Well, that's fine with me, I suppose. I just think it is curious that you keep repeating how "pointless" and "circular" this argument is, yet you don't actually bother to point out how it is so. As it doesn't seem like you're interested in an actual exchange, I'm done now.

I'm not sure at all what to make of your "warnings". Do you not think it important to understand the meanings of the words we use, or to aim for precision in that understanding? If your understanding of "unsurpassable" (note: not simply "unsurpassed") or "perfectly loving" differs from mine, that's fine. But to suggest that there's some harm in being exacting when talking about these issues seems a little odd.

Well, sure. This argument only "works" if you understand "God" to be a perfect or unsurpassable being. If you don't think God is such a thing, then it probably doesn't apply to whatever that thing is. But that's very different than the enterprise of natural theology/atheology being a waste of time.

Nah. If it is going to be formalized, it will look something more like:

1. A -> B
2. B -> ~C
3. C
4. ~B
5. ~A

And that's how the argument should be understood.

Well, I'm not the person you asked. But I'll give it a go.

1) If there is a God, he is perfectly loving.
2) If a perfectly loving God exists, reasonable non-belief in the existence of God does not occur.
3) Reasonable non-belief in the existence of God does occur.
4) No perfectly loving God exists.
5) There is no God. (Schellenberg 1993: 83)

"I just witnessed a murder!"

"Who cares? Murders happen every day. It shouldn't surprise anyone that there are murders in this country."

"But isn't it your obligation to take down in the evidence I have in order to help catch the criminal?"

"Not my problem. Come back when you have a juicy crime to report. Something exciting, and maybe titillating, like a rape charge or a kidnapped showgirl. Then we might do something about it."

My mistake, I didn't realize Murdoch became a naturalized American citizen. Nevertheless, virtually every foreign newspaper has at some time published editorials trying to influence American policy, and every news organization in the world that is worth a damn has released classified documents at some point.

Releasing a stream of illegally-released classified information from a democratic nation?

Your poor wording aside, it is not illegal to publish classified documents as decided by the Supreme Court in New York Times Co v United States. Leaking classified documents is only a crime for government employees.

Too bad people can't see this for what it is: a foreign national releasing illegally-obtained classified information in a coordinated effort to deliberately try to influence public opinion and US policy.

Other than your claim that Assange obtained the documents illegally, which I just showed to be a complete lie, that description applies equally well to Rupert Murdoch, but I don't see you calling for his arrest.

not the government that works on behalf of the people

If you had bothered to read even a fraction of what Wikileaks put out you wouldn't be so ignorant as to make the claim that the US government works "on behalf of the people".

It results in an environment where closed and repressive societies have an advantage in the information realm over open and democratic societies.

Did it even occur to you that you just spent your entire post attacking someone who has done nothing illegal and arguing that the media should shut up and only publish whatever information the government decides they should? Sounds like you would enjoy living in a closed and repressive society to me.

With the mixed signals Sweden is sending, he should be careful. They could say they want him tonight, but by the next morning they might change their mind.

"I believe they forgot an option or two:
7. Smarter than Slashdot editors"

That's the 5th option.

And from basic logic, not not guilty is the same thing as guilty. So logically, he must be guilty if he's not not guilty.

I rest my case.

Sadly, this isn't even valid. At least the modern, three-premise version of the argument (as defended by William Lane Craig) has that going for it. However, something like this is appropriated by Craig as justification for his second premise. Unfortunately, his arguments for the impossibility of an "actual infinite" fail just as badly.

If you mean to say that "God does not exist," cannot possibly be the conclusion of a sound argument, you're simply wrong. Indeed there are many valid arguments which would serve as candidates (evil, hiddenness, etc.).

I was responding to a post about the review's conclusions, not the scientific validity of the proxies, so obviously I didn't respond to McKitrick's claims. Don't insult me because I'm not discussing the topic that you so desperately want to debate. Start a new post if you can't stay on topic.

"If they were intentionally misleading the public, why would they omit the data from a later publication with much wider circulation?"

A report for the WMO has a wider circulation than NATURE, arguably the most prestigious science journal in the world? Are you kidding me?

The later publication contains all the information necessary to find the original articles. Anyone who actually deserves the label 'skeptic', instead of 'blind-faith conspiracy theorist' would have looked up the original articles by Mann and other to see how the proxy data was used to make the graph. Are you actually arguing a cover-up of data that is publicly available in the most prestigious journal in science? What kind of cover-up involves covering up material that is already in the public domain? If people like McKitrick are too damn lazy to check sources that's a mark against them.

"Intentionally supplying misleading figures is scientific misconduct"

Yes, it is. Except the report did not claim anywhere that it was intentional. Nor was it, considering that the dropping of tree ring data was made explicit in the original paper where the graph was used:

In one of the most notorious leaked e-mails, Jones, referring to the WMO report graph, described how he had "just completed Mike's trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years". Jones was referring to the fact that climatologist Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University in University Park had used direct temperature measurements to reconstruct temperatures over the past 20 years or so in a graph in an earlier Nature paper [2]. However, while Mann and his colleagues had clearly labelled which temperature lines were derived from direct measurements and which referred to proxy data, the graph submitted by Jones for the WMO report did not.
- UK climate data were not tampered with

If they were intentionally misleading the public, why had the same graph already been published with the missing information?

"What does bother me is the attempt to pass off the results of incompetent software engineering as valid science."

The evidence of your post tells me that the misrepresentation of facts doesn't seem to bother you at all.