Outside of your thread RK your easy to get along with and you and I have traded a few friendly jabs.  But you make yourself so difficult to have a discussion with, that it really is pointless in the "So..." thread.  We all have seen how important it is to you.  But your failing to make it important to anybody else.  Sooner or later your going to have to look beyond yourself and see the general reaction to this subject and the way your carrying on about it.  Your approach is failing.  I understand things more than you'll ever know, because you only hear the sound of your own voice.  AND THAT is what is causing folks to turn off to your otherwise valid concerns.

If you intend to quote me here, at least show the respect of quoting everything I said, not just what suits your argument.  It really is getting old.

But this is negated by the fact that, I don't really care that much, and to engage you on this topic seems to automatically become a matter of mortal kombat, complete with requisite hours spent in complex html quoting algorithms engaging in point-counter-point arguments. If there is a specific statement, or message about religion that someone has expressed somewhere on 1BC (similar e.g., to using the "I" word) that you feel deserves a rhetorical assault of some sort, then get us focused on that. Lets go to that thread that someone else started or posted in, and counter those "dangerous messages" so that the 10-year olds of 1BC are not lured to the dark side.

Starting threads to soliloquize about the universal dangers of religion is not the same thing. Sure, you're free to do it, but do you care that you doing it makes most people not want to participate? The real tragedy here is, I think you've got some excellent points. Heck, you might even be able to expand the worldview of some of the folks on 1BC who are religious. But you are undermining your own effectiveness because of the style and method you are using. I hate to see that happen, cause I would like to see some of the kernels in the points you make more fully digested by a range of people. But I don't really want to be around while you shove handfulls of it down their throats and throttle them for being so stupid as to not gobble it up on their own.

As it stands, you do not seem to be responding in order to counter and rebutt "dangerous messages" in religious posts made on 1BC by other community members, e.g., threads started in order to offer justifications for holy war, or posts that use words like "infidel" in an offhanded, casual manner. You're simply getting on a soap box, posting some provocative lures, then reeling in your victims when they take the bait. A year or two ago, there was a lot of this going on on 1BC, but it has thankfully died down, in part thanks to people responding to trolling threads with rational arguments to defuse them. Perhaps you feel that some of the past trolling behavior has been treated unfairly? Many of the folks who were past recidivists of trolling no longer seem to participate on 1BC very much. But in fact, some of them have become quite sociable and agreeable contributors to the site. Maybe your trying to make some sorta meta-point by executing what you see is a mirror-image of the rebuttals that have been offered to counter trolling threads in the past?

The energy and devotion you show in quoting nearly every line of my post separately, and providing a response of some sort is indicative of the potential you have to make a real difference in our world; if only you did not drive away your audience with a martial arts kind of rhetoric

I'm not going to commit to some kinda you-quote/I-quote game here. Suffice to say, there are many places where you seem to have misunderstood, or misinterpreted what I was saying. Based on your rebuttals to my quoted text, you often seem to have attributed a hostility to my words which I really had no intention to convey. My apologies if I did not make myself adequately clear, but:

(1) I'm NOT seeing that you really WANT to understand what I'm saying

(2) I AM seeing that you seem to have the time to engage in lengthy quoting for the sake of creating a lot of work for your debate partners, and

(3) I do feel that the meanings in alot of your rebuttals indicate a kind of malicious desire to lash out irrationally, and not actually communicate and interact with your discussants.

When I combine these observations with the fact that, I simply do not care about this as much as you do, and do not see the earth shattering significance of whether or not I do or do not participate, I am not particularly inclined to continue to participate. If it were not for hoping that you can be convinced to shift your delivery a bit I would have already stopped responding.

Dude, I'm an evolutionary biologist!

But I am also a spiritual agnostic. I see the kernel of truth in a lot of what you are arguing. Religion has been culpable in a LOT of bad. I just don't see it as being ALL BAD, or "the anti-christ" so to speak. There is way too much diversity in there under that rubric 'religion,' as RA points out with his Inquisition-Dalai Lama continuum. Moreover, that only represents one dimension of what is probably best conceived as a multi-dimensional space. For example, I myself have spiritual feelings, and my own theory about "God;" which I call my "amoeba theory." It'd be fun to tell you all about it, except for the fact that I have this suspiscion that if I did, whatever I said would be come fodder for one of your quoting barrages. Nobody likes to see what they have to say dissembled like a Frankenstein Monster, and unless you can clearly and concisely show that what you are seeking to counter is tantamount to promoting hate or violence, I think the consensus about the site etiquette is that it is bad form to seek to shut someone down with a wall of text.

Really, I'd love to have a chat with you about this, but not if your gonna act like this: disagreeable, patronizing, disrespectful, hostile. Maybe I've been guilty of slipping down the same slippery slope in some past exchanges here, but beyond me acknowledging that possibility and stating that it is something of which I will always seek to be mindful [but remind me if need be! ], two wrongs never make a right do they?

RA started this thread so that all of us in this 1BC "family" can hash out how it is that we want to agree to interact.

 -J'accuse!

 -I know I'm derailing a bit but when people make cheap jabs against me under the guise of this thread I feel that I must defend myself. But I believe I can ignore any further provocation.

Hear hear, Scip

I found what happened in the "So..." thread just eventually made me turn off from bothering to respond further. RK, I appreciate your passion and zeal for the topic, and I even partially agreed with you on some points, but your style can be pretty confrontational.

And Black Owl's response is pretty similar to what I was thinking.

I just don't have the interest in getting into a debate where respect or at least acceptance that others may have different options is lacking. Using highly emotive language such as calling others stupid or saying teaching religion to kids is child abuse only serves to polarise the thread.

Jerm hung on in there for a bit, as he didn't want to let some comments go unreplied, but even he found it tiresome eventually.

And now I need some sleep...