Okay. I've cooled down, and had an enlightening exchange with a poster to this thread that's led me to reconsider how I closed this thread.
Since there seems to be a good degree of honest mystification as to what on earth could be considered offensive here, I'm going to take another run at it, referring in part to the Newbie Guide.
1 - This is a forum clearly marked "Other" . . . which means arbitrarily designating anyone else's belief, whether they are present to defend that belief or not, is deeply problematic.
2 - Much of the discussion on this mercifully brief thread centers around that hoary old Reformation conflict about faith vs. works -- and no matter what filter you try to present that stuff through, it still boils down to Western Christian, and a conservative view of Western Christianity, as well. That's also deeply problematic, in that it not only excludes non-Christian religions, and non-Western religions, but it excludes more progressive versions of Christianity, as well as excluding doctrines that lend more weight to "works" . . . thereby consigning them to that shadowy territory not only of "other" but the territory of "False Religion" that's been set up in the
false dichotomy presented in the thread title itself.
That, however unintentionally -- and I'm rather unconvinced, since it's been set up in the "Other" room -- is pretty deeply exclusionary.
Now, to quote from the AW Newbie Guide:
You'll notice, please, I'm also not demanding that anyone agree with my worldview. You don't have to. And you can absolutely debate and discuss and tell me you think I'm wrong, and why you think so -- PMs are usually more appropriate for that, but if it's a discussion that you honestly believe would benefit the community, I'm willing to have that discussion on the boards in public, too.
What members (and all of us are members, mods too) don't get to do is marginalize other members. And we have Muslims and Catholics and Moral-Majority conservative Pentecostals. Republicans and Libertarians and Anarchists. We have brown people, pink people, pot-smokers, hippies, suburban moms, ex-cons, ex-cops, and Homeland Security specialists. We have married folks, and polyamorous folks, and singles and swingers and queers.
You get the drift, I'm sure.
I'm not inclined to try and prevent people from thinking and believing whatever they're inclined to think and believe -- whether they're fanatic adherents to the use of the serial comma, or won't use any capital letters or commas at all. It would be a fool's errand, for one thing, and this would be a rather stagnant and boring community, for another.
I'm also not inclined to let people behave like bullies about their beliefs.
The sort of smug-sounding discussion that immediately excludes from the discussion any religion that goes counter to some of the rather conservative and decidedly Western stuff that was presented here as some sort of supposed "marker" for "True" religion is a problem, for that very reason.
For example:
A genuine believer compares his self to the Divinity, and is humbled.
A false believer conflates his self with the Divinity, and becomes arrogant.
So what about religions that don't embrace any sort of "Divinity" -- as defined by you -- at all? The implication, by omission, is that those religions are somehow "False."
And I don't intend to simply pick on one poster - examples can be pulled from pretty much any of the posts above.
That implication, then, marginalizes any number of religions that have the misfortune of not having a representative on this thread. But I have no idea who might be reading it, and neither do you.
I have a moral obligation and a responsibility not to let this go unchecked as somehow representative of the philosophy of these boards.