Does DU have a too-strong pro-religion bias?

Once or twice in my illustrious DU career I have posted threads in the R/T forum suggesting, in so many words, that religious faith is strongly akin to delusion. Each time, I've been attacked as a troll, and IIRC the threads were locked. Why?

The basic reason, of course, is that it's generally against the TOS to call fellow DU'ers insane, and I can respect that, in much the same way the personal attacks--even indirect personal attacks, are not allowed. I don't even dispute the validity of that policy, because IMO it helps to keep at least an air of civility in otherwise cantankerous exchanges.

But here's the problem:

I've seen countless threads accusing DU'ers of being on the payroll of this or that pharmaceutical company. It's a personal attack insofar as it directly impugns the integrity of the poster and undermines the value of that poster's input. If I call a Christian a lunatic, he or she will take righteous umbrage, but no one who reads the thread will say "you know, Christianity is insane." Instead, the reader will dismiss my accusation as the ramblings of an anti-religion atheist. For that reason alone it's in my interest to refrain from such postings. However...

I've also seen DU members who are parents directly attacked for choosing to circumcise their infant sons. Every poisonous accusation is made, from "mutilator" to "child abuser" to "assaulting a helpless newborn," along with many others. Similarly, we males who ourselves have been circumcised are termed "cut" or "mutilated" or the like.

Recently, I've seen DU parents attacked for allowing their children to drink milk or play in the sun. WTF?!?

The response in each case? Nothing.


Is this a double standard?


I'm not calling anyone out. I'm attempting to clarify the TOS so that I may understand why people who choose to believe in God (or whatever) are protected from unpleasant statments, while people who make other choices are not so protected.

the main forums. The R/T forum is mainly believers discussing r/t, not believers and non debating. I think in the main forums, particularly GD and GD: P, the bias is somewhat against religion.

I think that a lot of religion posts in GD are moved to R/T, though.

The "big pharma shill" attacks occur in pretty much every forum/group in which medicine is discussed, including the so-called "Health" forum. The anti-circumcision attacks go on there all the time, too.


Thanks for your input. It would be worth my while to bear in mind that different rooms have different rules!

My first career was in medical research, but now I am in human resources. Still, I have an analytical type of personality, and will always be interested in science. There is so much misinformation in the health forum it is just beyond comprehension!

Personally, having worked in the Urology dept for several years (I studied tumor supporessor genes in prostate cancer), every doc I worked with was opposed to circumcisiom. Some recent studies have given me some reason to be more open minded, but for now, I am not convinced of its benefit. The difference is that I am open to new information, whereas fanatics are not.

Interesting. I've become quite the R/T warrior of late so I can actually say..I wouldn't necessarily agree with your OP.
You know I'm an atheist, but I also strongly object to correlationg religous beliefs with mental illness (I've seen true mental illness so its my personal belief that they are too totally different things.
I'm not so sure the bias you perceive is a reality...Look at the recent "fundamentalist atheist" flame war...None of the pro-atheist posts were deleted.
And actually since I think you know I have been called just about every nasty name in the book you can think of..those posts DO get deleted. In fact its been rather frustrating for me at times because while I'll remember it, I've been disbelieved by certain people on the name calling because the posts have been deleted (this was recently the case in R/T actually..Somebody literally refused to believe me without post evidence and it was ALL gone.

Obviously, there's a difference between believing an unlikely and having an actual neurochemical defect in the brain. I'm not equating those two situations. But if someone professes to have had a profound, personal, mystical experience (religious or otherwise) with no external evidence, how is that different from someone who claims to be Napoleon? Is it a difference of kind or of degree? If the former, then what is the difference? If the latter, then why is it wrong to call that belief delusional at least, if not actual illness?

Editorial note:
For purposes of this discussion, I am simply discussing it, and I'm not calling anyone anything!

Alas, I stand by my assertion about the Health forum. Every time I raise my head in that arena, I'm called a shill, as are you. Every time I enter a discussion about circumcision, someone is either called mutilated or a mutilator.


It's entirely possible that I'm incorrect in my assessment of R/T because recently I haven't been in there as much as I used to be. If the tide has changed, then that's good news.

are we talking about people who "just felt god," or people who claim to have had a beer with st. michael, than played backgammon with elijah?

A "mystical experience" can be as simple as feeling at one with the universe, etc (whatever that means), and that is a far cry from a schizophrenic-type episode. If it is the backgammon one, than i fully agree. But, i think, so would most people.

i will agree, though, that the health stuff gets out of hand. i've chimed in a few times, as a circumcised (or mutilated, i guess) man that I feel fine, don't feel like part of me is missing, etc. I'm always surprised by how many women jump into the fray, and insist that i feel terrible about myself :shrug:

A mystical experience veers toward delusion when one has an experience (or several such experiences) generally inconsistent with independently verifiable reality. By this metric, "feeling at one with the universe" doesn't qualify, nor does profound love or friendship. I would suggest that a feeling of certainty that one has had some kind of direct interaction with an infinite, omnibenevolent, and omnipresent entity is of a fundamentally (!) different character.

