Will arguing help or detriment your cause? (For: Argue, Against: Don't)

Hello twilighttrees! Interesting response, though I must admit, after reading through your response I realize maybe you thought I was being a little vague, as some of your addresses came from things that were not said, implied, or meant. So let me clear these up before I continue the debate from where you would have liked me to. #1, Merriam Webster is a dictionary, as I hope we all know, and one of the tough jobs of all dictionary companies is to put what is pictured in our brains into words, and they did a very good job. They listed every possible picture anyone could ever use the word in, but that does not help us much, at least not myself. What I want is a standard definition that is the baseline, and if you would like to use another word, well then by all means go ahead, but that baseline is still going to be there. I had no implication of straying from this standard definition, I find it quite odd that you say I did. In concern to "argument": (Merriam Webster) "The conversation resulting in red-faced frustration is the connotation of the term, not the denotation." When I told you that debate and arguments are different, here is what was meant: Debate: Civil, orderly, each opponent takes his/her turn. Argument: Anger filled, cutting off often involved, louder. Now I know that debates are good because they help to evolve one's ideas (I think we all agree they are good, hence the reason we are visiting a debate website). But arguments? Arguments arouse hatred (some are small, and thus this is little), and our body gets stressed as a result of such (again some are small, and this would result in little stress). Though you should not get these confused with the main idea which is do arguments help your cause, them getting mad is not worsening your cause (your belief set). Your cause is the important part of the argument, it is why you started it, and what you want others to believe in after it, one may argue that stress as a result means you should not have an argument, but I will cover this more later. Lastly the button saying argue. There are many definitions, but the baseline is the connotation, they simply opted for a synonym of the word they were looking for: debate, and sadly its connotation got lost in translation. I hope you got the point though. So to wrap that up, what I meant was the societal connotation of the word "argue", which references the picture I had in mind when writing the question. #2 "The debate in the topic is "will arguing help or detriment your cause?" while my opponent lists an example in which it appears one debater is selfish for brining up his case this does not answer the question. This example only displays a scenario in which the debater is seen in a bad light but not his case. Although a debater may appear to be selfish the debate at hand and weather or not its detrimental to his cause is the main point my opponent should bring up." This is what you said. I do not think you understood the allusion, and thus I will use a different one, maybe one more clear. If a man says to me that I should mention a number 1 - 10, and on guessing the right number he will give me a lot of money, followed by me being free to go on with whatever it is I was doing, but on guessing the wrong number, if it is so, I am still free, I would mention a number. I mentioned above two options ( One: The arguer does not influence the other, Two: The arguer influences the other toward his/her beliefs. ) as a result of an argument, thus by arguing you are taking a chance as to help your cause, and if you don't, well oh well, it's not like you hurt anything in concern with your cause. That is what I meant by the gambling example. Because you posed the question "Although a debater may appear to be selfish the debate at hand and whether or not its detrimental to his cause is the main point my opponent should bring up." I thought I would answer. I brought it up by saying: One: The arguer does not influence the other, Two: The arguer influences the other toward his/her beliefs. Hence there is no way it could cause harm. So to wrap up, you simply had a small misconception. The last part of your debate I found most interesting. You said, and you even provided a very nice example (Galileo), that arguments can be detrimental to others because, for example, one may argue with the pope, and that could be heard by the public, and then the pope is suddenly less valued by society, or in your case the church. This is entirely true, but what I specifically said was the cause (why we want to argue in the first place). Will arguing help one's cause? Or in other words, will shouting/bickering with someone help influence them or detriment them in terms of one's cause (set of beliefs). And the answer is, as I have stated before, that it will not detriment them. If you can refute the claim that I just made, I would like to hear it, but as of right now, my main point still stands, as I put it in my opening. Now to go over briefly the crux of my argument, as you have heard me state so many times before. The cause of the argument is the topic, and this is because there are many moving pieces to an argument, one of them may be like you said, the possible outside side-effects, but then again, maybe one of them is stress. Whether one person values one greater than the other is his/her own personal preference--he/she was probably born liking one more than the other--but for all the people here on this website, I think I can safely say that cause outweighs stress or even possible outside side-effects (Galileo was going to put his point out even if it meant incarceration). This is why I chose cause, and in terms of cause I base my argument.