---In [email protected], <turquoiseb@...> wrote :
From: "anartaxius@... [FairfieldLife]" <[email protected]> ... For example there is a wide range of intelligence here. Now somebody, we are not saying who, must be the stupidest person on FFL, though in all fairness, they may have all moved over to The Peak, that phallic symbol pointing up into the sky. Once we discover the stupidest person here, one of us, or several of us need to attack that person's 'person', their ego, by implying directly and forcefully they are in fact, not just in surmise, the stupidest person on FFL. Then, Doug has to determine if the stupidest person here person has been sufficiently maligned to warrant action against the violator for having pointed out a simple fact. Interesting. You certainly make a good case for how difficult Doug's job will be. Just riffing on this theoretical scenario, Anartaxius, do you think it would be easier for Doug to make such a Solomon-like decision if the person who had been named as the stupidest person on FFL had made eight posts just in the two days since Doug was made moderator, *each* of them violating the Yahoo Guidelines in some way? Of course I do not know. Suppose we called someone a criminal. Now that might violate the guidelines. But suppose that person was arrested the next day for a felony? Would the person making the now correct call be reinstated? Doug in posting definitions of various kinds of slurs included the word 'irreverence' but that word does not appear in the guidelines. I think that kicking a person off FFL for irreverence would be a violation of free speech, for from a religious person's view, an atheist is irreverent but has just as much right under U.S. law as people who have more difficulty grasping logic and fact. The religious unaffiliated are now 28.8% of the U.S. population, more than mainline Protestant, Catholic, and non-Christian believers. The only group larger than the 'nones' as they are called, is the Evangelical Christians. In the Netherlands, the religiously unaffiliated are 42.1% of the population and it is increasing. People are not just posting from the United States here. The 'nones' are 27.8% of the United Kingdom (as long as it remains united anyway). Of course, worldwide, the fastest growing group are the Muslims, and they seem to have a much higher proportion of psychopathic believers than any other group and whatever you might want to say about the non-existence of god, or about meditation, they don't want you to say that at all, for fact and truth do not matter, only your death. There are many people here who have carried their religious baggage into their spirituality, but the trend we see developing is that the connexion between religion and spirituality is becoming less strong over time among the English speaking nations and their allies. And we have scientists (typically not in the TM movement) investigating consciousness, meditative techniques and spirituality from a scientific perspective with very little carry-over from religious ideas. So the idea of 'reverence', in the religious sense, as a guideline concept would not seem a feasible supposition on which to pin a violation of Yahoo guidelines, and we can include there are a number of atheist groups on Yahoo, and it is not likely that reverence would be a part of the mental stance of such groups, and they are freely allowed on Yahoo. Atheists of the statistical kind (likelihood that god exists = 0.5% or something like that) really do not hate believers, they just think they are mentally incapacitated largely by cultural and familial influences, an illness that could be reversed with the proper education.
