Online discussion policy
This page outlines our standard operating procedure for responding to comments and feedback. Its purpose is to prevent FUD while correctly setting expectations around how we moderate our discussions. This policy describes our general rules for interacting with comments and feedback, and admits of reasonable exceptions.
This is a project by and for men who are interested in representing God’s father-rule into the world as accurately as they can, and in being useful tools in his hands to the best of their ability. Our mission, therefore, is men who are seeking to understand and undertake the work of dominion God made them for. Men who are not interested in hearing what we have to say about this—about rightly ordering ourselves and our world, about developing the virtues and skills necessary to this task, about building God’s house by building our own—are not our mission.
Our policy is to engage with people only if it will advance our mission: as much as possible to cultivate this kind of discussion, while eliminating any that competes with it.
Piety & perception
Though we are not shepherds in a congregation, we always seek to remain above reproach, and to have a good reputation with those outside the church, as Paul requires (1 Timothy 3:2, 7; Titus 1:6). However, we define this requirement by Scripture, rather than by modern intuitions which would condemn the speech of Jesus himself, and much of Paul’s own behavior, as contradictory to it. To be above reproach and have a good reputation, as defined by Scripture, is compatible with behavior that is considered insufficiently winsome, a bad witness, insulting or offensive, and which may result in receiving innumerable public beatings or frequent death threats (2 Corinthians 11:23). Paul himself five times received from the Jews thirty-nine lashes, three times was beaten with rods, and once was stoned almost to death (vv. 24–25). Jesus was crucified.
Because of the long-term feminizing influence on our culture, niceness has replaced love in the second greatest commandment (cf. Matthew 22:39). Thus, the kind of men who provoke anger and upset, as Jesus and Paul did, seem incompatible with the kind of men who are above reproach and have good reputations with outsiders. Yet Paul and the Spirit of Jesus were not hypocrites when they penned 1 Timothy 3:2–7 and Titus 1:6. There is a road, which we try to walk, between the ditches of being jerks for Jesus, and being emotionally manipulated by Christian cry-bullies and secular tone police.