You sound like you joined a cult.
Good luck.
I suppose you realize how odd it is for someone to say this about himself. One of the things about your posts in this thread that don’t feel positive to me.
Nevertheless, I wish you well and hope for the best outcome, for you and for everyone else.
I suppose I did. It is a “cult” devoted to self reflection, self improvement and helping others. Someone please save me from myself!
I’ve been very clear that I am not in the position to either give or withhold forgiveness to you, and that I wish anyone trying to move to a path of self-improvement good wishes.
Nevertheless this statement really is all sorts of fucked up.
Those here at least who have not received your request for forgiveness well are not declining to forgive you because of “issues” of their own. They are simply judging your attempt at apology as an abject failure. They don’t need your help. They don’t want your help. The most you can hope for is their granting you a chance to do things that can move towards repairing the damages and hurts that you recognize you have inflicted and are responsible for.
Really dude if your “cult” is, as you say, predicated on “self reflection, self improvement and helping others” you are missing some very basic beats when you automatically blame others for your failure. I’d strongly advise you take the self-reflective moment here. If what you see is mainly your big heart be open to the possibility that your lens may be distorted.
Then perhaps you described her incorrectly. Does she truly hate men, or does she love them the way an Episcopal priest would and should love her fellow humans? Does she mistrust individual men on a personal level but not as a group? Then that isn’t misandry. A member of the clergy doesn’t like everyone–that’d be impossible–but if they truly hate an entire gender, that’s a huge issue.
1 John 4:20:
It is the latter and it is justified. I can’t into personal details but really has been badly mistreated by men her whole life and I completely understand that. I am trying to help rebuild that trust for some of us.
Believe it or not, women tend to really like me in real life. I have issues of my own but I am certainly not a misogynist as people on this board try to portray me.
We both love people as individuals but not just a broad category. Some people really are just shitheads at least right now. The only thing you can do is help them to get better in the best way possible.
I am not in a “cult”. It is true that no one has to forgive me but the apology is out there if anyone wants to take it. I can’t undo the past, all I can do is improve like I hope others do too. I haven’t broken out a single Bible verse and I don’t even go to church all that frequently. I fail to see the controversy.
That would be refreshing. If this thread is any indication, that improvement is yet to start.
Maybe but you can’t run before you walk. I really have improved. I just have a long way to go. Baby steps and all that.
We’re not portraying you as a misogynist. Your own posts have done that. We’re merely pointing it out.
But good luck with the “Some of my best friends are women” argument. I’m sure many, and particularly the female members of the board, will find it compelling. Personally, I find arguing with the people you’re purportedly apologizing to about whether you’ve done the things you’re purportedly apologizing for usually turns out to be counterproductive, but that’s just my opinion, man.
You keep saying that, but all we have in evidence are your posts here and they haven’t changed in any perceptible manner.
It’s taking longer than we thought.
At the beginning of this thread, I gave Shagnasty the benefit of the doubt. Following his posts here, I have taken it back. He is attempting to rebrand narcissism as being “devoted to self reflection, self improvement and helping others” - but the “helping others” bit appears to be simply telling them that they’re wrong about him.
Now I hear all his posts in the voice of Saddam Hussein from the South Park movie. “But I can change, I can chaaaaaange!”
On behalf of everyone here, we warmly accept! 
(Can I do that?)
You just said this, two hours ago in the thread about blind dates:
I’m simply gonna leave this here. A reminder that you date women just so you can “piss them off and refuse them” and another reminder that you write off entire swaths of humanity (wtf is a “corporate exec” anyway?) based solely on their means of earning their daily bread.
In general, though, people who inform you that they are funny aren’t fucking funny at all. People who are good-hearted don’t go around saying they are; they go around being good hearted. The shittiest parents are inevitably also the ones who command adoring gratitude for how wonderful they are to their offspring.
In other words, people who feel compelled to announce loudly that they ARE something positive … never genuinely possess that characteristic.
Then perhaps your self-reflection should focus on how you depict your fiancée (and other women). But if you’re not mischaracterizing her in this post, I’d argue that, as a Christian clergy member, she’s lacking a crucial ability. Mistrust is a personal issue, and I’m sorry she’s had cause to mistrust. But if it spills over into “all men,” then it’s getting in the way of her religious beliefs and duties. Loving people–in the Christian sense–even though we’re shitheads (and we’re all shitheads at some point) means accepting on a fundamental level that humans can be shitheads and loving us all anyway. And that IS an essential ability for an Episcopalian priest. That doesn’t mean approval of our shitheadedness. It simply means being capable–and it’s not easy–of loving us as God does. You may not understand this, but I’m betting your fiancée does.
One more thing: the line that originally caused all the skepticism in this thread is the one about all you’d said was true, but the way you said it was wrong. Can you not see, in all your self-reflective truth-seeking, how troublesome this is? How it undercuts your apology? Imagine someone saying to your fiancée (or mother, sister, daughter), “I formally apologize for calling you a two-bit whore of the devil. That was rude. I should have called you a cheap prostitute of Satan.” It’s still a terrible, false, disgusting thing to say. Maybe you need to avoid posting apologies until you’ve taken a lot more baby steps and can honestly, humbly apologize for more than just the phrasing.
Isn’t that how pretty much every cult describes themselves? I mean, the usual cult pitch is that you’re going to examine yourself with the help of the cult, improve yourself, and help make the world a better place.
People have ‘tried to portray’ you as a misogynist by quoting misogynistic statements that you’ve made, and which even in your apology you’ve said you still believe. When people are just direct-quoting your own words without editing or dropping relevant context, it’s a bit silly to claim that they’re just ‘trying to protray’ you as what your own words say.
I don’t represent the Episcopal church in any formal or even informal way. They have been nothing but great to me and countless others over the years. I don’t even go to services that often. It is called “The thinking person’s religion” for a reason. They just break Christianity down into the core message but you get to decide how to achieve it. There is nothing cultish about it. It is like calling the Girl Scouts a cult.
Be that as it may, I am making an apology for my past behavior and I honestly regret it. I have been on this board for 20 years. Oh my goodness, I said some things that I would take back in hindsight. Call Mom!
I am not sure it is possible to make an effective apology on this board unless crosses, stakes and pitchforks are involved. That is fine. We all have our issues. I am just trying to address mine in the best ways that I can.
Your OP actually doesn’t say that you would take back the substance of anything that you said. It says that you consider everything that you said to be true, but that you presented it in an inflamatory way and that you deeply regret that way, but not the substance of what you said.
The ‘oh my goodness’ and ‘call Mom!’ hysterics seem like the typical deflection engaged in by someone giving an ‘apology that’s not really an apology’; if the stuff that you said is actually not a big deal and people are being absurd to be at all bothered by it, why even offer an apology in the first place?
There’s a lot of ground between ‘crosses, stakes, and pitchforks’ and ‘an apology where I claim that everything I said is true and that I just regret saying it in an inflamatory way’. IMO a good rule of thumb is that whenever someone trying to get people or a person to accept an apology makes any comments about ‘pitchforks’ or ‘burning at the stake’, their apology is actually worthless and/or meaningless.