Matt - actually most of the responses were kneejerk reaction to a misinterpretation of what Sam meant, mainly due to confusion over definitions. From the base argument I'd say their view is quite controversial, since it leads down a road towards 'thought police' and the like. The fact that dense used the word 'forgiving' in his post above shows that he's still not understood the argument as far as I can tell, or hasn't thought about it if he has. Sam didn't help that by not making his point clear from the off, and then writing a bunch of rather verbose and slightly pretentious posts. However it wasn't actually him that kicked it off, it was a post which was either a brilliant troll or utterly moronic daily mailesque crap by Nigel.