I read that "there are no winners in this debate"

Victory is, of course, informal, but you're generally considered to win when one or more of the following conditions is met:1) Your opponent leaves the forum.
2) Your opponent stops addressing your points and begins to post nothing but invective directed at you.
3) Your opponent changes the subject and refuses to respond to attempts to change it back.
4) Your opponent declares victory.That last one is especially crucial. Nobody who wins debates declares victory during the debate. Later, you may refer to a victory, but declaring victory while the debate still rages is always a dodge to conceal a losing position; that's certainly how its going to be percieved.Also, there's a general internet loss condition called "Godwin's Law", roughly defined as "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." The implication is that the first participant to make an improper comparison to Hitler or Nazis (generally in the form of an ad hominem) automatically loses the argument.

Mm, good one. Here's another - when your opponent dismisses what you actually wrote and replies to what he knows you actually meant.

In a forum, like this one, where thread topics are listed in order of the most recent post, a "bump" is a content-less post that serves only to bring a thread back to the top of the list, and therefore back to the attention of the forum's participants.Does that make sense?

Edit - ok, I guess you got it. Never mind.This message has been edited by crashfrog, 10-13-2005 09:25 PM

Grr...I don't know why stuff like this bothers me so much. It's not on topic, but let me just say that:1) There's no evidence that Flew ever was an atheist.
2) Flew still asserts that atheism is the most reasonable position, it's just not one that he himself prefers to believe.
3) His "conversion" doesn't "raise the stakes" for atheists or any such nonsense.In regards to the book - like the Ken Miller book, it seems like responses to Dawkins sort of miss his point. All Dawkins is saying is that, thanks to science, there's no need to believe in God or in a universe of purpose or meaning. Therefore, the views of Miller and McGrath - that, if you're so inclined, you can opt to believe in God and a universe of meaning - don't really constitute a rebuttal.

Yeah, you know, I guess that might seem really confusing, if you were some kind of ridiculous idiot that couldn't tell the difference between a system of government/economy and one country's particular implementation of it.To anyone who's not an idiot, though, that's an entirely reasonable chain of argumentation. No, "baiting" is when someone invokes the spectre of Soviet oppression as a brush to tar all atheists. Remember? Like you did?

Always so personal with you, Rob. What's the deal with that?

It might blow you out of your chair to hear this, but I'm not really here to insult people. I'm here to have fun discussions. I take the Devil's advocate a lot. I walk the line between the things we all know are true and ways to look at those things that are ridiculous.For some reason, people like you, and Holmes, and others, take that personally. You go after me. You insult me personally and insult my beliefs. And then, because I'm not nearly as forgiving a person as I would like to be, I respond in kind.What's the deal with that? Why does it get so personal with you people? It's like you're personally insulted by the fact that I have a differing opinion or a different point of view on things. The second I don't drop to my knees when Holmes joins a thread and deigns to correct my insignificant intellect on one of his pet issues, it's right into the ad hom territory for him. I'm ignorant. I'm illogical. Et cetera.