Author: Allen Esterson

  • Einstein’s Wife: Open Letter to PBS Postscript

    A Postscript to my Open Letter to PBS.

    In the comments solicited by PBS from Geraldine Hilton, writer/producer of the “Einstein’s Wife” documentary, she writes of the three academics who have dissociated themselves from the film, John Stachel, Robert Schulmann and Gerald Holton, that “not one has come forward and claimed they were misrepresented because they weren’t”: Defending Einstein’s Wife Film.

    However, the historian of physics Gerald Holton responds in an email to me:

    As to my ‘not coming forward’, as you report them to have said: I sure did, as many of my friends and colleagues will confirm. I told them how I felt to have been tricked into appearing in this awful film, because the film people said it was to be about Albert Einstein – not a word about his wife being made the main character, with entirely false claims. Thereby they also demeaned Mileva, about whose true, respectable role I and others have written.

    That Geraldine Hilton deceived Stachel, Schulmann and Holton about the nature of her film is implicitly acknowledged by Hilton herself in a comment she made in an interview [pdf] she gave to an Australian newspaper in 2004 in which she reports how she dealt with what she describes as the “Einstein supporters”:

    ‘She’s just an Aussie director, what would she know’, is what they’d think, we’d act dumb, we’re just a couple of Aussie chicks and they’d think, ‘what would they know’.

    One would be interested to know what PBS thinks about the ethical standards of a film-maker who sets out to make a documentary carrying a doctrinaire message, and deliberately withholds from interviewees with expertise on the subject the true nature of the project. Little wonder that it resulted in what Stachel describes as a “whole series of entangled falsehoods” (personal communication), and Holton as “a sorry fiction” that is a “blatant perversion of the role of Mileva Marić”.

  • John Ware on the MCB

    The government is finally starting to notice that the Muslim Council of Britain is in denial.

  • Clifford Geertz and the ‘Move Toward Meaning’

    Geertz’s models were drawn from literary theory and philosophy; he was read by scholars in the humanities.

  • Democracy Could be Worse Than Musharraf

    It was democracy that prevented the reform of Pakistan’s rape laws, not the dictator.

  • Senta Troemel-Ploetz Replies to Allen Esterson

    ‘For all we know, she may have’ – or not.

  • Allen Esterson Replies to Senta Troemel-Ploetz

    In historical investigations one must be guided by the hard evidence, not by ‘for all we know’.

  • Doubting Giles

    Giles Fraser is getting bored.

    Perhaps it’s time for a new sort of conversation about religion. The old one is getting really very tired, as in some overblown boxing match between two bruisers who just won’t topple. They slug it out. Land huge blows. Declare victory. Only for the opponent to rise again (no resurrection reference intended) and for the whole sorry circus to wind itself up for a rematch.

    Well could that be because one side refuses to admit that it’s making it up as it goes along? It does tend to keep futile brawls going when people refuse to admit that. I know it’s what I always do when I don’t have any evidence or argument – I just keep talking. I don’t mind; I don’t have to be anywhere else just at the moment.

    For a more interesting discourse about religion would also have to involve the reclamation of agnosticism, of the ability simply to admit that one doesn’t know.

    Well, that would be an idea, but surely Giles Fraser knows that many believers don’t do that, but on the contrary insist that they do know, because they have ‘faith’ (or because they read it in the [translated] Bible or the Koran). But those people (suprise surprise) aren’t Giles Fraser’s main prey.

    For the Bible constantly refuses to give God a definite shape and size. That’s what the Hebrew Scriptures call idolatry and what Marxists, following on, came to call reification. It’s turning God into a golden calf. Kant was right when he argued in the Critique of Judgement that it is the second commandment, the refusal to allow human beings a fixed view of God, which offers the most significant protection against religious fanaticism.

    All right, but then if that’s true, human beings who believe in this unfixed God have no basis on which to tell everyone else what to do – except the same human secular earthy basis that everyone else has.

    And those who work out their faith in a certain doubt and confusion are, in fact, the true believers. Walking by faith and not by sight, as St Paul puts it.

    Fine, but then you don’t get to tell us what to do. You have no special authority, or even special insight (except whatever insight comes from the sources that are naturally available to all humans – a habit of thinking about moral questions, for instance). You’re on the same footing as everyone else. So that spells an end to clerics appearing on panels as clerics, as if that gave them some sort of expertise or inside dope. You don’t get to do both. You don’t get to insist that ‘faith’ is all doubt and uncertainty, and still pretend you have special knowledge.

    Some atheists are threatened by non-fundamentalist faith. They reckon it a liberal alibi for fundamentalism, offering a more superficially plausible account of God which serves only to shelter fanatics from the sort of criticism that would put them out of business…A contrasting approach would be to work on the assumption that the most effective way to attack bad religion is with an alliance that includes good religion.

    Yes – I can see that, up to a point. (Up to a point because I wouldn’t want to join such an alliance on all issues; I would always want to reserve the right to ignore god and all its works on the grounds of extreme improbability and lack of corroborating evidence.) But there seems to be so little ‘good religion’ of the kind you describe around the place – religion that is genuinely doubting and uncertain. The endless valorization of ‘faith’ may be one reason for that dearth. At any rate the god-botherers who keep haranguing us incoherently about the virtues of faith don’t motivate me to make an alliance with them. Thanks for the invitation though.

  • Giles Fraser Says Religion is Doubt

    ‘Bible refuses to give God a definite shape’ – yes but it still definitely tells us what to do.

