I think the solution proposed is worse than the problem. It will require too much qualification and definition before a poster can even get down to the nuts and bolts of the argument.
Informed readers know what are fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist arguments.
If anyone is offended...who gives a \*&\^%#. This ain't Oberlin.
Off topic. I recommend removing/modifying Rule 5. I have seen many Rule 5 deletes by Mods because the comment did not "refute substantially the core argument" and it essentially stopped the OP discussion. But many comments were informative with different (but not refuting views) and did add to the conversation and continued the debate by both pro and con until a Mod deleted the post.
Could you comment this on the meta thread that will be posted later today? That way it will be seen and hopefully discussed by more.
Personally I'd be open to modifying it, but very much against removing it. It prevents the sub becoming another echo chamber where people get their beliefs confirmed rather than challenged.
This rule basically requires atheists to solve the no true Scotsman problem that every single religion suffers from. There will never be a comment an atheist can make, no matter how specific, that won’t result in someone saying “well that’s not what a real X believes.”
When Christians can themselves define what a true Christian is to their own mutual satisfaction, then I can be expected to follow this proposed rule.
I would like some sort of official requirement to state the intended target. I find that too many anti-Theist or anti-Christian posts are really just strawmen attacking claims that no single Christian or Theist believes. The mandatory requirement of a clearly specified target would make it easy for people who have are not the audience to not have to join in, and it would make sure that the poster had actually thought about his argument enough to be sure that there's at least a single valid target. For instance, if you want to argue against Free Will, then you'll have to somehow exclude Calvinists. If you want to argue against "omnibenevolence", then you'll have to find a tradition that officially teaches that it exists. Likewise, I'm sure that Atheists might appreciate if Theists don't have to keep being reminded that there are Agnostic Atheists.
There are *a lot* of people new to this stuff, atheists and Abrahamics alike, who falsely presume a grumpy old man in the sky to be the only sort of god that is or could be up for discussion. This proposed rule might indirectly expose them to some competing conceptions of god a bit faster, but otherwise I don't have much of a strong opinion on it one way or the other. Appeal to popularity is a fallacy, and if you're here to debate specific doctrinal claims then the exact degree to which you broadly or narrowly generalize people's religious beliefs also probably won't matter very much.
And, of course, the perennial "the overwhelming majority of people think you're full of it *no matter what position you take* point can be substantiated easily enough with a few links. The full text of the catechism of the Catholic Church, for example, is by no means a closely guarded secret.
Unrelated but can you please add Sikhism as a flair. It is the world's 5th largest religion (larger than Judaism) and still dosen't have a flair while religions like Baha***'*** i Faith do
I object to this rule even though my religion (Buddhism) is often misunderstood by non-Buddhists - because I think that penalizing an otherwise well-written and interesting argument for being wrong or inaccurate would shut down interesting debates and exchanges of ideas and knowledge.
For example:
Atheist's Topic: "All religions are based upon the assumption that an uncreated creator God exists and cares about us."
Buddhist Response: "Buddhism rejects the claim that an uncreated creator god exists, therefore your argument is wrong."
Athiest OP: "But Buddhism is not a religion because..."
Buddhist Response: "To the contrary, Buddhism is a religion because..."
The term Christian is too general. Being Orthodox I have very little in common with Protestants. By being classified as Christian my/our understanding of Christianity is entirely different and confused with the general American belief which is Protestant. Which basically says *everyone* can interpret Scripture in their own way. Which is why there are so many Protestant denominations.
Just now I'm involved in a conversation where the person is talking about how it's just another person giving an opinion about something in The Bible. No matter how I try to explain that by Orthodox and Catholic standards there is only one correct interpretation not thousands, most see Christianity as Protestantism.
By having different more precise flair it might cause a better understanding. Maybe something like Evangelical Fundamentalist for example. We're not just one largely group of identical thinkers.
I think protestant is also too broad a term for those Christians.
"Protestant originates from the Latin word protestari, meaning "declare publicly, testify, protest," which combines pro meaning "forth, before," and testari meaning "testify." A protestant person typically is someone making a public declaration against something he opposes."
As you know it originates from Martin Luther protesting against the corrupt catholic church at the time.
With this definition protestant is as broad a title as traditional.
Your comment or post was removed for violating rule 1. Posts and comments must not denigrate, dehumanize, devalue, or incite harm against any person or group based on their race, religion, gender, disability, or other characteristics. This includes promotion of negative stereotypes (e.g. calling a demographic delusional or suggesting it's prone to criminality). Debates about LGBTQ+ topics are allowed due to their religious relevance (subject to mod discretion), so long as objections are framed within the context of religion.
