Talk:Religious Debate Chat
Some of my reading in various places has led me to believe it was possible that RDC was never actually supported by FS. My understanding is that Alexis opened RDC on demon.nl under his own account there. Eventually tpka not took the hosting of RDC elsewhere. So this would make RDC never touching the FS server. --Fleetwood 23:50, 3 May 2006 (EDT)
Hey Fleetwood,
Well, there was no "FS server" at the time RDC was created but I think you're right. I don't believe RDC was ever an FS resource. It was Alexis' private project for a while and then not's.
--Jimf3 20:25, 4 May 2006 (EDT)
Older Talk
Here's more on the origins of RDC. Someone else will have to figure out how much of this information is useful.
It was founded by Alexis; TPKA not later became its Webmaster. Its origins are correctly described, although I don't know whether it was ever officially a Free Spirits message board. Certainly by the end it was privately hosted.
I arrived at RDC two weeks after it began. I was told that it was started after a Christian non-MAA was ejected from BoyChat for persistent flaming; Alexis wanted boylovers to be able to continue to debate with that person, so he started RDC as a place for religious debates between anti-BL folk and boylovers. Whether he also anticipated it as being a place where flammable religious topics could be moved from BC, I don't know, but that's certainly the function it ended up serving.
The board opened on February 13, 1998. Either the first post or the second one was by TPKA not, and its subject heading was, "There is NO God." At that point, a friendly debate started between boylovers.
RDC was intended, from the start, as a debate board. What nobody anticipated was that the religious debates ended up being more between boylovers themselves, or between boylovers and friendly outsiders, than between boylovers and hostile outsiders. The board did attract the latter, of course.
From the beginning, the board was a mixture of atheist/agnostic, Christian, and other faiths. A problem arose during the first couple of months, when some of the Christian posters tried to talk about faith matters among themselves, only to discover that the non-Christian posters (quite naturally) saw their posts as fodder for debate. At that point, the idea of the Christian Boylove Forum arose, as the article says.
The article says:
"Nevertheless, as time went by, it became clear that the board would be for debate rather than a support board for religious boylovers. This realization eventually led to the founding of the Christian Boylove Forum."
The use here of the term "religious boylovers" is misleading. CBF was founded quite specifically for Christian boylovers. After the founding of CBF, non-Christian spiritually-oriented boylovers were much more likely to post about their beliefs at RDC. Christian support posts were a special difficulty at RDC because so many of the posters - including spiritually-oriented boylovers - were ex-Christian and wanted to explain their reasons for rejecting Christianity. Debates were less likely to arise when someone posted about, say, their Pagan beliefs. RDC also ended up being a very supportive place for non-theist boylovers (whether spiritually-oriented or not). Christians continued to post at RDC even after the founding of CBF, but they did so on the understanding that their RDC posts were subject to debate.
--Heather 16:46, 20 January 2006 (EST)
