In my undergraduate days, majoring in Speech/Theatre Education, I took a class called, “Small Group Discussion.” The instructor divided the class into groups of six or seven people. Each group was instructed to create a task for themselves (which the instructor would not define for us). We would be presenting the results of that task … Read more
A man is saved no faster than he gets knowledge, for if he does not get knowledge, he will be brought into captivity by some evil power in the other world, as evil spirits will have more knowledge, and consequently more power than many men who are on the earth. Joseph Smith, April 10, 1842 … Read more
Recently, I started an adult Sunday School lesson on the Fall of Adam and Eve by saying “Today we are going to partake of the Tree of Knowledge.” I then took a big bite of a juicy red apple. After savoring the taste, I offered another apple to a class member sitting in the front … Read more
Right-wing propagandists like to push people’s buttons. Their favorite button to push is fear. If Democrats and the political left can be accused of harming innocent schoolchildren, the propagandists can be sure to get the angry, hysterical response they love to create. Critical race theory (CRT) has become a new boogie man for people unwilling … Read more
In a democracy, a wannabe tyrant is just a comical figure on a soapbox unless a huge wave of supporters lifts him to high office. Bob Altmeyer Much has been written about autocrats and despots. At whatever scale, home, school, work, or an entire country, these people rule as dictators using fear and the threat … Read more
The small rodent known as the lemming is often used as a metaphor to represent someone who mindlessly follows a crowd toward catastrophe. This is because it is commonly believed that lemmings commit mass suicide every few years by jumping off a cliff and drowning. The metaphor is useful because there are, indeed, people who … Read more
In Sacrament meeting recently the speakers were a young couple fairly new to our ward. They both spoke on the topic, “From small things come that which is great.” What caught my attention, though, was that neither of them wore protective face masks. The practice in our ward has been for speakers at the podium … Read more
Republicans frequently employ the informal fallacy. This category of faulty reasoning includes such problems as ad hominem (personal) attacks, begging the question, equivocation, false dilemma, faulty analogy, inconsistency and more. (Here is an interesting list). Informal fallacies are not fallacies of logic (those are called formal fallacies). Rather, they are fallacies caused by faulty premises … Read more