I am a veteran of many bannings at many essentially "Fundamental" or "Bible Believing" Christian forums so getting banned again involves less pain than most hangnails. This one even took me by surprise though, and I don't speak of the "unexpected" nature of the occurrence, I speak of the way it happened. I'd been expecting that axe to fall since about the first month I posted there. There was a certain "what took you so long" quality to it and a "You gotta be Kidding me, THAT's what you're doing this for?" I get the impression that since I'd reached a low "reputation" total, it was now acceptable to ban me. This is not to say that I stirred the FFF up for the purpose of the fun of a fight. Nor is it to say that I took insincere rhetorical doctrinal stances for the "sake of discussion." I did not, with a few possible exceptions that I believe I clearly labeled that way.
A number of wild "fish stories" are getting perpetuated by the now 3 or 4 day old discussion about my GETTING banned. At last checked the thread on my "banning" started by my friend Trina was ranking in the top 5 pages of views in the "fighting forum" and top 6 of replies. That's a historical ranking, since the forum began, and that's just one of the four threads I could find on the subject. If you combine that with the seperate thread on the same subject by Pastor Marty Braemer, it ranks even higher. The discussion may have finally died, but I'll believe that when I see it. Usually there's a day of piling on and that's it. This has been going on for a while now.
Let me address the myths that have grown out of this episode so that any of you who bother to look here and find my answers, can at least, find my answers.
I'm not coming back as a sock puppet, nor do I have one at FFF. I have only pelted one board with sock puppet ID's in all my time on the Internet. To name that board would be to revive a now settled conflict so I won't bother. I had come to the conclusion several years ago that I should be exactly who I am at all times, and not pose under some name. I started signing almost all my posts after that and subsequent board memberships were always under my real, legal, given name. A sock puppet would violate that principle. I suppose the FFF could recant on my banning and I suppose I could come back but that's theoretical. I'm not lobbying them for reinstatement. I don't think they're considering it.
With regards to claims that I "harassed" the Hawaiians. I tried for some time to steer clear of them as I regarded them to be unstable and undisciplined. For a long time I didn't even know they were related. The whole "Invictus" issue is what started the intense round of "competition" as it were and it involved them confessing their hatred for another poster without any prompting. Writing a thread about the sickness involved in kicking a Cyber Corpse is not a personal attack, but the guilt level of the three was so profound they identified themselves and then set about claiming that I attacked them personally. I had no idea.
What has been termed a "rep war" was in fact my concern about tone, which some of you will find odd since you blame me for the downward tone. Setting that blame aside for a moment, the concern I had was that it hardly matters we are in cyberspace when we say hateful things out of the purest forms of hatred, it only matters that we say those things. With varying degrees of intensity I have been attacked as brutally as one can be attacked via various pathways of private messaging while at the FFF and I made it a policy to "out" those people and ask why such open and concealed behaviors were acceptable. Having won my battle on my pet topic, truly the only subject I had left was that of tone. I will never regret doing so because it made friends out of two enemies, James Knox and myself. We don't agree on many many things, except that we are brothers in Christ and ought to act that way on this earth. James, I love you.
With regard to Scott McClare, aka "Ransom". This "man" is the embodiment of the problem at the FFF. Don't read this paragraph if you don't like graphic language, because it is graphic. Scott declared me to be an unbeliever, which if anything condemns not me, but him. He also took the time to send me a private note which he has acknowledged publicly at the FFF that he did send. In that note he asked me to "Go bugger my goat" which is, paraphrased, a vile invitation for me to have sexual intercourse with a goat by me inserting my sexual apparatus into that goat's anus. He acknowledges he sent this message. That is vile, that is wrong, that is without excuse.
