A Reply To The Arrogance of an (Anonymous) Critic

If you are able, or you have time to read the previous post on this blog, the post entitled "Was Jesus a Poor Man?", you may or may not find it interesting, and you may or may not disagree with the opinions expressed therein. I am happy either way, the opinions are mine, the speculations are mine, I happen to think they are reasonably sound, and I am happy to stand by them. But I am also happy to allow others to disagree with them if they wish. They are just opinions.

In order to provoke what I hope will be a lively and fruitful discussion, I posted the article on Qassia. I should say that I think Qassia is a very good site in its way, apart from one or two faults. The principal of these is the practice of screening. When an article is submitted by a member, it has to be "screened" by at least 12 other members before it can be published. This involves giving a grade fron 0 (awful) to 5 (outstanding) and then these grades are averaged out when the article is published. Thus the article for ever after has that grade on Qassia. The article that I mentioned ended up with a grade of 3.50 which I suppose is not bad, and seems to show that 6 voters went for a 3 (average) and 6 went for a 4(good job).

The reason I mention this in such detail is that it gives very ignorant and dogmatic people a chance to have an influence on events. Another feature of the screening system is that you are allowed to click on a statement that will give feedback to the author, supposedly designed to help the author of the article, but most often used by said ignorant, dogmatic people to try to show off their feeling of superiority. To cut a long story short, one reader flagged the article for, and I quote, "Some or all of the information is not true."

What information? The article doesn't give any information. It's pure speculation from beginning to end, it's a statement of OPINION. How can this be helpful feedback? Well, of course, it isn't designed to be helpful at all, but to be spiteful. What the critic is trying to say, is that they don't AGREE with the article, and if they had come right out and said so in a comment, they would have made themselves more worthy of respect. To say that someone whose opinion they do not agree with is, by definition, not telling the truth, shows a deep vein of arrogance, which, however, they are not prepared to back up by putting forward in public their own counter-opinion.

It's possible (and again, this is pure speculation LOL) that the person thought the article author was trying to undermine Christianity in some way. But, as was said in the footnote to the original article, nothing could be further from reality. The author of the article is actually trying to work to strengthen Christianity by moving away from fundamentalist dogma, and from useless myths perpetuated by careless reading of the text.

Another user, whose (very interesting) article I read last week, told us that her article had been flagged as having grammatical and/or spelling mistakes. This was preposterous. We all went throught the article carefully and could find nothing wrong. No errors of grammar. One word ("focussed") had a British spelling, which, given that the author herself was British, was hardly surprising. Our conclusion was that the person who did the flagging was self-important and a bit loopy.

So, all in all, Qassia is a good idea, but it suffers from its policy of allowing the idiot element to have too much power. Sphere: Related Content