My edition of the New World Translation is the 1983 edition. It was made in the same year as me (also the same year as the first Discworld book). There's now a 2013 edition. Part of me wants it. I'd like to see it, to explore what they've changed, to read the new appendices. I'm curious.

On the other hand, if I ask my parents for a Bible they'll get entirely the wrong idea.

I wonder where else I could source one.

I'd like to explain my last flag rejection @gonequiet. While I am glad you and others are making a concerted effort to clean things up, I'm also concerned that it is starting to feel in some ways like a witch hunt. The flag activity on this answer is a case in point.

That is the third time you've raised a custom flag on it. All three times you've given the same reason, something that would generally be more useful as a comment to to the OP. I'm not going to argue that this is a great answer, but it's hardly one of the more erroneous ones of his either. It actually manages to connect the dots so you can see how the interpretation got started.

It might be wrong. It might not be exactly what the op was looking for. It might not be very useful. But NONE of those are reasons to raise a flag and an the moment I can't see any reason to take moderator action. (Feel free to make a case on meta if you think I'm not handling things correctly as a mod).

In the mean time I think you should have DV'ed and moved on. And the next time you see your own downvote on something don't waste your time even reading it again.

Clarification since based on your flags I think you are conflating two different problems:

It (for whatever reason) the answer ends up not addressing the question, that is NAA material and I'm happy to help remove it. If, however, it is a case of miss-applied hermeneutics that just makes the answer wrong, which is quite different from being NAA. Wrong answers can be downvoted if you see fit but they are not cause for a moderator delete or even a flag.

@Caleb I was just coming here to raise this with you. Yes, I have flagged it three times; I did not remember the previous two (the first was from February!) and the interface doesn't tell me. Twice now you've missed the comment from the OP saying that this does not answer his question. What exactly would you consider evidence of NAA if not that???

@Caleb read the broader context. We were talking about cases where people try to shoe-horn their hermeneutic into places where it doesn't fit just so they can sermonize on this site. BH isn't a pulpit and if an "answer" doesn't serve to answer the question, it should be removed. One way that happens is through this approach. That doesn't mean it's 1:1, but it's something to look out for. I wasn't talking about using a valid herm. incorrectly (which gets a DV).

Oh, and @Caleb, there's no witch hunt. A witch hunt would be most efficiently conducted by starting at the witches' profiles and walking their content. That's not what's happening.

There are (at this point) three things that cause me to look at a question: it's on the front page, I participated in it (as you know I'm walking my answers now), or someone brings it to my attention. When I look at a question I tend to look at all the answers.

Sometimes I see stuff I missed before; sometimes I see things that I can now fix now (per meta) that I couldn't before; sometimes I see stuff that Jack acted unilaterally on and now that there's another mod and more trusted users it's worth raising issues again.

@Caleb by the way, I don't have the tools to confirm, but I strongly suspect that if you check deleted comments you'll find that I did comment to the OP.

There are no deleted comments at all on that post. And I didn't miss the extent comment from Jon. More importantly I also saw the reply which helps a little. My point still stands. Even the OP saying it isn't quite the answer they were looking for doesn't make it mod hammer material. DV serves the purpose of indicating the community judges it a less useful answer than the others and the overall negative score says it might even be outright wrong. No mod action required on those grounds.

Also I didn't say it was a witch hunt or that anybody was profile surfing. I said it was starting to feel like one. Are you willing to consider how your actions sometimes come across to people with a different perspective?

And although I saw the related chat after I'd done flag handling I stand by my point that there is a distinction between 'wrong' and 'not an answer' that is making some of your flags invalid. Do you see the distinction I'm trying to point out?

@Caleb yes, you said it felt like one and I responded to that. I'm not saying you said it was one; I just explained what's happening. I'm certainly willing to consider how my actions come across when taken in context, which it seemed to me you did not do.

@Caleb from the site-direction post: "But posts that do not comply with this and cannot be edited to comply will be deleted." (This = "show your work".) Under that guideline answers that consist only of unsupported claims are not answers as defined on this site.

And so, under that guideline, my declined flag on the Bob post shouldn't have been declined.

@MonicaCellio hmm, this is where we disagree. There is room for bad and wrong answers on SE, we just need to DV them

if it makes no attempt at answering the question, by all means get rid of it

but if it tries, albeit poorly, it shouldn't be deleted

that starts looking more like censorship and less like quality improvement / cleanup

@Dan merely bad+wrong gets downvoted. But utter noise should get removed. People espousing opinions with no support whatsoever is noise. That's not censorship; that's saying "get your own blog for that and stop trying to piggyback on Stack Exchange's success and good name".

Is it this answer being discussed?

For example, this is wrong and bad, but it's also completely unsupported and doesn't answer the question. NAA was denied.

