Atheist Biblical Criticism

Some issues for this blog

I thought I'd wrap up a few issues here about this ABC blog.

Fonts and layout

I'm still very much struggling with the limitations of the blog software. I've noticed myself how different browsers on different platforms present things differently. Also, my layouts look different in my word-processor before copying them across to the blog software, and I lose various features or things become rather disrupted.

Coping with Hebrew and getting it to line up in any pretty and consistent way is extraordinarily difficult. I've abandoned cantillation/accents as many browsers just can't cope - even when it appears correctly on my Mac, I can't get it to appear correctly on my work PC.

So I'm afraid you'll have to bear with me as I get used to the software and do what I can.

I'd like to be able to do tables and insert pictures, but this is going to have to wait until I have at least mastered the basics.

Audience

I need to do some work here, clearly. It's already a rather esoteric subject that I have chosen to blog about, and my marketing of the site is pretty non-existent for the moment. I'll see what I can do to get more people visiting. I've already contacted the Biblioblogs site, but had no reply so far - I'll chase.

Purpose of blog

I probably need to expand on what I say in the "About me" section.

I see this blog primarily as exploring issues of biblical criticism. Although ABC "wears its atheism on its sleeve", it's not here simply to say theists are wrong. Indeed, I will often quote supportively theists who are biblical critics. Theists can and do get biblical criticism right; sometimes some of them get it wrong, and sometimes that is linked to their confessional bias. Atheists who practice biblical criticism are not free from error either. Much of what I write echoes results from theist biblical critics who have been able to work beyond their confessional biases.

I would like the blog to include discussion of biblical critical ideas - and I need to improve its audience considerably to achieve this.

I am very likely to be critical of those who impose inerrancy ideas on the bible, as this is a very destructive human doctrine. So there won't be any sympathy for those who visit this site and propose such fundamentalism.

I may, from time to time, step outside the strict field of biblical criticism to comment on some related area. But I hope to keep such extra-ABC comments to a minimum and focus on biblical critical issues.

I have turned moderation of comments off for the moment - not that I have a big audience to be worried about! But given the experience of other bloggers in this field, I'll need to keep this under review should commenting become an issue. Perhaps I'll need a commenting policy one day; for the moment I'll just say "keep it polite and respectful to others".

It may be that my ideas for the blog will evolve over time, but that's it for now.