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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: coug who wrote (106277)	6/19/2005 11:36:49 AM
From: epicure	Respond to of 108807

Whoever "they" are, if you let "them" make you respond the way "they" do, then it is really "they" who have influenced you. Or at least that's the conclusion I came to a couple of years ago- about me. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with ritualized fighting (I hope I didn't say there was), unless you dislike brutality, even in word form, which I do. If Buddha had hit everyone in the face who had a different lifestyle than he thought appropriate or didn't respond well to his ideas, even if he'd had a GREAT message, I doubt he would have got very far. So I have to say that I think pure ideas need to be coupled with pure (or as pure as we humans can get) actions, or else they are polluted beyond the point where they can do any good. That said, I'm not sure all that many people are interested in finding new ideas, or even listening to them (and there's nothing wrong with that either), but for the people who are interested, the mode of the speaker may be more important than the message. I know for me it is very hard to weed the ideas out of a passage rife with insults. It's even difficult for me to read people that I know are busy bashing republicans or democrats (or other groups or individuals) on other threads, as I read one of their calmer posts. The "bad taste" of their other posts lingers. I imagine it is the same for other people. If we have any hope of communicating we must try to be civil everywhere on SI (as we would be in 3d) and address ideas, not go after people, and if we find the ideas SO horrible that we can't address them, and instead find ourselves needing to go after the person, then we need to be silent- IF communication is our goal. If it isn't, than none of this matters. That's just my opinion- obviously.