@JackDouglas that's one of them. That's the one Caleb was talking about in explaining his declined flags. There's also a broader conversation about showing work and NAAness.

@MonicaCellio I'm broadly behind the efforts you are making, but for me this answer just makes sense. I'd put it as one of Mike's best and most interesting answers (especially since Caleb's edit, which I wish Mike had done himself). It had my upvote and I'd be sad to see it go.

Note that Caleb's edit came after the flag.

I wonder if it could use an edit, inserting some of the relevant verses from Leviticus

because I think reading that part of Leviticus last week is a good part of the reason why I understand the answer

@MonicaCellio noted

It's always been hard to persuade Mike to edit in his comments

but if it is something we can do I'm all for it

It would also have to justify the change from a physical condition to a metaphorical one, that commerce is metaphorically tzara'at ("leprosy"), and that one can go and make a determination on his own (the law in Lev. is clear that they bring it to the priest -- no vigilante inspections). For starters.

I'm not sure that would improve the answer.

@JackDouglas Mike has consistently refused to edit his posts to update them. If others want to then feel free, but I think there is a limit to how much work it's appropriate to do on behalf of a stubborn and rebellious child who knows better and yet does not follow the rules.

physical->metaphorical is a given I think for Tanakh as well as NT. Unless you'd argue that the physical acts of purification in the law don't have a spiritual application?

@JackDouglas well, it probably highlights many flaws in the answer (as I said, it's wrong), but if he holds this belief he should support it and show why it's apporpriate. If he can transform "wrong" to "I see your point but we disagree", win.

@JackDouglas I'm saying that the Lev. passages about tzara'at are all about the physical, same as the laws of korbanot are about physical animals on a physical altar. Interpretation has to start from there.

@MonicaCellio I see that argument, but I don't buy it: this post broadly shows it's work which is enough. If one doesn't like it by all means one should DV (or improve)

there is no case for NAA IMO

@MonicaCellio If they are all about the physical, why does the diseased incur the state of ritual uncleanness?

@JackDouglas so @Jon's comment that it doesn't answer his question is wrong?

@MonicaCellio It answers "How should we understand the “Cleansing of the Temple”?"

perhaps the question title is wrong idk

@JackDouglas physical conditions convey tumah all the time -- tzara'at, nocturnal emissions, contact with corposes. I'm not saying it's only physical -- metaphor is possible -- but you can't just claim metaphor without actually doing some work from the original context. But I don't know if I can explain this to you.

OK, you don't need to exactly

I don't think he needs to spell it out because it isn't central to his argument

@JackDouglas now that you mention it, there does seem to be a disconnect between the title and body.

beyond the implicit fact that he is making the jump from physical->spiritual (that is obvious)

@JackDouglas what? His whole argument is "Jesus was cleaning up tzara'at" (never mind that he didn't have the authority, wasn't following the Lev process, etc).

He's claiming the temple had spiritual leprosy and needed to be knocked down - but he's just asserting it, not proving it.

@MonicaCellio is that offensive to you?

@JackDouglas offensive? I'm not sure. It's certainly completely wrong. It's up there with original sin and Jesus as the paschal lamb and other things I consider to be doctrinal nonsense (to say the least).

do you expect other contributors to share your doctrinal convictions?

I don't expect any to do so, Christian or otherwise and I try not to judge answer on whether they do or not

it's an interesting connection to make that provokes thought: that's why it got my up-vote, not because I think it is 'right'

@JackDouglas of course not. I expect doctrinal convictions to be irrelevant in answering -- and therefore they cannot be the foundation of answers.

don't you assume that Jesus is not the paschal lamb when you answer?

@JackDouglas assume (know), yes, but if it's part of my argument I show why.

Just asserting it would harm the site - doesn't matter if that behavior comes from me or Mike Bull or rhetorician or whomever. This isn't a forum, pulpit, or social club. We shouldn't care what people's beliefs and opinions are.

@MonicaCellio I care very much

@MonicaCellio I don't think we can avoid people's beliefs and opinions, even 'neutrality' is a defined set of beliefs and opinions

I also care that we don't define scope or judge answers using words like 'belief' or even 'opinion'

@JackDouglas As a user interacting with other users you may care quite a bit about what makes people tick. But that shouldn't affect the status of answers.

I do think we can ask they be asserted as opinions and beliefs, not as absolute truths

@MonicaCellio not at all, it is what I care about in answers

@JackDouglas I am not going to get sucked into that discussion with you again.

@Dan qualifying them as opinions is fine.

@MonicaCellio then consider not using those words in this context?

@JackDouglas if I need to know somebody's religious background to properly understand his answer to a text question on a non-religious site, something has failed.

@MonicaCellio at the extreme end I agree with you

@JackDouglas no. They are accurate. If you have a problem with them, propose other language -- how about some "do this" instead of all the "don't do this"?

not with something in the middle like this

@MonicaCellio how can they be 'accurate' when no two people can even agree what they mean?

