Well, more precisely, the aim is to provide the perspective of a particular Christian living in Melbourne, namely mine. Some of the issues raised might be related to Melbourne and some might be more global in scope. Most will hopefully be providing a Christian perspective and not just a personal rant that bears no resemblance to what Jesus might blog.
I will say from the outset that I imagine this blog will not be regularly updated for long. My modest aim for the blog is to have more posts than occasional readers, which at the moment would be satisfied by my writing a second entry.
My pessimism about how long the blog will last and how much I will write is based on past experience with attempts to update my website and also with seeing so many friends try (and fail) to blog for an extended period. It would be naive to assume that I have a greater ability to stick with it than my friends had. In this case, the issue is not that I have little to say about how my Christian beliefs relate to the world around me (to the contrary, there is much I would like to say), but more that I have many other things that I do in my life and part of actually being a Christian is that I have responsibilities to my family, work and church that I will prioritise above my "internet presence".
I am hoping, regardless of the size of my readership, that writing my ideas and arguments in blog format will help me to articulate my views more clearly and concisely. How many arguments over the years I have won in my head as I walk along thinking about how a line of argumentation might go! By writing such arguments out I am hoping to weed out some fallacious reasoning (or lazy thinking), so that I can better articulate them when speaking to people face to face. In Christian jargon, you might say that blogging will help my "1 Peter 3:15"ing.
The blog's name is "Yet another Melbourne Christian voice". I wanted to have something like "Yet another Christian Apologetics Blog", but yacab.blogspot.com was taken (and so were all variants that I could think of). I don't think I'm a typical Melburnian, although I do love this city, so in that sense I feel a bit silly pretending that my voice is that of a distinctive "Melbourne Christian". But yamcv.blogspot.com was free, so here I am. If you came here looking for something related to yams, or Curriculum Vitaes then you are probably in the wrong place, and you should probably consider finding a new search engine.
Finally, a note about commenting. I don't want people to comment on my posts and I have attempted to disable this within blogger. There are a few reasons for this, and if I allowed comments I'd be happy to hear readers' views on the subject. The primary reason is that whenever I read an article or blog post, no matter how interesting or persuasive the piece is, I end up looking at the number of "likes"/thumbs ups, and the nature of the comments posted after it.
My final verdict is coloured by the mini-democracy of people who can be bothered commenting on the posts. If the original poster doesn't respond to every single objection raised in the comments it can give the impression that they don't have the answers (rather than just that they don't have time or energy to do so). How much more is this the case when fundamental worldview questions are involved? If a post seems to put forth a persuasive argument that God exists, it is much easier to bypass the "thinking about it" phase if there are 500 angry atheists (or one persistent one) commenting about how this is rubbish because of (a), (b) and (c). If (a), (b) and (c) are reasonable objections then no doubt they've been put forth elsewhere in the blogosphere in a more articulate form and perhaps I'll come across them and post responses as standalone entries.
By not allowing comments I am missing out on the chance for valuable feedback though if my arguments are unpersuasive, or fallacious, or (worse in my view) presenting an unbiblical view of God. This is simply the price I will have to pay. If you see any majorly glaring issues you could email me and I'll try to look at them, and possibly even update my blog posts in light of them. Similarly if you find any spelling/grammatical/typographical mistakes please let me know; I cannot stand such errors.
You might wonder why I'd spend so long writing down ground rules for a blog that I expect not to last long. That is not a consequence of my being a Christian (or being a Melburnian) so much as the consequence of my being a perfectionist. I'd like to set things up so that, in theory, I could have a long running and successful blog.
