Stack Exchange is not the place for conversation, opinions, or socializing. This is stated as a rule valid for every SE site.
Since most of Christianity is based on interpretation of the bible, how is that different from opinion based answers? How is this question a real, constructive, answerable question, but this one isn't?
Not that I am not trying to defend the latter as a valid question, but understand how can the former be considered valid when the main rule is "no opinions".
To add to the other answers here: there's no rule on Stack Overflow (or most other sites) that prohibits opinions. Rather, we discourage questions that ask only for opinions. The guidelines for this are in the help center, but I'll quote part of them here for your benefit:
To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where …
- every answer is equally valid: “What’s your favorite ______?”
- your answer is provided along with the question, and you expect more answers: “I use ______ for ______, what do you use?”
- there is no actual problem to be solved: “I’m curious if other people feel like I do.”
- you are asking an open-ended, hypothetical question: “What if ______ happened?”
- your question is just a rant in disguise: “______ sucks, am I right?”
Questions that cry out for opinions - any opinions, anyone's opinions - tend to get them. What they often fail to attract are opinions backed up by facts and experience, geared toward explaining why a given opinion should be considered.
The question you reference appears to be based on an actual problem - boilerplate overwhelming logic in the asker's code - but rather than seeking a direct solution to this, he instead kicked off what is largely a philosophical debate. That's a shame; there are some good answers among the responses, but there are also an awful lot of raw opinions with nothing to support them.
Well, there are some sites where the answers are a little fuzzier than others. As it happens, Christianity is not one of those sites. It could have been and some of the new users expect it to be, but the site has worked hard to not encourage "the meaning of life" questions or answers. To quote from the top answer to "What Christianity.StackExchange is (and more importantly, what it isn't)":
- This site is a place to come to learn about what various Christian teachings have to say.
- This site is not a place to come to learn which Christian teachings are true.
- This site is a place to ask about, learn about, and inform about various Christian teachings, denominations, concepts, and doctrines.
- This site is not a place to debate which of these teachings are true.
- This site is a source for truthful answers about doctrine, Christian teachings, theology,
- This site is not a source for Truth with a capital "T"
These are extremely answerable questions. Anybody, including atheists, can learn about Christianity, Christian denominations, and Christian theology well enough to provide expert answers on the site.
First off, your premise is mistaken:
Since all of Christianity is based on interpretation of the bible,
No it's not. One very large group of Christians - Catholics - does not base their entire religion on the Bible. IF you look at Christianity.SE, there are lots of things being asked that aren't just interpretation of the bible.
Secondly, yes, there are somewhat different standards for some of the non-technical sites.
The boilerplate text for /About includes:
Focus on questions about an actual problem you have faced. Include details about what you have tried and exactly what you are trying to do.
Take, for example, the Science Fiction site... How does any of that standard text really applies to questions about SciFi books and movies?
Like any other SE site, the place you want to look is the list of what's on topic. There you'll see that there are indeed on-topic questions that go beyond just interpreting the bible.
As for your specific question:
How is "Can I believe in evolution and still be a Christian?" a real, constructive, answerable question.
... the answers given are a good overview of the different ways Christians attempt to reconcile Genesis's story of creation with the scientific beliefs about evolution and the age of the universe.
Someone hasn't read Good Subjective, Bad Subjective. You should read the whole thing, but here are the highlights:
Insisting on objectivity is fine for computing and mathematics. But once you get past the hard(ish) sciences, you veer towards the much softer social sciences. There are experts in these fields, but they are by definition, not exact. In fact, most academic fields don’t have objective answers. Topics like economics, engineering, the arts, literature, and social sciences don’t exactly have correct and incorrect answers. There is a growing list of proposals about increasingly subjective topics, and we believe many of them are going to make great Stack Exchange sites!
That’s where the problem starts.
We never claimed that subjective questions were horrible abominations that should never be asked. We simply choose to forego those subjective discussions, as there were dozens upon dozens of forums which already catered to them. ...
Guidelines for Great Subjective Questions
- Great subjective questions inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”. ...
- Great subjective questions tend to have long, not short, answers.
- Great subjective questions have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone.
- Great subjective questions invite sharing experiences over opinions.
- Great subjective questions insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references.
- Great subjective questions are more than just mindless social fun.
The question on Christianity.SE clearly is a question about a problem that someone is actually facing: the person asking doesn't know how to reconcile two conflicting beliefs and wants to know how to tackle the issue. The question on SO is just polling for opinion. That's why the first question is better, regardless of its subjectivity.
(Note that the SO post is also 4 years old from a different time when there were different standards)
I the question on C.SE should be closed, it doesn't meet the criteria of the site questions coming from an identifiable tradition.
There's a clear cut Catholic answer to this question that would fill many volumes with nuances and it's annoying to have questions like this out there because they pretty much preclude the asking of an answerable question. But, in that regard, there is no connection with the statement you're trying to make. If you scoped it to ALGOL, you wouldn't make it a better question whereas, if the OP on C.SE had scoped his question to 7th day adventist, it would be good (but then again, nobody knew where things were going at the time the question was asked) Me and him were the first users on the site, I asked a question about "Why did God create me" and it got closed, this is a much better question than that.
Of course, you must also realize that this was asked on like the 2nd day of C.SE's existence and there were quite a few bone headedly awesome questions on Stackoverflow when it was in beta (and for the first year). Best keyboard, mouse, funny loading statements, etc.. everything was there. Not sure where it is now.
How is this question (Can I believe in evolution and still be a Christian?) a real, constructive, answerable question...?
Actually, it's not; it was locked, probably because it's not about any specific tradition's answer to the question. (As an informed Christian, I speculate that there might not be such an answer since [Darwinian] evolution is not often included in catechisms or denominational statements of faith.)
C.SE only addresses questions that include a tradition's/denomination's interpretation of the Bible.
To summarize relevant parts of the tour page:
To boot: I think C.SE is good and beneficial for Christians because of this. As a Christian myself who has seen many different denominational disputes up close, I think developing good practices on proper intellectual discussion is needed among Christian circles and C.SE provides that, for this very reason.
