Rhetoric: All vs. In General
Yesterday I talked about a double standard between religious and non-religious. Today, I have another double standard that goes beyond claims of belief or lack of belief in deities and is more about general disagreements. Nevertheless, since people tend to disagree about religion a lot, this double standard comes up a lot in religious conversations.
If a Christian were to say, “atheists are angry people,” most other religious people and the secular religious general public wouldn’t think anything of it. This particular Christian is clearly talking about atheists in general and not making a claim necessarily about every single atheist. No one would claim that this Christian has to personally meet every atheist before he or she could conclude that “atheists are angry people.” That would be absurd.
On the other hand, if an atheist were to say, “Christians seem to be angry people,” most religious people and the secular religious general public would jump at the atheist for making the logical fallacy of a “Hasty Generalization” even if the word “seem” is used or some other modifier. Regardless however, a hasty generalization is only a logical fallacy if the small sample of subjects is claimed to represent all of the subjects. In other words, unless someone says that after meeting a few Christians we can safely conclude that “all” Christians are exactly like the few we have met, it isn’t a hasty generalization fallacy. Remember that an important aspect of the fallacy is the size of the sample of subjects.
There are also aspects of the statement which might be true by definition and therefore doesn’t need to have any sample size at all. Like the statement that atheists don’t believe in god. No Christian would have to personally meet every atheist to make such a conclusion since it is true by definition.
But my point here is that when Christians make a subjective statement about atheists without any modifiers it is assumed that they are talking about atheists in general and not all atheists necessarily. Yet when an atheist makes similar statements about a religious believer without any modifiers it is perceived as a claim about all religious believers rather than a general generalization.
Religious people including the secular religious tend to give themselves the benefit of the doubt, but they usually don’t extend that benefit to the non-religious. With that said, I wonder how many religious people will say that I am making a hasty generalization about all religious people with this blog?
Filed under: conversation, discussion, Hasty Generalization, logic, Religion
