@MonicaCellio @Caleb @JonEricson this is a selfish comment, but it is pretty overwhelming coming into this discussion after it's become so involved. I think I know where I personally stand anyways, but what is the simplest and least time-involved way to get the main points of this debate?

@YEZ I don't know if it's a debate so much as a conflict of culture. To me, the beginning and end are spelled out here:

But a lot of things happened in the middle that I continue to find bewildering. So I'm not the best person to ask.

@Caleb I think so. Sorry.

@YEZ The Q&A (and their comments) Jon just linked to seem pretty informative to me. Viz, meta.judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/429. But I definitely have not followed the goings-on over there, so am not sure of the best source of all the info you may need/want (because I haven't read such a source myself). For that reason, too, I can't definitely warn you against using BH (and note that I just posted an answer there, myself, though it's only my second). [continued]

[continued] But (at that link I just pointed to) @MonicaCellio does "no longer recommend this site for Jews" and suggests "Jews considering participation there should evaluate the then-current state of the site and seek rabbinic guidance". [continued]

[continued] Incidentally, even before much of the history that led to that warning of hers, there was an older discussion about why Jews might not use BH much. I (and she and others) weighed in on that, and you can see answers there, if you want. But meta.judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/429 is more recent than that (except that one of MonicaCellio's answers there is late-dated. See timestamps).

@YEZ my answer to the meta post that Jon linked to provides a reasonable overview as of a couple months ago. I need to update it with some newer developments, including that "reduced participation" has become "stopped participating". Another place to get a summary (with links) for why BH is problematic for Jews is here:

@Jon is bewildered in part because he doesn't understand the theological issues involved -- for which I do not fault him or any other non-Jew in the least. It's particularly hard to explain to a Christian why his deeply-held belief is not only bad but idolatrous from our perspective, and why we can't just say "but that doesn't matter; let's study the bible together anyway".

In my experience, multi-religion text study can only work when no one's religion has a privileged position, and, sadly, that's not the case on BH. I wrote some about that on my blog recently. So long as answers are allowed to argue from faith-based assertions, no matter how offensive those assertions are, it's not neutral space.

@Jon @msh210 @Caleb @YEZ - ok, I updated the meta post with current info because of all the conversation today.

@MonicaCellio Well said.

@YEZ thanks. Does this address your question then? Have I un-confused you? (Sorry for the earlier confusion.)

@MonicaCellio I wasn't confused, just inundated with a backlog of information. It seemed (and partially still seems) like there was a much longer evolution of the issue than was clear from the conclusion.

@YEZ yeah, it took about two years to go from "interesting and useful" to "bad idea; get out". I tried to succinctly lay out the key issues in the user profile (which may be the only thing Googlers ever see, if they even see that after finding one of my posts), and our meta post now has a little more and can serve as a link target if this comes up again. There's lots more background but the goal is to not make people have to wade through it unless they really want to.

@Monica ^^^

@msh210 ditto

@Double AA same.

@SethJ I've closed it. Once it got enough downvotes to be booted off the front page I relaxed a bit, maybe too much. The user has previous constructive participation here and is active on other sites, so I thought he might revise the question to address its flaws, but we should have closed in the meantime. Now that it's closed and heavily downvoted it is eligible for delete votes from 10k users.

@SethJ I'm not fully convinced that the question wasn't asked in good faith. I do think that it comes from very basic misunderstandings about Judaism. And I do object to the asker's argumentative tone, especially in the title and in the comments (now deleted).