Author: Ophelia Benson

The letters in response to PBS’s ‘Judgment Day’ that the ombudsman publishes make depressing reading. They’re so infatuated, so wrong, and above all so narcissistic. It’s all about them. They’re offended, they’re insulted, they’re in a snit. Because of course a scientific theory is about them. It’s not about what it’s about, it’s about them. Religion my ass; vanity is more like it. I’m not related to monkeys, I’m special, and you better say so right now or I’ll stop watching PBS.

I realize that PBS has always treated the neo-Darwinian theory of Evolution as sacred and beyond question but last night’s dose of Darwin-worship was so strong and so contrary to any genuine search for truth that I can no longer consider support of public television a morally defensible practice. For years, I have defended public television among my fellow Christians for its many fine offerings for family viewing, but PBS has become so strident and so relentless in its disrespect for fair debate and dialogue on the subject of Evolution vs. Intelligent Design, that I can no longer do so.

Because there are always exactly Two Sides to any subject; not three, not one, not eleven, but Two; and Both Must Be Heard. If, at the end of any given television program, one Side seems to have more evidence to back it up than the other seems to have, then The Fix Was In. It was a cheat, and it’s time to get out the old purple-with-rage stationery and fire off a note to those anti-family demons at wherever it is this time.

I have been a faithful watcher of PBS and the NOVA programs over the many years and have always stood up for those who would say that PBS was too liberal in its programming. Your program insulted me and my family with your very jaundiced view and recreation of facts that were slanted heavily towards Darwinism. You did have one science teacher who was pictured in a Roman Catholic Church, as a presumed Christian who said that IF GOD does exist — No more needs be said. Dan Fahey, Greenwich, CT

The program insulted him and his family. That was the point, of course – the Nova producers sat down and said ‘How can we go about insulting Dan Fahey of Greenwich Connecticut, and while we’re at it, insult his family too? Let’s be thorough here – if we’re going to go to all the trouble of insulting Dan Fahey, let’s insult his family. Otherwise our Victory would be incomplete.

The recent Nova special on Intelligent Design vs. Evolution was one of the most blatantly biased pieces of so-called “journalism” or scientific documentary. It was extremely insulting to the idea of Design. The whole tone of it was very sarcastic against Intelligent Design and completely victimized evolutionary thought by the evil villains of religious ignoramuses. It gave precious little air time to ID scientists who have plenty of legitimate research, but gave plenty of time towards evolutionary research…I propose that evolutionary thought is a religion in and of itself, and this program was its equivalent of a televangelistic sermon…Nova has lost all reasonable credibility through this piece. I have long known that they espouse Darwinian doctrine, however, this piece was biased, inaccurate, insulting, sarcastic and ultimately, due to its primarily cultural and political content, was outside of the scope of Nova’s “scientific” programming.

And did I mention that it was insulting?

I find the Nova episode that aired on Nov. 13 titled Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial was presented in a clearly biased manner. I was offended by this episode and I am a substitute for the public school system.

I was offended, I was insulted, I’m pissed off, I’m in a foaming frothing fury, and what do you atheist elitist snobs at PBS plan to do about it? Eh? Eh? Are you going to pay for my therapy? Send me an economy-size box of Prozac? Relocate me to Mecca? What? Awaiting your reply.

Never take medical advice from a novelist.

There have been a number of articles in the press recently criticising homeopathic remedies as worthless at best, and potentially lethal at worst, if they are being taken instead of tried-and-tested conventional medicines for conditions such as malaria or HIV…The organisation Sense About Science and journalists such as Ben Goldacre and Nick Cohen are targeting a symposium in London in December that will discuss HIV and Aids and the homeopathic response to such diseases.

Are they? Well done Ben and Nick. (Both strong fans of B&W, I can’t resist pointing out. Winterson probably not so much.)

I admit it is hard to talk about what it is that homeopathy actually does, or why it works. For my part, I want to know more, not less, but I can’t dismiss the thing in the way that Sense About Science, many doctors, and some journalists are asking me to…This homeophobia is, I think, a genuine terror of what homeopathy is suggesting; which is that we think differently about the relationship between the cure and the disease.

Hmmmmmmyeah, and why would there be a genuine terror of that? Because it wouldn’t work perhaps? Because ‘thinking differently’ could land us back in the good old days when cholera and typhoid and tetanus and TB and yellow fever and typhus and polio were all incurable and unpreventable? Hmm?

