rlr@pyuxd.UUCP (Rich Rosen) (11/04/85)
| >> Hume no doubt believed that past history determined present state | >> (incidentally, he did not believe in free will ... [ELLIS] | > | >Perhaps because he understood The Definition? [ROSEN] |-------------------------[excerpted from my article by Richard Carnes] Well, talk about vile dishonest manipulative rhetorical tricks! Carnes deliberately alters my article to capitalize "The Definition", as if to imply that I capitalized the words with some holy reverence. The fact that you cannot argue without resorting to stupid base tricks like this makes any further points you might have been trying to make irrelevat. Such falsification and manipulation is the hallmark of fascists, not of people trying to engage in serious rational discussion. >>(I shouldn't be belittling >>you, Michael, for definition-changing games. If anything, you are one of the >>few people here who understands such things. Rather than changing the >>definition to "get" what you want, which is a dishonest rhetorical trick, you >>change the premises to get to "acausality". What you miss, however, is >>that acausality cannot get you free will. Free will requires an active >>agent of first cause making the choices, unaffected by other causes of the >>material world. Yet it must be a WILLFUL agent, one of deliberateness >>that causes other things to happen. > Once again: Rich Rosen is the only person in this newsgroup, to my > knowledge, who is claiming either that people possess or that they do > not possess "free will." In other words, he is the only person who > is doing what he accuses everyone else of doing, namely, arbitrarily > defining "free will" in order to "get [rid of]" free will. Except for one minor discrepancy that you conveniently leave out. The definition I offer is the definition as contained in dictionaries, literature, etc. If using the definition that has been in existence for so many years is "arbitrarily defining" things, ... > When writing future articles, Rich, please ask yourself whether your > article arbitrarily defines free will in order to obtain a wished-for > conclusion (the nonexistence of free will). If so, commit it then to > net.flame: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. When writing future articles, Richard, please ask yourself whether your making claims out of the back side of your mouth for the purpose of callously manipulating those who read what you have to say. You may have become convinced through your own clouded wishful thinking of a "new" definition of "free will" for your own ends, and indeed you may not be alone, but your repeated assertions and manipulations show your ass-backwards way of thinking (redefine to get a conclusion, then accuse your opponent who uses an existing definition of doing that very thing) to be less than sophistry, less than illusion, more like the behavior one might expect from a horse's ass. If this word twisting is the way you argue, then please autocopulate in the privacy of your own terminal. -- "Wait a minute. '*WE*' decided??? *MY* best interests????" Rich Rosen ihnp4!pyuxd!rlr