…I’m staying out of the Pit for a while. Why am I announcing this rather than just doing it? A couple of reasons:
I’ve hung out in here a lot because, at one time, it interested me more than other forums. I do realize that people can (and some doubtless will) interpret this announcement as my being full of myself and thinking myself so important that my exit merits announcing, but I do have some actual friends and supporters who hang out here whom I admire, and this notice is for them. Suddenly not posting could raise its own set of questions.
It provides a clean break. In the Zev thread, it is possible that multiple responses have accumulated as I type this, and meanwhile there are fascinating debates going on in Great Debates. Only a moron would expend energy on fighting against people who call paraphrases “your own words” while interesting discussion goes on elsewhere. This informs all and sundry that I’m done with it.
I want to reassure people, like Left Hand of Dorkness, who are interested in and hopeful for my growth as a nicer, less aggressive poster that I’m genuinely trying. The Pit is not the best place to hang out if you’re looking to avoid snarls and meanness. This provides a bookmark for me, a reminder about what I need to do.
Thin skinned? I don’t think so. I think I’ve hung i thee with the best of them. And that’s part of the problem, I think. The challenge of meeting attack with counter-attack is too tempting and too unproductive. I’ll see some of you in the other forums, especially Great Debates. For those who don’t know, Sentient is hosting a great thread on whether memory is physical. There’s too much treasure in there to ignore for the sake of posting in the Pit.
A mod can lock this now, as far as I’m concerned. Or you can use it to flame me. Whatever. I may not know exactly where the garden is for me, but I know that it isn’t here.
Awww, you’re being an attention whore because someone accurately paraphrased what you were saying and caught you being two faced? That’s so very honorable of you!
I donno shit about the backstory here, but I do want to say that you’re wrong about panthiests Finn, and Liberal is right. Polytheists believe in multiple gods. Pantheists believe the universe itself is God. See here.
Does this mean that we can read a thread in the Pit now, and there’ll be a good chance that the thread will actually be about the topic proposed by the OP? Amazing.
Thank you for the correction, you are right. I was using the term in its second meaning and was unaware of the first.
I’ve heard it used to describe people who believe in a particular [url=http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=pantheon]pantheon
[/quote]
of gods, (ie. Greek, Egyptian, Norse…) Evidently I was in error, thank you for clearing up my ignorance.
(I’d still argue, however, that with the exception of ascribing an incorrect definition to pantheism, the rest of my argument was on target)
This was the link I tried to post. I had figured, in error, that if a pantheon was a group of gods, that a pantheist would be the adjectival description of one who believed in a pantheon.
I suppose that the standard “pagan” would (perhaps) have worked just fine.
We can only hope that when he attempts his pedantic bullshit in GD, he’ll be yelled at enough to the point where the only noise he’ll make will be in IMHO, where he’ll lobby for a forum of his very own. And a pony.
Lib is obviously intelligent, but when he gets into full bullshit mode all you have to do is stand up to him and he runs away. Kinda reminds me of a schoolyard bully.
Well, Liberal, I think it’s very communist of you to take a break from the Pit. While the Pit serves its purpose, it’s probably best for the boards as a whole when the members don’t hang out here too much; while there’s a place for letting off steam, constantly pitting each other doesn’t help us all come together as a community.
Oxford English Dictionary: "communism 3. Community of feeling; the spirit of a community. rare.
1870Daily News 18 Nov., A tribunal where the natural bias of mercantile communism could not influence the judgment of those who had to decide the question."
I don’t get why people have to come in here and “announce” they’re taking a break from the Pit. I take regular breaks from the Pit - every time I lose my temper or just need a break, in fact - and I never come in here to announce it.
At the risk of hijacking this thread (since I have neither Havana nor any other destination in mind), can I insert a bit of a practical observation regarding the other thread?
In the thread which touched off the current unpleasantness, Liberal posted the following regarding the Pitted poster:
Note that his specific observation is intended to provide an understanding of the Pittee’s perspective on the world. (This is hardly an unusual event in the Pit and can hardly be deemed a hijack, at this point.)
