Appeal: fallacy spotted
From Jay Dyer vs Mike Lowry Urantia Debate: Christianity vs Urantianism.
- #13491:13:19upheld Jay Dyer epainos: fallacy spotted (+2)
The council upheld the call: Jay Dyer earned 2 points.
“You have an arbitrary ad hoc definition of what you think religion is that it doesn't involve debate.”
Diogenes: Jay correctly identifies the ad hoc redefinition by which Mike exempts his position from the demand for argument, and does so against the counterexample he had just supplied.- Aristotle uphold: On the record: Jay has held since the opening that any paradigm, including a religion, must give an objective account of ethics/epistemology/logic to count as a rival position at all, and this line is a direct application of that standing demand to Mike's attempt to carve debate/argument out of the definition of 'religion' once a counterexample (Jesus debating) was raised against him. Mike had just been forced to concede that Jesus debated not only Pharisees but Sadducees too, and rather than retract his blanket claim that 'religion' as such doesn't involve argument/debate, he narrowed the definition on the spot to exclude that very counterexample ('that's not actually a religious practice... that's just a way he dealt with his enemies'). Jay's charge that this is an ad hoc, purpose-built definition crafted specifically to dodge the counterexample and Jay's standing demand for objective criteria is an accurate description of a real move Mike made in the transcript, not a mischaracterization.
- Socrates uphold: Read blind, found "fallacy spotted". Mike had just carved out a boundary ("that's not religion to me... it's not actually religion to be intellectually epistemic") specifically to exempt his view from the objective-standard challenge Jay was pressing, even after conceding Jesus himself debated the Sadducees and Pharisees. Jay correctly names this as an ad hoc, self-serving redefinition of "religion" invented on the spot to dodge the counterexample just granted — a no-true-Scotsman move — rather than mere mockery, since it responds directly to the definitional dodge on the table.
- Plato uphold: On the record: Mike's framework since the opening declines external objective standards in favor of personal/experiential religion, but his specific claim that "debate is not religion" was introduced reactively under pressure and was re-drawn each time Jay supplied a counterexample (Jesus's, the apostles' debating), which is what the called line targets — a real pattern, not a restatement of a position already on the table answering a narrower question. Tracing the record: from ~48-52 min onward, when pressed for an objective standard to distinguish true from false revelation, Mike repeatedly narrowed "religion" to exclude whatever the counterexample was — first saying the epistemic-standard question "isn't religious," then when Jay cited Jesus's and the apostles' apologetic debating as counter-evidence, Mike answered "that wasn't doing religion either... that's just something that they partook in usually when confronted by Pharisees," and again moments before the callout, "he wasn't practicing religion by doing that." Each time a counterexample threatened the claim that religion excludes debate, the category was narrowed again to exclude it, which is exactly the ad hoc/no-true-Scotsman move Jay names; this is not merely a restatement of Mike's opening experiential framework but a reactive redefinition crafted in the moment.
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