Anchoring yourself in peace
I've noticed that when I first returned to this forum after my absence, I was much better at dealing with people. As time went on, I lost my grounding. Now, in order to protect my ego, I've found myself sinking to the same level as the sad, substandard posters that think their ridicule and flaming is somehow funny. Only by reading through an old post of mine did I even become aware of how badly my attitude had been warped over the last 6 months.
So I'm asking for advice. Unfortunately, this is the same everywhere I've been. For every intellectually sound poster, there's at least two antagonistic trolls set on hooking you into some trivial ego-battle. Dreamviews was one of the better communities I've seen, actually. But it's gotten worse, of late. But I also know I couldn't find somewhere better, because most other forums on the internet are divided even worse. There's no constructive discussion, there are forums of moonbattery where proper skepticism is ridiculed and flamed; and there are forums where any idea that hasn't already been published by a scholarly source is dismissed at moonbattery.
There's no respect for ideas on the internet. Really, there can't be. Being disrespectful of ideas and differing points of view cannot exactly be banned, now can it? And some websites attract certain polarities of people while others attract different ones. Dreamviews was nice because it had a healthy skeptical element but this element is getting overcrowded by a rather sad mob of egotistical jerks.
And that's just the way life works. You can't avoid it. People will try to bring you down. They will call you names and make fun of you because it requires less thinking than breaking apart your claims. I originally came back to this forum in the hopes people would attack my claims so I could test them. But now, they just attack me and I gain nothing constructive.
So my question is, should I just give up? Try to find somewhere else with a skeptical element that hasn't been corroded by arrogance? Or do I simply need to anchor myself in detachment and continue this process, holding out for the drops of true, constructive wisdom that slip in between the heaps of worthless flaming?