Misunderstanding and Correction or Misrepresentation and Deception

This topic is only about the misunderstanding in the Money Isn't a False God between myself and Crashfrog. It is not about whether one's position concerning the money and false gods is correct or not. It is not about issues my opponent has had in other threads.In Message 262, I officially reported a discussion problem and asked for an official determination. I didn't get one. A few brave souls have put forth their views of the situation and found in my favor. Many thanks.Although my opponent claims to be capable of accepting correction, he has yet to concede that he may have misunderstood what I wrote in Message 27.Here is a snapshot of the text in question: A little insight into my thought process when replying. I responded to the question first and purposely mirrored the wording of my opponents question in my response to reemphasize my position. The word construe is not a word I tend to use at EvC. Responding to the rest of the paragraph was an afterthought and the remaining part of the paragraph was added to the quote before posting along with the response to that portion of the paragraph.The questions to be addressed by participants in this thread are:1. In the snapshot above did I agree that worshiping false gods doesn't mean temples and prostrate worship and that it means putting material concerns ahead of spiritual ones as my opponent contends in Message 30 and Message 39?or2. Did I respond to the question as I contend in my explanation in Message 40?If my opponent still feels there is deceit and misrepresentation, then he needs to provide evidence of such intent.As per the rules of this forum, please address the position and do not attack the person. This thread is strictly about the snapshot above and whether it was a source of misunderstanding or the beginning of deception.Edited by purpledawn, : Typo and LinksEdited by purpledawn, : No reason given.

I find this issue fascinating because people wonder why creationists doesn't change their belief when confronted with evidence to the contrary.In this instance we have an atheist who had a belief for less than 3 hours before being corrected and can't change his point of view when confronted with evidence.Food for thought: If it is this difficult for an atheist to let go of a new incorrect belief, how much harder will it be for a creationist to let go of a belief they may have held for decades?

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What evidence can you provide that actually supports your assertion that you meant something other than what you said?

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I provided the evidence in Message 1 of this thread.I didn't mean something other than what I said. Your error is connecting my answer to the paragraph and not the question as it was intended.Edited by purpledawn, : Subtitle

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I have provided the evidence; it's the difference between what you said, and what you later insisted you had actually meant.

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Since this thread is addressing a disagreement that has taken place in two other threads, please provide links to posts you feel contain your evidence.The only evidence you've provided in the other two threads is evidence of why you misunderstood my response. Even PaulK in Message 264 and Bailey in Message 42 agree that I was responding to the question and not the paragraph.You haven't shown evidence that I have been deceitful. You believe I've been deceitful, but you haven't shown evidence that I have.Just because you misunderstood what I wrote, doesn't mean I've been deceitful.

Your explanation is evidence of why you misunderstood my response. You expected a certain layout and I didn't follow that layout. On this board, we don't have to separate individual sentences.Remember, I'm the author of what I wrote. I provided insight into my thought process in Message 1. My response mirrored the words from your question.The two sentences don't make sense if they both refer to the paragraph minus the question. They would contradict each other.There was no major time lapse between your posts and my correction of your error, so that's just an excuse. If you disagree, please show me the timeframe you feel is questionable.I agree that you may have viewed the response to the question as a response to the paragraph. Unfortunately that is the wrong way to read it, and my guess is that you didn't even read the sentence that followed which would contradict the first sentence.Why do you refuse to believe that I responded to the question?

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On this board, replies to material follow the quoted material, and that's the format that I expected you were following because that's the format you have always followed, and continue to follow even in this thread.

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That's the format I followed.

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Are you saying that you accidentally responded to the paragraph instead of to the question?

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No.

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It is, frankly, not uncommon for you to unintentionally say things that are contradictory or simply unclear. Poor or unclear writing is hardly uncharacteristic of you.

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Please show evidence of this with links.

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So what? That doesn't place you in any particularly privileged seat when it comes to what you meant, and it certainly doesn't obligate me to take your assertions about what you meant at face-value or privilege them ahead of what you actually said.