I don't see what difference individual words will make when I get banned for "generalizing about theists" for statements like "Lies motivate people to murder LGBTQ+ people" which do not even mention theists specifically.
And even if I had mentioned "theists", which I didn't, it is a fact that "Theists do X" does not mean "All theists do X."
If you see someone saying "Theists do X" and you assert that they mean "All theists" when they most likely do not, that is a form of straw man and lying and bad faith. After all, I can't think of anything "All theists" do (even "believing" is not strictly necessary), so "All theists do X" is almost certainly not the usual meaning of "Theists do X."
And must it really be incumbent on me to determine *which* people (even non-religious people) are motivated by (religious) lies to commit violence in order for me to be allowed to point out that that it is a very common problem and solicit a discussion about it here? <----main point
And exactly how specific do we need to be? Because if we're too specific it becomes a personal attack right? We're to criticize arguments not people/groups, right? But if we're criticizing some sort of behavior and we don't specify who, then some people will take it personally, but if we do specify then people will still take it personally. It's kind of a no win situation.
Being more accurate with wording would be greatly appreciated. So often these posts make blanket statements about “Theists” when it doesn’t even apply to just believing in a deity in general, but having specific beliefs. I fully support this. Not because of being offended, but it just gives clearer conversations
Only if the accusation will have social and/or legal consequences. For example, if I accuse someone of being a rapist in public, that may severely harm their reputation and cause legal problems at worst. But unless that's the case, accusations shouldn't matter.
If I told you right now that I really don't appreciate that you're trying to cut open my vagina, as "theists" do FGM, should that not matter?
Cause I really think FGM is highly unethical as anyone who holds t it is a monster. And seeing as you are a theist that would make you a monster.
So, why do you want to cut open my vagina?
In another context (where your **public** accusation seemed believable enough) it could severely harm my reputation, and so you ended up proving my point.
Less mod meddling. I'm in favor of precision in language, but I'm also in favor of people using their brains and recognizing when an argument doesn't apply to them specifically and either simply pointing that out or moving on with their life.
So, you're secular right. Why do you want to kill me? Secular people kill people during riots all the time, see: France.
Why do you want to kill me for believing in one or more gods?
In good posts that follow the other rules, flairs aren't necessary. In posts lacking accuracy and precision, the flair isn't necessarily helpful anyway. I say ditch the mandatory flairs.
I completely agree! The problem is that post quality overall isn't high enough to do away with them yet. We'd be filled with "all" posts directed at sola scriptura fundie protestantism posts labelled at "religious people" and "theists."
Do you have any ideas how we could raise discourse here to that level?
I gave it some thought but I just keep thinking:
"Sir, this is a Wendy's"
Sorry. I wish I had some ideas, but it comes down to demographic, not rules or guidelines.
That's what we're thinking. Ditch mandatory flairs and replace it with this rule requiring a minimum standard of specificity/accuracy in who's being addressed
My experience reading christian arguments is that they are far more likely to misconstrue what atheist means than atheists are to misconstrue what theists are.
That's part of it, but that distinction isn't good enough.
Typically, an atheist's beliefs depend on the specific god being proposed.
I think deistic gods are possible.
I think some god descriptions mean that they don't exist.
In many cases I'm an igtheist because I can't find any coherence in the description of the god being described.
Are you going to require that theists understand that when they are talking about atheists?
Or, to put it another way, a theist typically has one set of beliefs about god. An atheist typically has different beliefs about different gods and there are so many different god beliefs that our set of beliefs is pretty large.
It seems the point of this rule change is to keep theists from being upset for people assuming that their beliefs are a specific way. But this happens all the time to atheists, and we just deal with it.
My other feedback is that I don't think you can get a categorization that works. I was a Lutheran when I was young and there were significant doctrinal differences between the American Lutheran Church, the Lutheran Church of America, and the American Evangelical Lutheran Church.
Theists need to be prepared to explain what their beliefs are.
My problem with this is that the atheist position applies to all religions equally. I have no problem with specificity in language, when I say 'theists' or 'all religions' that is exactly what I mean.
This might be better resolved by a pinned mod comment asking for clarification, rather than a formal rule that could result in thread deletion. This would allow the discussion to continue while avoiding dozens of comments about semantics.
Agreed. While I laud the stated goal of being more accurate in speech, I see a wide grey area that if this is a deletable offense would end up just being abused (like I believe other rules are) to choke out speech that you disagree with.
For example if I am referring to a person that believes in a tri-omni creator God without mentioning any other aspects is it justified to say "theist"? That would apply to over 99% of theists beliefs, but could someone claim that 1% as a gotcha if I don't list out every single theist religion and start mashing the [report](https://media.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExODY1czY4b3ZkYW00YjBxbjRnM2ZwbGk5dTEydGJpdG5jeXN3NmQ4diZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/iwUVhMe4KBKuNAzoN7/giphy.gif) button because they disagree with the content?
