Moderation is a Virtue

In the murky, distant, and ancient past before social media, dinosaurs ruled the earth and blogs ruled the Internet.  This blog, Father Hollywood, regularly had 400 hits a day.  Facebook made it easy to publish one's thoughts and disseminate them from the phone.  The age of the blog began to recede.

But as Big Tech continues to censor conservative and libertarian opinions, and as the discourse on social media has gotten, well, stupider, I'm finding myself wanting to blog more again.

I do post all of my sermons to Father Hollywood, and cross post them on Facebook.  And I noticed that there are no comments on the blog, but there are sometimes comments and discussion when I post them to Facebook.  And then it dawned on me.

I have comment moderation turned on.

I did this years ago when I was getting bombarded with spam.  I forgot that I did that, and as I don't blog nearly as much as I used to, I never check for comments.  So I did today.

I had dozens of comments "awaiting moderation" going back several years.  Many were indeed spam.  Some were comments from friends and intelligent contributions to dialogue.  I apologize for not posting these!  Sorry, guys!

Others were from nutters - which gave me a lot of entertainment.  

One particular post that dealt with fitness and losing weight brought out some interesting commentary.  As Luther once quipped, if you throw a stick into a pack of dogs, the one that yelps is the one that got hit.  I had overweight Lutherans castigating me for proclaiming too much Law and not enough Gospel (this wasn't a sermon, by the way). Two people said (in unmoderated comments that I just saw) that overweight people should "trust their baptism."  I don't see weight loss in the Small Catechism's discussion of benefits that baptism confers, but what do I know?  

Another comment was from a nutter who decided that Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, and the entire Mises Institute were antisemites and racists.  I emailed Walter Block (who is, of course, Jewish) - whom I had just met at the time - and he responded with a video blog.  I posted it here.  In response, I got a comment (which I didn't post) from the nutter that made the accusations in the first place.  Interesting reading!  LOL.

Since that time, I have become very close friends with Walter Block.  I know many of the folks at the Mises Institute, and am honored to call them my friends.  I do indeed know Lew Rockwell now - not that we are close friends, but we have had many conversations over the years, and he has published many of my articles.  I have had the honor to have been invited to an event at Dr. Paul's house.  And there are others at the Mises Institute whom I consider very close friends.  I don't say this to brag or name drop (in fact, it makes me laugh because I'm often the real Forrest Gump, and somehow I end up in places that make me wonder, "How did this happen?").  I'm saying this because the charges of antisemitism and racism at the Mises Institute and anyone associated with it are false.  They are malicious lies.  

Another commenter told me that the early church had women clergy and that I should study up on it.  Another fellow decided that funeral sermons - often read by families of the deceased - would be a great place to argue about the theology of death.  Another fellow insisted repeatedly that I was a "Calvinst" while another called me an "Arminian."  How I pulled off that trick, I don't know.  

Great stuff!

At any rate, I did release a bunch of comments today.  Many are years old, so you probably won't notice them.  I will try to blog more often and check comments more often as well.  As convenient as it is to use Fashbook, it has its downsides - being run like the Third Reich for one, and not having a good search engine is another.  

So who knows?  Maybe blogging will make a comeback.  I'm still going to practice the virtue of comment moderation, though.  If I really want to deal with spam and nutters, I'll just stick to Facebook.