Letters to the Editor
Michael Huggins
Published Letters: 32 Editor's Choice: 6
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De irrelevantium blatherum non disputandum
[Read the article: Our office manager is a dental despot!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Mad cartoonist writes:
but I like irrelevant blather!
C'mon, does anybody actually read advice columns for the advice? It would be like Car Talk without the insults and inside jokes!
If anyone reads Tennis for advice, they're wasting their time. If Tennis ran Car Talk, it would go something like this:
Dead silence.
Caller: Uh, hello, is anyone there? Am I on Car Talk?
Tennis: Far out, man. Yeah, I think you just might be. At least that's what they tell me. But who am I to judge?
Caller: My neighbor came out of his driveway too fast and broadsided me. My door won't close right, and I need some specifics for the insurance adjuster.
Tennis: I hear you, man. I mean, cars exist, right? I see these things all over the place, and I think they're cars. Sometimes, I even drive one. At least I call it driving. You might disagree.
Caller: Um, about my door...
Tennis: What color is your car?
Caller: Huh? Er, does that really matter?
Tennis: I'm strangely interested in your case. See, I've got this theory that if your car is a loud color, you may be sending off aggression vibes to your neighbor. It may be that he was just responding to the message you sent. I mean, ask yourself why you feel you need to come across that way.
Caller: What in the hell are you talking about?
Tennis: See, I can tell you're pissed. I hear it in your voice. That's a very interesting condition. My father-in-law used to do that. He drove a Dodge Charger. Does that suggest anything to you?
Caller: I can't believe I'm listening to this.
Tennis: Hey, man, chill. It's all good. I mean, who am I to say what you're like. I'm just developing a theory here. It's cool, man...
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Your friend is as craven as he is foolish
[Read the article: The atheist and the creationist: Can't they just get along?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]LW, I no longer post here or read this column much, but I couldn't pass up your letter. Tennis's advice, as usual, is perfectly useless, though strangely apt: a hundred flowers are blooming, all right, but mostly in his head.
But to your problem: your friend's request to you to help him "weigh the evidence" reminds me of nothing so much as a quote from Erica Jong: "Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't."
I no longer believe in religion, though I did once. I don't deny its importance as a cultural artifact, and if it were taught, as The Iliad is taught, as great literature, I doubt that anyone could find much room to object. When it is taught as geology and biology, however, it is nonsense.
Some atheists have offended their readers' sensibilities by seeming too harsh. Some of their readers, including fellow atheists, seem strangely blind to the inappropriateness of teaching Bronze-Age myths to children as though they were fact. If your friend were considering joining a polygamist cult and asked you to help him "weigh the evidence" for that way of life on the grounds that it is practiced in the Old Testament, presumably the matter would be clearer even to those who are always so afraid that atheists will insist on anything that might bother someone. One hopes the same would be true if your friend volunteered to teach school in a primitive village somewhere and was asked to inform the children that the moon was really a giant gourd hung about a mile above the earth.
Your revulsion and contempt are exactly right, for several reasons. First, your friend, like anyone of normal adult intelligence, has already experienced doubt and admitted as much to you, so his request rightly strikes you as disingenuous. Second, whatever moral or spiritual comfort your friend may think he derives from reading about the repopulating of the earth following a worldwide flood, no reasonable adult can accept such an account as historical and scientific fact, and to use it to deceive children is monstrous. Third, your friend is effectively using you, or trying to: attempting to enlist your aid in a charade in which he pretends to be objective, when what he actually wants is the permission of a non-believer to believe, and teach, what he himself secretly suspects is incredible.
You should write to him something like the following:
If, as your scriptures teach, you believe that the "unsaved" lack the spiritual knoweldge to discern the truth, I'm not sure what help you think I can be to you to begin with. If, as you have been honest enough to admit in the past, you have a reasonable adult's doubts about the claims that the earth was created in 7 days and was once wholly covered with a flood, then I can only urge you to do some honest research. If you wonder about so-called "Intelligent Design," buy and read The Complete Idiot's Guide to Evolution, available in any bookstore. If you were going to teach schoolchildren that the Beatitudes or the Sermon on the Mount set forth noble precepts for living, I would encourage you to do so. But if you are asking my permission to teach what no scientist has been able to believe, as scientist, for 150 years, your request is as strange as your beliefs. Finally if, as it appears, you are trying to get me to help you pretend that you are being objective, then I can only say that your actions strike me as cowardly and dishonest. If you wish to deceive children with what is not science and falsely call it that; if you wish to put them at a disadvantage in their later education and make them a laughingstock among educated people, I cannot stop you, but your wish is frankly contemptible. Write back to me when and if you ever come to your senses.