I was sent this as an “open letter” — I don’t know if it’s posted anywhere else, but since it’s “open”, I’m happy to let everyone read it.

Dear PZ,

Can I please ask you to refrain from insulting and writing about Sam Harris in the negative. I don’t know what you expect to achieve by constantly writing Sam Harris hit jobs. You are tearing the atheist community apart.

Does it not hurt you knowing that you are contributing to the toxicity of the atheist community? Do you not care about, as Sam Harris says, that his daughter will one day have to read articles about their father being a racist, and Islamophobe? Even if you don’t agree with Sam or Richard Dawkins, can’t you please get in line. They’re the ones on the front lines. They’re are the ones that will bring enlightenment to the masses.

Don’t you care about the damage you are doing? Imaging someone who is considering the notion of god and reads Sam Harris and thinks, “yes this makes sense, I no longer believe”. Now imagine that this person has major influence in society. Imagine that maybe this person becomes president. Imagine the good they could do.

Now imagine that they then read a PZ Myers blog post, and they read you saying Harris is a bigot and racist etc. You just prevented that president from being enlightened and doing great work as president, because they instead read something religious and became religious.

These are the stakes. We are not cultists, we are just pragmatic, for the greater good. I compel you. But I bet you have your mind made up and are not willing to listen to my sound reasoned arguments.

I feel a duty to at least try to persuade you and your readers. Please just write something positive about Sam, at least that way you appear neutral and unbiased.

kind regards,

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I feel like I have to explain who Immanuel Velikovsky was, it’s been so long that he pinged on the radar. He was a crackpot who published a series of pseudo-erudite books in which he used a combination of bullshit Bible scholarship and bad physics to bamboozle audiences –and it worked, because physicists couldn’t address the claims about what the Bible said and the Bible scholars were cowed by the physics. But he had Venus erupting out of Jupiter and ping-ponging around the solar system at the time of the Exodus, and sailing past Earth to rain down manna on the Hebrews (turns out he couldn’t tell the difference between carbohydrates and hydrocarbons, either). It was stupidity squared, but had a brief surge in notoriety when some scientists suggested that his book be banned.

Anyway, I hadn’t heard much about Velikovsky in years, and was thinking that was one kook who’d finally been forgotten, but now I learn that a remnant strain of Velikovskyism lurks in an unsurprising place: among the climate change denialists.

This doesn’t warrant a long article but it ended up being longish. It’s just to comment on the fact that Anthony Watts has published another article from Tim Ball, pushing Velikovsky’s crank ideas as science. Tim argues that scientists shouldn’t point out dumb and wrong notions posing as science. Tim calls such behaviour “scientific elitism”.

Anthony Watts gives an excuse (if you can call it that) for publishing such nonsense, saying that he promotes Velikovsky “in the context of learning” and seems to think the Director of GISS NASA is a coward for not doing the same.

Well, hey, Velikovsky does well among those who don’t understand physics or chemistry, so I guess it’s not unusual that he would thrive among the denialists. He has found his people.