Of Course I'm Wrong

It’s virtually impossible for you to visit this blog and not say to yourself that the author is wrong on something or another.
Thank God, none of us fallible people are responsible for policing the thoughts of humanity. We have enough trouble with our own. Then again, too many people feel it their duty to correct the world, or at least those portions of humanity they encounter.
I can’t tell you things I don’t know. Of those things I know, all of them come from my previous experience as processed through whatever intellect came with my DNA. From that experience, there are only a few things I can put into words. Sure, I believe what I’m telling you. I’d be frankly worried if you told me you believed everything I wrote. The biggest threat to a loudmouth is a genuine sycophant; people who have even a smidgen of contact with reality know you keep your enemies closer than your friends. You keep the sycophants busying chasing shadows because they’ll get you killed.
In other words, I don’t take myself too seriously and I don’t want that to change.
If I don’t allow folks who think differently to hang around, inevitably I’ll miss something critical and the random process of reality itself will kill me. On the other edge of that blade of truth is the realization God is God, and what people think and believe is His concern, not mine. Regardless how I word my pieces here and elsewhere, all I can realistically do is share my experience. I know better than to believe I’m somehow stringing words together that reflect some aspect of absolute truth. My commission from Him is not changing people’s minds; that’s not possible. My commission is making noise that draws attention to my experience. What happens when that noise reaches your ears is where He takes over completely from me.
So if someone who isn’t my brand of Christian, or isn’t any brand of Christian at all, posts a comment that challenges my assertions, I’m likely to allow the comment. Arguing with me, even rudely calling me names, isn’t going to get your comments deleted, so long as you address something that strikes me as fundamental to my post. I usually try to answer, but sometimes it’s just not necessary. I trust God to handle what my readers take away from the exchange. As I’ve said before, we live in the Realm of Shadows, and reality itself isn’t all that trustworthy. What’s trustworthy is in a different dimension altogether.
Thus, I promote the use of the Internet as a means of sharing between people. It strips away most of the baggage people use to manipulate each other. If there is any hope to making life here in the Shadows tolerable, one of the best places to communicate about improvements is online. My primary objective is getting you to think beyond the Shadows, but even that requires a good bit of discussion about the Shadows themselves. At least, that’s how it works out for me. There are some things I can’t tolerate, but I don’t begrudge other people having their own brand of lunacy alongside mine. What I don’t like is when you try to cut me off from having my say.
Fortunately, the Net tends to favor letting every lunatic have their say. The Net could care less what you are transmitting, so long as you obey the traffic rules. That’s a pretty good basis, because here in this really badly broken shadow of divine reality, it seems to work out best that we don’t censor things in the sense of total control. I may not want you on my lawn, but the street in front of my house is not under my control. In my experience, if you are complete fool, something will run you down. If not, it’s my duty to tolerate a certain amount of noise. If God tolerates your existence, I’m not in any position to argue. So chase all the porn you like, just don’t link to in the comments here.
Sometimes I’ll be working with a Net service, and the folks behind it try to block something. Their servers, their rules. It’s how we justify blocking spam. The volunteer community of computers sharing the electronic commons can decide there are some things we just don’t have to tolerate. To make it most fair, we place the burden on the person who controls the hardware, for the most part. But if your service is wide open to too many people who don’t agree with your policies, don’t be surprised if they’ll look for ways to bypass your censorship. The nature of large open virtual communities makes it challenging to police them. It’s the basic vigilante justice of the Net, an arms race and technology genius battle of the wits. Enjoy the adventure, because if a significant portion of your clientele disagree with your policies, you are fighting a losing battle. Technology is one thing, but humans are endlessly creative and variable.
Facebook is blocking various sources for articles that FB users want to link, for example. One of the primary ways around that is using an URL shortening service. You have to guess the folks who see your links won’t be cagey about the possibility of some scammer taking advantage of the security weaknesses in FB and in human habits. There are a lot of factors, such as folks like me who run Linux or highly protected Internet tools and are somewhat immune to some portion of online threats. It’s all a matter of user beware. Still, if you find something someone has posted elsewhere on the Net, and you want to share it with your FB buddies, you can find a way to link it if you are willing to work at it just a bit. Is your message worth the trouble?
You can also decide something is so important you could ask to repost the article on your blog, or even summarize and offer a digest. That takes more work, but sometimes the truth is worth it. More importantly, it preserves the principle of basic liberty of thought. You aren’t a computer, so stop letting people program you. If this Net thing is worth anything at all to you, study to find ways to use it most effectively.
I’m wrong; you’re wrong; we are all wrong about something. That isn’t going to be fixed in this realm of existence, but you shouldn’t put up with anyone hiding from you something which may prove to be a reasonable approximation of being right.