"in the middle like this" -- what's "this"? BH?

@MonicaCellio the grey area between "shows no work" and "joins all the dots brilliantly"

This is clearly not productive. You and I are not communicating and I've invested more than enough time trying to fix that without seeing results. Part of the reason I hang out in the other room is to have a buffer around you. Leaving now.

fwiw: I think it is possible to "join all the dots brilliantly", but not to "join all the dots perfectly". We'd run out of words if we could not assume some prior knowledge. Assuming a modicum of familiarity with all the texts seems reasonable to me.

@JackDouglas I see some of both sides here

So do I

But I don't believe Monica does :|

@JackDouglas I think we agree that there is no such thing as 'neutrality,' which Monica refuses to accept, seeing it more as a semantic argument rather than a real one

And I also think that we shouldn't delete a bunch of bad answers if they so much as attempt to answer the question

if they fail or do it poorly/wrongly, by all means DV

but I'm not a big fan of deletion

but I agree with Monica that religious assertions of truth should not be central to one's argument

to include hermeneutic methods that require this

not all hermeneutics are good fits here

@Dan There are some answers I think should be deleted: I think I'm somewhere in between Monica and you on this, but not just because they assume that Jesus in some sense fulfills the law, perhaps you and I see that differently, but that is a very specific question that could be taken to meta.

specifically those that are not reproducible and that have religious claims as vital components of interpretation

@Dan reproducible?

@JackDouglas if you can't teach me your hermeneutic in a logical fashion so that I can apply it and draw the same conclusions as you, it's not reproducible

@Dan to you

and thus it is a purely subjective opinion disguised as a hermeneutic

well, I highly doubt Mike or Bob's hermeneutic's fall into that category. They both have integrity imo

They still might not fit here, but it is not because they don't have a system

it is because it is too alien to the rest of us here

it's sort of like the field of chiropractics. Does it work for many people? yes. Is it reproducible? No. Put 10 chiropractors in a room and ask them to identify spinal subluxations on the same patient, and you'll get 10 different sets of results

the fundamental premise of chiropractics is that spinal subluxations cause disease/energy imbalance/lack of wellness, but they don't define it so that others can objectively come to the same diagnoses

so what is the litmus test? it has to be something to do with community acceptance, not making a truth claim about their hermeneutics being "purely subjective opinion disguised as a hermeneutic"

@JackDouglas that's what I've asked here

I'm open to inpuit

@Caleb asked me to rework it and ask it on main

I'm not sure how to

@Dan wow, I totally misread that meta Q

I want it on meta

> For the sake of simplicity, answers should refer to varying hermeneutic approaches as either 'good' or 'bad'

I read that as a statement about what answers on 'main' should do

:S

@JackDouglas no no

if the Q is neutral I'd like to upvote, not downvote

and I don't think that a hermeneutic is necessarily bad everywhere, I just meant for here

I didn't want to ask people to write 'not a good fit here' and 'good here'

yeah, 'good fit', 'bad fit' might be better advised than 'good', 'bad'

so I just went with simple terms

@JackDouglas changed

I am pretty sure people don't read the post, they just DV based on the title

I even wrote in bold font:

It is not meant to declare any hermeneutics as off topic / disallowed, merely to show that some may not be received as well as those that do follow these guidelines.

I read it when I DV's, just a bit too fast. I think my impression of the title coloured my interpretation of the rest of the Q

It's a subject I've been thinking about for a long time and is close to my heart

I'll certainly answer, but possible not for a week or two, is that OK?

taking Bob as an example, I think his herm just doesn't fit here, as much as I'd like it to.

@JackDouglas absolutely

sorry for delay, at work

a lot of time spent waiting on machines these days

I need more machines

haha

@JackDouglas I would generally agree

but my goal wasn't to generate a list of specific hermeneutics that are good fit/bad fit (although examples don't hurt), but to develop some helpful guidelines that folks can follow

i.e. sometime your hermeneutic is welcome but not how you're used to communicating it

@JackDouglas I begin vacation after work today (tentatively)

unless various parts for certain devices ship sooner, then I will come in and repair those devices and conduct exams, but otherwise I'm on vacation haha

@Dan I read every word twice before voting. Careful with the assumptions you make about votes.

@Caleb I didn't mean you, but point taken

@MonicaCellio True. Also note that the edit only moved his own explanation about how the answer fit into the bigger picture word for word from his comment.

@Caleb I've been good for making poor generalizations like that as of late, my apologies

@Dan I'm probably going to take my own suggestion on that one and try to work up some questions for main that take off on the idea.

@Caleb thanks

@Dan Apology accepted. Truth be told I'm not very easily offended so don't worry to much on my account .... my reason for pointing that out is how often I see such assumptions/generalizations leading to ongoing missunderstandings.

