I’ve seen lots of religion threads that didn’t get hijacked ('course they tend to be the shorter ones…). For example, the current one in GD about Jesus in the Qur’an. I attempted to hijack it by posting about Moses in the Qur’an, but did anyone take the bait? No… Good Dopers. 
So ponder this:
If a hijack lands with a thud, and no one posts about it, did it really happen?
Of course not…
And, let us not forget, users can set their browser to view this forum in threads rather than linear, so there is really no such thing as a “hijack” anyway.
I just ignore the pair of you. It’s very hard to keep up in an argument between two posters whose names anagram each other. 
Kudos, though that is a profoundly stupid reason.
Absent moderator intervention, perhaps posters saying “You know, X, I think your point has been made” is not a bad way to go.
Can’t see it working when the person in question has an axe to grind, like Peter Morris in the recent Randi thread(s). Even moderator requests to keep it OT didn’t work there, but still, never mind.
Left the whole quote because I’m going to discuss it a little, on account of my own poor expression in the previous post.
I’m with you, Liberal – up to a point. If your argument for eliminating public schools deals with the topic as stated by the originator, that is, disputing the facts underpinning the OP’s case for paying teachers more, or contending that the goals stated by the OP are either unworthy or better served by eliminating public schools, then you are on-topic. And this, in fact, leaves plenty of room for you in your example. But, jumping into a debate about funding public schools with, say, a generic screed about how the Natural Rights of Man make Government a Curse, Taxation Anathema, and Education a form of Technocratic Slavery is something even I would agree is off-topic. If some limits were not set, a determined zealot could insist that every debate begin with a discussion of why we should not simply abdicate our place on Earth with a program of universal euthanasia followed by an eternity of peace and Heavenly reward: interesting enough – once, maybe. My preference here is that any poster should at least have the burden of showing a real connection between the topic and his/her response to it. That’s the ticket – the only one, besides an appropriate civility – into the discussion.
Similarly, there are religious debates in which the very existence of God or the judgment of believers is not a factor. A discussion of, for example, how a rolicking, freethinking downer of a book like Ecclesiastes ever got included in the Bible, say, is not addressed by “There is no God,” nor are lots of other questions about the theory and practice and history and literature of religion.
But some are, and when they are so addressed, I think they’ll have to find a way to deal with it.
I think the hijacks could at least be minimized (if not completely eliminated) by framing the OP’s and thread titles so that they ask for specific theological or denominational answers to questions rather than leaving them open ended. For instance: When does the Catholic Church think that Jesus will return? will generate a hell of a lot fewer hijacks than When will Jesus return?
Alternatively, a “theists only” disclaimer could be added to the OP.
This is ostensibly a fact-finding, hard-nosed message board, though, not a religious one so it’s going to be hard to maintain purely confessional threads. There are many, many places on the net where those kinds of discussions thrive and flourish. We’re just not that kind of board.
I’d hate to see a “theists only” disclaimer - some of the best information comes from our non-theists - including yourself.
But I will agree that the constant hijacks into “stupid people who believe the myth” are quite old - there are interesting discussions to be had even if you don’t believe.
Hey, Poly, does this thread qualify? It only contains 16 posts though.
Actually, very few threads get moved from GD to the Pit. It is much more common that a person will naively ask a legitimate GQ religious question in GQ, only to have any number of posters (religious, non-religious, and anti-religious) begin to submit arguable opinions regarding either the interpretation or facts behind the OP whereupon the GQ Mods send it to GD.
In the thread in question, (I am presuming it is the If Jesus Could Heal the Sick and Raise the Dead thread), I would note that pseudotriton ruber ruber initially simply threw out a single smart-assed comment that was not really much of a hijack and he was responding on the smart-assed comments already posted. The real destruction to the thread occurred in interactions with Der Trihs and Apos that were encouraged by the other posters (e.g., kanicbird). I guess it has been too long since we had genuine religious debates (instead of debates about religion) and folks forgot how to deal with the silly interruptions. Back in the “old days” (last summer and before) their observations on belief would have been shrugged off as irrelevant by most posters. By the time I looked back in on the thread, so many posters were actually giving their views credence by responding to them, that I saw no purpose stomping on the thread that had already been hijacked.
