I have to say, MEBuckner, that was well played.
And why do you think that is? Because dozens of posters all randomly picked him as the person that we’d pick on, dish crap on, and call names?
Perhaps if lots of people are angry and frustrated with him, there’s a REASON For that. And it sure as heck isn’t just because he knows lots about philosophy (even if he does). Knowing lots about philosophy is no excuse for not communicating clearly, or for REPEATEDLY REFUSING TO ANSWER SIMPLE QUESTIONS (see the current pit thread on hate speech).
Well, I don’t want to say yes, but there’s no simple answer to this question. Enough well-liked, well respected members of our community have openly disagreed with Lib that there seems to have been a trickle-down effect resulting in him being insulted by people who rarely encounter him and almost never post in his type of threads. Simply put, it has become “popular” to talk down on Liberal. I’ve seen it done by MPSIMS flirt-thread slobs whom I know aren’t familiar with his writings outside of “pulling up a lawnchair” (so to speak) to see him being pitted.
I didn’t like it when it happened to handy and I don’t like it now. Handy may have done a lot of drive-bys but it got to the point where the way he was treated here was just way over-the-top unneccesarily mean. We’ve been on the verge of seeing a repeat of that with Liberal for awhile now (I wonder if there’s a correlation with their status as #s 1/2 in post counts? :dubious: ) and I don’t want to see it happen.
I can safely say you are mistaken.
You’re asking him to “retract” his deeply held religious beliefs? Good luck with that. And how is holding that belief, and being willing to articulate, “forcing” his religious belief on you? His position is that you can believe whatever you want, or nothing at all, and you’re still okay with his conception of God. You don’t have to go to his church, say his prayers, or drink his Kool-Aid to be accepted by his God. Explain to me, please, where “force” enters into this theology, 'cause I just don’t see it.
I’ve given Liberal a ration of shit a time or two myself, but I’m with Cisco on this one. People are jumping on Lib just because he’s Lib, and not because of anything he’s actually said.
You actually care whether a poster posts in the pit?
Now you’re making things up.
Liberal does not hold that much in the way of Christian dogma, and if you have been slamming into him for lo these many months without realizing that, then you really have been paying more attention to slamming him than reading his posts.
Note that the overwhelming number of contentious posts had nothing to do with “one” religion or monotheism or Judaic Law or any of the issues related to the one you have dragged up, here. Liberal and Jonathan Chance had a bit of by-play on that topic, but the majority of the attacks were following Czarcasm with the “you can’t make me go to heaven” claim. By the time that you jumped in, the topic was well and truly into belief vs non-belief and you made no serious effort to distinguish your complaint from those of your predecessors. Specifically, you began by going back and quoting his explication of the Pittee’s meaning (which is relevant only to believers), then insisted that he defend what he had not actually yet claimed. You then went on to cherry-pick quotations out of sequence and out of context, building an argument based on error. (Specifically, you included the “worship” passage that I have already noted was ill-conceived, and drew the whollly incorrect conclusion that he was including atheists in his circle of believers.) That is not supported by Liberal’s posts in order and in context. Your error is a primary reason why I reckon Liberal should not have inserted that sidebar, but you had, at that point, imposed a belief on Liberal that he had not expressed.
Note: Liberal did not embrace the Pittee’s claim that all who are good are “Christian,” he merely explained the perspective. Conflating separate posts with separate ideas by insisting that Liberal include the Pittee’s beliefs within his own is your error, not Liberal’s.
This is not to say that you had no legitimate complaint to lodge with Liberal’s position, but jumping into an ongoing mêlée with a tangential feud argued incorrectly is not the best way to get your point heard.
Note that in my initial post, here, I am, indeed, pointing out how Liberal might consider reviewing his posting style to reduce the number of trainwrecks. I even noted that his sidetrack regarding semantics (ably cited, now, by your entry into the fray, in which you did quote part of his aside, misunderstanding what he had said), was the principle caused of the problem. However, given the zeal with which people were willing to ignore his actual words, I do not think that he can be held solely responsible for the ensuing havoc.
You know, I honestly think that might be a good idea. There does not appear to be a single topic that in any way, no matter how incidentally, involves the discussion and logical interpretation of material evidence which cannot be massively hijacked by yet another of his masturbatory diatribes on all things epistemically relativist and the denial of anything remotely resembling a common-sense understanding of “reality”. To have Liberal in the room is to either beg him to stop posting, or surrender to a relentless game of thrust-and-feint (parry would accord his dialectical style too much credit for cohesion), where he not only refuses to argue a particular point when legitimately called on it, but attempts to use abstruse logic (often incorrectly or obtusely) to assert he never made any such claim. He is either ravingly mad, or the most maliciously disingenuous and malignantly contrarian sophist I have ever encountered in my entire life. It’s to the point I fear any discussion of a host of topics because, beyond hostility, I simply have grown to dread reliving the nightmare of watching Liberal prattle on yet again about his wooly essense. For Pete’s fucking sake, Man, we get it.
