User:Vvesser

I got off to a spotty start where education was concerned. My father was a religious fanatic who took me out of school at the age of 14 so I could add support to our family income. We belonged to a very traditional creation without evolution dogmatic "faith". I eventually left everything I knew behind and moved to a big city alone at 18. It was several years before I realized I needed answers. In the early 1990's the kind of education I was looking for was out of reach for a person with an 8th grade education and a religious complication that made going to my family for college money impossible. A string of library binges did get me off to a start and eventually I had enough information make one of the hardest changes in thought a person can make. I realized that my religious "given beliefs" were wrong. (A book would be here if this was for that) Now, I had to change the very foundation of my view of the meaning of life. Fortunately, the internet was beginning to yield a new kind of access to specific knowledge so you didn't need to check out a stack of books and scan though thousands of pages just to figure out that you needed to learn about radio-carbon dating to take another step. (A dogma purge is a pretty challenging thing to do) This or some other fact verification technology that started to rebuild your foundation so you could see that you were lost in a false belief. Blood, sweat and tears were a new promise for me. I knew that each thing I learned was likely to inspire these three things at a minimum. But there was something else, something wonderful and invigorating; the trill of a eureka, an "ah-ha moment". Suddenly after years, days and hours of study a picture became clear! There were thousands of tiny moments held in memory for just that missing link. When they came together it was a rush of joy and wonder, a pure moment that rewarded your efforts, finally, in a flood of understanding. No adrenaline rush could match this! So I became hooked on learning, knowing that another moment like this was coming. The pain of removing a dogma clog was rewarded with light, true light that radiated on every surface and revealed the wonder that had eluded my adult mind for so long. Now I had a glimpse of what was coming and could never turn off this light again! From this point I found Wikipedia and eventually dedicated online schools. Now the light flows in at near its potential speed and I glean it's brightened fields, not quite like Jim Carys rendition of "the Riddler" wearing the cap that sucked knowledge out of his victims, but I definitely see a parallel in the internet. Anyway, I am largely educated by the internet and find it's abilities to be more direct than anything else I have access to. At 53 years of age I am just starting to work into more specifically toward degrees in science, math and religious studies. I hope to be able to give back to the resources that I have benefited from. This platform was one of the first that gave me knowledge without requiring cash up front, so I am starting here now. All the Best Vince

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