AW! Epistles
From Amelia: Posting Comments on AskWhy!
Abstract
Abstract
I posted a legitimate comment, but the result was a page which termed it to be spam. In consequence that means that it will be rejected without perusal. I don’t understand the ethics of such. If you want people to make comments, you surely would be accessible for whatever may be said. A balanced argument on any subject is only reached by the “fors” and “againsts”. The conclusion could be reached by the person receiving such a message, is that you only really want to sell books. I don’t think that is so, but think such could be how some think.
I filled out the comment section below this page:
http://www.askwhy.co.uk/christianity/0302Christmas.php
I posted a legitimate comment, but the result was a page which termed it to be spam. In consequence that means that it will be rejected without perusal. I don’t understand the ethics of such. If you want people to make comments, you surely would be accessible for whatever may be said. A balanced argument on any subject is only reached by the “fors” and “againsts”. The conclusion could be reached by the person receiving such a message, is that you only really want to sell books. I don’t think that is so, but think such could be how some think.
People manage to write comments without getting them rejected, and I tested the procedure before I put it on line, writing various messages to test it. Sadly, though, the criteria have to be either very strict or very sophisticated, and sophisticated systems usually cost a lot! The reason is spam bots, web robots that go around leaving spammy messages often for drugs and porn. I am a liberal man, and people who want to do porn and drugs can do it for me, but I have no intention of letting their suppliers advertise their activities on my website. So mine is fairly strict.
Essentially, you should be able to write anything in ordinary English, but any html markup is rejected because it can be used to run scripts on unguarded websites, causing all sorts of trouble, and words that are common in advertising websites such as Host(!) and URL are rejected. Often suspicious words are just cut out but the rest of the message gets accepted. So apologies for the strictness, but I relaxed the criteria at Christmas for a few days and was flooded with robotted spam. I have a blog where messages can be sent, and I have a forum where ditto, but few people seem interested in bothering. The blog has its own proprietary spam busting software and busts over ten times as many messages as it accepts, so the phenomenon is common.
Having said all that, it is possible that something has gone wrong and all messages are being excised, so please try again, maybe sending just a few innocuous words to check that the message gets through, then try something more ambitious being careful not to use any html symbols or web linked words. Split a longish message into several shorter ones, then there is less likelihood that you will waste your time only to be rejected. If a word is being rejected simply splitting it arbitrarily should work. Obviously, it makes the message look odd, but most humans would see it as a typo, and the algorithm will not see the suspicious word because it will not work as a link when thus split.
I would like to have your response, and others reading the page might too, so please have another go.
Thank you so much for taking the time to write and explain. Sadly we live in a world which is greedy and self obsessed. I changed my service provider last year in order to change my email address as 90/% of the mail I received was from porn oriented sites, often with lurid pictures suddenly assaulting one’s eyes. None of this was solicited by me. So I understand what you are saying. Perhaps I was quick off the mark in my comments to you, which were not meant to in any way offend. Another thing I find in these days is that not many people are courteous and will knock down what one says and go on the offensive and defensive if one expresses an opinion that doesn’t support their own, rather than viewing another opinion as perhaps valid, or an opportunity to learn something. I must be less sensitive to such.
I will have another try to “have my say”, bearing in mind the suggestions you’ve made, but not being too computer literate, sometimes find unexpected results to my attempts which fox me somewhat.
I had always been chary of putting a direct reply form on my website because of the dangers involved, but as everyone else seemed to have them, and they seemed popular, I thought I ought to try it, but after my Christmas experience when the form had only been online a short while, I thought strictness was necessary, and I put in the blurb that the object of the form was to have short messages only.
Before then, this medium we are now using was the feedback method I preferred, and I have a statement somewhere online (now in the form blurb) that emails might be published at my discretion. Consequently I have a whole directory of discussions, some of them extended (click the link to e-pistles).
So, if you prefer it, and have a lot of interesting things to say, just send them here, but they are, as I said, published at my discretion, and after I have had the chance to rebut anything I disagree with. Anything that is not spam I leave on the blogback, but usually do not reply to.
