The S.R.C. Charter


 

Soc.religion.christian is a moderated group. This means that all postings must be approved by a moderator (me) before they will be distributed. Your netnews software should automatically transform postings into email to the moderator. Thus you should be able to post to this group just like any other. However some sites have software or configuration problems such that postings do not work, or create multiple copies of the submission. If you have trouble posting, you can also send postings as email directly to me. Please use the email address christian@cs.rutgers.edu. (Mail sent to my personal email address will often be delayed.)

The Purpose of the Group

As I understand it, this is a group for discussion of Christianity and issues related to it. It is not per se a Christian group. By that I mean that contributions from non-Christians or those that other Christians would regard as "heretical" are welcome. However they should be relevant to Christianity. A number of Christian believe I should enforce some doctrinal standards. There are three reasons why I do not:

• Tradition. This group was created by a vote, and many of the people voting for it would not have consented to a moderatorial policy that judged postings based on their theological views.
• Usenet and University policy. Usenet uses lots of resources of various universities and governmental agencies. It would be inappropriate to use these resources for an activity that discriminates against posters based on their religious views.
• Which standards? This group is used by Christians from all the major traditions, including "liberal", "conservative", Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox. It's difficult to imagine doctrinal standards that would not exclude some of those groups.

I take a wide definition of Christianity. For the purposes of this group it includes Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Quakers, Christian Science, etc. (This doesn't necessarily represent a personal endorsement of these groups.)

Criteria for Rejecting Postings

The purpose of moderation is primarily to increase the "signal to noise ratio" of the group. Most "real" postings are accepted. (The majority of submissions are spam.) Those that are rejected generally fall into one of the following categories:

• personal attack, or postings that are likely to generate discussions that are primarily ad hominem
• postings that are primarily attacks on another group, indicating no interest in understanding them.
• postings in areas that have recently been discussed, and which I do not want to restart discussions on. There are certain controversial issues, such as homosexuality, which could dominate the group if allowed to do so. Thus I only allow them to be discussed periodically, once every 6 mo. to a year. [Actually this doesn't seem to be happening at the moment. As of April, 2005, I haven't had to close a discussion for some time.]
• postings irrelevant to the subject matter
• postings that do not make sense on their own (see below)
• postings falling into certain specific categories for which there are specialized groups. This includes
  • talk.origins - discussions of evolution and related issues, in their scientific aspects. The theological implications of creation and exegetical issues involving the creation account are fair game.
  • sci.med.aids - discussions of the medical and social aspects of AIDS
  • talk.abortion - all aspects of abortion
• requests for donations (even for worthy causes) and uses for personal gain (except as follows). Commercial use of Usenet is in flux. For a while it was getting looser. However with the amount of inappropriate email and postings now going around, I've found it necessary to get tighter. The only postings I regularly accept that announce products or services requireing payment are conferences. And even there, I expect the payment to be simply the expenses to attend the conference.
• postings that appear to violate copyright or intellectual property. Obviously I can't always tell when you have taken material from someone else without permission. But if I see any reason to believe that your posting was taken from another source, I will reject it, and ask for confirmation that you have permission to post it. This does not apply to brief quotes from another work, but it does apply to postings of an entire work.

In general when I get a posting that appears to be material that someone else wrote, or that is taken from a published work, I expect a statement at the beginning or end indicating its copyright status and your permission to post it. Copyright is one issue, but I am concerned about permission even for non-copyrighted items. I consider it impolite to submit something as a posting without permission from the original author. If people on a newsgroup were discussing something I had written, I'd like to know about it.

In most cases rejected postings can be made acceptable by minor changes. When the issue is permission, in most cases all you need is a note at the beginning indicating that you have permission from the author to post. I don't keep copies of rejected postings longer than 24 hours. So you should resubmit the posting with the necessary changes or explanatory notes.

I almost always send mail when I reject a posting. This means that if you don't see either the posting or a reject notice, some communications failure has probably happened.

Edits to Postings

I may make some edits to postings. These changes fall into one of the following categories:

• where a posting includes a previous posting, I may abbreviate the included material, or replace it with a summary. I may also supply additional background about the context of the discussion if it seems to be necessary. Doing this intelligently takes time, so I make no guarantees that I'll do this for you. I'm just as likely to send the posting back to you and ask you to abbreviate the quotations.
• I sometimes correct obvious spelling and grammatical errors. In fact I do this very seldom, but sometimes it is obvious that English is not an author's native language, and I take pity on them.
• I will sometimes add my own comments. I normally do this when there's a fairly obvious response, in an attempt to avoid getting 50 identical responses. I will also sometimes suggest fruitful issues that I'd like responders to think about, if it seems likely that when left on its own a posting would tend to generate mostly flames. These comments are always in brackets and signed with my initials [like this --clh], and are almost always in a section clearly separated from the main body of the posting, at the beginning or end.

I do not modify postings in other ways. A few times in the past I have gotten postings that were mostly fine but had one paragraph that was offensive or otherwise unacceptable. Removing one portion of a posting -- even when I included an explanation of what I did and why -- has always resulted in bad feelings.

About the Moderator

My own views should not affect the way I do moderation. However in the interests of openness, I will tell you what they are. I am an Elder in the Presbyterian Church (USA). My theology is very strongly influenced by Calvin, although my views on predestination may not be exactly the same as his. I do not believe in the inerrancy of Scripture, but I am at the conservative end of those who do not. I am a Vulcan. This is visible both in my philosophy and my temperament. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations is central to my view of the way God works. This commitment is very useful for a moderator.