@Caleb it's easy to jump on bandwagons

I just want to see the site do well

@Dan I believe that. As do I.

@Caleb :P

hey y'all ... everyone still fighting about site policy?

@swasheck yup

@swasheck how's your holiday prep going?

le sigh. i suppose like most good things, sometimes you have to wade through sewage to find the treasure. i just dont have the stomach for it so i suppose i'll answer again, at some point, when i dont have to worry about someone's personal theology invading it to the point that it becomes nonsensical.

@swasheck I think I see a light away off down the tunnel :)

@Dan it's going well. i like this time of year.

@swasheck trying to work on that

@swasheck very good

@Caleb my perspective has always been that i'm totally fine with theology and overabundance of doctrine overriding BH scholarship ... on christianity.se (there is such a thing as theological scholarship)

I start vacation after work today (tentatively)

@Dan howso?

@Dan excellent. what sort of plans do you have?

@swasheck we even created another room to try to keep most site-moderation-related stuff out of this room that doesn't require chatting with the big mods

figured save only the important stuff the community needs big mod assistance with for here

that way this room is more free to have fun and talk about things like holiday plans

interesting

@swasheck mostly to do as little as possible, unless I get a bug up my butt and decide to code an idea I've had for awhile

which may happen, as I would find it fun

and it would be a good learning exercise in creating APIs using Django

:)

@Dan ugh. not Django

@swasheck haha not a fan?

@Dan prefer Flask but i'm also not an ORM guy (being a DBA and seeing the crappy SQL that they tend to generate)

and if you're just going to create an API then i'd stay as minimal as possible ... some minimal framework that's pypy-compatible and run it on nginx/uwsgi

which now outperforms tornado ... significantly

but ... if you're going to be writing something and learning something ... why not Go?? :) it's awesome

@swasheck You sound like Baggins sending Gandalf off to somewhere where adventure might be welcomed.

@swasheck not having to create my own CRUD screens/templates is a must

> "Good morning!" he said at last. "We don't want any adventures here, thank you! You might try over The Hill or across The Water." By this he meant that the conversation was at an end.

I want to design models and have all the CRUD screens automatically generated

@swasheck you know, I have considered Go

I need to build a heavy forms-based app

@Dan i dont even know what that means ( i mean ... i know CRUD but what are these "screens?")

@swasheck meaning i design a model and the framework can automagically generate screen for CRUD operations. I don't want to design the same screen four times

@Caleb haha

@Dan jmoiron.net/blog/golang-orms

so if I had a simple model Person with fields: Name, Age, FavoriteColor

@Caleb less "adventure" and more like "you're distracting from the focus"

@Dan ... ,LongWalksOnTheBeach

@swasheck exactly!

I want a screen to add a new person, edit/update an existing one, view/read existing one, and delete existing one

ChristianMingleTheDeuce.com

?

but I don't want to do all that work

@swasheck not even close to the actual fields I want, mind you :P

@swasheck (I wasn't trying to imply you were shunning something that we shouldn't be missing out on by the way, only being funny)

@Caleb like you, i am not easily offended so i thought nothing other than that you were being funny ... but i missed a good fellowship of the rings pop culture retort to you

:)

@Dan ain't nobody got time for that!

@swasheck now you've got me contemplating not using django again

haha

but... the... admin interface....

the good part is there will never be more than 1.4 million rows in any given table, and likely only half that at the most

at least with the current US population

and projected growth of targeted sub-population

nerd

@swasheck yup haha

@swasheck also, the community has reached more consensus on 'showing work' in questions and answers

and we have a lot of agreement on our site distinctives

so we are slowly making some headway

@Dan love the Indy reference

@swasheck that quote just fits so well

@Dan should be the site tagline

byline

or whatever it's called

that would be great

@swasheck random fact: I studied karate with the guy who was the caretaker of one of the crystal skulls the Indiana Jones movie was made about

after becoming caretaker of the skull, he gradually became more of a wackjob

he already was to some extent, he of course believed in the skull's mystical power, energy channels in the body, etc.

but it turns out his particular skull is somewhat fraudulent

I met Anna Mitchell-Hedges once before she passed away

and Bill Homann is now the caretaker

neat

that is who taught karate

@swasheck yeah, it was interesting

but I haven't seen Bill in a long time

@Caleb @JackDouglas either of you around?

@JackDouglas my ping didn't work so I went with this

I am trying to get in touch with one of you due to the pending tag description here: hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/2985

except I feel the way it is written isn't appropriate here

I'd go with something more along the lines of:

"A narrative in which a great flood is sent by a deity, or deities, to destroy civilization in an act of divine retribution. Such an account is described in Genesis and alluded to in other Biblical texts."

actually I went ahead and just killed the tag

it was newly created and not really needed