Bible Question:
Dear Bill Mc, I think you brought up a very important point in a recent post. If a person comes to this forum looking for help and answers, and sees nothing but confusion, then they will be hurt instead. There are several solutions to this problem. I would like to share a few ideas that I have. 1. After a person asks a question, only have three people respond initially, and wait for the original person to elaborate again before everyone else jumps in. I know that there's no way to stop people from posting, but those of us who post most often (see the top 20 in my voting post recently) could just agree amoung ourselves to refrain from posting if there are already 3 responses. 2. While a thread is "alive and kicking", we could all agree to stay within the scope of the original question. In other words, if the original question is about baptism, we refuse to digress into a debate about free will. At the same time we could preface our statements with a phrase such as, "from a perspective which believes that we have the ability to choose to accept or deny God's free gift of salvation, we believe such and such about this issue, based on these verses." Then others who didn't agree with the perspective could instead of arguing that point say, "that makes sense from that perspective, but from the perspective that God alone decides the salvation of mankind, we believe such and such about the issue, based on these verses". Then what is being discussed is the original issue, and if anyone wants to discuss which perspective is correct, they can start a seperate thread on that. 3. After a thread has pretty much closed down, the person who started it (or another of their choosing) could write up a summary statement. This would be done after many people had already given their ideas on a subject, and a certain time period (perhaps a week) had passed since anything new was added. There could be a standard heading for these type of posts (perhaps "Consensus of the Thread"). That way at the end of each thread there would be one post that people could go to in the future who were interested in that topic. This would also be an opportunity to show that although we disagree on some details, we are unified on the essentials. This summary thread could focus on the overall answer to the question that everyone seemed to agree to while just mentioning some of the nuances of specific posts. An example where I tried to do this can be found by searching "native consensus". I think that if we could agree (or at least many of us) to do these things, that it would make this forum a much more helpful place for others to come to for guidance and truth. There could of course be other, better plans, but this is what came to my mind. What do you guys think? |
Bible Answer: 1. I agree with this. And it certainly places great responsibility on those first answering. 2. I agree. Stay on topic. What a novel idea! 3. Also sounds good. |