He highlighted the concerns specifically surrounding the multiple peadophile scandals and cover ups by those in power. It goes all the way to the top. That's not a generalization, it's a cold hard fact. People DO follow religious leaders blindly, hence them willingly covering up decade's of child rape and murder.

Trying to silence that criticism is a very silly thing to do.

A lot of people do follow leaders blindly, that's not exactly confined to religious circumstances either, but not all people do. We don't allow sweeping statements like that on the forums, and you know it. At least you ought to.

There's no doubt that the Catholic church has some very serious issues in regards to pedophilia, and as an institution they have historically gone to great lengths to cover it up. All this is true. The intention was never to silence the underlying criticism of his post. We could likely stipulate that a good portion of their leadership throughout the ages has been at least willfully ignorant to the problem, if not worse, but simply declaring all of their leadership to be mad is a step too far. If we start allowing broad statements like that to go without any kind of action, then we're opening ourselves up to countless other generalizations about some organized religion or other. As such, the warning was appropriate, even if it was borderline.

What wasn't appropriate was his reaction. 

And if you're so keen on telling the mod team how to handle everything that comes our way, perhaps you should have stayed on the team, rather than doing all this backseat driving. This issue is settled, and your next post in here on the matter will result in your moderation. We've been very forthcoming with everyone involved up this point, but enough is enough now. It's dealt with, and we've said what there is to say about it.

At first I completely agreed with the Ka-Pi moderation, but the more I think about it the sillier it becomes.

To say that Ka-Pi "didn't offer a constructive outlook", while every other comment in that thread wasn't constructive either, is ridiculous. One commentator even replied "Can you be even more unnuanced in how you view Catholicism?" while ironically doing nothing but dismissing any discussion about the topic and not even contributing a worthwhile opinion. If there is one thing you will notice about the thread, it is that everyone's language is very general and nobody went with an in-depth explanation. You might say that this doesn't matter, but when the mod team answers that the problem with Ka-Pi's statement was that it was a "generalization", when every statement in that thread is general and the angle of debate was in layman's terms, it shows a clear bias against anything that can possibly be in any way upsetting. But people can get upset at anything.

Even the description given of what Ka-Pi said was wrong. He never said the Catholic church was a cult (in fact it was one of the few words he didn't replicate). He replied to a comment that tried to single out ways in which religion can be misused by replicating the comment nearly verbatim as a means to show the correlation by what is often misdiagnosed as just an exception to organized religion (it being improperly used) and one of the biggest religions in the world.

So what we have is a comment where the intentions have clearly been misinterpreted and "generalizations" that actually make sense in the context of what the thread calls for, but because it's an opinion that can possibly be offensive it is bad. Ok.

This kind of attitude insinuates that religion is something that inherently needs defense, despite the fact that unlike sex, race, or sexuality you can change it at any time. Religion is an institution first, an idea second, and a group of people third. It was very clear that what was being discussed by Ka-Pi was the institutional aspects, but apparently he gets moderated because he generalized in a very general thread using very general language to describe a very general opinion. Nothing he said was even close to discriminatory or bigoted, and to say that " If posts like that were ever deemed acceptable here, I would have no interest in this community" while Numberwang and CaptainExplosion were allowed to make the worst threads on the site for *months* really shows the problem with a lack of awareness and forethought.

The way he handled himself after the fact was very unreasonable, but this moderation isn't really much better.

Oh, going with petty digs huh?

Good luck.

So moving on beyond Ka-Pi, when has the mod team ever not closed down discussion? Seems to happen rather fast too. Also seems like opinions almost never change and that even on the rare occasion where there is a difference in opinion among mods they still go along with the decision made because of some kind of loyalty to the process, a process which has been shown to be faulty many times. 

What is the point of this thread? 

You're finally understanding.

Glad to see Rol can finally go back to his life's work.

Seriously, good on the mods. You could have just taken it away forever if you wanted.

Agreed with this, the thread when used how it was originally intended is a great way to have insight into the background goings on which can impact a user suddenly if they overstep a line, and it lets others see exactly what happened in a unified thread for discussing incidents.

Just hope that no user or mod feels picked on because of any posts in this thread, just always keep in mind that mod or not, the people you are talking to here are real people sitting at their PC's also looking for a bit of a break from work or so, not looking to be the butt of a conspiracy theory about being a bag of lizards secretly set out on vgchartz to make someone else's life hell.... also for the lizard people reading this, please note that I, for one accept our new Lizard overlords!

Good job Miguel.

I still find it weird that this apparent frequent abuse has to be pointed out specifically for this mod thread. Abuse should be covered plenty by the forum rules and be dealt with as such. If abuse is happening and no mod action is taken, how bad of abuse can it really be?

I also take umbrage with point 3 of course as this is kinda targeted at me as well. Why wouldn't it be fine to constantly utter negative criticism? That's what criticism is for. Point out weak points and mistakes so they can be mitigated in the future. It says you welcome criticism and then it says some criticism is unwelcome and even worse, some criticism is taken less serious if coming from specific users. That's a pretty bold open statement. I recently watched the South Park episode about "safe spaces" again, so this statement feels eerily familiar.The only criticism that should be unwelcome are lies and blank unfounded statements. Those things should be covered by the forum rules already, so feel free to ban people who do so. But selectively disregarding criticism based on where it comes from just feels wrong.

Also, for the record; I do think staff of a forum should be more steadfast than the average user. That's why they're mods, or at least that's why they should be chosen. They deal with filth every day. They're not defenseless little punching bags. They have all of the authority and power to deal with subjects who break forum rules. It shouldn't even be possible for mods to take abuse, as they can just deflect it by dealing with it. I'm just a stupid little forum user with no special powers or any kind of authority. You are an army of staff that stick together and have the power to remove me with a finger snap. What can I possibly do to hurt any of you?

You are now free to disregard this criticism.