Not that the thought of awfulness was in itself new. I had a dreadful feeling that the whole exercise would be awful from the moment Ward first contacted me to suggest by email that I take the Christian pages from Wiki:

Subject: Christian Clublet

19th October 2000

Richard -- Would you consider creating a Christian clublet and moving all wiki pages devoted to Christian topics to the site?

I think that the wiki community has done an admirable job reaching a constructive level of dialog, probably due to your persistence. That answers a question that I'm sure we both wonder about: yes, a wiki can survive a divisive topic.

I would consider maintaining an awareness of the namespace of such a site and automatically linking citations from programming related pages to it without further annotation.

The Christian topics now amount to more than just amateur philosophy. Their wholeness diminishes the wholeness of the programming content of my site. -- Ward

So why did I start and why did I keep going?

I want to think through the question and write about it totally honestly. That is the reason Why Is Now Closed.

There were in fact some really positive surprises for me in hosting Why, throughout the two years. Of all my fears when Ward asked I guess the greatest was: "Oh no, that means we will just get the obsessive nutcases from Wiki, with the sensible, high quality and witty people not touching us with a bargepole." We would soon be locked into the kind of humorless bickering I had spent two and half decades as a Christian avoiding, since I had had the great privilege of witnessing something so much better at school at age sixteen. Either that, or we would soon become exclusively Christian, which I felt, given where the pages were coming from, would be even worse.

Well, it never happened. In fact, even though we had our fair share of bickering, I don't think that at any time in the two years we degenerated completely. Towards the end I was incredibly grateful to Tom Ayerst and Peter Swords for double-handedly ensuring that this would not happen; earlier Josh Grosse, Tom Kreitzberg, Walden Mathews, Keith Hodges, Jason Yip, David Smith, C Herger Thomann, James Crook, Michael Mcginnis, Michael Chean, Philip Knaggs, Keith Braithwaite, Phil Crawley, Peter Merel, Martin Noutch and many others made substantial contributions in many different directions.

Even Richard Kulisz became a hero on more than one front, despite causing inevitable community stress - for one important example of which see Holocaust Reading. My eventual Verdict On Kulisz, fully endorsed by Keith Braithwaite, put some small restrictions on his editing rights after he had been extremely rude to Tom Kreitzberg. Interestingly, though, this is not at all how I remember Richard now but as an honest, passionate and sometimes brilliant contributor. As both Walden Mathews and I suspected, Richard was not willing to accept the restrictions and didn't edit Why again. Walden felt that this proved that I had been unwise; sadly I felt that a more tragic view of hosting was far more realistic. I knew that I had never been fully wise in any week of Why. This didn't alter the fact that some action by an imperfect host was needed, in this and various other cases.

Other people left in other ways and for other reasons. Confusion about what I came to call Perfect Progression Of Proaction, Pragmatically And In Principle was more often cited as a reason than was I believe warranted. With all the challenges, such a varied bunch of constructive, consenting adults, which I felt we always had (at least until Tom Ayerst's departure in November 2002 after a crucial late intervention by "Frick" on God And Existence), made for truly fascinating eclecticism, as Tom himself put it (More Or Less) in a much appreciated email at the end.

Most of all, as time and tumult has receded, I find that I want to thank the vast bulk of initial people that came across from Wiki, to "give it a go", in November 2000. Eight weeks in and many had begun to lose interest - and this apparent loss of "Critical Mass" was definitely part of the cause of the tension with Keith Braithwaite - but in many ways it was for the "ordinary people" of Wiki that I did the considerable work I did here in preparation and then the initial "hosting", whatever that was going to turn out to mean. I continue to salute those ordinary people and Ward, the incomparable host who somehow managed from a miserly 200 lines of Perl and abundant humanity to create such a strong, enduring culture of quality yet diversity, laughter yet respect, from which we benefited so much.

Walden's lovely example of How To Enter Why was typical of the hopes, bonhomie and goodwill at that time.

From the above, two reasons easily deduced are

• the unexpected quality of at least some of Why, at least some part of every month for two years, despite its rockier moments

• what I and Clublets (aka Niki Niki) as a whole were learning, technically and socially, about doing wiki in what Ward originally called "divisive topics".

