Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 361 Editor's Choice: 12
-
"Gadfly" Ron Paul
[Read the article: Rudy, Mitt, Fred or John]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]So now here's my question.
McCain, who continues to take flack for his moderate stance on immigration, announced his fundraising total of $5 million for the third quarter, a paltry sum that put him on par with -- drum roll, please -- antiwar libertarian gadfly Ron Paul. Meanwhile, a front-page New York Times story reflected the revised conventional wisdom about the only actor-politician in the race with this headline: "Subdued Thompson Stirs Few Sparks on Stump."
Thompson raises no money, has given no decent speech, cannot keep track of the status of who is in charge of the russian land mass and changes staff three times--and he still earns front page coverage. Ron Paul has raised as much money as anyone, has a clear message that is different from the others--a message that happens to ring true with independents and disaffected republicans, and he gets not coverage, beyond the "Gadfly" label.
So how does this work? What makes John McCain or Fred Thompson a "legitimate" candidate, while Paul is cast aside? What does he have to do to be treated as one of the real candidates. You can't cite the polls; at this stage, the polls are driven by name recognition, which are in turn driven by media coverage. Where's the cover of Time or Newsweek story on the growing threat of Ron Paul?
Does it have anything to do with his opposition to the occupation? Is that what makes him not a Serious Candidate? Because I don't see why he is not at the forefront with the rest of these loons.
-
The "yeah" is missing from the initial Ricks quote
[Read the article: A nation of Rich Lowrys]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Nice summary. Would that the WaPo and the TIme would run it on the op-ed page.
-
ESP, Religion and Tooth Fairies
[Read the article: Proud atheists]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]One of the recurrent themes that comes up when an atheist is confronted with fatuous questions like these:
But can you really equate religion with astrology, or religion with alchemy? No serious scholar still takes astrology or alchemy seriously. But there's a lot of serious thinking about religion.
or
What if clairvoyance and speaking to the dead were proven to be real?
is to note that there are all kinds of other ridiculous things that people believe that are routinely rejected by most other people. Invariably, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny pop up. The trouble is that such references are rightfully interpreted as derisive. So the person making the comment is turned into a bad guy, even though if he were an evangelical deriding the Muslim vision of 70 houris waiting in Heaven, not a peep would come out of them.
It's to Pinker's credit that he answers the second question in one word: "Yeah."
Yes, of course it would! And that question goes to the heart of this insufferable, Templeton-approved interviewer. There is no faith in science. If you provide evidence that the whole materialist model is false by showing an instance of life after death, then you've shown the whole model to be false.
And if you find the stack of turtles, after all, then the old lady is right.
But you won't find them. The accumulated evidence, entirely outside of science, of the variety of supernatural belief means that none of them can be true. They can't all be true, because they are contradictory. And any one particular set of supernatural beliefs is contradicted by a vast majority of people who reject those beliefs. So this faith thing doesn't work, especially as the central argument, as with the interviewer's citation of 91% of those polled believe in (the Christian) God, is refuted by the 80 percent of the world's population who don't.
In any case, it doesn't matter what the numbers of believers are. Something is true or it isn't. To not put to fine a point on it, it is silly to believe in things that aren't true. To be rattling on about whether it is really reasonable to believe in virgin births, parting seas and physical lifting of human bodies turned into potting soil into "heaven" does a disservice to the interviewee. Of course he doesn't believe in nonsense. The real question is whether the interviewer really does.
In Dawkins' book, one of the things he likes to do is ask people who say they are Christian whether they really believe in X, where X is both absolutely essential doctrine for a Christian, and is also completely impossible to accept if you believe in things like television and GPS systems. He points out that it is considered unconscionably rude to ask such questions. They are embarrassing questions.
It's not embarrassing to ask a physicist if a demonstrated case of levitation would overturn Einstein's General Theory and Newton's Laws. He'd just snort, and say, with Pinker, "Sure. Of course." There's an infinity of such tests that could overturn scientific theories. There are no such tests that a believer in the supernatural would accept. That's the difference. It's not hard to understand. And it's why "faith" belongs outside of scholarly discussions, except as a widespread and hard to understand human phenomenon, like playing lotteries.