LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

I hated to do it, but I had to pull the plug on the "Chiron" post. The main reason was also the main complaint- there really was not a connection to any sort of Dominionist angle in the original post.

Let's clarify a few things: some Christian religious sects tend to almost target themselves for a bit of ridicule and razzing, but that isn't the purpose of this community. I'm not saying that humor is prohibited, but this isn't meant to be a snark site. I can't remember the username of the actual religious snark site that is on LJ, but someone named it a while ago.

To reiterate: Please keep the snarkasm about Catholics, 'fundies', Mormons and such on your own journals, along with any rantage. Right now, posting is open for members, but I don't want to have to make posting here a moderated activity. The team here has enough to do already.

Let's try to be kind and considerate of one another, please.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Hi, all-

I've increased the font size by a couple of notches. What do you think?

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY einatlanta)

Hi out there! I'm two months along now in the tagging project over here, and I have a new disambiguation question for everyone. Currently there are three tags that overlap (christian zionism, israel, israel and lebanon). It occurs to me that we not only need to decide which of these terms to use, but whether or not the concept of dominionism and zionism really should apply to all posts regarding the middle east. Please vote!

[Error: Invalid poll ID 1013131]

For those of you new here, this is the third tagging poll associated with this project. You can see the last poll by clicking here. The last poll also links to the first poll.

As always, you can help with the tagging process! Just tag up your entries as you post them - the best way to do so is to hit the "edit tags" button after your entry has been posted, and choose tag terms from the drop-down list provided. To pick multiple terms, just hold down the control key while you click. Thanks Again!

( more details on project )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY idragosani)

Folks, this is getting to be too much!

As requested earlier, please put your introductory posts in the original census post thread and NOT as individual posts to the community. All of the informational posts are getting swallowed up in the storm.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Hey, folks- please confine your introductory posts to the intro thread. While it's great the folks are introducing themselves, it's kind of drowning out other posts that are a little more pertinent to the community. If you've gone and made an 'independent' post, please copy and paste it to the intro thread and delete the 'indy' post.

We have nearly 1400 folks here. I figure that about a third are going to post. Please be considerate. Even I posted on the original thread, so there's no excuse.

Thanks, all.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY wyldraven)

It was actually our intention that the introductions be made as comments to the census post. If you all wouldn't mind, we would very much prefer that to the individual introductions. The potential 1400 new posts would be overwhelming to most of our members. Thanks.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY catvincent)

EDIT:
NB - Please put your introduction posts on THIS THREAD ONLY - we're getting swamped by the individual intro posts on the main list! Thanks.


Since Dark Christian has increased membership so much over the last few months - and also to see just how diverse a bunch we are - we're asking everyone here who is willing to post a short introduction about themselves.

You don't have to post any information you don't want to share - and you can be as detailed as you want if you do join in.

The main things we'd like to hear about you are:

Who you are - your LJ handle (and if you are so inclined, your real name).

What you do - work, student, whatever. (Again, only be specific if you really want to).

Your beliefs - religion, political and whatever else matters to you.

How you came here - what drew you to join DC and how long you've been around.

What can you do - what active efforts you are doing or are willing to do to oppose Dominionism.

Anything else you'd care to add - your age, sexuality, your family status, whatever matters to you that you want to share with us.

Guess I'm first...

I'm Ian Vincent. Most folk know me as 'Cat'. I live in Bristol, England.

I'm founder/director of a company which specialises in paranormal security - ghost-busting, curse-breaking, (non-violent, non-denominational) exorcism and the like.

My beliefs are best described as 'eclectic' - though raised in a not-very-devout Church of England home, I'm now a Goddess-worshipping Taoist heretic with elements of various occult/shamanic traditions and a flavour of Discordianism and the use of sex-magic as a sacrament. As far as the beliefs of others go, I think all belief systems have an element of truth to them - and that none of them have *all* the truth.
That includes my beliefs!

Politically, I'm a cynical skeptic - mostly I believe in equal human rights for all and anything that gets in the way of that (especially for reasons of power or profit) makes me quite annoyed.

I joined DC quite early on - long ago enough that I can't remember how I got here!