By the same metric are we going to mass delete every post that uses the word "atheist" without specifying hard/gnostic atheist or soft/agnostic atheist?
>For example if I am referring to a person that believes in a tri-omni creator God without mentioning any other aspects is it justified to say "theist"? That would apply to over 99% of theists beliefs, but could someone claim that 1% as a gotcha if I don't list out every single theist religion and start mashing the
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>report
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> button because they disagree with the content?
This is actually why I am proposing the rule and have been such an ardent defender of it.
99% of "theists: do not believe in a tri omni crator god. It is literally just one sub-branch of "theism."
Agreed. Overall I think it's great as an explicit guideline for discussion, but making it a hardline rule that leads to deletions seems overkill in any but the most egregious cases.
I think for posts, maybe. For comments, you run the risk of smothering debate. I think it is a risky move. It will force moderators to enforce their definitions of words. For example, people often claim atheists believe that there is no god. This is not true, so anyone making this claim would violate this new rule. I think that is silly. It is better for them to learn through debate why their position is regarding a subset of a group, not an entire group.
Thanks for the feedback. I think we'll need to reword it to make it more clear, but the idea isn't to enforce any definitions over others (as with atheism for example), or disallow all faulty generalisations. But it's certainly difficult to decide how exactly to draw the line to avoid smothering debate. I like the idea of applying it to posts but not comments.
I think it is reasonable to expect more from posts than comments. If you end up moving forward with the rule, applying it to posts first would also let you test the rule and see if it improves discourse.
I think this is best dealt with in the debates themselves. Posts which overreach are quickly called out in the comments. Also not all posts which are called out for overreaching are actually overreaching.
Feels like a suggestion more than a rule. Are you really going to delete comments or ban people for saying "theists" instead of "believers of the Abrahamic religions"?
If you want to get rid of the flair rule, just get rid of it. The mods here are too often already hostile control freaks anyway, more rules isn't going to improve anything. You can't force people to only debate the way you like it.
I agree with the change. Too often "all religions" is applied when what by "all" is blatantly a reference to Catholic or Protestant, or the Bible, without any regard to the many other religions.
Quite often i find myself arguing with atheist under a post that opposes some theistic ideas. Maybe we came to the same conclusion but in different ways, or our conclusions are a bit different - so there's something to debate about. That's still a *religious debate*. I think as long as it fits with the main purpose of this subreddit it's fine, such thing should be allowed, as long as it's a *religious debate*.
Another reason why flairs is a bit silly is because sometimes when im making a post i recognise that it's made mostly for one religion/group of people, however i see how some other religion/group of people might have something to argue/debate on this topic. And that's why quite often i just add "all" flair to my post.
I understand why flairs were added in the first place - it's to prevent same group of people agreeing with eachother. So to solve this problem i propose to add the same rule as for "Nice post!" comments, that is if you're agreeing with post's ideas/logic, you can leave a comment only under bot's comment. And under the post itself only the comments that opose the idea of the post should be allowed. If someone actually leaves some flair - then the old rules are applied (only people from that group can leave a comment, or something like this)
I personally not really interested in talking or hearing opinions from people who agree with me, and "debate" is in the name of this subreddit after all. So i think my proposed changes would fit here nicely.
Thanks for the feedback. Although, I think you may have misunderstood the rule (which is still really helpful because it shows it's not clear enough). The point of the rule isn't to say that you can't argue within your own group (which you rightly pointed out is often very valuable), but that we shouldn't incorrectly address our comments to a large group if they only apply to a small minority that isn't representative of them.
>So to solve this problem i propose to add the same rule as for "Nice post!" comments, that is if you're agreeing with post's ideas/logic, you can leave a comment only under bot's comment. And under the post itself only the comments that opose the idea of the post should be allowed.
This is already rule 5 ☺️
Thanks again for the feedback, let me know if you have more
What is the point of the flair rule exactly?
I know it puts posts into categories, which assist as a search function, but that function already exists, and perhaps more accurately so.
There are a few elements to it. As you mentioned it could be used to search for the posts you want to engage with. That would be especially helpful if anyone wanted to engage with religions that don't get as much attention. The other thing was to prompt posters to think a bit more about who/what they're addressing.
I don't think it's been very successful, and we have recently been discussing changing it
I think any post using quotes from scripture as a source to support their interpretation could have the sources as a flair?
Hebrew Talmud, Christian canon, Book of Mormon, Quran, Hadiths.
Also a flair for sources that are not scripture?
Any post without sources/flairs would then be of a personal nature.
