Sarah, how about you tell us at what point you claim you stopped posting and the homeless guy took over?
I think asking for forgiveness is a little premature. Let us be clear on what you’re saying happened first. Did you start that thread? Did you write any of the responses to it?
Daniel
Nope, I didn’t start that thread. I’ve been tied up lately and barely had any free time.
I don’t agree. Forgiveness and exhoneration are not the same. Forgiveness, by its very nature, is unconditional. Why wait to ask for forgiveness?
So why did you even register on the boards? You have no other posts anywhere.
Daniel
You will have to excuse me, but I don’t believe you yet. Whoever wrote that thread knows you very well; specifically, he or she is very aware of how you feel about clothing, for example. Much of what was posted in that thread is consistent with what you posted over on that writer’s board that was linked earlier in this thread. I still am extremely distrustful of your claim that the entire thread was perpetrated by a random homeless dude.
You still aren’t telling us the entire truth; I’m still not even sure you’re telling us any of it.
If you didn’t start the thread then surly you didn’t post in it (don’t even try to say you just ‘went with it’). Which makes the above statement ‘weird’.
Your running out of opportunities to be taken seriously.
So come clean right now or shut the fuck up.
If you want my humble opinion…
I know gobear doesn’t hate Christians - he’s not that sort. But he’s expressed pretty naked contempt for religion of all stripes (calling it silly at very least), always without saying anything of the sort about their adherents.
Sit down, grampa. Don’t get overexcited; you don’t need any extra stress at your age. Shhh, it’ll be okay. 
I don’t think she merits forgiveness until she more honestly comes forward - I for one and many other folks around here (I suspect) would be happy to write the incident off completely if she would acknowledge that she posted the thread (or, alternatively, explain how and why the homeless gentleman in question managed to engage in a several day long discussion on the unique issues facing a young Muslim woman in the U.S.)
Until she actually owns up to what she did, I don’t see why we ought to forgive her or welcome her to the boards at all; after all, while I doubt perfect honesty is the norm here, I don’t like to think I belong to a community of naked dissimulators, since I don’t see how it’s a community at all. (The naked part would be okay if they were cute, though.) A community of people who make mistakes is fine, since that describes every community in existence.
Sarah W, memories are short and the thread in question is gone. I think a lot of folks here would be inclined to forgive you (and the few who are still pissed would be obligated per the rules not to bring it up) if you just owned up. It was a bad idea, you said some stuff without thinking, and (frankly) the pile-on of folks who appeared to be trying to trip you up by demanding knowledge of esoteric issues was somewhat unpleasant. Shit happens, and we’d understand.
I suppose we just look at forgiveness differently. Had Jesus told the woman, “Admit to me your adultery, and I will not condemn you,” I would still be an atheist.
Did she claim not to be one - in spite of evidence to the contrary? Liberal, your smug platitudes don’t match the personality that’s shone through on the boards.
Sarah, it’s not that we don’t want to believe you, but the thing is-how do we know you’re not someone just having a lark and now laughing because you managed to convince us?
It’s not you-it’s that people have tried this before. How did that person manage to stay logged in to your user name and password-if you’re using a public computer?
Sorry, but we’re skeptics, and your story has a few holes in it.
We? Southerners? Libertarians? People taking Prednisone for medical conditions?
Oh, Christians! I get it, you’re faulting me here for being a godless heathen, eh?
In fact, this statement contains the subtle implication that I’m demanding she somehow publicly ‘repent’ in some sense for her crimes, and if you read my post, you’d see that it’s clearly not what I said. I made it quite clear why I don’t think that sort of pretending is conducive to what he have here on the boards.
Besides, Christian doctrine, to my knowledge, does indeed require one to admit, and even repent, ones sins. Apparently Jesus’s forgiveness is slightly more demanding than you make it out to be. You might be confusing Jesus with some of the more palatable new-age icons.
Lib, when dealing with me, in the future, please either avoid the veiled insults or state them honestly. The intellectual cowardice of trying to make statements without admitting them saddens me. See, for instance, your repeated misspelling of my name, even after I alerted you to it. Do you do that when you bring me up in threads in hopes that I won’t stumble across your discussions of me? Because it’s not necessary. I don’t do vanity searches. I don’t mind if you insult me; this is the Pit. I’d just rather you were honest about it.
Sarah_W has yet to admit anything to us; at the moment she is blaming everything on a random homeless loony.
No – Lib is saying what he regards as God’s capacity for unconditional forgiveness. With which I agree.