Yes, the later posts by Der Trihs and Apos were off topic. However, the two appropriate means of dealing with such interruptions are (1) to decline to rise to the bait and (2) to report the offending post. (You can always politely ask that a poster go start their own thread on the topic: some actually will.)
The earlier posts by Der Trihs and Apos (which I first saw and ignored) were not even that much off topic. It only became a problem when one of them would throw a little dig in at theology or belief and, instead of ignoring the single off-topic line, posters would keep engaging them and trying to make an issue of “proving” the perspective of various Christian beliefs.
Anyone who responds to hijacks encourages hijacks. If someone is constitutionally incapable of making a comment without throwing in a little claim for the superiority of their own beliefs–especially if a poster has been doing the same thing throughout his or her posting history so that their quirk is easily recognized–it ought to be a simple matter to ignore them as a one-trick pony (at least on that topic).
Having said all that there is no flipping reason for dumbed down disclaimers. If a non-believer opens a thread dealing with a particular belief, it should be obvious to anyone smart enough to manage a keyboard (and certainly anyone smart enough to participate at the SDMB), that the discussion already presumes the beliefs. Making the hostile and idiotic claim that “Well, I ought to be able to attack the very foundations of belief because I don’t like it” is simply a display of petulance (as well as irrationality).
If the topic in one scenario is “Why did this religious figure demonstrate the capacity to heal–even to bringing himself back from the dead–why did he not go all the way?” then it should be obvious to anyone who has already passed first grade that the premise of the discussion already accepts the stories that describe the person.
In contrast, if someone posted a thread in a separate scenario “Do not the wounds of Jesus as viewed by Thomas prove that the resurrection is real?” then the topic addresses the reality of the resurrection and pointing out the possible non-existence of Jesus might be relevant.
In any event, the proper response to the first scenario is to politely request that they move their discussion to a separate thread and then report the problem if they (and their opponents) persist.
Does it demonstrate a certain perverse childishness that a poster is compelled to make some dismissive comment abouit “the other side” in every singe thread into which they insert themselves? Yes. This is true whether they point out the (claimed) foolishness of religion, the (claimed) damnation of those who do not believe, the (claimed) stupidity of GWB, the (claimed) foolishness of opponents of GWB, on and on ad nauseam. However, we do not vet posters for social skills before they register and I would hope that, in the interest of encouraging lively debate, more of us would overlook the smaller social transgressions that do not rise above the level of faux pas to the level of brutish anti-civility.
What would happen if a religion thread were not hijacked?
Well, if it got to 88 posts, you would see some serious shit.
(Fortunately, it will never happen.)
Actually, I disagree with this analysis.
What would seem to me to be more likely is that so many threads have been unceremoniously hurled from GQ to GD if they involve religion and include a whiff of disagreement that a lot of posters have come to the belief that all religious threads must be posted to GD. I saw a question looking for answers, not any serious effort to evoke witnessing. The fact that the first few posters were having some fun with it does not change its original intent.
Great example. And even more so, because I doubt there is a single Doper who “believes in” astrology – but it explores how people who did, viz. the Magi, might have followed up on the putative historical antecedent of Matthew’s “star of Bethlehem” story. And with Diogenes providing the necessary context: Matthew was a flat-out nut on “things that point to Jesus,” whether misquoted O.T. passages or Zoroastrian astrological BS.
For the record: The “Franz Ferdinand” for this thread – the proximate cause, last-straw reason – was in fact the thread Sarahfeena references. But it was predicated on that being the most recent example of an ongoing trend towards threadshitting. I do not mind humorous snark, especially about beliefs about God, and found Apos’s first comment to be funny, not offensive or hijacking.