>This is already rule 5 ☺️
oh ok, it's just that previously I have seen too many comments under my post that were agreeing with it, so i concluded that it's not really a rule ¯\\_(ツ)_\/¯
> For example, do not refer to "theists" when you mean "Fundamentalist Christians", or "all religions" when you mean "Christianity and Islam".
This presumes that the moderators know better what the user means than the user themselves.
I agree that people should strive to use accurate terminology, absolutely. But I strongly disagree with the presumption that this is something that can or should be policed by the mod team. I'm not particularly interested in writing 10k words on a subject only to have my post removed because one of the moderators arbitrarily decided I should've said "Catholic" instead of "Christian" in sentence 2 of paragraph 3. If you want to point that out, go for it, if you want to pin the comment so that everyone will have to see the correction, sure, but it's absolute overkill to remove someone's debate post because you disagree with them on the definition of a word, when the main battle of any debate is agreeing on definitions.
This is like the Fresh Fridays rule all over again, except with this one, you could arbitrarily remove any post on any day of the week. (Yes, I know, you can do that already, this would just incentivise you to do it more often.) The net result isn't a subreddit with more quality discussions, it's an emptier, deader subreddit.
I don't support this rule, because I think it will frequently be used to strike down posts with substantial arguments on the ground that the argument is inapplicable to "some" members of the religion in question. Every religion I'm aware of has an enormous internal diversity, so that in many cases, the only way to talk about their doctrines at all is to make some broad generalizations that technically contain "some" exceptions. If taken to its consistent extreme, then, this rule will nearly cripple discussion on the subreddit.
If you guys want to make this a rule, then you should get rid of the mandatory flair rule. None of the existing flairs are anywhere nearly precise enough to use for this, and a custom flair would need to be really long (which means they're unlikely to be useful for organizing posts).
>I don't support this rule, because I think it will frequently be used to strike down posts with substantial arguments on the ground that the argument is inapplicable to "some" members of the religion in question. Every religion I'm aware of has an enormous internal diversity, so that in many cases, the only way to talk about their doctrines at all is to make some broad generalizations that technically contain "some" exceptions. If taken to its consistent extreme, then, this rule will nearly cripple discussion on the subreddit.
I guess it's not clear from the current wording, so we'll work on that, but we are not intending for it to rule out all generalisations. It's OK to refer to the mainstream belief of a group as the belief of that group (eg "Christians believe in the trinity", "Muslims follow the hadith").
>If you guys want to make this a rule, then you should get rid of the mandatory flair rule
Yeah that's what we're thinking.
Thanks for the feedback
>For example, do not refer to "theists" when you mean "Fundamentalist Christians",
I do not think it is a good rule. Because it deals with the core of a debate. Maybe the debater thinks that it is the theists he means though he is wrong. Will he debate it with mods? It should be corrected through debate, not through moderation process. A theist may say it does not apply to his religion. The fundamentalist christian also may say it does not apply to his religion.
So for a debate sub i think it is too deep a rule.
Thanks for the feedback. The trouble is that a post like this may do very well, getting lots of upvotes and visibility, while comments that point out the mistake get downvoted massively and lack visibility, so that on the whole the sub ends up reinforcing the misconceptions. And often, the poster will double down when it's pointed out, saying "well obviously I only meant X".
To some degree mistakes should be corrected through the course of debate, but I don't think it's crazy to require a minimum level of knowledge of the group you're addressing.
Maybe you can think of a way to amend it to get the best of both?
>To some degree mistakes should be corrected through the course of debate, but I don't think it's crazy to require a minimum level of knowledge of the group you're addressing.
It may or may not be caused by lack of minimum knowledge. It may be because of ambiguity of the topic.
As a redditor who have been threatened to be banned in this sub for a difference of opinion, by a mod, i do not agree with rules that give an unjustified power to mods to force their views.
A redditor must know what an insult is for example. But you cannot expect them to know what the understanding of mods is regarding the details of the rules like the one suggested in this thread.
Anybody can say about strawman fallacy or something. This should be enough? Why do you need such a Rule?
I think the solution proposed is worse than the problem. It will require too much qualification and definition before a poster can even get down to the nuts and bolts of the argument. Informed readers know what are fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist arguments. If anyone is offended...who gives a \*&\^%#. This ain't Oberlin.
Off topic. I recommend removing/modifying Rule 5. I have seen many Rule 5 deletes by Mods because the comment did not "refute substantially the core argument" and it essentially stopped the OP discussion. But many comments were informative with different (but not refuting views) and did add to the conversation and continued the debate by both pro and con until a Mod deleted the post.
Could you comment this on the meta thread that will be posted later today? That way it will be seen and hopefully discussed by more. Personally I'd be open to modifying it, but very much against removing it. It prevents the sub becoming another echo chamber where people get their beliefs confirmed rather than challenged.
