DCHindley

Apologies to Andrew Criddle, Earl Doherty and all those who post thoughtful posts, for omitting you all ("y'all") in my earlier examples of superior amateur criticism.

Andrew, I may not always agree with you, but everything you post here has been top notch, and you allways cite your sources. I can usually backwards engineer how you came by your opinions when you do state one. Thank you!

Earl, I was really impressed with the amount of research that went into your latest book. The endnotes were great. Of course, I don't quite agree with your "sublunar realm" idea as the basis from which Jesus was historicized by early Christians. Earl, don't take criticism so personally, and don't feel you have to refute everyone who snipes at you.

DCH

stephan huller

I've said that many times to Earl. He's not Moses the lawgiver. At best we're like Nietzsche's Zarathustra repenting from establishing 'thou shalts.' No book is going to 'all right.' No one has all the answers. We're all making our way in the darkness, some with more light than others.

sotto voce

Sabine Grant

Thank you for your feedback, Horatio. To add water to your well, the Terms of Use discourage obstruction from participation :

There are only 2 Forums on FRDB where we have a pesting system in place.The Political Discussions Forum where participation is open to members who have fewer than 35 active infraction points. If they reach 35 or above, the system automatically blocks them from posting in PD until their active infraction count returns to below 35.

The other being Support Fireside. Not based on active infraction points but on a member disregarding the Support Fireside Guidelines which prohibit any antagonistic or/and judgmental comments/communications targeting the OP. SF Moderators are then empowered to evaluate the situation and pest that member.(meaning the member is blocked from posting in SF).

Indeed, it would place added maintenance on BCH Moderators. It would also place them in the position to be judges of who can participate and who cannot and that outside of the Terms of Use. I need to clarify that any "power" of exclusion is exercised by FRDB Staff Members and not based on a member being not eloquent enough, not smart enough, not educated enough or ESL or whichever "not enough...". FRDB has intended from the time it officially came alive on line to be inclusive of all of our registered members whichever background they may have. That is why we have such pluralistic and multi cultural representation among members of our community.


Regarding the hobby horse dragging and repetitive claims which were previously debunked : it happens in our other Forums too. The way we have handled it is by relying on the alternative to lock the thread or ship it to ~E~ where it will not disrupt any longer the expected topics compatible with each Forum's heading title.

Unfortunately, we cannot rely solely on our members' willingness to either scroll past comments/material which have no value to them or use the ignore function to not have to be exposed to comments they find annoying or asinine or disruptive. You might be one of the exceptions who has enough self control to be "naturally" selective.

Sheshbazzar

Perhaps this is finally the appropriate time and place to make the observation that I am now in my tenth year as a participant on this Forum with a post count now standing a 6,690 most of which were in BC&H.

In all of those years I believe I have only initiated 3 threads of my own. (any others that may appear under my name are the results of mods splitting out discussions from threads that were initiated by others -usually because of our friend Chili)

Two of the threads that I did initiate were locked and sent off to 'E' because the mod either didn't like, or didn't comprehend the content of my subject matter, and/or personally disagreed with my views. They never clarified why, just shit canned them.

It is rather frustrating to attempt to present highly technical material, material that requires time and thought to absorb, and needs remain open to review and to questioning in order to achieve comprehension, when at the first sign of heckling a mod steps in and locks the thread sending it off to 'E', so permanently dead ending any possibility of any further discussion, questions, or clarifications.

I can bare with and deal with heckling and ignorant one liners, but having about every thread I open, closed and locked by the mods while still on the first or second page leaves me no resort to getting my views and arguments across other than finding subjects brought up in threads opened by others that I can 'piggy-back' on to.

So I would like you moderators for once to try to see this situation from my perspective.
The OP subject and its initiator should not be so easily censored, as it were on a moderator whim, with no further input or defense from the the OP presenter allowed -particularly when that poster does not have any record of regularly opening 'hobby horse' threads.

This may help explain why I am so opposed to any unnecessary censorship. I would much rather have to endure having my thread cluttered up with a hundred off-topic-attempts and diversions, and one-liner heckling posts and yet be allowed to continue and survive until I have finished my argument and presentation, than having a mod step in and lock the thread and send it off to 'E' after only 15 or so posts, most arriving as smart-ass one liners from the peanut gallery.

For me over-censorship is already the biggest flaw on this site, and I'm certainly not going to be supportive of any efforts to further increase censorship.

Jaybees

While I don't share Shash's feeling that there has been over-censorship on this site, I think any trend in that direction would be bad. I enjoy the occasional ribaldry, I even learn something new once in a while. And, whenever a topic becomes too esoteric for me, I move on to other threads.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

Sheshbazzar

But then it wasn't your threads that were censored.

I would prefer less censorship, or at least allowing the initiator of a thread the opportunity to defend the content of their argument before mods locking and consigning it to 'E' with no further input allowed.

I did continue one thread in 'E' (back when it was allowed) and the material was found valid enough that it ended up being brought back to life in BC&H, very rare even then, and damn near impossible now because 'locked' now prevents any argument or clarification from being further pursued in 'E'.

Got to make damn sure that some people are not allowed to have their say even if it's way down in the dungeon of 'E'.
Kind of like the old time governments that had the prisoners tongues cut out so they couldn't complain or explain.
Unwarranted censorship sucks.

aa5874

This is fantastic.

So we can expect the repetitive already debunked claims that there was an historical Jesus of Nazareth, that the Pauline letters were composed before c 70 CE and that a Celestial Jesus was crucified in the Sub-lunar to be shipped to "E".

How many times must those already debunked claims be posted on BC&H??

stephan huller

I think the point is that the site wants to go beyond the 'usual suspects' that come here, including myself. Most of the 'regulars' come here to be heard. They have ideas that the rest of the world - people at work, at the bus stop or the candy store - don't care about or don't understand. So they come here.

Now let's be honest for a moment. Most of the people who post here are unattractive. I don't mean physically unattractive (but that's probably true too). What I mean is that what they post here is not going to help expand the number of people who use the service. Most of what is posted here is fucking weird. If someone were riding on a bus and the guy beside them starting talking about Constantine conspiracies, Marcion, and crazy Hebrew shit the person would probably want to move seats.

So the point is not about what's good for us but what's good for the forum.

Clearly the way to go IMO is to somehow attract more experts or people who have some sort of recognizable expertise on something related to Biblical Criticism and History. Let's face it, the most useful service we provide here is when someone who uses the rest of the forum but doesn't come here regularly wants a terms or a concept related to the Bible explained from a rational rather than a faith-based perspective.

To this end, we all have to agree that while - we'd all like the forum to give more time for us and our particular ideosyncratic POV - for the good of the forum (if any of us are capable of that kind of magnanimity) we've got to attract people who have (a) the language skills (b) familiarity with the original source materials or (c) an interesting perspective on (a) and (b) in order to broaden the appeal of the forum.

It's a mess here. Unless you are used to the chaos, it's hard to follow the quality posts because let's face it - all of us come here looking for what we posted, look for what 'people are saying about us' rather than thinking about the good of the forum.

Sheshbazzar

Oh. The goal then is to constrain posts to only what will be most pleasing and comprehensible to 'Joe Everyman' the commuter without challenging his preconceptions or turning him off? Quantity of members over quality of material and discussion?

Only present that good old cut and dried 'expert' 'mainstream' academic opinion and its supporters, lest we should ever rock the boat of (mostly barely interested) public opinion.