Pages

Thursday, July 31, 2008

Orthodox Bans

What is it about the Orthodox? Is their lack of integrity native to their religion?

Within the past year, two Orthodox participants in discussions here have earned a ban. In both instances warnings were issued almost from the time they first began posting here - not due to the content of their writing and argumentation, repetitive though it was, but due to their demagoguery in the comboxes.

Not only that, they both proceeded to defy their bans from the time they were issued. One would think that they would be at least somewhat concerned about maintaining some sort of testimony both personally and for their denomination. It doesn't look good for Orthodoxy to have representatives of their group who behave in such a manner.

What's more the second of these, Lvka, not only violated his ban, but he can't even keep his own word. In a comment since removed, Lvka actually agreed with my vote to permaban him, because without it, he wouldn't be able to resist the temptation to misbehave.

So much for Orthodox integrity. Currently, Lvka and Orthodox are not welcome here, not now, not ever. When Turretinfan urged clemency, I told him that I'm always open to the lifting of a ban. However, I'm not the only contributor to this blog. Unless the others here are open to lifting it, I will not lift it. I've tried that with Orthodox himself too, and he demonstrated he could not be trusted. Indeed, he took to posting pseudonymously for a time too, as if we couldn't figure out it was him.

This sort of infantile behavior will not be tolerated. As a reminder, this blog is also a ministry. We provide this service free of charge to the community, but that doesn't mean that the community gets to set their own terms when participating here. If people who are banned have something to say, then they can use their own blogs to say it - not this one. They wouldn't appreciate it if we showed up at an Orthodox church service and started behaving in this manner. We'd be ejected quickly. The same rules apply to them when they come here, as it would apply to us in such a situation.

So, let the record publicly show the entire blogging community that Lvka and Orthodox are not to be trusted to behave. If they are participating on your blogs, you might want to keep that in mind. I would urge other Orthodox bloggers, like Perry Robinson and JNorm -both of whom do a pretty good job and for whom, while I personally disagree with you both I have some respect for the way you comport yourselves - to have a word with their two peers about such childish behavior.

Get it together, Lvka, and you might just have your ban lifted later on, but it does not help you to act the way you are currently. Any continued posts from you in any thread will tell us that you don't believe that what you say here is worth the bandwidth, and we can do with you what we did with Orthodox - hunt down your posts in every thread, and delete them on the premise that you agree that your posts are without value and should be deleted.