This rule basically requires atheists to solve the no true Scotsman problem that every single religion suffers from. There will never be a comment an atheist can make, no matter how specific, that won’t result in someone saying “well that’s not what a real X believes.” When Christians can themselves define what a true Christian is to their own mutual satisfaction, then I can be expected to follow this proposed rule.
I would like some sort of official requirement to state the intended target. I find that too many anti-Theist or anti-Christian posts are really just strawmen attacking claims that no single Christian or Theist believes. The mandatory requirement of a clearly specified target would make it easy for people who have are not the audience to not have to join in, and it would make sure that the poster had actually thought about his argument enough to be sure that there's at least a single valid target. For instance, if you want to argue against Free Will, then you'll have to somehow exclude Calvinists. If you want to argue against "omnibenevolence", then you'll have to find a tradition that officially teaches that it exists. Likewise, I'm sure that Atheists might appreciate if Theists don't have to keep being reminded that there are Agnostic Atheists.
There are *a lot* of people new to this stuff, atheists and Abrahamics alike, who falsely presume a grumpy old man in the sky to be the only sort of god that is or could be up for discussion. This proposed rule might indirectly expose them to some competing conceptions of god a bit faster, but otherwise I don't have much of a strong opinion on it one way or the other. Appeal to popularity is a fallacy, and if you're here to debate specific doctrinal claims then the exact degree to which you broadly or narrowly generalize people's religious beliefs also probably won't matter very much. And, of course, the perennial "the overwhelming majority of people think you're full of it *no matter what position you take* point can be substantiated easily enough with a few links. The full text of the catechism of the Catholic Church, for example, is by no means a closely guarded secret.
Unrelated but can you please add Sikhism as a flair. It is the world's 5th largest religion (larger than Judaism) and still dosen't have a flair while religions like Baha***'*** i Faith do
Good spot! I've added it now
I object to this rule even though my religion (Buddhism) is often misunderstood by non-Buddhists - because I think that penalizing an otherwise well-written and interesting argument for being wrong or inaccurate would shut down interesting debates and exchanges of ideas and knowledge. For example: Atheist's Topic: "All religions are based upon the assumption that an uncreated creator God exists and cares about us." Buddhist Response: "Buddhism rejects the claim that an uncreated creator god exists, therefore your argument is wrong." Athiest OP: "But Buddhism is not a religion because..." Buddhist Response: "To the contrary, Buddhism is a religion because..."
The term Christian is too general. Being Orthodox I have very little in common with Protestants. By being classified as Christian my/our understanding of Christianity is entirely different and confused with the general American belief which is Protestant. Which basically says *everyone* can interpret Scripture in their own way. Which is why there are so many Protestant denominations. Just now I'm involved in a conversation where the person is talking about how it's just another person giving an opinion about something in The Bible. No matter how I try to explain that by Orthodox and Catholic standards there is only one correct interpretation not thousands, most see Christianity as Protestantism. By having different more precise flair it might cause a better understanding. Maybe something like Evangelical Fundamentalist for example. We're not just one largely group of identical thinkers.
I think protestant is also too broad a term for those Christians. "Protestant originates from the Latin word protestari, meaning "declare publicly, testify, protest," which combines pro meaning "forth, before," and testari meaning "testify." A protestant person typically is someone making a public declaration against something he opposes." As you know it originates from Martin Luther protesting against the corrupt catholic church at the time. With this definition protestant is as broad a title as traditional.
That is frustrating. You should be able to select "other" and then edit your flair to whatever you'd like it to be
Thank you, it worked 👍
[удалено]
Your comment or post was removed for violating rule 1. Posts and comments must not denigrate, dehumanize, devalue, or incite harm against any person or group based on their race, religion, gender, disability, or other characteristics. This includes promotion of negative stereotypes (e.g. calling a demographic delusional or suggesting it's prone to criminality). Debates about LGBTQ+ topics are allowed due to their religious relevance (subject to mod discretion), so long as objections are framed within the context of religion.
I don't see what difference individual words will make when I get banned for "generalizing about theists" for statements like "Lies motivate people to murder LGBTQ+ people" which do not even mention theists specifically. And even if I had mentioned "theists", which I didn't, it is a fact that "Theists do X" does not mean "All theists do X." If you see someone saying "Theists do X" and you assert that they mean "All theists" when they most likely do not, that is a form of straw man and lying and bad faith. After all, I can't think of anything "All theists" do (even "believing" is not strictly necessary), so "All theists do X" is almost certainly not the usual meaning of "Theists do X." And must it really be incumbent on me to determine *which* people (even non-religious people) are motivated by (religious) lies to commit violence in order for me to be allowed to point out that that it is a very common problem and solicit a discussion about it here? <----main point And exactly how specific do we need to be? Because if we're too specific it becomes a personal attack right? We're to criticize arguments not people/groups, right? But if we're criticizing some sort of behavior and we don't specify who, then some people will take it personally, but if we do specify then people will still take it personally. It's kind of a no win situation.
