Anti-ID group (IDCAB) begins again?, Can't tell you how much I missed that friendly bunch. Options

[Sxeptomaniac]

I had really hoped they'd keep themselves under control after FeloniousMonk's desysopping a while back, but they appear to be back at it again.

Cla68 seems to have stirred them up by trying to add a "Scientific theories" category to the Intelligent Design article. Don't think it was a really good idea, but it doesn't justify the reaction.

Now Hrafn has decided to tag various articles as being Creationism stubs, including James Tour, a guy who has specifically said that he's not an intelligent design supporter. He signed a petition, so therefore he's a creationist, even if he says otherwise, right? Never mind that he's done nothing else related to creationism, and all indicators are that he never will. Now Guettarda's gaming to try to keep the tag in (since when is the burden of evidence on the one removing material from a BLP?).

I really did not want to get involved with these people again, but I'm not letting them go back to messing with BLPs like they did in the past.

This post has been edited by Sxeptomaniac:

[Kelly Martin]

The ID/anti-ID fight is one between committed ideologues. Both parties are equally guilty; both sides want their religious beliefs (theistic Christianity on one side, and strict atheism on the other) imposed on others by force. I have no more love for strict atheists than I do for any other sort of fundamentalist evangelical. The thing is, neither side is going to compromise, not even to the point of allowing a fair presentation of the claims made by intelligent design or the very legitimate arguments as to why they fail to comprise a scientific theory (which is a different beast than a "theory about science", which is one of the equivocations that ID proponents are fond of using).

The sad thing is that the argument for intelligent design is so intellectually and rationally bankrupt that there is no need to get all mean and nasty about it; it is certainly enough to dispassionately set forth the case against and let people make up their own minds. Everything I've seen is that the only people who will believe this stuff are those who are already predisposed, by religious belief, to accept it uncritically.

The problem is that "rationalists" (as they sometimes call themselves) tend to be unable to suppress the urge to be snarky about their own belief in their superiority over all those "stupid people" who have not seen the light of reason. And since they have both David Gerard and Jimmy Wales on their side (more or less), they have no reason to restrain themselves on Wikipedia.

[Doc glasgow]

The ID/anti-ID fight is one between committed ideologues.

Looks to me like a lot of it is a fight between people who believe in NPOV on one hand and people who don't understand the concept on the other. Either of groups may or may not have religious convictions or be atheists, but that's largely irrelevant. Even a fair-minded atheist hasn't got a look in.

[Kelly Martin]

Looks to me like a lot of it is a fight between people who believe in NPOV on one hand and people who don't understand the concept on the other. Either of groups may or may not have religious convictions or be atheists, but that's largely irrelevant. Even a fair-minded atheist hasn't got a look in.

That's utter nonsense. None of the combatants in that fight is fighting for NPOV, which is a concept that's even more incoherent than intelligent design. They're all fighting for their preferred religious belief, or else proxying for someone else's preferred religious belief. All of them are going to claim that they're fighting for the "neutral point of view", of course, because the game requires it.

The "neutral point of view" is that intelligent design is a system of religious belief that has been expressed in a manner so as to appear to naive individuals to be a set of scientific claims, created as a political gambit to displace the teaching of evolution in public schools in the United States. However, neither side of the conflict is willing to leave it at that; the anti-ID people feel the need to heap scorn and condemnation on everything anywhere near intelligent design, and the pro-ID people are obviously unwilling to admit to the status of intelligent design as political theatrics. The true shame is that the difference between the neutral point of view and the point of view espoused by the anti-ID crowd is mainly one of tone.