Yes, that's right, and I'm pretty new to doing this as intensively as I am. I mean, decades ago when the scientists were promising an Information Superhighway where we could all talk to the world from our bedrooms, I thought it was just what I had always wanted. But I've been online for 8 years and only just started to find my 'voice' in this way, and I am grateful to everyone here for being so accepting and helping me to feel comfortable doing that. I am experienced at writing on the net, but it's been mostly at a forum I own myself, largely about therapy, which was my work until recently. It's like I just woke up and thought - hey, there's a big world of ideas out there and I'm stagnating! Besides, I don't advertise my forum and hardly anyone goes there!
I see what you mean about joining a forum where I'm not too confident about the underlying philosophy - why not find like minds to talk to? - well, I guess I find it can get too comfortable and psychologically incestuous. Everyone can keep reaffirming the party line and can share the same blind-spots. There's often more growth when we come up against people with different ways and ideas.
I'm mixed up and working stuff out. As I said earlier, I do see some truth in the LoA and I-M, I just don't see it quite the way it is often presented here. Also, as I said, I change my mind about the world - sometimes I'm into the idea of subjective reality, other times I think the MrsCogans of the world might be right. At the moment, I'm actually quite taken with Ken Wilber's model of spiritual growth - the Great Nest of Being - as described in his 2000 book Integral Psychology, so I'm going through a yes-spirit-does-exist phase, and I've also signed up at the James Randi Educational Foundation forum, where I imagine I'm going to be banging heads with some hard-line materialists in the near future. Scientific materialism, they like to pretend, is the same as being 'sceptical', but they fail to see that scientific materialism is THE religion of our time, and they're not sceptics, they're believers! I don't suppose I'll make much headway. There's this weird thing about the spiritual dimension (or even just our subjective mind), that seems to resist scientific investigation. Hence, James Randi has had his million dollars waiting for I don't know how many years for the first person to demonstrate supernatural anything, and somehow it hasn't been won. I don't think that necessarily means that there is no spiritual or transpersonal realm, but it certainly is a big puzzle to me why it is so hard to demonstrate its reality. Anyway, I digress. I think I just wanted you to know that I'm a bit argumentative in general, not just here!
I'm glad you're not mad at me. I value your posts a lot, BTW.
Who's moderating? Does it matter that we seem to have wandered miles away from the topic? I prefer very loose topic keeping, myself. Let discussions meander where they will, I say!