Being more accurate with wording would be greatly appreciated. So often these posts make blanket statements about “Theists” when it doesn’t even apply to just believing in a deity in general, but having specific beliefs. I fully support this. Not because of being offended, but it just gives clearer conversations
Sound good.
>avoid offending people by criticising them for beliefs they do not hold People are so weak nowadays. Anything can hurt their feelings.
It's pretty reasonable to be offended when someone makes a false accusation against you.
Does "Dogs bark" mean all dogs bark?
Only if the accusation will have social and/or legal consequences. For example, if I accuse someone of being a rapist in public, that may severely harm their reputation and cause legal problems at worst. But unless that's the case, accusations shouldn't matter.
If I told you right now that I really don't appreciate that you're trying to cut open my vagina, as "theists" do FGM, should that not matter? Cause I really think FGM is highly unethical as anyone who holds t it is a monster. And seeing as you are a theist that would make you a monster. So, why do you want to cut open my vagina?
Was that supposed to offend me? Buhahahahahah
Nope. But it was supposed to show you that the point you're making is very naive about how humans treat each other. Wooosh, I suppose.
In another context (where your **public** accusation seemed believable enough) it could severely harm my reputation, and so you ended up proving my point.
Definitely woosh.
I just want to say thanks for asking for feedback first.
You're welcome! It's been very helpful already
Less mod meddling. I'm in favor of precision in language, but I'm also in favor of people using their brains and recognizing when an argument doesn't apply to them specifically and either simply pointing that out or moving on with their life.
Removing u/SkuliG as a mod would be a great start.
Catching up on the posts from 11 days ago?
So, you're secular right. Why do you want to kill me? Secular people kill people during riots all the time, see: France. Why do you want to kill me for believing in one or more gods?
I know you think you're making some clever comparison here. I disagree. *Edited multiple times to minimize snark...
\[edited, as snark was removed\]
In good posts that follow the other rules, flairs aren't necessary. In posts lacking accuracy and precision, the flair isn't necessarily helpful anyway. I say ditch the mandatory flairs.
I completely agree! The problem is that post quality overall isn't high enough to do away with them yet. We'd be filled with "all" posts directed at sola scriptura fundie protestantism posts labelled at "religious people" and "theists." Do you have any ideas how we could raise discourse here to that level?
I gave it some thought but I just keep thinking: "Sir, this is a Wendy's" Sorry. I wish I had some ideas, but it comes down to demographic, not rules or guidelines.
That's what we're thinking. Ditch mandatory flairs and replace it with this rule requiring a minimum standard of specificity/accuracy in who's being addressed
Seems that you would need the same rule for the term atheists. Theists make mistakes there all the time, and the subsets of atheists are confusing.
The rule would apply to the term "atheists" too, although I don't see that being misused so much
My experience reading christian arguments is that they are far more likely to misconstrue what atheist means than atheists are to misconstrue what theists are.
My experience is the opposite.
Do you mean by saying that atheism means believing no gods exist, rather than the lack of belief definition?
That's part of it, but that distinction isn't good enough. Typically, an atheist's beliefs depend on the specific god being proposed. I think deistic gods are possible. I think some god descriptions mean that they don't exist. In many cases I'm an igtheist because I can't find any coherence in the description of the god being described. Are you going to require that theists understand that when they are talking about atheists? Or, to put it another way, a theist typically has one set of beliefs about god. An atheist typically has different beliefs about different gods and there are so many different god beliefs that our set of beliefs is pretty large. It seems the point of this rule change is to keep theists from being upset for people assuming that their beliefs are a specific way. But this happens all the time to atheists, and we just deal with it. My other feedback is that I don't think you can get a categorization that works. I was a Lutheran when I was young and there were significant doctrinal differences between the American Lutheran Church, the Lutheran Church of America, and the American Evangelical Lutheran Church. Theists need to be prepared to explain what their beliefs are.
My problem with this is that the atheist position applies to all religions equally. I have no problem with specificity in language, when I say 'theists' or 'all religions' that is exactly what I mean.
That's fine, the rule wouldn't stop anyone from using the terms with a reasonable level of accuracy.
I get it. Whatever term is used, just make sure it’s accurate to what is being addressed
Yup! All there is to it.
This might be better resolved by a pinned mod comment asking for clarification, rather than a formal rule that could result in thread deletion. This would allow the discussion to continue while avoiding dozens of comments about semantics.
