lpetrich

I think that we ought to believe that ARN's board is down for upgrading when we see it restarted -- and not before.

Ragnarok

Damn! And I never even got the chance to troll it.

[ March 15, 2002: Message edited by: MoCk ]</p>

S2Focus

And how many times have *secular* C/E boards been taken down for "technical" or "other" reasons?

Is it just my imagination, or do "Christian" C/E boards really suffer a more downtime than do "secular" C/E boards?

(Maybe it's because Christian web-masters prefer Windows while "heathen" web-masters prefer Open/Free/NetBSD or Linux... )

[ March 15, 2002: Message edited by: S2Focus ]</p>

Ragnarok

{snicker} As an IT guy I was wondering when somebody else would notice this. It just seems to me that whenever I go to a Christian website I ALWAYS see .asp after all the URLS and I often notice that the pages don't look right or won't even load (I use desktop Linux - yes I'm one of those people) Heathen boards, though, always seem to be cross-browser aware and use Perl or PHP (mainly Unix/Linux stuff).

Maybe Jesus and Bill G. will cut a deal. They both seem to prefer exclusive customer lock-in.

Richiyaado

Hi S2Focus,

I don't know about other boards, but I've posted on and off at ARN for over a year (though not recently) and this is the first time I recall their taking the board down. Actually, I do think they're upgrading their bb software to include more bells and whistles but, as lpetrich suggests, we'll have to wait and see.

faded_Glory

I only recently returned to ARN after a long absence, and found that the overall level of posting had gone done considerably. The discussions were more and more openly dominated by YEC fundies such as Jeptha, Douglas and creationist. This even pissed off the less traditionally religious ID'ers such as mturner (otherwise himself a royal pain in the rectum) to the point where he walked away.

There was a very long drawn out discussion between Jeptha and a posse of 'evolutionists' (for lack of a better word) on the Second Law of Thermodynamics 'forbidding complex macro-evoution'. Jeptha was incredible - dancing and weaving around the issues, contradicting himself at every twist and turn. Whenever anyone gave up out of sheer frustration, he claimed another victory! Eventually he was cornered into an impossible position and simply left. What disappointed me is that at no point did we get support from 'ID evolutionists' such as Mike Gene or others who accept Common Descent with Modification. I guess their politics are worth more to them than scientific integrity.

Douglas, known to us here from a 'KO in round 1' by scigirl in our FD&D Forum, turned out to be a complete screwball with an elaborate mathematical construction to prove the bible true. I guess faith on its own doesn't cut it anymore? It is actually a shame ARN is down...I'll miss it for entertainment value, if nothing else

fG

Principia

*sniff* I miss Douglas, already. There was a touch of irony and tragedy to see him storm off after the Moderator at ARN closed his thread about his equations.

I miss the entertainment too. After getting over the initial frustration at seeing him completely distort a mathematical argument <img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" /> , it was even more fun to destroy it . After a while, I guess, I just stopped reading his posts and jumped to the conclusion that it was going to be wrong anyway. That's probably when the whole thing blew up.

SC

theyeti

Jeptha is actually an OEC, but he comes across as less inteligent than Douglas, for example. His arguments consist almost entirely of ridicule, except for his 2nd LOT argument, which has been refuted forwards and backwards so many times that it's not worth counting. Doesn't faze him though.

In a way I kind of feel bad for Douglas. His "biblical equations" get shot down even by ardent IDists. It's kind of like the guy who has spent all of his life wanting to be a movie star, but he just can't act. Somewhere inside of Douglas is an intelligent human being screaming to get out; I really do wish him the best.

The level of discussion there had gone down considerably. There are almost no technical science threads at all (other than 2LOT). Almost every thread starts out with some sort of whine about "dogmatic materialists" (or fill in your choice of pejoritives) and then someone who cared would have to correct the misconceptions for the ten thousanth time. And then of course there was the favorite technique of posting an article that they claimed was "ID friendly" when it clearly wasn't. They will spin anything as being in their favor. And I also liked the rhetorical tactic of them showing where someone used an engineering term in biology, and then claiming that as evidence of ID. All in all, it had become a poisonous atmosphere, mostly because the hardcore ID contingent was sure that they were right, and would therefore despise anyone who would be critical of it.

theyeti

Principia

That quality of the posters on ARN is what troubles me the most. So long as the conclusion supports the various theories (be it OEC, YEC, ID) it matters not to them how they arrived at the result. If you attack the conclusion, then the argument is automatically an ad hominem of some nature. If you attack the premise, it simply becomes a non-issue, and then they move on to some other argument (usually one of ad hominem nature, as well). One ARN poster with whom I had such a debate was so kind as to admit that he did se my point but didn't want to say so during the argument (he made some excuse about wanting to make fun of me first, then was going to recant after taking care of his kids). The admission came only after spending dozens of posts dancing around the issue, which degenerated of course, into a pile of insults.

So, how do you guys keep it 'clean' here at II, or have I just not been here long enough to read the mud-slinging posts?

SC

[ March 16, 2002: Message edited by: Scientiae ]</p>

Richiyaado

Hello All,

I agree that the level of discussion at ARN had declined considerably in recent months, but there were always a few people on both sides of the issue whose posts were interesting. As I am not a scientist, I learned a great deal from Jesse, Myrmecos, Matt Brauer and Niiicholas particularly. Also, Dayton and Lizard could always be counted on to hold the IDists feet to the fire with respect to the social, political and religious aspects of the ID movement.