I missed the explanation of what happened with the $500 bet. Did prr ever get his money from Liberal?
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I missed the explanation of what happened with the $500 bet. Did prr ever get his money from Liberal?
Yes, he did. http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/...d.php?t=471099 The contract changed a bit, later, under the agreement of both parties.
Moderating:
[modhat:e68827w5]Since this thread relates directly to events that took place at the SDMB, I have moved it to the off-board forum. Thunderdome rules apply here...[/modhat:e68827w5]
Thunderdome rules
If you don't mind, I'll defer to Liberal in responding to this one, since I told him I wouldn't want to trick myself out as an attention-whore on this subject any more than I had to. But, yes, I got paid in full, for a mere year or so of non-posting, as opposed to a lifetime, which was our original agreement. Even that took a surprising amount of self-discipline, I'll tell you that....
Thunderdome roolz!!
Also, it wasn't a bet. More like a payment for services rendered (if "getting the fuck out of Liberal's face and staying the fuck out" may be considered a service. I suppose it was....)
My apologies for answering for you, prr. I just remembered the thread on the Dope.
I just have to say a few things about prr. He's a man of great decency and honor. He's sincere and good hearted. When he tells you what he will do, you can... well... take it to the bank. His honesty and good nature have frankly been an inspiration to me — even now.
After a recent unfortunate sequence of events in the Thunderdome, I was seriously questioning the commitment I had made to the Captain to do my best to help this board succeed. Wallowing in my own self-pity, I was trying to engineer a face-saving way to rejoin discussions. And then I came across this thread.
It's one of the many lessons prr has taught me over time. What the hell am I doing sniffling over my trivial run-in with no one of consequence when a man like prr can emerge from a year of hiatus and post like nothing ever happened, with humility and gratitude to boot?
Certainly, it was a strange way for a good relationship to form, but sometimes that's the way things happen. Be forewarned that when and if he is ever Thunderfucked, I will have his back. I don't even care if he's wrong. He has earned my support with his honesty and contrition.
As for how it went down — and it's notable that he defers to me on this — there was something in our old discussions at the Dope that I could not abide. His old persona repeatedly claimed that, unlike homosexuality, faith was a choice. People of faith, he avered, could turn it on or off like a spigot.
That simply isn't true, of course. Our faith is born of our life experience. We can no more disavow our faith than we can disavow what we dreamed last night. It happened. And we cannot prove to anyone that it did. But there's no more sense in my saying I don't believe in God when I do, than in saying that I didn't dream about fireworks when I did. I can't convince you of either one, but neither is any less real.
As I told Tris when he called me, all I ever wanted prr to do was admit that he couldn't just squint and grunt and suddenly believe in God. Nor could he expect me to do the opposite. I wanted him to acknowledge that faith — genuine faith — is not something one chooses in the way that one chooses a particular hair style versus another. I wanted him to understand that faith is not the enemy of reason any more than happiness is the enemy of reason.
Anyway, even though he has not quite articulated what I hoped for, he has demonstrated in his words and deeds the practical equivalent. He has learned that forgiveness heals the forgiver, and that he can be friends with people of faith — that our differences in that regard are not obstacles to having a mutual respect.
Why the money? It was the only tool I had. He needed it, and I didn't. Besides which, his edification was worth more to me than $500, and so it was a fair price. It doesn't and didn't make any difference to me whether anyone found it distasteful. I believe that one or two people went way overboard busybodying over the whole thing. Moralizing about it to the exclusion of even attempting to understand what we were doing.
At any rate, the deal is done. We both were faithful to our agreement. And a very stong bond between us has emerged. If that fact does not in a person's mind trump feelings of disgust, then as far as I'm concerned that person has serious issues that he won't likely discern even when they are put directly in his face in this manner.
So here we are. Prr has a friend who has his back. Respect has emerged from hatred. And we all, hopefully, move on.
