If not best practices, at least better ones.

General Discussion
1

A fellow participant responded to one of my posts by saying :

Very clearly you did not follow the context.
To which I replied - I probably didn't. The fact of the matter is, there are so many issues and arguments and voices in some threads, it is almost impossible to take them all in.

There must be a better way of working through topics. Is “The Center for Inquiry” one of the premier forums for rational discourse about religion or not? Let’s put our heads together on this.

One approach would be to start multiple parallel threads on a topic. So for example, qwerty666 kicks of a conversation by asserting that “secular morality is superior to religious morality.” liberty1776 responds from a libertarian point of view. After a bit of back and forth, a new participant, john3:16, wants to push back against the original assertion from an evangelical christian point of view.

Would it make sense for john3:16 to start a new thread for this? He/she could cut and paste qwerty666’s original question into a new thread and go from there.

Or perhaps we could tighten up our questions by adding more in at the start. So, for example, instead of asking

Why is there something rather than nothing?
we could re-phrase the question as follows:
DEFINITION: For the sake of this argument, I am going to define "nothingness" to mean absolute nothingness. That is to say, "nothingness" has no matter-energy, no space-time, no contingent or necessary beings of any kind, no logic or math, no causal powers or abstract qualities of any sort. This kind of nothingness does not even have the attribute of existing.

QUESTION: Given this understanding of nothingness, is it possible to say what could or could not derive from such a state? Does such a state even make sense?


With the question thus defined, debates about the meaning of “nothingness” are off the table. We are free to debate the meanging of this word in another thread, but not this one."

2

I am open to such ideas.

3

I like the idea, but that’s some serious moderation. I wouldn’t want it on all pages all the time. But I’m open to it.

4

Thanks for the positive input.

I do have a couple of newbie question.

  1. On some forums, participants can engage in one-on-one debates. Does CTI have something similar?

  2. If I start a thread, can I end it?

 

 

 

 

5
1. On some forums, participants can engage in one-on-one debates. Does CTI have something similar?
Not in the rules and nothing that the software facilitates, AFAIK
2. If I start a thread, can I end it?
Nope. We frown on mass deletions. Unless you get marked as a spammer, then everything you said is wiped away. I can lock a thread, but that's for when a conversation gets too heated and isn't going anywhere.