Comments can also be made on my guestbook, a Bravenet service. I mentioned to you that I have a forum, also by Bravenet, also hardly used, perhaps because I do not “prime” it with contentious statements, and a blog on Wordpress which rejects only spam (though leaving the blog owner the right to review rejected messages in case it got any wrong. It never has, for my blog!) I have only censored anything that got through (a spam apparently praising me to get in a dubious link) once, so if I really enrage you, and you want others definitely to see, either the forum or the Wordpress blog are the places to reply. Be sure to give a reference and link to the page you are discussing.
The points you have raised have given me the chance to provide information that might be helpful, and is the sort of thing I like to publish online, so I might add this correspondence, assuming you do not object.
Again my thanks for your explanations. I will have to study it a bit in order to work out “Wordpress” and “Bravenet", etc.
These are simply the companies that host the service, Wordpress the blog, and Bravenet, the forum, guestbook, and a few other useful services such as counters. You do not need to know anything about them, unless you want to use them yourself. just click on the link you see on the page. They are off of the askwhy main website, but that makes no difference to the user, or me, for that matter.
I thank you for your leeway in allowing me to make comment directly to you. I am wondering if you are able to present the theme of your message in a few sentences to give a summary of it. Then each aspect could be researched in a progressive manner by enquirers such as me, who gets a bit bogged down if a set procedure isn’t worked out first, rather than hopping from one subject to another, and getting distracted in various directions en route. I am not suggesting that your presentation is not acceptable. However, there is much to contemplate on your site and I would find it difficult to know where to start. May I use the example of my summary of the Bible to show what I mean? I think of it thus:
The origin of man, the fall from grace of man. The way to be “re-instated” into an approved state. God’s purpose for the earth and mankind. Where man figures in that purpose. What that purpose is and the completion of that purpose.
With something summarised like that, I am able to search for information on the origin of man (creation or evolution for example), then how man came to a disapproved state…, and so forth, to the finale.
With regard to what I have written, please feel free to use what you may think would be useful.
Thank you. Over the years the website has grown rather, and it perhaps is hard to know where to start, though mainly the Christianity pages are simply linearly historic from the history of Jesus such as we can work it out reliably up to modern times. I begin it with a personal introduction to show how I was led into it beginning when I was a youth. If you want more on me, I also have a mini pen portrait in the science directory. My training was as a scientist.
Regarding approaches, you seem to begin with the bible, so you might want to begin the pages with the Judaism directory which opens with a review of the controversy among scholars about biblical origins and the archaeology of Palestine. Essentially the controversy is between those who will not contemplate that the bible can be wrong, and those who want to treat it like any historical document, a human production, fallible and indeed written for a purpose. It is hard on believers, who have been misled for lifetimes by other believers, all of whom refuse to look because they have been convinced by the previous generation of believers that they already know everything that needs to be known from those who passed it on to them.
The historical evidence simply does not support what is in the bible. The inhabitants of Canaan were Canaanites, and Canaanites believed in their own known gods, only one of whom was Yehouah. In other words, they were not monotheistic but were polytheistic. Canaanites are the same people as the Greeks knew as Phoenicians, and the Romans as Syrians. Eventually, as monotheists, they were known as Jews.
The Canaanites were introduced to sophisticated religion by the Persians in the event called in the bible, “the return”. Persian settlers were sent into Judah to set up a temple state to raise revenue from the province of Abarnahara, and to act as a guard on the troublesome Egyptians. The temple was officially opened in around 417 BC by Ezra who read the law to the uncomprehending people. They wept. It is described in the bible, and this is the realistic time when the law was actually given to the Jews. Moses then, supposedly the lawgiver of a thousand years before, is mythical like King Arthur in Britain. The bible began with the law, at first what is now called Deuteronomy. The Persians pretended the law had already been discovered 200 years before, but had been forgotten because of the Babylonian conquest. The historic books were written according to the formula of the so-called Deuteronomic historian who devised the notion of people being punished by God for doing wrong, and rewarded for doing right. The people of the land had generally been wrongdoers—they were always apostatizing and breaking the law—but would become a great nation if they conformed. It is the theme of the Jewish scriptures, now called the Old Testament by Christians. Persians had access to Assyrian archives to write the histories, and they are based on essentially correct king lists but not on correct events.
So Judaism was invented only three centuries before Christ, and the bible only began to be written then, after the time of Herodotus, explaining why Moses was not known as the world’s first historian!
