See this thread:
https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/326864/
It was closed without a satisfactory response from the Scratch Team. All they did was defend their actions, which we are asking to change. Without letting more discourse take place, or more information come from the Scratch Team, the topic was closed.

We want the right to Express out religious beliefs on Scratch, just as atheists are allowed to share theirs. Not allowing peaceful and civil discourse is a violation of the Community Standards.

What exactly isn't being allowed to be said?

powercon5 wrote:

What exactly isn't being allowed to be said?

See the thread I linked to in the OP.

Support. (Just saying, “beleifs” in the title should be “beliefs”)

I'm willing to bet that if an LGBTQ+ user said that Christianity was a lie, they would suffer minimal consequences. This is a problem.

Religious freedom doesn't cover hate. Being anti LGBT is hate. End of.

TheRealNetherBefore wrote:

Religious freedom doesn't cover hate. Being anti LGBT is hate. End of.

Not so fast. Not supporting our view can just as easily be considered hate. And there are ways to discuss this in a peaceful way. And I believe we should have that right. Not allowing us to is not welcoming or tolerant to us.

As an atheist I have the personal belief that believing in a God does not make sense.
However, I can understand why people believe in a God. That comfort that there's still something after death is nice, that you'll see your loved ones again.

Humans have always been scared of the unknown, to not know what comes next is scary, even I'm scared by it.
Humans also have powerful imaginations. We tell ourselves stories of who we are and what we want to be.
Religious people have stories that explain the unknowns of the world.
Why are there rainbows?
That's told by the Noah's Ark story.
What happens after death?
That's told when we learn what heaven is.
What morals should we follow in life?
That's told by the ten commandments.

Whether these stories are fictional or non-fictional, we'll probably never know. It's your personal belief whether you believe or not, and personally I don't.

As you can see, the Bible in particular explains the unknown. It teaches us and guides us through God's word.

Let's take the argument against homosexuality in the Bible.
It, again, explains the unknown. Early Human didn't know why males fell in love with males, so (depending on your belief) either they wrote a story, or God told them a story.
This story says homosexuals are bad, this is because we are scared of the unknown so we're scared of males loving males. It's the earliest known case of homophobia with it actually being a phobia.
But is this argument correct? We now know why males love males and females love females, it's natural.
So should we continue believing the old story or make a new one. A story of how there's nothing wrong with males loving males and females loving females.

Now let's take the issue in hand of there only being 2 genders.
Through human existence, being non-binary has never been written down in our stories, whether they be medical stories, fairy tale stories and census stories. So now we reach the same problem we had before, we need to write a new story, but what should this story say?

Should the story say that there are only two genders or should it say that there are many genders?
We don't know at this point.
We write most of our stories based on science and science should give us an objective answer.

The stories we wrote about transgender used to say that it was a mental illness, and that it was wrong and not normal, but as new facts came to light, we rewrote our stories. Whether the stories will stay the same, we don't know. Maybe there'll be another chapter that makes it a mental illness again, maybe there won't.

What we do know is that no story we write will ever be complete, and we write them every day Humans as a race still exist.

So it's up to you. Do you believe the stories of long ago? Stories from religious books, from Humans that didn't understand what was happening, that were trying their best to write correct stories. Or do you believe the stories of the present, from Humans that know just a bit more than we did before.

TheRealNetherBefore wrote:

Religious freedom doesn't cover hate. Being anti LGBT is hate. End of.

LGBT freedom doesn't cover hate. Being anti Religious beliefs is hate. End of.

See how easy that was to flip that round? You can't argue against that just like I can't argue against your point. I can just prove that your point is very broad. Broad to the point it proves itself to be broad.

