The Atheism Web: Logic & Fallacies

Since we’ve all just been subjected to a season of two-handed shoveling from both sides of the political aisle, here’s a nice refresher course for those of us whose bullshit detectors have been overworked or jammed with excess alpha male bovine fecal matter. You don’t have to be an atheist to appreciate this site, either. This simple page explains, briefly, what logic is and isn’t; then it lays out the basic structure of arguments and tells how to spot them and lists some material for further reading. But the most handy feature is the site’s list of common fallacies, from ad hoc to tu quoque. Anyone who’s listened, critically, to AM radio talk-show blather will recognize tactics common to that medium: post hoc ergo propter hoc, the red herring, the slippery slope, the straw man. Given the Orwellian doublespeak flying around, I suspect that sharpening one’s critical-thinking skills might be a swell idea.