The earlier books were modified from the myths the Persians brought from Babylon, explaining why they are mainly Mesopotamian and not Egyptian myths, but then were extensively re-written by the priests of the Egyptian Greek Ptolemaic kings, after the fall of Persia, in the period 300-200 BC when the Ptolemies ruled Palestine and saw the Jerusalem temple as valuable as the Persians did, but looking the other way. They favoured the Jews, and Judaism because it was a bastion against the enemies of the Ptolemies, the Seleucids, and because many Jews by then lived in Alexandria, and needed to be bought off by favours to their religion. This is when Moses and the Exodus from Egypt was developed as a myth from hints in the more sparse Persian account.
Regarding the New Testament, biblicist scholars refuse to place Jesus in context, because they refuse to accept that he had a context, being a revelation of God, but he fits rather well into the context of first century Judaism, as an Essene. The early pages of the Christianity directory explain this. The first Christians were rather obviously Jews, but many Jews outside of Judaea in the Greek and Roman world were already having difficulty adhering to their conventions in an alien world. Paul offered to them a form of Judaism all together easier to follow in the Hellenistic world, and similar in concept to popular Hellenistic gods. They readily accepted it, and so too did the godfearers who were gentiles attached to the synagogues but fearful of converting, especially the males, because of the need for circumcision. Women were much more numerous among proselytes, and among godfearers and many of these became Christians given the chance. Christianity in the west was always predominantly female, and when Luke wrote his westernized gospel, he introduced many spurious women to give them a greater role in what was primarily a male story, being a story of armed rebellion against the Romans.
Another large section is about the belief in God as opposed to believing what is real, and so this is combined with science as the alternative. This is the Truth directory, and if you are interested in arguments for God or for Nature, then that is another place to start.
Another section expands on the benefits of treating Nature as the deity rather than an abstract artificer God. Nature necessarily is a goddess. Everything natural in the world is born, not made. The female sex is the basic sex, as science has shown abundantly and repeatedly, yet believers still consider the woman as merely a product of Adam’s rib, an inferior product of the manufacturing God, simply to be a companion to the man. Yet men have breasts!
Lastly, I mentioned in my last letter, that there are around a hundred discussions with readers in the e-pistles pages, in some of which I review what I have said at greater length in the pages. The most recent are at the top.
I hope this will give you a few ideas about where to make an entry. If you are seeking a debate, then take a look at the debates I have already had in the epistles section, because many of the points you might wish to raise will already have been raised there. The Google search boxes on the pages should help you find specific topics, though as you will doubtless realise, the search phrase will need to be specific if you are not to raise too many answers, even searching just the AW! website.
I’ve been back to AW briefly before getting your email. The conclusion I have so far reached is that a belief in Nature as God is the basis of the argumentation rather than an Invisible Master Designer (or whatever an idividual calls the God of christians). Having been brought up with christian values (though not high church, rather a long line of non-conformist forbears) I don’t see a conflict in Science and Creation. I believe created things are scientifically made, not “magically” produced. Perhaps a similar view was held by my ancesters a hundred or so years ago. It would seem that they were not happy with the teachings of the prevalent churches of their day. I will certainly read further and thank you for the time you’ve afforded me by way of explanations and information.
You want to move on, so just a final word of explanation. Christians these days seem to come in two principal varieties, those who oppose science because they hold fundamentalist beliefs, and those, more like yourself, who think Christianity and science are reconcilable. Now anything can be reconciled notionally, if the crucial differences are ignored. I can reconcile black and white as merely shades of light ignoring the fact that one is the presence of it and the other the absence, quite an important distinction, one might think.
Christianity is a belief, the acceptance of what one is taught with no questioning of the basics. Science is the diametric opposite. It is disbelief until something is shown to be true by evidence. Scientifically, God is a nonentity. There is no evidence of Him. He is entirely notional, a figment of the mind, ie based on tradition, whatever you have been told by previous generations. Nature is what we experience daily in our real lives. It exists unquestionably and we depend upon it. It is the womb that we live within. If we were to destroy it, then we too would be destroyed.
So, you are right in your assessment, but little of the argument against Christianity and Jewish tradition has anything to do with a preference for Nature rather than God. It is all based on an assessment of the historical evidence, ie upon a scientific examination of it. The point is that Jews and Christians say the bible is their evidence for God, but the bible is not at all what it purports to be.
There is no need to acknowledge this. I’ll leave you to your studies.
