nroberts

Maybe this forum needs a philosophy channel. Religion is but one subset of the many answers available to important questions about life, the universe, and everything. It's also a fairly uninteresting domain of human thought since discussions invariably end up resolving to appeals to authority and/or "faith". No serious headway can be made, no consensus that isn't preexisting can be established, since there's little, if any, weight put on evidence and much, if not all, on "personal revelation". Thus it all end up being variants of, "It's true because I said so," or, "It's true because [such and such scripture or authority] says so."

This is of course why almost all discussions on religion are nothing but breeding grounds for fights. When half, if not more, of the participants believe they have a back-channel communication with the creator of everything and that anyone else is "blaspheming the Holy Spirit" or "worshiping themselves", there's really nothing else that can come of such discussions.

Philosophy, on the other hand, is a much more civilized arena of discourse. It's an arena where questions are more welcome than answers and claims to authority get the scorn they deserve. A battle ground where you're actually required to back up what you claim. Yet even though it's incredibly different from religion, it seeks many of the same questions.

In a philosophy channel we could discuss the pros/cons of materialism vs. dualism...or discuss the introduction of some third alternative. We could discuss the moral implications of a creator God, discuss the features that would be necessary for such a God, or even attempt to define what exactly is "moral" anyway. And *discuss* is the key word here because I don't see a lot of that going on here.

In all honesty, I've yet to see a single religion channel or religion forum that didn't end up devolving into just piles and piles of name calling and shit flinging. I've already expressed why I think this is inevitable (because the rules of civil discourse just don't apply). That's pretty much all we have here, with minor pieces of interesting possibilities that get squashed almost immediately, and I'd really be more interested in discussing the wide variety of questions and answers we all have to these ultimate questions. Such simply can't take place in a religious arena, which is always overcrowded with know-it-all Godheads and the hubris with which they approach every single conversation that might take place.

If there's enough interest, maybe we can talk the forum deities into intervening and Intelligent Designing us a forum to discuss philosophy and meanings outside the contrivances and orthodoxy of religion; without the baggage and stumbling blocks thrown in our way by history's intellectual cripples and lunatics. Religion is certainly not off-topic in the philosophy arena, but that doesn't seem to apply visa-versa. In my opinion, it's much more interesting and productive to discuss the alternative viewpoints to religion than to just keep "discussing" religion all the damn time--a system of thinking that I just wish would die and go back to the hell it came from anyway (so why keep feeding it?).