I personally have no problem with liberal atheists (or conservative ones for that matter) participating in religious forums. I've enjoyed the many discussions and debates with such people.
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Goodbye Perhaps?
- Thread starter rocala
- Start date
pope made homophobic slur
The pope made an horrendous homophobic slur https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13467075/vatican-silent-homophobia-pope-francis-gay-not-admitted-church.html I'm not angry I'm disappointed It sends out the wrong message, that such language is acceptable He should have known better...
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More liberals than conservatives.
You expanded the OP to be about politics in general not Trump/Biden.
I was making the point that the politics section is mostly liberals and it is these threads which are drowning out the religious threads. Religious people are less likely to be liberals and are more likely to be conservative, and would like more discussions that aren't jumped on. As @SalixIncendium pointed out, the liberals dominate the political scene, so being realistic, it is those posters who are drowning out the religious discussions and are becoming angry at the idea of political threads being toned down and religious ones amped up. This seems to be the issue.
This has always been the divide on RF.
I just did a little addition, and it actually appears that while maybe your 90/10 goal is not being achieved, religion is still far ahead.
The total, under Religious Topics and Discuss Individual Religions combined is:
Threads = 96,700 ------ Messages = 4,478,500
While Under Political Discussion, those numbers are:
Threads = 23,200 ------ Messages = 946,200
(For the sake of clarity, I ignored "Everything But the Kitchen Sink")
Perhaps, just perhaps, the fact that is less than 6 months to the next Presidential election in a very highly contentious nation -- where campaigns run far too long -- is what causes an occasional uptick in political commentary.
In England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France and elsewhere, we keep our elections to weeks, sometimes a couple of months. But nothing like the forever elections in the US. Even India, the most populous democracy in the world, doesn't take that long!
Perhaps focus on the fact that most private ventures adapt or die.
I do not believe for a moment that all of these topics can be discussed in "theological ways." How should we treat someone who self-identifies as a witch? "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," says the Bible, and if that's your theological source material, what choice do you have but to kill him or her?
To suppose that we can have "theological discussions" about the disposition of people's lives is barbaric, in my opinion, something from our distant past which we have grown far beyond. These are social, psychological, legal and humanitarian questions now -- and so they should be. To permit religion to dominate is to say that, yes non-believers in Muslim countries should be murdered, and that yes, a woman should be allowed to bleed out because doctors are too terrified to operate in states that are controlled by "Christian Nationalists."
These are not theological questions: they are deeply human questions. To suppose that any of the plethora of gods and religions the world acknowledges are the final arbiters is to abdicate our own human responsibility to our fellows, our own species -- and therefore our own family.
I have no problem being in a minority -- I've been in several all of my life. I'm gay. I never had a family and grew up not knowing how to deal with family life. I'm an atheist, and always was, in a world that was (76 years ago) very religious indeed. But I got along in that world, and I fought back against that world, too.
But where I think you, and some of the others who would like to see me out of here, are wrong is this: religion isn't about God (or gods, or spirits or anything else). Religion is about being human, and tries to answer the questions that humans (through both religion and philosophy) have always asked: who are we, where do we come from, where are we going, how do I know what's right and wrong, how can I live a good life, and what is a good life anyway?
If you make your interest in religion only about "what is the nature of God" and questions like that, you'll never learn anything -- because that information is not available to you. All you and everybody else can do is surmise, and then argue back and forth with nothing but scriptural texts written by humans to make your points. And that leads, as history has already shown us over and over and over again, to nothing but schism.
Humans only began to discover what "human rights" are (or should be) starting with the Enlightenment -- the change of focus from the divine to the human. So all those other topics that some members of RF don't want to be discussing are really, in fact, the subject that we should all be studying, all of the time. Because in the end, humans are the focal point of the study of religion.
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The thing is, if you want to get back to the original purpose of the place, it wasn't intended specifically to accommodate discussions by/for religious people. It was intended as a place where literally anybody was welcome to come and talk about religion.
I mean the place was created by an atheist. That by itself should be a pretty clear indicator of the intention.
That and the fact that the original name of RF was Religious Education Forums, not just Religious Forums (that's just the URL). I don't know when we dropped Education from the title but I think it was a mistake. Just one more thing we lost during our glorious system upgrades.
When I first joined staff we were constantly having to remind people who had probably been misled by the domain name that this was a discussion board, not a church, and that the purpose of the place was to discuss religion academically. I think the reason we don't have to do that so often now is because it's become obvious.
Like I said, this place wasn't intended for religious people, it was intended for the the public in general. And I think a big part of the reason we have fewer threads covering religious topics now is because to some extent the general public has lost interest in the topic.
In 2004 when the place was created, religion was a hot topic:
--- 9/11 had just happened and the US was waging war with not-so-subtle religious overtones.
--- there was widespread concern in the US about the influence the religious right was having on politics. Even some high profile Christians, like Jimmy Carter, we're speaking out against it.
--- widespread sexual abuse by the Catholic church had just come to light.
--- advances in medical technology like stem cell research and genetic engineering were sparking outspoken resistance from religious quarters.
All that and the fact that the still somewhat new world wide Web was bringing people from all over the world together for the first time and forcing us to deal with our differences, religion being one main example.
Religion was something that was on a lot of people's minds.
Probably not so much now.
Yes and from a business perspective the focus is to make money. I'm sure the owners don't care how that happens.
This is what I'm getting at.
I think people misread me as saying atheists aren't welcome here when that's not what I meant. I meant that in relation to the side discussion of liberal atheists dominating the politics here and that being the reason religious discussion has been swamped. Many groups are largely absent from here, such as Muslims and Buddhists, for example. This has been fairly consistent for at least a decade.
I was saying that in relation to that.
But the point of the forum is religious discussion, as you have pointed out. I see no issue with telling this to people as it is the intent behind the board.
If we include politics, I think the least we could do is change the name, because the name is pretty clear.
I would also suggest the purpose of a business is not just to make money, but to benefit the customers.
Spice
StewardshipPeaceIntergityCommunityEquality
But North American Politics IS a sub-forum. Those threads aren't posted to Interfaith Discussions, etc., or they would have been moved.
Secret Chief
Degrow!
One does not equal the other.
Twilight Hue
Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
Not even Elon Musk carrying a kitchen sink?
I think people just aren't understanding. Maybe the age of the single topic discussion forum is over, I don't know, but back when I used the web in the early noughties, fora were generally dedicated to a single subject and that was the main focus. Other topics were allowed but they were not meant to be on par with or dominate the main focus of the board. So 9/10 threads would be in relation to what the forum was dedicated to. I think now people think everywhere on the web is like social media and it's a free for all, but this is not what fora are supposed to be. For example, if you go to Christian Forums, you expect it to be Christian discussion, if you go to Engineering Forums you'd expect engineering discussions. If I found those forums were full of discussions about politics I'd be a bit concerned.
Secret Chief
Degrow!
Anything other than religion - anywhere - is off-topic. Keep up.
Secret Chief
Degrow!
Especially not that!