Let me quickly switch to another, years-back incident to draw a pertinent parallel. The “issue before the house” was the Atonement, the theological doctrine that Jesus’s death and resurrection worked some sort of miraculous gift for believers that saved them from something in some manner. (My apologies for not digging out that thread, if indeed it is still accessible.) Now, personally, I find the evangelical doctrine of the Substitutionary Punitive Atonement at least as offensive as PRR and Der Trihs presumably do: the idea that God (=Father) is some sort of monstrous ogre who delights in torture, but is willing to accept the death by torture of his Son in place of the torturing of others. Tom was quick to supply three other conceptualizations advanced by theologians to grasp the significance of the Atonement, which helped my own understanding of the idea considerably.
Note that this whole thing presumes, as an initial hypothetical premise, that there is some truth to the theological concept of the Atonement in the first place – that Jesus’s death had some significance beyond his own life, applicable to Christian doctrine generally. That’s an initial presumption, on which the discussion proceeded. And yes, there was a comment from someone that averred that the whole question does presuppose that the Atonement does have some meaning, and that’s purely a matter of Christian doctrine.
But it was handled with great aplomb – the atheist was able to make that point without a rant, the rather thorny conceptual issue was explored with dexterity and scholarship, and the thread became a means of fighting ignorance, specifically, on the issue of what different Christian concepts of the significance of the Atonement are/were/have been.
I respected the injection of the atheist’s perspective, keeping the topic properly within the “if/then” category – as any discussion on beliefs properly should be. Contrast that with “Anyone who has religious beliefs is necessarily deluded” and “They’re all in it for money and power over others’ lives by brainwashing them” repeated ad nauseam – the present bit of threadshitting.
As another parallel, a recent thread on transubstantiation might be worth looking at. Playing Jeopardy, the question there actually was of the sort, “What is it that Roman Catholics actually believe happen to the Communion bread and wine, Alex?” And the answers explored Platonic/Aristotelian/Thomistic/Dunsscotian metaphysics. Except for the ones that insisted that the only proper worldview is one in which biological/chemical analysis defines what does and does not happen. This bit of dogmatism was brought to you by the Usual Threadshitters.
As an Anglican, I have absolutely no interest in defending Thomas Aquinas’s eucharistic theology – my church formally disavows it. But as an answer to the question, “What do Catholics believe?”, it’s precisely the right answer. And that is factual – not as a statement about priestly hocus pocus in the objective universe, but as a true statement regarding Catholic doctrine.
I find wit and irreverent humor to be good things, part of what makes SDMB discussions fun. I find bludgeoning threadshitting to make the same damn point in every thread remotely related to the subject area to be as egregiously offensive as someone ringing your doorbell with a Jack Chick tract in his hand.
Hey tom,
give me a break.
Here was the sum total of the OP:
“If Jesus Could Heal the Sick and Raise the Dead… then why didn’t he heal his crucifixion wounds after he rose from the dead? Yeah, I know he wasn’t planning on hanging around long, but I can’t imagine that it’d be much fun to walk around with freakin’ holes in your feet! I doubt that there’s ever been an official explaination of this so I’m putting it here in GD, rather than GQ or IMHO, since I figure that any answers posted will be hotly contested.”
Now, right off the bat this OP is basically snarkily challenging Christian doctrine, not just asking a GQ from a Christian perspective. I can’t guess Tuckerfan’s state of mind, and he hasn’t really participated in any of this, but trying to characterize the OP as written as plain request to hear what the different theological takes on the matter are is simply nonsense, as Sapo later realized, but apparently you’d rather cling to so that you can toss off your pissy comments about me.
You offhand noted that some of the responses were a little less than serious, but let’s look at some of them, shall we:
“It could be given that no amount of praying has ever cured someone who had an amputation, then it makes sense that his powers were not able to fill in the holes as the material was missing. Kind of limited powers for a being claiming to have created the Universe, if you ask me.”