Whether that qualifies as "delusion" might just depend on how one assimilates the experience, and what one does with it thereafter.

yes, i agree with you. the people who claim god literally spoke to them, etc, are either deluded or using a phrase like that to gain trust from the audience

...is that after all this world has to offer in extra-sensory experience, you have apparently missed it all.

It sounds as if you have even managed to never have been drunk. Who, exactly, explained the nature of reality to you....???

Visions AND feelings are OK....!!!!

And lucky you, in your fast paced world, you haven't even experienced sleep deprivation.

Yes, I think you are well-equipped to decide what is real and what isn't.


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I said nothing about extra-sensory experience. For pity's sake, listening to the radio is an extra-sensory experience, because I sure as shit can't hear radio waves without a technological device as a mediator. But I don't therefore run around screaming that the box on the table is supernatural.

You persistently place far too much faith in human senses, which are so preposterously unreliable that they can never be used as the sole evidence in favor of a supernatural event. The very reason that science demands reproducibility is because human sense are so fallible; but when we repeat an experiment many times over, with many different people observing it, the aggregate chance of veracity becomes greater and greater. The whole process is designed to minimize the impact of human senses upon the interpretive process.

" But if someone professes to have had a profound, personal, mystical experience (religious or otherwise) with no external evidence, how is that different from someone who claims to be Napoleon?"

I make INTUITIVE decisions all the time. The choices I make are completely un-scientific, unplanned and based solely on the mysticism of a "gut feeling". Of course I can blow all sorts of smoke up your ass about why I made that choice, but I would probably be trying to sell you something.

That's a clue for you....


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Where to eat, for example, or "does Joanie like me?" These types of questions that are routinely answered by nonlinear internal reflections.

But for matters of objective fact, intuition is hopelessly unqualified. Gut feelings and hunches certainly do play a part in the genesis of scientific hypotheses, but they certainly aren't adequate as evidence in support of those hypotheses.

And, anyway, you didn't answer this question:

Shall I call you Emperor?

...is that there is no way to measure a mystical experience unless you want to use evidence from the social sciences. You can usually verify, by looking, whether or not, someone is 'Napoleon'.

You're actually lucky in that you have verifiable, scientific evidence of WHY things happen to you. I bothered by the notion that you profess to know why things happen to me and others when you really know nothing of us except that we all seem to be 21st century humans........

And I'm not denying that there are many verifiable threats in our society. From reading and personal experience I have found a way to negate those threats. It involved a profound, personal, mystical journey and my only evidence is..."Here I am!!"

If you're going to say that I'm here because science works, then I'm going to have to ask you to prove that.


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Incidentally, if we're talking about some metaphysical, over-arching "why" behind all things, I should disclaim outright that I've seen no evidence that such a purpose (a "why") exists.

If you're simply referring to "why" as a matter of cause-and-effect, then we're on much firmer ground.

To that end, I've made no claim about why things happen to you. However, if you claim that supernatural or mystical things happen to you, and you have no stronger evidence than "I really really really believe it!!!"

Additionally, I am aware of no social science that actually asserts mystical or supernatural phenomena to be real, except as a statement of the beliefs of the participants (a la "while in the trance state, the mount truly believes that he's being ridden by the loa"). If you can cite a credible source in support of your claim, I would be greatly interested to read it.


And your last statement makes no apparent sense.

Yes, that is the question isn't it.

If science actually cared, it would look further. It only wants the power.


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I've had this discussion with many dozens of "reality is what you make of it" types, and the question of "why" can always be paraphrased thus:

"I want to know that the purpose of the universe is aesthetically pleasing to me."

And for that reason, the answer "there is no discernable why" is dismissed as unsatisfactory.

Always. Every single time. Without exception.



If you are that exception, then I invite you to articulate the question in a manner that specifially fits your intent.


In any case, your post illustrates your fundamental failure to understand science. Science is a system of tools for describing and predicting phenomena. It is not concerned with any transcendent "why," nor does science want "power," whatever you might mean by that.

Its because somebody seems to think that scientists aren't people who are curious about the world around them and use the tools of the scientific method to learn about the world around them but seems to think that we are all money grubbing psychopaths that want to trample on the lay person!
Funny how the people I KNOW aren't interested in politics at all and actually DESPISE politicians--but NOOO we just want to push our poisons on everybody and make a profit!!

I have no idea what this means...

"I've had this discussion with many dozens of "reality is what you make of it" types, and the question of "why" can always be paraphrased thus:
"I want to know that the purpose of the universe is aesthetically pleasing to me."
And for that reason, the answer "there is no discernable why" is dismissed as unsatisfactory.
Always. Every single time. Without exception."

