It has come to my attention that people have serious problems with the difference between fact and opinion. Please refer to this as a guide.
Fact:
A statement which is empirically provable. Such a statement can be shown to be true or false. No amount of disbelieving will change a fact. For example, blog starts with the letter, "b." You may believe that blog starts with the letter, "w." However, that will not change the spelling of blog, nor make your incorrect spelling any more correct.
Opinion:
A statement of belief. Such a statement is neither true nor false. Such a statement is a personal expression. For example, Pizza is delicious. I happen to feel that statement is accurate. However, if you disagree, then it would be quite accurate for you to say that Pizza is not delicious.
Seen in this way, whether a particular person is good or bad would be an opinion based on the subject standards of goodness or badness in the same way that the quality of music is subjective. Thus, no matter how much I might protest, my posts regarding Hussein Obama are opinions.
However, someone's existence is not an opinion, but a fact. One either is real or is imaginary. There simply is no middle ground. Thus, G-D's existence is a fact, and not an opinion at all.
Therefore, if two people are debating on the relative aspects of a particular organization. It is quite proper to say that whether the organization's methods are an unfair scheme is matter of opinion. However, it is not accurate to say that whether the organization's methods fit the legal definition of a particular brand of fraud is a matter of opinion--this is a fact, either false or accurate.
Praise Him daily and He will bless you abundantly. Good night and G-D bless.
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5 comments:
You do make yourself quite obvious you know!
Actually, the difference between fact and opinion is more vague than we allow ourselves to believe. We do not hold the keys to existence. There is such a vastness of things we do not understand that it is impossible to say that we "know" this thing or that thing. We guess and other people affirm our guesses.
We try to "prove" things, yet our proofs are not concrete, as we would like to believe. Just because gravity works one way many, many times does not mean that suddenly gravity could not change. The "laws" of science are not laws at all, but descriptions that people have made up for things they have observed.
Science is simply another religion in which people attempt to believe what seems the most likely to be true.
Rali,
Your comment is Dangerously close to moral relativism. I agree that science is a set of beliefs making up a faith. I would also go so far as to say that there is a difference between opinion and belief. However, THERE IS AN ABSOLUTE TRUTH!!! If you do not believe such, you do not believe in G-D, you do not believe in The Bible and you do not believe in Morality. Sorry to be blunt, but it is true.
However, the real issue I was addressing was a definitional one. I explained a definition and the response I was given was, "That is your opinion." Sorry, but a definition of a word is not a matter of opinion. A word means something. That is the basis of language. The word "Apple" means a roundish fruit with a tough skin and a softer inside, which grows on trees. That is a fact, it is not an opinion. Just because you feel that the word "Apple" should describe a orange-colored citrus, does not change the fact of what the word "apple" means.
You cannot argue language (or rather, I would highly suggest you don't) when arguing about any sort of absolute. Language and the connection between the word and the sign are completely arbitrary and fluid. What was a definition hundreds of years ago may not be a definition today in the same language. I give you, for example, awful.
I believe you are actually trying to talk about the idea of an a priori, which I would agree with. All humans have an a priori (an already existing knowledge) of the thing that we term an "apple". And that a priori does not change simply because someone else calls it an "orange". However, that has nothing to do with language - which is a very, very slippery slope.
I am not arguing moral relativism (thanks for the label, though). Instead, I am brining up the idea that humans have a very hard time proving anything at all because we understand very little of the world about us and of our own selves. This would, actually, suggest a much higher belief in an omniscient being such as God, not the opposite of.
For example: prove to me that God exists and human minds have not just made up the idea out of fear or self-preservation.
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