Many of the internet sites in which believers and non-believers interact contain a lot of personal insults, ad hominem attacks, and just plain verbal abuse. I don't want this site to ever become that way. I do not moderate the comments section although there is one person whose rants I regularly delete. I am a firm believer in free speech and I would love to have this site be a place of intelligent dialogue. I don't want it to become like this episode of Monty Python.
It took me a long time to get to that point with my blog. Good luck.
ReplyDeleteBen
Thanks for this. I am new here, as well as new to this terrifying realization that much of what I believed for so much of my life is wrong. Also quite tired of having my nose slapped with rolled up newspaper. Hope this place remains peaceful. EFH
ReplyDeleteMy hat is off to you (if I wore one, that is). This is a reason I favor your blog, and a few of the others that are at the top of my list. I don't find the mud slinging to be especially productive or interesting, and your well reasoned academic tone is a big draw for me.
ReplyDeleteI have no relevant academic credentials (I'm a financial analyst and CPA) and can only be content to engage in these topics as an arguably well-read amateur, but this setting is more conducive to the direction I want to go with my personal studies than the other sort. Here's to more of the same.
By the way, off topic for this particular post but sort of relevant to the last post, have my favorite topical areas reached some sort of plateau with respect to the publication of new quality books? For some time I had seen a flood of good material on the Historical Jesus (Ehrman, Sanders, Friedrikson, Vermes, etc) and on both textual criticism / textual based historical reconstruction (Richard Elliot Friedman, Frank Moore Cross Jr., Mark Smith, Baruch Halpern, etc) and archaeological historical reconstruction (William Dever, Israel Finkelstein, etc).
Over a period of about 5 years I was afloat in these kinds of books, and either I've fallen out of touch with the latest scholars who have taken up these subjects, am unaware of more books from the familiar scholars, or am truly in the midst of a slowdown in these publications. Any hint as to what's going on? If it isn't a slowdown, a pointer in the right direction would be welcome.