I think it is possible to have interesting and useful discussions about the nature of who and what we are that includes viewpoints that are religious, non-religious and 'other'. Message boards seem to be very bad places for them.
These are the sorts of things that people have put a lot of time and effort into thinking about and wrestling with - and there are very often emotional personal experiences tied up in those beliefs. On message boards, however, you usually just want to spend a short amount of time making relatively concise statements. Not the best format for getting across a complex worldview. This creates the "Amazon rating effect" where in order to influence the "overall results" you feel compelled to rate things either 5-stars or 1-star even though almost everyone holds 2-4 star beliefs.
These are the sorts of things that people have put a lot of time and effort into thinking about and wrestling with - and there are very often emotional personal experiences tied up in those beliefs. On message boards, however, you usually just want to spend a short amount of time making relatively concise statements. Not the best format for getting across a complex worldview. This creates the "Amazon rating effect" where in order to influence the "overall results" you feel compelled to rate things either 5-stars or 1-star even though almost everyone holds 2-4 star beliefs.