Critiquing the "Skeptics"

[Conde Lucanor]

No doubt will I find pictures of God as a man with a beard and dress by searching Google Images, but that is quite a weak reason to believe that the Christian God is exactly like that.

That sounds like a skeptic talking. Next thing you will say is that there is no hard evidence of God with a beard and a long dress. But seriously, as a skeptic, I would go a few steps beyond. I mean, does God really have a look? That would imply that light rays would bounce from his body with different wave lengths into the retina of the observer as to form an image recognized by the brain of that observer. But wouldn't that imply God's body to be material, composed of atoms and molecules?

You should know that this is also a satirical and fallacious portrayal done, in part by the 'skeptics', as part of a campaign against religion and Christianity, and a very childish campaign most definitely.

Do you mean that Christianity has conspired against itself for centuries? Do you mean that perhaps the most celebrated artwork of the past 500 years is a satirical, childish, fallacious portrayal done by a skeptic named Michelangelo:

http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1411782/thumb ... cebook.jpg

This goes back to my point that you need to look into Theology and Esotericism for explanations of this, because you will find that there's more to religion than just 'superstition', if you were to apply the art of metaphor, hyperbole, and other literary devices in literature to understanding scriptures and religious beliefs.

I agree that religious texts can be studied as literature. I have no problem with that. As fictional literature. But anyone familiar with the field of Semiotics knows that literary texts are open to many interpretations and the interpreters themselves are part of the construction of meaning, including the intentions adscribed to those texts. I think it can be easily shown that theologians' intepretations of religious texts are fiction themeselves, since their inquiries concerning those texts are not scientific, but driven by the desire to find in them a connection to the dogmatic institutionalized beliefs of each church. That's very different from the scientific study of texts, as in philology and hermeneutics. Scientific archaeology has also provided hard evidence of the social and cultural conditions of a given time and place, which allows us to compare and put in real context the stories of religious texts. That's why we know they are mostly fictional.

[WanderingLands]

That sounds like a skeptic talking. Next thing you will say is that there is no hard evidence of God with a beard and a long dress. But seriously, as a skeptic, I would go a few steps beyond. I mean, does God really have a look? That would imply that light rays would bounce from his body with different wave lengths into the retina of the observer as to form an image recognized by the brain of that observer. But wouldn't that imply God's body to be material, composed of atoms and molecules?

Conceptualizing God, nonetheless, is a lot more complicated than merely saying (in a literal form) "beams of light", or that he's "a man in a dress". It may be iconic images or descriptions, but it's actually a lot deeper than merely saying what does He/She (if it's really a gender) look like. For example, eastern religion and eastern philosophy (such as Buddhism or philosophical Taoism) may say that "God" does not have a shape or form, at least in the human or material descriptions. They describe "God" in terms of being "limitless, omnipresent" - almost refering to a universal will or universal mind that binds all things. You will find these concepts in the Pantheism of Spinoza, or even some Neoplatonism. But overall, it's still naive to prescribe a human, material, or literal characteristic to God, as "God" is a concept of Metaphysics, which tackles the overall nature of things.

Do you mean that Christianity has conspired against itself for centuries? Do you mean that perhaps the most celebrated artwork of the past 500 years is a satirical, childish, fallacious portrayal done by a skeptic named Michelangelo:

http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1411782/thumb ... cebook.jpg

No, I am not arguing that Christianity is conspiring with itself. I am just pointing out the trend with the 'skeptics' making one-sided statements about religion and spirituality. And like I said, it's still allegory.

I agree that religious texts can be studied as literature. I have no problem with that. As fictional literature. But anyone familiar with the field of Semiotics knows that literary texts are open to many interpretations and the interpreters themselves are part of the construction of meaning, including the intentions adscribed to those texts. I think it can be easily shown that theologians' intepretations of religious texts are fiction themeselves, since their inquiries concerning those texts are not scientific, but driven by the desire to find in them a connection to the dogmatic institutionalized beliefs of each church. That's very different from the scientific study of texts, as in philology and hermeneutics. Scientific archaeology has also provided hard evidence of the social and cultural conditions of a given time and place, which allows us to compare and put in real context the stories of religious texts. That's why we know they are mostly fictional.

