In Reply to: A suggestion for "Wondering" or "Non_Christian" posted by Alan on January 18, 2004 at 11:06:04:
If I may referee this tricky situation...
You may be missing the point.
Your posts do bother people, and a few have already mentioned it, on the boards and off the boards. It has a lot to do with your presentation, not content.
This is a public forum. Everyone has a right to participate and respond to your post even if you weren't specifically addressing them. If it were completely private, you should be exchanging encrypted emails.
This person also mentioned that not all your posts bother him/her, and went into lengthy explanations about what statements of yours do.
You are right that neither you nor anybody else needs the grief of these outbursts. However, your asking this person to avoid your posts, is to say you don't think there is any truth about your offending people and therefore you don't need to find better ways of expressing your views. I do personally feel there is room for improvement, and increased awareness on your part.
I hope I won't offend you, but there has been some feedback that people don't know what to say to you or learn to ignore your comments, because they don't even know where to begin and don't want to get into it. So in your case, a lack of adverse reaction is not always because there is none.
It could be that it has been a long time since you were in The Family, and you have moved on so much, so you are not really aware of the senstivities here; or it could be something else like what was discussed before about the "arrived-at-Journey" vs the "Journey that journeys" as MG eloquently put it; or it could be that the format of this board and the rules and regulations aren't what they're supposed to be.
Whatever it is, we are looking into this, and may revise the Rules and Guidelines.
Also, you don't know that this person has not or is not willing to participate in religous debate, so it would be a bad idea to assume this is a fact. It seems to be these very same types of statements which set him/her off into cussing-ville this time, after somewhat restrained initial posts.
And for the record, while we try to avoid censorship, if the outbursts continue, we will have no other choice than to place a ban on you, Wondering.
Now I have to hide in my plexi glass bubble so you guys can hurl rocks at me. :-p