Pretty much nothing is being debated in the Apostates: what made you lose your religion? thread. Had I been Modding in its original home, I suspect that I’d have left it there. OTOH, since that thread was posted and moved to GD, we have had two follow-on threads: the mirror-image Religious/Spiritual- what has kept you from losing Faith? that states in its opening line that it was inspired by the Apostates thread and the (probably, but not explicitly) related Christians - What made you believe?. Each of those will almost certainly include witnessing (which board rules direct to GD) and had I moved the Apostates thread back, we would now have parallel threads running in separate Fora–an event that would probably be confusing.
My cousin has a thread idea: “How do I cook my pretty minister for my cat?”
FWIW, Tom, I will grant that the “Apostates” thread probably fits in GD best. I just think that it’s important for posters to notice & remember when someone is soliciting a poll/witnessing/personal experience thread, & not turn into a GD shouting match.
It’s especially important for posters like me, who never remember which forum they’re in, & debate everything.
I had honestly never noticed that “Witnessing” was listed as one of the categories on the top page. So from that standpoint, I guess that there was some merit in having moved the thread.
So, it may be more of an ATMB topic to say–but since I don’t feel like starting another thread about this–I’m not sure why “witnessing” is something that should go in our Debates forum. If I want to share some random, “Jesus appeared to me in my Kellog’s Frosted Flakes[sup]TM[/sup] and told me about our coming doom!”, that seems more like an MPSIMS topic to me, unless the person particularly wanted to debate his witnessing of Jesus in his Frosted Flakes.
I mean, you can’t even ask for a cite. “Jesus spoke to me!” “Cite?” 
Any chance to have “Witnessing” struck from the description of GD?
Okay, thanks for the response and clarification, and thanks as well to TomnDebb. I won’t drag this out any more. Just for the record, I don’t think my post was witnessing. I think ‘witnessing’ is a proclamation of the merits of one’s religious affiliation. And I don’t have a religious affiliation. But, yeah, let it lie, let it lie.
A few years ago, before the overwhelming presence of humanistic, secular, skeptical infidels drove them away, we had substantially more persons with backgrounds from which witnessing was more likely to be a culturally prompted response to various attacks on either a god or religion. (We’re not talking about the periodic drive-by spammer that we still get (and that, with luck, few posters see as we ban them and make their posts disappear). We’re talking about sincere religious people (not all of them Fundamentalists, much less fundy loons), who would respond to various claims against god or religion (or in favor of various beliefs that the poster did not share) with flat out declarations that God had done one thing or another and that humans needed to recognize that fact and respond appropriately.) As you can imagine, such declarations were always met with a hail of negative responses. Those responses might range from a patient dissection of their statements based on and supported by opposing verses from Scripture or noted theologians all the way through angry assaults upon their persons, intellect, and occasionally the purported marriage (or lack) in which their parents had engaged prior to their conception. In all cases, however, such professions of belief tended to derail any other topic in the thread, becoming a hijack as the participants debated the accuracy of the claims.
Eventually, any profession of faith was simply relegated to GD as a pre-emptive and precautionary move. Since such professions of faith most frequently (not always) took the form associated with “witnessing,” that was the label under which the rules were laid out.
Now, we have long since driven off the more obnoxious participants in that behavior and cowed into silence the more polite posters who might consider such responses. I am not sure that we continue to need the rule as it is currently formulated. I could see, with our current composition of posters, a thread similar either to the Apostates thread or to the Believers thread posted in response living happily in IMHO or MPSIMS for several pages without fights breaking out among the participants. (We still have a (very small) number of of rabid fundmentalist evangelical atheists on the board who are liable to drop into such a thread for the sole purpose of calling all the other participants fools, but as with any drive-by posts, I would hope that most of the community would recognize their psychological compulsions and ignore them.)
On the other hand, there were so many bad incidents (involving a (very small) number of rabid fundmentalist evangelical Christians) that those memories, along with the reinforcing memories of the bad exchanges in the board war with the older Left Behind Message Board, that I am not sure that you will be successful in persuading any staff member who was here in the bad old days to rescind that rule.
If you think it is worth it, you can take your case to ATMB.
And, of course, now a debate has begun to form in the Apostates thread.
The only question being, why did it take so long?
People tend to try and be true to the OP.
Exactly what I sought to avoid by the wording of my OP, and by placing it in IMHO, where it belonged in the first damn place. I so wish I hadn’t given my implicit consent to moving it (not that that would have stopped Czarcasm necessarily). It’s not that I’m against debate, but that’s ALL the thread will be soon, and I was hoping for more anecdotes.
But now I shall remind myself not to sweat the small stuff.
Except when a mod moves the thread to a forum encouraging something CONTRARY to the OP. :wally
Sighing.
Don’t sweat the small stuff, Rhymer. Just unleash the genetically modified flesh-eating winged howler monkeys and be done with it.
There was a lot of good information in the thread though. I wouldn’t be too disappointed. Might have been a little less atheist-heavy in IMHO, but otherwise.
I don’t know if this excuses my apparently horrid decision(which I had thought would be o.k. according to the person who started the thread, Skald the Rhymer), but years of past experience tells me that if I had left the thread in IMHO, it would look pretty much the same as it now does in Great Debates, but for these exceptions:
- I would have posted at least three times for people to quit trying to turn a poll into a Great Debate, and then
- I would either have moved it to Great Debates or closed it.
I’m sure you experience is correct. My point was just that as a reader of the board it is nicer to be able to have the option to give the benefit of the doubt to other posters and maintain the ruleset of the forum you wanted. Otherwise you are never allowed the chance to even hope for the ruleset you want.
For something tempestuous, just moving it the instant it turns seems fine (i.e. no warnings.) But moving it before then doesn’t seem to save anything. When it needs to be moved, a report mail will come (at least I assume that most things get reported pretty soon.)