comments on comments

My favorite blog http://www.patheos.com/community/deaconsbench/ has closed comments for a while.  This post has comments on the closing.

Since I can't find his email address, I'm going to post here my thoughts.

First, though, as I typed the previous sentence, I started to use the word feelings instead of the word thoughts.  That identifies part of the problem.  This is a hot, immediate medium.  Words go directly to the screen w/o passing through the brain for very long.  Sometimes called blogorrhea.

Second, there is ignorance.  Too many people pontificating without know what they are saying.  Funny word pontificate - it has come a long way.  It began life meaning a bridge builder from that fashioable language Latin: pons - bridge and facere - to make.  Pontiff (or a member of the same word family) was a title for Roman leaders.  With seven hills and many valleys, there was a need for bridges everywhere.  Since the Pope has this title, it can be inferred that bridge-building is somewhere in his job description.  Although it has secular roots, many would say it has a basis in faith.  Cf the writing of Paul the Apostle.

The root cause of problems is the lack of consensus on what it means to be a Christian.  For that matter, there are a number of terms that, as we say in information technology, are overloaded.  They have been given multiple meanings.  Computer languages have evolved ways of handling that situation.  It does not appear humans have done so with human languages.

Try to come up with a commonly acceptable definition for Christian or Jew or Muslim,  In the first case, wars were fought over the definition; in the last case, those wars are going on even as I write.

There have always been apologists.  They were critical in the early church as people trained in Greek philosophy tried to get their heads around the Semite sayings and ideas of Jesus of Nazareth.  They wrestled with the notion of who is God?  who is Jesus? what are their relationship?  those ideas that were boiled down to form the heady potion that is the Nicene Creed.

People like G K Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc were called controversalists.  They seem to relish a verbal spat.  But they did so with a flourish and good humor that belied the seriousness of their discourse.

What we have today are trolls.  I am reminded of a scene from the movie "Good Morning Vietnam."  The General at the radio station is telling the Sergeant Major why he is being banished to a backwater post from the front lines. "At first I thought you were tough, but now I know you are just plain mean."

Perhaps, a good start would be a conversation, if that is possible, on what it means to be Christian.  Part of the root cause as regularly identified on the above mentioned blog, stem from a radical (from the Latin word radix for root) difference of opinion on that issue.  While the study of that issue would be theology, the practice of the issue is just living as a committed Catholic Christian.

btw the technique could also be used as a party game - do those still exist?  Gather the players into small groups and give them one or two related words for which they are to come up with a mutually agreed defintion.  Then bring the groups together for sharing.  Start with the pairs conservative/liberal and Democrat/Republican before moving on to the more tendentious Christian or Jew or Muslim.

Let the games begin!