Anyway....

"Science is a system of tools for describing and predicting phenomena."

That is why it has limitations. Of course, around here, where everybody has their own company-issued toolkit, you all think you're master mechanics.

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It's a commentary on people who embrace the notion that "reality is what you make of it." These people often demand to know the "greater" "purpose" behind the universe. When confronted with the possibility that there is no "greater" "purpose," these people say "that's not an answer," or something to that effect.

What they are, in fact, seeking, is a "purpose" to the universe that is pleasing to them on some basic aesthetic level. If the answer is unsatisfying or unpleasant, they deem it insufficient or wrong. Or else they cry foul and say "science has no authority to make that call."


As I mentioned, I've had this conversation many dozens of times, and this has always been the response. Including this time.


What toolkit? Issued by what company? What the fuck are you talking about?


It's clear that you're not interested in understanding anything. Instead, you are interested only in voicing your dissatisfaction that science--far and away the best explanation for the functioning of the universe--doesn't give the touchie-feelie answers that you're seeking.

Just like each of the many dozens of other conversations I've had on this topic.

You're making a mighty leap here...thinking that I'm actually asking you about the nature of your "universe"...and thinking further that your lofty analysis won't be pleasing to me...WTF???

The toolkit I was talking about is science. That's what you called it....tools for measuring reality.

A 'company issued toolkit' is one that is provided by the company to do company work. It fixes company equipment....

Don't like metaphors....????

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By attempting to trick me into distinguishing "my" universe from "yours," you are attempting to get me to buy into your crackpot "reality is what you make of it" nonsense that I've decried from the start. I may be dumb, but I'm not that dumb.

And don't try to be cutesy and pretend that you meant nothing snarky by "company-issued-toolkit." That's an unambiguous accusation of dogmatic thinking, and if that is indeed your accusation (which is, I note, consistent with your debut post in this Group), then you'd better back it up, unless you're still just trolling.

Somewhere where talking about "all this world has to offer in extra-sensory experience" doesn't make you look like an idiot.

I agree with you on the health insults..one of the way they handle that kind of nastiness is moving threads from GD to Health..and once there it doesn't seem like the posts get deleted much...
On the other hand..I posted a thread in GD once about the bigotry directed here agaisnt the people in the biopharmaceutical industry like me and there was indeed a literal "fuck you pharma shill" response that did get deleted.

(separating the "shill" issue, which I agree with you on) i rarely, if ever, see any proselytizing from theists on DU. So when we as atheists attack their religion, it's kind of one sided. Yes, of course there are individual exceptions, but you never (in my limited experience) see atheists as a group being referred to as idiots, or mentally ill. I wouldn't call it a pro-religion situation, as much as an anti-attacking your beliefs thing. Now, I don't know if I fully agree with that itself, but I believe that this is the main motivation for mods/admins.

On a side note, I refuse to call religion a delusion, or think of religious people as stupid, or "sheep," blah, blah. Religion has been part of the human experience for millennia, and i somehow find it hard to believe that every single person that has existed who believed in a god or gods was mentally ill. the human mind is, imho, wired to believe in supernatural powers, unless it is otherwise trained. we are lucky (?) enough to have the drive for critical thinking in us, and perhaps someday it will be universal. But i doubt it; so it might be more useful to learn how to work around religion, rather than attacking it. As a skeptic, i frequently tread on religious toes. but i think that irreverence is fully tolerated, and even embraced, by a lot of religious types. with science, we cannot definitively challenge the belief in god, so why try? Instead, we try to show reality for what it is, and that's that. a few may find their way to to atheism or agnosticism, but even if not, we will at least have opened people up to critical thinking, just a little more.

/ramble

And you're right about the folly of asserting that all religious people are stupid or sheep. Also a good point that proselytizing is effectively nonexistent here.

The aggressiveness of some atheists, myself included, can be attributed in part, I think, to the fact that we really are a kept-down minority. While you're right that the attacks might be somewhat one-sided here at DU, in the larger scheme they are effectively one-sided in the other direction, so when a fed-up atheist finds an outlet, sometimes the spigot opens full-bore!

As far as the "wired to believe" thing goes, I kind of look at it as analogous to "wired for language." It's clearly a part of our makeup, but no one would ascribe to language an actual reality external to itself. Religious belief, hard-wired or not, lays claim to an external reality.

I fear that you're right in identifying the impossibility of successfully challenging belief on a large scale.

about atheists "ruining" the R/T forum..and you can see what kind of reaction that got!
Thats the post where all the posts deleted were derogatory in the highest form to atheists.
And btw someone had taken a view that the "fundie atheists" have anger/mental health issues and thats why they are so "strident" in R/T..This included a nasty swipe at me because I have long posted in the MHSG...Varkam I am sure remembers that one!

there's no doubt that atheists are one of the most hated groups in america

If Rush Limbaugh was the one giving intellectual backing to the anti-vaccine movement, and not a Kennedy, I think there'd be a huge difference in the way vaccines were treated on DU.

