Thanks to all those that participated in a constructive and friendly manner. Unfortunately these topics that are wide open like "share your beliefs about religion" or "Tell me what you think about politics" tend to get pretty ugly and spiral downward. In general the net pros of letting these types of topics run free on BYC have never outweighed the net cons (hurt feelings and lots of extra work for our moderators). Trust us, we see all the behind the scenes reports, hurt feelings, and "I demand you delete my account from this forum!" notes.
There is a time and a place for these very heated discussions, but based on our years of experience we've learned that BYC isn't one of them.