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This leads one to believe you are behaving this way on purpose. As a supposed English Major and science guy, you know better than that. Your slip is showing.

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Because you replied to the paragraph. Ergo, you responded to the paragraph. If you did so by mistake I'm prepared to accept that, but it leaves unexplained why you allowed the discussion to continue for so long on the basis of the obvious misunderstanding you'd caused. Surely it was immediately obvious that I was replying to you as though you'd replied to the paragraph and not to the question?

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You still haven't shown that a long period of time has passed. You have been shown otherwise. (Even though I quoted the whole paragraph, I bet you can tell which sentence I'm actually replying to.)I haven't figured out whether the first mistake was intentional or a real mistake, but the refusal to take correction is obviously intentional. You're creating conflict to argue for the sake of arguing. That is not the spirit of debate on this board.

But when you change the persons position and then expect them to argue the position you've created for them, problems arise. Then you are no longer arguing their position.

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That's correct. You quoted material, and then you replied to that material.

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You quoted a paragraph and then you replied to that paragraph. So I was correct in how I originally interpreted you.

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No you didn't because you didn't take into account the whole paragraph which includes the question, which you demonstrated by no quoting the question when referencing it.

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So you intentionally responded to the paragraph instead of to the question.

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As I point out in Message 1, the first sentence was a response to the question and the second was a response to the rest of the paragraph.

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Um, this is precisely what I was instructed as an English major - how to interpret text without preoccupation with author biography. As I've just explained to CS what I was instructed in as an English major was not to commit the Intentional Fallacy, as you are now asking me to do.

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This is not a case of Intential Fallacy. This is a discussion.

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My recollection is that several posts over several days elapsed in between my reply indicating that I had interpreted you as assenting to a paragraph instead of contradicting a question and your first insistence that I had "misrepresented" you, and that your insistence that I misrepresented you began only when I showed you how positions you had indicated assent to had directly contradicted the position you opened the thread to defend.

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They are all date and time stamped. Show me the time line with links.

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You're responding to the paragraph. When you want to answer questions, you quote only the question - as you've done in this very post:

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That's not a fact. Just another excuse.This example you gave isn't part of a paragraph. This is how it looked in the post. They were three separate sentences. Come on English Major, you know what a paragraph is.

Since Crash brought it up again, I assumed he didn't accept what you presented earlier. He didn't respond to the msg or acknowledge it. I was hoping he would show us what he considers a long period of time on a forum like this.

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Thus, in reality Purpledawn waited only 9 hours to provide a correction, not days. And on a forum like this, a 9 hour delay is far from unreasonable.

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And that was overnight, so I was sleeping. Crash posted after 11pm my time and I responded after 7am my time the next morning.If he can't understand me when I'm awake, he definitely won't understand me while I'm asleep.

I can understand why a creationist doesn't want to let go of a belief they have held for decades. It could be a major life changing event.I don't understand why Crash has a need to hang on to this misunderstanding. There's nothing major riding on it. There's no fame, no fortune, no free parking, etc.He's actually hurting his credibility on this site just like some creationists do.If he truly is an English Major, then I would say he's doing this on purpose. If he truly believes he is right, then he needs to check his meds. If he is doing this on purpose, then he is breaking forum rules, but he claims he isn't.At least this issue gives me insight into how to advise people to deal with similar situations with Crash.

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I am not convinced that this thread should have been started.
I am convinced that it should be brought to a close.

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I feel the thread is needed. My opponent supposedly has an aversion to misrepresentation. He threw down the gauntlet months ago, but refused to do a Great Debate. He basically has thrown down the gauntlet again and I'm taking him up on it.He's accusing me of deceit and misrepresentation. I've only accused him of misunderstanding. We have a science guy who isn't accepting facts.He's provided no evidence of deceit or misrepresentation, only assertions.I couldn't do this within the threads. It is an attempt to discern whether he is innocently misunderstanding and unable to admit when he's wrong or intentionally misrepresenting to create side battles.Personally, I can ignore him. As an admin, I won't always have that option.

