Posted on 10/30/2003 5:04:39 PM PST by Dales
Correct. But then, I've not seen anyone make that claim here, either.
Bull...that assertion has been made on this very thread (against Christians who don't swallow the lie of evolution)
... which is why I don't understand why a handful of Freepers would choose to make war on those Freepers who happen to accept evolution.
The war was against the religion of evolution, NOT "Freepers who who happen to accept evolution," Your side insult, and the mangement seems to look the other way. Meanwhile, one of the few posters who wanted to talk science gets banned.
like is said...the management should be ashamed. It is something I would expect democrats to do...not conservatives.
I feel for your boss. Standing on the Word of God is difficult when your detractors can effortlessly tear down your testimony from your own book.
I will pray that he finds the courage to stand on Christ's Word, rather than the ever-changing ideas of men. Peer pressure can be detrimental to spiritual growth. I know this from personal experience.
I hope there's a branch in the Vatican!
What is essential is to try to understand the principle behind this "evolving". It is my contention that an intelligent design is responsible for this evolution. That "intelligent design" I choose to call the Creator or God. The more we can understand of this intelligent design, the better we can live and the more we can accomplish.
Don't tell anyone, but we've got a branch at Darwin Central. If you reveal the secret, half the fun in these threads will vanish.
They have an extension campus there. It is rather hard to find however. The local Home-Owners Association has hid it in a remote basement.
There are a few there who attend to that basement with great faith.
Catholic bashing?
With respect to Intelligent Design, there are some interesting arguments made, but to date no truly satisfying scientific experiments, is my understanding.
It's worse than that. There's no coherent ID theory to do experiments on. Irreducible complexity has been alleged in flagella, blood clotting, etc, and almost immediately shot down by rather convincing demonstrations that there are animals (respectively bacteria with a type 3 secretor system, dolphins) that get along fine with part of the alleged IC system missing. So it's not ID. Peer review would have spared him this embarassment.
I don't think ID will get anywhere in the scientific community until Behe, Dembski, or someone actually starts submittig papers for peer review. And then it depends on the papers. The popular ID literature is very far from convincing, at least to me. And only a tiny percentage of scientists take it seriously at the present time.
The reason people like Behe don't get a "peer review" is because those who control such reviews are evolutionists who cannot stand to have anyone challenge their little religion.
Sounds like theistic evolution to me. If the Earth can be old and evolution can happen, it's hard to see what else science can do to upset you. The people having the problems are mostly hung up on one or the other of the aforementioned points and end up telling science what it is allowed to find.
How many papers containing original research on ID has Behe submitted to peer-reviewed journals, and had rejected?
Jim, could you do us the courtesy of explaining why you found Phycisist's post to be laughable?
It seems to me that his comments are right on target, and personally I concur with them 100%. Virginian-American expressed very similar views in post #382.
He had two points, which I believe are reasonably self-evident, that I'd like to add my two cents to:
1. Yanking threads or outlawing the topic altogether is not a deterrent for some of the posters. In fact, by their own admissions it seems that for some posters, any evidence or statement which might appear to support evolution or any scientific finding which is a cornerstone of evolution is considered by them to be an attempt to "remove God" in some way.
Such people would be *happy* to have any post or thread yanked which touches on these issues. So by pulling threads or suggesting that the topic might be made not welcome on FR at all, you're not discouraging disruptions, you're *encouraging them* -- the more they make trouble on these threads and make Abuse Reports, the more likely your annoyance level may reach the point where such threads are outlawed, and they'd be quite *happy* with that result.
In short, threatening to pull threads may seem like a deterrent to foodfights, but for some it would actually be an enticement.
2. Physcist's other point was that it is political misstep to, intentionally or unintentionally, send the message that the Republican party, or conservatism, or FreeRepublic have signs on them reading, "only literalist fundamentalist Christians need apply". It's a recipe for alienating many who would otherwise find conservatism quite compatible with their beliefs. As Physicist took pains to make clear (although it still seemed to be misconstrued by the poster in post #398), this is not to say that anyone wants to eject fundamentalists from the part (quite the contrary, they are a strong component of it) -- it's just that it seems equally shortsighted to drive away or silence those who hold other views, when they're still on your side on almost every other issue.
