Why isn't there a separate forum aside from GD for religious debates?

??

Do you mean “thread” or “forum”?

You mean a separate forum? I agree, that would help.

Help what?

Anyhoo, I’m pretty sure there is a separate forum for discussing issues related specifically to the SDMB.

Then presumably the moderator will move it to that other forum, right?

That would help, too.

For those who feel that quoting the bible verbatim, instead of debatim.

Topics tend to run in cycles. Currently, we are in the midst of a “religion/God” cycle. A few months ago, one could rarely find even one thread on a related topic. At other times, Great Debates has been dominated by the economy, terrorism, Conspiracy Theories, Terry Schiavo, IRS practices, Iraq, Afghanistan, race relations, and dozens of other topics. They come and they go and if we created a new forum for every issue that generated a lot of separate threads, we would probably have two or three dozen sub-fora below Great Debates.

The idea of a separate forum is not absurd. When feuds over the U.S. Presidential Election threatened to swamp Great Debates, a sub-forum was spun off for it, later being modified to address any issues on any elections. In that case, the fact that each U.S. election cycle tended to dominate the board for up to two years at a time, lent more weight to the suggestion and eventually persuaded TPTB to open a separate forum.

If we find that religious arguments are totally dominating Great Debates for many, many months, we might consider repeating that action. The current religious wars have not lasted nearly so long, so while the question is legitimate, the answer is that we probably will not act on it unless it persists for quite a while longer.

= = =

In the meantime, since this is more of a board question than a Great Debate, I am moving this thread to ATMB.
I have also modified this thread’s title a little bit to make it clear to others who have not previously seen it.

Because for some people, religion is their answer to everything. They cannot discuss even an insignificant event without relating it somehow to scripture.

And there are also people for whom evolution is their answer to everything. They cannot discuss even an insignificant trait without relating it somehow to evolution.

At most, evolution is an answer to everything in biology. There’s still plenty outside of biology that has nothing to do with evolution.

This post is like the Platonic Ideal of “false equivalence”. Its clear to me now that other instances of false equivalence I’ve seen in other posts were really just crude reflections of this post, cast on the SDMB like shadows on a cave wall.

In my experience, the former are about 1000 times commoner than the latter. And in my line of work, I meet more of the latter than most people.

Avoid those threads.

They usually have pretty clear names. I can’t really think of a recent instance where I’ve found myself clicking on one without knowing what was in it.

And there aren’t that many of them. There’s been an uptick recently, but even then, I only count 10 out of the top 99 threads. And that’s including stuff like “Christians photographing gay weddings”, which is as much public policy as a religiuos issue. A religion only forum would be pretty quiet.

So seems like a solution to a non-existent problem, IMHO.