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Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:

Exploring the reasons is valid, [..]

This board is to explore what this means, how people cope and deal with this, not to question the decisions.

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Originally posted by Doublethink.:
Random example, if someone says - i am not a Christian because they teach this literal understanding of the bible and because of their homophobia. I'd wish to be able to challenge that - as in, perhaps that is true for x,y,z denomination but not all churches/denominations believe that. Is there perhaps an additional reason why you went from weekly home group to athiesm without considering other expressions of faith ?

Because it seems that alot of people using this board are still holding elements of spiritual or theist beliefs & at the same time, alot of posters seem to want recapture elements of their experience of church life.

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Originally posted by Pre-cambrian:
The trouble is if you take these two together you are going to find it very difficult to stay within the Board guidelines of no converting, or at least not putting pressure on to come back and try it again.

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Originally posted by ThunderBunk:
I'm not sure whether my question belongs here on in the Styx - perhaps a kind host could move it if the latter is the answer.

Is there space - here or elsewhere - for those who have found themselves in the same dilemma but taken the opposite path to compare their experience? This is very much my experience, but again I'm rather anxious about using this board to explore it because it may sound like proselytising, on the "it doesn't have to kill your faith - look at me and come back into the fold" lines.

It sits probably on the borders of Purg and All Saints, if not in here. At a wild guess, it's the fact that it sits on so many borders that makes me unable to decide where it belongs....now there's a startling revelation.

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Originally posted by Doublethink.:


It feels difficult to post on this board unless you also agree, respectful disagreement is needed or you risk just being an echo chamber.

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Originally posted by the famous rachel:
(And to be honest, I don't want to be swamped under IngoB's unique posting style here or there... I lurk a lot more than I post these days, and I know whereof I speak!)

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Ho hum.

Anyhow, my actual post was intentionally aimed at a specific factual claim and addressed that from a specific point of view. I avoided drawing any further conclusions from that, in particular not any conclusions concerning required spiritual action ("therefore you should return to church", or whatever...). As it happens, I largely agree with Pre-cambrian's conclusion, though obviously not with his/her evaluation thereof. But my post itself was open-ended in this regard.

I count six responses that happily affirm Pre-Cambrian's point of view after my post. Some of them, including that of "the famous rachel", written in a rather stark tone. None of these received any hostly attention.

It seems pretty clear then that the main purpose of this board is the mutual affirmation of each other's peculiar lack of faith. Anything posted along those lines is perfectly fine, anything else, not so much. Discussion is limited to support. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. But I'm not particularly interested in participating. So, enjoy yourself.

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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear

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Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:
Telling stories is fine, and exploring those stories.

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Originally posted by Doublethink.:
I was uncomfortable with the hosting call re IngoB stating a piece of reasoning was based on false premises (sorry ipad copy/paste not working so linking is compromised).

It feels difficult to post on this board unless you also agree, respectful disagreement is needed or you risk just being an echo chamber. Alot of statements are being made about both "the church" and "Christianity" that i would want to discuss - but if that hosting call is how you are interpreting your guidelines, I don't see how that would be possible.

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Originally posted by Firenze:

So I would be in favour of questions being asked, with the proviso that the answer may be 'I don't want to go there'.

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Me too.

I've been pondering this this morning, and my thoughts are these: This board, in terms of environment, seems to be a combination of Purgatory and All Saints (with a dash of Hell in terms of anger, not personal attack). So there are intellectual aspects of discussion, but some people have also experienced hurt & betrayal. So we'll have to pick our way through each discussion and each point in terms of the best response.

(I hope that isn't junior hosting, I promise it isn't intended as such, I was just reflecting - in church - this morning, on the sorts of discussions I want to have here. In addition, I'll add that I'm very grateful indeed for the addition of this board and the discussions I've read here so far, and I'm grateful to SC & AR for their work.)

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Originally posted by Autenrieth Road:
IngoB, what would you be interested in participating in? What did you expect this board would be?

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Originally posted by Jemima the 9th:
I hope that isn't junior hosting, I promise it isn't intended as such, I was just reflecting - in church - this morning, on the sorts of discussions I want to have here.

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posted by Doublethink

It feels difficult to post on this board unless you also agree, respectful disagreement is needed or you risk just being an echo chamber.

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Originally posted by IngoB:

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Originally posted by the famous rachel:
(And to be honest, I don't want to be swamped under IngoB's unique posting style here or there... I lurk a lot more than I post these days, and I know whereof I speak!)

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Ho hum.

....

It seems pretty clear then that the main purpose of this board is the mutual affirmation of each other's peculiar lack of faith. Anything posted along those lines is perfectly fine, anything else, not so much. Discussion is limited to support. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. But I'm not particularly interested in participating. So, enjoy yourself.

