I notice that the “open” forum gets a lot of threads about religion–or at least, about theism, atheism, and Christianity (which may or may not include Mormonism). Islam and Judaism regularly appear on the International Politics forum (as if Christians are not involved in international politics), while the local folk religion gets shunted off to Culture and History or somewhere.
Shouldn’t there be a separate “religion and spirituality” forum, where all the different religions and unreligions can receive equal treatment?
What you need to do is make a list of links to such threads and use them to make your case to maoman. If you gather enough relevant threads together to seed a new forum, he’ll consider it.
most of the traffic seems to come from fortigurn and the old, now absent, positronic brain of RDO.
and why invitation only? that’s a bit rich. a women’s forum that’s invite-only, i can understand, but blocking ‘unwanted’ viewpoints from a religion forum is either intolerant or cowardly, or both, i would suggest.
(a) History and Culture seems to be specifically about Chinese / Taiwanese history and culture, whereas not all religious topics belong here.
(b) Not all religious discussion is focused on historical or cultural aspects. Rather, a good portion of posts have been discussing whether religion is true, and if so, which one(s).
I don’t think the forum should be invisible, or invite-only, although that might be a reasonable approach to take for a Christian-devotional subforum (to take a likely example).
While I admit to being a religious fanatic, in much the same way that Fred Smith is a political fanatic, I waver between several forms of fanaticism, which permits me at least to present the illusion of moderation! (It’s my SubGenius heritage.)
Yes, I like the idea of a separate forum for Religion & Spirituality, but open to all so that debate can be included, including theism vs. atheism, Mormonism vs. Christianity, Falun Gong vs. everyone else, etc. There has been enough discussion about religion over the years to warrant it, IMHO.
As for closed sub-forums, should there be different ones? One for Christians only (and of so, what kind)? One for Jews? Buddhists? Mormons? FLG practitioners? Atheists?
[quote=“Screaming Jesus”]Problems with that suggestion:
(a) History and Culture seems to be specifically about Chinese / Taiwanese history and culture, whereas not all religious topics belong here.
(b) Not all religious discussion is focused on historical or cultural aspects. Rather, a good portion of posts have been discussing whether religion is true, and if so, which one(s).
[/quote]
Problems with those problems:
The suggestion isn’t so much that religion belongs within the current scope of that forum, but rather that the scope be expanded to include it.
That forum does include culture and history in general, not just Chinese and Taiwanese. In there, you will find in just the first two pages, threads on Extinction of the Great Auk, Footprints in Ash set duration of man in America at 40,000+, Ancient Seahenge ‘returns home’, Japanese bonds from the 1930’s, and Battle of Britain Won at Sea - Not in the Air, Earliest Scots Braved Ice Age Conditions, Cinco de Mayo?, Cleopatra was well ugly, beauty of fat: Now & Then, etc.
The Learning Chinese forum is for people who think there’s some value in learning Chinese.
The Restaurants forum is for people who like good restaurants.
The Technology forum is for people who want to know how to use technology more effectively.
The politics forums are for people who think there’s some value in politics.
If there were a new forum called “Religion & Spirituality”, it obviously wouldn’t follow this pattern. Going from the threads Dragonbones linked to, it would have to include people who had little interest in religion and were quite happy to take elements of religious motivation, practice, and belief completely out of context to make their points. So is this really the best name for the new forum? If we need a separate section for those threads, maybe “The Beliefs forum” would be better, especially as it echoes a common implication in them that religious faith or lack of it is mainly an intellectual exercise.
Joesax, it is quite possible to be cynical about politics in general, and yet post in the politics fora. Same with religion.
I don’t like the name “beliefs.” For one thing, it includes many things that don’t belong under religion or spirituality. (Political beliefs, medical beliefs, etc.). For another, many aspects of religion have nothing to do with belief (e.g. art and architecture), which some say is a characteristically Christian (or Protestant) emphasis. Anyway, much less clear to the average visitor.
On the issue of invite-only subfora, well, is there any demand for these? If so, then what do people want? (I dimly recall that there may be a policy of refusing requests for any new fora of this nature, other than the women’s forum which already exists.)
I don’t think we need to concern ourselves with the values or motivations of people who post in particular topic areas. Some people want to discuss religion, without any assumption that there is value in a particular religion, or without having a belief in that particular (or any) religion. So what? Not every post in Parenting is by a parent. I don’t think we need to characterize a particular topic as being “an intellectual exercise”. Topics are topics, and posters will make of them what they want. The forum areas are there for convenient categorization, and one of the needs which I, as an Open mod, perceive (you may or may not agree) is to limit the amount of stuff in Open, as it tends to be a bit much to moderate. I think religion dovetails nicely with culture and history, personally. So I would vote for moving it there.
The term ‘beliefs’ doesn’t rub me right. As SJ points out, it is too broad, for one thing.
The fact that it is quite common (natural, indeed) to talk about beliefs in relation to religion and spirituality doesn’t reduce the latter to the former.
I agree with the motion to start a ‘Religion and Spirituality’ forum. IMHO, this is (potentially) the highest sphere of thought humans capable of contemplating. The fact that this is relegated to the realm of mere opinion is a subject worthy of discussion in its self.
I’m all down with that. We have a Youtube forum, so why not something that looks at the spirit. But I pray that posters mind their manners when dealing with such a subject.
I agree that religion is more than beliefs. My rather tongue-in-cheek point was that people seldom seem to treat it as such. The kind of conversations I personally tend to enjoy and gain something from are those where the participants think about the intended meaning and goal of religious teachings. And it’s good to find common ground with people from different religions. My impression is that there haven’t been many of those kinds of conversations here, though I haven’t followed the debates very closely.
Anyway, if there are enough religion-related threads which don’t neatly fit anywhere else, of course they deserve their own forum. Religion & Spirituality is as good a title as any.
If this is truly the highest sphere of thought humans are capable of contemplating, then we are all well and truly fucked. I wanna start a forum for flobbers that fart in front of females. Can we? I would think contemplation of such events to be vastly more satisfying than superstitious twaddle rationalizing.
SJ I admire your writing. I’d rather start a forum just for you to write in. But this is far too narrow a flobographic to warrant its own forum, imo. The sooner we are done caving into religious demands, the sooner we can fix what religion has done to this human race. Let’s start right here. If flobbers wanna be spiritual, they can go to one of the chrizzilions of websites dedicated to such, again, imo, addle-minded contemplation.
