I posted this comment to a thread that may have been abandoned by its creator--but maybe she/we can pick it up here.
Alice,
You said you wouldn't show your "true colors in this insane asylum" when someone told you to come out as yourself.
A montage of unconnected ideas is one characteristic of an insane asylum. But this forum at its best is when we do wear our true colors and present our own true thoughts with the aim to comb them out in this forum.
That is not what happens in an insane asylum.
I'll grant you that it gets that way some times, like a mad house, when something like the craziness that we left behind shows up here. What do I mean? I mean that when, as one of Jehovah's Witnesses, we asked a legitimate question the first response we got was " Do you know who the Faithful Slave is?" and the second response , if it was a really troubling question, "Wait on Jehovah for the answer". And many times we really knew the answer in our heart and the person we asked did too--but we were all afraid to wear our true colors.
Some of us took that for a while but we're not looking for easy answers. And we know there might not be any answers--we just wanted the chance to talk. In search of sanity we left the mad house to ask our questions and look for answers.
Some of us don't believe in God anymore. Some of us have found that God didn't leave us when we left the WTS. He surprises me by his kindness and willingness to comfort and deal with my questions; and it is remarkable how much easier it is to really wait on God. When I had to wait on the WTS to hear from God and then wait for them to get back to me, well, that just was plain wrong. The process that the Bible outlines for discovery really does take a more direct path than that.
Part of the process that Jesus outlined is a process of knocking and asking. One of the great examples he gave was in Luke 18:3 of the obnoxious widow who kept demanding justice from a judge against her adversary at law. Many of us feel that way. I feel that way. We want justice against abusive religions--which includes the WTS. We are supposed to ask questions! Hard questions.
But we must ask and answer them fairly them fairly.
Here is a better way to view this forum--at least I think so: Look up the work "heckle" and you will see it is a word derived from old English /German . HECKLE has come to mean: harass and try to disconcert with questions, challenges or gibes. You may think of this as only a negative effect. But the word in it's most ancient use was a verb that descibed what was done to the long rough stems of flax plants in the difficult process of preparing them for spinning and weaving into useful cloth. The tool for doing this was called a HECKLER. It was a flat bat with thin, long, claw-like spikes nailed through it. It looked like a weapon. These tools (there were a pair of them) with wet flax stems laid between the claws, and the opposing action of the tearing claws raking through the raw stems,broke the trash off the fibers, and combed and softened them for into strong threads formaking linen cloth.
Heckling has a good purpose. What we all have to watch out for is using the heckles wrongly. They may look like weapons but they are not--except to separate the useful ideas from the trash in what we say and what we think.
Heckling really is good--proper heckling, that is.
Isn't it possible that the heckling allowed on this forum can be God's way of helping us get our answers?