Quote:
Originally Posted by Nell
There is something you should consider. This forum has been around for a long time. There isn’t much that hasn’t been discussed already…some things ad nauseum. You might benefit from reading the older topics and formulate your thoughts. You haven’t posted anything new…yet.
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While I agree, I have also done that when trying to find older discussions. And I have found several problems.
- The topics are not as well organized as we might like. I think the overall structure of the forum is pretty good. And I have no idea what might be better. But not all threads are within the most relevant category.
- Not every thread title is as descriptive with respect to the important topics. I cannot recall specifics at the moment, but within the past month, I went in to look up old threads on various subjects. And on several occasions, the best coverage was almost a side-topic that got a life of its own and was accepted as the discussion without moving to a different thread.
- Even where the thread is "on topic," the thread title is not clearly about what the thread actually discussed.
- In some cases, the most significant discussions are not actually on this forum but were on the Bereans forum which is no longer available. We may have tried to discuss some of the same topics here but too often devolved into concluding rather than establishing a real basis for the conclusion. I know that I have made reference to the thread where we discussed Authority and Submission (aka Spiritual Authority) thinking that it was on this forum. I looked for it last month and couldn't find it. So I looked on my hard drive to see if I had copied it out of the forum for my personal reference. And I found it. In a folder of Berean posts and threads. It was on the Bereans forum from June 2010 through April 2011. About 350 posts. And no one can refer to it. The little we have talked about it here seems to have been shortened because of the prior discussions.
And while I understand UntoHim's desire to not repeat posts from the Bereans forum, especially while both were active (that included the time of the Authority and Submission thread), I now think that some of what we consider to be our wealth of prior discussion is no longer available. It was shut down several years ago when the Bereans essentially turned off their forum. And without disparaging the currently active members of this forum, I do not think that we have the breadth of participants to do the heavy lifting of the kind of analysis that would be required to fill in the gaps in our "evidence." We would need more members with the inclination to actually do it.
As for the threads actually on this forum, unless we are going to challenge our participants to do the forum equivalent of Lee's "thorough study of the entire scripture" to find anything that is there, we probably need to figure out how to add tags or something beyond subject categories, thread titles, and word searches to index the contents of the forum.
I realize that if you go to look for things, you may find what you want quickly. But on other topics, it is not so easy to find. Sometimes the problem is figuring out the right word. What seems obvious to me now might not have been the word used then. And I gave up on a couple, then discovered while reading seemingly irrelevant threads (relative to the topic I had previously tried to find), there it was. I never found a significant discussion on Authority and Submission (besides the copy of the Beran thread I put on my hard drive). We talk about "deputy authority" all the time but almost never do more than summarize that it was bad theology from Authority and Submission. I know there was a much more robust discussion of the theology of God's economy. I eventually did a reboot on the book here, but it did not get much beyond the first chapter. The exercise was an eye-opener for me related to much of Lee's ways of thinking. And was part of the reason I started in on Authority and Submission (unfortunately on the other forum).
And I know that I am suggesting something that none of us really has time to do. It is more of a lament that we had not considered our current state as a possible outcome of the decisions made as far back as 2008. They did not seem bad when they were made. I agreed with UntoHim about not duplicating discussions from the Bereans forum (whether or not I ever actually said it). Yet here we are now wishing we had at least had a more nuanced version of that decision.