But back to the original question. Do you believe that you need to have evidence against something in order not to believe it? Or do you believe one should have evidence for something in order to believe it?
If you’re asking me (or even if you aren’t) I am very slow to believe anything. If a person tells me things that might be true, as long as I don’t think there is 100.00% or 0.00% chance it’s true, I keep a “yellow flag” on it in memory. I will give them the benefit of the doubt, until such time as I have more information or find something so logically flawed that it tells me this is at least inconsistent. It may be because what is being said is not true, or it could be that the person is writing about something true, but they themselves don’t understand it enough to present it properly.
In the case at hand, primarily the Imryl v zackin wars, I sided with zack because a) he was the OP and I tend to give the OP deference without compelling reason not to, b) because as far as I could tell he came across as sincere, c) what he was saying was compatible with what I already believe about evil – having had some close encounters with evil myself (even performing it
) especially during my Dark Night, nothing he said was beyond what I could imagine myself doing, if I were in their position.
I didn’t side with Imryl because post after post, he worded things that gave me one impression, and when I called him on it, he twisted it around to say something that may be technically true by Bill Clinton standards, but something that any reasonable reader who knows the English Language would have come to a different conclusion. After going around that several times, I concluded that Imryl is annoyingly evasive, if not deceptive, when we’re talking about things that are right in front of me because the evidence is in the thread itself. And when somebody dances me around like that, jerking me first this way and that and acting like I’m the idiot, I don’t give their argument about things I’m not experienced with, much weight.
So there was a fighting match. I picked sides with the one who treated me with respect, and against the one who didn’t. IMO I might have been wrong, but to me it is the Lord’s work to favor people who come across as sincere and not with haughty and smarter-than-thou attitude.
All that said, I didn’t take either story as gospel truth, or at least complete gospel truth. That said, even if zackin was lying about his own involvement, or the details thereabout, I do believe with a lot of supporting evidence (says the Google oracle) that SRA’s are, in fact, performed.
That brings up motive. Why might somebody tell us about SRA’s unless to brag about them, and I personally thought the OP came across as anything but braggadocious. Imryl came across as the kind of person I have to watch every single detail, and consider every possible permutation of every word searching for Whatever He Meant By That.
Alan
