Re-post from another blog

Friday, 15 March 2013

On Rational Discourse and Blogging

I taught Logic for years. I taught Debate. I taught Rhetoric. These were at the university level. 

These parts of the Trivium should be taught earlier than college or university, but rarely are. 

I had Logic in first year of secondary school, when I was fourteen.

I know the fallacies. I know how to think. I know how to lead students to think and there is 

hardly anything more exciting than watching students learn to think. It is an amazing experience.

I also have a journalist background, working in high school, college and city newspapers.

I have blogged from 2007-2009 and January 2012 until now.

I read many, many blogs and comment on some.

The past two days have been painful in the blogosphere. One reason has been the lack of logic 

and the use of fallacies.

Opposing sides of an argument have used faulty thinking, which are the fallacies, instead of sticking 

to points and arguing from logic.

Why this has happened is simply that most people have not learned to think or argue logically.

Emoting is useless and, on line, selfish and boring.

Sadly, adults have not mastered these stages. I would change the words "persuasion" and "persuasively" 

in the two diagrams to "argumentation" and  "debate". Persuasion uses emotion. which is subjective, 

while argumentation used object logic and facts.  Fallacies reveal faulty thinking and the application of 

subjectivism, such as name calling.

Name calling and ad hominem statements cause pain and hurt.

The problem is compounded by the fact that many people are afraid of the truth.

I hope all of us who belong to the Guild and all who read the Guild only want truth and not sentiment or comfort.

The truth, as Christ said, makes us free.  Anything less imprisons us in an adolescent state of either denial or confusion.

Confusion is not from God. Clarity is from God. Division is not from God. Unity is from God. But, unity must be 

real and not based on fake niceties.