Website Idea: Religious Debate, where the Religious meet

When all things fail in life, a lot of people look for answers and one way of doing so is thru Religion. We all have different views when it comes to religion, and its always been a controversial topic ever since. Religious type of websites tend to lock themselves in their own groups where they all believe in the same religion, but I started to think that in the real world we have to interact with different people with different religions and it doesn’t seem to matter that much we all still get along. So I thought how about a website that gives people a chance to debate with others as long as it is within the “rules” and that it is a valid argument. Here’s how it works:

Users are formed within their own teams (Christians, Muslim, Buddhist, etc.), and might even go down to Minority Level (like Roman Catholics & Baptist etc.). It will be a semi forum / discussion board, where questions are placed, and answered by members. The twist will be how it’s the whole website is going to function.

There will be different “levels”, for example I could interact in the Roman Catholic as myself the “User”, but if I do interact with the Baptist Church it will be Roman Catholic as a whole (so answers are voted by % by the Roman Catholic Church Team before it can be posted) and then the next level which is Interreligion (so the whole Christian Team must vote). There will be certain quotas for teams before they could join another level (must have at least X number of members).

The weight of voting will be assigned to users thru their feedback and ratings from their own teams, and feedback and ratings will come from different factors such as (making sense, polite, etc. more on being a great debater and shows respect to other religions). As the levels go higher, the religious debate goes deeper and becomes more interesting for people.

If Users post any vulgar, obscene or offensive words then they could be flagged. Being flagged means the message stays in the ‘pending’ area where top leaders of each group will vote if it is acceptable or not (assuming that leaders are responsible) and majority rules.

User Interface will make the difference by trying to make it a semi magazine style where it’s easy to see what goes on in a more bird’s eye view. So Interreligion in the Front page and then Inter (Christian) Sub-religion and then Specific religion (Roman Catholic).

Revenues could solely come from ads, but with the contraversial effect of the specific topics and surge of traffic thru contents (SEO) it will be easy to be found in Search Engines. Ads could be sold at a premium once traffic is stable.

Unclear thoughts:

• Could this be localized?
• Would Users act responsibly when religions are discussed? (civilised and polite)
• Would this be banned from different religions?

This idea is still very rough, the concept is spicing up the forum / discussion boards and making it very interesting for people to do better in those sites. What do you guys think?