cwald wrote:Thanks MnG
Perhaps you need to be a little more outspoken at MDDB? It appears they chase away many folks who otherwise might find "some" benefit from the site, and they really do give the church a bad name, in my experience at least.
cwald,
I
was a lot more outspoken at MDDB. I've spoken up plenty in the last three years during which time I was repeatedly called a board nanny by a handful of posters there. More recently, one poster took to insinuating very blatantly that I was a sock puppet for a person who posts here and has long since been banned form that board. I've been treated like a name-only member by some and a useful idiot by others, a direct result of the black and white thinking that prohibits the possibility that a fellow Mormon could possibly be intelligent, knowledgeable, and still disagree on substance. And to be fair, I've had a couple of moments when I was the judgmental jerk.
Now having said all that, there are reasonable people who post on that board. Most of them just don't speak up very often. Some have explicitly stated that they've grown tired of revisiting the same old issues over and over. If there are other reasons, they've gone unexpressed publicly, to my knowledge.
But I will tell you why I stopped posting.
Recently I put myself, knowingly, but with sincere motives, dead center on the battlefield during a board war between this board and the other. I thought that my motives were fairly transparent but they weren't, due largely to my own failure to articulate them well. As a result, I received a warning with a very unflattering description of how my behavior was being perceived by the mods. The PM was clear that I would banned if I crossed any lines again. I get that. But I also get that I'm not one who is going to play team sports just because someone hands me a jersey. I do and say what I do and say because I believe it to be morally right.
Even though it was a misunderstanding and might have blown over in time, I decided that it wasn't worth continuing to post actively. I hadn't posted over there in about six weeks and the only reason I posted at all in the past few days was because you were being called a troll and I knew better. I couldn't stand by and do nothing. You are my friend.
I lurk and I want my account to stay open because I want to be able to reach out to friends I've made on that board but I don't think it would do me or anyone else any good if I kept posting there.
'Nuff said?
"In my more rebellious days I tried to doubt the existence of the sacred, but the universe kept dancing and life kept writing poetry across my life." ~ David N. Elkins, 1998, Beyond Religion, p. 81
