Russell checks in on the twins.

I join with Jason and others in objecting to the metaphors of violence that the twins have taken to using whenever they characterise the actions or speech of the people they have constructed as opponents – all those horrible “New Atheists”, such as Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins. More specifically still, I object to the over-the-top language that has been used to describe the views of the small number of people who have, relatively recently, protested the more religion-friendly statements made on behalf of the the National Center for Science Education (NCSE).

Quite. I think the metaphors of violence have been steadily increasing in the twins’ articles lately; my guess is that that’s a reaction to the strong (but not violent) criticism they’ve been getting. It would be better if their reaction to criticism had been to try to make better arguments, or to admit that their arguments were feeble and take the whole thing back, or even to admit that their arguments were feeble and make more limited and tentative claims. But no. Instead they have simply repeated their claims more insistently and with even more pointing and naming (Dawkins! Coyne! Myers! Myers! Coyne! Dawkins!), and with the addition of increasingly violent metaphors. Let this be a lesson to us all. If we make large claims, and sensible people line up around the block to tell us why the claims are too large and too free of support, the thing for us to do is not, repeat not, just increase the volume or ratchet up the rhetoric or both.

They didn’t do enough thinking while they wrote the book. That’s their problem right there. It’s all too obvious when you read it – you think as you read, ‘Jeez, this is just thrown together, it’s like some sloppy piece of homework a kid does last thing on Sunday night and expects to get a crappy grade on.’ There is no thinking here. It’s very odd that they didn’t notice that – and that their editor didn’t notice it either.

Russell explains what Coyne and he and others have been soberly arguing about the NCSE and then adds:

Regardless whether we are right or wrong about this, we are entitled to express such a view, and it is in the public interest that we do so. The Colgate Twins have – and should continue to have – every legal right to exhort us to self-censorship, but such self-censorship is not in the public interest, and it is morally reprehensible for them to urge it … rather than simply addressing our arguments on their merits. The twins have moved the debate to a meta-level where our actual arguments are not addressed and we are forced to defend our very right to put them. This is a time-wasting distraction. Worse, we are presented as vicious and violent; we are demonised, rather than being treated as reasonable, peaceful people with a valuable role to play in public debate on serious issues.

When faced by this, we quite properly respond with anger and contempt. There is an appropriate time for those emotions – a time when they are healthy – and this is one of them. The twins have shown that they are not just reasonable people who happen to disagree with us on important issues. That would be fine. But they have no rational arguments relating to the issues of substance; instead, they are purveyors of hatred and bigotry who choose to demonise opponents. They choose to treat us as beyond the pale of substantive discussion of our ideas. Well, we are entitled to say what we think of them; we are also entitled to go on making our substantive points, patiently, civilly, and reasonably, as we have done throughout.

It will take more than these two privileged nitwits with bright, toothy smiles to get us to shut up.

Yeah.

Bryan Appleyard cuts through all the verbiage and sets everyone straight with just a few words – nineteen words, to be exact.

…the new, militant atheism of Richard Dawkins and friends…The disputes didn’t amount to much then and they don’t amount to much now. Put it like this: it is blindingly obvious that claims about a spiritual reality can neither be proved nor disproved by material means. End of argument.

End of argument! So tidy! Except for the tiny little fact that proving and disproving don’t exhaust the possibilities, so there is argument after all. Quite a lot of it, in fact. So much for ‘End of argument’ – and for bossy attempts to end arguments.

In order to make their case meaningful, the Dawkinsians must prove that religion is demonstrably a bad thing…they can’t prove this…because the persistence of religion in all human societies strongly suggests that, even in the most basic Darwinian terms, it has been good for us as a species.

Uh huh, and the persistence of rape and murder and general violence and paranoia and crabbiness in all human societies also strongly suggests that it has been good for us as a species, does it? No complexities there? No issues about what is good for the individual, not to mention the gene, not being good for ‘us as a species’? No issues about adaptations to one environment persisting into a different environment? Nothing to indicate that that claim might be a little simplistic?

The point is not how the watch was designed but the fact that it is designed. Some process has led to its existence and it is that process that matters because the mechanism and purpose of the watch clearly make it different in kind from, say, rocks. Equally, humans also require a different type of explanation from rocks. It may be natural selection or it may be some innate force in the universe. Either way, it is reasonable to associate this force with morality and God.

Or immorality and Devil. Or gymnastics and Energy. Or technopop and Noise. Or – you get the idea.

This is an entirely decent and persuasive argument against the intolerance of the atheists, in that it shows religion makes perfect sense, and getting irritated because you think it’s “untrue” is just silly.

Okay, I give up, this stuff is too sophisticated, I can’t keep up with it.

Now it’s Michael Ruse’s turn to do the ‘atheists are evil’ routine using the numbingly familiar ‘atheists are evil’ weapon of shameless exaggeration and misrepresentation. In short, like all his pathetic allies in this tawdry campaign, he paints the people he dislikes as violent and aggressive when all in the world they are is verbally explicit.

In the past few years, we have seen the rise and growth of a group that the public sphere has labeled the “new atheists” – people who are aggressively pro-science, especially pro-Darwinism, and violently anti-religion of all kinds…

‘Violently’ – in the sense of coming right out and saying that they think religion is a bad thing in many ways. That’s a pretty strained sense, if you think about it. That is to say, it’s a cheap trick, and unworthy of someone who says at the outset that he is a philosopher. Philosophers aren’t supposed to use exaggeration to do the work of argument. That’s a no-no in the trade. Ask anyone.

