From: mjsmith@cac.washington.edu (Martha Smith )
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: RFD: soc.religion.biblestudy moderated
Date: 12 Jan 93 22:12:28 GMT
Article-I.D.: shelley.1ivfocINN2tc
Distribution: world
Organization: UW Computing
NNTP-Posting-Host: redx.cac.washington.edu

I like the idea of letting the subject line determine the flow from text to text.  I also agree wholeheartedly that Bible scholars regardless of religious persuasion should be welcomed.  I had earlier expressed reseervations that the group could disintegrate into a single viewpoint.  Good moderating is necessary
In article <C0IJJB.5q.2@cs.cmu.edu>, spok+@cs.cmu.edu (John Ockerbloom) writes:
|> Some comments on Bill Nelson's proposal:
|> 
|> >This would be an excellent place for Christians, Bible Scholars, 
|> >or people just interested in reading the Bible to come together 
|> >from all over the world and share *their* interpretations of God's 
|> >word.
|> 
|> >This would be a group where the subject of the validity of the 
|> >Bible, Jesus Christ, God, and the Holy Spirit will NOT be under 
|> >question.
|> 
|> There are plenty of Bible scholars who are not Christian, or who do not
|> believe in the inerrancy of the Hebrew or the Christian Bible.  The first
|> excerpt above implies that their contributions would be welcome, but the
|> second one implies that discussion would be limited to 'orthodox'
|> Christian viewpoints.   Which is it?
|> 
|> (I should add that the moderated religion groups I'm familiar with
|>  require posts to be on-topic, but do not require them to be from any
|>  religious viewpoint; for instance, postings from both Christians and, say,
|>  atheists, are welcome on s.r.christian.  This is a good policy, IMO.)
|> 
|> > I would like to propose that the 
|> >members of the group decide upon what they would like to discuss
|> >[with discussion limited to a week normally.]   If 
|> >further discussion is desired, the group can either decide to 
|> >continue the discussion or take it to email.
|> 
|> How would these decisions be determined?  It's easy in a small face-to-face
|> group or mailing list to determine consensus, but I'm not sure how
|> it would work in a Usenet newsgroup.
|> 
|> It may be a better policy to use standard prefixes on subject lines to
|> identify which books or passages are being discussed.  That way,
|> discussion can continue in parallel on particular segments as long as
|> people are interested (or until they start getting repetitive), and
|> readers can use subject search and kill facilities to follow the
|> threads they're interested in.
|> 
|> >For those who do not have access to Bibles, they can either be 
|> >directed to an ftp site where they can access electronic copies, 
|> >portions of the Bible can be broadcasted on the last day of the 
|> >prevous discussion period (as long as permission is granted first 
|> >- to avoid copyright infringement)
|> 
|> The King James version is available on many sites, and is not under
|> copyright, so it can be broadcast freely.  Newer translations are
|> generally still under copyright.  I'm not sure where you'd get the
|> deuterocanonical books (the 'Old Testament Apocrypha'), though; are
|> they in any of the on-line KJV's?  (If there's a Douay translation
|> on-line, that should be out of copyright now, and would have them.)
|> 
|> John Ockerbloom
|> -- 
|> ==========================================================================
|> ockerbloom@cs.cmu.edu                4209 Murray Ave., Pittsburgh PA 15217