I'm not looking for the same input from the same people who've already told me what they think of me.
I am sorry about the tremendous misunderstanding; I do see one of the biggest in the idea that 'a person is their beliefs'. That explains pretty much everything, above all why people took offense at things I said. For my part, I was always careful to avoid personal insult, which I see as fundamentally separate from one's beliefs. You will search in vain among all my posts for epithets like idiotic, insane, etc as applied to members here. You won't find cursing of people and comments like "friggin' idiot" or whatever in all of my posting, even though I experience that myself at the hands of a certain few other members here. I have already apologized for any such incidents and will express my regret yet again should you find anything of the sort. You will find ideas - IDEAS - labeled as "foolish", etc, as (I hope) we would all agree that the idea of flapping one's arms and jumping from a tall building will NOT result in flying; that there IS such a thing as a "damned-fool" idea. But not people. Because I see a difference.
I'm only telling what I see; I'm not inviting debate about it. From where I sit, I encounter a great deal of avoidance of my ideas, which I happen to share with people of the past* and when the debates on ideas fail, I see a turn to personal attacks. Nor will I point fingers here.
Obviously (or it OUGHT to be obvious), if a person IS their beliefs, then I am equally insulted when people challenge them - and yet no one was forthcoming with apologies for challenging my beliefs. It is a root self-contradiction, that says, beliefs may not be challenged - unless they challenge one's own beliefs. I'd say that from that perspective, I tolerated a great deal of insult myself - only I didn't see it as insult to begin with, because I can tell the difference between a person and their beliefs.
Anyway, someone made a comment about a pig, and I do not wish to annoy, or to point fingers as to who the pig is in the scenario. I think debate to be useless, because the debate is rigged from the beginning, and most people don't really want honest debate that goes deep - the people that do are the ones who did not come out with the ad hominems - I'll especially recognize folk like Cambo there as decently refraining from that and recognizing, to an extent, the root problem. (There are others, of course)
Why say anything? I think you guys are worth it - or at least enough of you have sufficient doubt or openness to make it worth while. Some people have been particular generous and thoughtful - from Murrin to Linna to LF, even though we differ and have drawn lines in our understandings. I'm willing to extend that further - that people who do get that I was never insulting might open up where now they are closed. But I won't debate here any more. The rules may be applied to everyone, and seen to be "fair" in that sense, but they do work against the traditional believer who does think that there is one particular view of the world that actually happens to be true. So I won't debate here. Even if people come onto my thread, "polluting" it with their own versions of events. This thread is not here for that. That's what the other locked thread is for, and since it has been established that I will get "special" treatment, and wear the yellow star, or yellow cross rather, I won't participate any more as a regular member, responding to all and sundry or intruding on their discussions where my ideas are not wanted.
So what's left? After all, I am a human being too, who like y'all, thinks myself to be rational and reasonable. I didn't arrive at my position through random insanity, but like many of you, through a series of life events and thought that convinced me of the truth of what I see.
I think, for people who are NOT closed off, very occasionally I can offer glimpses, thoughts from elsewhere, not my own anymore - since so many can't hear me anyway - that might cause some people to consider the ideas in there that they also see to be true - for I'm sure that many of us can find common ground on a number of things yet.
So, the occasional pm exchange will work for talking to such people, without having third parties come on to jeer or heckle. And maybe this kind of attitude and approach will do something positive for some people. But I won't participate in other people's threads any more. It does seem to dead-end into rudeness and personal attack.
All that said, I'll offer the one way that it seems to me that I may be able to communicate something to some people - without slamming doors, or even seeming to put someone down - to show that in the end there never was any insult intended to anyone. I've said often enough that the relatively high IQs found here attracted me; and I believe that is part of the problem, paradoxically enough. One can become TOO dependent on reason and exclude things like common sense, things that even uneducated peasants in the fields know to be true. Reason should be our servant, not our master, even though we should certainly pay careful attention to it.
I'll offer a thread or two in the Close and see how it goes. No debate; only explanation. The climate would have to change a great deal before I could consider debate again.
Again, this is meant to be a single post explaining (even to some people like Wyldwode who never come to the Close) what on earth happened to me here, not a thread discussion on KW policy, opinions of members or anything like that.
If you have an honest question, feel free to pm me!
*This is why I have said merely asking for a religious composition of self-identification in our own time (2011) is not nearly sufficient. Unless you clarify connection with belief of the past (from x BC to 1999 AD, for example) of people who identified as Christian, Muslim, etc, you have established nothing that tells us what people actually believe.