These were indeed strong reasons for me throughout. But they would not remotely have been adequate to motivate me much beyond 19th January 2001. To explore the obstacles, without which the unexpected motivation will make little sense, we need another section.

Here are two people who caused me quite a bit of trouble as host, more trouble than expected even, yet the hassle factor was of the same order of magnitude as expected.

• John Passaniti was passionate about his gay lifestyle and had a very aggressive approach to editing Why, especially in interpretation of Leviticus. But we knew John from Wiki. It wasn't a big problem.

• Kathy Bracy complained far too much about hosting decisions but again this was in line with Keith and my expectations, based on Wiki experience.

I raise these two examples not for themselves but because, even in our first eight weeks, one very old business friend of mine, Dave Steffe started to criticise me openly and trenchantly on Why when I tried to deal with these two other folk. Now that was a ghastly surprise of the first order. For I got the strong impression that Dave, who I'd introduced to Wiki not long before, was "hooked" on Why but that this condition was going to completely wreck his and my relationship. That I had never even dreamed would be a possible result of agreeing to be the host. My fears were not groundless. It looks as if we will never talk again. That is a tragedy that makes me weep every time I think about it.

But even that wasn't the worst surprise.

I don't have time to extrapolate. But look at how it all started on Wiki over three years ago, in that brilliant first edit still preserved in Open Theism Presuppositions. How could this awesome person gradually mutate into "Frick", the pedantic yet boringly and ultimately spookily persistent mentioner of the imminent death of the host of Why in Hidden Agenda, the one who never once apologised, never admitted to even one error of judgment in what they had done here, never owned up that they intended never in any sense to submit to Real Names Please or Real People Please in either community but to demand all the rights of those that had?

I simply ask the question. There is a genuine challenge in trying to account for the Full Strangeness Of Vicki. I too was totally fooled until the day mentioned. But, looking at the total picture, why such intense undercover efforts? And to achieve what exactly? I am determinedly Realistic About Not Knowing, I Don't Know/Don't Care about you.

I only made the connection gradually, in retrospect, over two years or more. But eight days after I knew that I knew the worst - and the shock of what I knew I was in for was palpable - I had another very disturbing experience. But of a totally different kind. It was so unnerving I was only able to begin to try to tell the story two months later, in Four Way Synchronicity.

What is quite clear to me now is that I needed something this strange, hard though it was to decipher, implying just perhaps that the work on Why and what became our Hypothesis Of Christian Origins had a much greater significance and purpose than I could have dreamt, at least to the god of the poor, otherwise known as the God And Father Of Jesus. What was being put up in Sketch Form from heaven was way too big for me, and still is. But somehow I took the message that I was to struggle on - has there ever been such a thing as a divine KBO? I am amazed what has been made possible since. And there's no Ingratitude Risk in this case. -- Richard Drake

The most crucial milestones, as I revisit the story, were my Closing Comments in Hidden Agenda in June 2001, when I spoke of that passionate commitment from teenage years, and the little noticed Why Rockefeller Recruited Roll and its sequel in February 2002. The first being a wild determination that rose up in me, to fight whatever and whomever, and the second much wilder, bold alliteration that came so strongly, as if from right outside my own feeble determination, as I lay awake one Saturday night. Most important of all was the understanding that followed around three days later. It was as if a wonderfully complete and calm Document Mode answer was given to my own question, in the form of a two-by-two matrix. (Those who think it impossible that any god could speak in such terms can presumably be much relieved not to have to consider that possibility.) The page Merit, Madness, Mercy Or Manipulation was to be the place the two dimensions became four logical options in serial text. No doubt it will happen, in due time. But just as the calm justice of the dispassionate analysis astounded me, a passionate argument arose from the neatness, as if to explain the whole of my adult life. "Your job is to move all that are willing into the Quadrant Of Mercy. Learn and practise what this means: I desire mercy, not sacrifice. The Son Of Man came to seek and save the lost, even those guilty of the worst manipulation, as well as their countless, wounded victims. My sacrifice means that all streams run into the Quadrant Of Mercy. That is the sole purpose of any study, any spiritual warfare, any sacrifice. That is Why Jesus Recruited Richard."