Where is the line between freedom of speech...

Maybe I can illustrate this with some real life examples. You're a guest in my home at a party. You need to use the bathroom to do the bad thing. The best of us sometimes eat lots of broccoli, the wrong kind of deviled eggs or under-cooked beans. We get viruses. You might be having a bad day. Green fumes are escaping through the door. The plants are wilting, the dog's fainted, the guests are gagging and opening windows. We still love you. We'll pretend it never happened. Manners. Manners.

But you do it in the toilet not on the toilet and certainly not on the floor several feet away in from of the sink. If there's an involuntary event despite your best efforts and the toilet's received an unexpected baptism - you quietly ask for the cleaning supplies and set things right. You don't act as if nothing's happened and leave a ghastly surprise for the next person. Manners. Manners. Manners.

Maybe for some God Only Knows reason you've used a fine wash cloth to wipe up. I can forgive and even forget - but not if you fold it back up and stick it in the middle of a stack of clean towels. Don't sneak outside in the dark and throw it over the fence. Children play in that yard and the neighbors are going to investigate. Especially when you're drunk and it's hung up on the branches of their tree blowing in the wind like a filthy unspeakable flag. We have ways of disposing of this quietly and cleanly if you'll only ask.

What's happened here recently is someone coming in with a full load, having shat, with pre-meditation, right in the middle of the living room, and being proud of it.

Does it make sense now?

Gisteron wrote:

tzb wrote: This is a religious temple...

See, this is the premise I don't buy. A religious temple has walls and doors. What is said inside is said between the members and for the members. It doesn't invite guests and it certainly doesn't give them a platform to voice an opinion. In fact, it only allows that to a few select members. In TOTJO, even sermons can be submitted by anyone. That's not what any other temple would do. A religious temple may not shut and lock its doors, but it isn't in a public space where everyone can read it and anyone can contribute just as they step in.

When I say a public forum, I don't merely mean a publicly accessible website with scripts to enable free information exchange between the members. I mean it also analogous to an actual public forum. A market place, a public square, out in the open for anyone to come in and out and sell whatever they wish so long as they don't go neither after the visitors nor other booth owners. In that analogy to silence someone is equivalent to pretty much demolishing someone else's booth. The fact that you may be renting the square for that forum every week and allow everyone to have their booths here and to sell their products from them does technically give you just about all the power over the place. But we will go and find someplace else if you start feeling entitled to damage our booths and your investment to rent the place will become meaningless.

If you want a religious temple, build up some walls and close the doors and delete all but one booth and rebuild that booth to instead be a pulpit for a select elite few to preach from. Until that time this place belongs to the users and we wear what we wish on our feet bearing all the responsibilities and consequences that come with it and only in the moment we stomp on someone else's it will be your time to intervene as a police guard - a server, not a landlord.

Disclaimer: I'm not adressing the actual TOTJO administration, nor do I speak on behalf of the rest of its member pool. I'm speaking as a hypothetical "us" and adressing a hypothetical "you", illustrating the kind of relationship I find healthy and desirable, independant of how close to it TOTJO actually is or strives to become.

Khaos wrote: I am also confused as to what religion is practiced here given that you can essentially believe as you please.

Even the doctrine has been said not to be doctrine.

So then, there is the claim of religion, but with nothing that exhibits a religion. Other than the ranks...

I too have been a guest in various temples, and though i was allowed in, there was indeed quite a difference between being a guest and a member.

This is no religion as you understand it...

But, the average member can see it...

Do, its OK if you don't...

As to a physical location....

I know plenty of people who go to the brick and mortar temples, and have no religion...

The working definition of a religion in my World Religions college course is from Invitations to World Religions, Brodd, Little, et al, Oxford University Press.

"Religion is a cultural system integrating teachings, practices, modes of experience, institutions, and artistic expression that relates people to what they perceive to be transcendent" (page 9).

There are very many other definitions of religion, and the first chapter of the textbook covers a variety of them. In general, each definition is an attempt to describe a system of symbols that inform practices and motivations. The consistent question from which the most controversy arises is what one means by transcendent? For many of us here, members of this Order, in this 21st century digital temple (i.e. website) the Force is transcendent. And therein we begin our discussion. We share our thoughts and experiences regarding the meaning and subsequent practices regarding this transcendent symbol. To assert that what we do here does not exhibit the characteristics of a religion is erroneous.

That this Temple chooses to restrict and regulate some kinds of posts is not a denial of free speech nor an infringement on the principle of free speech. Free speech still exists even if this Order encourages and enforces decorum.

My point wasn't actually that the Temple censors anything. On the contrary, the reason it is so rich and diverse and exciting is because this is precisely what it doesn't do. People here are dismissed, mostly temporarily, and only after severe and repeated misbehaviour. Short of that everybody is welcome and free to voice just about any opinion because there isn't much of an official dogma it can be inconsistent with. The argument is that this is a good thing and that it should stay that way and that most of us would probably no longer enjoy this place should it change a lot in that aspect. I also added that a place that would rather be more exclusive would also have to shut itself from the constant back and forth with the outside world.

Frankly I find it a big stretch to say that this is a religious temple in that regard. With its current policies it is so equivalent to an open and free market place that if we set our standard such that it still qualifies as a religious temple, then every place where there are people at all would have to be called a religious temple, too.

And if such spaces were organised around:

Proteus wrote: Services, sermons, marriage licenses, personal member consulting/consoling, symbols, a creed, a code, a source of myth (one of countless), learning material/continuous discussions and contemplations concerning personal belief about life and the source of the universe.... I could go on.

I imagine they would be.