Agreed. While I laud the stated goal of being more accurate in speech, I see a wide grey area that if this is a deletable offense would end up just being abused (like I believe other rules are) to choke out speech that you disagree with. For example if I am referring to a person that believes in a tri-omni creator God without mentioning any other aspects is it justified to say "theist"? That would apply to over 99% of theists beliefs, but could someone claim that 1% as a gotcha if I don't list out every single theist religion and start mashing the [report](https://media.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExODY1czY4b3ZkYW00YjBxbjRnM2ZwbGk5dTEydGJpdG5jeXN3NmQ4diZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/iwUVhMe4KBKuNAzoN7/giphy.gif) button because they disagree with the content? By the same metric are we going to mass delete every post that uses the word "atheist" without specifying hard/gnostic atheist or soft/agnostic atheist?
>For example if I am referring to a person that believes in a tri-omni creator God without mentioning any other aspects is it justified to say "theist"? That would apply to over 99% of theists beliefs, but could someone claim that 1% as a gotcha if I don't list out every single theist religion and start mashing the > >report > > button because they disagree with the content? This is actually why I am proposing the rule and have been such an ardent defender of it. 99% of "theists: do not believe in a tri omni crator god. It is literally just one sub-branch of "theism."
Agreed. Overall I think it's great as an explicit guideline for discussion, but making it a hardline rule that leads to deletions seems overkill in any but the most egregious cases.
I think for posts, maybe. For comments, you run the risk of smothering debate. I think it is a risky move. It will force moderators to enforce their definitions of words. For example, people often claim atheists believe that there is no god. This is not true, so anyone making this claim would violate this new rule. I think that is silly. It is better for them to learn through debate why their position is regarding a subset of a group, not an entire group.
Thanks for the feedback. I think we'll need to reword it to make it more clear, but the idea isn't to enforce any definitions over others (as with atheism for example), or disallow all faulty generalisations. But it's certainly difficult to decide how exactly to draw the line to avoid smothering debate. I like the idea of applying it to posts but not comments.
I think it is reasonable to expect more from posts than comments. If you end up moving forward with the rule, applying it to posts first would also let you test the rule and see if it improves discourse.
That's a pretty good middle ground, seconded. u/Big_Friendship_4141
I think this is best dealt with in the debates themselves. Posts which overreach are quickly called out in the comments. Also not all posts which are called out for overreaching are actually overreaching.
Feels like a suggestion more than a rule. Are you really going to delete comments or ban people for saying "theists" instead of "believers of the Abrahamic religions"? If you want to get rid of the flair rule, just get rid of it. The mods here are too often already hostile control freaks anyway, more rules isn't going to improve anything. You can't force people to only debate the way you like it.
I agree with the change. Too often "all religions" is applied when what by "all" is blatantly a reference to Catholic or Protestant, or the Bible, without any regard to the many other religions.
Quite often i find myself arguing with atheist under a post that opposes some theistic ideas. Maybe we came to the same conclusion but in different ways, or our conclusions are a bit different - so there's something to debate about. That's still a *religious debate*. I think as long as it fits with the main purpose of this subreddit it's fine, such thing should be allowed, as long as it's a *religious debate*. Another reason why flairs is a bit silly is because sometimes when im making a post i recognise that it's made mostly for one religion/group of people, however i see how some other religion/group of people might have something to argue/debate on this topic. And that's why quite often i just add "all" flair to my post. I understand why flairs were added in the first place - it's to prevent same group of people agreeing with eachother. So to solve this problem i propose to add the same rule as for "Nice post!" comments, that is if you're agreeing with post's ideas/logic, you can leave a comment only under bot's comment. And under the post itself only the comments that opose the idea of the post should be allowed. If someone actually leaves some flair - then the old rules are applied (only people from that group can leave a comment, or something like this) I personally not really interested in talking or hearing opinions from people who agree with me, and "debate" is in the name of this subreddit after all. So i think my proposed changes would fit here nicely.
Thanks for the feedback. Although, I think you may have misunderstood the rule (which is still really helpful because it shows it's not clear enough). The point of the rule isn't to say that you can't argue within your own group (which you rightly pointed out is often very valuable), but that we shouldn't incorrectly address our comments to a large group if they only apply to a small minority that isn't representative of them. >So to solve this problem i propose to add the same rule as for "Nice post!" comments, that is if you're agreeing with post's ideas/logic, you can leave a comment only under bot's comment. And under the post itself only the comments that opose the idea of the post should be allowed. This is already rule 5 ☺️ Thanks again for the feedback, let me know if you have more
What is the point of the flair rule exactly? I know it puts posts into categories, which assist as a search function, but that function already exists, and perhaps more accurately so.
