{"id":4572,"date":"2013-12-08T20:33:07","date_gmt":"2013-12-09T01:33:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=4572"},"modified":"2013-12-08T20:33:07","modified_gmt":"2013-12-09T01:33:07","slug":"santa-brought-you-a-fallacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=4572","title":{"rendered":"Santa brought you a fallacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

USA Today<\/a> recently reported that “not all Christians believe there is a War on Christmas.”\u00c2\u00a0 Most who don’t have this belief have the contrary belief – that not only that there is not a war on Christmas, but that the holiday is doing just fine and one doesn’t need to force it on the non-believers.<\/p>\n

But Larry Thornberry at AmSpec<\/a> sees a fallacy:<\/p>\n

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A recent USA Today<\/em> story carried the headline \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Not all Christians believe there is a \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcWar on Christmas.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 Hardly surprising. Not all Christians believe Elvis is dead. The obvious escapes many, pious or heathen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The title of the piece is “Objection, Your Honor. Relevance?”<\/strong><\/p>\n

Two important things.\u00c2\u00a0 First, ad populum<\/em> arguments are not failures of relevance.\u00c2\u00a0 Otherwise the fact that something is ‘traditional’ or ‘common sense’ wouldn’t lend any support to anything.\u00c2\u00a0 But it does – else conservatism would, at it’s core, be a fallacy.\u00c2\u00a0 Ad populum<\/em> arguments suffer, instead, from problems of weak authority<\/em> – the matter is whether there are other reasons undercutting the authority or the accuracy of those attesting.<\/p>\n

Second, the analogy between those who don’t believe in a War on Christmas and those who believe Elvis is still alive is mighty ridiculous.\u00c2\u00a0 The difference between the two is that Elvis-death-deniers fail with empirical evidence.\u00c2\u00a0 War-on-Christmas deniers distinguish being oppressed from tolerance.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

USA Today recently reported that “not all Christians believe there is a War on Christmas.”\u00c2\u00a0 Most who don’t have this belief have the contrary belief – that not only that there is not a war on Christmas, but that the holiday is doing just fine and one doesn’t need to force it on the non-believers. … Continue reading Santa brought you a fallacy<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,519,204,18,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-appeal-to-the-people","category-ignorance-of-basic-matters-of-logic","category-specious-allegations-of-fallacy","category-unqualified-authority","category-weak-analogy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4572"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4572\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4573,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4572\/revisions\/4573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}