- Identify the conclusion - Disengage the covert assumption(s) - Value claim(s) - Cognitive assertions from emotive language - Translate them into...

- Identify the conclusion

- Disengage the covert assumption(s)

- Value claim(s)

- Cognitive assertions from emotive language

- Translate them into emotively neutral premises

1. The creationists have no right to impose their mistaken, ignorant, superstitious beliefs on others. They claim the constitutional right to the free exercise of religion. How about the rights of the majority of people who want their children taught the scientific truth about evolution - not fallacious myths and superstitions from primitive societies.

2. The insanity plea should be done away with; criminals should lose this easy way out. Killers can theoretically spend as little as six months in a mental hospital, then be released. It's time to take a stand for safety and put psychotic killers in prison.

3. Until now, the protest against the holocaust in our own nation has been vocal but far too small. The massacre of an unwanted generation through abortion and infanticide has sounded an alarm that should wake up every Christian. Helpless and guiltless little infants are mercilessly butchered daily in hospitals and clinics across our land. For the love of God, let us all urge the passage of the Human Life Bill, now before Congress.

4. A kind and loving God surely favors the pro-choice attitude. He wants his world inhabited by happy, well-fed children with parents who love and care for them. 

     Our burgeoning population in Third World nations with constant famine and disease, and many other human miseries, could be relieved if the Catholic Church were to adjust more of its ancient policies to our current civilization.

5. Thousands of years of organized religion have done nothing to solve any problems and have almost always exacerbated them by promoting fear, superstition, and irrational mythologies. Kneeling in prayer to some supernatural entity seeking "divine guidance" or, even more implausibly, "divine intervention", is not only a waste of time, it is counterproductive because it lulls the supplicant into inactivity.

     We must stand up, open our eyes, and face life's challenges head-on in a problem-solving approach that is reality-based, empirical, and above all, rational.