Who is hiding oneself? The people you are talking about engaging know exactly where this forum is and know the rules of common courtesy that are required to post here. That they choose not to abide by those rules is their choice.
This might be a justified statement if there were not an admitted bias against critics on MAD. It is impossible for critics to fully understand what the rules are, and many critics have been Q'd or Banned without explanation or seeming justification. Sometimes it appears the bannings were related to keeping the number of critics down. I think cal knows this and I am disappointed she made such a disingenuous comment.
MADdites pretend that this board is a full of vulgarity and porn. I don't know where the "porn" accusation comes from, frankly, but if a pornographic image were posted I'm sure Shades would move it to the telestial forum, where people know anything goes. (I'm not even sure he'd allow porn there, either, but just guessing). I've seen porn posted on the old FAIR board before the mods saw it and deleted it, too, by the way.
Vulgarity, at least in regards to the Celestial and this forum, is purely subjective. I find many of the self-righteous rants and the rude behavior towards critics and even doubters on MAD quite vulgar and offensive. I think Jesus had a harder time with the self-righteous pharisees of his day than he did with the outright sinners. I imagine a swear word would bother him less than seeing yet another MADdite jump on a person struggling with sincere doubts, or seeing people who supposedly "follow him" attack critics and implying "Satan" is behind their loss of faith.
If I recall correctly from my days as a believer, Jesus had different priorities, such as going after the ONE lost lamb and stopping people from casting stones.
I have not been banned from MAD, as far as I know. I just refuse to post on a board with such openly biased moderation that not only tolerates, but seems to, at times,
encourage some very rude behavior in believers. What an stellar example to those who wander onto the site.
I lost faith prior to my internet days, but I can imagine having wandered onto a place like MAD when I first found out about the more troubling aspects of church history. I can imagine posting a question about Joseph Smith' polyandry and being told, over and over, by rude, dismissive believers that the only problem is that I was too stupid or lazy to find out this information long ago.
Frankly, some of the people who post over there are of the same mindset as those who didn't have a moral problem with attacking Martha Brotherton and calling her a whore from her mother's breast. So I guess this type of behavior has a long history in Mormonism. I just wasn't familiar with it when I converted to the church. My fault, of course. Despite the fact that I checked out and read the sole TWO books on Mormonism in my college library and the internet hadn't been invented yet, I should have somehow been able to find out this information.
I don't need any recovery from Mormonism. I need recovery from my several years dealing with Mormon apologists.