valuable lesson, but not, perhaps, the one they were hoping we’d learn. No, what we learned was that parent would go ape over harmless things, and it was best to keep secrets from them if you wanted to hold onto those things that you earned and purchased on your own.

WE knew that there was no real magic, spells, or demons, but we also learned at that point that parents didn’t HAVE to listen to reason, and it didn’t matter if you were right, they could and would be as high-handed as they wanted while we lived in their homes. So I left! (It took me a few more years, 14-year-olds can’t exactly rent their own apartments, but I was the first of my family out of the house and living on my own, the first moment I was able to manage it.) – That was only the first of several similar incidents, but it was definitely the eye-opener for us!

I haven’t played an actual pen and paper RPG in over a decade, but I still have very fond memories, and would probably join a gaming group if I found one I could easily get to..

Technically, using ad hominem to mean ‘insult’ would be an example of argumentum ad pretentious fuckwittem

One Complete Internet™ is headed your way! Signature required upon delivery.

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StarStuff!,

Fucking evangelical christian philosophy majors. How the fuck do you deal with them?

Philosophically.

PS Good to see you’ve had a reprieve, but I know it ain’t much fun having something like that hanging over you. I hope it works out.

But yeah, I laughed at all that Satanism crap back then. It wasn’t scary or intimidating then, though, because I didn’t realize how seriously they bought into it.

I don’t buy the argument that a society consisting of long-living people is doomed and that the only wish they have is to die. There is no evidence for this. Life expectancy has increase a lot in the last 100 to 200 years – you could say that from the viewpoint of someone living in 1800 we are a long-living society. But have humans lost their will to live? Not at all.

This is often what misandrists do.

That’s the third comment of yours in a short period of time in which you throw out the word misandry or a variant with no context.

Since you’re practically begging someone to bite, I will:

Why don’t you tell us what you want to tell us about misandry, matriarchy?

(…) the [Ron Paul] sticker looked brand new, and the peace sign was a magnet (…)

Parents’ car, kid’s peace sign?

One can only hope… but the reason I originally thought of this as “tragic” is that most of the Paulistas I’ve actually met have been young people who assume (more or less uncritically) that anyone who opposed the Iraq war and opposes the “War” on Drugs must not be too bad.

I told him off several times. He’s very persistent. He turned a post (on the Freethinkers facebook page) informing people about the Genocide Awareness Project (a group that has large pictures of bloody fetuses and compares abortion to genocide) counter protest into a long, self indulgent thread about how abortion is wrong because “human nature”. That thread is now over 200 comments long. But it’s ok: I’m way cooler than him :p

There is NO FUCKING REASON to use “ad hominem” to mean “insult” when a) insult is the correct word to use and b) “ad hominem” has been adopted to refer to a specific thing WHICH IS NOT SYNONYMOUS with “insult”.

Of course there is: nerd cred.

It’s two pol sci sophomores quoting Socrates in an argument: nothing of substance is said, but Socrates therefore +1.

Technically, using ad hominem to mean ‘insult’ would be an example of argumentum ad pretentious fuckwittem (my Latin is rusty, not having ever studied it or lived during a time when it was spoken by non-elitists.)

Obviously the poor quality of this cider isn’t enough to keep me from indulging *hic* heavily.

Damn you, relay. Work, dammit!

That’s what I get for trying to navigate German gadget sellers.

If you can muster up the ‘cajones’ (for lack of a less gendered term) to tell them to shove that book of there up their asshole with the rest of the feces, most of them will know to steer clear.

Plus you have NO IDEA how good it feels.

…people often use the term ad hominem to mean not just ad hominem fallacies but also personal insults…

Yes, and those people are idiots.

We HAVE a word in English that means “insult”. That word is “insult”.

There is NO FUCKING REASON to use “ad hominem” to mean “insult” when a) insult is the correct word to use and b) “ad hominem” has been adopted to refer to a specific thing WHICH IS NOT SYNONYMOUS with “insult”.

I really did not think this was going to happen, but apparently devoting 2 months of my life to revisions was a good plan. Yay!

It usually is. :-) May your H factor rise.

I’ve never had enough geeky friends to put together a D&D game. Can I still be an evil, demon summoning, black magic practicing, satanist by playing Skyrim instead?

Yes.