@curiousdannii The question sucks, but it would make an even worse question on History. It would get bounced there for asking about Luther's theological justification for not doing something. It could really have used an edit to be either historical OR theological, but the current form is a half baked half breed that I couldn't justify kicking over somewhere else.

I almost closed it outright, but we've been pretty lenient on history questions in general and they haven't been much of a problem so I gave it a pass.

@curiousdannii I'm not suggesting railroading people into tacking on a theological scope. We have way too much of that already. But in most cases those "unscoped exegesis" questions really aren't in any decent shape for BH either. They would need editing to be decent questions there, if nothing else because the writing assumes a backdrop of Christianity. They also frequently wander from text to text with no regard for context. Both of those faults make them poorly suited for BH.

One cardinal rule of SE migrations is "Don't migrate crap". A lot of the questions that get flagged for migration are just not suited for any site — they could be fixed up for either site but until somebody does that I don't like to see pushing jjunk back and forth.

I don't think it will help BH to have a bunch of half thought out exegesis questions where the OP was actually hoping to kick of a discussion or get Christian counseling.

@Caleb You're the one seeing the flags, not me, but the only ones I've flagged (or heard other people talk about migrating) have not been ones that are after discussion or pastoral care/counselling

Maybe the frustration of the mods is a different frustration from regular users

@curiousdannii Ya sorry my gripe really isn't with your flags nearly as much as some others. You at least are active on BH and have some idea what works there which is more than I can say for all the flags we've gotten recently. We got whole rashes of bogus ones including too old to migrate, long closed, or otherwise poor quality ones that were just kicking bags and needed to be closed / deleted not migrated.

@curiousdannii Yes. I think the problem is the group of questions which actually don't fit EITHER site well: they are unscoped exegesis but the authors expectations are not a bunch of technical hermeneutical analysis, they want discussion about the truest application in Christianity. Those are hard because they don't fit either site well. Slapping "according to X" on them makes them pedantic on C.SE and they really have little substance to chew on for BH.SE.

@curiousdannii Lots of reasons, #1 being it's kind of subverting the system to say an entire class of questions need to be flagged and handled by moderators (i.e. exception handlers).

If StackOverflow were programmed in Python, I wouldn't have a problem with it.

#2 being, I don't want to touch these flags with Caleb co-moderating (and ex-officio-moderator-in-chiefing) and having lots of flags that I don't want to handle doesn't make me happy.

#3 as a Catholic, I care about denominational scoping, I see the Church as the only interpreter of Sacred Scripture, so I think it's always necessary

@PeterTurner That changes the nature of these questions from "how is this passage to be understood?" to "where can I find the official Catholic interpretation?" ie, a reference request. I don't think such questions should be banned, but they are in general low quality

@curiousdannii I would say, rather, that the questions would be, "What is the official Catholic interpretation?"

What Lee said.

@LeeWoofenden Such a question would only be a good question if you can demonstrate that there is doubt about what the official interpretation is, ie, by showing two different catholic commentaries

Otherwise, as I said before, just go look up the authorised commentaries