Please feel free to comment your choise,...and to elaborate! Multiple choices most be commented for shure!!! as for me: This Forum let's me interact with people,...and discuss some issues that are often 'off limits' for the people around me,... It has already proven for me an wonderfull opportunity to meet, talk and think together with other people on subjects that are sometimes verry difficult to understand,....when alone,... And it has certainly contributed to my peace of mind,...knowing that there are other people out there,...or should I say :'in here' that also enjoy the search and the quest for information and to have the opportunity to discuss this so they can make changes in their 'real' life,...whether that be on a high political level, or on a different basis, (for example: sociological) the leveridge is there,....that's the point,..
Well, I chose a few. Whenever I try to start a coversation about any of these topics, no one I know wants to discuss em. I cant have an intelligent coversation with hardly anyone I know. Not like their stupid, but they just dont like discussing these issues. (you know the icky ones - like death row and prejudice) Maybe Im just not interesting but I like to argue my point and I like to hear others and it sucks that I have noone to argue with!!!! Take care Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I nearly voted the same Voodoo, but decided all the above is most accurate! *stRgrl* I know what you are talking about. Shall we argue capital punishment again Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! 't was fun, wasn't it?!
I do post some funny stuff, but I learn a lot here. Can have inttellectual debates and get advice on issues that interest me. Beyond that I enjoy interacting with people online - very cool.
The short response General response A number of factors have kept me near Sciforums through time. I remember being a little starry-eyed and thinking that we could put up hard questions and get serious answers. Well, it doesn't really happen in the Religion forum, and it's quite hard to maintain a serious nature in the Ethics or World Events forum. But there are a number of reasons I still write at Sciforums. • Practice: Despite all else, my primary mode of communication is the written. I've found that unless I choose to be a complete dullard, verbal communication is often inadequate. I've been dead for stories for a while now, partially because I've obliged myself too greatly to "reality", but they're still there, growing and changing, until I'm ready to put them down on paper again. In the meantime, the object is simply to keep writing. • Expression: I must admit that it is nice to have a soapbox and a place to use it. • Socializing: I don't spend a whole lot of effort socializing, anyway, and my friends know that its easiest to get to me via email as compared to the phone or whatever. To wit, my "magickal partner" of years back popped up in my inbox on Sunday. But in terms of Sciforums, I'm not yet chatting with anyone, per the recent topic, and I have, in fact, developed at least intellectual relationships with a couple of posters here. For instance Cris is thus far the avatar of atheism, as far as I'm concerned; it's just that after a couple of years of communicating on various subjects, I see him reaching toward the living potential instead of labels and supremacy. It's always nice to have diversity and communication. • Learning: For instance, to keep on the atheist example for a moment, Adam and I have had some pointless rounds regarding atheism. Such proactive atheism as I see going on around here often equates, whether the atheists like it or not, a religion. When Adam stepped out on a limb, taking swings because he felt like something needed bashing ... well, I find that quite different from other atheistic inquiries pertaining largely to issues of faith the atheist is familiar with. Cris' commentary seems to come from two places--his education among religious folk, and the perspective he gained from that experience. Whereas Adam assures me that the cold objectivism of my own atheist experience isn't standard, he's asking me to take on faith the nature of atheism. In the direct comparison, I'm actually learning a thing or two from Cris, who seems to know better than to ask someone to take an issue on faith. And it's not like I didn't learn anything from our now-absent Christian cadre. Like I said, starry-eyed. I had great faith in humanity in general, and held great faith in the possibility of reconciliation among the masses. I understand now, based on the Christian presence at Sciforums, that this faith in reconciliation is somewhat misplaced. Of course, I've also learned that we're dealing with human issues, and not label issues. • Affirmation: If I described Christianity in a certain way to someone not at this forum, I would meet resistance. But what takes place in the Sciforums microcosm affirms a great deal of what I've been trying to figure out one way or another. Between ISDAman's Friday Night Sermons, the sheer immaturity of a couple of our Christian posters, and the blind insistence on poor rhetoric of others, there's nothing going on here that truly surprises me. All the way back through Lori and even Truestory, my time with this site has affirmed much of what I chose not to declare as factual, and thus is solidifying my view of people in the world. • Learning (redux): I would be remiss to fail to mention the odd relationship between new knowledge and prejudice. It's something I've examined carefully, but we can get to that in a minute. Take the idea of marking trends. Yet every time I look into the reason for an apparent behavioral trend about Christianity, I am both surprised and affirmed. I've learned a great deal of detail backing my points. E.g. for all Tony1 liked to accuse me of Catholicism, the greater part of my doctrinal knowledge of Catholicism came from the very argument in which he would reveal his hatred of Catholicism and Catholics, and would later derive his conclusion that I am Catholic. • Resolution of prejudice, or, Learning part III: Everyone who knows me well knows I'm a simmering, directionless bigot. That is, I'll hold anyone's choices against them if I have to. Largely reactionary, I'm always trying to suppress, for instance, my outright rage at the Christian experience. It is only my broader principles of human life and equality that stand against my advocacy of an active reduction of Christianity. Specifically, I would like to see Christianity gone from the human experience. Zero. Out. Done. Finis. But I do have principles which prohibit me from making a direct and active effort at extinction, extraction, exscinding, or otherwise. One must educate Christianity out of the human race. Of course, I'm finding that idea more difficult as I learn more about the human nature of the problem. They're like anyone else. Over their dead body will they give up this paradigm, and not even then. It's a human problem. I see atheists believing