And I can concur with several posters' observations, in that I have often tried to bring likeminded friends and acquaintances into the conservative "fold" (or at least vote for Republicans), only to find that one of their biggest reasons for declining has been the antics of the more outspoken anti-evolution (or fundamentalism-is-the-only-way view in general) members of the conservative movement. It strongly reinforces the common stereotype of conservatives as intolerant, or non/anti-intellectual. This is especially true when the person is familiar with the science of evolution, and is thus frequently astounded by the nature of attacks on it, since those attacks often make claims the listener knows to be untrue in a way that any first-year biology student would know better than to make.
This is not a good image for conservatism. Not if it's the only visible face of conservatism.
Conservatism would win many more converts if the public could see that there was room in the conservative movement for differing views on this subject, which as you correctly state is hardly a core issue. But it *does* become a core issue to many people when it becomes a litmus test for the movement and people with different views are made unwelcome or subject to constant abuse, or treated as third-class conservatives (or worse, treated as anti-conservative infiltrators).
I have no problem with most Christian-Creationist conservatives, and most of them have no problem with conservatives like me. But just as major rifts would develop in conservatism if it gave in to a "no room for fundamentalists" attitude, the same goes for the case if it a "no room for non-fundamentalists (or "non-Christians)" attitude held sway.
So... What to do about the foodfights? A few thoughts:
1. Even leaving aside the issues I mentioned above, I think that banning the subject entirely would be unworkable from a practical standpoint. There would be much bickering over what exactly constituted a sufficiently "related" topic. Plus since we've seen how easily threads (on almost any topic) can drift into a crevo exchange, the mods would have more work to do stamping out all such topic occurrences, than they do now policing just the subset that have achieved flamewar status.
2. It seems to me that we have a Goldilocks problem. The moderation often appears either Too Light (i.e. very little intervention) or Too Heavy (i.e. the sledgehammer of pulled threads or banned posters). Something in the middle may be Just Right, and nip problems in the bud before they reach free-for-all status. On a couple of earlier threads there were some "knock it off" posts by the Admin Moderator directed at specific posters, and it seemed to work quite well at reminding everyone to keep in line.
3. Disciplinary actions might similarly benefit from something other than an "all-or-nothing" approach. Currently nothing happens to a troublesome poster up until the time that they are suspended for a long period, or banned entirely (either of which the mods are understandably reluctant to use except in extreme circumstances). This gives some folks an impression that they're untouchable -- at least up until the time they get the boom dropped on them.
Instead, how about short-term suspensions applied more frequently for lesser offenses, as "cool off and think about it" periods? Anything from 24 hours to a few days might be quite effective. Frequent offenders could earn successively longer and longer time-outs. (As I keep current with the thread while composing this, I see that HalfFull has suggested the same notion.)
This would also have the benefit of directly defusing the thread in question.
4. A similar approach might be appopriate for posts (at least on "sensitive" topics) -- rather than removing only the most blatantly abusive posts, it might be worthwhile to try removing posts that are merely rude or whatever, perhaps along with asking the poster to try again without calling his opponent a liar, etc. If more posts got pulled just for *starting* a personal exchange, it might nip them in the bud before everyone in the room has their flamethrowers out. It wouldn't be any more work for the mods, they have to field those abuse reports now anyway. And it would be a lesson to those who weren't sufficiently aware of how their posts look to others. After a few rounds of this, most posters would learn what was acceptable and what wasn't, with the result being (hopefully) less need for future moderation.
5. For the more thin-skinned posters (who can see almost anything as a "personal attack"), or those who complain about everyone else's behavior while being bad actors themselves, is there a way to suspend or remove someone's Abuse Report privileges? Some people might be more inclined to get along if they are informed that they're treading close to the status of "the boy who cried wolf" as far as the moderators were concerned. And as a last resort, you'd be able to spare the moderators the frequent complaints from certain posters who have abused the privilege.
In closing, I'd like to say that I think the more recent "openness" from the moderators and yourself about how moderation is done, the problems the moderators face, and giving more feedback on problem posters/issues has been very helpful, and may help defuse the problem a lot all by itself.
You see correctly. Science does nothing to upset me, I am not averse to increasing knowledge. What upsets me is those who take literally the religious writings of two thousand years ago and try to form a modern perspective of reality based upon that. The principles described in those ancient writings may be quite valid but they need to be stated and understood in today's terms.
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