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If these rules give you as much heartburn as it appears they do, I suggest you take it up with the Author.

Actually, this was the largest posting I'd made on a religious thread in quite some time. As far as I'm concerned, FR's religous threads were gutted quite a while back. And not merely by management. I mean that it was already getting too watered down and chatty all by itself.

Spirited debate and contention between posters has always been - and still is - welcome, provided all are treated with the respect due another creature made in the image of God.

I suspect the more political correctness is enforced at FR, the more you will have a readership incapable of any major effort at activism.

Polite conversation is fine. But if you want to win, you need tough-minded people who just don't give a fig whether some liberal is offended, people who can take it and dish it out, people who get mad and go for broke, people who can stand up to a large number of liberals who hate ever single word they have to say. And that is who FR was in its greatest moments of activism. That's how FR made its mark during the impeachment/Floriduh incidents.

Maybe with the GOP holding power and the lack of threat to gun rights, we don't expect such a fight in the forseeable future. Maybe activism in either party declines inevitably when their party is in power or holds strong position. Or maybe FR wants to go more mainstream. Whatever. But I think we're leaving the hardcore activism behind. Still, that may not be something FR management can do anything about no matter what.

Some people would say that you should just get rid of the religious forum if you're going to water it down. Force the focus back onto the political side. Unless the religious forum reinforces the political side by helping to attract and retain tough-minded activists, I can't see its purpose. But then, I don't have a donor list so the picture might look different from the standpoint of management.

At any rate, I'm pretty much an ex-poster on the religious threads. So don't worry about what I think. I try to stay on the political threads entirely now, learn something about issues and candidates, read articles to help me remember all the fronts on our battle against the Left in both parties.

If the intent is to get rid of the religious forums by strangling them into inanity, that's probably as good a way to marginalize them as just pulling all religious threads outright.

I'll close by observing that effective fighters must fight. Shooters must practice, soldiers must train, cops must target-shoot and practice, boxers must box. These things must be a mental habit because we forget all too soon. For instance, any soldier who leaves the service suffers a substantial decline in combat readiness in only a year or so. It's not about their physical skills nearly as much as it is the ingrained habit of readiness and taking a confident and aggressive stance. FR used to be filled to the brim with combative conservatives, though they might not have been too dainty in polite company. Maybe our biggest problem was our past successes. As much as anything, FR reminds me of a peacetime military, not the elite fighting force we were. But maybe we'll see a revival if Hillary jumps into the race.

I want you to know I thought a long time before I decided to respond to your remarks in #801. I certainly understand your sentiments, and I think I know where you're coming from. At the same time, I believe there is one area where we're using a different definition, and one other area where I simply disagree.

The first is about "love". As I said in the announcement, I don't mean today's idea of something that's always warm and fuzzy. I mean Biblical love, God's love. There is a popular quasi-religious phrase I'm sure you're familiar with, that being "God is love". Even if it were true that one could describe God in one phrase, the phrase "God is love", based on the authority of Scripture could only be half of the phrase. It should be "God is love; God is justice". Or it might better be said that God's love is tempered by justice, while God's justice is constrained by love. I don't think that anyone can review all of God's acts in the Bible and come away with the idea that expressing love is somehow a weakness.

The second of my disagreements has to do with fighting for right, and who can best do that. You don't know anything about me, so you'll just have to accept my word when I tell you that I've known a lot of fighting men. Lived, played and fought with a whole passel of true fighting men. And I have to tell you, GWB, the very best of these fighting men were the most polite and courteous men you could ever meet ... right up to the moment it was time to fight. Based on personal experience, I simply don't agree that one has to be constantly confrontational to be an effective fighter.

I've read some of your comments on the main forum, and I'm sort of hoping you stick around over here - as long as you're not constantly smiting hip and thigh... :)