Quote (Shadowoffury @ Feb 8 2025 07:34am)

The purpose of language is communication. If you can convey your meaning and understand people who are trying to communicate with you, everything else is aesthetic. Slang is only a problem when you try to use it with people who are unfamiliar with your slang. This is generally understood and people will alter their use of slang depending on their counterpart.

There is a lot of slang that is now common which I do not understand. If someone uses it on me I say "I don't know what that means." And they either explain it or stop using it on me. It's not a difficult problem to deal with.



The real problem is altering definitions to fit your rhetoric. This is an attempt at obfuscation whether conscious or unconscious and it makes intelligent conversation impossible.

This is a forum dedicated, in part, to religious debate and yet I have yet to have a conversation here about the belief in god which did not devolve into a failure by my counterpart to recognize the difference between atheism and agnosticism. Defining the terms for them is met with denial. Inviting them to define and differentiate the terms is met with resistance.

You can not have an intelligent conversation about concepts if you fail to define the associated terms. What's worse is you think about concepts in language, so your failure to differentiate between terms literally prevents you from thinking rationally about the subject. It makes you stupid.

Quote (TiStuff @ Feb 8 2025 11:09am)

sounds like your making a challenge of some kind?

Quote (Shadowoffury @ Feb 8 2025 09:00am)

It was a declaration. If you'd like to discuss it tho I'm open to that.

Quote (duffman316 @ 7 Feb 2025 16:28)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dbR2JZmlWo

Quote (PapaPsych @ Feb 7 2025 09:11pm)

I'm on topic, answer the question, its literally the most bastardized word in the English language.

Quote (TiStuff @ Feb 8 2025 03:11pm)

sure, i am curious. i will go first with an observation. not being able to adequately define the difference between atheism and agnostic doesn't really seem to challenge the G(g)od claim?

Quote (Shadowoffury @ Feb 10 2025 08:00am)

It makes it impossible to intelligently discuss belief in god(s) if you refuse to aacept the established differences between types of belief. You can't debate something if you can't even define the terms. If we're talking about cats and dogs but I don't agree with you on what a "cat" means, the conversation is at a standstill until we can both figure out what "cat" means.

Based on your bracketed capitalization I assume you are a theist, which means you probably accept the well-established definitions. It's only atheists, in my experience, who try to use this particular form of semantics to get out of defending their position.

I'll define them quickly anyway since I believe that's what you're expecting.

Theism is the belief that one or more gods exist.

Atheism is the belief that no gods exist.

Agnosticism is an abstention of belief one way or the other, based on a perceived lack of evidence one way or the other.

Quote (Mondain @ Feb 7 2025 02:24pm)

This is both political and religious.
New words are invented to obfuscated old words/language/texts/dialects.
Swag,Rizz,Cap,FR,crash out, etc are current age terms used.
lol, rofl, afk, spaz, tight, more internet or urban demographic terms.

(they) teach us these words to dumb us down,
They speak in ancient tongues with each other.

Do you understand Language?

Quote (Santara @ Feb 10 2025 05:50pm)

New words are invented to obfuscated