Tom, since you’re posting here, maybe you can answer; why must all threads with even a hint of religion go in GD? Because some of us try to avoid that forum.
Well, I hang around GD much more than IMHO, so what do I know.
But Skald the Rhymer’s thread was kind of an IMHO thread, in that it wasn’t looking for a counter-argument to the effect of “Why you should never have become an apostate!” But, yeah, “witnessing” goes in GD. But, unfortunately, GD brings arguing.
Hard case. We need a “yes, it’s a poll, yes, it’s religion, no, it’s not a Debate, you monkeys,” marker.
Hint of religion = crystal meth & bootleg cigarettes = bikers with large brains
Well, there is a factual objective answer to the questions: “What do Catholics believe about papal infallibility?” or “What do Christians believe that Jesus was?” The answers may not constitute objective truth about whether a Pope is infallible or about who or what Jesus was, if anything. But they are single-value true-or-false answers to the question asked: “What do Xes believe [about Y]?”
Questions like that properly belong in GQ: there is a single true answer, or, in the second case, a structured hierarchy of answers (“Dogmatically, most Churches teach… but some Christians instead think that…”).
On the other hand, a wide assortment of issues are subject to disparate views, not to factual answers. I can define apostolic succession in GQ, but odds are that the questioner is not so much interested in the dictionary definition, as he is in the arguments pro and con. And that’s part of what GD is for.
The recent spate of Same Sex Marriage and Impeachment topics have in common that people are not so much interested in the specific answers (“in the Equal Protection Clause” and “treason and other high crimes and misdemeanors” or “not a blowjob but perjury about getting a blowjob”) as they are in the application of general principles to resolve the answers. That is where GD is most effective.
IMHO is specifically for issues on which people are willing to live and let live. I don’t much care whether you love or loathe asparagus, and if I participate in an IMHO thread on asparagus, I’m not likely to get into a dispute, with cites. But if the issue is “Gene Robinson” rather than “asparagus,” bet your bottom dollar I’ll be kicking ass and taking names. And so that thread belongs in GD, not IMHO.
I figured it this way-if the thread had called for former atheists to tell why they now believed, it could be defined as “witnessing”, and so it would only be fair and balanced to consider the opposite to be true. Witnessing doesn’t necessarily have to involve argument or attempts at conversion. Now, since you had originally said that you wouldn’t mind if it were moved to Great Debates, I went ahead and did so. Except for a couple of exceptions, it looks as if your original intentions are being followed, the thread hasn’t died down, and some of the posts have been enlightening, to say the least.
Yeah, tom, help us all avoid your crappy forum. 
As regards the OP (this thread) and thread relocation in general: yep, from time to time the Mods’ decisions are going to increase the UDQ (universal disgruntlement quotient), but thread classification is a fuzzy art, not a rigid science. In any case, we do not question Mods. See section 3 of the Charter.
As regards the specific relocation of the ‘Apostates’ thread, add me to the list of those who didn’t understand it at the time, don’t understand it now and somewhat resent it. I’m especially amazed, and rather offended, to be told that what I was doing in that thread was ‘witnessing’. I generally admire Czarcasm’s work around here, but I have to strongly disagree with this:
‘Witnessing’ is when an individual attests to a faith and its perceived merits. No-one in the ‘Apostate’ thread was doing this. There was no ‘debate’ mooted in the OP, and none was offered by any of those who responded. Colour me baffled.
What if I were to start a thread soliciting ideas for how to cook the prettiest cat in the world, whom I believe is my Lord and Savior?
You will note that I do not venture into other Fora and kidnap threads to be hauled, kicking and screaming, back into GD. There have been a number of occasions when I have opened GD to find a perfectly nice GQ, IMHO, or even MPSIMS thread sitting on the doorstep in a basket marked “would you please raise my topic?”.
However, aside from the issue of where a topic should reside is the issue of kicking a thread from one Forum to another. The staff has taken a fair amount of heat, in the past, with accusations of playing “hot potato” with threads, tossing them from one location to another. With the “automatic redirect” that the current version of vB permits, this creates less of a problem than it once did, but even the redirects are a hassle to track down if the redirection in the original Forum rolls off the front page and posters begin to question their sanity as to whether they had seen or posted to such a thread. (I am aware of the potential to use the search function to discover a thread’s current location, but my knowledge does nothing to soothe the panic of a distraught OP whose terror blinds him or her to the tools available to discover her or his baby.)
As a result of user complaints, the staff has a practice (nothing so definite as a policy or a procedure) of trying to refrain from moving threads all over the board. Therefore, when a thread drops into GD from some other Forum, I generally let it stay.
