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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Please learn what an ad hominem attack really is, thanks.[/quote]

If you are referring to me, a PP who kept pointing out you (or someone) kept committing the fallacy instead of responding to the point. I completely do understand what it is.  It is when you attack the messenger instead of the message itself.

What mistaken definition do you hold of the term?

Ad Hominem
(Attacking the person): This fallacy occurs when, instead of addressing someone's argument or position, you irrelevantly attack the person or some aspect of the person who is making the argument.

https://www.txst.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definitions/ad-hominem.html

Examples from this thread:

- "[i]a random internet commenter who doesn’t know anything about my religion"

- "This is not an ad hominom [sic] attack against you, it is more like a teacher letting you know you are not on track for the A paper because you are only using one source and not a great one at that." [/i]- This might be my favorite, because of the direct use of the term (mis-spelled but no points off there) while both committing one and denying it, but mostly because of the four uses of the word "you".

- [i]"The thing is that it’s really hard to argue with someone who knows very little about the subject they are talking about and is Hell-bent on defending their position and believing that everyone else is part of a conspiracy."

-"It’s because the person they are talking to doesn’t really have the scaffolding to receive any technical information and the big picture is easy to dismiss if you think everything is a conspiracy and have no respect for education or authority."

- "You are uneducated and not willing to learn, which makes you boring at best. "

- "I'm sorry that it's hard for you to process complexity and nuance."[/i]

That's just the last couple of pages.

I beleive that to be sufficient evidence.[/quote]
I don't actually think any of these are ad hominem attacks. They aren't attacks on you as a person; they're attacks on the demonstrated gaps in your knowledge that make this ongoing conversation pointless. What questions do you still want answers to? As far as I can see, they've all been answered, but because they weren't answered with "oh, you're so right, I see the atheist light now," you dismiss them.[/quote]

Every single one of those listed attacks the person and not the point.  The word "you" (meaning the poster responded to) was used four times in one sentence! Not one of those sentences quoted contain anything responding to the substance of a point.

You're just wrong on this.  They are blatant and obvious ad hominem fallacies.[/quote]
[quote]- "a random internet commenter who doesn’t know anything about my religion"[/quote]
You've demonstrated multiple times that you don't understand Christianity beyond your own narrow definition of it as a literalist, text-only religion. That's a substance critique, not a personal attack.

[quote]- "This is not an ad hominom [sic] attack against you, it is more like a teacher letting you know you are not on track for the A paper because you are only using one source and not a great one at that." - This might be my favorite, because of the direct use of the term (mis-spelled but no points off there) while both committing one and denying it, but mostly because of the four uses of the word "you".[/quote]
Again, this is about the substance of your argument being off track, because it's based on a false equation. Thinking that literalism IS Christianity is the substantive problem at hand in this critique.

[quote]- "The thing is that it’s really hard to argue with someone who knows very little about the subject they are talking about and is Hell-bent on defending their position and believing that everyone else is part of a conspiracy."[/quote]
You keep demonstrating that you don't know about the subject by continuing to argue against literalism, instead of accepting the feedback from Christians that our religion is more complex than that, and then debating the substance of the actual religion. This is using literalism as a strawman against Christianity. And that's not an attack on you personally, that's about the substance of your argument.

[quote]-"It’s because the person they are talking to doesn’t really have the scaffolding to receive any technical information and the big picture is easy to dismiss if you think everything is a conspiracy and have no respect for education or authority."[/quote]
This PP is pointing out that you don't have the necessary understanding ("scaffolding") of non-literalist religion (which is the majority of religion and Christianity) to engage on the topic. That's not about you personally, but your engagement with the material presented in the discussion.

[quote]- "You are uneducated and not willing to learn, which makes you boring at best. "[/quote]
I'll give you this one. In the context of your repeated unwillingness to engage on the substance of actual Christianity, instead of continually resorting to a literalist strawman, it read as more exhausted than ad hominem, but I'll give it to you anyway.

[quote]- "I'm sorry that it's hard for you to process complexity and nuance."[/quote]
This one was me and I'll give it to you too. Again, in context, you were ignoring answers to your questions that didn't conform with your incomplete understanding of Christianity. In that context, this critique was meant to be about your inability to engage with Christianity outside of your narrow literalist framework, but I let my frustration/exhaustion with that get the better of me and didn't frame that critique as well as I could have, and I apologize for that.[/quote]

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