in the same nonsensical manner as Christians, some of my pagan friends, and others. All people seem to behave religiously, whether or not they have any specific religion. It's human nature, and part of the quest now becomes to show that human nature as it is, and fix what's amiss about it, or at least adapt our vision of reality to accommodate it. • Venting: I do think it's real easy to tell when I'm venting steam, and just as easy to tell if I'm venting it at another poster or in regard to a more general issue. I mean, really, what, other than my personal satisfaction, did I get making a poem out of KalvinB's tantrums? It was fun. I laughed my ass off when I read through the final version and tried to stick meter into it. • Communication: One of the reasons I stalled out on my stories a few years ago is that the priorities of my life suddenly compelled me to treat communication as a given. It isn't. It's a hard, hard thing to do. The years off have devastated not my stories themselves, but my ability to communicate their essence. I prefer to work with abstractions, since there are so many people obsessed with the real. But years spent merely reading bullshit off the web, saying, "Yes, dear," to my girlfriend, and existing in my particular family (the most conformist post-WASP idiots I know) has left me standing in a place I never wanted to be. It's not bad to be common to other people, but when communication is your business and you suddenly find yourself failing to communicate exactly as everyone else does, it's a hard, long process to climb out of that pit. In the end, one of the most vital things I'm watching in my time at Sciforums is how well or poorly I'm communicating. In this sense, standoffs like the one in the Crucifixion topic serve both well and poorly. On the one hand, I'm obviously not communicating the point to anyone who didn't agree with my conclusions already; to the other, I'm learning a great deal about how to communicate with Christians, who happen to make up the statistical majority of the American population that I call a marketplace for such purposes. When I see the Emma Goldmans and so forth ignored by society while being correct in their assertions, one of the chief reasons I figure is that Emma runs outside the accepted paradigm. There must, says Tiassa's theory of communication, be a way to make certain facts apparent within a faithful arena. That we are at a point in history where Emma's traditional opponents (e.g. commerce & state) are lamenting the same issues she presented eighty years ago suggests the possibility of inserting the data we who recognize such issues have learned while the rest of the world ignored. At some point, it should be within reach to cause a quantum-leap in perspective, to foist the ignored but now-undeniable reality onto people and compel them to look honestly at what the outsiders have learned in an effort to avoid going through those same, useless processes again. Given my thoughts on liberty, though, it's a tough balance to strike, and relies largely on hope. I keep searching for a decisive key that will unlock those grander mysteries for people. It's an active communication process, though. What they couldn't see yesterday, they might see today, if simply because some new event has occurred. People are obsessed with what they think they can quantify, and aren't seeing the intangible factors. Consider it this way, for analogy. CD player my ass. MP3 my ass. Anyone who knows sound knows that your best option is a vinyl record and a clean needle and good speakers. Try it. For instance ... what was that White Zombie album called? I can't recall, but it was the follow-up to ... boy, you can tell I care about White Zombie. But I listened to that album for a couple of months. The 72-track recording sounds far and away better on vinyl than it does on CD, and even moreso than MP3. Why? The digital sample only reproduces what it's capable of digitizing (quantifying). What you're hearing in digital reproduction is a sampling of the sound, and not the true sound. Therefore, a lot of subtleties of the note get lost. It doesn't matter quite as much coming from a boom-box, but when you turn it up and say, "Why does this sound different?" that's the problem. Even top-of-the-line consumer CD players can't sample enough to get the whole of the sound. This is much like the way people treat ideas. Only what they can quantify and see, and those things they don't see are no longer issues. Just as you're no longer hearing the note, someone is no longer seeing the issue. Communication will be the salvation of humankind, lest we all chain ourselves into our houses with an online connection to the world and a shotgun to protect what's ours, dammit. I'm a writer with a broken story who is surrounded by people who want him to do anything but write. Sciforums is a refuge of sorts. And I've been around to other bulletin boards and so forth. Not one of them is remotely like the Sciforums experience. I remember once someone with a religion EZ-Board came over here and asked us to check out their board. It sucked. As far as we could tell, discussions of any one religion were for its advocates only. Beliefnet? By the goddess, that's a ridiculous community. Even other vBB projects are ridiculous with partisan moderators and idiot posters. The last year at Sciforums has been quite interesting, but an unfortunate necessity of growth. It used to be so civilized here. Nonetheless, despite a general decline into horsepucky, the posters here are still more intelliigent in their expressions than anywhere else. I keep hoping to get the novel put together so I can wear "Sciforums" t-shirts or something at public appearances. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! But, yeah ... I fully expect this site to haunt me if I ever become famous. I can just see the press conference now, when I announce candidacy for public office: Did you really write that Christians are idiots without intellect? Well, how, indeed, to rebut that without hair-splitting. But then again, if that course of events somehow comes about, maybe it will be a chance to foist my communication principles in a new, slightly more vital arena. thanx, Tiassa Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! (PS--the sad thing is that this is the short form.)
Edumacation. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Tiassa A great poet once wrote another great poet a letter. It was 6 pages long. At the end he apologized for the rather lengthy letter. He claimed he was in a hurry to leave town and had not enough time to write it. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
All of the above. I like you new avatar *strgrl*. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Bebelina, Oh sank you, sank you!!! I totally love it! Fukushi made it, so he deserves all the credit. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Fukushi, Thanx again, you totally rock!!! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