For those who are “afraid” to venture into GD, I would point out that biting is strictly prohibited and, actually, the majority of threads hurled into GD simply because the word “god” or “church” appears in the OP do not actually deteriorate into true debates. (I admit that we have a couple of evangelical fundamentalist atheist posters with a psychological compulsion to post that god is an imaginary being and religious people are psychotic, but such posters are few in number and in threads that were not initiated for the purpose of debate, if one ignores them they tend to wander off, muttering to themselves. It is not necessary to engage them and one may participate in a poll or reminiscence or even a witnessing without actually letting them become a distraction.)
ATMB, of course! :dubious:
Hmmm. I remember [post=7370980]being told[/post] that:
This was in response to my suggestion that sports threads should go in MPSIMS, as they are the epitome of mundane and pointless. He seemed to be saying that CS is the only topical forum, whereas all others are based on type of discussion, so putting sports in MPSIMS was out of the question.
Having little interest in GD, I rarely go there, but aparently the mods consider GD to be another topic-oriented forum in the same way that CS is?
Surely there is a reason why you guys are big fans of defining the forums based on types of discussions, despite two of the forums being topic-oriented. Here’s the thing, though: If you define them by discussion type rather than content, you should probably respect the OP’s desired type of discussion a little more, no?
(To be clear, I’m not arguing anything about sports in this post. While not thrilled, I’m perfectly content to keep them in the Cafe. I mentioned it as an example of how the mods seem to cite contradictory logic whenever it suits their purpose.)
Religion as a topic on the SDMB is incapable of being discussed dispassionately as a question of fact. All religious questions will sooner or later devolve into debate. Next to politics, religion is *THE * Great Debate, and is one of the reasons GD was created in the first place. That is the reason all threads concerned with religion belong in GD, not because GD is a topic specific forum.
I’d differ with this. There are any number of questions that can and have been successfully dealt with as issues of fact in GQ. I suspect there’s a notice in the staff rooms that any OP directly related to Fred Phelps gets moved to the Pit. I could even feature someone commenting on a particularly meaningful wedding, funeral, Easter service, or some such in MPSIMS in a non-witnessy manner, just a sharing of how the experience felt.
However, in general you are correct – a topic that proposes to analyze some aspect of religion is almost certainly a GD topic. Some highly constructive discussions have evolved from them, but it is definitely a make-an-assertion-and-document-it-with-a-cite sort of environment which is called for, and GD is great for that.
I don’t think I agree with that part of the Charter - mods need a good, thorough questioning regularly, and by golly, the head Nit-Pickers and Offenderati at Nit-Picker Central are happy to do it.
But seriously, I think it is good to question the mods and admins and the rules here. We do have more rules than other message boards from what I understand, but those rules didn’t develop in a vacuum, but evolved from the give-and-take of posters and mods as problems arose, and they make this board what it is, which suits some and doesn’t suit others.
That’s probably why I didn’t like having my thread on questioning the existence of a soul tossed into GD - I made it clear it wasn’t a religious discussion, there was no “make-an-assertion-and-document-it-with-a-cite” kind of answer available, and I felt that moving it to GD really hamstrung the discussion of opinions and feelings that was going on.
And I ain’t askeered of Great Debates - I’m just not particularly interested in working that hard at an argument. 
Points noted and understood.
Please may I (respectfully) ask you a simple question. Consider the ‘Apostates’ thread that was shunted to GD.
Q: What, in that thread, is being debated?
Actually, what I seemed to be saying was that I didn’t know where sports threads should go. From the same post you quoted and linked:
I’m also a little puzzled by your implication that I rejected your proposal to put threads in MPSIMS, and insisted on CS, when in fact you were the one who requested threads be consistently placed in CS, again in that same thread:
I’m especially pleased that you’ve decided recast the unofficial, personal opinions I provided at your specific request as a tap-dance of “contradictory logic” by the mods designed to suit some nefarious purpose. Nice. Glad I took the time to comment on your idea.
Nothing. But the thread was witnessing. Witnessing, in a religious context is saying, “Here’s what I believe about God and this is the story of my life that led me to believe it”.
So saying “I used to be a drug abuser living in the gutter, and then I read the bible and realized Jesus died for me” is witnessing, and so was your post in the thread. That’s not a bad thing, remember.
I do not agree with this.
There have been many discussions in GQ regarding specifics of who believed what and when did they believe it or what was the doctrine propounded at a particular time or even what did a particular doctrine mean that have been carried out in GQ (even to the point of entertaining clashing perspectives) that really did not fall into the realm of debate. (Religion is not the only topic of which this can be said. There are a lot of factual questions with varying possible answers that I think should remain in GQ because the points being argued are, indeed, facts, not opinions. I would hate to see every GQ thread where any poster contradicted another be thrown into GD.)
Here is an example of a religious question remaining firmly in GQ (even despite some inter-poster conflicts) that demonstrate what I mean:
Christian beliefs and their origins
I suspect that there are a number of religious topics that could also remain in MPSIMS or IMHO without degenerating into a fight, but each thread ought to be evaluated on its own merits and I am not going to go around second guessing other Mods on their choices.