Re: Change policies regarding posting anti religious comments
it would have been nice had you phrased your question, without assuming our perspectives, even though a cursory glance at religion forum would indicate that GS policy is that pretty much anything is fair game as long as it is discussed in a civil manner, which the thread was.
There are 2 distinct issues, and they are being mixed up
1) are your posts against our policies- not at all
2) are all the posts off topic as far as the particular thread is concerned or in the right form- yes, it had become a franken-thread with multiple things going on
The thread was started in Life1 and was not the right place for much of it because a big chunk of the discussion beyond the first page or so became very specifically religion focused, beyond just the initial discussion. Which I then moved to religion forum, which i created a challenge for religion forum mod because now they have a thread with posts about religion, general banter about people's experience with MILs etc, and no context on what happened.
Ideally, the established policies are that when a thread is to be moved from one forum to another, it is placed in review and the mods for other forums informed that it should be in their forum, and then they can move it, when it is so mixed up it is always a challenge to remove what would be irrelevant for that forum.
I put the mods of religion in a tough situation by moving it directly and essentially breaking the procedures that have been set, because the discussion was interesting and to take it to review folder and some lag time in moving it to religion may have meant that the moment would have been lost and an interesting discussion fizzled. However, in doing so, I created a challenge for the religion forum mods to now deal with all the off topic posts, which they took out, not because there is any issue with the posts, but because some simply do not belong in religion forum (I can give you a sample if you would like of general 'did your MIL say that' type of stuff) and some others like your discussion which in itself does not have an issue but may need to be a separate thread on its own. In cases like such, sometimes mods move all the stuff and get feedback from others on the team, especially if it has been moved between forums on what they should do, or how they should handle it. Which is what they are currently doing.
The discussion while interesting, and not against GS policies in anyway, needs to be a separate thread on its own merits, and the mods challenge is how to take those posts out and create a new thread and edit posts that may have partial general banter which was going on, and the responses to the discussion so it does not seem disjointed.
Hopefully, I have addressed your concerns and you understand that aside from the lag it takes sometimes due to a globally dispersed part time volunteer team which often needs to collaborate, the intent was to give the discussion its own place so it can continue unencumbered by irrelevant quips of a parallel discussion in the same thread.