@JackDouglas The point is that there are powerful voices on the Religious Right who, time and time again, tell blatant, outright, utter lies. And get away with it.
Tony Perkins is a liar. Bryan Fischer is a liar. And I don't mean that they've had one or two misstatements. I mean that their entire message is shot through with lies. They have no regard whatsoever for truth or decency. And they get away with it. They are respected voices. They write columns for major media. They are invited onto CNN panels and treated as legitimate contributers to the debate.
NOM lies. Every single ad that NOM has put out attacking gay people has been based thorougly and absolutely on lies.
(And that's every ad that NOM has put out. They talk about "defending marriage", but all NOM ever does is attack gay people (and perhaps sometimes trans people).)
And they get away with it. People donate money to them, under the misunderstanding that they're a legitimate group.
The ADF lies. They call themselevs the "Alliance Defending Freedom", and claim to be a lobby group in support of religious liberty. In fact, their actual goal is to force everyone else to live by the rules of Christian morality.
The chutzpah with with conservative Christians lie is almost impressive. I strongly supect there's something very interesting culturally going on there. The leaders are largely self-appointed, but their authority is absolute. Anyone with the right "stance" cannot be questioned. And as long as your "stance" on the Big Four is right, anything else is unimportant.
@swasheck And most of the Christian lies are slander. Slander against me and mine. I'd prefer to see them held accountable here and now.
i'm saying that you expressed profound disgust against JE's "schadenfreude" and people delighting in their "good fortune" and in the punishment of others. you just expressed a desire to see that happen immediately
I won't pretend I've read the entirety of the convo - but I'll say that sometimes discussions get out of hand and it's the place of a moderator to put them to a rest.
even if the moderator is one of the parties in a discussion. At some point, you've got to agree to disagree.
The chutzpah with with conservative Christians lie is almost impressive. I strongly supect there's something very interesting culturally going on there. The leaders are largely self-appointed, but their authority is absolute. Anyone with the right "stance" cannot be questioned. And as long as your "stance" on the Big Four is right, anything else is unimportant.
@TRiG I'm personally frustrated that we lost the thread on the important issue facing our site. If I wanted to get a bunch of links attacking conservative Christians, I would have visited the Eschewmenical Blog Room. ;-)
@JonEricson The conversation I was having was focussed mainly on the morality of Calvinism, and the role of logic/sympathy/whatever in forming moral principles. And then we somehow got onto a discussion of 5,000 eyewitnesses, and I asserted that I didn't see that as much evidence of anything because bigger lies still exist today, in our age of mass media.
I was asked for examples, and I provided some. shrug
@swasheck What I'd like to talk about is how we might keep our site welcoming to all view points, without losing quality. (And related issues like whether voting will lift the cream to the surface and when we should edit.)
You specifically asked me for examples of Christians lying (or, specifically, for respected, well-known voices on the Religious Right telling outright lies and nonetheless remaining respected). I provided some. You then made some strange comments saying they didn't count as lies for some strange reason and then started acting strange.
@JonEricson Put another way, each answer has up to 1 up-vote and up to 1 down-vote. There's no consensus except from the "meh" crowd who haven't voted.
If I may try to salvage one useful thing from the preceeding hour, though, I suggest that what happened in this room is a natural outcome of doctrinal clashes and this is what we invite if we don't figure out what our boundaries are with respect to that.
@swasheck It is not here. But it will happen in comments on the main site (until they get deleted and people get upset about that). It's already happened; the most serious case I rememeber was relatively mild, but that's because it was a new user (who went away) and we're young.
@JonEricson That wasn't meant to be a slam. It's like when the people come by your door with a petition for some minor-to-you thing that you never thought much about and it's easier to just say "no thanks" and close the door.
@Soldarnal I haven't voted one way or the other on his answer. I would want us to be more free in editing each other. Edits on other sites that change my tone or even bits of my meaning have been extremely helpful. And I can rollback if they don't work out.
@MonicaCellio again - i think that it's hard for people to feel OK with separating the academic endeavor from a "higher" purpose when it comes to biblical hermeneutics. they want to know that there's reason for doing what they're doing and feel as though they're dishonoring God if there is no doctrinal/theological injection.
Ok, I see your point -- you're talking about the heat of the back-and-forth. I'm talking a little about that but mostly about the long doctrinal discussion in a hermeneutics chat room. Doesn't mean we can't have them, but on main?
@swasheck I agree it's hard, but if we don't try to do it, we're just talking past each other with our own opinions, and that's not what this site should be about IMO. There are plenty of places on the net to argue theology already.
