Sivason,

In your first large paragraph you go directly at motive. I agree that's where most of the real action is. However, I want to make a few points in defense of where Summerlander appears to me to be coming from.

1. As a culture, 'science' is often prone to dismissing things as unreal which can't currently be accommodated scientifically. That's a mistake. However, within the area where phenomena can be rigorously studied and controlled, science has been very, very successful. If you go to the 'science' section of the bookstore, most of what you read is demonstrably true, notwithstanding some assumptions that are pushed a bit too far or some important things that are left out. That contrasts favorably to the spirituality section, where people are to a large degree just making stuff up, or parroting other people who made stuff up in the past, Almost all of it is misleading, which matters because it alters how we think about things in ways that have consequences.

2. Different people are working on different problems in their lives, and all of us let some problems or contradictions slide while we work on other things. But some of those problems that aren't so important to us do matter more to other people. And sometimes they'd matter more to us also, if we were seeing things more clearly in some regards. The process of bringing what's true more into focus has to start somewhere, and one good place to start is by looking at what is already understood scientifically and seeing how far it goes.

3. One useful problem solving technique is to set aside aspects of a problem that are too hard to solve at present, and work on the easier aspects. After progress is made where it is easier, than the harder part also gets easier, and it can be solved also. Another, almost opposite approach, is to go directly at what appear to be the most crucial parts of the problem, because if they can't be solved, the less crucial parts don't even matter. In some ways I skew strongly towards this second approach, though both are needed. There are important questions that none of the esoteric religious teachings attempt to answer, but which science can not currently answer either. If science as a culture claims to have answers to those questions, but doesn't really, then those claims need to be examined so that they can be gotten out of the way. Those claims aren't so much in your way personally, since you don't care about them.
But they matter directly to other people, and even for you they affect the mental and psychic ocean you swim in. Rhetorically, one way to examine them is to present them as possible answers and see if anyone can knock them down convincingly. I think it's true what you say that when most people present arguments, they're committed to the conclusions those arguments support, and almost no amount of logic or evidence is going to change them. But that's not what everybody is doing.

4. As I see it, a characteristic of most scientifically inclined people, and most atheists, is they want everything to be understandable. This amounts to a kind of control. A person feels knowledgeable and powerful when they have a dragon chained in the lab. Wild dragons that you only sometimes see are more unsettling to this kind of personality. Many people would rather live in a delusion of being in control than recognize that they're not in control. But a few people place not being deluded as a higher value. So even if such a person is temperamentally inclined to prefer everything to be well defined, they're still willing to grapple honestly with things that aren't.

5. For those who, when push comes to shove, prefer a false sense of wisdom to recognizing their own ignorance, that's not necessarily the wrong choice for them to make. Going back to my second point, we all work on things in our own necessary order. There are some things that nobody is presently equipped to deal with. So everyone fudges something. Some people fudge the logic, and refuse to see things that they don't know how to handle. Other people fudge the emotion more, and the recognize more of the facts but don't allow themselves to really feel the implications. Fudging neither can produce a level of psychological stress that's unhelpful. There may be a deeper perspective that resolves the conflict, and a degree of honesty is necessary to get there. However, in many cases that deeper perspective isn't attainable - a person needs to grow more first. And growth is more than a matter of embracing a philosophy. This is one reason I don't always dig directly at motive, even though I see that so much other discussion can be a waste of time. The half-truths that I have could be unhelpful for someone else, and if I could somehow force or foist those on the other person I would not necessarily be doing them a favor.

In regards to your 'reality does not exist' worldview, I think this is something that works for you, and would likely be useful for the rest of us to understand better. However, it's also true that it has limitations and is not in all ways enough for everyone. This goes back to my second point again.

In regards to sharing personal information using fake names and whatnot, that's not really a solution. Some of my experiences are remarkably unique, and there's no way I can obscure identifying information without altering so much that they're not really the same experiences any more. The way that I think is also distinctive enough that if anyone who knows me reads anything I write they can probably figure out who it is just from that. I hear what you're saying though, that there's value to having things out in the open, and I'm glad that you find the time I've put into this to be worth something.

My travel schedule has firmed up a bit by the way. I'll be in Boise on July 4th, but might not have more than a couple of hours open. Then I'll be back again briefly a week later.