Luckily, in this forum, you don't get to decide who can participate on any given thread and who can't. So your "done" is immaterial. You're beginning to look like you don't know what you're talking about, Loran. In other words, it's you who looks stupid, not Scratch.
Answer him or be forever branded as a lightweight. If you can't even use a standard definition of the word, then you have no standing here. We don't make up definitions to fit our argument; we use the standard definition, or nothing.
Now either get on with it, or shut the hell up. You're derailing the thread.
Loran:
I did answer the question, several times. So did Wade. The discussion with Scratch is over because he knows precisely what I'm talking about and he knows the careful delimitations I placed on the debate in an attempt to keep in tightly focused and on track. Scatch is a provocateur and a demagogue, not a serious critic of anything, and discourse with him, as, it seems, with you, is, for all intents and purposes, is useless.
By the way, here's the definition of the term from Answers.com:
1. A false statement deliberately presented as being true; a falsehood
2. Something meant to decieve or give the wrong impression/
3. To present false information with the intention of deceiveing.
4. To convey a false image or impression.
5. To cause to be in a specific condition or affect in a specific way by telling falsehoods
And from Wikipidia:
A lie is an untruthful statement made to someone else with the intention to deceive. To lie is to say something one believes to be false with the intention that it be taken for the truth by someone else.
A true statement may be a lie. If the person who makes the true statement genuinely believes it to be false, and makes the statement with the intention that his audience believe it to be true, then this is a lie (see Jean-Paul Sartre, Le Mur (1937)). When a person lies he or she necessarily is untruthful, but he or she is not necessarily making an untrue statement.
I checked my Oxford American Dictionary and my Webster's and found nothing close to Scractch's definitions except one in Websters, which was essentially the giving of false impression or statement,
especially with the intent to decieve. This is difficult philosophically, as it imputes guile to false statements of unspecified kinds--including philosophical or metaphysical, whose truth value may not be ascertainable in a stratghtforward way and in which the one making the claim may be a sincere believer in the statements being made. In any event. The overwhelming body of lexical definitionss are all explicit or implicit in the presense of conscious awareness that the lie is being told and that the information conveyed therin is false. That is the only way I mean the term to be taken in relation to this thread and the questions I posed.
If neither you nor Scratch are capable of handling such a discussion with a modicum of intellectual honesty and the throwing of endless red herrings into the water, then this thread will, I suppose, go the way of Wade's.
Loran