Ben Stein is a bit peeved

Stein has a little tantrum over outcry against his address at the University of Vermont. It’s not at all notable, except for one little comment.

Stein said he has spoken at many universities, including Columbia, Yale, Stanford, and American University, “and no one has said boo. Somehow at UVM, it has become a big issue.”

I recommend that we make it a big issue at every university where he speaks. The man who said flatly that “science leads you to killing people” should not be honored at any university.

Well, OK, he would fit right in at Liberty University and such places as that. But no real university.

Here’s one face of evil

This is Samira Jassam. She is not a nice lady.

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She was responsible for sending men out to rape women, so that in their despair and shame she’d be able to recruit them as suicide bombers. She’s a monster. The cowards who would do her bidding and assault innocent women are also creatures of contempt.

This is where a pathologically religious culture can end up: with parasites like this who exploit the fear and hatred to create more fear and hatred.

Keep your prayers to yourself, Nurse

A nurse on a home visit decided to offer her services as a personal intermediary to a deity and pray for her patient. The patient objected and complained to the health organization — after all, the patient may not like her nasty bronze age god, and may feel put upon that a presumed professional is proposing to waste her time on chanted magic spells. It’s also a matter of courtesy: when I’m teaching, I don’t hector my students on matters outside the course content, like atheism, and when I’m being treated by a nurse or doctor, I expect them to leave irrelevant superstitions out of the examining room.

Anyway, poor suffering Nurse Petrie, martyr of the Baptist faith, is currently under disciplinary review for springing hare-brained mysticism on a patient in her care. Good. I don’t think she should lose her job over one infraction (although apparently she’s done similar things before), but she ought to be disciplined and taught what is appropriate.

But no, that’s not enough for the deranged dingbat Melanie Phillips, who declares that “This is the way society dies“.

I am a Jew; but when my mother was in the last stages of her terminal illness she was cared for by deeply devout Christian nurses who regularly prayed for her. Far from being offended by this, I was touched and comforted by this signal that they cared so much about her.

They cared so much that they bowed their head and babbled to an imaginary being while doing nothing. If someone wants a litany of nonsense recited nearby, sure, go for it…but purveyors of such useless fairy-stroking wastes of time think they have the privilege of pushing it on others, they’ve got another thing coming. And then she plays the Muslim envy card.

Demonstrating ‘a personal and professional commitment to equality and diversity’ apparently means that offering Christian solace to anyone at all, even if they don’t belong to another faith, somehow damages ‘equality and diversity’. Would the same action be taken, one wonders, against a Muslim nurse offering to pray for a Muslim patient?

First of all, “Christian solace” is only solace if you share a belief in the virtue of prayer; to rationalists, it’s all humbug and noise and not comforting at all. And secondly, yes, it doesn’t matter what religion the looney person is practicing. If they’re bowing on a prayer mat, ululating, waving burning incense over my head, sacrificing a chicken, clicking magic beads, or hollerin’ for god to come down and smite the devil in me, get them the hell out of my hospital room.

By the way, there is a poll on the odious Phillips’ screed.

Would you object to a nurse offering to pray for you?

Yes 11%
No 89%

Needs fixin’.

For those of you who think atheists are being too touchy, here are two additions.

  1. Put yourself in the position of the patient. You are sick and dependent on this person to help you get better, and she declares that your belief in her god is important. What do you do? There is an element of coercion here that should not be ignored.

  2. If the nurse were sincere in her faith, there’s something very easy she could do. Don’t ask, just go quietly off by herself and pray for the patient. The request is an unnecessary element that is little more than a ploy for attention, a declaration of her piety.

Texas creationists sink to a new low

It’s getting hot and nasty in the battle over the Texas science standards. Donna Garner, one of the members of the forces of darkness, has distributed a letter in which she claims that the atheists are winning Texas (I wish!), and that those of us who are working to teach evolution must be opposed more fiercely. And, of course, any accusation levied against scientists is perfectly fair. The kicker in her letter is a bit of slander:

Jeffrey Dahmer, one of America’s most infamous serial killers who cannibalized more than 17 boys before being captured, gave an [sic] last interview with Dateline NBC nine months before his death, and he said the following about why he acted as he did:  “If a person doesn’t think that there is a God to be accountable to, then what’s the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges?  That’s how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all just came from the slime.  When we died, you know, that was it, there was nothing….” (Dateline NBC, The Final Interview, Nov. 29, 1994).

Well, yes, of course! Why didn’t we think of consulting a convicted and confessed sexual sadist and serial killer on matters of ethics and science? I guess this is one perspective in which the religious have an advantage over us atheists — they’re already accustomed to regarding the clergy as authorities.

Snubbing degrees as a new kind of snobbery

There are days when you just want to slap a few journalists. The latest absurdity comes from the LA Times, in which an ignorant reporter waxes snarky over the fact that the vice president’s wife is addressed as “Dr. Biden”, since she has a doctorate in education, and snootily claims that:

Newspapers, including The Times, generally do not use the honorific “Dr.” unless the person in question has a medical degree.

