I don’t believe I’ve seen those threads, but we’ve had a number of decent threads here about the existence of God that I would consider perfectly reasonable philosophical discussions that don’t fall under what seems to be meant here by “witnessing”. In fact there’s one going on in IMHO right now, "What’s the minimum-level miracle it would take you to convince you God exists?. Since “witnessing” is supposed to belong in GD, I assume this is not being regarded as such.
OTOH, here’s a good example of what I mean. This thread was started in GD a couple of years ago:
Infant genetal [sic] mutilation is a blood sacrifice to the demon Yahwe.
The OP of that thread is just the kind of incoherent rant that one might expect from such a title.
So what happens?
Within literally 50 minutes, a mod shows up, not to shut it down, but to defend it with this comment:
Guys, this is the very definition of witnessing. Hence it belongs here in Great Debates.
i.e.- “Stop flagging this OP – it’s allowed by the rules.”
To be fair, the mod was probably just doing his job enforcing the rules brought down by TPTB, but it’s always struck me as a peculiarity of this place that while we try to enforce reasonable standards of discourse, especially in GD, any kind of blithering nonsense is given a pass as long as it touches in some way on religion. No doubt there is some history here that I’m not aware of, but it seems like a real anomaly.
And of course, that particular thread eventually did get shut down – as virtually all “witnessing” threads eventually do – after painfully struggling on and being a blight on the board for two weeks.