Surely it was god's will to have splendour banned?

Pretty much by definition, i guess. "God's will" always seems a tricky concept to me.

Not exactly. Good things are God's Will, bad things are...not exactly God's Will, just part of the whole mysterious ways of God, or God allowing mankind the freedom to be evil, you know to murder people or collude in banning righteous Christians from an internet forum.

Oh the wolf viper mods are out to get the Christians they are just doing it slowly as not to cause suspicion.

It is my impression that the few people of genuine faith on here are cowed and afraid of the atheists. They know they will get abuse if they stand up to the atheists and that the mods will allow that abuse in the name of being "liberal". In reality there is nothing "liberal" about allowing religious posters to be bullied on a Religion forum. And Splendour was horribly bullied by a group of posters on here. I had no issue with her and thought that she was quite original and deliberately funny at times. I think posters should be allowed to express their religious views without abuse on a Religion discussion board. THAT'S liberal.

YOU are attempting to politicise the discussion.

I have supported the argument. Jews and Christians are people of the Book and respected as such by the religion. Politicians will be politicians so you might find Christians fighting Christians, Muslims fighting Muslims etc etc depending on what they want.

Nowt to do with the faiths, everything to do with the politicians.

The true value of religions lie in their ethics and morality and not in their thousands of years old stories. The theists themselves often don't take those literally and most theists realise that a lot of the advice needs adaption to make it relevant today.

This is considered inflammatory towards atheists in general

Original Position : You made a post which was inflammatory (comparing atheists to a "bunch of donkeys") [the actual term used was "spiritual donkeys"]

However this is not considered to be a personal attack nor is it considered inflammatory towards Christians or Muslims

"This is not the happy clappy christianity forum to discuss how jesus bummed you in a dream last night."

You go figure.

That's all the value religions have? Ok, guess we don't need them then. I can be moral and ethical without needing to believe in a deity or two.

In fact, I think I'm more moral and ethical than most of the gods that I've read about. You've simply confirmed what I always suspected, we don't need religion anymore.

Are you sure that the 'bummed' poster didn't receive an infraction?

I reported the post as I found it very offensive but Original Position said it didn't break any rules so he wasn't going to delete it.

No theists believe in God and usually an after-life.

I can't agree with this, at least from my own experience with my own religion (Judaism) where learning and awkward questions are openly encouraged.

I am of genuine faith, and I am not afraid of atheists or liberals. I've been in RGT longer than you, and I don't see you being correct in general either.

I'm sure, as a long as they meet the paradigm. It's an insular and restrictive learning, biased and definitely not outward looking.

My paradigm is 'Anything could be true', the religious paradigm is 'God made everything'. Can you see how religoin is restrictive and mine is open?


You consider yourself to be "of genuine faith" but there are two issues there.

First is that it's not something to be particularly proud of, you've suspended all critical function and decided to just believe without any verifiable evidence. Secondly, Muslims (as just one example of a contradictory belief system) think you're wrong and that you're actually an infidel who won't get into their heaven. They don't consider your faith to be genuine, at best they'd consider you misguided. So you saying that your faith is genuine is really a bit pointless, it means nothing.

Also, you mentioning how long you've been in RGT is somewhat baffling to me. Of what significance or relevance is that?

I don't see you as being particularly religious. You even think gambling is moral.

I don't know how to respond other than basically repeating myself. I've always been taught that questioning your faith and the religion were good things.

This part was in response to Cwocwoc, not to you, so your questions are actually tangentially related, if at all, to what was being discussed. I don't think you realized that, right?

That was part of my response to Cwocwoc, and has relevance to what I quoted of him.

So does the Pope. Haven't we been over this?

That is not the answer of someone who is particularly religious.

You sure like to make a lot of assumptions. From what I've seen so far on this forum, ganstaman seems like a well thought out gent, so to make an assertion that he has "suspended all critical function" is just silly.

After reading many of your posts in this forum (and admittedly skimming through most of them), it seems like you genuinely believe that your OPINION that there is no god (atheism) is a FACT. It is a BELIEF. You may be wrong. Ganstaman may be right.

Sometimes in life (and in science), people can look at the same set of clues and draw very different conclusions. That is OK. It doesn't mean that one has "suspended all critical function", it just means that they have... drawn different conclusions.

