In my position, life is not so easy. People who have heard me speak on the subject of History and read my writings on Historically based material, know I know my stuff. In fact, when Richard Carrier tells me I am more learned on a particular subject then he (Gnosticism) it elevates my pride to numerical proportions unheard of. (He's my hero.)

But lets face it, we all know I'm a self-taught think-tank with a wealth of knowledge and not much in the ways of credentials. Usually, nobody cares, because the fact is...I'm damn smart. But when I get called a fraud based on the fact that I am an acclaimed expert in this field, it burns me up.

I know it shouldn't. Because I have enough people out there who respect me, and one Richard Carrier compliment beats out thirty...forty...a hundred negative comments about my expertise. But I can't help but take a shot to the gut for it. I find it increasingly difficult to justify my positions and my prepositions because I get backlashed for "being a fraud." As if somehow the messenger is more important then the message.

Yet people forget the fact that many a sage was without credentials before accomplishing things that revolutionized the world and science. For some reason we have been told that if you don't go to college you can not achieve the same level of knowlege as somebody who has gone to college. No matter that now the world of today, with internet sites devoted to holding ancient manuscripts and with authors being able to publish at an unheard of rate and in volumous numbers, the stay-at-home student can achieve the same acedemia as a student who goes to school, in fact moreso then a part time student who takes night classes or has only two classes a semester.

Forgetting the first two years are really nothing more then Gen-Eds, the last two years are the bulk of your cariculum per your degree. Two years. And if you go for a doctorate, four-six. I've spent more then that doing my own research (rounding nine years just on first century CE this coming month), and a lot more then a few semesters a year doing it. I didn't take long breaks or spring breaks and I certainly didn't drink my way through exams. And even better, I didn't just get the answers to the tests, which is so much moie common today in colleges all over the United States, where dialog and debate have utterly ceased in classrooms between student and professor. Instead I live every day debating and dialoging the points of history and historical fact. And not only with other people, with myself as well.

What does a doctorate mean when I can stomp down apologists with a doctorate in a sort of Theology or Religious study? Why does this perspective last...that a degree makes you wiser then those without? Why am I stuck without the financing then, to go to a better school and learn from these professors so I too can claim a more arrogant status? Why can't I be arrogant like that, and make all sorts of various assumptions based on a lie created by a society enriched in superstition?

Probably because I'm too intellectually honest for that. Sometimes I wonder if what I write will ever be taken seriously by a community of scholars who - by the measures of what I've been told tonight and on this board before by strangers - would never acknowledge the fact that an un-college-educated "expert" knows something that they don't...