Homeopathy, in common with other holistic approaches, asks that we look at the whole picture – the person, and not just his illness. Specifically, in the case of homeopathy, the remedy picture…follows the “like by like” premise – that tiny dilutions of the “problem” can prompt the body to effect its own cure…Homeopathy seeks to understand everything we are, everything we do, as a web of relatedness. The reason why I have a recurring sore throat will not be the reason why you have one, and what helps me may not help you.

And if the homeopath understands everything we are and everything we do (that’s understanding quite a lot, isn’t it) then the homeopath will know ‘the reason why’ I have a sore throat and also the very different ‘reason why’ someone else does? And then fix it? Izzat whacher saying?

As I understand it, homeopathy is not a linear medicine – a drug aiming for a target – nor does it seek to remove the human factor. The patient and the practitioner are both important and relevant when it comes to understanding how humans respond to treatment.

It’s all a matter of self-esteem, at bottom. Provided the homeopath really gets the patient, really sees the point of her and understands her very core of beingness, then the patient will be comfortable in her skin, and that is the secret of how homeopathy works. (The dilution is just to impress onlookers.)

Never take medical advice from a novelist.

So pointless obsessive punitive hostility and meanness can repel religious believers. Close-up acquaintance with the strenuously devout causes people to back away. That’s good to know.

Writing from New Orleans, where he was covering the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops meeting with Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, [Stephen Bates] said: “Writing this story has been too corrosive of what faith I had left: indeed watching the way the gay row has played out in the Anglican Communion has cost me my belief in the essential benignity of too many Christians. For the good of my soul, I need to do something else.” Bates, who says he still regards himself as a Catholic, said he was turned off by the intolerance he saw towards gays and the self-righteousness of Christians who “pick and choose the sins that are acceptable and condemn those – always committed by other, lesser people – that are not.”

Interesting – Desmond Tutu has just been saying much the same thing.

“Our world is facing problems – poverty, HIV and Aids – a devastating pandemic, and conflict,” said Archbishop Tutu, 76. “God must be weeping looking at some of the atrocities that we commit against one another. In the face of all of that, our Church, especially the Anglican Church, at this time is almost obsessed with questions of human sexuality.”…Archbishop Tutu referred to the debate about whether Gene Robinson, who is openly gay, could serve as the bishop of New Hampshire. He said the Anglican Church had seemed “extraordinarily homophobic” in its handling of the issue, and that he had felt “saddened” and “ashamed” of his church at the time. Asked if he still felt ashamed, he said: “If we are going to not welcome or invite people because of sexual orientation, yes. If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn’t worship that God.”

Indeed. The thought has crossed my mind once or twice, that surely even Anglicans have better things to worry about than The Great Homosexual Menace.

Stephen Bates elaborates in the New Humanist:

The vehemence even in the mainstream denominations could be quite startling and bizarrely tunnel-visioned. Graham Dow, the Bishop of Carlisle, has come to public notice for suggesting that the recent floods were God’s judgement on a sinful nation, but not only is he not alone…but they are not his weirdest views. An earlier book he wrote on demonic possession shows he believes devils enter up the anus…and the signs of possession include wearing black, inappropriate laughter, inexplicable knowledge, Scottish ancestry or relatives who have been miners. You may laugh – inappropriately – but Dow used to be an Oxford college chaplain, indeed once prepared Tony Blair for confirmation, and has risen to be a diocesan bishop.

Blimey. This is the Anglican church. I’m…surprised.

What really surprised me was the mendacity and sheer nastiness with which the feuds were conducted and, of course, the certainty with which such people knew that God was speaking directly to them and – funnily enough – endorsing whatever action they had decided to take. It is a hermetically sealed, deeply insecure view of the outside world and it does not just infect Anglicans, but many denominations…The Jehovah’s Witnesses, for instance, believe that those outside their inner circle will be ground to dust on the last day (remember this the next time you open your front door to them) and will only cooperate with the police in child abuse cases if the molestation has been independently and simultaneously witnessed by two elders, which may be setting the bar a little high.

The certainty is the thing I keep barking my shins on. The two-step. The carefree move directly from belief that God exists to confidence that the believer knows all about this God and what it wants the believer and everyone else to do – the complete failure to notice the rather obvious fact that even if there is a ‘God’ we know nothing whatever about it – that absence of evidence may (to the determined) be no bar to belief but is certainly an obstacle to pretensions of detailed and coercive knowledge. So what do you end up with? The combination of mendacity and nastiness with self-righteous certainty. You get a toxic brew, that’s what you get. Ask a religion reporter.