Please, Powers That Be, grant the fellow his own masturbatorium where he can challenge any and all masochistic enough to engage him in a safely compartmentalized fashion, so that we might have a moment of peace from this unrelenting philosphical wankery! Please!
Might I be so bold as to suggest that it’s not cool to pit a guy who has said he won’t be around to defend himself?
Yes, but the funeral isn’t really for the dead as much as it’s for the living. Just sayin’.
I assume you’re only directing the first part of this statement at me, as I didn’t address the rest of the OP. I didn’t comment on whether or not he had anything valuable to add, just that he needn’t attention-whore.
I call it attention-whoring when someone has to go and tell everybody, making a big deal out of it, that they won’t be posting in a certain forum or at all.
I think this is a fairly patronizing post. “You couldn’t possibly know what he’s talking about, but that’s not your fault, so there, there.”
I’ll let you take it that way then, as it quite likely applies in your case. Most everyone else, I expect, will actually understand what I wrote.
Cisco, yes, I think I understand what you mean.
And I, for one, am glad that Lib let us know his thinking about not participating in the Pit for a while. I have no doubt that he knew the kind of snippy remarks that would follow.
As for “attention whores,” I don’t know anyone who posts in the hope that she or he will be ignored altogether.
I’ve seen a great deal of snideness as well as unjustified, profane hostility directed at people who disagree with him - he does not always respond well to disagreement, and he tends to respond to mild rudeness with bombastic harshness. That’s not to say he’s consistently rude (as with certain posters whose names I dare not speak for fear of invoking them) or that rudeness is his only resort when faced with disagreement. But he does not have the calmness or general good humor of many posters.
I don’t understand why this notion is trotted out whenever Liberal’s behavior is at question (and yes, it always gets trotted out) because I have never misunderstood Liberal’s philosophical arguments. I’ve never even seen it happen, though if you have any examples off the top of your head, I’d like to see them.
On more than one occasion I’ve misinterpreted a statement of his (as others seem to do) but it’s hardly been due to an ignorance of philosophy - rather, it appears to be a tremendous inability to express himself in print without being inadvertantly insulting - often because his statements have multiple interpretations, one of which insulting, and one not (witness the argument over his reference to a poster as “a gnat on a camel’s ass”.) It’s a pretty unfortunate handicap in a text-only medium.
I’ve never misunderstood him on logical grounds, though. I guess you don’t understand why the implication that disliking procedes from ignorance is an insulting one - but it is. I’ve disagreed with him dozens of times, and in many cases I’ve had a hard time even convincing him to give a reasoned argument, or to respond substantively rather than with nitpickery. And I’ve seen a very strong tendency for him to sit back and withhold his agreement (as if it were a prize of some sort) until an argument was offered, and one to his liking, to prove him wrong, rather than actively participating in order to present and justify his own viewpoint.
That said, I think Liberal is often funny, and occasionally insightful, which is enough to make his presence here worthwhile. I don’t dislike him, but I’m not ready to say I like him either. I sincerely wish he would take some of the seemingly-constant criticism to heart and offer more genuine argument, because when he does, he often comes up with something pretty interesting.
I like Ham’s Cheesey thread better.
What exactly do you expect from a pit thread that amounts to ‘I am going home and taking my ball with me’? If you take your ball and go home everyone else is going to discuss how much of an ass/baby/whatever they think you were. Its an obvious result and if he did not want that to take place he would have just ceased posting in the pit.
You don’t need to hold ‘that much’ of christian dogma to hold some christian dogma, or essential christian dogma.
Lib said himself that all spiritual paths end up ‘in the garden’ which ‘is Christ’
If you’re not going to retract your accusation that I’m making things up, prove that he didn’t say that. You’ll have a damn hard time.
The belief that all paths lead to Christ is not christian dogma?
Is this, perhaps, Jewish dogma? Muslim? Hindu? Sure looks like Christian dogma to me.
By here do you mean this thread?
If so, what in specific have I brought up that was beyond the pale or beyond the scope of the thread?
I was unaware that I shouldn’t make a point if it’s similar to other points that have been made. My complaint, in specific, was one of qualification and elaboration. If that was not sufficienty distinguished from others, ah well.
Yes… I called him on what I saw as the implications inherent in his postion. And no, even if he was only talking about how it pertains to believers, it’s still something I would’ve argued with becuase it’s still wrong, and the implications are still there.
Based on error, how, exactly?
Did he not make certain claims as to the overarching metaphysical nature of Universe, and its relation to Christ? Statements he never retracted?
You see cherry picking, I see choosing relevant quotes which logically establish a paradigm and which cannot be ignored if they are not retracted.
I still believe that any metaphysical system which views all spiritual paths as leading to one place, and that place being Christ, is wrong whether you’re a believer or not.
I also believe that my paraphrase was an accurate representation of the logical structure of: worship = X , Atheists have X, therfore…, was accurate.
