Come on, please don't read too much into the posts. Most of us are here to learn something technical about perl. The meditation section is for such semi-serious amusements. I actually found tilly's post on regular expression quite informative perl-wise, and that's enough for an up-vote. I think every language has its passionate defenders/advocates, otherwise it probably will not survive. You will likley get the same reaction if you attack java in a java board, or python in a python board.

As to feeling insecure, I think we all should be, with our indian friends and my fellow chinese working hard at a fraction of our rate, we're more in danger than our beloved languages.