ansel12 post #65: "The first mocking of Christians and Christian America by attacking Christians as “taliban” on this thread, came from you."
John Valentine from the previous "Coelacanths" thread, post #13: "No matter what you call it, it consists of empty-headed recitation of propaganda points and misrepresentation of legitimate research.
No legitimate, serious scientist (i.e. expert) feels the slightest need to "defend" himself from this kind of inanity."
To which alancarp responded in post #25: "Okay, to be fair, I’ll refer to you, then, as part of the Evolutionist Taliban."
Important to note that, beginning with post #3, the "Coelacanths" thread included a lengthy discussion of some alleged "Christian Taliban" or "Taliban Catholics" , and John Valentine did not then respond to this particular gratuitous slap.
Sadly, it seems Valentine took in the term as being some acceptable form of insult on Free Republic.
It's not.
Nothing either Christian or scientific has anything to do with "Taliban".
Using such terms about our FRiends is simply inappropriate on Free Republic.
Amen!
This is a very strange thread, BJK. I’ve been at FR a long time & participated in a lot of discussions. Some got very heated. I’ve seen a lot of name calling—true conservatives calling other true conservatives all kinds of insulting terms, which never made sense to me.
What I haven’t seen is such a total & complete breakdown in communication. It’s as if one side is speaking English & the other side is speaking Swahili, & no actual communication ever occurs. I’ve seen this in liberal/conservative discussion galore; I’ve just never seen it on FR. [I.e.: it’s quite typical for a liberal to blow off every word a conservative says w’out pausing even half a second to try to actually understand the conservative’s point. That is the liberal MO. They consider themselves so intellectually & morally superior to conservatives, they naturally don’t need to listen to a word we say.]
Now this same phenomenon is happening on this thread. Having thought about it, here is my conclusion. Conservative evolutionists decided long ago that ‘creationists’ are idiots. They cannot conceive of a person who believes God’s version of the origin of the universe as anything less. That being so, there’s no reason to read or understand what we are saying; they know a priori it’s all nonsense-twaddle. So they blow past everything we say & just keep yammering in their own closed off echo-chambers.
If that’s not what’s going on, I don’t know what is. A communication train wreck of this order has to an explanation of some kind. Given the citations you mentioned, it’s clear the evolutionists hold ‘creationists’ in disdain. Evidently the disdain is such that it precludes even reading our posts.
And I do agree. Your post echos what I tried to point out in Post 7 of that thread - that we in the anti-evolutionist camp should have the right to question 'evidence' of any kind on any subject without being mocked or name-called... exactly what the Left does to we conservatives on a daily basis.
Valentine, it seemed to me, continued to argue that we did NOT have that right, and continued the name-calling (note that phrase "empty-headed recitation of propaganda points and misrepresentation...inanity"). Frankly, I think we could find examples in which the Left says virtually the same thing about "credible" climate science.
Hence, I tried to illustrate the absurd by being absurd - hence my own use of 'Evolutionist Taliban' in that context.
I frankly don't like the fact that I did that, because one of the hallmarks of this site is the reasonable engagement in actual debate without name-calling. We should not stoop to the levels of the Left. But it also seemed like no one was interested in doing so that day, and I wasn't interested in rolling over and taking such epithets without a response.
So I will accept that my method was poor... but hopefully my motivation - good or bad - is understood, for what it's worth.