I strongly agree with your view that an edit tool would be helpful. And I strongly agree with Sidebar Moderator that it is sad that too many do not reconsider their phrasing before mashing "post".
IMHO, too many posters lose sight of the fact that there is a real human being - a brother or sister in many common causes - on the other end of the Freeper handle, a person who may be deeply hurt by careless words which would never have been spoken face-to-face.
As an example, I recall an incident long ago when a bright but very young conservative college student just barely 20 was trying to engage a hardened old-timer on a subject of little consequence (and long since forgotten). The old-timer kept reacting aggressively to the youngster as if he were speaking with someone just like himself. When the age of his opponent was revealed, the conversation changed entirely and the old-timer became patient and careful with his words.
Thank you, AG. The reason I always argued against what seemed to be the inevitable "holy war" which has now been going on for several years here is that FR is primarily a political forum, and we could be more useful in effecting political change (e.g., fighting the "culture war") if we concentrated on our commonalities, joined forces, and took advantage of the strenghth there is in numbers. Our political opponents do not have to play "divide and conquer" with us, if we're already doing it to ourselves.
Naturally, in discussing political philosophy, it is inevitable that we would want to point to the religious sources of our concept of the meaning of law, and its relationship to ethics and morality. So religion necessarily will enter into it. But, if I were to present elements of the Scholastic philosophia perennis in support of my ideas, I would find it disruptive to have to deal with accusations that the Pope is the Anti-Christ, and the Catholic Church the Whore of Babylon. As a matter of principle, I refused to participate in that level of religious discussion in the forum. (The was only a single, unified forum, as I recall, in the early days of FR, and it was unmoderated.)
For that reason, I favored the creation of a separate Religion forum, where those who wished to discuss the intricacies of their faiths could do so. Apologetics, Scripture studies, and the like would be appropriate there, but not, except perhaps peripherally, in the political forum. Still, I had hoped that the discussion in the Religion forum would be guided by 1 Peter 2:15-16:
Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence.
The "gentleness and reverence" has been conspicious mostly for its absence in the Religion forum, and I do not exclude myself from that accusation. That's why it has become an embarrassment at FR, when it could have been quite the opposite. Had we exercised more charity in all our postings, even in the political forum, perhaps we could still count Matt Drudge and Lucianne Goldberg among our number. Now-a-days, few people in positions of influence want to have much to do with FR, and our effectiveness is mostly nil.
I don't usually have time to read whole threads, especially one as long as this, so my apologies if I'm repeating things which have been said above, or already settled. But, for the record, I think it would be a good idea to have group-specific threads, where more-or-less like-minded people may discuss a particular aspect of their faith. For example, I disagree strongly with the Calvinist doctrine of Limited Atonement, but it would be unseemly and disruptive of me to start putting my case against it on a thread where people want to work out some of the details of the idea among themselves. If such a thread were marked "Calvinists only please" or such-like, I would know my input would not be welcome, and would, in a spirit of civility, simply stay away. I probably wouldn't even read it.
To ease the burden on the moderators, I'd like to suggest a software feature which has been a feature of news readers for some time, viz., the "plonk" file, affectionately known as the "bozo bin". As we can already see from some of the responses to this thread, some people are here primarly because they like to fight. Several haven't been able to contain that urge even on this thread, and have attempted to bait others into "discussing" specific topics of religious contention. Such people, in my opinion, tend to dramatically decrease the signal-to-noise ratio of the forum. Rather than having them reprimanded or banned, I'd like to have the ability to simply ignore them. That way, if they direct incendiary comments my way, I will remain blissfully ignorant of them, and not be tempted to respond in kind. It becomes a kind of self-censorship, an aid to resist the temptation, in the terminology of the old Usenet maxim, to "feed the trolls".
A full implementation of this feature would require major changes to the server software, since it would require that custom pages for every thread be generated for each user. But a partial implementation might be easier and reasonably effective: namely, the ability to filter what turns up on one's "My Comments" page, which is already custom-generated as the result of a database search. The search engine would simply not deliver to that page any posts from someone on one's ignore list.
That's my two cents, for what it's worth. Good luck to our new SM!