Can we ban "comparative-religion" questions?

Question

I was watching this issue for a while before deciding to take a side... Comparative religion type questions are questions that involve comparison of Buddhism with Christianity, or Hinduism or Yoga or even Science, directly or indirectly. These types of questions tend to attract answers from people that are knowledgeable in one field but not necessarily in the other. This leads to incorrect assessments, which in turn leads to arguments. These arguments attract views and clicks, resulting in such question bubbling up to the top. The question then appears on Hot Network Questions list, getting even more views. As a result, other, more interesting and useful questions do not get attention they deserve. Should we ban "comparative-religion" questions or is there any value in keeping them that outweighs the harm they do?

P.S. I do believe that comparative religion itself can be a very fruitful field of study, it is just that I don't think it is a good S.E. topic.

Answer 1

I think I might be a prime offender here. I've posted 6 of these and I wrote the tag wiki. I think I might have even created the tag originally so I really ought to post. So in no particular order here are some general points and feelings about the issue.

1. I'm not a huge fan of the notion of banning a set of questions unless they really are off topic. We can downvote or vote to close if we really don't like them. The system is designed with this in mind so the community can express their opinion on a case by case basis.

2. Reviewing the tag they are of a variable quality like all the tags. The one on faith resulted in one of he best answers I've read here - from OP (Thanks Andrei)! Others have been closed or downvoted a bit which is as it should be.

3. Even poorer question can result in great answers. The Buddhist Bible one hasn't been one of my best admittedly and it go a few downvotes and some complaints about it in chat. But it generated some really great answers.

4. These questions can attract more heated debate - i think that's clear. But I think this is a call to be more sensitive and accepting of other peoples religious views (i was tempted to post on meta about that exact subject). People are very willing to moderate their opinions when challenged - the faith question again was great for challenging peoples notions and people edited their answers in response thus improving them.

5. The question do take someone with a foot in both camps to answer. But since many of us were brought up in non-Buddhist religious contexts or live in non-Buddhist societies - that is exactly a lot of us. I don't see this as a massive problem.

6. I would argue that we have a supply problem with questions. If we are determined to go down the route of banning sets of questions that I would really want us to dream up ways to encourage good questions. Otherwise we risk choking the site off i would argue. That's not a reason to keep rubbish questions but if we are hitting the questions with a stick I would want to see a carrot for getting more of the right kind of questions in.

7. On the supply problem again - I would really encourage people to post questions that they are interested in. If these questions are generating too much heat then one way to approach this would be to post more great questions on topics that you would really like to hear people's views. To me that would be a more positive approach then any kind of ban.

Anyway I like these questions and I think they produce good answers but I can see for others they might be an edge case. I don't want to upset but I have about another 2 or 3 of these questions that I would like to ask. I might take mercy on the site and delay them - i don't want to dominate the site with a minority interest.

Answer 2

Sometimes such questions are good and useful

Sometimes such questions are useful (so a blanket ban might go too far).

A "comparison" question might be useful, for understanding (specifically) Buddhism; for example:

• What are the differences/similarities in the concept of faith as used in Buddhism and Christianity? may help someone learn what role (if any) "faith" has in Buddhism, if they previously only know the word "faith" in English.

• Why isn't there a Buddhist Bible? may help someone understand why there isn't (and/or whether there is) a relatively short canonical set of Buddhist scripture.

OTOH (looking at other christianity-tagged topics) I see less purpose in Is Jesus considered to be a buddha? You could consider closing that, on the basis that it breaks this rule:

You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.

We are already able to close bad questions

We can close questions which are:

• Too subjective
• Off-topic (if they're more about another religion than about Buddhism)
• Duplicate

I see that people have already, rightly, closed some questions for these reasons.

Sometimes you might want to close a question temporarily, demand that it be improved (or edit it yourself) before allowing it.

Moderators can moderate answers too

Moderators can "protect" questions.

The main objection in the OP seems to be that this type of question tends to attracts bad answers, which leads to arguments. So perhaps you could achieve your objective by extra-strict policing of the answers:

• Deleting answers which you consider off-topic: e.g. if you allowed some-or-other question because it's 75% about Buddhism and 25% about Christianity, feel free to delete any answer that's 25% about Buddhism and 75% about Christianity.

• Extra-strict editing of answers by all moderators, to ensure answers are not controversial (including removing any parts of an answer that are "a bit tongue in cheek").

Deleting answers, and non-trivial editing of answers can really only/mostly be done by moderators.

Also note that just as a moderator can close a question until the author has improved the question, moderators can also delete (i.e. hide) any really problematic answer until the author has improved the answer (the author can still view and edit their answer while it's deleted, and then flag it for reopening).

And moderators can moderate comments

On some sites, moderators are strict about whether comments are on-topic.

• Comments are only meant to be for suggesting improvements to (or criticizing) an answer
• Other comments are off-topic: comments aren't intended for dialog, and off-topic comments are deleted
• Existing comments can be sent/converted to a chat room

Answer 3

According to this answer, a topic makes the 'Hot Questions' list when:

• It's recent (QAgeInHours is small)
• It's an upvoted question with many answers (AnswerCount and QScore are large)
• Answers are upvoted (AnswerScore is large)

Therefore this theory from the OP is wrong:

These arguments attract views and clicks, resulting in such question bubbling up to the top. The question then appears on Hot Network Questions list, getting even more views.

It's not "controversial" topics with clicks and views which make the Hot Network Questions list: instead it's the highly-upvoted questions, with many answers and/or highly-upvoted answers.

These (highly-upvoted) are perhaps not the type of question which you'd want to ban.

However, this answer suggests that you might choose to be extra-careful (or extra-strict) with answers to any questions which make the Hot List, because they advertise the tone/content of the site.