There's a difference between questioning a person, and putting someone through a grinder. Bob's essentially been accused of being a troll and an attention whore. He's been repeatedly asked the same questions he answered early on page one. I understand people don't like the answers -- I don't like them either. Does that mean we have to hound him?
I feel 'hounding' is a bit exaggerating. Think of the usual response here...this thread has been pretty easy going
. In any case I sure hope I'm not one of those you count as 'hounding', because I can totally second what arthwollipot said earlier about simpy being curious.
He stated early on he could not provide a rational response to such questions. Why hound him about it? It's like a shark feeding frenzy -- people smell blood, they've got to have their piece.
Glad to hear your POV. It's always good to remind oneself of the need to develop better communicating skills. But in this case I think it's more a question of somebody coming to a critical thinking forum claiming to have arrived to a conclusion based on critical thinking, and when asked about his thinking simply giving next to nothing to support his claim - either of the conclusion itself
or the thinking which led to it. Of course people want to know more, and since it's simply words on a screen through which we're communicating, it's only natural some questions seem more or less like plain aggressive, even accusing.
Surely there's a line to be drawn between serious inquiry, and people merely piling on.
Possibly, and clearly the line
you've drawn was crossed in this thread.
My apologies to those who've been respectful and showed the minimum restraint here. I did not mean to blanket condemn everyone in this thread (though I admit that's pretty much what I did).
As I stated before, at least I tried to be polite. If I failed, I also apologize. Not for asking questions related to topic and being persistent, but for sounding hostile. No intension of that.
And hey, if I'm the only one who's been embarrassed by this thread, so be it. I'll take my thin skin and finger-wagging nannyism and go chase the younguns off somebody else's thread.
Or maybe it's just that the topic of this this thread is something you can relate to?
------------------------
Anyway, Bob (hope you're still reading if not participating). I want to thank you for attempting the impossible. Trying to reasonably explain something completely irrational and arbitrary to a bunch of skeptics must be intimidating. But you tried, I give you credit for that.
However, in the end it all boils down to a fairly simple thing. I feel we might have a significantly different meaning for
critical thinking. And this is something I'd like to have you pause on a bit. For if your intention is to stay discussing topics on these forums (which I hope you'll do) I suspect you'll unnecessarily run into just more conflicts and even bickering because of your strange version of the meaning for
critical thinking.
In my experience, if you claim here you've done some critical thinking, people will expect you to have and provide a fairly clear, even systematic review of exactly that - your thinking. The subject doesn't really matter. You claim you've thought about something, even more so, you claim you've thought about it
critically. So when questioned of your thoughts, to be taken seriously you might be expected to give something more as answers than simply 'this is what I believe'. Blind belief and critical thinking, as I see them, are rarely compatible. But I'm glad to learn more every day and wish you all the best on your journey.
Good luck!
