Slanted Viewpoint

The following is a slightly edited copy of feedback I sent to NPR earlier this week. It’s probably a bit more harsh than they deserved. But I felt I needed to do some shaking here.

“I was truly disappointed in your coverage of the Florida evolution bill issue today. Even the title of your piece, ‘Bill in Fla. Lets Schools Teach Evolution Alternatives,’ is a distortion.

The truth is that no bill is needed to allow teaching of alternatives to evolution. Schools are already allowed to teach scientific alternatives to evolution, just as they are allowed to do so for any other theory in science.

What they are not allowed to do is teach religion in the guise of science. That is what this law is really all about. It is the latest attempt by the proponents of creationism to shoehorn the teaching of creationism in science classes. The more neutral sounding language is simply designed to circumvent the latest legal rulings against such teaching. Your report never really makes this clear.

Instead, your report makes the issue sound more like a “he said, she said” debate between Republicans and Democrats, with the Republicans on the side of academic freedom.

To describe this bill as advocating academic freedom, is like describing a bill that weakens anti-pollution regulations as a “Clean Skies Act.” It’s just double-speak. This is an anti-evolution bill, plain and simple.

Similarly, your report mentions the Discovery Institute as a source of support for the Florida legislation, but fails to mention that this same Institute was on the losing side of the Dover, PA trial that strongly ruled against teaching Intelligent Design in the classroom. Indeed, the Discovery Institute spokesman quoted in your report acknowledges that the wording of the Florida legislation was in part based on model language provided by the Institute.

Your report mentions Ben Stein’s new movie (Expelled), but fails to mention that it has received near unanimous condemnation for its promotion of knowingly false and inaccurate information. The New York Times, for example, called it “one of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time, a conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as investigative inquiry.” There is an entire Web site, Expelled Exposed, that exposes the many falsehoods in this movie.

While citing Ben Stein and his film, and quoting a person from the Discovery Institute, your report offered no statements from scientists or experts of any sort on the other side of this controversy.

In the end, your report comes off as a shameful example of ignoring the facts, and promoting the legitimacy of discredited views, apparently in a sheepish attempt to give yourself an appearance of neutrality.”

I watched Nightline’s interview with Clarence Thomas the other night. Mr. Thomas should be embarrassed to have given that interview. If he had any wisdom, he would request that all copies of it be destroyed. I know that Mr. Thomas sees it differently. He’s written a book describing how differently he sees it. That’s the problem.

Never mind that he once again asserts that Anita Hill was lying in her testimony, even though he offered no evidence to back this up. Indeed, at the time of his hearings and even now, it makes no sense to me why Anita Hill would subject herself to the public wringer that she went through if there was no truth in what she was saying. Maybe I am naive, but I believe her testimony more than I believe Thomas’s protestations. [By the way, you can read Ms. Hills' reply to Thomas here.]

The real problem however is not Anita Hill. It is that, in the interview, Thomas revealed himself to be so bogged down in his own prejudices that it is hard to imagine how he can ever deliver a fair and reasoned ruling.

First, he blames everything bad that ever happened to him, and most especially the problems he had getting confirmed, on racism. Thomas sees every slight as a racial insult. If he gets the wrong change at a restaurant, it must be because the waitress is a racist.

Now, I am white and I readily admit that I can never fully understand the currents of racism that are felt by those of color. But come on! Assuming you go with the conservative interpretation of history (which I assume Thomas does), the same thing that happened to him happened to Judge Robert Bork. In fact, it was worse; Bork did not even wind up with an appointment to the court. Bork’s very name has become a verb to describe the sort of political manuveuring that can shoot down a nomination. And, guess what? Bork isn’t black. Racism did not figure into the Bork process any more than it was a significant factor in the opposition to Thomas. Thomas sees his opposition as a coordinated racist conspiracy (even when some of his opposition came from African American groups) rather than groups of people that opposed him on ideological grounds that had nothing to do with race.

Second, he describes “liberals” (which, according to Thomas, includes pretty much anyone and everyone who opposed his nomination) as worse racists than “Southerners.” This is a pretty broad stroke to paint. Especially so when you consider than the political left wing has been at the forefront of the civil rights movement from its very beginnings. The venom with which he speaks leads me to believe that there is a likely revenge motive in his rulings. “Take that, you liberals…” I imagine he says to himself when voting on a decision. “You may have conspired to prevent my appointment. But I made it to the court anyway. And I have the rest of my life to do my best to make sure that no Supreme Court ruling ever goes your way.”

