Aw, don’t cry, honey, it’s nothing personal…you all can stick around as long as you like.
Just stay out of my way, goddamn it! 
The thing is, the moderators are not here to decide what is fair. That’s not their job. If one side gets it in the chops more than the other because of the nature of the people who post here (American, liberal, tending anti-religionist), them’s the breaks. It would not be defensible to ask the moderators to go beyond enforcing pretty straight-forward rules – and they are pretty straight-forward, despite the periodic bitching about them – to making determinations of what is fair and what isn’t. “Fair” is a purely subjective determination, and we should not be proposing to limit the free exchange of ideas solely on the basis that one side gets beat up more than the other and that’s not “fair.”
It’s all well and good to propose limits on the free exchange of ideas when you perceive yourself to be on minority / persecuted end of the argument. But consider how you would feel if you were on the other side, if you held a position you felt was right and you were told that you couldn’t discuss it further because your adversaries felt beat up upon.
If you don’t like the religion debates, don’t participate in them. I don’t. But ISTM to be completely unjustified to propose that people should not be allowed to discuss a topic because you don’t like the way they are discussing it.
Well, that’s one study. Not “studies.” And it really has nothing to do with the claims that **Lekatt **is making. No one has disputed that people **report **NDEs.
People have already said it, but it bears repeating; it’s not NDEs that get mocked more, it’s lekatt’s argument in particular. People disagree with Der Trihs pretty loudly too, but that isn’t ridiculing atheism/anti-war sentiments, it’s ridiculing his particular views of those things. The difference is that lekatt is pretty much the only constant NDE supporter on the boards, so disagreeing with him makes it look like people are disagreeing with the whole idea.
That’s not to say people don’t disagree with him. A more reasonable poster would probably still half pretty much everyone else in the thread disagreeing with them. But the amount of scorn lekatt gets is much more about his debating style than his actual position.
Anyway, my general view is this; perhaps they are futile. Perhaps very few minds have been changed. Perhaps no great ideas have come of it, no-one’s switched entirely from one side to the other, and even its existence means sniping and insults will be exchanged. That’s not a reason to get rid of it, that’s a reason to keep it and try to do better.
I think you’ll find the main reason for what you see as ridiculing and mocking is frustration. Many posters, myself included, have asked lekatt to back up his assertions (which he insists are factual) with actual peer reviewed studies. He links again and again to his own website and says that we just don’t know because our minds aren’t open. That doesn’t work here. If you are going to say something is a fact and not just your opinion, you need to be able to back it up. He refuses to do so over and over, and eventually people get frustrated and refuse to engage him openly, because he does not debate honestly.
Perhaps you missed some of my earlier posts. I don’t expect anything to come of this one way or the other. Furthermore, I don’t consider myself to be on either side of the debate nor have I given any indication that this is the case. I routinely avoid these discussions as I know for a fact I posses niether the intellect nor do I have the desire to do so.
Religious debates are automatically poisoned by a few overzealous atheists who will generally gang up with canned arguments and constant berating, ‘prove it’, ‘prove it’, for things you obviously cannot prove, and then consider your lack of proof on a statement of belief as a rhetorical win. They’ll then turn around and make you responsible for the evils of all religious people throughout history, making you defend arguments you never made that some other religious person made with them. If you do that to them, ‘There is no normative atheist.’, unless you make a comment about a hypothetical atheist, and suddenly you were insulting all atheists, even though by their admission there is ‘no normative atheist.’ The half-dozen or so usual suspects will berate you until you get bored, and then berate you for not answering their asinine questions. They’ll work very hard to shift the scope of a debate. Generally they argue tactically and without good faith. It’s not about arguing the issue, they make it personal as quickly as possible. The sooner they can make it about you being an idiot, the sooner they are happy with the debate. They take schisms as evidence that one can say ‘religion X means anything I want it to mean.’, as though there are not still common themes.
This is not a forum for religious debates. You cannot really get a good one, at least not very often. You are upheld to a ridiculous standard of factuality that no one in any other context is ever held to. Historical context is meaningless. They treat the world as though they are an enlightened emergent species completely divorced from the historical context that formed the rest of us mud people. Imperious proclamations are good enough for them, but it’s not ok for you to admit, “I don’t know the answer, but I think this is true.”, because the falsity of religion is ‘blindingly obvious’. The standards of decorum of course are one-sided. Der Trihs is not held to the same standard of behavior as say, lekatt, even though by and large he is the meanest poster in Great Debates.
Don’t come here for serious religious debates. They are very rare, and very few people know enough to do it justice. A serious religious debate requires people to be more polite than any other kind of debate, simply because it is dealing with very fundamental issues for the people involved in the debate, and also because expecting a person to know everything there is to know about their particular religion is about the same as asking someone to know everything there is to know about science, and I don’t mean a particular scientific discipline, but the whole of science.