Taken as a response to the point Czarcasm raised, does this not suggest that the people who don’t worship what Christians call God, that atheists who have awe and wonder do in fact worship some sort of God even if they just have awe for the world around them? Am I somehow mistaken?
This as I see it is a core issue, and it was never retracted.
Imposed a belief?
I believe I was quite careful to use the word ‘implies’.
I will admit that I misread it as implicating atheists in the group, but it’s still wrong even if it just implicates the faithful.
Conflating what exactly, and further, what exactly is seperate? If you take one concept (that all paths lead to one place) and then add a second (that this one place is Jesus Christ) then that leads to the conclusion that all paths lead to Jesus Christ. Show me my error in logic or where I’ve ascribed a belief to him that he didn’t state.
Moreoever, I didn’t read his post as simply explaining the pitee’s position, but agreeing with it. Or at least playing devil’s advocate for it.
a link to the first post which in my mind set a, perhaps misinterpreted, tone
Talking about how ‘the truth that arises from…’ something seems very different in meaning than saying ‘he claims that there is a connection between…’ It implies, at least in my mind, that you’re agreeing and calling his position, somehow, truth.
Or, rather, that construction presupposes that there is a truth behind everything. Again, 'least from where I stand.
Now, I am more than willing to admit that I was mistaken, if indeed he wasn’t implying that he agreed at all with the pitee. But I acted on my understanding and my intuition and asked for clarification, and for that I do not apologize.
I agree.
I was sloppy and I let myself become emotionally involved in an online message exchange. Always a mistake.
No, he can’t be held solely responsible, and I apologized in the thread for co-hijacking it.
I still believe, however, that if the ‘garden’ and ‘garden is christ’ comments weren’t retracted, that I still have a valid and necessary avenue of debate.
P.S. If Lib is still reading reading, you have my apologies for over-reacting and being too snarky. I still think that at best you are wrong, and at worst being really fucking annoying, but I do respect you. Kinda an odd paradox, but I’m willing to call out people who I respect. I’m also sorry for implying that your charcter is one of a schoolyard bully, but when I see you posting a manner that is fucking annoying, that’s the mental image I get. But it’s not the content of your character.
Anyways, I think it was Neitzche who said a man should be proud of his opponents. And I should endevour to keep my disagreements with you civil, even when you make my blood boil.
Zoe: there is a big difference between someone posting an OP because they want input, or writing a post because they want to engage in discussion, or simply posting because they’d like replies and interaction …
and someone posting something to the effect of
LOOK AT ME AND WHAT I’M DOING!!!
He opened up the thread and said it could be closed or people could flame him. So far, a few people have flamed him. And it’s not the same as someone who’ has been banned. He can still come back and post if he felt like it.
Further, people are pitted all the time and don’t respond to it.
And, finally, he opened up a new thread in the pit. Since this is a public message board ,I assume that would at least imply that people could discuss the OP, rather than it being an announcement from Lib which was then to be locked.
[quibble]
Um, Neitzche didn’t say that I should try to be civil, that’s all me 
(sorry for the tripple post, I’ll be quiet now)
[/quibble]
Nope. Not at all. Many Christian groups hold that there are very specific (and very limited) paths to Christ. In recent years, perhaps the last century, a number of Christian groups have begun to consider the possibility that others who are seeking the Divine are actually (if unconsciously) seeking Christ and among those groups a few will even accept that those (unconsciously) seeking Christ will find Him. However, that is not a core tenet of belief among Christians at large and there are a number of Christians who would violently oppose such a belief.
Not dogma, I’m afraid.
Yes, although with your recent explication I see that I had not quite understood your objection, as well. In the original thread, I would agree that Liberal asserted his belief that all spiritual seekers were, ultimately, seeking the same point and that, in his belief that point was Christ. However, I disagree that that was the point Liberal was making in the most contentious posts of that thread. The discussion swirled around the claims that Liberal was asserting that even atheists were seeking the same ultimate goal. I think that his semantic attack on the word “worship” confused the issue, but he never set out to claim that atheists were “seeking” the “garden” or that they would find it. While you were objecting to lumping believers, the rest of the participants were objecting to him “kidnapping” atheists.
As I noted, he and Jonathan Chance did exchange some views on a universal seeking by believers, but your interjection into that thread, and your residual anger in this thread are based on a rejection of “lumping” the believers while I am fairly sure that Liberal was concentrating on the fact that he was not attempting to kidnap the unbelievers, and so missed your objections–more easily because in your initial post in the other thread you cited his defense of the Pittee whereas he would have separated that post from the later exchange with Czarcasm.
As I said, I do not think that you are “wrong” to challenge his views on the garden metaphor, but I think you do him a disservice when you fail to note that your objections differ from the objections of the majority of his opponents, most of whom were claiming that he insisted on “dragging” unbelievers into the “garden” while he would see no such action. It would not surprise me to learn that in the turmoil of the other thread, he did not even notice that your objection differed from that of the others and that he was not even arguing your point.