Re: Religious weirdness in fandom Ah, but with acafandom, I had expected tolerance for "Meme X is crucial to me; let me explain how for a sentence or two, and then we can discuss how that relates to Topic Y at hand." I see that pattern plenty of times with SPAG, with characterization, with accuracy-of-location-detail, with portrayals of sex or race, with... other religions. It was disconcerting to be told, "your Important Meme of choice is irrelevant to the discussion."
Fair enough. But what you're finding is not that acafen are *worse* than non-acafen, but rather that they simply aren't any better. For me, that makes it a "fandom" problem, not an "acafandom" problem. Still a problem, though, I absolutely grant you that.
It gets weird reactions. There's a great deal of casual agnostic/atheist though in the fannish community, that gets very annoyed to find out anyone is actively religious. Gets the same kind of reaction that bringing up sexual kinks in a non-fannish discussion does... everyone looks uncomfortable when they realize that someone has erotic thoughts about a subject they thought was totally non-sexual. Same kind of squick reaction--"how dare JKR announce Dumbledore is gay! Now I know he's a pervert and I'll never be able to read the books again!!!"
I think I may have picked up on that on some sort of subconscious level, which is why I never felt comfortable talking about *why* I was so interested in certain topics during fandom meta discussions, or *why* I was drawn to the dilemmas of certain types of characters. The irony is, fandom works *really really* well as a place to perform thought experiments in religion, ethics and philosophy. But the idea that someone might be doing that – getting icky moral issues mixed into fandom's happy place – really squicks some people out in a way that sexual kinks don't, as you point out. And in this, I think I differ greatly from the acafen: sex and gender and transgression are all fashionable topics du jour, but other issues make them very uncomfortable.