  • Archbishops Link Arms Against the Enemy

    Task of Christian leaders is to defend Europe’s Christian heritage against zealous secularism.

  • Muqtedar Khan on Minneapolis Cab Drivers

    Can Muslims in free societies demand freedom and tolerance for Islam and deny others the same?

  • Hanging Video Shows Iran’s Crackdown on Dissent

    Increasing numbers of political activists are being executed by Iran on trumped-up charges.

  • No Squirming on Grounds of Political Expediency

    Cut out all forms of adornment – Sikh, Muslim, Christian, the lot – or allow people to wear what they like.

  • Archbishop Gets His Way

    When he says jump, BA jumps.

  • ‘Bad Science’ on Horny Goat Weed

    Whole grains, ‘holistic’ techniques, colonic irrigation, The Peniscope – it all adds up.

  • David Colquhoun Looks at Snoring Studies

    ‘Oh dear: looks like yet another undisclosed financial interest in a clinical study.’

  • Ben Goldacre in Praise of Quack Hunting

    Nerdy appraisal of research is fun once you’re catching people out and making them look silly.

  • Herbal Sex Aids Herbal but not Sex Aids

    Fast Formula Wild Pink and Fast Formula Horny have been taken off the shelves.

  • MHRA Press Release on Herbal Sex-meds

    ‘Only licensed medicines may be advertised to the public.’

  • Respect me or I’ll say the devil wears a condom

    Careful when talking to the Vatican. Don’t forget those 2.1 billion people who call themselves Christian – they expect respect you know.

    The World Health Organisation’s head of HIV/Aids called on the Vatican yesterday to speed up a decision on the limited use of condoms in pandemic-hit countries. Kevin De Cock welcomed the news that condoms could be sanctioned for married Catholic couples where one partner has HIV. “We’re very pleased to hear this,” he said. “But our concern is that these deep theological decisions take account of the biological consequences of infection. Could we please have this debate in a hurry. Lives are at risk and time is short.”

    Maybe he was being sarcastic instead of respectful. One can hope so. ‘Deep theological decisions’ indeed – what’s so deep about them, and for that matter, what’s even theological about them? Nothing. They’re just nasty human prejudices dressed up as what god wants, in the usual manner. Deep shmeep.

    Faith-based organisations play a huge role in forming opinion and fighting the pandemic. In Africa, they deliver 40%-50% of care. “I think the involvement of the faith-based community in Aids is extremely important,” he said. “As with any other group that has its own special beliefs and ideas and philosophies, we have to accept that that is so and remember that there is far more that unites us than divides us in the struggle against Aids.”

    No, he probably wasn’t being sarcastic then, not when he slipped the ‘faith-based community’ in there to replace the more neutral and comprehensible ‘religious people.’ Sarky people don’t do that – they refuse, and if people try to make them they lash out and swear dreadful oaths. They also don’t usually talk anodyne fluffy burble about own special beliefs and ideas and philosophies, because they know too well what a lot of ground that covers, including the stark staring mad, so they don’t invoke it in that sentimental way.

    It’s not the WHO guy with the unhappy name’s fault though, it’s the horrible situation we’re all stuck in where people who believe wrong things demand fulsome honeyed respect from people who don’t, on pain of making millions more people die of AIDS because the condom is excommunicated. We have to grovel and suck up to them or they’ll carry right on killing lots of us. There’s a deep theological decision for you.

  • Keep it buttoned, please

    Yes, respect for religion is mandatory, why do you ask?

    For the better part of 30 years, British Airways has operated a uniform policy without incident. The rules allow check-in staff and cabin crew to wear jewellery, but only underneath their shirts. There are many reasons for this, one of them being that people working at check-in have to lean over and tag bags. A necklace could easily get in the way…British Airways is at fault. For it is mishandling for a religious issue, betraying both its multicultural principles and a huge potential market. For, Ms Eweida not only has a strong argument of freedom of religious expression on her side, but also hundreds of millions of potential passengers. The 2001 census showed that 71.1 per cent of Britons identify themselves as Christians. According to Aquarius, a marketing consultancy focused on religious affairs, there are 2.1 billion people who call themselves Christian, by comparison with 1.1 billion who describe themselves as secular, non-religious, agnostic or atheist. The devout represent a powerful market: The Passion of the Christ has grossed $613 million at box offices worldwide…There are a growing number of Christians who feel threatened by secularism…By sticking to its guidelines on uniforms, BA is insensitively, perhaps unintentionally, appearing to use its professional code to make a secular case. People of faith expect not just tolerance, but respect. BA needs to show it.

    Uh? BA has a longstanding and reasonable rule about external jewelry, which all in an instant turns out to be a violation of freedom of religious expression as well as a foolish flouting of the, um, hunger for a sight of external jewelry on the part of Christians, who are more numerous than atheists and who made Mel Gibson’s horrible sadism-porn flick a lot of money, therefore, BA is inthenthitive, and thus we see that ‘people of faith’ expect not just tolerance but ‘respect’ and therefore BA is obliged to show it. There’s a good knockdown argument for you!

    No but seriously. What is this idea that people ‘expect’ ‘respect’ and that therefore everyone else ‘needs’ to give it to them? Why hasn’t that imbecilic and tiresome idea been nipped in the bud yet? People can expect anything and everything they like; that doesn’t oblige the rest of us to give it to them. I can sashay around the place announcing that I ‘expect’ everyone to fall down and knock their foreheads against the ground when I pass, but that doesn’t oblige them to oblige, does it. Expect away, ‘people of faith’, I don’t have to respect you unless you do something I consider respect-worthy. So get busy.