There is still a limit to how much trust you can put into scientific ways of interpreting myths and scriptures. The reason why that is, is because science mainly studies the mere empirical, or the more face-vale and quantity of things, but overlooks the more deeper depths of quality, and so does not try to actually get into the actual content of things like scripture or myths. Also, as much as there are many interpretations in more philosophical and theological schools of thought, it should nevertheless not be ignored or be ignorantly dismissed as "superstitious". Other ways would also include comparative religion; which compares the varying beliefs, customs, stories, and symbols of the worlds' religions. You may find similarities within the worlds' religions, which may give you at least a more better understanding of religion and the myths themselves.

[WanderingLands]

OK, I moved on to the other links. Let me be straightforward about it: I condemn any censorship of this kind. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to say even the most stupid things (and no one has the ultimate power to decide what is not to be published for being stupid and claim it to be the absolute truth). Being a victim myself of censorship in religious debates and other subjects (just recently I was blocked and labeled "misogynist" by a fellow atheist and feminist for opposing a law I considered discriminatory), I can attest to the incompetence of some moderators and people that is chosen as arbitrators in intellectual disputes, and they are choses despite their fragile tolerance, poor judgement and lack of good moral standards. But that just proves that human limitations and weaknesses can show up everywhere, whether is a religion or science forum. We should condemn them as we see them, but we need to be careful about generalizations: just because I was censored, doesn't mean I can claim that all religion advocates or feminists are unavoidably prone to conspire in a censorship campaign.

That may be true, but you have to remember that these 'skeptic' websites and forums are dismissing and censoring any form of information that is contrary to their belief. Same is of course is true with religionists, which is why I dissociate myself from both of these camps. However, it's science and 'skepticism' that's largely dominating the modern world, and much maybe like the religionists of Christianity, the new Secular ideology is shunning anything that's in contrast with their views.

You are mixing different things here. The first round of links in your list were skeptics' sites and I found them reasonably well-balanced. If you can point at specific instances where we can find the behavior that you depict, and in sufficient numbers as to say that it is a pattern of such community, maybe you could have a point, but so far, we only have mere generalizations and no details whatsoever.

I had another user on this forum named 'the Hessian' who sent me a RationalWiki article about Aetherometry. I read it, and was disgusted by the level of immaturity that was displayed on that article. I've pointed out the errors of that article; saying that it contained ad hominem and that it did not really debunk the Aetherometry group or made reasons for being against it; it just retorted to labeling it 'not even wrong', as usual scientific theories that do not agree with the academic world-view. Here's the thread below:

The article itself: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Aetherometry

1) TED Talk is definitely not a skeptic's or atheist organization. It has featured Bill Graham and you tell me what difference it makes against Rupert Sheldrake. But one thing for sure: TED made a blunder with this one. They should have known Sheldrake's background on crackpot and nonsense, it was not like he showed up with something new. So applying censorship after they had selected him for the show (and they had all the right not to select him at first), was a stupid mistake. But nothing to do with TED representing skepticism or atheism.

I don't really know much about Rupert Sheldrake, so I can't really speak for him too much.

2) The second link just leads to an article which is nothing but a catalog of conspiracy theories, nothing that much different from your average conspiracy theory site or the Protocols of Sion. Let's give it a fair treatment and say that it's not crackpot. Still it just states opinions about government and corporations using science as a puppet, but no specific mention of skeptics doing what you described in the initial post of this thread.

The second article "Science: Contemporary Censorship" is not mere conspiracy 'theory', as it may look like at face value.

Excerpt 1:

Two junior researchers who discovered that Australian medical scientist William McBride had altered data in a published paper voiced their concerns to the director of the research foundation that employed them. Getting no satisfactory response, they resigned. Seven other researchers wrote a letter about the allegations; they were retrenched. In the United States, junior researcher Margot O’Toole raised questions about evidence for results published in the journal Cell; one of the co-authors of the Cell paper was Nobel prize winner David Baltimore. The scientific establishment rallied around Baltimore and O’Toole’s career was virtually destroyed.

Excerpt 2:

Hugh DeWitt, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which designs nuclear weapons, has spoken out critically about US nuclear weapons policy. He has only survived in his job because of his visibility and support outside the lab. In the case of US government controls over encryption algorithms, a highly effective response has been open release of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), which has been distributed worldwide in the face of export controls.