Aside from being a Moderator here, I try to spread alternatives to the Dominionist mindset/memes wherever I can. I'm lucky to have a wide network of friends involved in various forms of activism (from womens issues to Deep Green alternatives) as well as writers in many fields. Between us, those memes get quite widely spread.
I'm always looking for other ways to make the message go wider.

Somehow, I managed to make it to be 43 years old.

I'm in a long-term poly triad with two wonderful women (which has lasted longer than most of my friends' straight marriages...) so queer rights and support/recognition of non-traditional family groups is very important to me. Having gone from low-lower-working class to middle-class over my lifetime, I'm quite sensitive to class issues - and when I get intense or angry my voice becomes rather Cockney!

Enough about me.
Over to you...

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

While I know that some folks have lots of fun poking at trolls on other communities, this isn't the place to do so. All it does is bring them here. That last post went a little too far, and I had to delete it. I do not want this place to turn into an arena of pissing matches between trolls and taunters of trolls. nebris, you're on notice. Don't do it again. Please brag about your exploits on your own journal, and not here. And don't drag this community into your pissing matches outside of it.

And what I have said to nebris I also echo to all here: We will not tolerate this kind of stuff.

Let's get back on topic. I declare a moratorium on all discussion of WFI, its blogs and its members, unless they actually are infesting computers with malware. Any future posts about this group will be deleted.

Thanks, all. Let's resume our normal discourse, shall we?

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY einatlanta)

Hi regular readers and new! This is an update on the ongoing tagging project here I started a month ago. Since then we've had a couple of polls on how people want to find things; you can read the questions and see the results for the first one here, and for the second one here.

As a result of these polls, the media tag was abolished and entires sorted by format of media (books, movies, news, video, radio, podcast). Establishment clause was supplanted by church-state issues as a search term. Terri Schiavo gained her own tag and was taken out of women's health and congress, but kept in with politics. Marantha, Every Nation, and Campus Crusade are all cross-referenced.

Next up: pulling Christian Marketing out of the Culture Wars category. My question for y'all this week is just - Have I missed anything? I know we're still tagging up the backlog - I'm just now starting July of 2005 - but have I missed any good tags that would be useful? Are there redundancies that have been overlooked in our tag list? Feel free to click around on the 'explore community tags" link there on the side and let me know what you think.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Hello, everyone. I have noted that we've suddenly gained nearly 100 newcomers over the last evening. I want to welcome you, and ask you to read and heed our Guidelines on our front page. By joining this community, you have agreed to follow them. The moderator team is watchful- we want you to have a good visit.

That said, I want to welcome you here, and hope that you find interesting and enlightening things to learn. This is not a bash or a snark site, but it is critical of Christian extremists. If you're the sort that is sensitive to shining light into the dark corners of your faith, you might not be comfy here. However, if you have some 'how come' questions about your faith and some of its practices that keep being brushed off, we might be able to help you. We have tons of tags and links to explore, and a Wiki for you to join and use, too. There are people of many beliefs here, so be respectful of them.

Read deep, play nice, have a good visit. And, if you would, please introduce yourselves!

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY einatlanta)

Hello all! This week I'm still tagging away, and I'm only about two years behind the current entries now. Last week we had a great poll where over 150 readers let me know how they would like to find things. Most of the questions had strong results, but unsurprisingly the last question - about categorizing the Marantha, Every Nation, and Campus Crusade folks - was a close one, with the most popular choice getting only 42.9% of the vote. The reason the answer to this question was a close run was because it was really a question about disambiguation, or how to agree on the specific meaning and use of related terms.

I expect this week's poll to also produce close-run results, because it is all about disambiguating some terms. I know some of the questions below may seem picky, but they are important - knowing how the community answers these questions will help me catalog things correctly, and ultimately that can help us all find the information we need. I will implement the results of that last poll into the tagging process as soon as y'all can help me with these interesting little questions...

[Error: Invalid poll ID 987239]

As always, you can help with the tagging process! Just tag up your entries as you post them - the best way to do so is to hit the "edit tags" button after your entry has been posted, and choose tag terms from the drop-down list provided. To pick multiple terms, just hold down the control key while you click. Thanks Again!

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

In the interest of fairness, and to assuage my curiosity, I have a question for the community.

Is this image offensive? It's on the community userinfo page, so it is possible to have missed it. It's been there since nearly Day One.




