Thread: thoughts of why people hate Christians

Originally Posted by BLUELINE976

Why do people debate anything? To exchange ideas, to prove someone wrong (or right), to boost their ego, who knows? In my mind, a debate can be a discussion. There are two sides (usually) with opposing ideas (usually), and they talk it out, civilized or uncivilized. What you want are civilized debates. Admirable, but there is no polite way to tell somebody they're wrong or have wasted their life.

Looks like we disagree fundamentally here. I don't think a debate can ever be a discussion. To me, a debate is two people trying to prove their respective viewpoint, and disprove their opponents. In most cases, there is no room for understanding on either side. On the internet and in real life, they are often as much fueled by ego as they are by the subject. That's not to say debates don't have any value; a concise, "controlled" (ie a moderator) debate can work. And no, I don't want "civilized debates", those never work. They are very forced and stilted, and either devolve into your classic shouting match, or don't really go anywhere and fizzle out. Plus, they are unbelievably awkward. You want them to just fight or fuck already, and get it over with.

What I want is simply honest discussion about religion, nothing more and nothing less. I'm getting the feeling you don't know what I mean by 'discussion', when pertaining to religion. For example, I had special lecture sessions in religion courses I took in university. The professor brought a few other religious scholars or other religions professors in to the hall. The topic was already prepared, and they would talk with each other about the prevailing scholarly interpretation of the passage, competing scholarly interpretations on the passage, the cultural significance of the passage, etc, etc. There was no arguing, no debating, it was a learning experience for everyone involved. There was no goal or objective in mind. I can't explain how much I enjoyed these special lectures I had. If I wasn't so busy with finishing up college now I would love to take another course with those discussion forums. Unless you've experienced something similar in person, a non "objective oriented" discussion might be completely foreign to you, which is understandable. There's little to nothing like that on the internet, certainly.


While I'm of course not expecting a collegiate level of discourse here, I somehow still hope I'll see a thread about exploring a certain topic or concept that isn't stipulated around proving everyone else wrong....or in absence of an antagonistic stipulation, the thread disintegrates into....well....every r/s thread anyway.

I think I should lower my expectations.

No, Grod, please do not lower your expectations! I would love such discussion, too. I also had a wonderful course I took in college: the course I took was philosophy of Eastern Religions, and it included learning about various religions including Buddhism, Hinduism, Shintoism, and others; the course was compare and contrast of various concepts; and all students were expected to read outside books and give book reports. What I got out of this course was a respect for other religions, and I became a much more tolerant person as a result. I loved that course, and would love to have more discussions like that.

I don't know if you saw, I had made a couple of threads in the Religion and Spirituality section of this forum which did not disintegrate into fundamentalist creationist versus atheists trying hard to avoid calling each other names. My two threads:

http://www.dreamviews.com/religion-s...hand-hand.html

http://www.dreamviews.com/religion-s...f-yes-how.html

I have found aspects of some threads on religion / spirituality on this forum worthwhile which is why I keep coming back to them. Plus I feel that if one left those threads only to the extreme positions without some middle ground it gives a very sad misrepresentation of the religious positions represented by people of DV. I think religious debate here could be much better than it often is because the fact that often it is antagonistic and includes at least some participants who are either not serious enough or take themselves too seriously, well all that does make starting serious religious debates a challenge.