Of course, "strongest" is not the same thing as "best." People being as they are, those two things often differ.

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In rhetoric, strongest=best and weakest=worst, as the goal is to persuade a particular audience, not to uncover the truth.

The latter is dialectic and only the most brilliant, detached minds can even engage in it.

Everyone should strive to bring themselves and others up to the level of dialectic. The goal is for the intellect to rule, not the passions.

If the intellect is in charge, then most logical=best.

I think dialect is a different art than rhetoric, a tool with a different purpose.

I think our ability to trust or distrust, and our passions and emotions, are conveyers of important information. They are irrational, but not unreasonable.

It is, so to say, the dialectic of our ancestors. A sort of... genetic tradition.

That makes sense. It has to stay well-ordered, though. Our instincts and emotions often hint in the direction reason should go, but even there the intellect has to swing in and sort everything out.

Apologetics is rhetoric, not dialectic, by the way. That the highest form of argument.

Experience certainly bears this out. However logical faith or religion may be, some people just refuse to believe it.

I think more and more that some personal experience with Christ—often through other people—is necessary to win people over to the point where they can reason clearly about Christianity.

You have to love someone, to really know them.

Isn't that the whole point of Ender's Game?

To defeat your enemy you have to know him, and to know him you have to love him.

I often distrust my heart and stick to my head, and that has caused me much grief. My heart was saying something important. It was picking up on input that I couldn't rationally process and that I wasn't even consciously aware of.

It's like a sensor.