{"id":58,"date":"2004-11-03T23:53:15","date_gmt":"2004-11-04T07:53:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=41"},"modified":"2004-11-03T23:53:15","modified_gmt":"2004-11-04T07:53:15","slug":"the-spiritual-value-of-blogging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2004\/11\/03\/the-spiritual-value-of-blogging\/","title":{"rendered":"The Spiritual Value of Blogging"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Recently I&#8217;ve been participating in a debate at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.challies.com\">Challies.com<\/a> on forms of church music.  It&#8217;s actually a bit of an anachronistic debate that hearkens back to the &#8220;worship wars&#8221; of the early 1980&#8217;s.  My own participation has got me thinking, though, about why I blog and comment on others&#8217; blogs.  Is this really a worthwhile activity, or is it a divisive distraction?<\/p>\n<p>The truth is, I love arguing.  What&#8217;s worse, I&#8217;m trained as a lawyer and litigated cases for thirteen years, so I&#8217;m pretty good at arguing when I want to be.  Occasionally I take positions in blog comments that might not be <em>exactly<\/em> what I really think, in order to make the other person think through his position more carefully or just to play around with an argument.  (The stuff I posted on Challies recently, however, is really what I think).  I quite enjoy doing this on sites like Challies, where some of the positions people take, it seems to me, are a bit extreme and not well thought out.  (Tim Challies, the blog&#8217;s author, is usually thoughtful and articulate, although I often disagree with him; its his commenters who sometimes seem to speak without thinking).<\/p>\n<p>I wonder what this kind of discourse accomplishes.  Are we just engaging in the sorts of disputes scripture warns us against?  Or is it iron sharpening iron, with the occasional glimmer of better understanding being granted to the participants or to outside observers?  Are we compromising unity, peace and love for the disembodied, hermetic arguments we can indulge in online?<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recently I&#8217;ve been participating in a debate at Challies.com on forms of church music. It&#8217;s actually a bit of an anachronistic debate that hearkens back to the &#8220;worship wars&#8221; of the early 1980&#8217;s. My own participation has got me thinking, though, about why I blog and comment on others&#8217; blogs. Is this really a worthwhile [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-W","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}