If You Comment, Just Stop

All right, after a few days not posting anything, to post a critical remark on commenters seems cranky and lazy, but: this is really good: Why We Don’t Allow Comments from Mark Jones, posted on Reformation21. His remarks to the troll and to the retired person are especially good. Jones concludes:

[A]s a pastor, I love questions and discussions with my people. I know who they are; they know who I am. We can usually talk face to face, and progress is typically made. Even if we don’t end up agreeing — I still have some holdouts in my church that reject the biblical practice of infant baptism — we still love one another. It seems to me that this type of “debate” is fruitful. But the “debate” that often takes place on blogs is sort of like an old banana that has been left under a car-seat for a month.

Update: Some readers felt targeted by this and resented it, and understandably. When I read and then wrote about Pastor Jones’ blogpost, I was thinking of my own reactions to blogposts and my own impulses to write them. I know the desire to speak just to speak and to speak when in fact you don’t really know what  you’re talking about. I was also thinking about the comment strings on other blogs I read and how often I’m disappointed to find nothing useful in them, when some people somewhere could respond helpfully.