GUIDELINES ON POSTING ABOUT OTHER FAITHS
**Members are not allowed to denigrate people of other religions or speak scornfully about other religions. **If a member does, he will generally be counseled first and suspended if he persists in disrespectful postings.
If the nature of an initial posting is blatantly scornful of any religion (e.g., “the pope is the anti-Christ” or “Rome is the Whore of Babylon” or “Muslims are terrorists”), suspension may be immediate and without prior counseling.
Members are free to discuss, dialogue, question, disagree with, and debate the doctrines and dogmas of both Catholicism and non-Catholic religions.
However, all discourse must be civil and charitable.
Guidelines
For both Catholic and non-Catholic posters:
- **It is acceptable to question the doctrine or dogma of another’s faith **
- **It is never acceptable to question the sincerity of an individual’s beliefs **
- It is never acceptable to state a blatantly disrespectful characterization of any faith, (“Rome is the Whore of Babylon”, “Nazarenes are Holy-Rollers”, “Jews are Christ-killers”, “Muslims are terrorists”) its tenets, practices, or adherents
- *Bringing up historical controversies peculiar to a particular religion should be done cautiously **
- **It is acceptable to discuss the effect the incident had on current policy or practice. **
- **It is acceptable to seek the truth vs. commonly-held beliefs or conventional wisdom about actual events. **
- **It is fallacious reasoning to use embarrassing incidents to claim that they “prove” a particular religion is false. **
- **Expecting members of any Church to defend or answer for the excesses or extremism of bodies that have broken with it is a technique that has no merit and can’t be defended. **
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It is our observation that discussion of such past events rarely serves a useful purpose and inevitably opens a thread to posts that violate forum rules and/or the bounds of civil discourse. So, while such threads may be useful, they raise a red flag for the Moderation staff.