Czarcasm responds:
Indicating that regardless of the Pittee’s motives, Czarcasm still finds the manner in which the pittee posts upsetting.
Still no hijack.
To which Liberal responds:
So, now, Liberal, we have a problem. The obvious answer (to me) to the first quote is that however Czarcasm felt about the Pittee’s views, your actual words were only intended to explain the (religiously based) views of the Pittee without endorsing those views or expanding them beyond the notion that the Pittee held them. In other words, neither of you really needed to say more on the topic. However, you then attacked Czarcasm’s post on semantic grounds–and needlessly confused the issue. Regardless how many meanings “worship” might convey, the Pittee intended to say that all good people worship the one true god and Czarcasm was simply stating that he disagreed. Your final paragraph in the second quote actually does agree with Czarcasm and was all that was needed without any further comment:
[ul][li](Pittee believes X of all people.)[/li][li]**Liberal ** explains belief of Pittee in context of Pittee’s world view.[/li][li]Czarcasm rejects Pitteee’s worldview.[/li][li]Liberal assents that Czarcasm has a right to do so.[/ul][/li]However, by dragging in other meanings of “worship,” (none of which had been used in the thread), in a clear attack on Czarcasm’s post, we now find multiple posters inferring all sorts of things about what has been posted and implying (and declaring) the purported intents of other posters.
I agree, Liberal, that in your final declaration in the quoted exchange, you asserted that no one should be dragged kicking and screaming into a belief or an afterlife in which they do not believe. However, it was your insistence that various atheists might use the word “worship” in multiple ways, in a hostile comment on Czarcasm’s post, that created the confusion.
You are right throughout that thread that you never insisted that anyone was going to be forced to go where they did not choose. It is just a bit ingenuous, however, to claim that they should read only your final remark in the exchange I quoted while somehow ignoring any number of implications (or, perhaps inferences), drawn from your earlier “semantic” paragraph.
On the other hand, given that, following the “semantic” digression, Liberal did, indeed, post “No one is including you or anyone else who wishes to be excluded.”, it would seem that any number of subsequent respondents might have taken the time to note that he was accurate in saying that he had not intended to force a belief or an afterlife on anyone else.
If everyone decides to bring their favorite hostilities and preconceptions to a thread, we can pretty well always be guaranteed a hostile thread.
Liberal has his own, often abrasive style of arguing, this is true. However I’ve seen very little, if any direct hostility coming from him directed at specific posters. You guys call him a schoolyard bully, yet in my experience I’ve seen him take a hell of a lot more shit than he’s dished out.
I suspect many (not all) of you who have trouble with Liberal aren’t familiar with classic, general, or any kind of specific philosophical doctrines, and thus aren’t accustomed to being argued at from those standpoints. This is not your fault of course, it is more the result of cultural differences and/or your preferences of educational pursuit, but it is in my very humble opinion unfortunate (for all parties.) I think he brings something of value to many of our great debates (not all of which occur in the forum marked “Great Debates”.)
Good luck in your cooling down period, Lib. I’ll still be around the pit occasionally, as I find it less hostile than some of our other forums :D.
I’ve heard this argument before, and didn’t buy it then. Essentialy, it goes that anybody who’s got a problem with his style of argumentation simply must not be able to get it. Well, after close to six years in the ivory tower and many philosophy classes, I have to say I’m well aware of the paradigms involved.
He never retracted his original claims that all spirituality lead to ‘the garden’ and that ‘the garden’ was Jesus Christ. Without that being retracted, I see his claims that he’s not trying to force anything on anybody as mere obfuscatory rhetoric, talking out of both sides of his mouth.
‘You don’t have to believe in what I believe, or hold the metaphysical doctrine that I do, becuase you already do and you just don’t know it.’
Pardon me if I don’t take that a ringing endorsement of difference and individuality.
If all spiritual paths lead to what is essentially (and essential) Christian dogma, then it doesn’t matter what you say after that about not forcing people, you’ve already boxed them into your dogmatic worldview.
