WWDD?
Rant | Published on April 15, 2008
Detourned image, courtesy Misha.
bOING bOING sprinkled holy water on my blog (I Am Not Worthy), and now faithful and godless alike are weighing in, with the usual signal-to-noise ratio: a handful of closely reasoned, well-argued responses and a farrago of spittle-flecked invective, Alpha Mensa threat-posturing, and off-topic maunderings from the flying snark monkeys. Like Dawkins, I have a day job (albeit a far less exalted one!), so I'm going to address the points raised by the more substantive commenters---whose insightful critiques leave me very much in their debt---sometime in the next few days, perhaps as late as this weekend. Until then...
...watch this space.
I would very strenuously recommend that you not bother, and that you ban comments on your blog. I realize there's a contradiction here in leaving a comment to that effect, but hey, that's life. Blog comments are a waste of time and taking them seriously is a total mistake. If you weren't going to write it before the blog comment, don't write it at all.
Posted by: Giles Bowkett at April 15, 2008 11:27 AMCan't agree. Pruning spambot posts is a pain in the pants, to be sure, but that's the price we pay for our little piece of the commons. It's always open-mike night here at SHOVELWARE (or at least it will be until the trolls and the spammers drown out the more reasoned voices) because I'm naively committed to the idea that one of this medium's big selling points is the fact that it offers an ad-free, non-corporate form of public address...at least for now. You seem to presume that taking any comment seriously mandates taking every comment seriously. (You seem to presume, too, that your comment should be taken seriously. This is what lit geeks call situational irony.) I'm not convinced the one follows logically from the other, just as I'm not convinced that enabling blog comments implies that I live and die by my comment thread. Short Version: Writing is a communicative act. Until they perfect the tinfoil telepathy helmet, I'm going to scribble, scribble, scribble to convey my thoughts to the world outside my skull. If my readers take the time to respond, and if their responses merit a response, and if I have time to scratch one out, I'll do so. I'm interested in dialogues, not monologues, and I think there's an implicit politics in that position. Which is why I'm answering you, here and now.
Posted by: M. Dery at April 15, 2008 03:40 PMWhat I think you are saying is that Dawkins and company are overlooking is that Christianity is a patriarchy. That it is more about male dominance than God.
Posted by: Journeyman at May 6, 2008 10:31 PMPost a comment