“He didn’t want to have to rest for eight hours to get his spells back, perhaps?”
“If you went through all that trouble for a set of new piercings, would you just let 'em close up?”
And from the guy who was parroting your line about how this oh so serious discussion got hijacked by the hordes and those who enable them, Sapo: “Because he knew he wouldn’t be walking on water anymore.”
Ho ho ho.
Hmmm… seems to me that a heck of a LOT of people were not taking Christian doctrine or the OP very seriously.
Now, I agree that Der Trihs is often obnoxiously over-focused on simply saying that Christian belief is nonsense, but the reality is that he responded to what others had first said about salvation in a thread already pretty given over to snark (and what wasn’t was people basically agreeing that “make up your own answer, anything is as good as any other” was the only real answer), and then people went on to respond to that. Maybe he shouldn’t have. But when people start then presenting some idea like the plan of salvation and how it REQUIRES Jesus to retain wounds, is it really so obnoxious to challenge them to explain it?
Here I’ll answer that question: no, it isn’t.
Which is why your account of things is bullplop. I understand that you are trying to play den mother, and even tried to be fair and charitable to some extent. But you just took a couple of digs at me to smooth the process, and frankly: dick move, pal.
I think Dio makes a good point about phrasing OPs carefully to minimize jacking. It seems to me that hijacks seem to be pretty well handled on these boards by observiing that they do not respond to the OP, are not welcome by the OPer, and that the respondent is welcome to open their own thread.
Personally, I tend to not read too many religion threads these days, mainly because they very rarely say anything that is new or of interest to me.
Religion strikes me as a somewhat unique issue. I’m not sure exactly why it is in GD, other than that it tends to be a contentious issue. Because it makes exactly as much sense to me personally to discuss specifics of Jesus’s wounds after he rose from the dead, as it does to hobbitry, D&D, and the like. It seems to me that that type of discussion might do better in IMHO. Or GQ could handle factual/historical questions. But interpretation of and elaboration upon an imperfect and manmade record? Go right ahead and do it as much as you want. But if you are doing it in public, be prepared for someone to raise their hand and observe that all this stuff might well be made up.
Just because a whole bunch of people have very strong personal feelings about a particular mythology doesn’t make it anything else to me. And since this board is supposedly interested in fighting ignorance, it doesn’t strike me as inappropriate to observe that theological discussions are often distinguishable from facts. For example, it used to surprise me how many people just assume that Jesus’ very existence as a historical figure is a well-documented unquestionable fact. With no idea how minimal the contemporaneous evidence is, and that instead of facts they are relying on consensus. To me, that is an important distinction.
Of course, one can make such an observation without shitting. But non-believers carry their baggage just the same way believers carry their baggage, and in similar fashion insert their (non)belief in places it does not need to be.
For what? I’m not really accusing you of anything. I mentioned you, Der Trihs and pseudotriton ruber ruber by name, only because you had already been named earlier in this thread.
Yeah, I think that in your later responses where you wandered off into the “well, it could not have really happened anyeway and people who believe it appear to be a bit out of it” mode, I think you were leaning away from the actual point of the thread. However, as I already noted, your initial responses were fine and your posts only started looking like a hijack with the cooperation of kanicbird and Sapo (whose name somehow dropped out of my earlier post).
In your first posts, you addressed the issue, then in Post #39 you start throwing out that it is “fair” to ask “snarky” questions and go on to posit any number of speculative "well it coulda"s. Sorry. While I do not think that, by themselves, your comments were intended as a hijack, the fact that you had to throw in the shot at believers and then continue interacting with Sapo in what was an off-topic discussion did nothing to keep the thread in line with the OP. Since you have already been called out in this thread with claims of hijacking, I noted you in my post while explicitly noting that it required the responses of other posters to turn your comments into a hijack.
