Is Philosophy of Religion allowed on a secular site?

Question

There was this question on the status of love in the religion of Sikhism.

I dare say I am more in a position to be able to give an informed answer here than most others who are likely to take sikh as a misspelling of sick!! [Not counting Swami Vishwananda who's spent his life studying this because he's not regularly contributing here any more]

Below my answer tkruse put this comment

None of this is philosophy. The emotional affect of the biological mother of the OP is not a philosophy argument, but totally irrelevant. Nor does philosophy need to follow the physics of household furniture. So this is all off-topic preaching.

The specific, local and minor reason for my opening this (meta) question is that I assume he's also flagged my answer as "not an answer".

But there's a bigger more global reason:

This particular user has on multiple occasions claimed:
Phil-SE is a secular site

This seems a harmless and natural enough claim. Until one examines the equivocation that arises from sliding between polysemous meanings of 'secular':

• In the original meaning (laicite post the French revolution) it meant there is no official state religion and people could profess and practice as they please as long as they don't impose onto others.

• Over time as more and more liberal (so-called) thought has gone mainstream, it has morphed into constricting religion into narrower and narrower spheres.

Inter alia I recommend the work of Brad Gregory who draws a long but straight line from the Protestant Reformation of Luther to modern secularism a couple of centuries later. I've alluded to it briefly here. He describes the 'Reformation" as religion being more than just religion in catholicism to becoming less and less from the Reformation through secularism to the 21st century

So is this a secular site? And in which sense?

This is topical since obstreperous opinionated users like this one who's main contributions are flags and VTCs rather than questions or answers are more and more becoming the the rudder of this site. Eg. My answer discussed here was closed whereas when user JD asks about the canon, a question that should have importance both on main and on meta, it is ignored by the complainants and deleted by the mods!

Summary

In increasing order of magnitude

1. Tkruse flag if it exists. It's a minor nuisance if they're opinionated and slightly more if the mods agree
2. Their comment — discussed above
3. Their answer which expands on the clueless opinionatedness and brazenly pushes their own scientismistic materialistic views that are irrelevant to the question/questioner
4. But worst of all is not tkruse but Ted Wrigley's answer which pushes colonial tropes. I briefly allude to them in comments below the question but it's no point saying more if the mods are going to obediently wield the mod hammer.

Hence this question.

Refs

My other question on religion bias.

Answer 1

I think that while we have questions about why god is necessarily-loving, restricting it to Sikhism is an interesting question. I suspect that a lot of the VTC votes are for 1. saying "all religions" 2. the presence of quotes from sacred texts without it being entirely clear what the purpose is. In my view, those are easy problems to fix, so I submitted an edit request there.

Rushi's answer

In my view your answers might benefit a lot from "bracketing" them. E.g., there's a big difference between starting your answer with

Does your mother love you? Do you need proof? Can she give if you demand?

and

One argument, advanced by so-and-so, is that "love" is not provable through intellectual discourse. How would you prove that your mother (or someone else) loved you? You might try to point to actions, but those can't directly prove a feeling. So, the argument concludes, you can know that somebody loves you, but you can't prove it.

In the latter, it's clear what you're arguing and what it's intended to prove, so people can read what follows with that in mind. E.g. with this answer, it's not particularly important whether your mother loves you, but many of the comments are about "some people may not have a mother that loves them, your assumption is false." If you start with "this is an argument about..." you explain your point better.

(Same with the thing about the stool; why do you feel it's relevant to OP's question? I don't understand, and my assumption there is that you catapulted off into "what it means to have faith" instead of "why is God necessarily Good". But if you preface it with what you are attempting to explain and from what perspective, it'd be a lot more clear.)

Tkruse's & Ted Wrigley's answers

If you have an issue with it, it seems like the best thing to do is raise it as a comment, or downvote it. I don't think either of these are great answers, personally, but that's the nature of SE is that sometimes somebody writes an answer you dislike.

Answer 2

This is not specifically a secular site, but it is a philosophy site, not a theological one. Questions about philosophy of religion are fine. Questions that push a religious point of view are out of scope. Broadly speaking, philosophy is distinguished from religion by being based on reason rather than sacred texts or traditions that are considered to be authoritative.

Philosophy of religion is concerned with questions such as the following, so these are in scope:

• Arguments for and against the existence of a deity.
• The coherence of divine attributes such as omniscience and omnipotence.
• The phenomenology and epistemology of religious belief.
• The relation between religion and science.
• The concept of divine intervention and miracles.
• The relation between religion and morality.
• Religious conceptions of the nature of humanity, the soul, eternal life.
• The nature of religious language.
• The nature of religious experience.
• Religious pluralism.

Answer 3

You're welcome to talk about Sikhism, but preaching is not on topic in any religion.

I explained brief but clearly why the given answer is not a philosophical explanation of anything, but mere preaching, not talking about a religion as an object, but advertising it.

The answer to why god has love cannot philosophically "Because god is like a stool, with the third leg being love, and it needs to be hard and rigid". That's rather a sketchy sexualization, if anything.

For weeks now you've been whining about how you want to discuss religion, but somehow not do so in the subsites where everyone else also discusses them, and the first chance you get here, you get overexcited and blow it, showing why it's so hard to tolerate religion here. Because any chance they get, the religious will start preaching instead of explaining.

I would have liked to see a philosophical rational argument from Sikhism about god, but instead we get affirmations and flowery metaphors delivered in a condescending authoritative way.

Philosophy SE is not a place for

• Praying
• Preaching
• Practicing
• Professing
• Proselytizing
• ...And I wish I could find more such activities starting with "pr"

Also I did not flag the answer, your assumption is wrong.

Answer 4

You wrote: How does God’s love and goodness follow logically?

According to whom? This site often struggle strives to be fact-based. If you ask, 'according to Jainists, how does God's love and goodness follow logically?' then you have a fact based question. If you don't specify a group such as Shiite Muslims or Lutheran Christians or Kant or Spinoza, then we get everybody and the brother giving us their opinion on God's love. While it's great that some contributors want to provide their personal philosophy (or in this case theology) and even do it in an articulate fashion, this is not thephilosophyforum.com. Editorial opinion is unavoidable. Personal opinion completely is.

Simply keep your questions to fact-based, reference-enabled questions. If you have a philosophy of religion question, so be it, but I'd use https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy-religion/ as a guide as to what constitutes philosophy of religion.