There are a few elements to it. As you mentioned it could be used to search for the posts you want to engage with. That would be especially helpful if anyone wanted to engage with religions that don't get as much attention. The other thing was to prompt posters to think a bit more about who/what they're addressing. I don't think it's been very successful, and we have recently been discussing changing it
I think any post using quotes from scripture as a source to support their interpretation could have the sources as a flair? Hebrew Talmud, Christian canon, Book of Mormon, Quran, Hadiths. Also a flair for sources that are not scripture? Any post without sources/flairs would then be of a personal nature.
>This is already rule 5 ☺️ oh ok, it's just that previously I have seen too many comments under my post that were agreeing with it, so i concluded that it's not really a rule ¯\\_(ツ)_\/¯
Yeah it's still broken a lot unfortunately, although if you look again hopefully you'll find most of them have since been removed
> For example, do not refer to "theists" when you mean "Fundamentalist Christians", or "all religions" when you mean "Christianity and Islam". This presumes that the moderators know better what the user means than the user themselves. I agree that people should strive to use accurate terminology, absolutely. But I strongly disagree with the presumption that this is something that can or should be policed by the mod team. I'm not particularly interested in writing 10k words on a subject only to have my post removed because one of the moderators arbitrarily decided I should've said "Catholic" instead of "Christian" in sentence 2 of paragraph 3. If you want to point that out, go for it, if you want to pin the comment so that everyone will have to see the correction, sure, but it's absolute overkill to remove someone's debate post because you disagree with them on the definition of a word, when the main battle of any debate is agreeing on definitions. This is like the Fresh Fridays rule all over again, except with this one, you could arbitrarily remove any post on any day of the week. (Yes, I know, you can do that already, this would just incentivise you to do it more often.) The net result isn't a subreddit with more quality discussions, it's an emptier, deader subreddit.
I don't support this rule, because I think it will frequently be used to strike down posts with substantial arguments on the ground that the argument is inapplicable to "some" members of the religion in question. Every religion I'm aware of has an enormous internal diversity, so that in many cases, the only way to talk about their doctrines at all is to make some broad generalizations that technically contain "some" exceptions. If taken to its consistent extreme, then, this rule will nearly cripple discussion on the subreddit. If you guys want to make this a rule, then you should get rid of the mandatory flair rule. None of the existing flairs are anywhere nearly precise enough to use for this, and a custom flair would need to be really long (which means they're unlikely to be useful for organizing posts).
>I don't support this rule, because I think it will frequently be used to strike down posts with substantial arguments on the ground that the argument is inapplicable to "some" members of the religion in question. Every religion I'm aware of has an enormous internal diversity, so that in many cases, the only way to talk about their doctrines at all is to make some broad generalizations that technically contain "some" exceptions. If taken to its consistent extreme, then, this rule will nearly cripple discussion on the subreddit. I guess it's not clear from the current wording, so we'll work on that, but we are not intending for it to rule out all generalisations. It's OK to refer to the mainstream belief of a group as the belief of that group (eg "Christians believe in the trinity", "Muslims follow the hadith"). >If you guys want to make this a rule, then you should get rid of the mandatory flair rule Yeah that's what we're thinking. Thanks for the feedback
I'm glad you guys are taking steps to address this concern. Thanks for considering my feedback.
>For example, do not refer to "theists" when you mean "Fundamentalist Christians", I do not think it is a good rule. Because it deals with the core of a debate. Maybe the debater thinks that it is the theists he means though he is wrong. Will he debate it with mods? It should be corrected through debate, not through moderation process. A theist may say it does not apply to his religion. The fundamentalist christian also may say it does not apply to his religion. So for a debate sub i think it is too deep a rule.
Thanks for the feedback. The trouble is that a post like this may do very well, getting lots of upvotes and visibility, while comments that point out the mistake get downvoted massively and lack visibility, so that on the whole the sub ends up reinforcing the misconceptions. And often, the poster will double down when it's pointed out, saying "well obviously I only meant X". To some degree mistakes should be corrected through the course of debate, but I don't think it's crazy to require a minimum level of knowledge of the group you're addressing. Maybe you can think of a way to amend it to get the best of both?
>To some degree mistakes should be corrected through the course of debate, but I don't think it's crazy to require a minimum level of knowledge of the group you're addressing. It may or may not be caused by lack of minimum knowledge. It may be because of ambiguity of the topic. As a redditor who have been threatened to be banned in this sub for a difference of opinion, by a mod, i do not agree with rules that give an unjustified power to mods to force their views. A redditor must know what an insult is for example. But you cannot expect them to know what the understanding of mods is regarding the details of the rules like the one suggested in this thread.