Poe’s Law

I love satire. Of most colours. I like it when Christians satirise our own culture, and when non-Christians do it too. Satire is revealing. It is good for teaching. It makes me laugh.

LarkNews is one of my favourite satire sites, I know of a few people who have fallen for its satire in the past…

People reposting satire as real news is pretty funny – like when a couple of mainstream news outlets picked up an Onion piece that reported the moon landing was fake.

Poe’s Law didn’t make the Wikipedia list of eponymous laws I mentioned previously – but you can read it on this page – RationalWiki’s page.

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won’t mistake for the real thing.

It’s one of those Internet subculture things particular to debates with atheists (along with the No True Scotsman Fallacy) that comes up all the time. It’s a shorthand thing that prevents any real discussion taking place springing from an extreme position. The problem is that sometimes extreme positions may be correct. This is my biggest problem with all the conversational threads I’ve read on the atheist blogs I follow. If it turns out that God exists (as I believe he does) they’re going to look like idiots. This is the problem with Occam’s Razor, and in fact any other eponymous law that becomes common parlance. There are times when there’ll be a complex explanation for something that is true while a more simple explanation with less steps may be wrong. There are times when it’s appropriate to reference Hitler in an argument (Godwin’s Law). There are times when someone will be claiming to be a Scotsman when they’re not (the No True Scotsman Fallacy).

Using these laws in conversations who don’t know about them makes you look like a prat. Especially if you end up quoting them and being wrong.

I’m going to posit my own eponymous law – and I’d like it to catch on. Campbell’s Law. It states:

“As the length of argument on the internet increases the probability of referencing an irrelevant eponymous law or incorrectly identifying a fallacy approaches one.”

I’ll posit a second law.

“Just because someone, somewhere, has described a common phenomena as a “law”, it does not necessarily render the practice a transgression.”

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5 Comments for “Poe’s Law”

  1. 1kutz

    “Just because someone, somewhere, has described a common phenomena as a “law”, it does not necessarily render the practice a transgression.”

    heh. Your other option is to tell atheists that their appeal to the authority of William of Ockham is as valid as your appeal to the authority of St. Paul.

  2. 2Nathan

    Yeah, but then I don’t get my own law.

  3. 3kutz

    Yeah you do, just be happy to let them have their appeal to authority as long as you can have yours. :) Watch them squirm trying to work out which of those they’d prefer!

    ;)

  4. 4Nathan

    I’m not sure that an appeal to Paul makes any atheist squirm.

  5. 5kutz

    I don’t think you quite caught my drift. Either they admit you can appeal to Paul (or your own law), or that they can’t appeal to their ‘law’…

    I think this is a valuable contribution to the New Perspective, actually.

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About St. Eutychus

Eutychus was a young man who fell to his death because the Apostle Paul preached for too long (Acts 20). I've decided to canonise Eutychus and make him the patron saint of my dalliances around the Internet.

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Nathan is a Christian. A husband. A writer. A reader. A coffee drinker. A “spin twit”. A consumer. A fan of stupid gadgets. A fan of staccato lists in profiles.

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