Excerpt 3:

A different corporate technique of stopping the message is to obtain a patent on a product or process as a means of preventing its development. For example, General Electric used its control of patents to retard the introduction of fluorescent lights, which were more efficient than the incandescent lights it was selling. Although patents and copyrights, as forms of intellectual property, are supposed to foster the creation of new ideas, they can be used to restrain development. Fortunately, then, scientific ideas such as formulas cannot be copyrighted. If copyright, which is valid until 75 years after an author’s death, could have been applied to the theory of evolution or methods for solving equations on a computer, the negative consequences can be imagined.

Seeing the actual examples and evidence shown in the article, it is quite certain that not all conspiracies are 'theories'.

[Conde Lucanor]

You will find these concepts in the Pantheism of Spinoza, or even some Neoplatonism. But overall, it's still naive to prescribe a human, material, or literal characteristic to God, as "God" is a concept of Metaphysics, which tackles the overall nature of things.

You're right!! Now you know how skeptics feel when they read in the Bible all the nonsense about a god that displays human behavior, gets a virgin pregnant and has a son that redeems humanity from the curse of his father's failed project.

Some time ago I wrote something about Spinoza's Pantheism and that it looked to me as being on the limits of atheism or agnosticism. Spinoza´s reasoning can be used to debunk the silly fantasies of most religions, including Christianity. No wonder why he was prosecuted for being critical of the Bible's fairy tales (talk about censorship campaigns). Deists like Thomas Paine are also frequently cited by skeptics, atheists and secularists.

Do you mean that Christianity has conspired against itself for centuries? Do you mean that perhaps the most celebrated artwork of the past 500 years is a satirical, childish, fallacious portrayal done by a skeptic named Michelangelo:

http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1411782/thumb ... cebook.jpg

No, I am not arguing that Christianity is conspiring with itself. I am just pointing out the trend with the 'skeptics' making one-sided statements about religion and spirituality. And like I said, it's still allegory.

You didn't get it. You said depicting god in that way was a satirical, childish portrayal, a campaing against Christianity carried on by skeptics. But I tried to make you realize that such a portrayal comes from Christianity itself by showing you one of the most iconic images of Christianity, located at one of its headquarters (Sistine Chapel at the Vatican). If it's a conspiracy, then it has to be a Christian conspiracy.

There is still a limit to how much trust you can put into scientific ways of interpreting myths and scriptures. The reason why that is, is because science mainly studies the mere empirical, or the more face-vale and quantity of things, but overlooks the more deeper depths of quality, and so does not try to actually get into the actual content of things like scripture or myths.

I disagree. Context is a key for interpretation, it gives us clues about who wrote what, to whom it was directed to and why. If I mention an ethanol engine in a text, no matter how allegorical I can get, no one in two centuries from now will be able to argue that I'm writing from the 19th century and that my target audience is comprised of Napoleon soldiers. For the same reason, Archaeological findings and other historical clues of the social environments in which the texts were written, provide a basis to determine how the texts were composed or compiled from different sources (perhaps from many from oral traditions) and who they were intended to. When combined with Philology and Palaeography, there's not much room in these studies for the wild, made up stories and interpretations of theologians.

[WanderingLands]

You didn't get it. You said depicting god in that way was a satirical, childish portrayal, a campaing against Christianity carried on by skeptics. But I tried to make you realize that such a portrayal comes from Christianity itself by showing you one of the most iconic images of Christianity, located at one of its headquarters (Sistine Chapel at the Vatican). If it's a conspiracy, then it has to be a Christian conspiracy.

Let me clear up what I'm saying. When the Christians, or people of the Renaissance, were drawing God as a man, that they were using it as an allegory symbolizing the 'God in man', as the various artists, inventors, and philosophers of the Renaissance believed that 'Man' was in the 'image of God' in that he could create beautiful things and try to replicate nature, which is the basis of Renaissance Humanism. However, the 'skeptics', whom the vast majority do not understand symbolism and allegory in these paintings of 'God', decide to use it as a ridiculous retort against Christianity; that they think that the 'Christian God' is equated with the Renaissance paintings of 'God'.

