R.I.P. Gatormb

Lawdog maybe?

 

I have forgotten many of their names. Gordon and rev come to mind, and last I heard rev became the owner of the site over there. I have not seen Gator715 in quite some time. It appears he is doing other things. I cannot remember many of the others who ended up staying over there except the ones who came back here.

 

Before your time here mb and I had a lot of back and forth on this board with three primary groups: the atheists and the agnostics, the Catholics, and the neo-orthodox Christian(s). If you had been posting back then, you would have been posting a lot more frequently because mb started a lot of threads on various subjects i.e. threads on evolution, threads on Mary, threads on the reliability of the Bible, threads on the archaeological evidence for the Bible, threads on the 10 commandments, threads on abortion, threads on predestination, threads on Mormonism, etc. MB was much better at starting the threads of a religious nature than anyone else, and when he stopped posting on GC the religious threads died down quite a bit, although I started a fair share for a while longer after he left. That was before the era where every thread had to have an immediate change of subject to Trump no matter what the subject is outside of a thread like this one. Prolonged intelligent discussion for over 20+ pages was possible back then.

When I started posting here MB was attending a charismatic church, but he had a good theological foundation and he took the Bible very seriously. We definitely had a large theological common ground, a common ground you would have no doubt been a part of and shared in. So, it was through our cooperative efforts in apologetics that mb and I really got to know one another and become friends. I was going through a theological cage stage back then, even well into my early to mid twenties. And when you are engaging with people from a neo-orthodox or even a Catholic perspective there are major disagreements that happen along the lines of soteriology. So, I dug my heels in and I defended my, at the time, evolving soteriological POV against the neo-orthodox POV on soteriology and the Catholic POV on soteriology. There are some posters who remember it very well (for better or for worse). MB latched on to reformed soteriology during that time period. He ended up becoming very convinced of it, and that is when he started reading and listening to Sproul. MB also ended up leaving his charismatic church and started attending an OPC church at the time because his theological convictions had shifted. I think MB spoke positively of me because we did apologetics together, and in the process of doing apologetics together he moved into a reformed view of soteriology. There was not a way to engage with the claims of neo-orthodoxy and Catholicism apart from engaging them on the subject of soteriology. Both of them hold similar views on the fundamental nature of salvation because they are both works based religions, although neo-orthodoxy represents the more extreme departure since it flat out denies an atonement. MB considered coming into a reformed view of salvation to be a big point on his spiritual timeline.

Since my early cage stage days on Too Hot, I would like to think that I have matured a little bit. A sort of de facto truce has been made since then between the neo-orthodox poster mb and I went back and forth with. She very much dislikes labels, but neo-orthodox is a very fair description even if she would protest it and try to evade it. There was also a conservative Catholic poster mb and I went back and forth with quite extensively, and we also have a sort of truce where we don’t draw swords any more. We find ourselves more or less on the same side of most political threads nowadays. For the most part the religious conflicts have gone by the way side, and I try to keep my engagement more centered on the subject of politics.