Yeah, it might be fun to spoof religion when you’re drunk, but “religion” and “debate” are mutually exclusive concepts. Religion is for believers; Debate is for rational folk.
This board is like shortwave radio, full of religion spam. I am still waiting for Sony or Sangean to come up with an SW radio that nulls out all stations that mention “Jeeshus” or “God” more than once in a 24-hour period.
Can’t we just move all this religion bullshit off to a different Message Board? Or at least provide a “superstition filter” for those of us who are into rational discussion and debate instead of flying saucers and assumptions of Mary?
I am proud never intentionally to have opened any of those pieces of crap.
The problem is that they run the interesting stuff right off the page, and I have to read at least the title, much as in the SW radio situation, in order to delete the spam.
Are you the only person never to have been bothered by spam?
Naw, I don’t think so. If it is a “GD”, then fine. Some are enlightening. But if it is just witnessing or faith-bashing, then it ends up here by default. THOSE threads we can do without. Maybe the PIT?
Given the description of the “Great Debates” forum, it would seem that everything else should be moved away first; the forum is defined as the catchall for things that are religious or otherwise unsolved.
Not to mention this thread really belongs in ATMB, since it’s really a question of board usage.
Unquestionably the fundamental questions of religion - are there deities (or a deity), and if so, what are they like - cannot be settled by debate. However, it is quite possible to rationally debate lesser religious matters within shared systems of belief.
Let’s spend a little time (a very little time) in a new community, and rather than give ourselves to get a feel for what goes on there and why, start trying to impose our own rules on it, and try to reshape it to fit our own narrow needs.
I think the religious threads in GD are usually fun. But they’re like canned yams: they rarely go bad, but when they do, don’t even open the damn thing.
I tend to agree with the OP in that religion is the realm of faith, not reason, and not available to the ordinary reasoned debate that other topics are. If the SDMB was a democracy, I’d vote to have a seperate forum for reilgious discusions. But being that it isn’t a democracy, it’s no big deal (as others have said) to just skip the religious debates if you so choose.
It seems to me that the dividing line would be impossible to draw. When does something become a religious debate? In the realm of gay rights, my most-frequented debate subject, most of the opposition to gay equality is based on religious precepts. Witnessing abounds there, but the threads are pretty obviously political in nature.
For better or worse, religion is infused into social policy, politics, education, science, and almost every other aspect of life, at least in the US. Trying to separate out the religious from the secular seems pretty futile.
Even though I suspect jimbino is a bigot against religious folk, I agree with the OP, to an extent. Generally I just don’t open them, mostly because I’ve seen the same debate about a billion times in my time here. And frankly, it gets tiring. Both sides make the same arguments, bring up the same strawmen and use the same baits over and over and over and over and over. And the worst part is that even if the OP has a different title, just about every religious thread ends up the same thing - 90% of the religious threads could be merged into one thread without anyone losing a beat.
Frankly, all threads that annoy me should be banned. IMO.
Because after all, that’s the rational, intelligent thing to do.