@secondson said
There's no such thing coming from anyone posting in this forum, and how can there be? No one is perfect.
With that in mind, from my perspective, the idea is to formulate an environment where ideas and beliefs can be discussed as objectively as possible.
That means keeping your personal feelings about your debate opponent to yourself. Your insults, derogatory remarks a ...[text shortened]... flawed fellow man, or woman as the case may be.
Other positive additional comments are welcomed.
An interesting suggestion, to host an objective discussion without motivations creeping in. This would be possible if the topic were, for example, the composition of Jupiter's gasses. There is no human factor involved in that. However, wherever beliefs
about humanity are involved, there is necessarily a subjective element which cannot be ignored without detriment. Especially where the beliefs in question are, broadly speaking, religious or spiritual beliefs, beliefs about man's destiny or purpose in life.
Christianity would be uninteresting as a belief system if there were no promise of personal immortality embedded in it. Belief in the existence of a soul which survives death, and the prospect of eternal heaven or hell, is essential to get Christianity off the ground as a belief system; if there is no soul, there is no need of a saviour/redeemer. Take away the motivation to gain a personal heaven and avoid a personal hell, and what's left of it? A moral code, some dramatically embellished history, and a bronze-age myth about how the world came to be; one could get all that from Homer or Gilgamesh or the Upanishads or dozens of other ancient writings.
So, yes, drop the personal insults and invective; but to exclude motivation from the discussion is to miss the essentially human aspect of spirituality. Especially where there is reason to suspect that the real underlying motivation for
accepting a belief system in the first place is not the one which is offered to rationalize that belief system when challenged to justify it.