That’s true, and I appreciate your desire to avoid the excesses that I urge members to avoid. That being said, some debate and criticism is legitimate, although one could also say it is strictly speaking off-topic for this thread, which you have observed, and which I again greatly appreciate.
I do also appreciate the very friendly manner in which you and
@chevyontheriver have engaged in this thread, which in my view exemplifies how we should try to interact in this manner; I am not a fan of the Wesleyan remark of “agreeing to disagree” as I see it as being Pietistic and anti-doctrinal, representing the normalization of schism or the normalization of the minimization of doctrine (and Wesley, for all his good, did experience pietist influences, chiefly from the Moravians, as well as the influence of the similiar Latitudinarian movement within Anglicanism).
But without agreeing to disagree we can still agree to a dialectical model that is cordial, that refrains from logical fallacies or gross historical inaccuracies, such as the alternate histories of the early church proposed by some Restorationist denominations and also by the Landmark Baptists and those influenced by them*
*On the other hand, some skepticism of the generally accepted Patristic narrative such as evinced by your own beliefs is obviously something that can be accepted, particularly since some hagiographic texts are known to contain inaccuracies or accidental confusions, for example, the Copts regard the Ethiopian synaxarion to be more reliable than their own, for their own synaxarion confuses Eusebius of Caesarea with Eusebius of Nicomedia with regards to the incident surrounding the death of Arius, which is embarassing since the Syriac Orthodox, the historical main communion partner of the Copts, venerate Eusebius as a saint with the feast day of February 29th, which in the Byzantine Rite is the feast day of St. John Cassian interestingly (and for saints with their feast on the 29th of February there are rubrics for what to do when it is not a leap year at least in the case of St. John Cassian), but completely discarding it and instead, without any archaeological or historical textual evidence to support it, claiming that certain ancient heretical sects such as the Paulicans, Bogomils, Marcionites, etc were anachronistic proto-Protestants, when all historical evidence suggests that most Protestants including all confessional Lutherans, confessional Calvinists and creedal Anglicans would find their doctrines utterly abhorrent, is something else.
Indeed among the Orthodox and Catholics committed to a Patristic theological model of the church, an accurate historical record and critical editions of the Patristic corpus and of liturgical texts such as the Divine Liturgy of St. James (the Byzantine version of which until recently lacked a good, robust translation free from speculative interpolations from a 19th century Greek translator, but ROCOR has provided a really good translation in English and Church Slavonic that also avoids weirdness like celebrating the liturgy versus populum on a makeshift altar in front of the Iconostasis being deleted, for this kind of thing confuses the laity and is not actually called for by the ancient rubrics, and is further anachronistic in that historically there was a templon or curtain and the Bema of the Armenian and Assyrian churches, but the full iconostasis as seen in contemporary Byzantine, Coptic and some Syriac churches took a while to develop from early proto-iconostases). Thus we want to make sure our historical record is accurate, even though we do accept many events which I believe you have expressed a view of as being incredible.
But in general, your conduct has been that of a responsible debater, who has never caused any of the harm I alluded to in the OP.
Recently in another thread also where you and my friend
@BNR32FAN and our mutual friend
@Xeno.of.athens have been present the three of us shared the unpleasant experience of encountering what one might call a “trackless trolley” minus the “ey”, by which I am not referring to a trolleybus, but rather one dewired in an altogether different way and in a manner than what sometimes happens to busses powered by overhead electric cables such as one finds in San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, Philadelphia, Dayton, and until recently also in Boston.
Which takes me to another point - these overly intense theological debates create enmity which prevents us from discussing other fun subjects like, for example, mass transit systems, which i absolutely adore. I would love to discuss mass transit for hours with any member of the forum who is interested in the subject. When I was in my youth I persuaded my parents to obtain for me, at great expense, a copy of Jane’s Urban Transport Systems (then in one of its earliest editions as a standalone apart from Jane’s World Railways) and i recall reading breathlessly about the different transit systems in Tashkent, Torino and Toronto and in Dalian, Delhi and Dortmund, and the different manufacturers, particularly of monorails, peoplemovers, hovertrains (like the Otis peoplemovers used to access the Getty center in Los Angeles, which ride on a cushion of air, or the even more aggressive Aeromovel of Brazil, and of course full-fledged maglevs such as the Transrapid in Shanghai which sadly I did not get the chance to ride on before its maximum speed was decreased from 256 MPH to 186 MPH) and the new Shinkansen maglev being developed of necessity in Japan due to overcrowding on a portion of the original conventional Shinkansen line, and other specialized high tech transit systems (but not hyperloop, which has been overdiscussed, and is also, as Elon Musk may have conceded by calling the related company he established The Boring Company, kind of literally boring, and as exciting as Tunnel Boring Machines are to some, I am not an enthusiast, since they engage in too much boring for me, although I do appreciate the fruits of their boring).
