Is not the 'Christian-baiting' along the same lines as those who would quash your ideas? You sound like a highly-intelligent person, and I would like to hear your ideas. If there is a proper place to post these ideas, I would like to know. I will warn you now though: my faith is strong, and I have had experiences that prove to me what I believe is true. However, we can discuss these ideas without resorting to sterotyping. We are all free to choose which path we take; for me to degrade your choices is as bad as if you would degrade mine. We can try to convince each other; we should not degrade into personal insults.

Thank you for your patience with me. Since I am new at this, I know I may have broken an unwritten rule or two. With this many people, we can and do have major disagreements. We all should discuss this intelligently, not derogatory. (I do include all the Christians that do not follow this rule, and I know there are many)

You may have a point re where I post such things as I am not yet used to the rules governing etiquette on these forums. I'm used to a far more open and freely expressive environment within the forums on which I usually post, (such as Piston Heads where you'd expect it to be cars only but the forum topics wander all over the place). To say that posting on a subject other than the technical in a forum called The Community I find a little weird though; what kind of a community would that turn out to be? I think that in principle posting opinion on the content of a wiki in a forum that pertains to be the wikis' community forum is highly relevant and to call it a waste of your time is not exactly saying a lot about the strength of your community now is it? Maybe we should debate that if the rules permit such a thing…

I think that my closing remark on this post is to point out the difference between learning to live with ideas with which one disagrees and simply not debating them. Surely they mean different things? In fact it could be argued that debating such ideas is learning to live with them although admittedly it does require the another party to respond to the points raised. So if you are serious about about the content of your post then perhaps discussion would be an idea rather than simply trying to quieten voices with which you disagree.

SC

The beauty of Wikidot (besides being the best content-management option I've ever used) is its free nature: if you want to debate the "Systematic Theology" wiki manager, and his forum doesn't allow it, create your own wiki. You can even link to his pages to give the public a chance to know how much more enlightened your ideas are.

Now, being a non-Anglo, non-White, non-Protestant myself, I take issue with your characterization of the god in the Bible as a "white, middle class god" (even if many folks in the Bible Belt would like to believe that). I'm not a Bible expert (and do not intend to become one), but as far as my knowledge of history goes, the god described there is originally Jewish; it doesn't differ much (at least in fundamentalist approaches) from the Muslim god; and, when Christianity spread, (Northern) Europeans were late-comers, Ethiopians and Egyptians being among the pioneers.

Now, if by "white" you mean Semitic, Middle-Eastern, I would absolutely agree with you. But I doubt that's what you had in mind…

I could not agree more!

SC

Expand your horizons a little and see that your fairy tale view of the world could not exist.

SC

PS. I shall check back to see whether you are prepared to have your view challenged or whether you prefer to scuttle off instead.