u/ExpressionOfTheSoul writes me: "If you're interested in discussing the things you brought up to me in the Emotional Healing forum, I suggest making a post about it on an appropriate forum and pinging me to it. Perhaps you could post it on one of the forums you mod or at the Conspiracies forum (If you want to post anything about me over there, go ahead). The mod decisions regarding the bans are final. There is a new post in the Expose religious extremism forum and a couple in the Bible Oddities forum you might be interested in discussing elsewhere." So it appears appropriate to collect a few facts about this account in one place for proper understanding.

My immediate conclusion is that Soul is likely to need special consideration for reasons he cannot share. Since I don't understand the account's behavior, I'm just documenting it. (1) Soul appeared at Conspiracies last week and began posting from a broad gnostic perspective and I interacted and sought understanding. (2) Soul deleted all content and created three new forums (now four) and posted welcome messages with guidelines but without sidebar rules. (3) I posted some questions in two of these, and Soul interacted with one of my comments. (4) Soul permabanned me from both forums, I copied my unanswered questions to his third forum, and he permabanned me from that forum as well. (5) Soul wrote the message above. Clearly Soul is interested in maintaining a positive persona in speech and also in permitting a number of aggressive actions in tools and logs, and in focusing on his new forums while accepting being pinged in other forums.

The ban reasons were "No proselytzing efforts." (SeekersOfTheWay), "Moderator discretion." (ExposeReligiousExtremism), and "No proselytizing, persuasion, or agenda pushing." (EmotionalHealing). I infer that Soul is not too interested in working out a consistent moderation policy but seeks to organize discussion in specific but often unpublished ways.

Though there might be much I'd want to say as to the several posts Soul has made, supportive and supplemental, for now I should probably stick to the questions that went unanswered (looking forward to Soul's answers), and try again in the fourth forum if I have any observations there. Those questions are:

I hope you don't mind my having a few questions about belief so that I know how to interpret the forum's purpose.

1. I see you're talking about theosis or divinization, as described in the Gospel of Thomas passim, and called in 1 Peter 1:4 being "of the divine, fellowshippers, by nature" (literal). That would be the meaning of "becoming Christ" (Anointed), because there are both the many applications of instantiations of Christ and the one central application of participation in Christ. It is rightly taught under the marriage metaphor by which one is the bride of Christ, thus the body of Christ, thus one with Christ, thus in various aspects indistinguishable from Christ: the bride is both a partial instantiation of the household that is named Christ, and a holistic participation in everything that Christ is and means. It doesn't appear Yeshua taught us to do anything different than he did (he taught us to do greater than he did), so it seems that in every way in which we are Christ he is also Christ. Q: Is it fair to uphold Yeshua as the model of the bridegroom with the follower being the model of the bride: that is, how could we have any better model for our lives than his life?

2. In this sense I would take your concern about "belief in" and "worship of" Christ. In my review of theology there is no belief in or worship of Christ other than what directs itself to belief in and worship of the Most High, and any sense in which it is applied to Christ the Body it is to be applied equally to Jesus and to his follower, in that bridal household metaphor. When Scripture speaks of "worshipping of" mortals it is to be worship of the image of God in the mortal, and the idea of "trusting" a mortal would similarly be limited to trusting God to work through the mortal; and Jesus honors those limitations in his teaching. Inferring from your other forum, you're rejecting absolutism, which would here involve trust and worship that is not directed to the Most High alone (even as in our actions we accord trust and reverence to humans freely). Q: Is that the kind of belief and worship that you're deprecating here?

3. You also speak of evolution (i.e. change), and in actual practice the most important evolution is that over a single life, because there is nothing for us at any moment that growth and improvement are abandoned; the open mind is always experiencing newness and volution. I've been investigating concepts of the "many lifetimes" ("reincarnation") and so I'd presume you're looking for more Abrahamic concepts like gilgul rather than more Hindu concepts like transmigration. It's complicated of course, so I have questions. Q: Are you looking at a multilife view that accounts for the constant evolution (change) in population totals, such that the billions alive today obviously did not all have continuous existence coming from past millennia? Most reincarnation views don't handle that very well, but I think gilgul does. I don't see the answer in Thomas or I would've brought that in.

4. Q: Are you familiar with details of Oversouls that are evolving as various unique lives manifest? An Oversoul is an archetypal personality that connects lives in such way that we can speak of both continuity and individuality without running into the contradictions that often arise on the subject. The Oversoul manifests in many individuals, can appear in multiples at once (i.e. can increase in its number of representatives on earth), and is undergoing a communal learning process via the individual variations of the archetype. The Oversoul exists first in God's conception and variously in its manifestations. I trust that explanation is what you're going after.

That should suffice for now. I hope this gets discussion off on the right foot because practicing this life with reference to the past and to the next life includes ensuring we have the core absolutes agreed. As I noted separately, this is not done by dogma but by evolving hypotheses that model the mind of the Most High with ever-increasing accuracy and sufficiency.

Add: Fifth permaban from ExposingExtremism for posting a perfectly responsive news article with title "Exposing Extremism 25 Dec 23: Alleged members of extremist group indicted in suspected SoCal New Years Eve bombing plot. A federal grand jury indicted four people on Tuesday in connection with a suspected terror plot to bomb targets in Los Angeles and Orange counties on New Year's Eve." Stated reason, "Mod discretion-user has exhibited mod griefing behavior across multiple forums. Ban final. No appeals." Apparently Soul believes it's entirely rational to create lots of fora about religiously motivated extremism and gatekeeping, then to gatekeep answers to questions about his core methodology, and then to have essentially no rule because "moderator discretion" can always be used for permaban whenever no other rule applies. This is creating welcomes one by one and demolishing them one by one, which is the height of either insanity or shilling. I sought to be sensitive, but it appears to me this is just the same user as one or more previous incarnations who doesn't desire to question his own presuppositions with the assistance of others. I still believe in enough sensitivity to give him space to remove his own extremism in protecting his beliefs against rational improvement, but remind everyone that there are always the two choices, contradiction or truth, and one had better either admit one is on the side of contradiction and nihilism or on the side of truth and self-awareness.