Well put, Jim. It's nice to see someone else recognizes that my shirt is green, after all.
livestodive, you're not a stroke. A stroke is one who knows better, but does worse. If you're still learning, you can't be a stroke, by definition. We all have to start somewhere.
I will also add that I am the "serious technical diver" that said recreational diving isn't dangerous. Please let me clarify that: it's a matter of degree. If you're breathing compressed gas underwater, you're certainly in more danger than you are sitting in your armchair watching the boob tube. On the other hand, the risks in rec diving are as minimal as diving risks come. The risks become exponentially greater when you add, for example, a decompression obligation or overhead. Those with experience diving in these extremely risky situations get a little fast and loose with the term 'risk' after a while.
It's tough to quantify risks in this game, but here's my "gut feeling:"
Risk: Activity
1: Sitting in the armchair. A reference risk.
4: Diving recreationally, with some modest experience.
10: Driving a car.
500: Deco diving, with modest experience.
5,000: Diving in an overhead.
If you wonder why overhead diving is, IMO, ten times more risky than deco diving, remember that you can survive the bends -- but you can't survive drowning.
I don't have any hard statistics at hand to accurately quantify the risks, but I feel you're at least 5,000 times more likely to die cave diving than sitting in your armchair. If you get accustomed to dealing with that kind of risk, it becomes automatic to start considering armchair-sitting and rec-diving to be, by comparison, basically equivalent risks -- hence my statement that rec diving is "not dangerous."
I'll put quotes around it next time.
- Warren