I disagree. Context is a key for interpretation, it gives us clues about who wrote what, to whom it was directed to and why. If I mention an ethanol engine in a text, no matter how allegorical I can get, no one in two centuries from now will be able to argue that I'm writing from the 19th century and that my target audience is comprised of Napoleon soldiers. For the same reason, Archaeological findings and other historical clues of the social environments in which the texts were written, provide a basis to determine how the texts were composed or compiled from different sources (perhaps from many from oral traditions) and who they were intended to. When combined with Philology and Palaeography, there's not much room in these studies for the wild, made up stories and interpretations of theologians.

Indeed, context is key for interpretation; but so is looking at it from a more spiritual and/or esoteric point of view, that is equally as valid. Without that spiritual point of view, we are left to think that these people who wrote it were under some 'delusion', or 'superstition' in believing in a higher realm, when really there must be something more than just 'superstition' that caused whomever authors to write it.

[Conde Lucanor]

That may be true, but you have to remember that these 'skeptic' websites and forums are dismissing and censoring any form of information that is contrary to their belief.

Let me point out again that the sites displaying censorship were not skeptic's websites or forums. They were Physics sites and I'm not sure if I need to emphasize that "Physics" is no synonim of "atheists" or "skeptics".

However, it's science and 'skepticism' that's largely dominating the modern world,

I would be the first to cheer for it, but unfortunately that's too far from being true. Now it's like we're going back to the Middle Ages.

I had another user on this forum named 'the Hessian' who sent me a RationalWiki article about Aetherometry. I read it, and was disgusted by the level of immaturity that was displayed on that article. I've pointed out the errors of that article; saying that it contained ad hominem and that it did not really debunk the Aetherometry group or made reasons for being against it; it just retorted to labeling it 'not even wrong', as usual scientific theories that do not agree with the academic world-view. Here's the thread below:

The article itself: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Aetherometry

This seems to be just anecdotal and adds nothing to whatever argument you're trying to advance. I have not read the article, so I can't qualify its merits. I can trust you that it might be immature, but you should be also aware that Wiki projects, such as Wikipedia, are to be read with some restrictions, given its mass collaboration nature, which allows even nonsense to be published if it goes undetected (and many times it does).

I don't really know much about Rupert Sheldrake, so I can't really speak for him too much.

So how can you use it as exemplary of the point you're trying to make?

Let me clear up what I'm saying. When the Christians, or people of the Renaissance, were drawing God as a man, that they were using it as an allegory symbolizing the 'God in man', as the various artists, inventors, and philosophers of the Renaissance believed that 'Man' was in the 'image of God' in that he could create beautiful things and try to replicate nature, which is the basis of Renaissance Humanism. However, the 'skeptics', whom the vast majority do not understand symbolism and allegory in these paintings of 'God', decide to use it as a ridiculous retort against Christianity; that they think that the 'Christian God' is equated with the Renaissance paintings of 'God'.

So you agree that the iconic image of the Christian god as a bearded white man came from Christianity itself. Now, let's assume that artists' depictions of the Christian god were allegorical or symbolical, as you purport. That would just explain the author's intentions, not how the general public viewed these works of art. In the same way that you can generalize that a "vast majority" of skpetics "do not understand symbolism and allegory", it can be said of the average Christian believer that does not understand symbolism and allegory. So, despite any official positions of theologians, it's still possible that Christians believe god's image is factually not too far from Renaissance imagery:

http://www.godvine.com/12-Year-Old-Prod ... en-43.html
http://www.wdam.com/story/25856186/litt ... ck-to-life

Indeed, context is key for interpretation; but so is looking at it from a more spiritual and/or esoteric point of view, that is equally as valid.

But contrary to "spiritual or esoteric points of view", scientific points of view are objectively reliable, able to make predictions about the world we live in and put to test its own results. It discovers real things. Esoterism and spiritualism are just unreliable speculations that produce no verifiable results, so ultimately rely on pure faith.

Without that spiritual point of view, we are left to think that these people who wrote it were under some 'delusion', or 'superstition' in believing in a higher realm...

It is exactly just the opposite: it is that spiritual point of view that gives us clues about their delusions and superstitions. There's no evidence of a "higher realm" and it's just logically impossible. Read Spinoza.

[cladking]

I would be the first to cheer for it, but unfortunately that's too far from being true. Now it's like we're going back to the Middle Ages.

Yes, indeed. And it's coming at a breakneck pace.

