If someone rejects evolution, should they be subjected to intolerance and ridicule?
Ridicule, yes. Not on this website perhaps, because of the rule against personal insults, but certainly in a society that honors free speech.
Intolerance, no, within limits. We're all free to choose our friends and the social groups we join, but
civilization by definition requires that we be
civil to each other, which is a minimal level of tolerance that allows the other person to live his own life in the contemporary definition of freedom.
Whatever happened to love, tolerance, understanding and compassion?
We're not required by the rules of civilization or this website to love each other, and in fact we're free to hate, although there are limits on the expression of that hatred both in civilization and on this website. Tolerance and compassion, again, yes; or to be precise, civility, which is a measured minimum level of both of those. Understanding... well hey that's something you either can do in any individual case, or you can't. I can't understand what people like about grand opera or Japanese court music, and many of them can't understand what I like about reggae or heavy metal. I don't think that lack of understanding is a big problem for them, me or civilization.
Personal attacks noted in bolded format. . . . I don't know, James ......if those aren't personal attacks, like the ones that get people warned or banned on sciforums, I don't know what is! :
I echo the previous member who pointed you to a dictionary definition of "personal." Insulting a group is not the same as insulting an individual member, especially since almost everybody who has negative feelings about any group makes exceptions for individuals, as in: "Some of my best friends are Jewish." Based upon that commonplace dichotomy, one could cop a legal plea that just because one says generically that the people of Berzerkistan are fools doesn't automatically imply that one feels that way about the one Berzerkistani who posts on this forum.
Baron Max said:
So then I should be permitted to denigrate blacks in the same way ...just not naming any specific person in those attacks, right?
Racism falls under a different rule on SciForums, not just one more category of personal insult. It's specifically prohibited both at the group and individual level.
Or I should be able to attack Muslims as long as I don't attack specific person in those attacks, right?
This is a place of science, and religion is unscientific at best and antiscientific at worst. This is one of the few havens we have where we can speak freely about the idiocy of religion; they have many of the other ten zillion websites to spew their ignorance, illogic and tribalism that periodically threaten to bring down civilization. Negative remarks about religion are tolerated here, especially if they are specifically about religion's unscientific stance, or in the case of evolution, the downright antiscientific stance of the Religious Redneck Retard Revival that has been spreading across America like a cancer for the past thirty years.
You betcha. Fuck that stoopid bullshit. They say the same kinds of things about us among themselves, and often to our faces. Perhaps with less profanity but that's hardly the point.
We make no claim to be tolerant of religion here, but we still don't allow individual personal attacks against religious people.
Interesting concept. But what do you think James R. will do if I post just such an attack on black people ...as he's done against all creationists?
He'll remind you that we have a hard-and-fast rule against racism that is one of the quickest ways to get banned. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, I'm just saying that it's something we all have to accept if we want to post here. Allowing racist posts is an easy way to get blocked out of myriad corporate and family computers by their filters.
You know this, Max. You're lapsing back into your trademark disingenuous style of argument. This puts you in the same category with Sam, who pretends not to know things in order to stir up trouble.
