Does your posting of a 7 year-old article have the same aim of refuting a currently ongoing discussion in the MSM? If not, then why bring it up afresh now? Since the massively overwhelming opinion of historians is that the story is bogus and leads to nothing good, one can only wonder what prompts this article’s presence here. While the article does, in fact, get around to citing the usual denials of authenticity for the legend, its first third is murky enough to plant a seed of doubt on the scholars’ findings. Is that, in fact, the goal of of posting such sensationalist nonsense now?
This whole paragraph is just a backhanded way of attributing motives to a poster by questioning the motives of the poster.
"Attributing motives to another poster or otherwise reading his mind is “making it personal.""
Everything we write says a little about who we are, I believe.
When one frequents a forum such as this on a daily basis and reads multiple postings by the same author per day, I'd contend that it is impossible not to a) get to know the poster's personality and b) develop an understanding of his/her motives. Unless of course, one has no critical faculties nor intelligence. It's not judgment. One simply reads what is put out by the individual in question.
You can protest somebody's judgment about a poster but it's usually been made as the result of deja vu. On any given day, there may be nothing remarkable about a person's behavior. However, over the course of months and years, certain patterns appear. The same things are repeated, the same issues are returned to. The same reactions occur. A picture begins to emerge.
Of course, we're not allowed to voice what we've seen and learned but that's OK. We all know how the game is played by now and most of us understand what's happening.
Uh...I, to the best of my recollection, never asked for this topic to be placed “under the ban,” though I probably would be less than saddened if it were. I merely sought the rationale for posting a 7 year-old article about such an inherently divisive topic, and further questioned the citation - in order to create a juxtaposition of sorts - of five other threads, which at least were current-events related when they were first posted some years ago.
As for questioning motives, well, what is one to think when a 7 year-old article is posted that is thoroughly detached from any issues in current news, the movies, etc.? I merely asked for an explanation. How far back does an article have to go, and how unnecessarily incendiary does it have to be, before it should be clear to a potential poster that the potential gains are far outweighed by the losses incurred on the Religion Forum? Consider that many seekers and fence-sitters are on this site, and the inter-religious sniping they see here is most unseemly. We don’t do very well in this regard even in legitimate areas of contention; the quality of debate often (on both sides of an issue) quickly turns to mud slinging and “Yeah, well so are you!” types of “discourse.” How much worse, in the aforementioned seekers’ eyes, are threads that clearly are out to serve no good purpose? Doesn’t this sort of thing make us ALL look bad?
No. I think you're oversimplifying the issue. When something comes up in the media (be that "Pope Joan," "the Da Vinci Code," "the Golden Compass," or even despite his being taboo here, Jack Chick), it merits discussion, especially if it's in the context of analyzing and arguing against it. Each of the five articles mentioned previously about "Pope Joan" are in this context: one informing about a book, one calling to action in response to a question on Jeopardy, and three clearly debunking the myth in response to it being in the MSM stories.
This whole paragraph is just a backhanded way of attributing motives to a poster by questioning the motives of the poster.
Yet the basic facts of the paragraph are true.
From the best that I can tell, by ordering us to not "make it personal" the RM is asking us to give posters the benefit of the doubt as to their motives by sticking to the issues. We all make judgments; that's part of being human. Not "making it personal" is a way to keep those judgments to ourselves to keep relative peace here on the forum. That said, sometimes, some posters make it very very difficult to do that.
None of these posts are done in isolation; FR is a community, and members of a community have personalities that, as time goes on, are easier to discern. Sometimes this is beneficial, sometimes it isn't, but either way it's inevitable.
Context is everything. What a poster posts, when the poster posts, and what else has been posted in recent memory are all important. I think Marshmallow's analysis in 39 explains the situation very well.
But I'm not the RM, so take my 2 cents worth as just that.