Recently, it has been the newly appointed director of the NIH, Francis Collins, who has been incurring their hatred.

No – their disagreement. Surely a philosopher ought to know the difference.

Then he complains of Dawkins Coyne and Myers (catch them in the Pineapple Lounge tonight at 9:30) saying things about him, then he explains why they do:

This invective is all because, although I am not a believer, I do not think that all believers are evil or stupid, and because I do not think that science and religion have to clash.

No, it’s because you say stupid things like that. They ‘do not think that all believers are evil or stupid,’ and they don’t over-simplify that way, either.

I engage with believers – I don’t accept their beliefs but I respect their right to have them.

But that just describes us – the “New Atheists.” That exactly describes us. We respect people’s right to have beliefs – duh – but we don’t accept the beliefs. So – the implication that we don’t is just yet more misrepresentation.

Jason Rosenhouse points out another way of looking at the matter:

What is so significant about the New Atheist books is the sheer volume of books that they sold. They have revealed that to a far greater extent than was previously realized, there is a hunger in America for books written from a non-religious perspective. That is a momentous accomplishment, and one that should warm the hearts of anyone who cares about promoting science and reason.

Quite; and in doing that, they have also made it easier for atheists to be frankly as opposed to covertly atheists. That too is a momentous accomplishment, and a useful one. That is one reason it is irritating to have reactionaries telling us ‘No no no no no, you have to be covert about it, all this frankness is a disaster and an outrage, get back in that closet at once.’

This is all just standard scapegoating from M and K. It’s so much easier to focus on a handful of writers who arrived on the scene just in the last few years and to ignore the deeper cultural forces that have tended to make America more hostile to science than other industrialized countries.

It’s scapegoating and worse – it’s become a full-throttle campaign to work up hatred and rage against atheism and atheists. Mooney and Kirshenbaum may not even realize that’s what it is, but if they don’t, they’re being very stupid and very reckless. They should be more aware and more careful. They should realize what kind of language they are using, and stop doing it. They should not, for instance, say that ‘The atheist biologist Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago, for instance, has drawn much attention by assaulting the center’s Faith Project’ – but that’s exactly what they do say. That’s very loaded language – loaded, provocative, misleading, and potentially dangerous. Like Jason, I find that vexing.

The twins are back with a vengeance. They are worse than ever. It is as if they have swallowed some terrible slow-acting Kool-aid that is dissolving their brains in tiny increments. Where will they be by October?! Curled on the floor drooling?

It’s the same old thing, only worse – the sequiturs more non, the rhetoric more cranked up and deceptive, the petulance and finger-pointing more brazen.

…assault on their faith…straight into a world of moral depravity and meaninglessness…in-your-face atheist touting evolution…unending polarization around evolution and religion…

Pause to note that Mooney and Kirshenbaum themselves are working energetically and overtime to foster and increase the very ‘unending polarization’ they complain of.

…no tolerating nonscientific beliefs…attack and belittle religious believers, sometimes using highly abrasive language…moderate scientists…the hallowed institutions of American science…politically, spiritually and practically they see no need to fight…regularly blasted for it by the New Atheists…the atheist biologist Jerry Coyne has drawn much attention by assaulting the center’s Faith Project…Coyne is once again following the lead of Dawkins…denounces the NCSE…

Then they finish up by giving in inaccurate account of Charles Darwin’s reply to Edward Aveling then telling us (‘the New Atheists’) we ‘ought to deeply consider’ the difference between Darwin and Dawkins. ?! Why ought we? We don’t belong to the church of either one of them. We know how to think all by ourselves without any training wheels. Mooney and Kirshenbaum cannot say as much.

Update: I’m still banned from commenting on their site. Last time they just left my comments in ‘moderation’ forever, but this time they’ve simply deleted them (after first trapping them in moderation). They’re a sleazy pair.

I wouldn’t want you to think I’ve forgotten the twins. Chris popped his head around the door the other day to say ‘Here’s another favorable review’ (funny how both of them either ignore the bad reviews or pretend they were good reviews). While he was at it he also said ‘and here’s someone who thinks what we think – no actually he said her comment was ‘revealing’ and then said ‘It seems to me that Hannah is our ally in the cause of better public acceptance of science–and I for one, am glad for it.’ In other words, same old thing: keep ignoring what critics say and keep doggedly repeating what the twins say in the hopes that sheer repetition will convince the unconvinced.

Here’s a news flash: it won’t.

Hannah’s comment goes like so (you could write it yourself without even looking):

[A]theists have as much capacity for creating dogma as do religious folks. That is clearly evident in reading comments here. I will say, once again, that it’s insulting to continually read from progressive commenters here and other places that I must be a “crazy” who believes in “fairy tales”, etc. because I am a Christian. For the record, I have a degree in science (from a highly-regarded state university known for its science programs), have worked as a research assistant, am always trying to learn more about the natural world. The Christian denomination I belong to and many others are not like the fundies, and in fact are appalled at what those folks are doing. Many of us speak out against their un-Christian and other actions that harm their children (re education), the country and the world.

So…she thinks it’s insulting to read that she must be a crazy because she believes in fairy tales because she’s a Christian – but she doesn’t mind calling other Christians ‘the fundies’ and ‘un-Christian.’ What, exactly, is the difference? What is the relevant variable here?

Is it whose ox is being gored? Yes; pretty obviously. So she forfeited her moral standing to complain about being insulted.

