This thread in MPSIMS is a very interesting discussion about different religious people’s approaches to sex before marriage.
In the current 27 replies, at the most two are unnecessarily disparaging of Christianity considering the OP and the forum, yet there are posts hinting at or directly stating that here at the SDMB we hate Christianity and will likely turn the thread into an anti-Christian rant.
I’m not calling out anyone specifically, but it just frustrates me when I see something intentionally oppositional inserted into an otherwise interesting and informative thread.
Can’t we refrain from accusing each other of closed-mindedness until we at least observe the action at hand? It’s sort of like going into the house of someone of a different faith than you and saying, “well, I’m sure you’re going to tell me my religion is stupid.” You become the aggressor by casting yourself as a victim of an incident that hasn’t even happened yet.
You mean all the insults towards Christianity in this thread are actually…not insults to Christianity?
Anyway, I don’t see the Christian persecution in that thread you mentioned. A couple people mentioned that the Dope is not necessarily the place to seek advice on temperance and prudence (and this is after a rather ridiculous attack on Christianity in post 4.) I don’t see a single post in there either stating or hinting that the post will turn into an anti-Christian rant. Closest I saw was Lissla Lissar’s post, wherein she said we’ll probably get a lot of exactly what Soapbox Monkey already said.
So…where are you getting this from?
Now, you wanna talk about how the atheists on the board love to climb up on the cross (ironic, no?), then go ahead.
I didn’t see anything stating that here at the SDMB we hate Christianity. I did see Telperien’s comment that Dopers tend to be rowdy noncomformists. And there are a lot of agnostics and atheists. The conservative Christians are a fairly small proportion. In my reading, anyway. I did make a snarky comment:
which upon rereading I should have left out. So far, I think that was the most inflammatory thing in the thread, and it was spurred by:
All from above me in the thread.
I shouldn’t have snarked, and the comments were relatively mild, but I don’t think what I said was untrue. I could have phrased it better. For that I apologize.
The worst I see is “I don’t think you’re going to get a lot of help from this Board,” and “You’re looking in the wrong place for temperance and prudence re sex here (IMO)” – both probably true, IMHO – and one “I expect you’ll get a lot of, ‘Well, Christianity is dumb and screwed up anyway, particularly about sex, so don’t torment yourself.’” (Here and here and here.) None of those amount to “directly stating that here at the SDMB we hate Christianity and will likely turn the thread into an anit-Christian rant.” None of those responses come even close to that. ISTM that by starting this Pit thread you are yourself doing what you are deploring: Becoming the aggressor by decrying an incident that hasn’t even happened yet.
I think that’s a pretty good thread, from both sides. I don’t think the non- (or anti-) religionists have been schmucks about it, and I don’t think the religionists have been schmucks about it. It’s about the last thread deserving of a Pitting, IMO, at least so far.
Yours was the comment that kind of spurred this, but I’m not saying that it was horribly egregious or anything. It just seems indicative of a lot of discussions here where, when a thread that is tangentially related to some of the “big debates” (religious/political/de-clawing) will be turned into an argument by people claiming that they don’t want an argument, but that the “other side” will most likely show up to shit on the thread and say inflammatory things.
So, my point is not that Lissla Lissar said something horrible, but just that it seems that even in a thread which is going well and respectfully except for one post (that of Soapbox Monkey), the ‘my team rules/your team sucks’ mentality that surrounds so many issues here can’t seem to stay away.
I’ll further add that my point is not that ‘one side’ does this and another doesn’t, it’s that we as a community, even in the most innocent of threads, can’t seem to shake ourselves of partisanship, and it frustrates me.
No the dope is one of the few places where mainstream christianity does not hold any significant power. For persecution of any real scale or meaning to exist, there must be an imblance of power. If any christian in the US wants to claim they are persecuted for their beliefs in any meaningful way they need to take a long hard look at their definition of the word.
In all fairness, I did joke at it in my thread title, and actually did what I’m claiming to rant against; inviting an oft-repeated war of ideologies into a thread that isn’t even about that battle, so mea culpa on that front.
