Author Archives: Bruce Nielson

Thoughts on Word Defining vs. Word Policing in Discussions

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This post is some of my thoughts on a comment made by LDS Philosopher. In it I hope to illustrate why Karl Popper was correct that battling over the meaning of a word has political ramifications, but never rational ones. My desire is to put this issue to bed (at least for myself) so that I can just put a link to this post when this issue comes up again. As such, the post is not actually about ‘taxes as theft’ per se, though I’m sure many will desire to respond to it as such. (And that is okay.)

Here is the comment in question:

Taxes are only objectively unlike theft in certain ways if you define theft as “forcible seizure of property, in which the victim has no token of a say in what happens with it.” I define theft as “forcible seizure of property, regardless of what happens next.” So your argument only works if you define theft in your specifically narrow way, which conveniently precludes taxation.

This argument is, in style, a common sort of argument of which I wish to illustrate a hidden logical fallacy in it.

The idea being expressed is that because I (in LDSP’s view) defined the word ‘theft’ wrongly, my whole argument is wrong. But, in fact, this isn’t rationally the case. In fact, I will illustrate that — rationally speaking — it simply does not matter who ‘has the correct definition.’ Continue reading →

Thoughts on Income Taxes, Theft, and the Making of a Blog Debate

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Politics are patently ridiculous, “testimony” masquerading as rationalism — SilverRain.

I had an epiphany while engaging in this thread that eventually turned into a side thread about whether or not ‘taxes’ were the same as ‘theft.’ I wanted to write it down to remember it. I hope Geoff (who I have to use as an example) will realize that I’m in no way knocking his position. In fact, I hope Geoff will see that he successfully helped me understand his position better.

First, a quick summary of the ‘taxes = theft’ debate. The whole debate was between various conservatives. No liberals or even moderatres (unless you consider me a moderate) were part of the debate. Geoff and some of the more libertarian leaning commenters (LDSP, Rame, Skyler) took the stances that taxes were theft. Adam, SilverRain, and myself (to a lesser degree on this thread, though I’ve engaged in this argument elsewhere) took the stances that taxes, while they should be minimized, are not equivalent to theft. (In a humorous moment, Adam — regularly perceived as an extreme conservative — sent an email to some of us on the thread and said how much he enjoyed finding himself on the other side for a change.)

I’ve been thinking about this for a while and I realize that there is a really important point that came out of this that I personally didn’t want to forget, namely that from a certain point of view, both sides were right. Continue reading →

My Own Thoughts on Democrats and Mormon Bigotry

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First, let me say upfront that I believe most Democrats, just like most Republicans either have no issue with Mormons or are totally indifferent. (Which works out to be essentially the same thing.)

However, I wanted to chime in with my own point of view on this.

First, the politically liberal Mormons making comments have no issue admitting that some democrats dislike or even hate Mormons. So this seems to be a ‘fact’ for our purposes.

One argument that has come up several times now though is that some Democrats, while willing to use Romney’s Mormonism as a weapon against him for political reasons, have no issue with liberal Mormons like Harry Reid. I, for one, have no argument with this. So we’ll take this as a ‘fact’ as well. Continue reading →

Could It Be Any More Obvious that Republicans Hate Mormons?

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For those that are wondering: yes, the title is just meant to catch your attention. Sort of.

Just a few days ago I predicted a surge for Gingrich. Now we’ve got one. Not much of a prediction really as it’s entirely expected. Evangelicals just can’t vote for a Mormon. It doesn’t matter if he’s ahead in the polls in a race with Obama (and is the only one of the Republican candidates that is.) Because — as I’ve said elsewhere — Evangelicals are generally religious first and political second. (Nothing wrong with that in and of itself.)

A Mormon president is simply unthinkable to a devout Evangelical. It would utterly undermine everything they’ve used for a century as their primary form of border control. You won’t be able to go to an anti-Mormon class without someone in the group raising their hand and saying “oh, come on, the President of the United States is Mormon. We must be missing something here.” Continue reading →

Peter, Oliver Cowdery, and the Melchezidek Priesthood

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How many of you remember this post where I talked about “the problem of history“? In that post I gave a fake example of how in history, especially religious history, we often build informationless narrative fallacies that, due to the way human beings think, seem like rational arguments but in fact are not.

Now compare that to this post from John Nilsson back from my Mormon Matters days. I found it an interesting example of how difficult it is for us to remove our biases when dealing with religious history. (Or probably with any sort of history we care about.)

When I turned this rudimentary training [in history] on the sources describing the stories above [about angelic ordination of the priesthood], I found the records to be vague and contradictory, more so than in the case of Joseph’s different accounts of the First Vision. This is partly because Joseph had a co-participant, Oliver Cowdery, who left his own account of these experiences, and that many other early Church members wrote as if they did not hear of these ordinations until 1834 or 1835. Cowdery’s account is especially interesting, as he mentions only one occasion of priesthood bestowal, only one priesthood, only one angel visiting, and declines to name the angel as either John the Baptist or Peter, James, and John. (Note that the Church has added an “s” to “holy angel(s) in the link to the Oliver Cowdery account above to soften the ambiguity, under the guise of correcting “spelling, grammar, and punctuation”.

Continue reading →