Re: wow, what a way to show Christian love
Submitted by Blackstone on 2007-01-28 14:02:14, Sunday
In reply to Re: wow, what a way to show Christian love submitted by Dakota on 2007-01-27 17:26:43, Saturday
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First of all, the use of profanity that CSL lowered himself to is never called for. This board is not for evangelism but neither is it meant to be a ghetto or a trailer park. If what you said above were true, that the post was meant to degenerate us or question our Christianity, then I could see why you would react in such a way. Such a reaction would merely be feeding the troll, which is very ineffective, but it's at least understandable. In this case, however, there was no clear evidence that this person was being malicious rather than simply misjudging the forum and its members. Now, let's look at this logically: possibility 1: The person is being hostile and you react with an outburst like CSL did. result 1: You just fed the troll (which is what he wanted), lowered people's opinion of yourself due to your choice of trailer park language, and caused damage to the image of those in this forum in the eyes of anyone who visits and doesn't know any better. possibility 2: The person is being hostile and you react with love. result 2: The troll is not fed, gets bored, and eventually leaves. You have done no harm to your image or the image of the forum and look better in the eyes of anyone who visits. possibility 3: The person was speaking in good faith and being honest but mistaken and you react with an outburst. result 3: You just reinforced their view that you are not a real Christian because of your choice of language and hostility. By extension, you have reinforced their views about no one on the forum being a true Christian. possibility 4: The person was speaking in good faith and being honest but mistaken and you react with Christian love. result 4: The person may realize their error and come to realize that we are true Christians. Even if they do not, the positive reaction makes us all look better. We have actually had people come in with mistaken assumptions and realize their error in the past. This has happened in both this forum and in other bl forums. There has even been the situation where a reporter infiltrated a bl forum thinking she was going to get the inside scoop on these monsters, but she ended up scrapping the story when she realized they weren't monsters at all. We even have at least one person who has been instrumental in keeping CBF and other BL resources running after the recent pulling of the plug who originally visited the forums as an outsider with many mistaken beliefs about who and what boylovers are. We can't just go around attacking everyone who expresses an ignorant opinion of who we are. Ignorance is merely lack of knowledge, of course people are ignorant of this topic and say ignorant things. The post that CSL attacked did not have a hostile tone, it had an ignorant one. There was no reason to attack that person. This time he may have correctly guessed that the person would turn hostile later, but what if next time his guess was incorrect and all he managed to accomplish was drive away a potential ally? |
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