• Revised Commenting Policy

  04/08/2012

  I’ve posted something like this before but have had to add the final bullet point today. (And have today decided not to allow any further comments from the offender who caused me to add this last point. It seems to me that he has been warned enough).

  The following types of comments will be deleted without question.

  • Comments which appear to be legitimate but whose posters’ details point to porn sites.
  • Comments which contain homophobic epithets. I’m open to intelligent discussion but I’m not running a site which allows people to get away with silly name calling.
  • Comments which claim to prove something by quoting a single verse taken out of context from the Bible. Scripture is too precious to me to allow that. This is a place where the Bible is loved and honoured and treasured. Comments which use it as a weapon are unwelcome.
  • Comments promoting one Bible translation because all the rest are flawed. Like quite a few people who comment here, my Greek and Hebrew are a bit rusty. However, it was worth learning them as I can now make up my own mind about such matters. Go thou and study likewise.
  • Comments promoting or trying to raise money for particular missionary societies.
  • Comments disparaging women and in particular comments which undermine my female colleagues. I learn about God from them.
  • Comments trying to explain Penal Substution as a theory of Atonement. I know what it means. I know how it works. We’ve already established that like most Christian people I don’t believe in it. It gets boring if you try to explain it to me again.
  • Comments in which those of us who are gay are likened to murderers either in the eyes of the commenter or in the eyes of God. To be honest, when it becomes that offensive, I don’t think we are talking enough of the same language for me to want to bother carrying on listening. I’m also not in the business of providing space for that kind of rhetoric. Those who want to make such comments can do so on their own blogs but not on mine.

  As I’ve repeatedly said before, I like an intelligent argument and tend to adopt this policy as much for the sake of those others who like a sane corner of the web as for myself.

  [Most] Comments welcome.

Previous Posts

• Advent is Nigh

  28/11/2003

  Hard to believe that I am chosing Advent hymns o­nce again. Choosing hymns is hard most of the year, but not right now. Advent has good music and some very good hymns, but not many and it o­nly lasts four weeks. They slot in pretty easily.

• Book Club

  27/11/2003

  A good meeting of the Book Club last night, discussing Iris Murdoch's The Bell. I am not sure that we ever decided what the Bell itself represented, if anything, but the conversation along the way was interesting.  I was the o­nly man there, as usual. Do men read fiction?Part of the discussion became focussed o­n…

• Old Skills

  25/11/2003

  For reasons too complicated to go into here, I need to revive computer programming skills that I last used 20 years ago. I have a particular task, to do with mapping the local council wards, which I think can o­nly be perfomed using Prolog. I was always fascinated with this logic based language but never terribly competent.…

• Reaping the Whirlwind

  24/11/2003

  I am interested in a metaphor that is doing the rounds at the moment. Clare Short has said that Tony Blair is now reaping the whirlwind. This is in relation to the terrorist attacks that seem to have become more likely since the war in Iraq.The metaphor comes from the Bible (Hosea 8:7) and is…