hedrick@topaz.UUCP (Charles Hedrick) (09/22/86)
Welcome to mod.religion.christian. The newsgroup mod.religion.christian is for discussions of Christianity and related issues, such as Biblical studies, Christian origins and Church history. Submissions should be sent to topaz!christian. (Due to my confusion, some announcements have mentioned topaz!mrc or topaz!mrc-submit. Those addresses will also work.) Correspondence of an administrative nature should be sent to topaz!christian-request. Topaz talks to all the major backbone machines. Examples of machines that we talk to a lot are harvard, seismo, ut-sally, sri-iu, and cmcl2. Optimal paths from ATT sites tend to go through bonnie. Optimal paths from Bellcore tend to go through rruxqq. Articles will be distributed individually (i.e. not as a digest). I will not modify them (othen than rejecting inappropriate ones...), except to prune unnecessary headers and possibly large pictures in the signature area. I may add my own comment at the end in brackets [like this --Clh] if there is something simple which can avoid a number of people making needless responses. The purpose of moderation is primarily to eliminate long and repetitious discussions. (The moderator is under instructions from the Usenet backbone to control the volume generated by the group.) Of course the usual Usenet canons of good taste will also be applied. Personal attacks and ad hominem argument will not be accepted. A followup should be posted only when it has content that would be worthy of standing on its own. It is best to write an article from scratch, rather than annotating someone else's posting. If you want to respond in a point by point manner, you are encouraged to send the response to the original author. Perhaps after a dialog, one or both of you can post a summary of anything that came out of it. "Kneejerk" responses are discouraged. We know that atheists do not consider it legitimate to cite the Bible as an authority, and that they consider Christians' beliefs to be without evidence. We also know that Christians consider atheist viewpoints to be un-Biblical. It is not necessary to post a response if all it does is point out one of these things. Authors should beware of crossposting to groups that are not interested in Christianity. Crossposting to net.religion.jewish, or whatever it is called now, is probably never appropriate. Readers of that group are in general not interested in Christian origins, even when the topic involves 1st Century Judaism or Jewish attitudes towards Christianity. Readers may be interested to know that there is a mailing list which is more controlled than this newsgroup. Messages are expected to be consistent with orthodox Christianity. In practice traffic is primarily conversations among Evangelical Christians. The moderator will put interested readers in touch the the maintainer of this list. This newsgroup has a history of being somewhat more freewheeling in the subject matter and contents of its discussions than the mailing list. It should be impossible to detect the moderator's personal views by watching his editorial policies. But since people these days seem to expect to know where politicians get their money, perhaps the readers of this group will want to know that the moderator is a Ruling Elder in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). He claims to be one of the few remaining real followers of John Calvin (though not -- shudder -- a Calvinist).