I'm not sure I even "understand what we were doing." Certainly, what we ended up doing was far from what we started out doing, reaching an understanding that began with carping and squabbling. The root cause of the conflict was, I think, in mistrusting each other's sincerity. I certainly mistrusted Liberal's, arrogantly assuming that anyone who claimed to have direct, unmediated knowledge of God's existence was either delusional or lying--and I chose "lying" as the correct answer. Because Liberal had no way to prove (and no interest in proving) God's existence to an outside observer like me, I felt that he was creating an unfalsifiable position (that he didn't necessarily believe in) for the sole purpose of squelching me (and doubters like me) in debate, and he felt, I suppose, that I was calling him a liar or crazy or possibly both, because I was. So I had little problem catching him in a rash offer to pay me never to post again (at a time when I was berating myself for all the hours spent on the SD anyway), and we were off.Quote:
Originally posted by Liberal
But w/o getting into Liberal's actual position here, I find him sincere in his assertions. I don't understand his position, not a tiny bit, but I no longer believe that he is merely pretending to hold the beliefs he describes, for rhetorical superiority. At the time, what I was trying to say to him was "Hey, if you can 'choose' to believe in what you claim to believe, and I can't prove you wrong to universal satisfaction, then anyone can claim to believe in anything--so your testimony on this subject establishes nothing." To his challenge--"Oh, yeah, then why don't you choose to believe in God, smart guy, and prove me wrong?"--my response was something like "I could SAY I believe in God--which is what I think you're doing--without actually believing in him, but I won't put myself in the unethical position of making false affirmations, which isn't keeping you from doing it."
Now, to be perfectly honest, I still don't see a whole lot of room between "insincere arguing for rhetorical victory" and "delusional," but a lot of people whom I respect give Liberal a lot of credit when it comes to logical/theological/philosophical fine points that I can't even pretend to follow. (Philosophy, especially when it got remotely mathematical, was easily the hardest thing for me to learn in school, and certainly the most tedious.) The recent exchange by someone (I forget who) who posted his poems and Liberal, who praised his poems to the skies, drove this point home for me--some people just get certain types of philosophical thought that thoroughly escapes me. I'd already absorbed that lesson practically anyway, because I'd seen Liberal engage in many such discussions, even with those who disagreed with him (but who also understood the terms of the philosophical discussion, as I did not), and consistently earn the respect of those he was arguing against. I must credit that, if nothing else, as pretty good evidence that Liberal knows what he's talking about here, even if I don't really follow the argument. To do otherwise, would be arrogant in the extreme: it would be akin to saying "I don't understand this whole argument, so therefore you're wrong and I'm right." So I'll just chalk up Liberal's beliefs as something I neither share nor accept but a perfectly sincere voicing of his actual beliefs that I don't feel capable of understanding.
That's actually close to my position on science in general: I don't understand nuclear physics, but I support the conclusions of those who have undergone the training, just because I have respect for the system they (and I) operate in. I know, for example, that my own graduate study was difficult and thorough, and the people who studied different fields went through the same graduate and post-graduate training, some of them in closely related fields to mine, and those whose training overlaps with physicists more than mine does will vouch for the rigorousness of both my training and that of physicists, so I have no problem with calling "nuclear physics" a legitimate field, even though I understand it personally little better than I understand black magic.
Absent this legitimizing (to me) of Liberal's philosophical position, I would probably continue to have a problem accepting his sincerity, which may be a character flaw in me rather than a legitimate postion to take (I'm a congenital skeptic) but this evidence has pushed me over the line, aided greatly by his geneosity of spirit in reaching out to me and making it easier (making it possible) for us to forgive so much enmity. I don't need to understand his position to give him full credit for genuinely holding it--I must add, however, that I continue to think that many of Liberal's fellow "believers" are merely pretending to hold the beliefs that they were indoctrinated in holding, and are choosing to believe because that simplifies their lives and frees them from needing to think too much. Obviously, Liberal isn't clinging to his belief system so as to avoid difficult thinking.
Anyway, this is a whole 'nother discussion, and I don't know that I have very much to add to it, but I did want to say that I appreciate Liberal's kind and overly generous appraisal of my character above, and am happy to reciprocate my admiration for him. It's very pleasing to accept a bond with someone of faith, actually, because I have long claimed on the SD to believe sincerely that all people should and must believe what they believe, that persuasion and conversion-attempts and proselytizing are useless and unethical (both to and from religion)--we can talk of these things with no goal towards changing any one's particular beliefs but simply to express our own views. For some reason, probably because my own views are extremely and radically opposed to organized religion, I have had a very hard time having the sincerity of this claim accepted, and indeed have been accused of being an atheist fundamental intent on force-converting believers, which is 180 degrees from the truth. I think that one of the many things I've learned from Liberal is that one can be a believer in the Christian God and have the fact of one's belief be the most important thing that one cares about, above converting others, above adhering to any church doctrines, above reflexively defending other Christians--that devout belief is totally and seriously focused on one's self, the only thing anyone has control over in the first place.