Fair for its Day - Religion folder

Now, I really don't mean to offend anyone's religious feelings and please don't take this personally or anything... but the "Religion" section for Fair for Its Day is absolutely abhorrent. It is riddled with indentation issues, uses a ton of assumptions and "alternate views", attempts to defend homophobia, tries to downplay the seriousness of sexual slavery and is extremely preachy throughout it all. It is a clear result of multiple people trying to outdo each other in defending their chosen religion from criticism and occasionally getting kind of extreme in doing so. Many of the examples don't actually point out how the religious texts were progressive in their time, but ouright attempt to justify the values they espouse. Personally, I feel tempted to just delete everything there into oblivion, but if that's too radical of a solution, can anyone please do something about the aforementioned problems?

Edited by Tharkun140 on Jun 13th 2019 at 6:37:30 PM

I don't see a problem (barring the indentation.)

Fair for Its Day, by its very nature, requires the work to show or imply views that some people today might find unacceptable.

It also requires the work to be progressive for its times. For which none of the entries provide evidence other than "Everyone else was surely even worse!" without any basis that I'm aware of. And seriously, don't you see a problem with insinuating that gay people are the main cause of epidemics and excusing murdering them because of it?

Actually, I think that warrants hollering: Is stating that sodomites are the singular cause of STD epidemics and arguing that killing them off is morally acceptable — as the bottom example in the aforementioned folder does — really something we want around here?

Edited by Tharkun140 on Jun 14th 2019 at 12:02:02 PM

First of all, don't get started with religious shit-slinging. We don't censor the wiki, barring the stuff that can lose us advertisers or get us sued.

Second, the entries in that folder seems to actually provide evidence that The Bible, etc. did take steps forward in social norms, whether explicitly stated or implied. (I hesitate to say "steps forward" here since that might imply the moral superiority of that belief system, but there really isn't a better way to phrase that.)

The only other religious or administrative text is mentioned during that crapfest is the Code of Hammurabi, which was written over a thousand years before the oldest parts of the Bible, and yet is called "contemporaneous" for some reason. I don't care if you call my objections "religious shit-slinging", this is just ridiculous. Any text can be called progressive if we compare it to texts written a millenium prior. If there is any other evidence, I must have missed that.

Are we also not censoring objectively false information? Because if not, the next thing I'm doing is posting my own example, in which I argue ISIS is actually progressive by comparing them to some militant organization that existed in the tenth century and claiming they are contemporaneous.

Edited by Tharkun140 on Jun 14th 2019 at 3:24:46 PM

I suggest taking Fair for Its Day to the Real Life cleanup thread to see what people think of those sections. Both the Real Life and Religion ones should be looked at.

There was a brief discussion of this trope in 2014, but I cannot find a resolution.