Very nice post. You pretty much nailed my perspective on this thing too. The threads I enjoy the most are the ones where I disagree with other freepers. That confines most of my comments to threads on animal rights, music downloading and evolution.
But in all three, you just sort of tire of seeing the same arguments over and over and over. For a while I actually started saving my responses as word documents, then every so often I would cut and paste them into a response to someone (prefacing it with a sentence saying I had done as much).
What is really "new" to the debate lately is that the same thing really does seem to be happening to the evolution side of this as happened to Dan Rather. It is a new and exciting twist, and another reason to praise the internet as a way to really disseminate information. I think it is also why Bush won the election. Lies just do not have the legs they used to.
In other words, for me the story here is that the debate (fight) has spilled from the confines of the dark and controlled auditorium out into the broad dailight of the street. Many of the combatants are rather embarrassed by the now obvious puppet strings dangling from their bodies.
I love when this happens, even when I am the one the light of day is cast upon in a not so positive light - albeit it can be more acutely painful then, in the short term.
The reason we get into the same arguments over and over is that the creationists keep posting the same claims over and over again. And when challenged, they claim they don't want to get into the same argument. Well D@mn. If you want to make the same baseless claims over and over, you better darn well expect the same ol' arguments.
In other words, for me the story here is that the debate (fight) has spilled from the confines of the dark and controlled auditorium out into the broad dailight of the street. Many of the combatants are rather embarrassed by the now obvious puppet strings dangling from their bodies.
It wasn't so very long ago that one could not easily locate a subject, an author - do his own fact-checking. The internet has changed our basic attitudes by empowering us to look behind the curtain.
At bottom, RobRoy, what I suspect is happening is a kind of broad cultural backlash. The progressive Left (i.e., "post-modernism" -- which includes folks in science and the arts and letters who, while maybe not professing to be members of that category, still have imbibed a large number of ideas from post-modernist thinkers [more or less unconsciously] about the nature of God, man, and society) -- is slipping into the irrelevance it so richly deserves. The Internet has facilitated this process; for it makes it far more difficult to control information. And of course, the control of information is an indispensable bulwark of the power of the "status quo."
Repression of thought, curbs on speech, the kind of "diversity" that makes one walk in lock-step to the approved nostrums of elites, authoritarianism/totalitarianism of all stripes, all seem to be on the losing side of history right now. President Bush's "liberty initiatives" aren't so much as cutting against the grain, but riding the tide of changing global circumstances, which are driven by intellectual, cultural, political, and ideological change.
It's as if folks had finally started taking C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man quite seriously, and are fighting back. In the process, culturally it seems we are going back to, and reappraising our "roots" -- which derive from the traditions of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome.
This is what makes for the conflict and general loss of civility of debate these days. Careers are on the line, reputations are at stake -- and also the ability to wield power.
Well, them be just some miscellaneous thoughts of my own, FWTW. Thanks for your post!