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The trouble is finding a way of maintaining it as respectful disagreement and keeping the discussion to a tone which those with doubts find comfortable and helpful. I'd actually like to talk through some of my doubts in that context and would accept some respectful challenges...

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Originally posted by the famous rachel:
I was actually more thinking of your posting style in Purg than of your specific post(s) here. I (and maybe others here) are feeling perhaps a little fragile for purg style debate as a whole, and you are perhaps a key tone-setter in purg these days.

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Originally posted by the famous rachel:
The bit in italics could be read as an invitation to engage, if you want to. The rest is a suggestiong that everyone might need to think about how they engage.

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Originally posted by Doublethink.:
I would guess that Stella Maris still involved discussion and debate.

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Originally posted by Doublethink.:
That is different from, accept without criticism anything posted on the board.

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Originally posted by IngoB:

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Originally posted by the famous rachel:
I was actually more thinking of your posting style in Purg than of your specific post(s) here. I (and maybe others here) are feeling perhaps a little fragile for purg style debate as a whole, and you are perhaps a key tone-setter in purg these days.

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Possibly, if only by sheer volume of output...

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Originally posted by the famous rachel:
The bit in italics could be read as an invitation to engage, if you want to. The rest is a suggestiong that everyone might need to think about how they engage.

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I still don't know how to "respectfully challenge" without being suspect of "critiquing". I can obviously tone down the heat, though in my experience there's a lot of mote-and-planking going on with that. For example, you rather freely and dismissively caricatured the beliefs of rather a lot of Christians in your reply. But you apparently thought that this is fair enough, or more likely, you didn't particularly worry what those who hold those beliefs would feel. That's totally fine with me. But my point is that in order to really minimise the impact of me expressing my opinion, I have to consciously filter any hint of such superficial and negative engagement with the opinions of other out of my writings. And that actually is a lot of work, since the default mode of my - and I would argue everybody's - writing is actually the sort of thing we see in your post.

But even if I did go through all that effort, it remains the case that "respect" is not an objective quantity. It is a shifting and negotiated standard of behaviour that depends on the people involved. I may be able to correctly guess what "the famous rachel"would consider a respectful challenge. But that does not mean that the next Shipmate over agrees, and they also read that post. For the most part, on SoF, people will let you get away with a crap ton of bullshit if you only 1. spike your opinions with lots of "seems", "appears", "maybe", "possibly", "in my opinion" etc., no matter how strongly you hold them and indeed how forcefully you put them otherwise; and 2. if you re-phrase your strongest assertions as pseudo-questions. So I probably could sneak-ciritique here if I only followed that model. But I think this typical SoF "agreeable discourse" is 1. tedious to read, and 2. fundamentally, either a lie or a delusion of "openness" and "niceness".

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Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat Thirdly - actually, I did think The Famous Rachaels response was rather strong, but we were, at that point, discussing what to do, and all I could have done was re-iterate what I had said, I left it. She has apologised.

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Originally posted by Doublethink.:
I would guess that Stella Maris still involved discussion and debate.

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Originally posted by the famous rachel:


But that's where I'm at. That may not be where anyone else is at, and my impression is that there are a lot of people round here feeling a lot more hurt and angry than me. Hence, what I might be interested in or enjoy is in no way the most important question.

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PS... fire alarm here - no time to check post - sorry for errors...

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Originally posted by the famous rachel:
I'd appreciate a tone which lent towards "I see where you are coming from, but have you considered..." rather than "You are clearly wrong because...".

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Originally posted by Jemima the 9th:
Given what IngoB said above about many of the words used in SofF, I think his "You are clearly wrong because" is the equivalent to lots of other people's "I see where you are coming from, but have you considered..."

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Originally posted by Jemima the 9th:
And yes I'm up for challenges and reasonably strong debate too. I'm off to look up the toddler God bit now.

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Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:

quote:

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Originally posted by Jemima the 9th:
And yes I'm up for challenges and reasonably strong debate too. I'm off to look up the toddler God bit now.

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The thing is, for some people that is OK, and there is no problem with debate if you specifically ask for it.

The default position though, is more respectful, because some here are sick of other Christians telling them how to do things properly, why they are wrong, what there problems are. This is a place where they can explore those matters without someone saying "Oh, but you are wrong".

In the straws thread, many of the issues are simply one final straw - not enough to be an issue on its own, but along with everything else, the final breaking point. I know that I stayed for a long time, because there was nothing that was so much of an issue that I couldn't ignore it for a while. Until there was. That in itself was minor, but with everything else, for me, was a breaking point.

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Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:
The default position though, is more respectful, because some here are sick of other Christians telling them how to do things properly, why they are wrong, what there problems are. This is a place where they can explore those matters without someone saying "Oh, but you are wrong".

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