I've seen it in other places too. When I got tired of seeing the "john edwards is my hero!!11!!" threads, I started asking what those people thought of a quote Russ Feingold gave criticizing edwards, and one person actually told me their opinion of Feingold, not edwards, was lowered.

Similarly, Dawkins and co. are hardly given the same consideration on an issue than members of the religious left are. I actually braced myself for some bouts of insanity over the Schiavo case when Jesse Jackson sided against her husband during that travesty, but fortunately frothing hatred for Bush leftover from the 04 election seemed to keep people here from considering what Jackson had to say for a second.

But after that event settled down, Jackson's credibility among DUers was not damaged in any way.

there was a time when a post expressing anything but respect for religious ideas/dogma would get you warned - the only time I've caused a thread to be locked when when I dared to criticise a "believer" for their beliefs. The religious were automatically accorded respect on DU in a way that believers in, say, UFOs weren't.

Perhaps it's harder for someone not from the US to quietly ignore all this "we need your prayers" waffle. We just don't waste time with that stuff over here, on the whole.

I do think that religious belief is, at best, self-deception and at worst delusion and mental instability. And I think it's dangerous. Am I "allowed" to say that on DU? More than I used to be.

I say that as a skeptic, an atheist, and a moderator, too.

The way the system works here is that people have to alert on posts in order to bring it to the attention of the moderators (or a moderator has to see it themselves and then alert on it). If it isn't alerted on, odds are we're not going to do anything about it.

Even if you do alert on something, that doesn't mean it's going to get deleted. A lot of times we'll look at something in context and feel that it doesn't cross the line.

Everything is done on a collaborative process, meaning that we get opinions from one another before we do anything. Sometimes (although it's not often) action isn't taken just because there's no input and then it falls through the cracks.

All that being said, I think that bias is inevitable in that it is human. I also think that the group of people who mod this place (me excluded) are some of the most objective people on DU. They bend over backwards to try to take into account their own personal feelings and biases when enforcing the rules here.

I think that the most likely explanation is selective memory. I don't mean that as a pejoritive since we all experience it. It's just basic psych: we're more likely to remember things that upset us or things that fit in with our schema as opposed to otherwise. For my money, I remember far more pharma shill or atheists-are-bad posts than Xtians are nuts posts.

You're likely correct about the selective memory, but I can't for the life of me recall a thread being locked because it attacked atheists or so-called Big Pharma Shills. Unless the threads are deleted altogether and I simply lose sight of them, these posts seem to linger on, while others (as I've described) quickly vanish without trace.

For my part, I've alerted on (I would guess) dozens of posts in Health, all of them purporting to offer specific and significant (and potentially deadly) medical advice, but to date not a one has been deleted. I find this discouraging, despite what I sincerely believe to be the honest and good-faith efforts of the mods.

You've spoken quite well to that particular point in the past, in fact.

More often than not, though, those are individual posts and not OPs.

Re the Health forum: One man's dispensing dangerous medical advice is another man's disucssion of news / findings. What you (and I imagine, on many instance, myself as well) see as someone offering medical advice others are more inclined to see as a discussion of health news. Pretty much the only time that something will be dealt with as offering medical advice is if it is solicited from another member. It sucks, but thems the breaks.

Thanks for the clarification, and you're right that it's frustrating.

Just to keep it in perspective, I was recently told by a local theist:

"...the mods at DU really are pro-atheist, and reflexively anti-religious, and you can get tombstoned because they won't look very far into the issue. They'll just decide you've upset too many people, and that is that. I've seen it before happen to others, and it almost happened to me, too."

So, yeah, there are examples for both sides, but the trend seems to be moderately fair.

I would suggest that you alert on those posts that you feel push the limits and start a dialog with the Mods. Hell, they've got nothing better to do. :)

There was a study quite some time ago into media and attitudes, and it found that people generally believe that the media is biased against their point of view (ex We believe that the media is slanted conservative while conservatives believe that the media is liberal). I think it's probably the same deal here. Atheists believe that the mods are biased against them, and theists believe that the mods are biased against them. Us mods don't get no love :(.

I was trying to frame the original question in terms of the official TOS, rather than making an accusation against the mods' practices or even-handedness. That is, if the TOS says "posts by Orrex will not be tolerated" and the mods enforce this rule, that's not their fault; it's the nature of the site, which is fine.

I was just looking to clarify whether the TOS was formulated in such a way as to allow certain kinds of inflammatory posts but not others.


And you've clarified this--thanks again!