To my eyes, Jesus doesn't look too happy to be holding that weapon, even though it is obviously a toy, as indicated by the red tip on the barrel. Such a marking is a federally mandated indicator to make sure that law enforcement officers do not mistake it for a genuine weapon. He seems to be saying, "Here- this is your weapon, not mine. I am a man of peace." The picture was meant to illustrate the large break between Christ's teachings and what some of his more militant believers want him to represent.

It's a subtle message, but it's there for those who have the eyes to see it and understand the irony.

Your interpretation of the picture might be different, which is what art is all about. However, if it truly is offensive, I'll take it down.

[Error: Invalid poll ID 986031]

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY einatlanta)

I just took the tag sidebar off the main page. Don't worry; tags are still on entries if we've put tags on. The page was taking a really long time to load (as alobar pointed out) because of all the tagging I've been doing. I am now moving the tag index over to the wiki. This may not be fully operational again until Monday afternoon; I will update this entry when I finish.

Please pardon the construction dust while cataloging continues. If you disagree with this decision, please let me know!

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY einatlanta)

Hi folks! I've been tagging away for the past week. I started with the very first post in 2003, and now I'm about halfway through February of 2005; this is when the volume of posts here really started to pick up, so I have some questions about how y'all would like to find things here.

Remember, if you'd like to help out, the best thing you can do is tag up your entries as you post them. To do this, hit the "edit tags" button after you post, and choose tags from the drop down menu. To choose more than one tag, hold down your control key as you click away. I plan on keeping this poll up for a week to get a good sample of replies.

[Error: Invalid poll ID 983072]

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY einatlanta)

Hello, my name is einatlanta, and I'm a librarian. As a result, I have to catalog and organise things. I just can't help it.

Currently as a mod over here I've decided to make it my goal to go back through the dark_christian archives and tag up all the entries. Tags are the little words you see at the bottom of each submission around here. If you click on one of the tags, a page showing all articles tagged with that word will appear. Tagging articles helps everyone searching for information on a specific topic find what they need more quickly.

I plan to tag around six past entries a day until all the old submissions are tagged up for cross-referecing goodness! Anyone who is a mod welcome to help me with the backlog.

Even if you're not a mod, you can help too! Here are some tips for tagging your posts on dark_christian as they are made.

*Try to use tags that already exist in our catalog. The easiest way to do this is *after* you publish up your post, hit the "edit tags" button. On the edit screen a scroll box with all existing tags for this blog will appear. Select as many existing tags as you think you need. This prevents things from getting too subdivided; for instance, we use the tag "military" for all posts about evangelical activities in the USAF and Army here. If you start tagging them seperately, those researching will have to work harder to get the big picture of wider movement in our armed forces.

*Use last names only when tagging a specific person. Not every person mentioned on this blog needs to be indexed, but if you feel that someone is important enough, use their last name only when tagging. For instance, Jerry Falwell is tagged as Fallwell, Ted Haggard as Haggard. This will build pages around specific active individuals.

*Keep it simple. You will rarely need more than three tags for any entry. Most articles can be categorized with one or two tags. Yes, tagging is fun, but don't get over excited.

Tagging new articles as we go along will cut down on the backlog of posts to tag. Having the entries in this community better organized will help newcomers determine if something has been posted before, and what this comm is all about. All help is welcome!

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Hello, readers-

I just completed a check of the links on our Links sidebar, and did a bit of editing. I've added a few sites (see bottom of sidebar), and took away others which had either 404'd or become 'cobwebs'.

If you have a relevant site or blog that you would like to add to the sidebar, let me know. I'll check it out and add it if it looks good. There is a limited amount of space on the sidebar, so if it goes over the limit, we'll just have to post the link.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Just checked our stats page, and we've just cleared 1100 subscribers to this community. Welcome aboard! Hope you'll join the blogswarm this weekend! I'm getting ready to create and post the icon for it.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Hello, folks. We're about to cross another threshold: 1100 subscribers to this community. I never thought it would breach 100 readers, much less 1000, but it seems that the interest in this rather esoteric subject grows day by day. I am glad: the more people who understand what is happening to Christianity in America and its hijacking by political (and even fascist) interests, the easier it will be to counteract the damage to this faith by these wolves in sheeps clothing. That was the original purpose of this community, and it still is. I want to thank readers here for their contributions and intelligent (and non-bashing) contributions to this community.

