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Is there an effective way to design a realistic religion for a world?

So he asked about the problem with uninformed religious questions on the site in Meta, and we told him he could ask and answer his own question, and he did, and lo, it was awesome, and both his question and his answer were much-upvoted and thanked, and people rightly commented that it was a great resource to which they would refer often in future.

And then, it got CLOSED as too broad.

Why?

Should it be re-opened? Should this be elevated to a FAQ, somehow? How is that done? Should he just publish it to a blog or journal somewhere, and we should link to it? It makes it look like it is a problematic item by having it closed, while in fact it is a great resource which could head off many daft questions and headache-inducing answers. Or is closed-as-too-broad the place Stack Exchange thinks such things belong?

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The question was closed -- by the community, not by moderation action -- as too broad ("if you can imagine a whole book being written to answer this..."). It did get an excellent and well-received answer, which is valuable content for the site. But it seems that the community, after considering it, found it too big, at least for one question. That happens sometimes, especially early in beta when a site is still working out its scope.

There is no shame in having a question closed. Closed questions are still available on the site, can be voted on and linked to, and provide knowledge. This question is not at risk of being deleted. Being closed prevents additional answers to this one and also signals that future questions should be scoped more narrowly.

If you have religion-related questions, please do go ahead and ask them.

As for FAQ status, that's not really what the site's FAQ is for, but it's totally kosher to link specific questions from the site in tag wikis where that makes sense. I haven't looked to see if that makes sense here, but if there are religion-related tags whose wikis would benefit from a link to that question/answer, go for it.

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    $\begingroup$ It seems odd or unclear for the close reason to be "too broad" when it is asked and answered by the same person by design, and is basically providing a great answer to a general field of questions. The "too broad" suggests to me that there was something wrong with doing this. Seems like ideally there would be a close reason that doesn't seem to indicate a problem. $\endgroup$
    – Dronz
    Commented Dec 10, 2014 at 21:43
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    $\begingroup$ @Dronz There was a problem, the question was too broad. Look at just how long CAgrippa's answer was, and even that didn't cover anything. Other answers were trying to help but got deleted, downvoted, etc. It was an amazing resource, so we have no intention of deleting it, but equally it's not a model for questions to follow in the future. $\endgroup$
    – Tim B Mod
    Commented Dec 10, 2014 at 22:10
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    $\begingroup$ If that one was not closed then future enormously broad questions can point to that one and say "but mine is less broad than that, why was it not closed?". The results are problematic even with self-answered questions, very problematic for normal questions. $\endgroup$
    – Tim B Mod
    Commented Dec 10, 2014 at 22:11
  • $\begingroup$ Ok, but I have been using Stack Exchange for years (not that I pay strict attention to all the site philosophy) and this close reason had me think this was discouraged. Similarly, the most recent comment on the question itself shows someone else thinking that question was not good for the site. If a great example of a broad question can be good for the site, and I think this is a great example of that, then it still seems confusing to have that as the close reason. At least, I was confused. :-) Not sure I have a better suggestion - "Closed as Rhetorical Question"? "Closed to prevent me too"? $\endgroup$
    – Dronz
    Commented Dec 10, 2014 at 23:34
  • $\begingroup$ I thought questions were protected to prevent "me too". Or at least that's what the protection notice on a couple SE sites states. $\endgroup$
    – Damian Yerrick
    Commented Feb 16, 2015 at 16:25
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If you look at the question, you'll find:

Then there are the sub-questions, such as:

followed by a bullet list of questions, each of which could have been a question of its own. I think this is a good indicator that the question is too broad.

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    $\begingroup$ So do you honestly think it would be better for this answer to have been broken into several rhetorical self-answered questions? I certainly don't. I get there are policies, with reasons. This seems to me like an example that shows the policies don't have room for certain types of excellent content. Seems to me the site would want to add a category to appropriately include great content of categories that don't fit into its schema. $\endgroup$
    – Dronz
    Commented Dec 12, 2014 at 20:14
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    $\begingroup$ @Dronz there are examples of broad questions that have been broken up into smaller ones and cross linked. Sometimes that can cause problems but generally it works well. I don't see a reason that the religion question couldn't be asked as several separate questions which would each attract a variety of answers from people who might not be prepared to answer all of them at once. $\endgroup$
    – trichoplax is on Codidact now
    Commented Dec 14, 2014 at 14:54

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