[CS-FSLUG] Too political?

[Stephen McCracken]

Steven T. Fricke wrote:
> Now, I am done. I can't take this group any longer. I have braved it out
> as much as I can, but you guys are driving me nuts.
> 
> I can't add anything to your political rants because I just don't care
> to hear it in this forum. I was too new to consider jumping in and
> starting a *real* thread ON TOPIC and really had hopes that I would
> really find open discussion about FOSS going on from a Christian point
> of view. That sounded interesting! What might be out there that I don't
> know about yet? Based on discussions since I joined; NOTHING. I was
> hoping that maybe people knew about new versions of BibleTime or maybe
> even other new Open source bible study software. Maybe even some
> theological discussions. I can't find any of that though the political
> positioning.

I would probably agree with Steven that the discussions do sometimes get 
long-winded.  (The two most obvious types are the type discouraged at 
the table--politics and religion.)  I think the idea of Tim of the 
tagging (TD: & PD: & maybe IF: for informational posts like some of 
Fred's) would help a lot.

I use a couple of different mail clients and Mozilla's thread view makes 
it easier to by-pass some of the topics, as well.

> About all I can see is extreme right-wing American political messages
> forwarded and discussed, and accusations that it is impossible to NOT be
> a Conservative American Republican an still be Christian. Somewhere I
> lost the FOSS discussion in all that.

I would also agree with much of this.  It is easy to get pushed to one 
extreme or the other in the two-party system of the USA and would say 
that probably most Christians fall with the Republican view on many 
issues.  BUT, I would also say that I would prefer a system where one 
didn't need to stand classified with labels of "Republican", "Democrat", 
"Liberal", "Independent", etc.  I think if we really wanted to examine 
issues rather than just calling each other names (the labels above) we 
would find that God's view could fall in the view of any of the labels 
above depending on the issue being discussed.