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