But more to the point, it’s a silly complaint anyway. Suppose commenters here and there said that people who believe in Santa Claus or Loki or parking angels are crazy. That would be insulting to such people – and that would be just too bad. If you believe fanciful things for no good reason, then you just have to put up with people in the wider world saying those beliefs are silly. Your best friend may humour you, your siblings and colleagues perhaps will too, but you can’t expect all of humanity to oblige. You just can’t. In the public realm, ideas and beliefs have to stand on their merits. If they can’t – then there’s something wrong with them.

This is obvious in the case of beliefs in Santa Claus and parking angels. Generalized discussion of the absurdity of belief in Santa or parking angels doesn’t generally trigger outrage about militant fundamentalist new aclausists. Christian beliefs, like other religious beliefs, are not fundamentally different from other such fantasy-based beliefs, but people in Christian regions think they are because of long habit and social norms. That’s an illusion. It’s an illusion that ought to be patiently chipped away at until it is gone. It’s not an illusion that ought to be cherished and cuddled and pandered to.

Another comment from Eric.

Based on the linked interview, it seems pretty clear that Karen Armstrong never really left the convent. The mind has mountains, frightful, sheer, no man fathomed, as Hopkins said.

It also has walls. Take her claim that “The golden rule is that you treat everyone with absolute respect and you don’t exclude any creature, even a mosquito, from your radius of concern.” You have to have put up a wall somewhere to be able to say this. These are just empty words, and they reveal something about her use of language. Laurie Taylor says that he noticed “how carefully Karen constructs her sentences, her care with words, her capacity to alight on a perfect phrase with all the effortless delicacy of a sparrow on a washing line.” Well, but that’s not what she does. She sermonises. She uses empty words that “sound good”, that seem to be moved by something deep, but really they skate over the surface of things. I don’t know about you, but I swat mosquitoes! So much for radius of concern.

She sermonises. Every clergyperson has a stock of words and catch phrases that they can use ad libitum whenever the need arises. Listen to a long Baptist prayer, and you’ll hear all the stock phrases making an appearance, and everytime that minister or pastor is asked to say a prayer, the stock phrases are repeated over and over again, through dozens of prayers.

Or take the idea of the Hindus who bow to each other, and thereby acknowledge the divine in each person. It’s like everything that is done by religious people. Whether it has significance or not, it will be given it. Take the use of the word ‘thou’, used traditionally in direct address to God. During the time when liturgies were being modernised, ‘thou’ gave way to ‘you’. People objected, because ‘thou’ speaks of respectful distance. But of course that’s exactly the opposite of what was intended, because ‘thou’ in English is like ‘Du’ in German, used only with your closest friends, and in prayer. It communicated informality and intimacy. But that was only a rationalisation too.

Or take the claim that religious rituals are meant “to remind you that the world is not yours to do with as you choose.” No. The rituals developed because they were believed to be commanded by God. They were acts of obedience. However, environment is in, so it’s in in religion as well. The rituals only make sense in terms of some absolute command. Why would anyone do silly, ritual things otherwise? To remind you that you can’t do whatever you want with the world?

Nonsense. Listen to what she says: “Writing and study are my prayers.” It’s a way of “going beyond” and bringing “about a state of ecstasy.” She’s now like the Jews, because this is what they do when they study. No, it isn’t, because Jews do it because they are studying the words and thoughts of God, and this brings on ecstasy. The recitation of the Koran, says Hitchens, seems able to bring on exalted spiritual states. Yes, not because of the Arabic, though, however beautiful and mellifluous, but because it is thought to speak the words of a god.

“Karen Armstrong is a persuasive talker and writer.” Yes, she means to be. She’s a preacher. She’s picked up the smooth effortlessness of the born preacher, the cadence, the repeated catch phrases, the platitudes. She picked it up in the church. And yes. Of course she’s persuasive. But it doesn’t take us beyond, because it is focused on itself. Going beyond is the illusion of all effective preaching, an illusion of all effective religious language. That’s why changing it is so challenging to the religious. It bursts the bubble of illusion. Karen Armstrong knows the secret.

You can even square the circle and seem to be making sense. Consider her claim that “doctrines are a peculiar disease of western Christianity.” First, this makes a nonsense of her claim that religious beliefs are the effect of modernity. But, second, trinitarianism, christology, and the relationship of the persons of the Trinity were thrashed out in the east, with people like Gregory of Nazianzus, Athanasius, Arius, etc.., in an argument that was scarcely understood in the west. How christology was understood did derive in large part from the way that Christ was adored in popular devotion and liturgy. But the heart of the argument was ontological, and how the being of God and the being of Christ and the being of the Spirit were understood. It is ridiculous to suppose otherwise, and to say that doctrine was a particular concern of the west is nonsense (as Bentham might say) on stilts!

I was doing some research for an article earlier and found an interview of Karen Armstrong from a few years ago.

“I’m off to America tomorrow. I have a little book on the Buddha coming out in paperback, so I’m going to a literary festival to talk about it. Which is a nice rest from Islamic fundamentalism.” Was she regarded as an expert on Islam in the States? “Well, it has turned out a bit like that. I was supposed to be flying to America to take up a post at Harvard on September 12 in 2001 and was actually packing when the terrible news came through. So, when I got to Harvard I never even had a chance to set foot in the library. I was continually on the radio and writing articles. Vanity Fair and GQ and Time wanted huge articles on fundamentalism. I had to give two talks to the American Congress, to Senate and to the UN. Suddenly people wanted to know what Islam was.”

