At first, I thought that this site might be interesting. But I've had sufficient exposure to the immaturity that dictates the "arguments," and I've lost interest.

I teach rhetoric and argument for a living. I haven't encountered anyone here who could survive two minutes in my classroom.

This site isn't about argument; it's about pissing into somebody else's sandbox.

Stay in your pissy little sandboxes and stop pretending that you know anything about argument.

Well said.

People who are keen on accomplishing something at any cost sometimes cloak themselves with religion as a means of facilitating that accomplishment. Take away religion, and their keenness remains; they'll just find another cloaking device (atheism, for instance. Look at Lenin). Religion isn't the cause of their misdoing, but it's deemed "guilty" by association.

I defy you to show me where, in your thesaurus, it says that terms are interchangeable.

We could go round and round for a very long time, but I'm getting bored.

The point I'm making is that you're very bad at arguing. That's all.

You really need to do some homework before you reply off the top of your head, son.

"Their definitions will most definitely be the killing of another human." So you're using the word "kill" to define the word "murder"? Sweet. And what do you mean by "most definitely will be"? I know what it means--it means you haven't bothered to check and are only making a hopeful prediction. And where do you get off saying "another human"? Has it occurred to you that all these words ending with -cide have something in common? Suicide = killing. Killing yourself. How hard is that?

Manslaughter, killing, and homicide are manifestly NOT the same thing. Why do you think there's a different term for each?

The Holocaust was genocide. Again, for you folks in the cheap seats, all of these terms have different meanings.

"Take a peak at Malcolm X and that should give you another example. " Example of what? That whole paragraph is a mess; I have no idea what point you're trying make. Did you bother to look at a thesaurus and see that what I said--that the terms are not interchangeable--is true?

"[I]f we did not have religion" . . . . You're technically correct in that I was technically incorrect. What I wrote shouldn't be in quotation marks, but it's a valid and accurate paraphrase nonetheless.

"Abortion is not defined in the dictionary as murder . . . ." First of all, there's no such thing as THE dictionary. There's a bunch of dictionaries and they're all different; many are worthless. How do I know that you didn't just pick the one single dictionary that suits you? Argument from dictionary is fallacious; that by itself is enough to blow your point to smithereens. But the icing on this particular cake is you calling me a twit. That's an ad hominem fallacy, which is a sure sign that someone has brought a knife to a gunfight--that someone being you.

And if you can't keep up with why my argument includes the question of "what if Hitler's mother had had an abortion?" you are incapable of understanding my argument's more sophisticated points. And do you seriously expect me to believe that you've never heard anyone define abortion as murder?

"Your whole argument seems to miss the key word in your made up words that I didn't write. That sentence that I didn't write starts with if. I pray to GOD you do not need a definition for the word if." Umm--look again. I put the "[I]f" in there. Beyond that, your paragraph is an illogical, stylistic mess. And it's mighty darned ironic that you'd interrupt this particular argument in order to say that you would "pray to GOD." Your logos is long gone; now your ethos is down for the count too.

And then you try to end by redefining science. Calm down, take a deep breath, and go back to last week's freshman science class. Is hypothesis proof? No, it is not. And again, you don't bother to say where your definition comes from.

And I did not "say that what ifs have never proven anything valuable;" I said "What-if questions are fun, and can be valuable for motivating people, but no scenario has ever proven anything." Big difference. And I defy you to find any credible authority on argument who says that any scenario can ever prove anything. In other words, hypothesis does not equal proof. Is that concept really impossible for you to grasp?

"There is not exactly a numerous amount of people that still support Hitler or his regime ... " I didn't offer that as proof; I offered that as illustration and example. In case you forgot, I know that scenarios can't prove anything. Unless you're right about what you said earlier, in which case you're wrong now.

A sophist is someone who tries really hard to make the weaker argument appear to be the stronger, and who relies on fallacies in order to do that. A sophist is also what DaWolfman sees when he looks in the mirror.

And you're not even good at being a sophist. Good sophists successfully camouflage their fallacies; yours are glaring.

It's pretty clear that you lack an understanding of what argument is and how it functions. I really don't know why I'm spending time rebutting you. Kind of like swatting at a mosquito, I guess--eventually I'll either decide to squash you, or just get bored and move on to something else. But for now, watching you squirm like a bug on a pin is mildly amusing.

Do yourself a favor and read Fahnestock & Secor.

You're going to have to define "murder" for this argument. If you look in a thesaurus, you can find synonyms for "murder," such as:

execution

assassination

homicide

manslaughter

suicide

killing

Are these terms interchangeable? Of course not. Ask a lawyer, a doctor, and a priest what "murder" means, and you'll get three different answers.

We need to know where you're coming from in order to know whether to agree or disagree with you--how do you define "murder"?

"[I]f we did not have religion . . ." introduces an argument from ignorance, which is a common fallacy, but you can't use what we don't know as proof for your position. We might be farther along, but we might be much better off. You don't know. Nobody knows. It's hypothetical, and consequently worthless as support.

What if Adolf Hitler's mother had had an abortion (which, by the way, is another possible synonym for "murder")? Would the world better off? It's easy to say "yes" automatically, but--what if the vacuum left by Hitler's nonexistence was filled by someone worse?

What-if questions are fun, and can be valuable for motivating people, but no scenario has ever proven anything.

My argument is that saintly people outnumber Hitlerian people, and that by itself is enough to indicate that religion--even with its undeniable flaws--is ultimately a good thing.

I believe that the majority of people want to be good, and that it's easier to be good when you have a structured model--i.e., religion--even though a minority of people use that structured model for their benefit.