Title Author Date

Hannah Arendt-quote TalkReason , Sep 14, 2008

Dear Mr. Krul:

Apparently your letter was designed to repudiate Professor Bottaro's thesis pointing to creationists' habit of quote-mining. To this end you provided a link to Arendt's article where the segment is found quoted by Klinghoffer. Since Klinghoffer has correctly quoted a selected sentence from Arendt's article, you apparently believe this particular factoid somehow invalidates Professor Bottaro's thesis. In fact, your reference to the article in question does not exonerate Klinghoffer and does not prove Bottaro wrong. Professor Bottaro quoted a whole paragraph from Klinghoffer's article, of which the citation from Arendt is just a fraction. Among multiple distorted citations by creationists sometimes one can encounter an accurate one, and neither Professor Bottaro nor any other critic of ID has ever asserted that each and every citation provided by ID advocates is always necessarily distorted.
While this particular citation by Klinghoffer is in itself accurate (and Bottaro has not denied it), Professor Bottaro correctly noted the overall well documented penchant of creationists (especially ID advocates) including Klinghoffer, for misquoting various sources. For example, you may wish to look up an egregious example of a direct fabrication of quotations by such an ID proponent as Jonathan Wells right here on Talk Reason (http://www.talkreason.org/articles/ugly.cfm).

Talk Reason administration

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Title Author Date

Hannah Arendt-quote Krul, Jeffrey Sep 21, 2008

Oh dear!

Let's see..
1. Klinghoffer quotes some reputed historians like Fest and Arendt (who is more a phlosopher than a historian, by the way) about biology.
2. Professor Bottaro walks to his office, finds the book of Fest and shows that the Fest-quote is a misquote.
3. Willing to give a contribution to the article, I search the internet, and find the original text of the Hannah Arendt-quote, which I present to the Talkreason- administration. As for I am a biologist, nor a native English-speaker, I will leave it to the Talkreason- administration to decide whether the Arendt-fragment is a misquote or not.
4. And because of this, I 'apparently' try to 'prove Bottaro wrong'?

I guess something went wrong in understanding eachother.

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Title Author Date

Hannah Arendt-quote TalkReason , Sep 21, 2008

Dear Mr. Krul:

Thanks for the clarification. If we erroneously interpreted your intention, we apologize. As our
justification, we perhaps may point out that it seemed hard to interpret your intention other than we did. If you did not try to somehow cast doubts upon Prof. Bottaro's article, what other reason did you have to point to the quote from Arendt's essay? Anyway, hopefully our apology will satisfy you and the matter may be thus solved.

Best wishes,

Talk Reason administration

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