Which mods/admins were being Power Tripping Bastards?
A mod from World News@lemmy.world.
What sanction did they impose (e.g. community ban, instance ban, removed comment)?
I had my comment removed and received a one-day ban.
Provide a screenshot of the relevant modlog entry (don’t de-obfuscate mod names).
Provide a screenshot and explanation of the cause of the sanction (e.g. the post/comment that was removed, or got you banned).
Original post: Pope is in ‘critical’ condition after suffering ‘asthmatic respiratory crisis,’ Vatican says
Like many of us on Lemmy, I think the Catholic church is responsible for a lot of evil in the world, including the way they were/are directly involved in blocking access to contraception leading to the needless death of millions of Africans due to the AIDs epidemic, the endless cases of child sex abuse, along with the ongoing coverups, and honestly too many awful things to mention in detail here.
So I left a comment that said:
The Catholic church at this point has all the moral authority of a child sex cult.
Explain why you think its unfair and how you would like the situation to be remedied.
Amend community rule 4 to remove the reference to religion. WTF is it doing there as a rule in a news community in the first place? Is LW being run as a theocracy now?
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ~~anti-religious,~~ or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
The mod in question is also ~~a~~ religious ~~weirdo~~ (see below during a discussion about Luigi), so perhaps that is why they have the rule in place. But if that community not going to accept fair criticism of religion then it isn't a serious news community imo.
I fully acknowledge it wasn't a long ban and the rule was in place, so it was perhaps a BPR or YDI in that sense. But the rule shouldn't be there in the first place. How on earth is it justified? And looking at the other votes and comments on that post, it's clear that the the vast majority of folks hate the Catholics church as much as I do. So why is this mod running defence for the famously morally bankrupt Catholic church in a world news community?
Look, I agree with you about religion in general and in particular Catholicism.
That being said, the opinion I now present is a bit of a Devil's Advocate position:
The moderators of lemmy.world's worldnews community want to create an inclusive environment, and doing so means that they have to accept that the majority of the world (up to 85%) identifies as religious. (Stay with me, this is going somewhere)
Whether I like religion or not, I've met a lot of those people, and I'd say at least a quarter of them are decent people, religion be damned. They practice what they preach, so to speak.
So perhaps the moderators are doing their best to give users, including religious users, charitable interpretations of their interactions with others. Meaning that disparaging the entire religion might set off a lot of fighting that they would rather not moderate, and they also don't want to make the moderately religious feel unwelcome.
I agree with your assessment that the comment probably shouldn't have been removed, it's a bit overkill.
I'm just trying to put myself in the shoes of a moderator who wants to keep the amount of moderating they do to a minimum, and they could either accept that the majority of people may very well be religious or they can make an echo chamber full of atheists like us.
I think the rule is fine and getting rid of it is just asking to make a large portion of the world in a world news community feel unwelcome. Not every person inside the Catholic church is literally a child rapist, no matter how much they have done to enable child rapists in their ranks.
Like I said, I think removing your opinion (that could handily be backed up with evidence) is overkill... but at the same time maybe it was to prevent a flamewar from being started. Who knows.
Finally, Pope Francis sucks but is still a lot less sucky than most of the right-wing Cardinals who are closer in politics and ideology to that of Donald Trump and want to get back to sitting on gold thrones. Francis has at least tried to change the church marginally for the better, no matter if what he's done fails to come close to what needs to be done. He's literally up against his own theology and half of the Cardinals (if not more) of his own church. Perfect is the enemy of good and all that nonsense.
Anyway, that's my two cents and me trying to give charitable interpretations to the actions of the moderators.
Well said!
Your take is reasonable as a devils advocate type of thing, but I don't think having a rule against anti-religious sentiments is a good thing regardless of what instance it's in.
I get not wanting to form an echo chamber, but it's not our fault that online spaces largely became a refuge for atheists and people who are critical of religion. I say let the dice fall where they may in a space where both theist and anti-theist opinions are allowed.
And aside from that, lumping anti-religious sentiments in with racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia is just ridiculous. At the very least they could have worded it better.
That's a stretch, from what I've seen.
It's their own definition of inclusive
That attributes more good faith to their behavior than I'm willing to believe.
I know, but theyre at least better by a hair than the ones in news.