I am sorry for upsetting you. — god must be atheist

Thank you, you're a gentleman.

I am rather sensitive to percieved insults. I fully mean my characterization of myself as a "loser": only one semester of college (absolute shit show for my being absolutely unprepared for the milieu) followed by far too many years of menial jobs, with me continually regarding my bosses and saying to myself, "fuck, man, not only am I smarter than this guy, I'm in an entirely different intellectual category...what the fuck is wrong here, what the fuck is going on?". In any case, "abject failure" is my opinion of the state of my life, and as a result thereof, there exists a seething anger (actually, "rage" would not be too strong a word) which resides just underneath the surface of my affect.

If you want the truth, the convincing reason for the strength of my personal convictions regarding "emotional competence" is my own personal experience with it. My own problems were never intellectual, they were purely emotional in nature, based upon early (as early as second or third grade...that is, seven or eight years of age) perceptions of inadequacy. I blame the parents. If you see your kid is feeling shitty about himself to the extent that he seems to have developed the kernel of an injurious, malign self concept, and you don't address the issue, in fact do whatever the fuck you have to do to address the issue, then you are utterly remiss. My point is, that I know from personal experience, and can unreservedly affirm, that intellectual capacity is utterly ineffectual if it exists within a framework of emotional instability or of a malignantly poor self-concept.

Anyways, sorry for the intensity of my above reply (it was even more intense before I edited out all the "f-bombs"). I hope that I have provided a reasonable explanation therefore...an explanation sufficient to merit the pardon of yourself.

No worries, Michael, it's all in a day's work. I've been insulted and insulted others on this forum, only to walk hand-in-hand later into the sunset on the white horse we rode in on.

Have fun, carry on, make the best of it.

I can relate to your experience of "feeling shitty", in childhood and later... so can many users here, although they may keep mum about it. It's just that most people who are philosophically inclined are autistic to some degree. Not all need to have had a depraved childhood with molestation, starvation and unlove, but we are all Inwardly turning, reflective, questioning, deep and intuitive in logical ways but not emotionally. Well not emotionally on the interpersonal level. Intrapersonally, we may be. We (I, for sure, I don't know how many others I can speak for) are social misfits at worst, and difficult to get along with at best. The difficulty may not spring from being cantankerous or abrasive, but just from a lack of an ability to make ourselves understood and vice versa for and by the general population.

I don't blame my parents for my being autistic, not beyond the genes they supplied me with. I hold them innocent in the sense that they lacked the intention to bear a sick son.