Not that anyone will care, but I have removed Better Bibles Blog from my list of links. It has become over the last couple of years a bastion of white male conservatism, promoting a fundagelical agenda and driving out any form of real discussion.
Now that the administrators have invited a blatantly dishonest white spremacist to contribute, it’s time to say good riddance.
Update: it appears I misinterpreted the phrase “moderated status”; Peter Kirk informs me that Hobbins has not been invited to contribute.
Doesn’t materially change my opinion of BBB, which is (my opinion, that is) mostly motivated by one individual whose folksy style masks a wilful ignorance of critical thought and a rock-hard intolerance of anything outside a carefully circumscribed conservative belief system.
My opinion is overly harsh perhaps because I grew up in the same heretical sect as he, and suffered for it.
It is not true that John Hobbins has been invited to be a contributor to BBB. He has made some comments, uninvited and currently moderated, some of which have been approved and several of which have not been – including a few yesterday which were published for a time and then removed.
I regret that currently all the contributors to BBB, of which I am one, are white males – or at least relatively white: at least one has some Native American ancestry. The one female contributor we did have had to leave for personal reasons, and perhaps because of the merciless way she was attacked by certain people including your alleged white supremacist. If you can propose anyone female and/or non-white who can contribute to BBB in an intelligent manner, we would be very willing to consider her or him.
Nor do I accept that BBB has been “promoting a fundagelical agenda”. Some of our commenters have, it is true, but we try to be open to all viewpoints in comments. But several of us contributors are by no means fundamentalists and take issue with anything on the blog which looks like fundamentalism.
Thanks Peter; I have updated the post.
The reason Suzanne (and I, in my updated post) are harshly critical of people who display certain attitudes is that we have been greatly damaged by people espousing those attitudes, and believe the harm comes not from particular people who happen to believe particular ideas, but from the ideas themselves, which enable and motivate people to act in harmful ways.
The Top 50 Biblioblogs lists a number of female bloggers, and though I haven’t gone through the list to find pictures of the bloggers, you should be able to find persons of non-caucasian ancestry therein.
As for “alleged white supremacist”, the country I grew up in was utterly consumed in an orgy of ethnic violence, and will not recover for generations, if ever, so anything that smacks of ethnic prejudice makes me see red, for which I most emphatically do not apologize.
Scholars tend to forget that ideas can lead to real-world harm.