Tony, I am disappointed you are leaving as I think you have become a well like and well-respected member. Only David has the ability to delete your account, and generally does not use it, however I will bring this thread to his attention.
Before closing the thread, I made a very thorough explanation of the reasoning behind it, and I'm sorry that you didn't agree with me. As I mentioned, a public forum probably isn't the best place to express your religious views. While our debate over the use of religion in Daycare was full of heart and very interesting, it was different from your specific religion thread because your thread was asking members to look at a different religion. Rather than saying your freedom of speech has been supressed, I would argue that you were mixing church and state. I would also argue that it could be constrewed as being rude or offensive on your part that the faiths of other members are "wrong" and we should all therefore look at God and the Lord and learn to embrace them.
I certainly respect you and respect your beliefs, but I do not agree with your spreading your beliefs around. An Internet forum is not the place for that.
Furthermore, as I mentioned, we had a debate on religion a couple of months back. That began as more of a question about which faith people believed in. This seemingly conversational topic enjoyed a few days of heartful debate before we also needed to close that because members began to gang up on each other based solely on their faith. Before the thread was closed, many members exposed very deep secrets about themselves that I can imagine took a lot of courage to expose, and also meant that members had become very comfortable here. I remarked that I thought it was amazing a few teenagers on the Internet could respect each other and each other's differences, in many ways, better than grown men like President Bush and PM Blair can. Unfortunately, that utopia couldn't last forever and soon came to an end; thus we had to end the debate.
I closed your topic, therefore, to prevent any other similar arguments, which many members take very serious offense to. Religion is a person choice, and it is easy to offend someone and not even realize you are doing it!
Again, I'm certainly sorry you feel that your rights are being violated, but I think it is more a matter of the general pursuit of happiness for the entire forum. I'm going to close this thread now, not to suppress your freedom of speech, but because it really is not an appropriate topic for other members to post in. If you have any other concerns or wish to continue this conversation, please use the Private Messaging system to PM me so we can discuss it in a more private environment.
Thank you.