Biblical Hermeneutics site: mostly harmful

[cellio]

The Stack Exchange network has many great Q&A sites, several of which I'm pretty heavily involved with. (I just passed 100k reputation network-wide.) My first and favorite site is Mi Yodeya, the site for Jewish questions and answers. The quality level is very high; I've learned a lot.
SE started with Stack Overflow, for expert programmers, and

Comments

[browngirl]

ouch, all my sympathies.

[cellio]

Thanks. Given the way it turned out, I'm glad to be rid of the site. The divorce was actually more than a year ago (not long after I posted this), but we've only just settled the custody case, so to speak. (The account deletion was last week.) I'm free! They can't harm me any more; at worst they can say nasty things about me behind my back, but people everywhere can do that, so there's no point in worrying about that. I won't be there to hear it.

[thnidu]

Quora's just as bad. Most of the questions on Atheism topics are either proselytish or trolling, mostly from Xtn POV but occasionally Muslim. I'm not an atheist* and I'm Jewish,° but...
Oh, now I know what icon to use for THIS comment!

* Consistent agnostic: I don't know, and I don't think you do either.
° For those who may not know (not you, Monica!), that's not redundant.

[chaos_wrangler]

Glad to hear you made it out of there. I've been reading your posts about this and wincing, and thinking that maybe it's been an "unrecognized good" that I don't have time to get involved in on-line religion discussions b/c I don't think that I'd be able to tell the difference between safe and not-safe until it was too late.

"Unrecognized good" - there's a tradition/philosophy/something that everything that happens is for a benefit, but we often don't see enough of the picture to know what it is. Sometimes we do though... my best example is the fact that I had a one-day stomach flu a couple of months before before I got married, which I did *not* appreciate at the time. But then when I got sick on my wedding day I recognized it as "nothing serious, will feel better tomorrow, and in the meantime do X, Y, and Z to lessen the symptoms" and then I was so focused on not appearing sick (so I wouldn't get fussed over by everyone) that I didn't have spoons left to care about any small problems that happened at the wedding.

[cellio]

I know what you mean about "unrecognized good", though the term is new to me. Sometimes you realize that a good thing depends on a not-so-good (at the time) thing having happened. It's great when things like that work out.

You would be able to tell if you visited the site now, but it wasn't so obvious in 2011-2012. There's a claim -- no idea if it's true -- that while, if you drop a frog into boiling water it'll jump right out (ouchie), if you instead put it in a pot of cold water and gradually heat it up, the frog won't jump out in time and you get cooked frog. Jews, and for that matter non-evangelical Christians, were the frogs in that site's pot of cold water.

And it's not just the frogs who couldn't tell in time; several of the moderators and senior users can't see it either. Oh well.

[chaos_wrangler]

It's not an official term, just the best phrase I could think of, and I realized that it's not a great phrase for it because it wasn't obvious what I meant without the explanatory paragraph.

And I figured it couldn't have been that bad/obvious at the beginning or you would have noticed then. I'm just glad you we're able to extricate yourself.

[anonymous]

Random atheist (who, incidentally, occasionally asks questions on Mi Yodeya) here, who was linked here from your SE profile.

This isn't entirely relevant, but I remember when you still had a profile on BH warning about Christian bias on the site. As someone who's occasionally poked at Christianity.SE just to read questions (and has fallen into a rage because of the amount of irrelevant preachiness that even high rep users can have there), I'd like to thank you for that warning. I never did end up on Hermeneutics, but something tells me I might have had a better time of it (for a vast number of reasons) asking the questions I'd had about the Hebrew Bible on Mi Yodeya instead. Cheers!

[cellio]

Hello anonymous random atheist, and thanks for commenting!

Christianity.SE is very Christian in flavor (no surprise), but I find that easier to take than what's going on at BH. C.SE is up front about it; BH isn't. I don't spend much time on C.SE, it not being a major interest of mine, but I've asked a few questions there and felt like I was treated reasonably.

Please do ask your questions about the Hebrew Bible on Mi Yodeya -- we welcome them. You will, of course, get Jewish answers, just as you'd get Christian answers on C.SE. If you want non-religious answers, I'm afraid you'll have to look outside Stack Exchange. (There are a couple people on BH who bring that perspective, but it'll be mixed in with rather a bit of evangelism.) I hope you'll visit Mi Yodeya next time you have a question, or just to browse. We have lots of biblical questions already, especially torah, tagged by parsha (torah) or book (prophets and writings).

[anonymous]

Hmmmm... In my case, part of it is probably just that I'm more prone to finding stuff on C.SE irksome because of various (bad) experiences I've had with Christianity itself, in addition to the evangelism I've noted. (I've never had anything similar things happen to me with Judaism, not being of Jewish extraction.)

But anyhome, thanks for the response! I'll probably keep asking the occasional question on Mi Yodeya, particularly since for my purposes, I feel like it's valuable to, at the very least, be aware of religious interpretations.

[anonymous]

That is too bad. I wish I had been around while you were there. If it makes you feel any better, I will be boldly representing the scholarly textual and historical criticism angle from now on, and steadfastly opposing the apologists. Hermeneutics is the place for scholars, not evangelism.