I can't believe I'm hearing this. Yes? Of course? I mean, I don't condone people hacking FB accounts, of course. But why do you think a belief as ridiculous as that deserves any protection whatsoever?

I'm not really singling out Christianity, either. If someone hacked a known homophobe's Facebook account and posted photoshopped pictures of them sucking cock, or got into a racist's account and started talking about their black girlfriend, I'd applaud, and couldn't give a damn about "making them trash their own value system".

And the funny thing is, if the opposite occurred and, say, a right wing nutcase hacked my FB account and could say whatever they wanted - they couldn't really do any damage, because my entire self-image isn't founded on maintaining some ridiculous social façade. It would be an embarrassing security lapse, possibly provoke some mild teasing from friends and family, and life would go on.

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UPDATE: Man, I am a really bad debater. I'm coming across pro-vandalism and anti-peaceful-tolerance here. Despite my views on religion that's not what I wanted to say; my argumentative position is drifting towards the extreme to oppose Mr. Markham. If I were a better debater, I'd be able to resist that - we're well into "devil's advocate" territory for me by now.

I do not condone these attacks. I wanted to make the point that I don't consider these attacks to be particularly hurtful or serious, and that anyone who is seriously upset "when somebody takes their identity and has them say things they never would" should lighten up.

I got a little too far into "asshole mode" above too. I won't change it now but actually, I wouldn't support defacement of this Great Pumpkin believer's page. Why? Because my whole actable complaint against religion is that it's intolerant. I strongly oppose religious superstition, of course, but that's not a legitimate reason to take action against them. Simply being stupid is not evil, in and of itself. Intolerance, however, is the actable offence and that's what legitimises attacks upon religion. Now if the Followers of the Great Pumpkin had a political agenda against other segments of the worlds' population, that would be a casus belli.

I would like to say, though, that if you hold beliefs that seem to make you a favourite "lulz target" then you should probably re-examine them.

The only way to not be a target is to believe in "nothing". He who stands for nothing will fall for anything. That's not a good way to live.

The whole idea of (today's) "lulz" is to make people who are defensive about something react in a completely over the top manner. Rational people are rarely defensive and don't tend to overreact, so they are rarely targeted, and it would be a failure if they were. Hence, if you have a belief that tends to make you overreact defensively when teased about it, it is probably flawed. That was my point.

We can agree that identity theft is bad, that identity theft that trashes somebody's reputation is worse. We can also agree to disagree on mocking people. As you pointed out, the entire problem with religion is that it is intolerant. Once you become intolerant yourself in opposition, you lose the basis for your argument.

I'd like to see everybody re-examine their beliefs on a regular basis, no matter what they believe. In fact, it's the ones that don't do this that I worry about.

BTW -- don't cut your debating skills short. I wrote three replies to you before I came up with the last one. All the others had me going over the deep end and taking positions that were far afield of what I wanted. Perhaps today you're just a lousy re-writer.

Ah, that's the Achilles' heel of liberalism right there, isn't it? Actually, I think we must make an exception for intolerance. The goal is not just to promote tolerance at the level of the single person. It's to maximise it society-wide. With that perspective, intolerance is identifiable as a cancer in the system, and must be excised.

"taking positions that were far afield of what I wanted"

Ha. Sounds familiar! There's a fine art to maintaining one's argument, even in the face of in extremis counterargument pushing one further and further away from one's core position. It's an art I have not yet mastered. Elsewhere on this site you'll find plenty of examples of my being suckered into making spirited defences of unsavoury things while trying to defend some much more noble principle. Perhaps the format of this site's discussion is simply unsuitable to making complex arguments with deep roots, especially given the expedited timeframes for making a response anyone is likely to read.

A fews years ago I tried starting to write a book which would describe all my beliefs, and why I believed them, derived from as close as I could get to first principles. I abandoned the project when it became an organisational nightmare; trying to justify what I thought in one area turned out to have links to 10 other areas and after a while I didn't know whether I was trying to enumerate and codify my answers to moral questions or writing a blueprint for "my perfect society". Anyway it was completely unmanageable and I gave up.

I've given some concepts in graph theory and structured data a lot of thought since then and I should probably try again. Most of my beliefs can, I believe, be encoded in a directed acyclic graph. I should attack the problem again not as a book but as a web site, so I can just post a link to the appropriate section here and save a lot of time, while also keeping the discussion formal and free of scope-creep.

That would also satisfy your requirement for belief self-scrutiny. What could be more rigorous than explicitly enumerating and justifying - and thus throwing open to public scrutiny - every founding element of every belief you hold?

Damn, I really should get started on that ..

I think that you just need to not be so concerned with this... Unless, of course, you're talking about taking a week to write something out. If you're talking about "if it's still on the frontpage," I tend to use the 'threads' link at the top to frequently check on any responses to my posts.

I think breaking into people's stuff to mock them is being a pretty big asshole, but I don't think it's worse than being an asshole.

Well, the victims still have their own value systems, I wouldn't say this stunt trashed it for anyone. But..

That's not civil conversation. That's not even mocking people you think are stupid. It's a whole other level of nastiness altogether.

This I agree with completely. I feel sorry for religious people just as much as the next sensible guy, but what the 4chan people did is not funny, it's not commendable, it's just world-class douchebaggery.