Some Things Are Obvious
Balerion said:
Criticizing an ideology is hatemongering...unless that ideology is one Tiassa disagrees with, in which case then it's fair not only to criticize the ideology but to make sweeping generalizations about the adherents themselves.
A couple of quotes from a recent discussion:
• "I mean, what's so hard to understand about 'Religion insults us, so we should be able to insult them?'"
• "When he says, 'I reserve the right to insult religion,' what do you suppose he means? Are you really unclear on the target of his insults?"
In scholarship, there is a word to describe someone who dismisses the established, scholarly record as irrelevant and arbitrary in order to insist on one's own definition, especially when the supporting evidence for that personal definition actually contradicts the definition.
When people stand up in defense of crackpottery on the pretense of the propriety of hatemongering, it's not hard to figure out what's going on.
None of this, however, denigrates the proposition that some sort of change is necessary in how we've conducted the Religion subforum over the years. It's just that it is quite clear that any sort of scholarship in our discussions of religion is quite unwelcome. You argued that
crackpottery trumps the scholarly record:
"Why, because he hasn't discussed the criteria you arbitrarily set for him?" To the one we have a scholarly record. To the other, we have a personal definition not even supported by the dictionary definition offered in support. Tell us again, sir, which standard is arbitrary?
I'm reminded of a time twenty years ago, in Salem, Oregon, when we nearly got in a fight with an anti-Semite who really wanted to go rounds with my "Jew" friend; we couldn't stop laughing as I told his drunk wife that a Star of David has
six points, not five. The Dragon, blessed be, had the decency to not engage the man in physical combat, since the result would have been tragic. Still, though, setting aside the question of what one country bumpkin from east of town thinks about any particular group of people, it
still cracks me up that the guy had no idea what he was trying to lay his hate on.
We can easily subsume Theology as a child forum to History, and Comparative Religion—a related but distinct study—either as anthropology under a Human Sciences parent subforum, or as a philosophical endeavor as a child to the General Philosophy subforum.
If, on the other hand, we are to reserve a Religion subforum for the purposes of hatemongering, we might as well just scrap it entirely.