Some people’s “Christian doctrine… does indeed require one to admit… one’s sins. Apparently Jesus’s forgiveness ,” according to them, "…is slightly more demanding than you make it out to be. "
While Lib can be more than a trifle prickly at times, I don’t think he intended insult, veiled or otherwise, at you, but was rather stating his own convictions. And, as someone who shares his on this matter, it can be very annoying to be told that “we’re not real Christians” because we stand on Jesus’s own words, rather than the legalist twist put on them by some conservative Protestants and Catholics. If there was ire in his post, I see it directed at your echoing that perspective, not at you personally.
Nuff said – I don’t have a dog in the fight between you and him, but I thought that perhaps a third party without strong emotional involvement in the argument might be able to mediate peace. If I have, good. If not, or if I’ve misrepresented Lib in stating my understanding of what he was saying, then my apologies for butting in.
It should be pointed out that having a good reputation with one’s fellow men is not necessarily something that should be taken at face value, or as an indicator of probity. As Jesus said, “Blessed are you when men hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their fathers treated the prophets…[But] woe to you when all men speak well of you, for that is how their fathers treated the false prophets.”
I’m not sure what the circumstances were for Wild Bill (in fact, I’m not totally sure I’ve heard of that poster before), but IIRC, PaulFitzroy bit the dust over this post, and not his “Bomb 'em all!” rantings. Granted, what killed him in the end was the overall pattern of behavior, and some of his more… extreme foreign policy views probably contributed to the banning, but I wouldn’t say for certain how much weight they had. I can’t say that there were no repercussions at all, but I can’t say that the mods cracked down with an iron fist, either.
It seems to me that there certainly was a time, particularly before the war in Iraq began, where there were a lot of posts saying “All Muslims hate America” and “Religion of peace, my ass” and things like that. And while many Dopers argued against those particular displays of ignorance, it didn’t seem like there were as many arguments or that the arguments were as vehement as they might have been if another religious or ethnic group were singled out.
After a time, I got so frustrated reading those threads that I stopped reading them entirely - it seems like there are fewer now than there were, but perhaps that’s only because I’m shunning them. But I have gotten the impression that it’s more okay to generalize about Muslims based on the actions of their lunatic fringe than it is okay to make similar generalizations about other religious groups. And that bothers me. It doesn’t bother me enough that I’d run around shrieking “Racism! Discrimination! Bias!” But it bothers me.
Sarah_W, your story makes no sense and for now I don’t believe it.
For starters, how would some random guy know enough about this board to even start an “Ask the…” thread in the correct place? How would he keep it running for days? Why would he even think to go the the SDMB in the first place on the off chance that you conveniently just made an account there so he could spoof you?
Come clean.
Haj
I agree with hajario. How would a random homeless guy know so much about Islam, also?
The story does not add up.
None of this makes any sense to me. I didn’t even know the thread had been deleted. I thought something had gone wrong with the SDMB server when I couldn’t find it. Until I looked in Angua’s new “Ask the” thread (Anguarocks! I read everything by her), and she said something about Sarah W’s thread being deleted. WTF? Who ever heard of a thread being deleted? Is there an explanation somewhere? You who have internet access at work, you have the luxury of keeping up with SDMB developments minute by minute. I, on the other hand, though I always check in during breakfast, I then have to go to work where there’s no internet access. Then after work I schlep my butt clear over to Old Town Alexandria to see my TG counselor. By the time I get home, have dinner, and collapse wearily into my computer chair, whole sagas and epics have been born, died, and buried before I even get to find out about it.
Sarah W., if that is indeed your name, it looks like you’ve been having us on. Either when you started, or recently. The inconsistencies in your posts just do not add up. It doesn’t even read like the same person posting. You can have fringe ideas and as long as you’re real it’s OK. But do not pull any phony stuff here. This is a community of people who trust one another to be real with each other, and phonies don’t stay long. If you honestly come clean and give us the whole story, I think you have a good chance of staying Otherwise, ma‘a salâmah.
Johanna, This: is what Tuba Diva said about the thread.
It doesn’t explain why the thread was removed instead of merely closed.
I expect it has something to do with the fear of the mods/admins of not being seen as PC enough.
One has to admit that islam - as a whole - didn’t come out as a very peaceful religion in that thread.
Now we can’t have that, can we?
Why admit there are people willing to stone other people to death? See women as second-hand citizens? Or are teaching their kids to throw homo-sexuals of off high buildings?
Nah. Muslims are good people. And we - on the SDMB - will keep on repeating that, until it’s our turn to get a taste of their bigotry.
*Disclaimer: Like gobear, I’m against all religion, but as long as people don’t hurt other people with their believes, I’m fine with it.
The sad truth is: That all terrorists are muslim [ by Abd al-Rahman al-Rashid]
http://www.worldpress.org/Mideast/1941.cfm
And we [in the Netherlands - and I don’t mean decades, or even ages ago] have more crimes; thefts, rape, murder, commited by muslims than by people of any other faith.
Yes. That’s it exactly.
:rolleyes: