Allow me to share in your candor. As I have not been offended by yours, I hope that you will not be offended by mine.

I think your three reasons for why people would post are valid. Those are the primary reasons. I don't think your objections on how moderation practices are affecting that are valid. In fact, I think your objections demonstrate a lack knowledge of the site policies, their history, and their justifications. Your meta participation, for a four member, is practically non-existant. Your mischaracterizations of the site policies and failure to understand the justifications is a direct result .

Examples of your misunderstanding:

1. You give a faux quote of a hypothetical poster who would be upset at there being a question that compares Islam and Christianity.
 * Comparative religion is allowed and always has been, as long as it is being compared to Christianity.

2. You wonder why "conversation and debate" is banned.
 * How is it you can be a Stack Exchange user for *years* and not realize that this is discouraged *network wide*?
 * It's not banned either. It's just reserved for the chat rooms. Main site content *must* focus on questions, answers, and comments that serve to make those questions and answers better.

3. You ask what is hurt by allowing an author of an answer to come back and defend himself?
 * Are you not doing that now? There are multiple avenues and opportunites to defend an answer, primarily in comments below it. This is not to be confused with debating God's Truth in an answer, but the factuality and logic of an answer.
 * Meta is the formal avenue for questioning a moderator's or the community's actions.
 * Deletes can be undone and nothing is hurt by deleting then undeleting, except maybe a few egos.

4. You claim the difference between "The Bible says X" and "Some people interpret the Bible to say X" are a hair's width apart.
 * Not so at all. Surely you are aware of the massive number of mutually exclusive doctrines on all kinds of things. And they all read the same Bible!
 * The paragraph were you say that really shows that you are critisizing something you do not understand. You are saying that some questions are not allowed, but indeed they are.

5. You say "any serious discussion of what different groups believe must surely at some point discuss why they believe this or where the idea comes from"
 * "Why does group x teach doctrine y?" is on topic.
 * "What is the biblical basis for doctine y?" is on topic.
 * "What is the history of doctrine y?" is on topic.
 * "What is the argument for/against doctrine y?" is on topic.
 * To cover your specific example, immersion, all questions above would work and [probably are already on the site][1].

6. You state there's some kind of "classic paradox of politically correctness" happening on the site.
 * What utter nonsense. First, no one is telling you what to believe to participate, nor are they telling you that you have to "accept" anything.
 * What the site policies do dictate is that any group that self-identifies as Christian is within the site's topic, and you must be respectful of that. You are not required to answer those posts, agree with them, or even read them at all. In fact, you can filter you home page to exclude/include certain tags.
 * Your belief that "truth matters and that not everyone who calls himself Christian" is on topic, but is not a quality metric for deciding what is on topic.
 * There is no ban on questions that ask who is a Christian. As long as they are accompanied by "according to [person/denomination]". Otherwise, who's opinion is the one that actually answers the question? How useful would it be if a hundred internet people I don't know, self-identifying as Christian, authoritatively tell me some other person is certainly not Christian, rather than a question about a denomination or theologian I *do* know telling me who is and isn't Christian?
 * Your Java example is entirely stupid. In no way is the Java spec comparable to the Bible, and in no way is their respective uses comparable either.
 * Neither Muslims nor Buddhists self-identify as Christian, so their beliefs are off-topic, except how they may relate to beliefs of those who actually do self-identify as Christian.

I don't know if you are insane, but I am baffled that this post is by someone who's been using Stack Exchange for over four years.



[1]: http://christianity.stackexchange.com/search?q=immersion