Can there be a free forming debate possible on the topic? I am on the evo side, but if I genuinely believed that somebody was committing blasphemy against God by suggesting the Earth was older than 6,000 years, I probably would consider them to be one of Satan's minions.
I don't have a real answer, just an observation. I think the threads are necessarily going to be angry and contentious. Perhaps a time out for a personal attack no matter who does it would be a stop gap solution, but otherwise, it seems kind of intractable, even putting haggis and Lutefisk or McClintock/Arnold threads to shame.
Perhaps there could be a special function, form to click on and abide to, recognizing that the other posters are all human beings, and you will respect them as such or else should be in order.
The big thing is respect. IMHO many creationists think that evolutionists are Satan's little helpers. Many evolutionists think that the creationists are buck toothed inbred hillbillies. This is the crux of the problem. How do you debate civilly in such a situation?
You're right in a way. There have always been flamewars on the crevo threads. The person who goes in thinking he's just going to calmly and rationally explain why he thinks as he does will sooner or later get a bucket of slops poured over his head. It is possible nevertheless to have a discussion of an article and for each side to get its point out to the lurkers. You just can't be too thin-skinned.
What happened starting in June--and only settled down with the banning of a few people--was an organized effort at disruption which resulted in thread after thread being moved to the Smokey Backroom and then pulled. Nobody was talking about science. It was all finger-pointing and ridicule, nothing else. Attempts to talk about anything else were invisible in the noise level.
What we're seeing on this thread is crying about the injustice of the banning of the disruptors (and some very revisionist history).