I abandoned the Convert Me long ago. I don't even bother looking in on it anymore, as I did for a while. Oddly, I have seen of late a number of other posts in private journals expressing unsoliciting dissatisfaction with the whole thing. I suspect it is because the entire enterprise is, really, intractable from the beginning.
Of course, most people expressing the dissatisfaction seem to be dissatisfied only with the vitriol and sanctimony. Neither vitriol nor sanctimony were things that I thought anything of, for the simple reason that I always took it for granted that they came with the territory. You cannot argue, let alone argue about religion and not expect self-indulgent rancor and self-righteous snobbery.
No, the trouble is that argument is a fundamentally destructive pursuit, and this has come to make me feel it is all rather hollow. Ideas are ideas. They are insubstantial, rootless. It makes no sense to pit them against one another. It is not that people necessarily are vicious, it is that the activity they have taken up is a vicious one. There is simply nothing to be gained by going around casting dispersion on others. We don't find truths; we build them.
I could talk about my distaste for scholarly trivia (If fundamental truth really were about dead languages and nuanced transcriptions, I would gladly throw up my hands and declare myself a nihilist.), for fixed notions and conventions, for addictions to labels and stereotyped, go-nowhere ideas, but that, I suppose, would be nothing but more of the same old bitching about nothing of which the world has quite enough.
I'm happy just to tend to my own journal and writings and to see what I can build. The things I have written there are immeasurably more expressive my spiritual view than any sermon I ever pitched at convert_me. If anything, I always left each of those behind, no matter about rectitude or eloquence, feeling that it was a tremendous waste of time. This, for the simple reason, that for what I gave, no one had anything to give in return but self-serving Phillipics and grandiloquent sophistry. Of course, I think that was my mistake from the beginning; don't try to trade with people who are already begging, as they have nothing to give. It's impossible to write sincerely to those who would disagree at every turn, just to be contrary.
I was fortunate enough to make a few acquaintances there, you among them, and so it is with a heavy heart that I abandoned the whole affair, feeling perhaps there was still some way to purify the evil of it. This is perhaps just as you would like to proceed without running into crude slanders and abuses amidst rational discourse. It's as I said, though, I cannot wonder if the whole idea was bad from the start.
You know what they say: You can't polish a turd.
Sorry you don't hear from me more often. Honestly, I take no small amount of satisfaction in hearing the news from the other side of the world discussed with such erudite attention. The mundane becomes the exotic and the exotic the mundane. That's about it.
Convert THIS!
I abandoned the Convert Me long ago. I don't even bother looking in on it anymore, as I did for a while. Oddly, I have seen of late a number of other posts in private journals expressing unsoliciting dissatisfaction with the whole thing. I suspect it is because the entire enterprise is, really, intractable from the beginning.
Of course, most people expressing the dissatisfaction seem to be dissatisfied only with the vitriol and sanctimony. Neither vitriol nor sanctimony were things that I thought anything of, for the simple reason that I always took it for granted that they came with the territory. You cannot argue, let alone argue about religion and not expect self-indulgent rancor and self-righteous snobbery.
No, the trouble is that argument is a fundamentally destructive pursuit, and this has come to make me feel it is all rather hollow. Ideas are ideas. They are insubstantial, rootless. It makes no sense to pit them against one another. It is not that people necessarily are vicious, it is that the activity they have taken up is a vicious one. There is simply nothing to be gained by going around casting dispersion on others. We don't find truths; we build them.
I could talk about my distaste for scholarly trivia (If fundamental truth really were about dead languages and nuanced transcriptions, I would gladly throw up my hands and declare myself a nihilist.), for fixed notions and conventions, for addictions to labels and stereotyped, go-nowhere ideas, but that, I suppose, would be nothing but more of the same old bitching about nothing of which the world has quite enough.
I'm happy just to tend to my own journal and writings and to see what I can build. The things I have written there are immeasurably more expressive my spiritual view than any sermon I ever pitched at
I was fortunate enough to make a few acquaintances there, you among them, and so it is with a heavy heart that I abandoned the whole affair, feeling perhaps there was still some way to purify the evil of it. This is perhaps just as you would like to proceed without running into crude slanders and abuses amidst rational discourse. It's as I said, though, I cannot wonder if the whole idea was bad from the start.
You know what they say: You can't polish a turd.
Sorry you don't hear from me more often. Honestly, I take no small amount of satisfaction in hearing the news from the other side of the world discussed with such erudite attention. The mundane becomes the exotic and the exotic the mundane. That's about it.
Take care,
[give or take]