As long as we're not being disrespectful, we should be able to express our beliefs freely. I've expressed that I'm Catholic on my profile page and other parts of the site and I don't say that all gays are going to burn (I'm not going there.). So, as some of y'all may know, most Catholics don't support LGBT (whether or not I personally do isn't relevant in this conversation and I'm not going to state my opinions). In that thread that you posted, infinitytec, it was mentioned that somebody got banned for saying that there are two genders. However, most Catholics believe that there are two genders. Does this mean that everybody who says that they're Catholic has to be blocked from the site for saying that there's two genders????
No.
Because they're not being disrespectful.
Look, if somebody says “There are two genders” in a non-disrespectful way and in a way that is relevant to the conversation, they shouldn't be banned. I don't understand why the Scratch Team decided to block somebody for saying there are two genders and going against the beliefs of LGBT when they don't decide to block anybody on the site who says that there are more than two genders and going against the beliefs of many religions.
That being said, I understand that the Scratch Team blocked the person who said there are two genders if they carried out the comment in a disrespectful way. If they didn't carry out the comment in that manner, they didn't deserve to be banned. Likewise I also believe that if somebody just walked up to anybody who believes that there are two genders on their profile and told them “Ugh, your beliefs are wrong, there are clearly more than two genders you *insert vulgar insult here*” they should be banned. If, however, they asked said person “Why do you believe in two genders?” they shouldn't be banned.

I don't know where I was going with this comment and I'll probably remove it later, but I guess I support. If the ST doesn't let Scratchers express their beliefs because they go against LGBT, then they need to prevent those who are LGBT from expressing their beliefs because they're going against those who believe otherwise.

This is a big issue that should not be taken lightly, people in authority have more influence on others than they think, if you say for example, eat like a pig, then what does that say about your so called country, or say you eat like a well behaved adult, then you are saying that about your country, same goes for websites, and companies, if the ST doesn't stay neutral then they create a power difference that in turn will make some people feel unwelcome, for example during the, pride month? idk. Many Christians and Catholics, from what I've read and seen, felt attacked, and/or uncomfortable and unwelcome, which makes scratch not what it strives to be, a place where all people can come together and co exist, but instead disturbs the power difference just enough to the point where it becomes an issue for others.

So basically what I'm saying is, Support, it's a blaring issue that the ST would rather put down, than address, or rather just ignore, instead of fixing it.

infinitytec wrote:

TheRealNetherBefore wrote:

Religious freedom doesn't cover hate. Being anti LGBT is hate. End of.

Not so fast. Not supporting our view can just as easily be considered hate. And there are ways to discuss this in a peaceful way. And I believe we should have that right. Not allowing us to is not welcoming or tolerant to us.

bybb wrote:

TheRealNetherBefore wrote:

Religious freedom doesn't cover hate. Being anti LGBT is hate. End of.

LGBT freedom doesn't cover hate. Being anti Religious beliefs is hate. End of.

See how easy that was to flip that round? You can't argue against that just like I can't argue against your point. I can just prove that your point is very broad. Broad to the point it proves itself to be broad.

I can argue against that, actually. To use one of my own personal quotes- same concept, different context. There is a major difference between both of these things so they cannot be interchanged so easily.
Firstly, you not being able to say things like that isn't scratch having a bias against religion. You are still allowed to express the rest of your belief without issue. It's not like the scratch team is stopping you from expressing your whole belief, they are simply not allowing you to express things that would make other users unwelcome and uncomfortable and this does not just apply to you but to everyone with opinions inappropriate for children. Heck, I keep quiet about aspects of myself that I know aren't appropriate for scratch and I don't complain about it because not expressing them is simply the right thing to do on a kid's site.
Secondly, the worst outcome of you not being able to express this is annoyance. It's a minor aspect of your entire person that you just have to stay quiet about in order to be respectful and appropriate- it's no worse than the filtering we do for social interaction. The worst outcome of you expressing these values is death. From experience I know that reading this kind of content makes LGBT people feel unwelcome, upset and suicidal: having to frequently read about how people think you don't exist, are disgusting or are generally immoral for things out of your control does not do good for ones mental health and self esteem. I can truthfully tell you that this is not exaggeration, it's the reality of the situation
Finally, this isn't really about religion, and you know that. The religious aspect is simply an excuse and justification for the expression of your beliefs. Religion isn't the focus of this argument, the focus of this argument is that you want to express anti LGBT beliefs and religion is a way for you to justify that. The bible teaches many other things than “its wrong to be gay”, some of which you seem to be conveniently ignoring such as “love thy neighbour”, a belief Jesus expressed towards the roman soldiers who were literally persecuting him and his followers.

Hi folks. We have already responded to this. Please do not post duplicate suggestions. Thanks.