I don't do this too often, but from time to time, it's nice to start a thread where we can introduce ourselves. I think we've accumulated quite a diverse readership, and people with many diverse beliefs, too. If you want to introduce and tell us a bit about yourself, and perhaps tell us how you found this site (I'm interested in that- Technorati has a ton of links to this site now), please do.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

I suppose that I should make this a monthly post, but I prefer to believe that folks here read the 'front door' on their own. But, just to make sure you know the rules, I will post the most pertinent ones here:

We respectfully request that you refrain from posting quizzes, flames, bashes, petitions, 'spams' for other Christian communities or any religious material which does not fit the simple guidelines above. Such entries will be deleted.

It is OK to criticize policies, judgement, ideas, etc. if you do so in a civilized and respectful manner. Do not attack the PERSON themselves. Bash away on your own blogs, please.

Do not post links to other people's Live Journals without their explicit permission.

Please avoid posting speculative or fearmongering articles- what they're already doing is bad enough without adding fuel (and foilhattery) to the fire. (The moderators have the ability to do research, and will do so, to determine if an article falls into this category.) Again, save stuff like that for your own blogs.

Please use discretion in posting 'act now!' articles. They must be relevant to the subject discussed.

Articles or posts which have no bearing on the subject will be deleted. We do use discretion when reading the articles- if an article does not specifically mention Dominionism, it does not mean that we will automatically remove it- but it should be part of the overall purpose of the community. For example, while an article about a Supreme Court nomination might not mention the influence of the Christian Right in the selection, it is clear that the selection of the Justice will have a lot of influence on the direction of church-state matters in the future. Such articles are permitted.

If you are posting an article from another source, please do not copy it in whole. Post an excerpt and a link to that article. This will keep us in good graces with the "Fair Use" requirements in copyright law. "Fair Use" shouldn't be more than three paragraphs.

There are people on this board from many diverse faiths. Please treat them with courtesy and respect. No bashing means no bashing, and it applies to all beliefs here- including Atheism and non-Abrahamic faiths. This is not a place to be prosetlysing or trying to convert people. Nor is this a place to debate why Catholics or Mormons are or are not True Christians. Trolls will be swiftly removed and banned from this community.

Mind your manners. Snarkiness and sarcasm are really not welcome here. If you feel the urge to start sniping or snarking, sit on your hands until the urge passes. We will show repeat offenders the door.

Joining and/or posting to this community means that you agree to adhere to the guidelines of this community.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

I had to go home with the flu today. And guess what I found in my mailbox? If you guess 'a begging letter with a 'magic hankie' in it,' you win.

Looks like these folks did a huge mailing of them all over the country. Mine said 'resident', so I know that I didn't end up on somebody's beggarlist.

I'll bet their bank account is really hurting- that thing weighs a lot more than a standard first class letter.

But I digress. I noted two posts about these things, and while the commentary about them in the first post ranged from amusing to outrageous, it really doesn't have anything to do with the main purpose of this community. I came close to deleting them, but decided that there was too much amusing and insightful commentary in them to do so. Just stay away from bashing, please.

I could go into a long diatribe about magical objects and their proper preparation or another equally long diatribe about how ultimately useless and downright silly and even sacrilegious such things are, but I am certain that the collective brainpower in this board could come up with arguments for both sides.

I have several new mods on board learning the ropes. This is an excellent exercise for all of us- and the guiding question should be: How does this tie in with the real purpose of this community? Is this something that could be better snarked about on our own journals? Is it necessary to bunnyhunt the resources? I don't think so. I am sure they'll get all sorts of backlash- and a pile of money from the gullible and superstitious.

There will always be religiously spattered 'outreach' to the weak and vulnerable. I personally think that things like this are a travesty of what Christ taught, and if he has one of these silly, poorly created things, he's drying tears with them. His words are being used to exploit the very people who should be helped. That church could do a lot more good by sending out offers to come to classes about financial (and reality) management, not offering a hokey little quark-attractor.

I'll admit that I am curious: who all got one? Just name your state, or if it has several major cities, your city. If someone knows what the bulk mail rate is, we could calculate how much money this organization wasted sending out magic hankies rather than helping the poor like Christ taught.

That is all I want to say about this. It isn't "Christian", that's for sure.