He was saying there's no longer any need for a good liberal arts education :)
Obscurity and speaking out of your head for your own benefit rather than to be understood is postmodern frippery not the mark of a solid education.
http://www.radiolab.org/2010/aug/09/
which will far better argue and illustrate myriad points on the invention of language, its beauty and wonder and value to differentiate us as a species and to bring us joy and fulfillment and illustrate the challenges and quirks that make its study such a joy and illustrate language's evolution as a thing of wonder.
Then again, you see something like the Rossetti archive
http://www.rossettiarchive.org/
and you are awe struck at the meticulous rigor and academic sensitivity it takes to understand permanence and context and format and physicality as intrinsic to the right of artistic expression.
Would these works have as much meaning if we OCR'd them, slapped them in times new roman, and beamed them to your twitching sweaty little palm sized cubes? Probably not.
It took a lot of time, a lot of arguing, a lot of hard questions and personal growth before I felt qualified to make statements like, "I don't think its a good idea to build a game engine that uses a Barthes-esque narrative decomposition to dynamically construct compelling storylines for video games." I don't think a religious education qualifies you as arbiter of language. I think his word is fun and quirky. Interesting. Highly relevant and timely.
You might also consider using the return key to break up your text a little better. You'd be less likely to be perceived as a colleague of the unabomber. (Edit: they fixed it)
You don't need to be an arbiter of language to find out what is and isn't a word. Damascean isn't a word. The word is Damascene. The phrase is Damascene conversion. Using the unword Damascean only harms the form and function of the prose.
The first poster was saying something casually, and I was making a joke. You're taking this sub-thread way too seriously.
As far as I can see you're just engaging in personal attacks and character assassination here while not saying much in the way of argument besides, "I'm more educated than you."
I mean, you could just say something non-inflammatory like, "I'm confused, what do you mean by 'Damascean'?" and then when given an answer reply, "Oh I see, thanks. In theology circles 'Damascean' isn't really used to describe that situation."
Anyway here's a counter-argument: the Bible has long been a work of popular culture outside of religion, this isn't a theology circle or a church, and if people want to lightly abuse the stories and language in it then so what?
(I would have responded to your post where you say "strawmanning", but HN wouldn't let me. EDIT: You've now amended that post to say that the word is actually "Damascene". If you knew this, why all the drama? Something tells me that this was learned recently via Google.)