What Issues Is The Forum Most/Least Knowledgeable About?

[politicus]

I like how so many of us can come together and agree that the forum is terrible at discussing religion, regardless of what sort of discussion it is that we'd prefer.

In this forum's defence, I think most places are bad at discussing religion.

This is true because there's nothing substantive to be said about it. There are no data points to consider and no evidence to weigh. Any religious discussion, by definition, is just a tedious back and forth on semantics, feelings, and navel gazing, with a heavy tribal sociological component.

One could make the same statement about politics. I suspect that's why they say you should never bring up religion or politics at Thanksgiving dinner.

Politics has data points and you can weigh the evidence of fx electoral data. If you treat religion in the same way, you generally get into trouble.

One example would be a Sorbonne doctoral thesis by Danish linguist Tina Magaard back in 2005 where she compared how much violence and violent rhetoric occurs in 10 different religions, which resulted in Islam having by far the most combative language and the highest level of intolerance towards other religions. This folllows logically from her very thorough collection of data points from the textual analysis and  weighing of the evidence.

It gave a debate of whether you can interpret this as Islam being a more violent and combative religion or whether all quotes should be seen in a specific context and should really mean something else and less violent. Quantative data in religious science seems always to be challenged by "contextualists" and semiologists etc. in a way polsci data are not (or at least to a far lesser degree).

[politicus]

Most political data in the US relates to the correlations between voting behavior and variables like ethnicity, socioeconomic status, parental politics, age and location. The same data exists substituting religious behavior for voting behavior, and doesn't generate any significant controversy.

The example you give would be analogous in polsci to a study that correlates members of a political party to the likelihood to engage in protests or violent crime based on tenets of a party platform. A study like that would meet with just as much challenge.

Religious sociology is a separate discipline and I actually think the forum does okay in discussing that.

Regarding the thesis, you have a point, and it may be a bad example, but the fundamental texts of a religion have a different character and importance than something as temporary and often mostly symbolic as a party program.  Textual analysis is at the core of religious studies and the data points you can acquire from a textual and linguistic analysis are far easier to challenge than the sort of empirical data polsci typically uses.