Evangelical Realism

Folks, I apologize for the sparcity of posts lately. A combination of time-consumers both at work and at home is leaving me with a serious shortfall in my available time and energy, which I hope will be resolved in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, I’m going to try scheduling some re-posts of material from the early days of the blog, in hopes that someone will find it fresh and rewarding.

Take care.

Well, here I am back again. Very nice vacation, I might add.

The time off gave me a chance to review a few things, and I’ve implemented a new comments policy that I think will be easier to maintain going forward. There’s a link for it at the top of the page. Basically it says that if someone submits a comment it doesn’t necessarily mean I should or will publish it. I’m generally in favor of free speech, but everything in its place. The comments section is the place for comments that enhance the quality and value of the blog by making some kind of substantive contribution (for or against my remarks). The discussion forum is the place for everything that may or may not meet the quality standards of the comments section. I think that strikes a reasonable compromise between my desire for free speech and my desire for high-quality comments, don’t you?

Well, I thought I was going to squeeze in a couple more days of blogging, but it looks now like that’s not going to happen. This is the year that my wife and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary, my son turned 18 and graduated from high school, and my daughter turned 16, and we are going to Mexico for a grand one-trip-celebrates-all. Yay vacation! So that’s going to leave me incommunicado for a while.

Y’all take care and be good while I’m gone, k?

Please bear with me while I figure out how to work this moderation feature. It’s not going to be an ongoing condition, I promise. Well, for those that can engage in honest, good-faith dialog anyway.

As you may have noticed, we have a new Comments policy in effect here at ER. (And if you haven’t noticed, you might want to hold down the Shift key and click your browser’s “Reload” button.) Basically, I’ve decided to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in the comments by moving the trollish stuff to a “Troll” Watch forum over at the ER Discussion Forums. I think I’ve been patient and indulgent long enough, and if I have to turn on comment moderation and filter out the personal issues, I’ll be glad to oblige.

Note that this policy applies to all commenters, no exceptions. We will discuss facts and issues here, and we’ll discuss personalities, insinuations, recriminations, and other diversionary tactics on the forums.

Yours for a more static-free connection to the truth.

DD

Folks, I’m going to be offline for the next week or so due to my son’s graduation, some home improvement projects, and an increased workload at my day job. I’ve got posts scheduled through next Tuesday, but new posts and comments monitoring are going to be extremely spotty this week. This should give cl time to finish up his well-reasoned rebuttal without further distractions from me, at least, so that may be a good thing.

Take care and behave yourselves while I’m gone, ok?

Ladies and gentlemen,

I’m in a bit of a dilemma. On the one hand, I’m all for free and open discussion. On the other hand, I’m not sure that blog comments are the best venue for extended dialog. What’s a blogger to do?

Well, for this blogger, the answer is the new Evangelical Realism Discussion Forum. It’s a standard web-based board, so if you’ve got something on your chest and you want to get it off, have at it. There is currently one (1) forum available at the moment, but I’m willing to open up more if there’s a demand for it.

I’m a bad comments moderator and I’ll likely be a bad board moderator as well, so everything is likely to be pretty wide open at first. I’ll leave it up to you folks whether we want moderators or not (and if so, who). But the main idea here is to provide an alternative to comments as the primary venue for extended discussions. In fact, if I think a discussion would be better suited to the boards, I may politely request the participants to take it to the forum (and if that doesn’t work, I may move the discussion there myself).

The general rule of thumb is that if you have a comment about a blog post, leave it in the comments. If you have a comment about someone else’s comment, then it could go either in the comments or on the boards. If you’re commenting about a comment on a comment, then it definitely belongs in the boards. Post to the boards and then leave a link.

Cheers, and enjoy the boards.

As everyone has probably noticed by now, I am way behind on reading comments, let alone responding to and/or policing them (other than the automatic spam filters, of course). I would greatly appreciate it, therefore, if commenters would try to police themselves.

I strongly encourage the expression of sincerely-held beliefs and ideas, even if wrong, so that they may be discussed and critiqued. I strongly encourage thoughtful critiques of any and all beliefs and ideas so presented. I strongly encourage tolerance of the manner in which these ideas might be presented, since not everyone is a skillful writer (and those that are, haven’t always had their morning coffee yet).

I strongly discourage discussion of the character, abilities, motives, or personal ancestry of individual commenters, as tempting as such comments may be at times. I discourage the posting of comments that make frequent use of the pronoun “you,” as in “you always…” or “you never…” or “you are just so…”, when directed at a specific individual.

Please think before posting. My goal is to address the ideas themselves, and to demonstrate which ideas are most consistent with real-world truth. Personal attacks are a distraction (and indeed, one way to defend a weak idea is to present it as offensively as possible, in order to side-track the discussion into a mere flame war, and thus protect the bad idea from direct analysis).

It is not necessary to win any one argument. Truth is consistent with itself; the evangelical realist need only persist in directing people’s attention to the truth, and over the long term the burden of maintaining a falsehood will weigh more heavily on the untruthful person. We ought to have the confidence of our convictions, and rise above personal foibles. And if we have guests whose thinking is misguided, we should welcome and encourage them, because where else are they going to go for better guidance?

I know that I myself am not as good at that as I should be (Challenger Grim comes to mind—I really regret losing him). But I originally named this blog Evangelical Realism because I saw a need for a place where realists could reach out to the misguided, and encourage them to adopt a better world view (to borrow an oft-misused term). I want to show how the ideas of realism make more sense and are more consistent with real-world truth than fantasies, intuitions, superstitions and hearsay are, and how realism actually improves one’s quality of life.

I could do better. We all could do better. I invite everyone to join me in trying.

Just want to say a hearty thank-you to Daniel Florien for including my blog on his list of The Top 30 Atheist/Agnostic/Skeptic Blogs. That’s quite an honor, and I’m flattered to be in such good company. You should drop by if you haven’t already and have a look (don’t forget the blogs mentioned in the comments too).

Thanks also to PZ Myers for repeating the list on his blog Pharyngula. We’re seeing a nice bump in the stats right now thanks to these two mentions, and I appreciate it.

My ISP seems to be having some server difficulties, and I’ve had to revert back to PHP 4 temporarily, which might keep some of my WP plugins from working correctly. Please bear with us while we get this problem sorted out. Thanks.