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My recollection is that several posts over several days elapsed in between my reply indicating that I had interpreted you as assenting to a paragraph instead of contradicting a question and your first insistence that I had "misrepresented" you, and that your insistence that I misrepresented you began only when I showed you how positions you had indicated assent to had directly contradicted the position you opened the thread to defend.

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PaulK has summed it up twice for you now.When we look at the exchange summed up in Message 19, we see that messages 27-31 are all on May 5 which is also the day you first entered the discussion. So your recollection is incorrect. You jump in, screwed up, and were corrected all in the same day.I'm not sure why you're relying on your recollection when the thread is easily accessible and PaulK summed it up very nicely for you in the Problem thread.May 8th (after I was asleep) is when you next replied to pinpoint message 27 as the source of your error. I replied the next morning on May 9th. I also posted the request in the Problem thread on May 9th.So again, no long passage of time before I corrected your mistake. Not a day and not a week. A post is not equal to a day.For a science guy, you don't check your facts very well. It's all there in blue and white. How can you continue to ignore the facts?

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Your first "correction" - that is, the time when you began to falsely claim that I had misrepresented you - is Message 40, posted three days after the initial exchange. PaulK's summary is doubly incorrect.

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Incorrect. The first correction was in Message 31. Since I didn't know what words of mine gave you that idea, I had no way to address your source directly. Three days later is when you told me that Message 27 was the source of your understanding.

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So, again - if there was a genuine misrepresentation why did it take you three days to correct it?

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You jumped in, screwed up and were corrected all on the same day.It's on the record.

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Uh, no. There's no mention of any "misunderstanding" in message 31, and the message indicates your continued agreement:

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I see, because I didn't actually use the word misunderstanding. Wow, you got me there. My bad.Same song second verse.In message 30, you stated: In message 31, I told you that I had not agreed. That is correction.

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Rather than being a correction, Message 31 simply continues our accord on the appropriate interpretation of the passage.

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Nope. Message 31 is a correction and addresses what I assumed may have been the source of your misunderstanding and that was my agreement with the worshiping mammon issue. There was no mention of the issue with Message 27 which you pointed out 3 days later as the source of your understanding. You didn't mention the issue with worshiping mammon.

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You knew exactly what words of yours gave me that idea, because not only did you write them, I quoted them back to you when you asked me where you had said what you said. If a misunderstanding had occurred it was apparent long before the three days you waited to tell me I was in the wrong.

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Read carefully. I didn't ask you any questions in message 31. The facts are not in your favor.

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She needs Crashfrog's head on her mantlepiece, at this point. She's even admitted it.

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You're gigging yourself.

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And then if that wasn't enough, when she tried to backpedal from her initial agreement on the issue, still on the 5th, I said:

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Date stamp for that is May 8th.

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And then finally on the 9th (sorry, it's the 9th rather than the 8th as I mistakenly said earlier) she replies to this message by indicating that I've "misinterpreted" her remarks:

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Your post was 11:03pm on the 8th and I responded at 7:25 am on the 9th. I do sleep at night. Can't count that against me. I did eat breakfast. Then there's the time it takes to research the timelines and delete expletives, etc. Nothing sinister about that.

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Obviously. I can't for the life of me see how any other interpretation makes sense. I've been charitable enough to extend the olive branch and allow PD to simply admit she spoke ambiguously and caused the misunderstanding, but even that was rebuffed.

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I have no problem with someone misunderstanding what I wrote. I can correct a misunderstanding which is what I have attempted to do.The problem here is that you don't accept the correction and wish to hold me accountable to the erroneous position you created for me while proclaiming deceit and lies.All you needed to do was accept the correction. Then we could have continued the discussion with the position I actual held and not the one you created for me.