I cherish a day when our children once again will restore as heroes the sort of men and women who - unafraid and undaunted - pursue the truth, strive to cure disease, subdue and make fruitful our natural environment and produce the inventive engines of production, science, and technology.
-- Barry Goldwater
The party of Lincoln must be the party of science and reason. To be otherwise is to cede these positions to the Democrats. Already the Democrats are painting the conservative movement as hostile to science, and they will do so every chance they get. It is crucial not to give them the opportunity.
However, there are many people on your website who are playing right into their hands. Everday on your site, pro-science people are savaged as idolators, Nazis, communists, or worse. There are people on your site stumping for the Moonies. People who claim doctors are unable to cure disease and that surgery is sinful. There are people who argue that the Apollo missions were a fraud, that the bible condones slavery, that oil comes from rocks, that the HIV virus doesn't cause AIDS, that crop circles and alien abduction are real, that astrology is science, that the earth is the center of the universe.
Jim, your site is in danger of becoming a crank site. Bad posters drive away good posters. Bad moderation exacerbates the problem. What do you think people are going to notice when they log on to your site? They are going to remember some nut who says dinosaurs walked with humans. They're not going to remember the poster who quietly states science are religion aren't in conflict, because that is human nature. The trolls are going to stick out like a sore thumb. They will take home the lesson that your site is chocked full of anti-science nutcases, and they will extrapolate that to conservative movement as a whole.
If you truly believe "evolution is socialist dogma" you have bought into a bill of goods. The vast majority of people working in science and engineering disciplines have religious faith. They understand what Darwin's theory says. They don't worship Darwin, as is often posted on your site. That notion is not going to win any votes. To the contrary, it is going to lose votes. It's bad for this website, and it's bad for the conservative movement. I urge you to reconsider your position, and clean up some of the trolls on your site.
The only conflict between science and religion is that which people manufacture.
I bought into the "bill of goods" a long time ago. If the site goes down because I don't believe the Marxist lies, so be it.
May I add a corollary? Having a high incidence of such posts also gives ammunition to those at DU and other places to defame this board as a bunch of "far-right religious nuts." It also lets people alter the Wikipedia entry with factual posts that make FR look bad.