Author: Ophelia Benson

Wisdom from an expert on holistic medicine.

Dawkins seems to be stuck in the last century.

Stuck in the last century – that’s a good one. Experts on holistic medicine are so hip and cutting edge and up to date while stodgy boring unfashionable people like scientists are stuck (like flies in amber, like gnats in ice cream, like a large person in a small doorway) in the last century, way the hell back seven years ago before the internet or CAT scans or the internal combustion engine.

He’s a very entertaining guy, but he suffers from existential insecurity: everything has to be proven before he’ll believe it.

That’s stupid, in more than one way. I’ll enumerate them. 1) ‘Existential insecurity’ is a silly tendentious self-flattering label to apply to rational skepticism of miraculous claims. It is not ‘existential insecurity’ to think and say that claims of medicinal effects that defy the laws of physics are not automatically credible. 2) It’s an elementary mistake to confuse evidence with proof, which shows what kind of ‘expert’ Stephen Russell is. Everything does not have to be proven before Dawkins will believe it; for claims about the natural world he wants evidence before he will consider the claims plausible.

His basic, rather alarmist, premise was that western medicine is in danger of being overshadowed by alternative medicine. Apart from being simply not true, it’s a very old-fashioned way of looking at the field.

There it is again – the peculiar obsession with fashion, and the clumsy lurch into irrelevance. It doesn’t matter whether it’s ‘old-fashioned’ or not; the issue is merit, not fashion.

It’s ridiculously nihilistic to think that if you can’t prove something right now, it isn’t valid. It’s so self-limiting: Dawkins must be very unhappy in himself. We’ve progressed beyond that.

We fashionable up to date types, that is – the ones who keep making the same stupid mistake about proof over and over again, while calling ourselves ‘experts’ in a ‘field’ that thinks water remembers a vanished molecule and can therefore have curative power. Russell must be very happy in himself; but what’s that got to do with anything? He’s still a chump.

Good old Nigeria, arresting 18 men for going to a party while (perhaps) being gay. That’s dangerous stuff; much more dangerous than, say, telling people that polio vaccines are part of a western plot to render Muslim women infertile.

There are vociferous local demands for the men to be stoned to death. At last week’s court hearing, an angry mob of Muslim homophobes assembled outside the court. They shouted anti-gay epithets and demanded that all 18 men be sentenced to death. Furious at the judge’s decision to opt for non-death penalty charges, they pelted the defendants with rocks as they left the court, attacked the police, and attempted to lynch the judge and to set the court building ablaze…

Sounds like a fun afternoon, doesn’t it?

Peter Tatchell points out some tensions:

Nigeria’s anti-sodomy laws contravene the anti-discrimination provisions of various African and UN human rights conventions that Nigeria has signed and pledged to uphold. These include the African charter on human and peoples’ rights, which came into force in 1986. It affirms the equality of all people, without discrimination. Similar provisions are included in the UN international covenant on civil and political rights to which Nigeria acceded in 1993…The persecution of gay Nigerians is symptomatic of a wider tyranny, which tramples on individual freedom and civil liberties, as documented by Human Rights Watch.

Whatever editor wrote the subhead for Tatchell’s article missed his point, and in fact subverted it. Whatever editor did that got things completely wrong, thus showing a depressing lack of understanding of the real problem.

This African country claims to be a democracy but its persecution of gay people is pure tyranny.

That’s stupid. Tatchell doesn’t mention democracy in the article, and that ‘but’ is no ‘but’ – it’s nonsense. Persecution of gay people is not somehow inherently the opposite of democracy; on the contrary, it’s a very tidy illustration of the danger of democracy, precisely because gay people are always a minority, and a pretty small one at that. It is perfectly possible to be both a democracy and a country that persecutes gay people. The tyranny in question is the tyranny of the majority.

Some good lines in Hitchens’s account of his book tour. First stop was Little Rock:

At the end of the event I discover something that I am going to keep on discovering: half the people attending had thought that they were the only atheists in town.

Just so. That’s why some atheists think there really is a need for atheists to be ‘militant’ or ‘aggressive’ or ‘strident’ or, to put it in less vituperative language, articulate rather than silent and active rather than passive. That’s why some atheists think there really is a need for atheism to become public, talkative, unembarrassed, unapologetic, taken for granted, normalized, quotidian, rather than private, silent, ashamed, secretive, and weird. We think that because of all those people in Little Rock and Dallas and Jackson, Tennessee, who think they are the only atheists in town, and feel isolated, outnumbered, and intimidated as a result. We think we need to speak up more so that all those people in small towns and less cosmopolitan cities can become aware that they are neither alone nor abnormal.

To the New York Public Library to debate Al Sharpton, a man who proves every day that you can get away with anything in this country if you can shove the word “Reverend” in front of your name…In the evening to debate with Marvin Olasky at the L.B.J. Library. Olasky is the man who coined the term “compassionate conservatism” and helped evolve Bush’s “faith-based initiative.”…My challenge: name an ethical statement or action, made or performed by a person of faith, that could not have been made or performed by a nonbeliever. I have since asked this question at every stop and haven’t had a reply yet.

Well, yes. We’re always hearing that Christianity teaches compassion or that Islam teaches charity – as if nothing else did. Why is that?

At the airport, strangers approach to say, “Thanks for coming to take on the theocrats.”…Again I notice two things: the religious types are unused to debate and are surprised at how many people are impatient with them, or even scornful.

Another reason for atheists to speak up more – or to be more ‘militant.’

Jerry Falwell—another man who managed to get away with murder by getting himself called “Reverend”—dies without being bodily “raptured” into the heavens. Indeed, his heavy carcass is found on the floor of his Virginia office.

Maybe it’s an imposter?

At one point I ask [Reverend Mark Roberts] if he believes the story in Saint Matthew’s Gospel about the graves opening in Jerusalem at the time of the crucifixion, and the occupants walking the streets. Doesn’t it rather cheapen the idea of resurrection? He replies that as a Christian he does believe it, though as a historian he has his doubts. I realize that I am limited here: I can usually think myself into an opponent’s position, but this is something I can’t imagine myself saying, let alone thinking.

Well it is difficult. As a Christian I believe it, as a historian I have my doubts – how does that work? Do you set up an imaginary door inside your head, and believe or doubt according to which side of the imaginary door you’re on? But if so, how do you avoid being aware of what you think on the other side of the door? But then that is what puzzles me about the religious mind: few believers really act as if they believe all the time, so why doesn’t that fact interfere with their belief? Well, maybe it does, far more than the usual polls would lead you to think; hence all those atheists thinking they’re the only ones in town.