[net.religion] "impoliteness"

karl@osu-eddie.UUCP (Karl Kleinpaste) (02/14/85)

----------
> There seem to be people who think that
> arguing sides of the Christianity/Humanist debate (flame?) is a lot of
> fun. [Rich claims] to be enjoying it. The problem is that there are 2
> groups of people that I know about who are not enjoying it. The first
> group are the Christians who want a nice forum to discuss Christianity
> with the implicit assumption that Christianity is true. They don't want
> to have to defend their beliefs from what they consider [Rich's] attacks.
> The second group is comprised of people who think that both sides of
> the argument are seriously flawed. This includes the believers of
> primarily esoteric religious practice, but may not be confined to them.
> I am in this category, and so is Tim Maroney (hi Tim! If you have been
> sending me mail it hasn't been arriving) and I know that there are
> others.
----------
In general, I agree with this.  However,  there is a 3rd group of people who
read/post-to  net.religion* but aren't enjoying it who are not afraid of  or
bothered by having to defend their beliefs. I consider myself in this group.
There  are  a  number of others, too; I know several by mail,  and  quite  a
number are known by reputation. The  problem  is that doing so over and over
begins  to get old after the third or fourth attempt. Frustration begins  to
set in, because we feel at times  that people  are looking for holes for the
sake of looking for holes. I happen to believe that there are no holes in my
belief system, but expressing the entirety of that system such that no holes
would  remain would require the posting of an article so long as to  totally
overwhelm any network I know.  I  think it can  be done; I started to try to
write  such  an article once. I gave up when I hit the  1500-line  mark  and
realized I wasn't even off to a good start.  I rm'd the file and decided not
to bother. The magnitude of the task is too great.

When one posts to the network, and one tries to express some idea reasonably
concisely, one is bound to leave out a few things. It's the nature of trying
to economize one's postings.  But  when 20,000  people  read it, each reader
notices something slightly different that they would like clarified, or feel
inclined to  attack.  Thus,  one  article gets  clobbered  by  4 or 5 actual
responses  from  those  sufficiently motivated  to  respond.  Attempting  to
respond to each of those can only lead to escalation of the problem.

It is much better to move  discussions off  to private mail very early on in
the  life  of  a  discussion. For instance, when both  of  us  were  posting
regularly to net.religion,  Tim  Maroney  and I flamed each other reasonably
well in public. Bad idea. Since last May, however, Tim and I have had a very
reasonable and almost completely  civil  discussion about quite a variety of
things having to do with one another's religious beliefs. (We've been a  bit
quiet  lately,  because  we're  both  too busy,  I  guess.)  It's  been most
enlightening to me, and quite pleasurable to argue and discuss in a way that
doesn't lead to raw, unadorned flames.

My point is this: net.religion gets to be a drag. Private mail works a whole
lot better after a discussion has started.
-- 
Karl Kleinpaste @ Bell Labs, Columbus    614/860-5107  +==-> cbrma!kk
                @ Ohio State University  614/422-0915  osu-eddie!karl