raisemeup

I am a Creationist and a Catholic myself and this has been a great disappointment to me. While atheists on this forum do themselves no favors either, their viewpoints are to be expected and in personal conversations I have found most of them to be very cordial and respectful (even open minded). On the other hand, several Catholics (and theists) who believe in evolution that I have been in contact with have been very arrogant, derogatory and disrespectful in their communications and in their forum answers. I know I am generalizing and the vast majority of Catholics I know are wonderful Christians (after all, I am Catholic myself) and many have a creationist viewpoint. However, it's been my personal experience that this is not the case for those that believe in evolution on this forum . Anyone have similar experiences? If so, why do you think this is the case?

Please note: The official position of the Catholic Church accepts a creationist view. However, they do not agree with evolution unless it is acknowledge that God created the universe from nothing and that the evolutionary process was guided by God. This, of course, is in direct conflict with leading proponents of evolution who insist that the process can proceed by only natural means and does not require external supernatural influence.

Also, I've tried to be very respectful with my question. If this gets deleted, it will be further evidence to support my contention.

Many viewpoints on YA concern me, particularly if those viewpoints are representative of the population. My question (in more detail) is this - Do you think "Yahoo Answers" accurately represents the viewpoints and demographics of the US population (or the larger world population it samples). While not necessary to answer the question, do you have any data or evidence to back up your opinion? For example, do you know how many people participate in YA? Are demographics published anywhere - like age, sex or other information based on profiles? Do more younger or older people participate?

I'm not asking this to be critical of anyone's viewpoints in any way. It's my experience that people will be much less inhibited in their responses when answering with anonymity on a forum like this, but doesn't that bring even more credibility to how they really feel? One thing I've noticed, for example, is that the percentage of atheists answering certain questions seems proportionally higher than the general population or am I wrong about that? Are people with passionate opinions the only ones that participate in YA. Are those opinions the only ones that matter if most others would have no opinion anyway? Thanks in advance for sharing.

Sometimes another respondent to a question takes issue with your answer and denigrates your response. Is it appropriate YA etiquette to debate back and forth by continually editing your response? A negative would seem to be that you are no longer directing your comments at the person asking the question. There are other types of forums that are created specifically for debating but YA is not one of them. On the other hand, I'm anxious to respond to critics but don't want to do so if YA frowns upon that behavior. What do you think?

I am a newbie to the "politics" of YA. I notice that there are some "cowards" out there that target the questions you answer and take license to denigrate your answer (rather than directly answering the question that was asked) but provide no way of contacting them so that you can provide a rebuttal to their nonsense. I have considered adding edits to my answer to provide a rebuttal, but it seems inappropriate to debate someone in the context of someone else's question, although I do see this occur frequently. In addition, I suspect that these same cowards would report my answer and get it deleted even though they are the ones calling me out in their answer as ignorant or stupid. I've also considered reporting abuse, but I don't favor censoring other people, even if they are somewhat belligerent. Any suggestions? Is what they are doing contrary to any guidelines? Do I simply grin and take it? What would you do?

While I agree that the existence of life itself, the birth of a child, medical advances and many other things we sometimes take for granted are "miraculous", I am talking about events of a more supernatural flavor such as a miraculous healings, visions, predictive dreams and other things that are outside of the "normal" and can be attributed to God. I personally have experienced some of these events and I'm wondering how common they are. If you have experienced a supernatural miracle attributable to God, can you briefly describe the event?

I notice that many (maybe as much as 50%) of the questions on yahoo consist of one of the following:

1) Questions for which the answer is known but is being asked just to ridicule others who have a different belief system.

2) Questions that could easily be answered simply by doing a Google search or looking at an encyclopedia.

3) Polls for which a few responses could never be representative enough to draw any conclusions.

4) "Cheating" by asking others to do your school homework assignments.

Perhaps I'm over generalizing, but If you ask one of these types of questions and would like to comment on why you do or want to add to the list, please respond. My personal opinion is that it seems that people just want to "socialize" on-line, but merely having people answer a question without much interaction doesn't seem too fulfilling. What do you think?

but when I attempt to post an answer, it has suddenly changed to resolved (and a best answer chosen)?

Did the person asking the question resolve it before waiting for the time limit? Or is the time limit being displayed incorrectly? This has happened quite frequently so I end up wasting time answering a question which I then cannot post.