And the only person who could tell them was Karen Armstrong? Because Karen Armstrong is the only English-speaker in the world who knows anything about Islam, and there is no English-speaker in the world who knows more about Islam than Karen Armstrong? No, and no. Why was everyone demanding her then? Who knows – number of sales, name recognition, the thing where if you talk on the radio once then you become the person who talks on the radio every time after that – something along those lines. Whatever it is, it’s irritating. It’s especially irritating that even the US Congress and the UN couldn’t do better.

But that’s just a warm-up – the really irritating part comes later.

I don’t, though, think of myself as an ambassador for Islam. What I really want to do is make a plea to my own culture. And that began a long time ago during the Rushdie affair when I noticed that some of the liberal defenders of Rushdie segued very easily from a denunciation of the Ayatollah to an out-and-out denunciation of Islam. I began to think that we had learned nothing from the 20th century because it was that sort of cultivated inaccuracy that led to the death camps.

Notice the way she simply assumes (and assumes that Laurie Taylor will also assume) that ‘denunciation’ (which being interpreted means criticism) of Islam is bad and wrong and illegitimate. Then notice that she compares rabid loathing of Jews to criticism/’denunciation’ of Islam – as if they were exactly the same kind of thing and led in exactly the same direction. On the one hand a group of people, on the other hand a religion with its attendant ideas and rules and taboos.

But the tendency to read the Bible or the Koran as though they were literal texts, holy encyclopaedias where you look up information about God is an unfortunate offshoot of modernity…Religion is an art form. And it has always turned to art when it wants to express its truths, to architecture and music and poetry and dance. Theology should be poetry…[I]t should also fill you with the same sense of wonder and the same intimations of transcendence as when you read a great poem. Like poetry, religion is an attempt to express the inexpressible.

Yes, in Armstrong-land, but in the real world, that’s not what most believers mean by religion, to put it mildly.

Laurie Taylor suggests that that is a brand of self-serving nonsense that clerics and apologists fall back on when talking to skeptics. Armstrong is unmoved.

But religion was not about beliefs until the 18th century. That was the time when faith started to be equated with believing things instead of putting your trust in something. Until then religion had always been about doing things rather than believing things.

Really – then what was the Inquisition all about? What were the wars of religion about? What was Luther so agitated about? What were the post-Luther popes so worked up about? Why was there an Albigensian crusade? Why was there an Index?

Laurie Taylor asks related questions, but he claims to find Armstrong persuasive anyway. Well not me.

A pretty story.

After being feted in Britain for exposing the appalling abuse of children accused of being witches, a Nigerian charity is apparently being intimidated by its own government. The headquarters of Child Rights and Rehabilitation Network (CRARN), which works with the British fund Stepping Stones Nigeria, was raided by a group of men claiming to be police officers earlier this month…These shadowy figures then went on to beat children kept in the care of the charity after they protested against the intimidation…It has since become apparent that the police were accompanied by a lawyer from Lagos, Gary says. This is the same lawyer who has been representing Evangelist Helen Ukpabio in the law suits that she has filed against CRARN, Stepping Stones Nigeria and Channel Four since the broadcast of the internationally acclaimed documentary film – Saving Africa’s Witch Children. Stepping Stones allege the police, conspiring with Ms Ukpabio, have created a trumped-up charge of fraud to frighten Sam and his colleagues and stop their life-saving work.

Stepping Stones Nigeria on child witches.

Stepping Stones Nigeria does not wish to denounce any faith organisation. However the role of the church, especially some of the new Pentecostals, in spreading the belief in child witches cannot be underestimated. There are numerous so-called pastors in the region who are wrongly branding children as ‘witches’ mainly for economic self gain and personal recognition.

Helen Ukpabio apparently being one of the worst.

Supporters of Helen Akpabio stormed the Calabar Cultural Center today with the intent of disrupting a child’s rights conference being sponsored by Stepping Stones Nigeria and the Nigerian Humanist Movement. The crowd of over 150 fanatics stormed into the hall chanting religious slogans and intimidating the small crowd, which they outnumbered by more than 5 to 1.

A very pretty story all around.

Andrew Brown has no shame.

[Sam[ Harris has had an op-ed in the New York Times, in which, in his bold and exhilarating way, he makes the case against appointing a Christian scientist, Francis Collins, to the important American government post of Director of the National Institutes of Health. This is not because Collins is a bad scientist…But he is, unashamedly, a Christian. He’s not a creationist, and he does science without expecting God to interfere. But he believes in God; he prays, and this is for Harris sufficient reason to exclude him from a job directing medical research.

That’s false. It’s flatly, demonstrably, brazenly, offensively, in your facely, unprofessionally, what journalistic ethics?y false. The fact that Collins believes in God and prays is precisely not for Harris sufficient reason to exclude him from the job at the NIH. Harris says very clearly what makes him ‘so uncomfortable about his nomination’ and it’s emphatically not just that he believes in God and prays. It’s right there in black and white, words on the page, easy to understand – yet Andrew Brown feels free to say he wrote something quite different. Why is this okay? Because it’s CiF ‘Belief’ and therefore there are no rules?

Harris explains his worry very clearly. He quotes Collins on god and morality, then

Why should Dr. Collins’s beliefs be of concern? There is an epidemic of scientific ignorance in the United States. This isn’t surprising, as very few scientific truths are self-evident, and many are counterintuitive. It is by no means obvious that empty space has structure or that we share a common ancestor with both the housefly and the banana. It can be difficult to think like a scientist. But few things make thinking like a scientist more difficult than religion.

