ST (may I call you that?), I appreciate that you see value in the things I have to share. I fully realize I can easily come across as harsh, very harsh, in the written form. I don't necessarily see it as a child stamping his foot, but more as someone asking questions and, when those questions are not answered or worse, answered with worse information than before, getting more agressive with the questioning. I question everything. I have a hard time letting it go.
Perhaps mocking (I rarely call people names, that's just rude, to me) is not the smartest resort. In my mind, when someone refuses to adress questions, attempts to say they have secret knowledge and that's why they are right, etc., that is an intellectual roadblock they are refusing to even see, much less address and, at that point, there is no reason to continue rational questioning and debate.
However, I don't have it in me, and, as I said, this may just be my own challenge, shortfall, foible, etc., to let that go and allow someone to continue to talk from a presumed postion of authority using ignorance and prevarication of examination of their statements. At that point, when rational questioning and debate is dead, I just start mocking the poster for making patently ridiculous and obviously demostrably false statements. We only get better by challenging our beliefs, being able to withstand the heat of debate and questioning, by forging our ideas in the furnace of critical thinking.
Notice that there are several religious posters I never get into it with, like Tec. She freely admits what she says comes only from her postion of faith. I not only agree with that, I strongly support her right to her faith, her ideas, her beliefs, her right to talk about them because she is honest about the source and whether or not there is evidence for things and whether or not it is just her personal belief.
But, when those personal beliefs are state as fact, when a question about them causes the poster to doulble down on the rhetoric, insistence and claims, then it's on.
It's a public forum. Responses should be expected.
