[TruthTalk] Fw: farewell to TT -- long but most real answer

[Lance Muir]

----- Original Message ----- From: Debbie Sawczak To: Lance Muir Sent: May 26, 2005 14:42 Subject: farewell to TT -- long but most real answer Lance, this may be too long to post on TT. I'll let you be the judge. I'm writing as if to you--you asked the question, and besides, that keeps me more open and thinking less about how others will respond. Do what you like with it.   Why did I leave? David is partly right about the time factor, but that springs from the more important issue, which is the quality of communication that happens on TT; I am serious about communication (maybe too serious!), so I put a lot of time and thought and energy into reading the messages and composing readable replies. As it became harder and harder to understand and be understood, that investment only increased, and with it my anxiety about the result, since it usually turned out badly. It just wasn't worth it. Reducing the number of messages would only get at the symptom, not the cause.    When I started on TT the first time, back in December or January or whenever it was, I took everybody at face value and expected and practised normal communication. I actually learned stuff from some people, got new ideas from them. It wasn't long, though, till it became clear to me that some key participants were not up for learning anything at all. They were, at best, only into correcting people. At their worst, they did not read posts lovingly (putting things in the best light, trusting the intent, looking for points of commonality). They also did not read them properly (as wholes, following the thread of argument, looking for the main thrust, interpreting parts in the light of the whole). Instead they tended to pick messages to bits and "pounce" on individual words or predicates that raised flags for them. This was generally done in a tone of superior spirituality, superior allegiance to God and Scripture. There was never any good way to respond to this. What can you say in return when someone does this, since every subsequent attempt to address their response only leads to more of the same? Here was something I can only describe as deafness, hardness. With other people outside TT--for example, you and I when we misunderstand each other--we try again. There is good will. It gets cleared up. Or we find the places where we agree and go on from there. But on TT, people just dug in deeper and deeper. Ironically, people ended up going to ridiculous extremes of untenability to defend something they had said.   The same old arguments kept coming up again and again, with zero change in anybody's position. That was a bore. We were in an argumentative rut, so that if somebody posted something that wasn't related to one of the polarizing issues, it was ignored, or quickly and superficially dispatched, or twisted into something that did relate to one of the polarizing issues. Meanwhile on the polarizing issues there was just mindless mouthing going on, for the most part. If Camp A Member said something, it had to be right. If Camp B Member said something, it had to be wrong. There were only rare exceptions to this.   There was a lot of sarcasm. From childhood I have been unable to tolerate sarcasm. Sarcasm when it is obvious you are joking is one thing (even though it's a weak form of humour), but then there's sarcasm intended to make the other person appear absurd or evil so you can beat them unfairly. It is not real communication and I do not allow it in my family. For me it is the end of the conversation, which is why I stopped responding to certain TT people altogether.   Accusation, recrimination, smearing, insulting, and condemning were common too, and produced anger in me, not all of it righteous. This anger generally turned to sorrow. I would seek refreshment elsewhere (in prayer--sometimes confessing and receiving forgiveness for my anger--in Scripture, in other parts of the Christian community, etc.), and try again, but this cycle got to be wearing, and the people doing these things seemed not to notice or care that they were. It was discouraging. When I left the first time it was with the idea of probably returning refreshed at some point, and I did. That might still happen this time, too, but if it does it will take longer. I think I have to grow more, be wiser and stronger and braver, before I can be of use on TT as it is.   Even those who didn't deal in this kind of thing were mostly not prepared to entertain any idea they didn't already believe. The whole point of the exercise seemed to be to prove you were right, rather than simply to be understood and to understand and consider and appreciate. (I can just hear it: "How can I appreciate what is patently false? And if it's false don't I have a moral obligation to say so, every time?") Some, when they didn't understand something, just shrugged and said, "Who cares? I know what I think. If I don't understand it, it must be something that doesn't matter, or worse, something pretentious. Obviously God doesn't want me to be bothered with these things." I don't think calm closed-mindedness is any better than ranting closed-mindedness.   When I engaged several people off list, I found them to be quite different. That, I think, might have been the final stroke, because I realized that these were probably all decent, warm, pleasant, humble people but the dynamic of TT was twisting them into something else, and that seemed downright sinister to me. I suspected it might be happening to me as well. And if the people engaging on TT weren't the real ones, why bother at all?   Debbie