Civilization is regressing about a decade a month at this time. A dark ages will be in full "bloom" in another ten years and everything will be politically correct.

[Conde Lucanor]

Some time ago I wrote something about Spinoza's Pantheism and that it looked to me as being on the limits of atheism or agnosticism. Spinoza´s reasoning can be used to debunk the silly fantasies of most religions, including Christianity. No wonder why he was prosecuted for being critical of the Bible's fairy tales (talk about censorship campaigns). Deists like Thomas Paine are also frequently cited by skeptics, atheists and secularists.

Just came across this article in Philosophy Now that quotes from Feuerbach reaching the same conclusion:

http://philosophynow.org/issues/103/Lud ... _1804-1872

As Feuerbach would later summarize it in Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843), “Pantheism is the naked truth of theism. All the conceptions of theism, when grasped, seriously considered, carried out, and realized, lead necessarily to pantheism.” And yet he believed that the unification of all thought and matter in the deity is so fraught with destructive significance that, ultimately, “Pantheism is theological atheism” – by equating God with the universe, pantheism allows humanity to see clearly that our concept of God is our alienation of our own nature; and this perception brings to a close the first stage in man’s self-rediscovery.

[WanderingLands]

Pantheism doesn't simply have to be equated to, or similar to Atheism. As a matter of fact, the doctrine of Pantheism can also lead to more metaphysical and esoteric speculations. For example, the Seven Laws of Hermeticism written in The Kybalion talks about the idea of interconnectedness and unity in the Universe, which stems from the idea of God being the Universe. You can also look at sacred geometry, where there's the golden ratio in everything in the universe, which can lead to the idea hat he Universe itself is divine.

[Conde Lucanor]

Perhaps in some other doctrines of Pantheism, but in Spinoza's, there's only one substance existing in different modes, but is not composed of parts and relationships among those parts. It's not an anthropomorphic being who intervenes in history, actually there's not even a history, because everything is all at once. For practical purposes, it works like atheism, even though it isn't.

[NielsBohr]

For some time now, since I have been looking into alternative information within science, history, and what not, I have occasionally encountered many websites and groups on the Internet that call themselves "skeptics". These are people who of course are atheists, as in militant atheists. The things that they do is that they counter against those who are in alternative history and alternative science circles; they use the banner of science, as in the positivist modern form of science, to "debunk" things that fall out of the mainstream scientific paradigm (ie. critique of standard cosmological model, critique of mainstream medicine, research into psychic/paranormal phenomena, homeopathy). When it comes to historical and political manners, they attack people who question things in history and politics (September 11th, the World Wars, the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy, Globalization) and talk about things like the Federal Reserve, the bankers (ie. Rothschilds), and many other things.

The articles that I have read on these skeptic websites are horrible in content. It is often childish and immature; contains use of insults against people who fall outside the mainstream paradigm; often times, they do not address much of the claims that many in the alternative circles say. They often simply label them "conspiracy theorists", "denialists", "quacks", "cranks", and "charlatans". If they were to address any points, they would use weak information and other logical fallacies, such as selective reading, strawman, hasty generalization, and what not.

Hi WanderingLands,

I went on your message because I was deeply sceptic when I was young. I assume nowadays to be protestant, but I do not forget my sceptic period.

I made a first constatation when I would subscribe in a philosophy forum some years ago; most of them - as you mean - did not separated skeptics from atheists.
And when they did this separation intellectually, in fact, most of them did not.

-On a french forum, I used of maïeutic (Socrate's method - using questions), with only a sceptic person. After about 100 posts, the moderator - an atheist woman - accused me of manipulation.

And the reason was... I had used the ((nevertheless) classical) method, going from general questions to specific ones.

-But there is one thing I must say, is that on numbers of such sites, we bring conspiracIES theorIES which were (each the inference of the precedent) the step before paranoïd symptoms.

This is why I am happy to have found a non commercial site (this present one), and its neutral presentation is for me a good thing.

So enjoy!

N.B.:
I would like to precise too, that I think as you, about the marginal thinkers as being necessary. I think more precisely that and idea, as far as it is coherent or even use the principle of analogy, cannot be bad in itself.

After that, we could have some doubt about some thinkers who take for them a global theory to inoculate there their own punctual concepts. I saw this method somewhere else; it was very seductive, but its foundations were not the "ownership" of the author. And in this case, we can fear the worst, as unsuitable derivations.

