Refocusing Christianity.SE

@MasonWheeler agreed, but lets remember that this site is not for seekers...its not going to be an effective ministry tool for anyone.

Also lets go ahead and say right now that no policy decision can or will come out of this dicussion, Only a meta post proposing this.

@Richard I think our target audience should be theologians, professors, and pastors.

We had one of the strongest beta sites around, until Caleb came up with that ridiculous "scope" idea and Richard started enforcing it left, right and center. And now the site is dying.

@MasonWheeler nah, better to get the bugs out early, before people are accustomed to being able to do whatever they want. Programmers struggled for months to reform users and its only recently taken...

I think our guideline wording is fine but people are assuming that it says/requires more than it does. Note that our guidelines require "referencing a doctrine". In the example I gave, I "referenced" a doctrine by name but didn't actually cite any external material in links, quotes or footnotes. I only used my knowledge of it as an "expert" to write an answer that was inherently falsifiable because I was speaking about something that you could look up because it cited the doctrinal position.

@Richard once we clean up a bit we should shift our focus from that and onto promotion

I would be much quicker to close not-constructive questions where the scope is too broad and any answers that come in before the closer are likely to be wasted efforts.

@Richard Having a look ... I'm going to edit out some of the moderator language in favor of noting that the community can do this work. (edit, review, suggest, re-open, etc). Of course a moderator can step in and short circuit the process but I don't think we should encourage people assuming only a moderator can get something re-opened.

@Waggers This isn't a place to do progressive theology and develop a new faith, only answer questions about the orthodox version of it, just like Judaism.SE is for Jews. If your theological viewpoint says that Christianity should be something other than it is, this isn't the place to vent or hash out those views. That's just not a QnA format thing anyway.

@Waggers I'm not opposed to new thinking and teaching in general. Provided that it is stands up to scrutiny. However, this isn't the place to formulate or propogate those teachings. We should try to stick to established stuf

Besides, if we really had strayed so far off the path that God intended for us I'm not sure he'd be using StackExchange as his principle medium for telling us that

@Caleb right, and lets not forget we are supposed to be an expert site, expert sites should use expert terminology (correctly with some agreed upon definition obviously)

Personally I look at the top-voted questions to see the example of what a great question should be... that's something I'm not seeing here

If someone is looking for a "survey of beliefs" I don't know if this is the site for them. They run into list questions where everyone is right.

@Flimzy I think that it's really shed light on C.SE. It's really illuminated what high quality answers look like in relation to religious questions.

@Caleb Yeah, I have to take off too. WE can work on it tomorrow, I say.

"Should Christians do X" is probably always too broad.

It's more of a low-quality filter than it is scope change.

So, exegetical questions must have biblical support; doctrinal questions must have doctrinal or exegetical support; non-doctrinal questions must have external references.

Few Christian doctrines are actually definable in a vacuum anyway, they are almost all responses to some other doctrine. Even the wording of the early creeds was often to counter heresy.

@Caleb I totally agree that it's not Protestantism.SE, but we have a major portion of our community that believes in the priesthood of all believers. That means that biblical support and personal revelation are just as valid as historical/traditional/doctrinal ones.

It turns the scope of this site into a site about doctrine.

Note that "unsubstantiated" is different than "unidentified/unaffiliated".

That's what closing is for anyways ... a temporary zone on the way to deletion where people can step in to turn them around.

whatever we do, we need to do it soon. Its a lot easier to legislate policy at 1k questions than at 2,3 or 4

@Caleb vetting questions would be a good start. Our answers are often ok if the question is good, but garbage questions attract garbage answers