Now Charles Austin and some of his buddies have a thread aimed at elimating anonymous posters from the albp forum, which is a special “crusade” of the Austin/Dornheim crowd. (This is also what they say is wrong with Free Republic).
http://www.alpb.org/forum/index.php?topic=1018.0
These misguided “crusaders” forget that many posters are laypeople, with their own professions separate from their online identities as, say, orthodox Christian or pro-Serbian activists. Many such laypeople may have professional websites or blogs, and/or publications that appear on the open Internet. They may therefore wish to keep their professional identities separate from their controversial activist posts. If the alpb “crusaders” really believe, with Luther, that laypeople serve as priests in their professions, they should not begrudge us the right to keep these identities separate.
Moreover, even ELCA professionals (pastors, seminarians, AIMs, etc.) may wish for good reasons to keep their identities as controversial Internet posters separate from their professional identities. Liberal ELCA synods such as ours are snakepits, in which tyrannical revisionist “bishops” and their sycophants bash, blacklist, and push out traditionalist pastors, seminarians, and other church workers. Some revisionist seminary professors downgrade seminarians even for daring to call God “He” or “Father”. ELCA professionals should be allowed to use screen-names in order to protest these persecutory practices.
Finally, the real problem with the alpb forum is NOT the activities of anonymous posters, but the disruptor posts of revisionist trolls, which are designed to hijack threads to go the revisionists’ way!!!! The revisionists have even come to DOMINATE the alpb forum, in terms of numbers of posts, thus crowding out orthodox posters. When those who run the alpb forum recast it as an orthodox-only dicussion (for traditionalist Lutherans and former Lutherans now in the Orthodox or Roman Catholic churches), then the quality of the alpb forum will be restored to what it once was!!!!