Not exactly the sort of attitude you hope to see in a Supreme Court justice. To me, his interview does nothing to repair his reputation. It only serves to confirm why he never should have been appointed to the court in the first place.

I would think it was political satire if it wasn’t so serious.

An article in today’s New York Times notes that “videos showing insurgent attacks against American troops in Iraq have steadily migrated in recent months to popular Internet video-sharing sites, including YouTube and Google Video.”

It goes on to note: “Their availability has also produced some backlash. In recent weeks, YouTube has removed dozens of the videos from its archives and suspended the accounts of some users who have posted them, a reaction, it said, to complaints from other users.”

There is an implication that at least some of the complaints have a political basis. That is, it is somehow “unpatriotic” to post these videos. More generally, it is certainly true that the Bush Administration has actively sought to prevent Americans from seeing this sort of footage.

As the Times article observes: “At a time when the Bush administration has restricted photographs of the coffins of military personnel returning to the United States and the Pentagon keeps close tabs on videotapes of combat operations taken by the news media, the videos give average Americans a level of access to combat scenes rarely available before, if ever.”

Help me out here. What exactly, in principle, is unpatriotic or immoral or whatever, about showing Americans an accurate portrayal of one aspect of what is going on in Iraq? Yes, it is true that we may disagree with the motives of some of the people making the postings, but that does not change the validity of the videos themselves.

Back in the days of the Vietnam War, scenes of combat were common on the networks’ evening news broadcasts. Historians have cited this as having had a significant effect in mobilizing the anti-war movement at the time. No doubt this is one of the reasons that the Bush administration doesn’t want such video available for the current Iraq war.

However, as many in the news media have claimed, the upcoming midterm elections will be, at least in part, a “referendum on the Iraq war.” If that is so, then shouldn’t the voters have the opportunity to be informed about what is actually taking place in Iraq? How can anyone defend the notion that seeing only the military’s Bush-approved sanitized version of events is giving voters the information they need to make an informed decision?

A spokesperson for YouTube defended the site’s removal of many of these videos, by claiming that they “display graphic depictions of violence…displayed with intent to shock or disgust…or with implied death.”

Let’s at least consider the possibility that what is taking place in Iraq is, in fact, shocking and disgusting. Certainly, there is “death;” that’s what war is about. To me, that argues for why such videos should be seen; not why they should be censored. Being shocked by the truth is one way that an electorate becomes informed.

One final note: The headline of the article in the print edition of the Times is “Now on YouTube: Iraq Videos of U.S. Troops Under Attack.” The headline on the Web site is “Anti-U.S. Attack Videos Spread on the Internet.” Huh? The Web site headline could easily be mis(?)-interpreted to imply that the videos themselves are anti-U.S. (i.e., unpatriotic) as opposed to meaning that the videos show U.S. troops under attack. I hope this was not deliberate.

A few weeks ago, Newsweek ran an article titled The New Naysayers. It was about a trio of newly-published books on atheism. The books are Breaking the Spell (by Daniel Dennett), A Letter to a Christian Nation (by Sam Harris) and The God Delusion (by Richard Dawkins). What these books, especially the latter two, have in common is aptly summarized in this quote from the article:

“Dawkins and Harris are not writing polite demurrals to the time-honored beliefs of billions; they are not issuing pleas for tolerance or moderation, but bone-rattling attacks on what they regard as a pernicious and outdated superstition…These authors have no geopolitical strategy to advance; they’re interested in the metaphysics of belief, not the politics of the First Amendment. It’s the idea of putting trust in God they object to, not the motto on the nickel.”

This is a much more aggressive and offensive (in both senses of the word) posture than atheists have taken in the past. And, overall, for this I am glad.

Atheists have for too long been far too polite in their criticism of theistic positions. I suppose it comes from being such a small minority, or at least feeling like one. It can be difficult to be assertive when you know that the result will be the virtual casting of stones upon you by almost everyone else in the community. But if ever there was a time for atheists to be willing to take this risk, the time is now, where we have a war being waged by religious fanatics in our own country against religious fanatics in other countries, with ordinary people on both sides caught in the crosshairs.

