And because /u/tuscanspeed deleted his most recent comment before I could hit the submit button to reply to it, I'm putting the reply here:

Tens of thousands of denominations disagree that no one cherry picks.

It never said nobody cherry-picks. I said not everybody cherry-picks. Not the same thing now is it? Good job wasting that mulligan on a strawman.

I must have missed the abolitionist movement you speak of as I don't find it relevant to the discussion. It misses the point.

It's was the counter-example that spawned this branching of the thread. It was very much relevant. This speaks to your reading comprehension skills.

Not a personal "you" there guy. But since you feel the need to get butthurt about it anyway....agnostic what? It's an adjective, not a noun. Agnostic Theist? Deist? Atheist? Teapotist? Ateapotist?

Despite what Dawkins would have you believe, the 2D orthogonal model for theism/gnosticism isn't the only semantic model out there. The word Agnosticism was coined by Thomas Henry Huxley, and he described it as:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism#Thomas_Henry_Huxley

• “When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last.”

Note that he didn't consider it to overlap with atheism, even if some people nowadays prefer to define it as such. So when somebody self-labels as an “Agnostic” one should assume they're talking about original Agnosticism which may not conform to how you define Agnosticism.

Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism

• “Atheism has been regarded as compatible with agnosticism,[30][31][32][33][34][35][36] and has also been contrasted with it.[37][38][39] A variety of categories have been used to distinguish the different forms of atheism.”

So even if this semantic issue you're trying to contest was relevant (and it isn't), you aren't really doing yourself any favors trying to bring it up.

How do they do this? By cherry picking what details are important or not?

No, they don't do this by cherry-picking. You interpret it differently. You really can have 2 people read the same evidence, and come to different conclusions via interpretation. For example, physicists aren't can't be said to necessarily be cherry-picking just because they subscribe to a different interpretation of quantum mechanics. It's not about what evidence you have, it's about how you use it.

But let's not call it anything else. Interpretation is one form of cherry picking.

Why would we call it something that it's not? You've literally just made this up. You're conflating totally different ideas.

Here's your first clue that they're not the same thing, nor even subcategorically-related: Differences of interpretation aren't always fallacious. Cherry-picking is always fallacious. That's a pretty big clue that differences of interpretations aren't a subcategory of cherry-picking.

They're not mutually exclusive.

Even if we bend over backwards to pretend they're not mutually exclusive were true, mutually exclusive ≠ synonymous. Them being synonyms (as you previously claimed) would be a Venn-diagram with 2 circles that are 100% overlapping. Two things being not-mutually-exclusive would be 2 partially overlapping circles. So it still wouldn't excuse the silly mistake you made.