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I actually realize things appear that way. I started discussing it but thought it would be a tangent and deleted it. First, just because there is a fallacy doesn't mean the conclusion is false. It just means that the middle part is not a strong logical argument. Second, the final judge for who receives eternal life is Christ. There is no circular reasoning as far as that goes, assuming you believe the Bible is true. To have a "No True Scotsman" fallacy, you need to have moving goalposts. The goalposts on this are very clear but not very useful for several purposes. Third, some of those purposes are legitimate from a Christian, or even non-Christian, perspective. People do lie, including to themselves (cognitive dissonance, even). How do you know if your pastor or fiance believes in Christ? The Bible gives us some heuristics for determining how spiritually mature a person is. One of those is the presence and absence of certain character traits and behaviors. Humility, peace, truth, love, selflessness, and absence of sin are all part of that heuristic. And that heuristic, again, has been fixed for two thousand years. No moving goalposts, so no "No True Scotsman" fallacy. Anyway, maybe all that is not convincing to you and you still think it all adds up to a No True Scotsman fallacy. If so, maybe we should leave it at that. The labeling of the strength of argument is not very interesting to me. I do find, however, that for the intents and purposes I've experienced, looking for evidence of a Christ-like character, or at least growth towards one, has proved to be useful as long as I understand that I'm working with partial information since I'm not omniscient. But I don't really need a full set of information to know Pol Pot didn't really follow the teachings of Christ. |