Happily, the number of atheists may be larger than is generally assumed, even here in the U.S. As Dawkins notes in the Preface to his book: “The reason so many people don’t notice atheists is that many of us are reluctant to come out. Exactly as in the case of the gay movement, the more people come out, the easier it will be for others to join them.”

Okay, Richard. You’ve convinced me (which was not that hard to do!). I am coming out. Let me start here with two personal thoughts on the subject:

The black box. One of the most insidious aspects of religion is how it manages to defend itself against attack. I don’t mean attacks from non-believers against religious individuals. I mean intellectual attacks that might otherwise get a thoughtful religious person to question their own beliefs. In this way, religious beliefs have something in common with a successful virus.

As others have also noted, religious beliefs carry their own immunity protection, making it difficult for a successful attack to be mounted against them. How else to explain the fact that Hurricane Katrina could kill thousands of people, yet a survivor may still thank God for sparing his or her life? Logically, for survivors to believe that God directly intervened to save their lives, they must also believe that God could have intervened to save everyone who died but chose not to do so. In other words, those who died were not equally deserving of God’s mercy. Even worse, there is an implication that God, being omnipotent, caused the hurricane in the first place — or at least permitted its destruction.

Every time there is a disaster, I have trouble wrapping my mind around this. A raging fire burns an entire neighborhood of houses to the ground, killing several people. Yet, interviewed on television, there will always be a surviving resident thanking God for allowing them to get out of their house alive. Why is it not equally valid to curse God for allowing the fire in the first place? Or at least for the people who died?

I am sure that most people don’t give this any thought at all — in the same way they don’t think about why the sky is blue or how their brain works. It’s just accepted. If some thought is given, it will likely lead to a reply such as “God works in mysterious ways and we cannot always understand his purpose.” But that just doesn’t cut it. By explaining everything, such statements explain nothing.

To put the matter in metaphorical terms: Suppose I had a black box and I told you that inside it was a genie who could grant your every wish. However, to get a wish granted you had to talk to the Genie directly. And to talk to the Genie, you first had to open the box. The problem is that no one has ever been able to open the box. Further, according to a scroll that is attached to the box, if someone ever does find a way to open the box, the Genie will instantly fly away, before you can even see him and certainly before you can ask him anything.

If you were to accept all this as true, based on faith, it becomes an elegant self-sustaining impenetrable belief. There is no way that anyone could ever prove you wrong. Whether or not the box is ever opened, the predicted result is the same: you never get to see the Genie and you never get to ask your wish. So the faith that the Genie exists safely survives.

If this black box faith appears to work in the same way as many religious beliefs, if it appears to mimic how a person’s belief in God is not shaken by events no matter how good nor how bad they may be, no matter what evidence and logic might otherwise dictate, this is not a coincidence.

The need for proof. When I say I do not believe in God, some people of faith ask how I can be sure that God does not exist? And why is my certain lack of belief any more defensible than their certainty that God does exist?

First of all, while I consider myself to be an atheist rather than an agnostic, I admit that I cannot prove that God does not exist. So I am not certain that God does not exist. As any scientist worth his salt knows, you can never prove the negative. I cannot prove God does not exist any more than I can prove that flying saucers from Mars are not circling the Earth at this very moment, using cloaking devices to keep us from detecting them.

But this is exactly why the burden of proof is on those who make extraordinary claims. No one (well almost no one) truly believes there are flying saucers in earth’s orbit right now. This is because there is no evidence to support such a belief. When we ask why we can find no evidence, the most reasonable explanation is that there are no flying saucers.

Just because some explanation has some very remote possibility of being true doesn’t mean that it deserves equal consideration to other explanations that are far more likely to be true. This is so whether talking about flying saucers or a God that answers our prayers.

It is especially so when you consider all the different religious belief systems in the world. Almost by definition, all but one of them must be wrong. Yet most people cling to the correctness of just one of these systems, simply based on the happenstance of what they were taught as a child. This is not the best way to evaluate truth vs. falsehood.

I often hear that religious beliefs are a matter of faith, as if this somehow absolves people from having to have defend the reasonableness of their beliefs, whether to atheists, to those of different faiths, or even to themselves. I don’t see why religion should get this free pass. It is just another way that religion works to prevent a believer from ever having to consider that they might be wrong.

