One problem is that a lot of people evidently find it very hard to disentangle strong disagreement from abuse.

By that I mean two things - on the one hand there is a belief that, in order to express disagreement, it has to be hyped up with hate talk - and on the other there is a tendency to assume that expressions of strong disagreement must actually imply this kind of hate talk, even if it doesn't actually appear.

Put those together and it's inevitable that disagreements spin out of control, especially in an online setting where the normal inhibitions that apply in face to face confrontations don't apply. No one is going to break your nose for insulting them here.

What happens instead is that at some point a moderator steps in and the thread is closed, and that people walk away. Sometimes it seems they walk away from the Mudcat, and that's a shame - though I can never understand the logic of that since threads that go bad have never been more than a small minority. Mostly they just walk away from the thread involved, and the cost there is that the opportunity to discuss things that deserve to be discussed gets aborted. And that is a pity because there aren't too many opportunities to explore real differences in the face-to-face world.

One minimal rule which we can surely make for ourselves is to decide never to post in hot anger. Write in anger, maybe - but stick it on one side. Read it over the next day and maybe post it then. But perhaps someone else will have made the same point by that time, and perhaps you'll see a way to make it that gets it across better, and won't just provoke a kneejerk response.

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As for "the Christian thing" , like Bill D I'd disagree with the assertion that "The Conventional Wisdom at Mudcat is that Christians are evil".   It's a view that a few people seem to feel obliged to express persistently, often in ways that are undoubtedly sincerely held, but also intended to provoke anger and heat. But so what? The way to respond to that is simple enough in principle, if not always in practice - turn the other cheek. Hold off on posting the response, and do it in a way that doesn't set out to provoke anger.

As for the BNP, that is a poisonous and evil organisation, fundamentally at one with other racist movements that have disfigured history over previous generations - but personal attacks on people who have made the very serious mistake of swallowing its message merely serves to strengthen it, and to distract attention from the task of countering that message.