In Reply to: well.... posted by Acheick on March 17, 2006 at 10:35:09:
"I was getting the impression that you were in cahoots with Moonshiner whom I do believe has an old bone to pick with me."
That is just your paranoia speaking Acheick, thinking that there is a conspiracy by some posters here against you. The only reason you are upset with me is because I challenged your repeated assertion that Islam is not a religion and I countered the war propaganda you were repeating on this site with some anti-war propaganda.
I do not consider you a fundamentalist, and always thought you were a lot more tolerant and inclusive than your recent posts about Islam demonstrated. What "old bone" I have to pick with you is a mystery to me.
OT2, who I do consider an extremist, a fundamentalist, has made several accusations against me, for example, that I have mocked the Christian God and Christians in general. Perhaps that's what you mean? I'm really puzzled by your opinion that you think I have something against you personally. I can't be bothered to do a search of my own posts to defend myself against OT2's absurdities, but I don't think I have ever attacked anyone's faith, belittled or ridiculed their religion, etc. If someone can find any of my posts where I have deliberately tried to provoke others by ridiculing their religion, I'll gladly apologize for that if that is in fact what I did.
When I post news articles here, which is what most of my posts are, it's not because I have an agenda and go looking for articles that support my position. I post articles that I come across during the course of my daily perusal of many different news sites, both mainstream and alternative; articles that I find interesting in relation to my own spiritual journey. I think that if I find something interesting in them, then others with the same cult background may also find them interesting. Most of the time, someone will post a reply saying thank you for posting it. But I rarely share anything too personal because of the heat it attracts from people with an agenda, namely fundamentalists all too eager to tell me how wrong I am.
I'm interested in exploring ideas, not debating endlessly with people who's minds are already made up, which is why I never respond to OT2's endless bible thumping, bullying and false accusations. That fact of the matter is that you can find many many conversations on this board involving Christian themes that are not interrupted by people of other faiths declaring how wrong those Christians are. On the otherhand, every time a person posts with a spiritual/religious perspective that is not Christian, there come the patronizing, narrow minded, fundamentalists telling them how wrong they are.
Acheick, just to be clear, I have never had a bone to pick with you personally. I don't know how you came to that conclusion as I don't recall offhand any conversations we've had. It seems to me more a matter of you being pissed off that I challenged your ideas about Islam. Like I said, I always thought you were a more tolerant person than you were expressing in those posts and was surprised by the tone you took in them.
Btw, thanks for comparing me to Noam Chomsky. I'm honored, although I'm no where near his intellectual stature (I read somewhere that he is the most cited scholar in the world). You might have done better to compare me to Harry Belafonte, a hero to oppressed people every where.