Again: another break: after mentioning me by named, and without clarifying, you tossed out a bunch of things like “perverse childishness” and like that may or may not have been directed at me. At the very least, that’s pretty sloppy. I don’t really know if you meant to direct those at me specifically, and I suspected they were mostly directed at Der Thirs, but you certainly didn’t make any effort to clarify.
Right. Away from the oh so serious point of the thread, which was “ha ha, explain this crazy conundrum I just thought up” and was mostly greeted by “ha ha, that’s funny, I’m witty too!” and, at best “who knows: anything is possible!”
And I still disagree. I didn’t make it a secret that I didn’t believe, no, but I also made questions and challenges directly in the spirit of PARTICULAR theological accounts that people had given. If Jesus had a new spiritual-stuff body, then it does imply that he deliberately re-wounded himself. Or if it was the same body, then it does seem like certain wounds and side-effects of death were healed and not others. All of those different theological takes have further implications. People started pulling in theodicy to explain the wounds, Der attacked that, people then made claims about IN RELATION to the issue of why there were wounds, and I responded to those too. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I think it’s pretty far from “perverse childishness” or even “threadshitting” that I did. It isn’t even clearly a hijack, since the issue of the wounds was always the basic core issue all of the rest revolved around.
Guess what: it was and is fair. Because those specific answers (he had a new body/he didn’t have a new body) all have further implications, and picking up on what they imply is perfectly in line with the GD of the thread.
As I said, miracles are miracles: anything can happen, virtually any explanation can fly. But at the very least, we can explore some rationale for why someone would want them to happen a certain way and whether this or that account makes sense.
It wasn’t particularly a “shot at believers.” It was pointing out that there are many many different possible rationales for any given event, and nailing down which is something that can only be done by trying to figure out what sorts of explanations are really consistent with everything else we know and learn from the story.
I know that I, for one, lose interest in religion-themed threads pretty quickly once the “sky pixie/invisible pink unicorn/spaghetti monster” stuff makes its inevitable appearance. :rolleyes: Good one guys! Very clever, especially after the millionth repetition. Reminds me of high school kids who think The Matrix is like whoa so deep and insightful… maaaan.
*Is cropdusting beach lobsters in Nebraska a good or bad idea?
There is a debate going on in Omaha where local officials are attempting to address a growing concern. The beach lobster population has grown and the DNR is looking for ways to curb the growth via cropdusting. Advocate for the homeless, Leslie Freed, states that these could instead be harvested and made into a nutritious bisque for the Omaha Homeless shelter… *
Let’s pretend for a moment that I started out a thread like that. Should we or should we not cropdust these beach lobsters? I’ll insist that we stay on topic because my belief that these beach lobsters not only exist in Nebraska but have also grown to a problematic amount. I’m basing all of this on what many might consider to be a false assumption but I’m going to insist that no one question the existence or not of these lobsters. This is the position that Polycarp is advocating, in my opinion.
This is on a forum whose original directive is to fighting ignorance (cliched truth there). Now, the OP is asking that ignorance be waived in this instance to make way for fantasy debate. Let’s all get on board about the Nebraskan Beach Lobsters (NBL) and anyone who might question their existence is just “threadshitting”.
I try to just avoid the religion threads in GD for that exact purpose. It would tempt me to exclaim that there are no NBLs and that the argument is based off of complete nonsense. Shouting across the rooftops that there are no discarded shells, that witnessing of the lobsters was never verified, and that the “footprints in the sand” show neither lobsters nor lobsters carrying people when there burden was too heavy.
All that being said, I think the position that religion-is-mythology-is-bullshit is a redundant one. It’s also one I don’t see relevent to keep making in these irrelevent threads but the frustration of baseline acceptance that these lobster exist and should be dealt with as being serious is frustrating for those who want logic to prevail. Prove that the lobsters exist before getting into the meta discussions of whether or not to gas 'em.