Attention All EvC Members

Upon reading many of the recent posts and topics discussed in our forum, particularly the Faith/Belief topics, I have been disturbed by seeing many attacks upon the person by other posters.This is NOT the Spirit or the intent of EvC Forum. We all are guilty of it, yet we ALL must focus on being more professional in our written replies and less emotional and antagonistic.Everyone please watch it in 2006, or the admins may send a heat seeking Moose missle that suspends upon impact!PB P.S. Wishing everyone a Happy New Year!

yeah i think a lot of people just need to take a break. antsy people have been here long enough to see topics being repeated and now they're getting even more antsy and just arguing stupid crap.

bumpity

Hi, PB.
I think a lot of the heat from evos comes from discovering the depths of the irrationality in our opponents, and realising 'My God (insert deity of choice),these people could be living next door to me'.

This seems strange to me. Irrational or not, isn't it necessary to find a way to live respectfully with your neighbor? This seems to me more a reason why you should avoid getting upset. Because coping mechanisms are part of what we need in real life.Ben

Hi, Ben.I've had a unique opportunity to experience an extreme instance of this problem. As you recall, my one suspension was due to a single cold, appallingly venomous post; I think of it as the Dragon of Eden Rant, written while my reptilian brain was in complete control, and written while I was medicated with opiates after surgery. I ascribe that disaster to the disinhibiting effects of the drug. I accept responsibility for it, because, hey!, I'm the driver here, but I was as shocked by it as anyone else, I think.I believe that the peculiar combination of intimacy created by forums, and the incorporeality of forum participation, combine to create a similarly disinhibiting effect; in addition, the persistence of posts changes a passing exchange of verbal bricks, an ephemeral conversation, into an eternally present quarrel. We cannot forgive and forget contentious histories at archived forums precisely because we cannot forget them. They are with us always.Our relative anonymity here, the mask of our avatars, encourages blunter, even ruder, speech than most of us would engage in face-to-face. Sparks fly, and the "on the record" nature of our exchanges preserves them like red ants in amber. That's not going to change.Still, once you understand the source of a harmful behavior, you are fully responsible for it: maybe you shoplifted because your parents sold your bike when you weren't looking, but once you gain that insight, the excuse expires.So we have a dynamic that both sustains anger and disinhibits its expression. We need to find a way to live respectfully with our neighbor, but the ground of our shared experience here complicates the effort with its psychological and emotional terrain, so different from that we share with our actual neighbors. It's good to avoid personal attacks; it's also good sometimes to let a cross word pass unmet, because we know where it came from.That means I agree, Ben This message has been edited by Omnivorous, 12-27-2005 10:37 PM

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What I refuse to accept is your insistence that your beliefs about your beliefs constitute evidence in support of your beliefs.

speak for yourself that

Okay, point, smartie pants......still, you didn't have to look me in the eye when you thumbed your rhetorical nose at me, didja?But I'll let it go, just to encourage the others.

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What I refuse to accept is your insistence that your beliefs about your beliefs constitute evidence in support of your beliefs.

*snuggly*

Nighttrain, it's stuff like this that is so irritating. Who is irrational is often relative to which side you're on. Some of us who've been into the Bible seriously for a years or decades do have to deal with a whole lot of irrationality by plebe type counterpart folks who happen to have recently acquired a concordance or found something on the web coming on and acting as though they'd done a lifetime of Biblical study, especially when they take Biblical stuff out of context or disregard total context, et al. Then there's the others who will say just about anything to get the last word in or debunk the Bible and Christianity. If you don't respond they sometimes get uptight and accuse of running off.

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From "THE MONKEY'S VIEWPOINT: Man descended, the ornery cuss, but he surely did not descend from us!"

a few people here do have pictures of themselves as their avatar. brenna, for instance, does. (it's a picture i took, too.)i don't know about other users, but i used my username here just about everywhere else. the only reason i retain some anonymity is because i'm damned hard to find sorting through google hits -- they're all for software.but yes, we do kind feel a little more free to let fly. i've also found that the chat tends to be more polite and more friendly.

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אָרַח

I remember when e-mail took the corporate and institutional worlds by storm in the 80s and 90s: the tales of disaster in that new hot medium were endless...Write, Click, Regret.When I was working at a medical institute in Boston, we were being assisted by a systems analyst from Trellis who was well connected with senior management; like a gnarly Zen master, he was both useful and frustrating.One night a fellow manager and I sat and composed an e-mail J'Accuse! of his performance--it was detailed, unrelenting, accurate--and boozily absurd. I enjoyed the fun of composing it, we agreed to delete it, and as I turned from the monitor my friend clicked Send.As it turned out, he was under the impression that we were using my e-mail account, but, in fact, I had stolen his password that day in the latest sally of our ongoing, good-natured cyberwar (stealing passwords, hijacking peripherals, etc.), and we were logged into his account--not as part of a scheme, but simply as happenstance: I was preparing to e-mail the department secretary from his account with a declaration of undying love. The consultant gave us an A- for content, an A+ for guts, and bought us drinks. Then he taught us a great deal for the next several months.Where was I? Oh yeah.Go thou and do likewise. Whatever.This message has been edited by Omnivorous, 12-27-2005 11:36 PMThis message has been edited by Omnivorous, 12-27-2005 11:36 PM

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What I refuse to accept is your insistence that your beliefs about your beliefs constitute evidence in support of your beliefs.

i love stories like that.

Hi, Ben. First up, an apology. I owed you a couple of replies but by the time I got back to the originals, 40 or so posts had intervened and I thought the reply had lost its relevance.To this present one. In an unstable world, you make judgement calls about your neighbours without delving into the depths of their beliefs. E.G., they might be a JW, a Muslim, even a Calithumpian. However the normal discourse concerns day-to-day matters and you really haven`t that much to go on concerning their hidden world. When we come here, the relative anonymity tempts people into disclosing what their beliefs are really based on. And sometimes, I sit back in disbelief. So I think the mere revelation of what goes on in their minds is a wake-up call on what people hide.

If this sort of thing is allowed, even on a thread like this, how can you expect civility?There is a massive, continual level of vitriol, insults, and false accusations, at times bordering on paranoia as shown in the comment above, hurled by evos at anyone that dares to criticize their beliefs. The vilest accusations are thrown out with no substantiation and seemingly almost no self-awareness within the evo community here.This message has been edited by randman, 12-28-2005 02:43 AM