I could make a development about the fact the actual science could seem to be too "dry" in comparison to the mind theory. I think this is more precisely the case of the classical physics. And do not want to allow myself in speculating about some quantic aspects, because I do no know enough this domain to this day.
Or if I do, later, in dedicated topic, I should be by quoting some physicists, known in the domain of physics.

[WanderingLands]

For some time now, since I have been looking into alternative information within science, history, and what not, I have occasionally encountered many websites and groups on the Internet that call themselves "skeptics". These are people who of course are atheists, as in militant atheists. The things that they do is that they counter against those who are in alternative history and alternative science circles; they use the banner of science, as in the positivist modern form of science, to "debunk" things that fall out of the mainstream scientific paradigm (ie. critique of standard cosmological model, critique of mainstream medicine, research into psychic/paranormal phenomena, homeopathy). When it comes to historical and political manners, they attack people who question things in history and politics (September 11th, the World Wars, the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy, Globalization) and talk about things like the Federal Reserve, the bankers (ie. Rothschilds), and many other things.

The articles that I have read on these skeptic websites are horrible in content. It is often childish and immature; contains use of insults against people who fall outside the mainstream paradigm; often times, they do not address much of the claims that many in the alternative circles say. They often simply label them "conspiracy theorists", "denialists", "quacks", "cranks", and "charlatans". If they were to address any points, they would use weak information and other logical fallacies, such as selective reading, strawman, hasty generalization, and what not.

Hi WanderingLands,

I went on your message because I was deeply sceptic when I was young. I assume nowadays to be protestant, but I do not forget my sceptic period.

I made a first constatation when I would subscribe in a philosophy forum some years ago; most of them - as you mean - did not separated skeptics from atheists.
And when they did this separation intellectually, in fact, most of them did not.

-On a french forum, I used of maïeutic (Socrate's method - using questions), with only a sceptic person. After about 100 posts, the moderator - an atheist woman - accused me of manipulation.

And the reason was... I had used the ((nevertheless) classical) method, going from general questions to specific ones.

-But there is one thing I must say, is that on numbers of such sites, we bring conspiracIES theorIES which were (each the inference of the precedent) the step before paranoïd symptoms.

This is why I am happy to have found a non commercial site (this present one), and its neutral presentation is for me a good thing.

So enjoy!

N.B.:
I would like to precise too, that I think as you, about the marginal thinkers as being necessary. I think more precisely that and idea, as far as it is coherent or even use the principle of analogy, cannot be bad in itself.

After that, we could have some doubt about some thinkers who take for them a global theory to inoculate there their own punctual concepts. I saw this method somewhere else; it was very seductive, but its foundations were not the "ownership" of the author. And in this case, we can fear the worst, as unsuitable derivations.

I could make a development about the fact the actual science could seem to be too "dry" in comparison to the mind theory. I think this is more precisely the case of the classical physics. And do not want to allow myself in speculating about some quantic aspects, because I do no know enough this domain to this day.
Or if I do, later, in dedicated topic, I should be by quoting some physicists, known in the domain of physics.

Hello, Niels - it is a pleasure to meet you here on this forum, and I say welcome! I can't wait to see what kind of information that you're going to bring to the table. But be careful - there may be 'skeptics' waiting to try and 'tear' you apart in the name of science and skepticism! Although I would say it may not be as bad as when you were on that forum where that atheist woman accused you of 'manipulation'.

[NielsBohr]

To make a summary, I asked her for explanations (and had to give my explanations on my own decision, trying to explain her that going from general to particular is the principle of all research method (only that, sorry)), or for excuses...

In place of bringing back excuses, I got again accusations - not in being only manipulator - but downright deceptive... Never defy this woman, she was hysterical.

-Which information ? -Oh, this is sure a strong word. Only a lecture a made of a physicist. I'll inform you when I decide to create this topic, but it is surely too early - and I believe some topics on quantic physics have been made.

If they are too specialized, I'll only post a question, or make another topic. Let's see later.

it is a pleasure to meet you here on this forum, and I say welcome! I

WanderingLand,
excuse me, I did not answer to all, so edited my post.

Thank you a lot for your friendly message and your welcome!