He then expands on why. By no stretch of the imagination does it boil down to ‘he believes in God; he prays.’ Yet Brown said, precisely, that it did – ‘this is for Harris sufficient reason to exclude him.’ He then goes on to say

Of course this is a fantastically illiberal and embryonically totalitarian position that goes against every possible notion of human rights and even the American constitution. If we follow Harris, government jobs are to be handed out on the basis of religious beliefs or lack thereof.

Then at the end he works himself up into a good old name-calling ‘demonizing’ fit.

[M]ilitant atheism, of the sort that would deny people jobs for their religions beliefs, doesn’t actually believe in real science at all, any more than it believes in reason. Rather, it uses “science” and “reason” as tribal labels, and “religion” as a term for witchcraft.

Whip that bogey – that terrifying militant atheism that would deny people jobs for their religions beliefs even though that’s not what Harris said.

It’s really interesting that many of the more vituperative atheist-haters – Madeleine Bunting, Chris Hedges, Mark Vernon, and certainly Andrew Brown – seem to be incapable of accurately reporting what atheists actually say. ‘A term for witchcraft’ indeed.

Good old Prince Cholls – he plans to question publicly the Food Standards Agency’s conclusion that expensive organic food is no better for you than produce from intensive farms. His dedication to keeping his subjects entertained is impressive. (His care for their health not so much. And as for his critical thinking skills…)

“This study hasn’t changed His Royal Highness’s views one bit,” one of the Prince’s friends tells me. “Charles thinks it’s ludicrous to suggest that vegetables treated with chemicals or meat raised with antibiotics can be as good for you as proper food.”

And he comes to this conclusion via…well they don’t say.

Lord Melchett, who is the policy director of the Soil Association and a close ally of the Prince, tells me: “He believes in organic food.”

Ah. Well if it’s a matter of belief then there’s no more to be said.

Got a broken leg? Hepatitis? Chapped lips? Have you tried some nice medicine?

A pharmacy supplying homeopathic remedies to the Royal Family…, Ainsworths, has been accused of “quackery” for supplying bottles of pills labelled as “Swine Flu Formula” for people suffering from the disease…Ainsworths has been granted a Royal Warrant by the Queen and Prince Charles, who are both said to be supporters of homeopathy…Its treatment is in the form of small “sugar pills”, which dissolve under the tongue. It is sold in £7 bottles, containing 50 pills, which can be bought on the company’s website or over the counter of its central London store. The label on the bottles reads: “SFF (Swine Flu Formula). Treatment: One to be dissolved in the mouth three times a day until improved.”

£7 for fifty little sugar pills! What is the other £6.95 for? Overhead? Malpractice insurance? A day in Brighton?

A Telegraph reporter got a ‘pharmacist’ at Ainsworths to sell him some. She said ‘the pills would help the body “overcome the symptoms” of the virus.’

David Colquhoun and others pointed out that this is dangerous bullshit. Tony Pinkus, the director of Ainsworths, on the other hand, said something rather different.

“At Ainsworths we cater for our many homeopathic customers who have requested a remedy to alleviate the symptoms of swine flu. Most of our customers are people who routinely use homeopathy and find it a satisfactory alternative to allopathic or conventional medicine and are exercising their freedom of choice.”

They ‘cater for’ their customers who have asked for a remedy to alleviate the symptoms of swine flu by giving them a very expensive bottle of sugar pills? That’s a funny kind of ‘catering for.’ At that rate I could go to a restaurant and request a remedy to alleviate my hunger, and be given a brick, or a hank of magenta cashmere, or a hand-painted Breton soup bowl. And the bit about freedom of choice is very patriotic and nice, of course, but it’s a damn cynical way to defend quackery. I’m free to choose a hank of magenta cashmere for breakfast lunch and dinner, too, but if I keep it up I will either starve or die of wool-poisoning, so people who peddle me the stuff are being…unhelpful.

“The remedy is available on request and we do not advertise or encourage people to buy it. We also make it clear that homeopathy can be used in conjunction with conventional medicines and do not feel we are ignoring or going against any governmental guidelines.”

Now that’s interesting. They’re in the business, but they do not advertise or encourage people to buy it. Well why not? Because it doesn’t work? Because it doesn’t do anything? Because it’s just common or garden sugar? And yet they do put a label saying ‘SFF (Swine Flu Formula) Treatment’ on the bottle.

Dr Catherine Zollman, a Fellow of the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health and a GP in Bristol, said she uses homeopathy in her every day care of patients. “Homeopathic treatment can be helpful where conventional medicine doesn’t have much to offer and there are ongoing symptoms in the patient which are causing distress. But it does have to be used with care and good assessment where serious progressive illness or disease has been ruled out.”

Helpful in what sense? Consoling for chronic pain or other misery when ‘conventional’ medicine isn’t working? ‘Helpful’ could mean anything or nothing. But even this Fellow of the prince’s whatsit is careful to warn against using it for anything real and treatable.

I would say more, but mindful of Simon Singh and the British Chiropractic Association, I will let you work it out for yourselves.

I mentioned that a commenter at The Intersection said I was lying. Tim Broderick, he is; here’s the central part of what he said:

When Ophelia Benson claims through her “questions” that Chris and Sheril have no evidence she is not telling the truth. It’s one thing for people who haven’t read the book to assert this – she has the book. So let me say that again and more emphatically: She is lying.

Here is the question from her own site: “How do you know overt atheism causes people to be hostile to science? How does that work? What is your evidence?”

From page 173 to page 185 there are detailed endnotes with citations to back up the assertions in Chapter 8…Benson doesn’t just disagree. She lies and asserts that they have nothing to back up their assertions.

