Imagine a place where people could all come together and say what they felt moved to say without fear of banishment or exclusion.
What a balanced place that would be. Hmmm..now I think about it, maybe that place already exists. I think they call it, Reddit.com. At least it seems a good emulation of that ideal.
This forum has always interested me, but it was only as interesting as the level of chaos that it allowed to happen. The process of continually refining the the forum areas until everyone had a home seems quite a good way of getting people to organise themselves likes birds of a feather. What I think is missing is the autonomy of those areas to run themselves as they see fit.
I wonder whether this could ever be replicated on this domain name or whether I could just go to where it's happening already.
*goes off to reddit.com to search for christian orientated reddits.*
Sorry..just thinking out loud. :-D
Yeah, I've frequently observed that when it comes to the liberal or progressive sub-areas of the site and the congregational areas for churches that are socially or theologically progressive, people are sometimes inhibited from agreeing with their own bishops, priests, and pastors by site rules.
It's like if you go to the Episcopalian area, a church that has openly gay bishops and priests, and performs same-sex blessings, you can't advocate for gay rights. If you are in a progressive sub-forum like this one who's very name argues for inclusion of people who might be outside the theological bounds of the Nicene Creed because they aren't trinitarian or don't believe in the virgin birth or view God in a different way, they can't come here and talk about that.
Heck, you can go to the Roman Catholic forum and agree with the Pope that evolution is real and, to use his words "God is not a wizard", or paraphrase St. Augustine of Hippo's 6th century condemnation of people who rejected what we'd today call science, and get nailed for not being properly respectful of creationistists.
Assuming that they want traffic and traffic is money (Ad-views, etc.), it would make sense to allow progressive areas to govern themselves. It makes little sense to even have the areas if we're going to exclude people who could be clergy in progressive churches from expressing what they could put in a sermon.
Has anyone talked to the new site owner about this? Maybe someone could private message him and raise the issue. The admins and stuff aren't really empowered to even grant site rules exceptions, I don't think. It has to come from the top. I think there is an assumption that the owner wouldn't go along, but he's never said anything about theology, has he? I'd encourage people to ask him about allowing these sort of exceptions in certain parts of the site.
Anyway, as to the two alternatives suggested:
1. Reddit isn't really a message forum. I like message forums running software like this one does. So that isn't the right alternative for me.
2. I would be interested in a site like this one using the same or similar forum software that was more open in allowing progressive thought to be expressed. In fact, somewhere back like 5-8 years ago, I started one. It didn't work out because I didn't have the money, technical expertise, or people skills to do it right. Eventually, I got rid of it. Running it was too much for me. But it can be done. If someone were to start another site like that, I'd probably stop by and say hi. It'd be a big time sink for them- it's very hard to get members to go from one site to another, even if they complain about the first site a lot and the other site is in theory exactly what they want, many will just not go or say they'll go and not go or pop by for a post and then never again- it's like herding cats.
Gotta be advertised heavily. I remember lugging my laptop around everywhere everyday to keep pushing conversations along, starting new threads, and getting links out there to bring in new people just get any kind of conversational momentum on my old site.
But I would love for someone to make the effort and invest the time and money and energy and try to do what I did. I think there is still room for it. It can be done. I was the #1 Google result for the two words that made up the name of the site I had back in the day, and that was before Google had personalized results, so anyone that searched for those two words would have had my site come up. When I let the domain name expire and my ownership lapse, some holding company registered it and was trying to sell the URL for $10,000 or something ridiculous (They never got it, they are still advertising it as for sale like 5-8 years later).