In a related public insult, "DeepSix", the "man" who claims to be parent to the two Hawaiian girls, I am named in a "pederast/catamite" relationship with another poster. This is of course, not true, but the claim was only deleted, and never retracted. No apology was ever offered for that either. Calling someone a name they merit in some real or allegorical way is not out of bounds in my view, but I am not a homosexual and the type of wickedness that "DeepSix" proposed I was involved in was that of an adult male (supposedly me) preying sexually on a juvenile male by engaging in homosexual anal relations with that young boy. That's pretty awful as well. In all the Hawaiian three engaged in their own very bizarre version of what love amounted to and the explanation of why anyone would show favoritism to another. Apparently, from what I could gather, the only reason to treat someone well was that you were having sex with them. I don't think they realize how sick a view of love that ends up being. I make absolutely no claims that they realize that "love" in any way, but it's very twisted.
There is also the issue of justifying relations with younger women or girls that keeps getting brought up. Sorry, that's not going to work. I merely pointed out that scripture does not define or describe the crime known as "Pedophilia." Heterosexual pedophilia has an entirely legal description and it is only wrong from a scriptural standpoint to the extent that we are told to stay legal in our behavior. The only way you can have sexual relations with a young girl is for there to be parental and sometimes judicial permission as well, to marry that girl. The shocker to many people is there are plenty of places where that can be done, thus you can marry girls as young as 13, which means you can then have sex with them legally and it is not pedophilia. You can jump and scream all you want, but this simply remains true no matter what. Since there is no scriptural prohibition, decide what you want, but you are only a pedophile in the legal sense, not in a moral one and all the same things a heterosexual pedophile wants to do and does do, can be done legally, in the context of marriage and are thus
not pedophilia. You might want to re read that paragraph a thousand times prior to commenting about this, because it's simply true. I am not going to do anything along these lines because it's not possible for me to legally marry a 13 year old, since I am legally married already. I suppose I can form a set of conditions in my mind where I might consider the act, from a theoretical point of view, namely, marrying such a girl, but I don't want to and right now I couldn't anyway and besides that, I like my wife a lot and she'll probably survive me.
There continues to be this sort of sly spinning as exemplified by a poster named "T-Bone."
"How ever we preceived this has ended...I really believe the overview should be seen. Hugh had long standing battles with all Bible believers on this forum..." As with most of the way he phrases things, T-Bone creates an impression of something that is not the case. Yes, I had battles with "Bible Believers", but "Bible Believers" have battles among themselves. He subtly tries to place me outside that camp, and I am not. This is not unlike his spin that I injected bestiality spontaneously into the forum discussion, which also had not occured.
Last, for now, unless I think of something new to add to this list and edit into it, there is the misunderstanding of how I left. It is believed that I ignored "repeated warnings" to lay off my discussion of Ransom's unsavory insult. I did not. For me to ignore a warning, I'd have to know it was a warning. In retrospect I do know it was NOW, but hardly then. "debbiet" is staff at the FFF. She sent me a message in pleading and distressed language for me to lay off the discussion about what Scott McClare acknowledges he said. All I saw was a message from a poster, and I was getting a LOT of messages, that indicated someone was distressed and disturbed, and they had made no posts in the forum. Knowing that "Webmaster" had a "gray dot" next to his name I assumed that all staff of the FFF had no reputation value and debbiet had a "green dot". I assumed that this meant she was a regular poster. I sent back a polite reply to her and I deleted her message and went on.
Now, I've had my threads "messed with" before, with no communication or response from the admins of the FFF, several of them occupy the trash file at the FFF right now. In my memory they disappeared first, and then several days or hours later, appeared in the "round file." As far as I knew, this was happening again, and from what the scuttlebutt is around the forum, there are posters with "more than average" power of board manipulation and I thought this was happening again. I got two more messages from debbiet. Here is one of them, which remains on the FFF as long as I don't clear the cookies involved:
"
You have been banned for the following reason: I (debbiet?) asked you to not discuss this on the forum and you have gone ahead and done it anyway, therefore you are banned.
Date the ban will be lifted: Never"
There was also a pop up window that said I had a private message from her, which I have never read, because I can't access private messages after I am banned. Fine and dandy. However, if it was merely the content that offended, it's still on the board, in other threads. If there are legal concerns over the content, I can assure you what's being said right now at the FFF is potentially more dangerous to those involved than anything I said. This is hardly a threat. I don't expect to get to a point with the FFF where legal action would be necessary or considered. I'm pointing out their flagrant hypocrisy.
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