Asking questions is not asserting, but never mind. He’s wrong on the substance too. This bit of chapter 8 for instance:

If the goal is to create an America more friendly toward science and reason, the combativeness of the New Atheists is strongly counterproductive. If anything, they work in ironic combination with their dire enemies, the anti-science conservative Christians who populate the creation science and intelligent design movements, to ensure we’ll continue to be polarized over subjects llike the teaching of evolution when we don’t have to be. America is a very religious nation, and if forced to choose between faith and science, vast numbers of Americans will select the former. The New Atheists err in insisting that such a choice needs to be made. Atheism is not the logical outcome of scientific reasoning, any more than intelligent design is a necessary corollary of religious faith. A great many scientists believe in God with no sense of internal contradiction, just as many religious believers accept evolution as the correct theory to explain the development, diversity, and inter-relatedness of life on Earth. The New Atheists, like the fundamentalists they so despise, are setting up a false dichotomy that can only damage the cause of scientific literacy for generations to come. [pp 97-8]

I would like to rip into the argument there, but won’t. (See Jason Rosenhouse on the subject.) But what I will do is point out that there is no endnote for that paragraph. None. Zero. You can easily check – the notes are on page 174. They go from one related to a passage on page 97 before that paragraph begins, to one on a passage on page 98 after that paragraph ends. That whole paragraph is note-free. So Tim Broderick was wrong.

The closest thing to a note for the overarching claim comes much later, for a passage on page 104 – and it’s worthless.

In fact, education researchers have found that defusing the tension over science and religion facilitates learning about evolution. “I submit that anti-religious rehtoric is counter-productive. It actually hampers science education,” a biologist at Davis and Elkins College in West Virgina. In Stover’s view, students who feel that evolution is a threat to their beliefs will not “want to learn,” and only reconiliatory discussion can open them up to evolution. (p. 183)

That’s just someone saying something, in the same way they are saying something. It doesn’t count as evidence. It could illustrate, or amplify, or clarify, but it can’t support.

So – are we clear? I wasn’t lying. M&K don’t provide support for all of their assertions, and some of what they purport to offer is actually worthless.

Austin Dacey, in The Secular Conscience.

“In the United States, secular and liberal have become dirty words…Best sellers allege that liberalism is a dogmatic faith, a critique popularized by evangelical leaders in the 1980s…When a rare few secularists push back against religious belief in print, they are branded – often by fellow seculars and liberal religionists – ‘dogmatic,’ ‘evangelical,’ ‘militant’ and ‘fundamentalist’ atheists. [examples in an endnote] Their scandalous premise is that religion is an urgent topic of conversation and therefore subject to the intellectual and moral standards of all serious conversation.” [p 11]

One thing that’s interesting about this is that Austin Dacey was one participant in something called ScienceDebate2008. Lawrence Krauss was another. Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum were two others, and the experience was, they say, ‘the central inspiration’ for their book [UA p x]. It’s interesting that Austin Dacey says things – many things – that are just the kind of thing that Mooney and Kirshenbaum consider The Enemy and attack in every mass media outlet that will have them, which is most of them. He could be describing M&K themselves in that passage above.

Or there’s this, in which Dacey quotes Nicholas Kristof talking about the ‘dismal consequences’ of religious influence and then rebuking ‘a sneering tone about religious Christianity itself.’ Dacey says

“Secular liberals are being asked to perform an act of cognitive contortionism, to object to the ‘consequences’ of conservative religion without objecting to the moral precepts that cause them.” [p 13]

Or this:

“Secular liberals must lift the gag order on ethics, values, and religion in public debate. We can no longer insist on precluding controversial moral and religious claims from public conversation…This means understanding and avoiding the Liberty Fallacy. Susceptibility to public criticism is the price of admission to public debate. Religious conscience does not get in free. Many secular liberals have convinced themselves that freedom of belief entails respect for all religions, and that respect means refraining from criticism. But that is not respect; it’s just blanket acceptance, even disregard.” [p 18]

Mooney and Kirshenbaum please note.

Thought for the day, from Owen Flanagan’s The Problem of the Soul (no, he doesn’t think there is such a thing as the soul).

“As for my ironist friends who think that science is no more objective than any other way of thinking, I have observed in most of them a fairly deep ignorance about science. Being around intellectuals who know almost nothing about science does not particularly bother me, except when they pronounce on the nature of science. My view is that if you are going to claim that all forms of discourse are equally subjective, you better have real familiarity with all the forms of discourse you aim to level.” p. 54

Now sometimes a cunning plan turns out to be not so cunning after all. Mooney’s cunning plan of banning me from commenting on his blog so that my unkind questions and objections would no longer appear there is going to turn out to be a mistake, because it means I will post them here instead. This is penny wise and pound foolish. A comment on his blog would just get lost in the clutter of kwokkery and other nonsense there, and would not be on the main page in any case. A post here is on the main page for a month. So you see…he should have just settled for letting me ask questions there. The morally bankrupt path Does Not Pay.

They have yet another article, this time a long feature in The Nation. The first part of it is actually good – but at the end, oblivious to the many warnings and shouts of ‘Watch out! Danger!’, they return to their petty childish feud with PZ Myers yet again. They make fools of themselves yet again.

Accurate science and the most stunning misinformation thrive side by side–anti-vaccine advocates, anti-evolutionists and global warming deniers all have highly popular websites and blogs, and there is no reason to think good scientific information is somehow beating them back.