Thank you for this answer. One question: how do you see the inevitable disagreement playing out? "From a Jewish perspective Isaiah 53 is not talking about Jesus." No Isaiah is not talking about Jesus. When anyone makes a doctrinal answer like this, those who disagree have to either ignore it or respond. Responding isn't going to persuade anyone, but letting it stand leads to broken windows. How can we provide a good environment for everybody? (And no, I don't want you to resign.) — Monica CellioSep 28 '12 at 12:53
"Opinion isn’t all bad, so long as it’s backed up with something other than “because I’m an expert”, or “because I said so”, or “just because”. Use your specific experiences to back up your opinions, as above, or point to some research you’ve done on the web or elsewhere that provides evidence to support your claims. We like you. We want to believe you. But like wikipedia itself, {{citation needed}}. And good subjective questions make this clear from the outset: back it up!"
@Soldarnal I haven't read any recently, but he's often taken a doctrinal stance with respect to the documentary hypothesis, so at least in that regard yes. It's hard to disentangle from the general "because I say so" tone of his posts, though.
@MonicaCellio this is a fun one. i really like the whole Lucifer thing in Isaiah 14. the role of hermeneutics is to establish that, in context, Isaiah is speaking of Nebuchadnezzar and establish the historical rationale for this.
@JackDouglas I think it must be possible, and perhaps should be done in collaboration with some other sites. SE came up with good guidelines for subjective questions and reached into answers some; I think we can jump off from there.
Isaiah 6-8 ... same thing. The role of hermeneutics is to establish Isaiah and Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz as the immediate referents. The role of theology is to sort out the inherent meaning of it all ... in both the near and far perspectives.
@JonEricson Agreed, the reason I'm curious is that his framework obviously shapes how he reads the text. He's reading the text with a Doc Hypothesis Hermeneutic trying to find the places that confirm his hypothesis
@Soldarnal I think DH is a valid hermeneutic that is generally badly applied by Ron. Many of his answers use bombastic language and it's hard to disentangle that. :-(
@MonicaCellio He often says the same thing - that his posts are probably hard to follow because he doesn't want them to be any lengthier than they already are
@MonicaCellio Your statement that "we're just talking past each other with our own opinions" is interesting as it's a major problem in literary philosophy.
If we're all just parts of various interpretive communities who all read the text in our own way, how can we communicate with each other?
It's generally recognized that there is no way to get "above the text" anymore - no way to stand outside it essentially doctrinally-agnostic.
But this has led to a whole host of other problems in our epistemologies like the one you bring up
@MonicaCellio A pragmatic solution (that I'm working up on meta) is to shoot for a "family resemblance" to the sort of commentaries we want to emulate.
Every statement is a POV statement.
Whether we are talking about answers on this site or language in general, all statements are qualified by the context of the point of view of the person expressing themselves. Even a statement as simple as "A cord of three strands is not quickly broken," may ...
I think answers that contain nothing but unqualified opinions are easy to deal with. The real problem is those that move back and forth without drawing lines. (And I use literal lines to solve that problem in my answers.)
For me, the bigger issue is attracting more expert opinions. The problem I see with a lot of the blight we get isn't so much that it is doctrinal, as the answers are poorly argued.
One thing this entire conversation has helped me understand is the value of down votes. I think sometimes we're actually trying too hard to accomodate people who really aren't suited to answering questions - no doubt because we all want to see this site grow.
@Soldarnal I think you're right. We're small and we're so afraid of chsing people away that we don't use two of the three tools available (edits, downvotes, comments) to try to improve their answers and welcome them in. We leave comments, which is good, but then when they don't come back and address them we don't follow up. I know how off-putting a downvote can be, but it is a tool in the box and especially if editing isn't agreeable, it's one we need to use more.
Lately, I've seen some users (who shall remain nameless) upvote answers by new users simply as a 'traditional welcoming gift'. An upvote is not the traditional welcoming gift (it's usually a nice comment). If a post by a new user is good and worthy, by all means, upvote it. If it's a so-so post o...
Since the beginning of mi.yodeya 1.0, I've made it my practice to welcome new users. I'd like to make it clear that while I'm happy to continue doing this whenever I get the opportunity, anyone else who wants to is more than welcome to also do it (as some have).
Here's the pattern I usually foll...
You said the following: *
about "the first day of the week". I heard something like it could
even be something like "the first week of each seven weeks" or so. Is
it true? Can anyone, please, comment on it here?
*
RE: The phrase directly translated is "one, of the Sabbaths." There are ...
I disagree with the conclusion, but the answer is of the type we want to encourage.
@JonEricson I've read it now. I don't agree with the conclusion (and would prefer that the final clause be tweaked), but it's well-argued. (I don't think the count for the crop was as variable as she says it was, and am pretty sure that at that time the 50-day count was already codified as starting the day after Pesach.)
Every statement is a POV statement.
Whether we are talking about answers on this site or language in general, all statements are qualified by the context of the point of view of the person expressing themselves. Even a statement as simple as "A cord of three strands is not quickly broken," may ...
You said the following: *
about "the first day of the week". I heard something like it could
even be something like "the first week of each seven weeks" or so. Is
it true? Can anyone, please, comment on it here?
*
RE: The phrase directly translated is "one, of the Sabbaths." There are ...