The problem is that you don't seem to care about the fact that you have no idea what goes on in the background. I have personally given out many infractions for attacks against Splendour. But you would not know that unless every single person I infracted came to complain about said infraction and you also happen to be here to witness that. Most people when they are infracted (especially regulars) immediately calm down and most apologize.

Splendour could have easily calmed down and walked away for a while and let some one those infractions (of which she earned every one) fall off, but instead she decided that the rules should not apply to her. Thus she faces the consequences.

As far as your accusations against me, they are completely unfounded. I have shown time and time again that I have no bias towards atheist or theist and that if you break the rules you will get infracted. I have also proven that I am not concerned with Mob mentality. I have banned and infracted (as well as exiled) many people without regard to public opinion and taken much heat for it along the way.

As far as mercy, she got more mercy than probably any other poster here. But let's be real for a moment, it's not like I threw her in jail. She is just banned from a forum so lets not pretend that this is a big deal. I (and OrP) have a job to do and letting Splendour get away with breaking the rules time and time again is not doing a very good job.

I've received at least two infractions for making 'personal attacks / insults' towards Splendour, and a couple of warnings. Half came from Jib, half came from OrP (and I believe one warning came from Madnak).

Had I continued to say mean things to Splendour, there is no doubt in my mind that I would have been banned. Instead, I either stepped away from the forum for a while, or put Splendour on ignore, or just stopped reading her posts.

It's simply astounding that certain posters believe that this banning was not a long time in the making, and/or that Splendour was somehow singled out by the mods due to some kind of 'atheist pressure'.

If anything, I think the fact that lots of posters wanted her banned is what helped save her skin up until now. The mods would have been resistant to appear to be giving into the 'mob mentality' by banning Splendour. However, she thumbed her nose at them one too many times and ended up getting exactly what she deserved.

Sorry, cut and paste error, I accidentally attributed those remarks to Cwowoc.

Perhaps you're working of a different definition of faith than I am. Plus, although it shouldn't make any difference, I thought I was talking to Cwocwoc.

"Faith = Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence". Disbelief has to be suspended, along with critical thinking , to achieve 'faith'. Religions couldn't survive without our ability to do that which says a lot I think.


Then you need to do more than skim them because you're wrong.

See above.

OK fair enough, sry for misunderstanding the context...

I agree that faith sucks. I don't like it at all. In fact I hate it. FWIW I am also anti-religion in general, but I don't think that everyone who is religious draws their beliefs 100% from faith. Some draw it from their intuition about the world and some draw it from (what they perceive to be) "evidence". Some decent examples of "evidence" of god were laid out in Zumby's recent thread (although most were shot down pretty well), including personal spiritual experience, the existence of self awareness, consciousness, etc. You can disagree with all of these, but they still qualify as "evidence". Now whether that evidence is valid or not is a different question, but someone who draws their faith from these concepts is not relying solely on "faith".

I can say that my own agnostic deist belief is drawn from intuition alone, and 0% faith (and 0% evidence for me).

As far as the "religions couldn't survive without faith" part... I would generally agree that this it is true that the major western religions rely on faith as a means to keep the religion going, but I don't think that the statement "no religion could possibly exist without faith" is true. I don't think buddhism talks about faith at all for example. "Secular humanism" is another group that many put into the category of a religion, and they are basically just a large group of atheists/agnostics.

Well stated JM. also nice avatar. Is that a killer whale with a cats head. !? lol

Saying American Christians are frighting and some Christians are wackos for believing in an interventionist God is more inflammatory then the quote you keep trotting out. Do you think you should of received infractions for saying those things? Probably not. Go figure.

Intuition, informed guesswork, whatever, as you soon as you decide to believe in one of the gods, you've made 'a leap of faith'. That's why arguing specifics with people of faith is so pointless, since the whole thing may be made up anyway, there isn't anything they can't counter by making something else up. It's much more fruitful to examine how they came to their faith.

I have Atheism due to there being a lack of anything more convincing, not because it's a religion, it certainly isn't either by definition or by it's nature.

That's because Buddhism isn't a religion. Buddhism has no Deity, Buddha was a man who achieved an enlightened state. Therefore there is no requirement for 'faith'