This problem was on full display in the 2008 Weblog Awards, a popularity contest that featured a tight race for Best Science Blog. The two leading contestants: PZ Myers’s Pharyngula, the online clearinghouse for confrontational atheism, and Watts Up With That, written by former TV meteorologist Anthony Watts, a skeptic of the scientific conclusion that human activities have caused global warming. Both sites are polemical: one assaults religious faith; the other constantly attacks mainstream understanding of climate change.

In the end, Watts Up With That defeated Pharyngula, 14,150 votes to 12,238. The “science” contest came down to the religion-basher versus the misinformation-machine, and the misinformation-machine won. That speaks volumes about the form science commentary takes on the Internet.

No it doesn’t. It says almost nothing about the form science commentary takes on the Internet. Furthermore, PZ is not just a ‘religion-basher’; as not-yet-banned commenters pointed out, he does science too. Furthermore again, M&K omitted to mention that he told readers not to vote for Pharyngula because of the inclusion of pseudo-science in the contest. This is all too typical of their incomplete malicious distorted ‘reporting’ on people they don’t like.

Now that’s going to sit here festering for all of August. Such a pity.

I wasn’t going to inflict any more Mooney-Kirshenbaum nonsense on you, but now Mooney (at least) has taken a couple more steps further into the moral slime, and I feel it My Duty to record the fact. I think it’s time to declare Chris Mooney officially morally bankrupt. He’s not just wrong – he’s doing bad things.

On that post I criticized on Monday, a commenter announced that I was lying.

When Ophelia Benson claims through her “questions” that Chris and Sheril have no evidence she is not telling the truth. It’s one thing for people who haven’t read the book to assert this – she has the book.
So let me say that again and more emphatically: She is lying.

Here is the question from her own site: “How do you know overt atheism causes people to be hostile to science? How does that work? What is your evidence?”
From page 173 to page 185 there are detailed endnotes with citations to back up the assertions in Chapter 8. [details of citations] It’s one thing to disagree with the premises the authors put forward. That’s fine – you’ve provided links to reasonable reviews that do disagree with parts of your book.

Benson doesn’t just disagree. She lies and asserts that they have nothing to back up their assertions.

You know (if you’re regular readers, at least) how loaded that language is. You know we don’t allow people to use that language here because it could get us (or, worse, just Jeremy) sued. That fact hints at a certain moral weight to the language. That’s not news – duels have been fought and brawls have been brawled over such language. I take very strong exception to the accusation. The notorious flamer John Kwok repeatedly accused me of lying (on the same kinds of grounds, i.e. ridiculously flimsy) last week, and I emailed SK to say please delete (it was her thread), and she did. This time things went differently. One, I did a couple of posts denying the charge and explaining what was wrong with the claim. Two, I emailed both bloggers to say please delete.

The comments were blocked; the email was ignored.

I emailed again later, after other comments were let out of moderation and posted (one can tell because new comments appear interleaved with old ones); I also tried again to post the comments. Still nothing.

I tried to comment in reply to people addressing me, this morning, and was unable even to do that – so I tried to post a comment saying ‘Good morning. Have a nice day’ and was unable to do that. So this is the state of play: a libelous comment announcing that I am lying sits there, and my denials are blocked, and I am now apparently banned entirely.

That’s morally disgusting. And there’s no way to get it on the record other than by saying it here, so I’m saying it here. Chris Mooney is morally bankrupt.

Here are the comments I made, that Mooney won’t let me post:

It’s libelous to say that people are lying when they’re not. I’m not lying. It’s not lying to ask questions. I’ve read the endnotes (obviously), and I’ve never said that M & K don’t have references; I’ve said they don’t offer evidence or argument. So have other people. So far, M&K haven’t offered any, they’ve just repeated their assertions.

Notice I’ve never said M & K are lying. I’ve flatly contradicted them at times, for instance when they claimed that Chris “tried to engage in a civil debate with Dr. Coyne” – but I’ve never said they are lying. That’s because I don’t know that they are – for all I know they believe every word they say.

Then

“From page 173 to page 185 there are detailed endnotes with citations to back up the assertions in Chapter 8.”

I’ve just gone through them again. There are citations and some attempts at argument, but they don’t back up all the assertions in chapter 8. In particular they don’t back up the one I asked about in the question you quote. I didn’t ask ‘how do you know science and religion are compatible?’ As you point out, I asked ‘How do you know overt atheism causes people to be hostile to science? How does that work? What is your evidence?’ The citations and attempts at argument in the endnotes don’t back up that assertion. It looks to me as if M and K think that assertion is so self-evidently true that they didn’t need to back it up – in other words that it never occurred to them to back it up because it never occurred to them that it was an assertion. They appear to think it’s just an obvious fact.

That’s it. As you can see – there’s nothing salacious or blasphemous or libelous, or even rude or repetitive or conspicuously tedious, at least not compared to comments by several regulars there. Yet I’m not allowed to say it – even though it is in response to a baseless charge that I am lying.

To repeat – this is morally disgusting.

Barbara Drescher tells another story of Mooney’s Short Way With Dissenters.

(I’m not including SK in this because she did delete the accusations of lying last week.)

Eric MacDonald made a comment that needs to be on the main page:

In their little piece on civility, where Barbara Forrest is quoted as saying “Be nice”, Mooney and Kirshenbaum say this:

Religion is a very private matter, and given that liberal religionists support church-state separation, we really have no business questioning their personal way of making meaning of the world.

This is false. Religion is not a very private matter. It is a very public matter, and it is increasingly more and more public. How people make sense of the world, religiously, almost always seeks to impose itself on others.

