We have resumed making comments on this post
/2010/10/03/how-shall-they-hear-about-jesus-unless-from-a-christian-preacher/
but there is a tech problem — WordPress is having a hard time coping with comments nested up to 10 deep and totalling over 100 altogether.
Attempts to post comments there will almost certainly apppear out of order and be lost from context.
Unless someone can suggest a better idea can we resume the discussion at this post site instead:
/2010/10/03/how-shall-they-hear-about-jesus-unless-from-a-christian-preacher-2/
Or just start adding new comments at the end of this one instead if that’s easier.
Thanks
Neil
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Hey Neil, you might consider setting up a google group. That is a old style BBS/forum mechanism, that can be set up to work with a web interface and/or via email, like a mailing list. Then you can disable you per blog node comment feature, and just add a link on your sidebar to “discussion group”. That gives you the best of both worlds, the ability to blog your articles, but additionally, a entire BBS/forum for you and your people to have discussions. And the google groups discussion mechanism is much more sophisticated than any of the blog comment systems. Anyone can make a group.
In fact, if you were smart, you would get 5 or ten of the bloggers that are friends, and start a common google group, and all put a link to the same google group on all of your blog sidebars. Then you will grow a meta-community that spans individual blogs.
Check out; http://groups.google.com/
Cheers! RichGriese@gmail.com
ugh. google. hate those guys.
Neil, you hate google? wow, what’s up with that? I have found google to be one of the best services out there. And when you realize they are now so big, and could end up making products that suck, and are hard to work with, and try to make everyone a google head… yet they constantly are coming up with more new and free products that they give away. I mean, take google voice. I know use my home phone to call free anywhere in the country, how can you dislike that. what don’t you like about google? Almost every product they have is as good or better than any similar product. When I compare google to something like facebook, it seems to me that google are products that are easier to use, and are more open than other products.
But to the original suggestion about a bbs/forum for your comments, if you hate google, perhaps set up a yahoo group. They also offer the ability as well. My original point is that BBS/forums can offer a really flexible mechanism for blog commenting. And they allow people not just to comment on your blog essay, but can also start a topic to. Often with blog comments, it becomes limiting. Meanings… comments often (and I think should) turn into a running conversation, not just about a specific essay, but rally just continual conversations by the community of readers. Often a comment thread can take on a life of it’s own, evolving almost nothing to do with the original essay. the BBS/forum mechanism allows this to happen more freely. And that fact that anyone can start a new topic is really handy and makes it so that the conversations can flow throughout the thoughts and idea of the community. I recommend them highly.
Cheers! RichGriese@gmail.com
I think it was rey who said he hated Google, not Neil. Hard to tell with these comment indentations. :-/
Tim, Good point. Thanks for pointing it out. Yes, the comment systems can be difficult. I am a real fan of the old BBS/forum systems. The have all the ability of blog comments, but they also allow for a more equalized community. Instead of one auther and mulitple followers, you get a community of equals. since not just one person posts topics (blog essays) and everyone else comments on the single authored topics. Each person of the community can start topics. A forum, also even offers everyhing a blog does, since topics are in effect blog essays. Plus, forums/bbses almost always have built in alerting systems. So, someone that wants to be alerted to each topic or comment can have them sent to them, or can get a daily digest. Or, can not get emails at all, but simply visit the site to keep up. i love them, and and very sorry that the are not more often used.
Cheers! RichGriese@gmail.com
Sounds like a plan. But right now I am in transit to Australia so not able to look at doing that for day or two.
Hey Neil, If you decide to do it, and you need any help let me know, will be happy to help you, and/or even walk your though it. You can always come find me on the CHAT on my world, and I can help you real time if you need it.
Cheers! RichGriese@gmail.com
Okay, thanks Rich. Back in Australia now, but my access to net is limited for a few weeks. May not be really settled till beginning December. Will let you know.
I’d like to suggest you to take a look at Reddit’s commenting system (see reddit.com/r/atheism for an example). You could easily create a subreddit (“group”) there for yourself and restrict it so that only invited people would be able to post.
This is in response to [Comment by mikelioso — 2010/11/03 @ 11:53 pm]
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Your quote from The Encyclopaedia Britannica is instructive. It shows that when a fact is historically tenuous (but still interesting and perhaps significant to motivational development), mainstream historians will signal its secondary nature by saying: “According to Polybius and Livy…” I don’t believe Nero trotted down the streets of Rome late at night barefoot in his pajamas, but it’s a funny story. So if I were writing a bio of Nero, I might say, “According to Suetonius, Nero used to…”
An honest historian of Christianity would write, “According to the gospel authors, Jesus was crucified under Pilate.” That’s what we would expect, anyway. But here’s what we get:
–John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: the Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant
He then quotes two late, secondary hearsay witnesses, Josephus and Tacitus. Please note that Crossan italicized the word “fact.” He submits that we absolutely know it to be true. But this is not what the evidence allows.
Tim, I agree whole heartedly with you here.
Tim, that is because the religion/theology/divitinity/etc… industry is NOT a history industry. The purpose of the religion industry is to give the average citizen assurance that there are academic experts with Pd.D. that can assure them their religious beliefs have a factual basis in history. The industry is in effect story telling comforters for the christian myths.
This is why I advise people to seek out books and articles by people with degrees in HISTORY, Not, religion. The Historians have to have their works peer reviewed by other real historians, not just others that are also in the business of giving the public assurances and good feelings about their myths.
Cheers! RichGriese@gmail.com
GODFREY
‘Paul again explains why the whole of Israel has been rejected:
They have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For they being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and seeking to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted to the righteousness of God. (Romans 10:2-3)
This is a very strange way to explain that God rejects them because they killed his son.
CARR
Yes, there is a contemporary ‘silence’ about Jesus.
But it is a silence that is filled with Paul speaking. He simply talks about a different history – one where there was no Jesus to reject and kill, and one where the problem with Judaism had nothing to do with any interaction between Jesus and Jews.
In Paul’s epistles, and also Hebrews, James, Jude, there is lacking any interaction of Jesus and Jews.
Ignoring 1 Thess. 2, where the relevant parts are widely held to be an interpolation.
Do we have contemporary reports about Julius Caesar that detail the history of the Romans and forget to mention any interaction between Julius and the Empire?
The way Paul sums up the history of Jews as a rejection because they ‘had not submitted to the righteousness of God – a most oblique way of referring to any rejection of Jesus of Nazareth.