Well, all I can say is davem's reactions on the Bible thread stemmed from a love of Tolkien and a love of the Downs and the rigorous debate it offered.
Its a fact that in Tolkien academic circles there is huge concern about the 'hi-jacking' of his work by people who wish to assign it a solely Christian agenda, bypassing all other concerns of language, northern myth, and all the other meaty concerns which went into the Tolkien 'pot'. To those who actually knew Tolkien this is wrong and potentially dangerous; they see how the reputation of Lewis has been ruined by such reductive 'criticism' (criticism in inverted commas because its not really criticism in the sense of being truly objective). So davem was talking from the side that is working hard to keep Tolkien from being pigeonholed.
That Bible thread started to go wrong when someone else proposed, in the most patronising way possible (and being patronised is a guarantee that you will start to get annoyed), to create a thread in which only Christian interpretations could be posted about - a form of 'religious apartheid' with no debate allowed on the validity of claims which some of us objected to not only as that would be prejudiced but also facetious (I have to say at this point I
know what the reaction would have been if I had tried to create a thread which merely listed all the instances which support Marxism in Tolkien's work, with
all challenges strictly verboten).
davem made the mistake of attempting to break the tension with humour (as English people do, its our nature - we cannot cope with either 'fuss' or earnestness), referencing Python, which only resulted in more flame. The reason davem was asked to stop what he was saying was because his 'tone', one he used all the time, was here used when the topic at hand was
religion (now I see how right people are when they say religion is often the root of war - no more will I view it as a benign influence). Had it been feminism, environmentalism, buddhism or any other
-ism or
-ity would anybody have been jumping up and down and telling us to stop being 'offensive'? I suspect not (in fact I know not - new threads on Buddhism and WWII analogies have been thoroughly savaged on here, and there is no more evidence to support LotR as a specifically Christian book than there is to support it as having Buddhist or WWII metaphors).
Oh, and then to underline
exactly what davem had been so afraid of happening, a decline into the kind of poor parallel picking we often see from young newbies who have not read the books happened, and we had some very shaky evidence for LotR being 'Christian' posted. Which again he responded to with typical English humour, which I'm afraid is sarcastic. Now we all know how sarcastic davem could be and has been for a long time, and he was most certainly not alone amongst high up Downers either. Alas, he chose the holy cow of religion.
So there you go. He did it because he loves Tolkien and loved the Downs. Unfortunately some people could not see that because maybe they love other things more than Tolkien or the Downs.