Gisteron wrote: My point wasn't actually that the Temple censors anything. On the contrary, the reason it is so rich and diverse and exciting is because this is precisely what it doesn't do. People here are dismissed, mostly temporarily, and only after severe and repeated misbehaviour. Short of that everybody is welcome and free to voice just about any opinion because there isn't much of an official dogma it can be inconsistent with. The argument is that this is a good thing and that it should stay that way and that most of us would probably no longer enjoy this place should it change a lot in that aspect. I also added that a place that would rather be more exclusive would also have to shut itself from the constant back and forth with the outside world.

Frankly I find it a big stretch to say that this is a religious temple in that regard. With its current policies it is so equivalent to an open and free market place that if we set our standard such that it still qualifies as a religious temple, then every place where there are people at all would have to be called a religious temple, too.

We're a temple, not a monastery. Monasteries are only for partying hard, temples can be used for business as well. (cf. history)

To compare this Temple's online forum policies to a marketplace is a false analogy. Metaphorizing ideas as commodities is the foundation of this false analogy, and the sharing of ideas in an online forum as analogous to the exchange of commodities further exacerbates the error. Marketplaces exchange products for other products of recognized equivalent value so there really isn't any analogical similarity because we don't exchange as much as we share with one another. Ideas are not objects and sharing is not exchanging products. Generalizing one characteristic, where people gather, as the criterion for the similarity is so broad as to assert virtually nothing at all.

If the working definition I offered above is to be the basis of TotJO religious standing then these characteristics preclude marketplaces since the latter are not concerned with transcendence or the artistic expression of the shared symbol system regarding transcendence. If the fact that persons participating in a marketplace are sharing a similar experience, and that they are part of an institution with practices is to be used as the criteria of analogous similarity with TotJO, then again, the supposed similarity is so broad as to not be stating anything meaningful.

Khaos wrote: I am also confused as to what religion is practiced here given that you can essentially believe as you please.

Even the doctrine has been said not to be doctrine.

So then, there is the claim of religion, but with nothing that exhibits a religion. Other than the ranks...

I too have been a guest in various temples, and though i was allowed in, there was indeed quite a difference between being a guest and a member.

Every religion is a journey of discovery. The difference here is that each person is allowed to follow their own journey, with the Temple assisting in a facilitating role, where other religions prescribe the journey for you.

Just because we do not follow the textbook formula for religion, doesn't mean that it is not a religion. I believe the term would be "unorthodox"

I'm not sure that there is anything that we "please" to believe. Beliefs aren't choices. We come to them based on what is presented to us. There are things that we seek, as there are those things that we simply hope are true ...

We can't even know the "what" because just about the entirety of our heuristic approach is based in comparison. Good/bad, high/low, heavy/light ... &c. ; or we go about reducing things to groups, classifications, families and so forth. The "transcendent" is therefore un-knowable as it is inclusive of all that there could be to compare it to thereby to 'know' it. It is beyond is and isn't ... the 0s and 1s that chain together to make our knowledge bases. All heuristic devices fail, thus making any epistemology about the transcendent simply a very fun rhetorical game ...

But at the same time, we all have, regardless of our respective cultures - regardless of our species even ! - some common Life experiences which "blow our minds". And for this reason, we seek answers to existential questions. This is why every generation of Man through our development has had a mythology, even if one doesn't know it or accept it ! If you've ever cried at a film or book, guess what, you just got tickled in your transcendent !

“CAMPBELL: That's right. You've got the same body, with the same organs and energies, that Cro-Magnon man had thirty thousand years ago. Living a human life in New York City or living a human life in the caves, you go through the same stages of childhood, coming to sexual maturity, transformation of the dependency of childhood into the responsibility of manhood or womanhood, marriage, then failure of the body, gradual loss of its powers, and death. You have the same body, the same bodily experiences, and so you respond to the same images. For example, a constant image is that of the conflict of the eagle and the serpent. The serpent bound to the earth, the eagle in spiritual flight -- isn't that conflict something we all experience? And then, when the two amalgamate, we get a wonderful dragon, a serpent with wings. All over the earth people recognize these images. Whether I'm reading Polynesian or Iroquois or Egyptian myths, the images are the same, and they are talking about the same problems.” (J. Campbell, B. Moyers, The Power of Myth, p. 40)

Alan wrote: To compare this Temple's online forum policies to a marketplace is a false analogy.

does not follow from

Metaphorizing ideas as commodities is the foundation of this false analogy, and the sharing of ideas in an online forum as analogous to the exchange of commodities further exacerbates the error...

even if I did that.

There is also an argument to be made as to why

Marketplaces exchange products for other products of recognized equivalent value so there really isn't any analogical similarity because we don't exchange as much as we share with one another. Ideas are not objects and sharing is not exchanging products.

does nothing to your point, because sharing is very much a form of exchange and because there actually is an exchange here without which visiting this place wouldn't be worth anyone's time.

Regardless, the analogy is drawn between the policies and not the products. It is the freedoms we enjoy here that are equivalent with that of an open marketplace (with the open part being the crucial one rather than the marketplace), and that are inconsistent with those of any actual religious temple that would discourage the discussion and dispute of a preacher's words and expel people for voicing disagreement with the official dogma in a way where other visitors could notice. This is not a question of the definition of religion and the analogy fails only when applied to aspects I didn't bring it up to adress while it stands quite well for both what I brought it up for and even for the strictly economical interpretation of the marketplace model, though that one, again, is not where the comparison is drawn.

And of course none of this is subject of the thread that dealt with the question of just how far we should allow freedom of speech to reach.