Basically, atheists are allowed to be jerks, and theists are not. This makes religious debates here impossible. This is not to say that the behavior of a few assholes reflects on all atheists. There are many very interesting atheists here, who are generally very respectful. There just happens to be a few atheists with chips on their shoulders who engage in mob tactics. I’ve hard far more meaningful debates with atheists on religious message boards than here. That’s because of the process of selection. The religious message board is not as likely to garner the jerks, but the people who are more level-headed and know where they are.
First, what’s wrong about saying “hateful things” about something you hate ? And yes, some things deserve to be hated IMHO. And second, if saying “hateful things” gets you banned, how many people do you think will be left ? What subjects will be off limits ? Political parties you hate ? Murderers ? Despised foods ? Smoking ? Board downtime ? Sony Online Entertainment ?
Factual support. Scientific facts are, well, facts, tested by and supported by evidence. Religious beliefs aren’t. Therefore, it makes perfect sense to put religious claims, and scientific claims in separate categories; if you can’t back a claim up, it isn’t science.
Wrong; they could be verified if they were real. lekatt claims that they have been. They haven’t been, because they aren’t. Now, the fact that people believe in them anyway is what puts them in the category of religion/superstition; not any innate inability to prove them.
Resolved : Colored Socks Are Better Than White Socks
You mean like you were banned for posting an OP that was a thinly veiled claim that atheists are all monsters, because only religion can be a source of morality ?
Oh wait, you weren’t.
Or the way you were banned for constantly refusing to answer posters because you didn’t think them worthy of a response ?
Oh, wait. You weren’t banned for that, either.
Ok, so I wasn’t banned for something I never did.
and…
I wasn’t banned for something that shouldn’t be a bannable offense.
Interesting.
Okay, I’m willing to let the rest of your post go, but this is just rubbish. Everyone knows colored socks fall five minutes after putting them on and white socks are much thicker and warmer.
Colored socks have style. They are the sign of a sophisticated mind. White socks, on the other hand, are obviously meant as a subtle racial insult to whites, since you are putting WHITE socks on your feet and walking all over them.
Really, Maureen, I expected better from you.
( we need a “snooty look of superiority” smiley )
Well that sounds like the statement of a bigot. I’m going to have to go ahead and disagree with you on that one.
This is a transparent strawman and I resent the implication. Some of my favorite socks are white. It’s just that the majority of colored socks out there are thin and lack elasticity. It isn’t my fault that white socks are inherently superior for being trod on.
That’s what they all say ! Given the chance, you’d be one of the first to first to round up the white socks and put them all in cam- ah, garbage bags.
On the topic of the OP… I want to see the religious stuff kept around. BUT I very much agree and sympathize with the frustration at how the topics are generally… conducted. I can’t claim a highground on this, but I can say that I try to be respectful and like to think I’m really trying to hear what is being said - not just what I want to hear.
It’s frustrating. In real life I can have a good conversation on religion once every two weeks, maybe a month. And I mean other than the lovely woman - not much to quibble with her over anyhow. I mean people I encounter in life outside of home. It can be very civil. Enlightening. It’s like a window into a person’s understanding of their life and, sometimes, the universe all compressed into a short conversation - even just a few blurbs.
And that fun event is something I keep thinking I can get online. But really… it’s a little rare. It seems that only in private messages have I been able to have even a short mutual respect with a theist (with whom I disagree). It’s like the Godwin thing… once the number of posts or posters get above some number, the probability of a crash reaches 1.
And if they made colored or patterned socks they way they make the nice cozy white ones… I’d be open to wearing them. But the soft wonderful white athletic socks just have way too much comfort in them to simply cast them aside based on some “intrinsic” increased value due to added dye. I wonder who is the one making decisions based on dye here… AHEM!
It could be your sig!
I’m really just joshing you.
It’s a cultural issue. Colored socks just don’t value superiority like white socks do. It has nothing to do with their color, of course. You could bleach a colored sock white and it would still be inferior.
No, no and HELL NO. ANY debate-whether politics, religion, history, etc-are going to be heated. Ban one, and you might just as well ban them all.
Where, oh where did I accuse him of making the whole thing up-just saying that his claims of it being caused by a heart attack are bullshit.
I’m sure that he experienced what he claims. Whether it was a NDE, or something weird he ate before he went to bed, who knows? What pisses ME off is his attitude, the way he talks down to everyone, and then claims to “love” them. He seems to feel sorry for us, because we haven’t gotten The Truth[sub]TM[/sub] yet.
He’s condescending, arrogant, and just plain annoying. We had another thread where someone asked what we thought an evil god would be like. He barges into the thread to say that’s not possible. Even IF it weren’t, how does that affect the topic? It was an interesting discussion, until lekatt came and ruined it.
Or this one?
He’s a one trick pony, and a rude one at that. I could do without his kind of “love”.
And not ALL of his detractors are non-religious, and/or atheists. I’m not, and neither is TomNDebb, or DocCathode. Not that that should matter, but I’m sure in his world, it does.
You should know better than this. This is Fake Great Debates.
Did you really thing you could just throw out a faulty assertion and back it up with anecdotal evidence just because “everyone knows”?
Off to the Pit with y… oh, wait.