Let's forget for just a moment that most of your garden variety Mormons are going to find Boaz and Lidia's avatar to be patently offensive. Should I really find a need to engage this person in discussion? And of course, from that perspective, is a person reading from a stone in a hat any more strange than claims of a man being resurrected (to the non-believer of course). So do comments like these really create an enviornment where you are going to get your reasonable run-of-the-mill believers to come join in the party?
When ZLMB disintegrated, and most of the believing LDS went elsewhere, this crowd followed them. They wanted the audience.
Polygamy Porter hardly represents your average critic so it isn't like there is an entire corwd of people just like him. Not here anyway. He annoys the hell out of people on both sides of the fence and the only other person who comes close to him is mercury. It is unfair to suggest that the majority of us who left ZLMB, people like myself, Beastie, Shades, californiakid, Don Bradley, Tarski, EAllusion, left because we wanted an audience for pissing off Mormons, as if that is our whole purpose.
It kind of felt like they relished being abrasive
Yes, some do. As some LDS relish being abrasive at MADB while hiding behind their vanguard of LDS moderators.
I don't think it is enough to talk about being polite, I think that for a community really to be inclusive (and I don't really think that this community is all that inclusive) there has to be an effort by all parties involved to buy into the community and to create a community
I agree with this, and that is why this forum can be annoying as hell at times. But I'd rather be frustrated with another poster and place him/her on ignore, than to have to deal with having my voice removed by moderators while others take advantage of my absence and pretend to be making mincemeat of my arguments.
I am not buying into the common myth that people at MADB don't post here because we're too abrasive for them. David Bokovoy is a perfect example. He's managed to make friends and have cordial dialogue here, to the chagrin of many of his MADB supporters no doubt. The fact that he is here disrupts their excuse for staying over there.
And clearly, having disagreements doesn't have to make things devisive. After all, I have had long running conversations (spanning years) with many of the participants here. Without rancor (and only the occaisional frustration).
Exactly.
Personally, I think that if you want to foster community, then you work at weeding out those who seem intent on creating division, and aggravating others whom you would like to participate.
Well, that would go against the philosophy here about free speech, which I don't entirely agree with, but again, it is better than the alternative at MADB. Well, if you're not an apologist anyway. MADB makes apologists want to hang out there because most critical commentary is suppressed and the critics are very limited in what they can say. They know that at the end of the day, they're on the winning team, because that is the image the moderators help create; that usually means a disturbing thread gets closed after an apologist has the last say, while the mods offer some cheesy excuse for closing it that has nothing to do with the established rules.
But, you will see people leave who otherwise would be valuable participants in the discussions here (and certainly this happens all over - including at MADB presently, but certainly at ZLMB and some of the other forums I have been a participant at).
I can't think of anyone that thin-skinned. Bokovoy certainly isn't, and neither are you. Why get offended by an avatar with a V and L when you see V's and L's everywhere? I never understood how temple symbols could be so ubiquitous in every day life. You'd think they'd be something nobody could accidentally draw or figure out on their own, something akin to Chinese calligraphy.
“All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it...Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality." - Albert Einstein