One of the most popular (or perhaps just populous) threads on this board is that of the 'Biblical scholar', Harold Camping and his EotW claims.
Now the thread started off pretty simply, the usual 'hey guys here's a claim, what do you think?', and was answered immediately by bikenbeer2000, succinctly enough for Astrogeek to suggest it went on a Harold Camping page, a page which has seen an absolute flurry of activi— no, sorry, a page which has seen minimal work because of a few things, among them the fact that it's nothing to do with 2012, it's a page that doesn't need an absolute bucketload of work done to it, and it's a topic that gets discussed far more in the forums. Indeed, it's still under construction with a week or so to go and frankly I couldn't care less.
Don't worry, there's a point to this rambling and it's coming up right about now.
I think that forum thread raises a few thoughts. For one, I think it's pretty impressive that for the most part Camping issues have all gone towards one thread, the topic is at least contained for want of a better word. The flip side to that is that I could argue it's a monstrous mess of a thread clocking in at over 500 posts, the majority of which are repetitive and unnecessary.
"Now don't be too harsh, people don't just all come at once with a fear then go away without one, and people turn up and see a thread, hop onto it to ask relevant questions, rather than reading through 14 pages of previous answers." I hear that side of things. What I question is how it's dealt with.
Herein lies the fighting fire with fire argument. It's my opinion that the answer to the claims was answered after two posts, one posing the question, the second responding to it. The thread might as well be done and dusted at that point, save for making sure to show how simple numerology is and how notoriously flawed it is. However, what we've seen (and I'm pretty sure even I've had to post this at some point as well) is that the first answer is not the only answer we've given. It seems that we give answers tailored to religion when the question is religious.
So the question I pose is simply 'should we?' For any topic, religious or not, should we be fighting fire with fire, using the claims against themselves in a sense?
I can see pro's and con's, I can see how someone would prefer an answer in a language they're familiar with, so to speak, rather than have to question an explanation of the answer, and get another wordy answer which still poses problems, question it again so on and so on. I can see how using the very same sources as proponents for what they really are and actually show can unravel a claim in seconds, it's certainly a tactic I've used in some of my videos.
At the same time, I can say that bringing topics into reality or into what's known and provable, actually spreading proper information on why a claim is wrong, rather than relying on a choice phrase from a holy book should be the better way to go - to keep using the Camping example, me quoting the Bible saying "Nobody knows the time or date" is a far weaker argument than "It boils down to numerology, which we can show to be nonsense."
We're all different on the forums, we've all got our methods for answering, I'm certainly not trying to push people down one route or the other, but when I see those 15 pages in response to a claim for this year, pages that circle around each other and don't really get anywhere, I have to wonder what the purpose of continuing to post in them is. I guess ultimately we do it until the thread dies. Maybe we can make certain threads die with more efficiency, who knows.
Enough rambling, hopefully you get the point - if not what I think then what I'm talking about - it'd be interesting to hear your views, and then to watch this thread sink down the pages to be replaced by whatever Off Topic topics comes next.
