From:  (Andrew Bromage)
Newsgroups: aus.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Reply to Andrew Bromage
Date: 23 Sep 1998 10:05:33 GMT
Organization: Computer Science, The University of Melbourne
Message-ID: <>
References: <36089B00>
NNTP-Posting-Host: mundook.cs.mu.oz.au
Cc: 
Xref: newsreader.mira.net.au aus.religion.christian:37106

G'day all.

bobe <> writes:

[Acts 4:17--20 deleted]

>I am sad to hear that you Andrew Bromage have determined that the
>Rapture of the Chruch, Christ coming for his Saints is OFF-TOPIC in
>aus.religion.  If you don't believe in the Blessed Hope of the Second
>Coming of Jesus Christ and are Forbidding His Word to be posted in your
>Australian Newsgroup, then you are a Judge. Who made you a Judge and
>Ruler over God's Word Andrew Bromage?

Nobody.  I just happen to like seeing my name in subject lines.

Seriously, it's unfortunate that you've chosen to answer my little
note in public (it's poor netiquette to post private email in a public
forum; in this case I'll forgive you since it was boilerplate anyway).
It's also unfortunate that you've interpreted the charter of this
newsgroup as an attack.  If you read the note I sent you, you will note
that it was not intended this way.

The charter of aus.religion.christian was voted on some years ago
(around the time of the newsgroup's creation) by the then readership.
The intention was to create a newsgroup to serve the needs of Australian
Christians and those interested in Christianity in Australia.  This is
NOT a general Christian newsgroup.  General Christian newsgroups already
exist and arguably serve their purpose well.  This group specialises in
the place where Christianity meets Australia.

To this end, we decided on some guidelines for what constitutes "on
topic" for this newsgroup.  What we decided is that every post should be
directly related to Australia in some way, either by the poster being an
Australian (interpreted in the broadest sense of the word) or the
posting being directly related to Australia somehow.  A posting which
does not fulfill this criterion is off-topic.

It is neither the purpose of the charter nor the job of the moderator
(myself) to define what constitutes Christianity.  Indeed, the
definition which we use is the broadest one that we could find:
self-ascription.  That is, if you call yourself a Christian, your
beliefs are on-topic (subject to the Australian relevance mentioned
in the previous paragraph).

I hope this clears up any misunderstandings that you may have.

If you would like to discuss the charter and its interpretation or the
rules and conventions of the Usenet news system in a.r.c, or the
moderation policy that we have here, I invite you to do so.

Cheers,
Andrew Bromage