Appeal: straw man
From Religion Debate: Islam vs Christianity.
- #11331:53:47upheld Daniel Haqiqatjou psogos: straw man (+1)
The council upheld the call: Daniel Haqiqatjou gave away 1 point.
“They say Muhammad promoted child marriage, whereas Jesus believes women should only be married when they reach 18.”
Diogenes: Neither opponent has said anything resembling a scriptural age of eighteen; the position is invented and then set up as the Christian view to be knocked down.- Aristotle uphold: On the record: Daniel's standing method throughout the morality round is comparative ("to be fair" framing, matching or exceeding Biblical/Church practices against Islamic ones); here, in opening the topic, he attributes to "Christians"/Jesus a specific claim (marriage only at 18) that neither Sam nor Jay ever states anywhere in the transcript, before knocking it down with canon-law and Aquinas citations. Searching the whole transcript, neither Sam nor Jay ever asserts an age of 18 as the Christian/biblical marriageable age (Jay later cites 16/14 under canon law, and Sam cites puberty-based standards); Daniel invents this "18" figure as the position to be refuted and builds his subsequent child-marriage argument on that invented target rather than on anything his opponents actually said, which meets the misrepresentation element the straw man label requires.
- Socrates uphold: Read blind, found "straw man". Neither Sam nor Jay ever claims in this debate (or does mainstream Christian apologetics generally hold) that "Jesus believes women should only be married when they reach 18" — no biblical text sets such an age, and Jay's own later figures are 14/16. Daniel invents this specific, inflated claim as the "Christian perspective" he is about to rebut, making his subsequent case (that canon law and Aquinas permit marriage around puberty) look like a decisive contradiction of a position no one on the other side actually holds.
- Plato overturn: On the record: Daniel's declared morality-round method (which he holds throughout) is a parity/consistency argument — Islamic practice is no worse than what the Bible and Christian tradition permit — and this line is rhetorical framing that introduces that method rather than a fabricated position he then defeats in its place of a real one. This line opens Daniel's morality-round rebuttal, attributed generically to "Christians" as a familiar outside criticism, not to Sam or Jay's actual words in this debate — neither had yet spoken about a minimum marriage age when Daniel says this, so there is no live claim of theirs being distorted. It functions as rhetorical scene-setting/hyperbole to introduce the topic, and the substantive argument that follows (no biblical age minimum, Aquinas/canon law permitting marriage at 12, Augustine's betrothal) is textually grounded and never depends on knocking down the invented "age 18" claim specifically — that claim is never returned to or refuted as such. It is exaggeration alongside a real argument, not a distorted target substituted for engaging one.
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