>>Me:
>> If ALL people have this property, being a sinner, then there is no contrast.
>Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience@pobox.com>
> Oh, give me a break. Are you saying the statements "All people are made
> of atoms" or "All atoms obey the laws of physics" are not meaningful?
> [...] all tangerines are not sinners, so "sin" is less general than "atomic substrate".
There is a difference, all atoms are not in people and not all the laws of physics involve atoms; I was assuming (it's not implicit in the original post I admit) that not only are all people sinners but all sinners are people. But now that I come to think about it, that's equivalent to "all non sinners are non people" so your example of a virtuous tangerine is a little bit of evidence helping to prove the proposition that all people are indeed sinners. Perhaps the original poster was right after all.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net