Religion does not respect boundaries. For a long time it was thought that religion had retreated to the private sphere, but it had not. Religious priorities were still reflected in law and social custom, but as soon as these came to be questioned, and in many cases overturned, religions began, once again, to strive to re-establish the religious ‘foundations’ of the culture. The introduction of an unreconstructed Islam into jurisdictions traditionally dominated by Christianity has led to renewed attempts to reassert Christian dominance.

The same thing is happening with respect to science. It is astonishing and disturbing to see someone with the apparent stature (in the scientific community) of Francis Collins making childish arguments for the consistency of science and (what turns out to be a gasp-makingly conservative form of) Christianity. This should be seen as a very deep cultural crisis. By all means tell religious yarns if you are afraid of the dark, but don’t bring them into scientific contexts, as though they had anything of value to offer. They don’t. In fact, what they offer, as Jerry Coyne points out, is only a blurring of boundaries.

Religion does not respect boundaries. Like any other form of monolithism religion is quite prepared to mix private and public, empiricism with superstition, law with personal choice. If M&K don’t understand this, then they do not understand religion and its dangers. It is a danger to anything that requires critical thinking. There is no place for humility or even etiquette here, whether or not science can or cannot prove a negative. What science can and should say is that it has no need of this hypothesis. In fact, I would hazard the guess that if there is a problem about scientific literacy, this is related to the fact that, for many, religion provides the illusion of knowing already. Making it clear that religion is something private – as private as poetry and considerably less helpful – and that the only reliable ways of knowing involve critical rationality and empirical evidence, might help to separate things that, in public discourse, are too often conflated.

Gould was wrong about NOMA, but he had the right idea. Religion needs to be put in its place. It has no relation to science whatsoever, and, despite its claims to the contrary, no special moral authority. Once this is clearly understood, the religious are free to tell each other stories, if it helps them get through the night. They may even imagine, in private, that they are talking about real things, but there is no reason for others to believe this, and lots of reasons why others should insist, and insist again, that religions must know their limits, and that they should not be taken seriously when they try to speak with a public voice.

Mooney and Kirshenbaum have struck again. They’ve written a piece on their blog telling some entity unattractively called ‘the New Atheist blogosphere’ why TNAB is wrong and M&K are right. It’s a repulsive read, because (as usual but more so) it’s so willfully blind, so obstinately determined not to heed reasonable objections but instead to ‘frame’ them as irrational outbursts from Declared Enemies.

They’ve created this bind for themselves, of course. They spent a large chunk of their very short book blaming ‘New Atheists’ for American ignorance of science, and then labeled all criticism as coming from ‘New Atheists’ and therefore (in ways not always specified) tainted and wrong and thus safe to ignore. The problem there is that they’re getting criticism from some very clever and knowledgeable people, so they’re ignoring criticism that they really (for the sake of their cognitive health, though perhaps not for the reputation of their book) should pay attention to.

But they’re not, and in the process of not, they are misrepresenting both themselves and their critics – which causes their critics to think even less of them. This is not because of some ‘New Atheist’ cognitive distortion.

For several months, Chris tried to engage in a civil debate with Dr. Coyne about the merits of “accommodationism.”

Chris did no such thing. ‘Engage in a civil debate with Dr. Coyne’ is exactly what Chris did not do. Chris made arbitrary random assertions about the need for greater ‘civility’ and cited Coyne as someone who needed to be more civil.

Forrest eloquently defended this view in the first half of her talk; but in the second, she also challenged the latest secularist to start a ruckus–Jerry Coyne, who I’ve criticized before. In a recent New Republic book review, Coyne took on Kenneth Miller and Karl Giberson, two scientists who reconcile science and religion in their own lives. Basically, Forrest’s point was that while Coyne may be right that there’s no good reason to believe in the supernatural, he’s very misguided about strategy. Especially when we have the religious right to worry about, why is he criticizing people like Miller and Giberson for their attempts to reconcile modern science and religion?

Many people asked what exactly he meant, and he never replied. That is not ‘trying to engage in a civil debate’ – it’s accusing someone of something and then refusing to elaborate or justify the accusation.

He became concerned a few weeks back, though, after posting (along with a few supporting words) a video of Eugenie Scott talking about science-religion compatibility. Merely for posting this video, Coyne accused Chris of “dissembling” and “using authority arguments.” Scott was also accused of dissembling—simply for making an argument she believes in.

Coyne did no such thing. Coyne wrote a long and considered post pointing out that Mooney was simply repeating the old accusation without having taken in the intervening objections. That does not remotely translate to ‘merely for posting this video.’

And so on. Needless to say, things don’t improve as they go on. This is why a lot of people disagree with M&K – it’s not because we all live in a box with ‘New Atheists’ painted over the door.

Doesn’t Scientology sound attractive. All you have to do if you want to be a scientologist is sign away all your rights, including the right to earn the minimum wage. Then if you leave or they kick you out – you have to give them some money.

7. BREACH OF COVENANT. If a staff member . . . breaks his agreement either by leaving staff before completing his commitment [either 2 1/2 or 5 years] or by violating his good standing as a Scientology staff member so that he is dismissed in accordance with policy, he or she shall remit forthwith to the Church a penance for violation of this covenant in accordance with the ecclesiastical policy of the Church…

Heads they win tails you lose. They don’t have to pay you the legal minimum, but you have to pay them if you want to leave (like for instance in order to get a job that pays the legal minimum). Take take take on their side, give give give on yours.

I can’t see what could possibly go wrong, can you?