Note: I wrote the above posting after finishing Harris’s book but only reading as far as Chapter 1 in Dawkins’ book. After completing the remainder of the book, I discovered that a good part of what I wrote echoes points made by Dawkins. See especially the discussion of Betrand Russell’s celestial teapot, on pages 52-54. I was not surprised. It would have been presumptuous of me to assume that I was the first person to think of these arguments. At first, this made me hesitate about publishing this item. Should I post something that is so obviously “unoriginal”? Obviously, I ultimately decided that I should. For a subject where most people have not heard these arguments even once, it can only help to have them repeated. This is a subject I will explore in more detail in my next posting.

The other night I attended a talk by Jeffrey Mason, author of When Elephants Weep among several other books. I was not familiar with his work prior to this talk. While the talk skipped around a number of topics, its main focus was on Mr. Mason’s assertions that animals have emotions akin to humans and therefore deserve a similar level of treatment and respect. This is now largely accepted as true, at least more true than had been commonly accepted years ago. I certainly concur. Additionally, I consider myself a supporter of animal rights, at least of the sort promoted by Jane Goodall if not PETA.

Still, Mr. Mason tended to make broad generalizations that went beyond what could be supported by evidence — such as when he claimed there was “nothing” you could learn about animals from studying them in a lab or that dogs should never be kept as pets because you are denying them their “ideal” existence (check out the negative reviews of his books on Amazon for less polite criticisms of his work and views). But what prompted me to write this posting was not Mr. Mason himself who, regardless of any difference in our views, I found to be a smart, witty and engaging speaker.

Rather, it was the more bizarre and extreme views expressed by members of the audience. Several people suggested that plants (trees in particular!) are as capable of emotional responses (such as fear) as animals and thus deserve similar deference. Going off in a different direction, one person noted that “it goes without saying” that dogs have telepathic capabilities and use them to communicate with humans. Given that there is no evidence of telepathic powers even in humans, it’s hard to imagine how this works. But I suppose that’s another story.

At least one audience member raised a telling point: “Where do we draw the line?” That is, where is the line that says organisms on this side have emotions and therefore need to be protected from human mistreatment while organisms on the other side do not merit this protection.

In trying to answer this question for myself, I gave some thought to the impressive HIV virus.

Here is an organism that measures less than 1/10,000 meters in diameter. It is nothing more than a couple of strands of genetic material, a few proteins and a shell to contain them. Yet, it displays what, from a human perspective, appears to be an incredible level of intelligence. Indeed, the best and brightest minds in the world have yet to find a way to defeat it, despite decades of trying. It manages to invade our immune cells and take them over, with the result that when these cells divide they produce more HIV, which in turn spreads to still more immune cells, eventually destroying enough immune cells that the body loses its ability to fight off infections. As stated on the How Stuff Works Web site : “HIV corrupts and disables the system that should be guarding against HIV.”

So where does that leave us? Should we conclude from the apparent intelligence of HIV that we need to be respectful in how we treat it? In particular, should we oppose attempts to kill the virus, in the same way that we might oppose those who attempt to kill dogs for sport or mistreat chimpanzees?

I am concerned that at least a few attendees in Mason’s audience would answer yes. But this is certainly not a conclusion I would reach. Instead, we should bear in mind that, just because an organism may behave in way that resembles an aspect of human behavior, doesn’t mean the behaviors are equivalent in any significant way. Ignoring this fact is the dark side of anthropomorphism. For another example, just because a plant emits an odor designed to attract insects (even if that odor resembles dead flesh, as in the case of stinking flowers), doesn’t mean that flowers have any conscious understanding of what they are doing or why. And it would be ludicrous to suggest that these flowers be accorded any “rights” based on their insect attractiveness.

As in any controversy, there may be fuzziness at the border line. It can sometimes be hard to draw a narrow and clear divide. In this case, individuals may not be able to agree on exactly what species fall on one side of the line and which ones go to the other. But that doesn’t mean that a line does not exist. And, even with a fuzzy line, distinctions can be quite clear once you move some distance away from the line itself.

In other words, it is not inconsistent to support the humane treatment of many animal species without having to support similar rights for trees and viruses. I’d like to think there is not much of a debate here. But after attending this talk, I am not sure. Anyway, it seems worth a mention.