I hesitated to post this rant, as I'm far from a mathematician by training, and I'm certain to expose my ignorance by commenting further. That said, it touches

I hesitated to post this rant, as I'm far from a mathematician by training, and I'm certain to expose my ignorance by commenting further. That said, it touches on some of the stuff that bothered me about maths around the time I stopped seriously engaging it. That is, axioms as assumptions, and playing games with what appear to be arbitrary symbols (e.g. infinite sets). For me, this seems to stray from a sort of pure, meaningful mathematics I was initially attracted to, and those objections were never met with anything but bluster and appeals to authority.