And then she trots out Bill Walsh of the Post and the vapid little god-bunny, Amy Sullivan, to agree that you only call medical doctors “Dr.”

Yeah, right. How many appendectomies have Dr Kissinger, Dr Condoleezza Rice, and Dr Martin Luther King done, huh?

They claim that this is the convention. Step onto any college campus. Look at the directories and ask around. You’ll find that the formal title for faculty and staff with doctoral degrees is “Dr.” (although you’ll also find that many of us prefer not to be addressed quite so formally). All I can assume is that these lazy journalists are completely unfamiliar with higher education…and I am not surprised.

You can find more reactions from Mike Dunsford and Wesley Elsberry. I anticipate more — this is a fine example of media contempt for intellectuals.

More oblivious irony from the religious

They just don’t get it. Here’s a beautiful example: Kurt Warner, the hyper-pious quarterback for some football team, has a number 13 on his jersey. Why?

“A lot of people believe 13 is an unlucky number,” Warner said, “but I’ve kind of embraced it.”

He added: “A lot of negative things come with the No. 13. My life is never dictated by superstitions. My faith is first and foremost. If you believe that God’s in control, there is no reason to believe in superstitions.”

Believing in bad luck is superstition, but thinking that rituals dedicated to a great hairy ju-ju in the sky will let you carry a football across a chalk line in the grass is not? Bwahahahahaha!

Man, I’m glad the magic space man made him lose his big ball game on Sunday.

Beer or souls?

Phil Zuckerman has written a book called Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll); I haven’t read it yet, but it sounds like a good approach, looking at secular societies like Scandinavia and comparing them to religious societies, like the US. At this point, I don’t know much more about it other than what I see in the reviews, and the Depth Deception blog finds an unwittingly hilarious review in Christianity Today. The final paragraph will leave you giggling.

Zuckerman sells humanity short. If people are content but no longer care about transcendent meaning and purpose or life beyond death, that’s not a sign of greatness but tragic forgetfulness. Their horizon of concern is too narrow. They were made for more. What does it profit a society if, as this book’s jacket notes, it gains “excellent educational systems, strong economies, well-supported arts, free health care, egalitarian social policies, outstanding bike paths, and great beer,” but loses its soul? Can a country build strong social systems and keep its soul? While I am thankful for Zuckerman’s reminder about Christianity’s social implications, and the example of a place that meets those obligations differently than we do, I am sad he misses the rest.

Wait…societies have souls? Weird. So is the Roman Republic in heaven? Do they still bicker with the Macedonian soul?

I’m going to go out on a limb here, though, and admit that if I had the choice between a country with free health care and great beer, and one that had neither of those things but that claimed to possess an imaginary, invisible, intangible ghost, I’d go with the ghostless one with health care and beer.

At least it was a good review. It convinced me to add this book to my purchasing list.

I still don’t know what women want

The NY Times ran an interesting article on sexology a short while ago, focusing on the differences in arousal between men and women. Like any guy, I read it hoping to discover the magic switch that turns women on, but as expected, the message is that female arousal is very, very complicated. This was not a surprise. One of the curious results, though, was that not only do men and women differ in the specificity of stimuli that induce arousal, but women’s brains (measured by self-reporting) and women’s bodies (measured by plethysmograph) don’t agree — vaginal arousal was measured when subjects saw video clips of mating bonobos and a variety of different sexual situations, while at the same time they reported a lack of interest.

It’s fascinating stuff, but I have to raise an objection. They try to use evolution to explain what’s going on.

Besides the bonobos, a body of evidence involving rape has influenced her construction of separate systems. She has confronted clinical research reporting not only genital arousal but also the occasional occurrence of orgasm during sexual assault. And she has recalled her own experience as a therapist with victims who recounted these physical responses. She is familiar, as well, with the preliminary results of a laboratory study showing surges of vaginal blood flow as subjects listen to descriptions of rape scenes. So, in an attempt to understand arousal in the context of unwanted sex, Chivers, like a handful of other sexologists, has arrived at an evolutionary hypothesis that stresses the difference between reflexive sexual readiness and desire. Genital lubrication, she writes in her upcoming paper in Archives of Sexual Behavior, is necessary “to reduce discomfort, and the possibility of injury, during vaginal penetration. . . . Ancestral women who did not show an automatic vaginal response to sexual cues may have been more likely to experience injuries during unwanted vaginal penetration that resulted in illness, infertility or even death, and thus would be less likely to have passed on this trait to their offspring.”

Evolution’s legacy, according to this theory, is that women are prone to lubricate, if only protectively, to hints of sex in their surroundings. Thinking of her own data, Chivers speculated that bonobo coupling, or perhaps simply the sight of a male ape’s erection, stimulated this reaction because apes bear a resemblance to humans — she joked about including, for comparison, a movie of mating chickens in a future study.

That all sounds very plausible, but plausibility isn’t enough — this is a perfect example of a just-so story. I’d want to see comparative data, but our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, are so different from us in sexual behavior that it would be difficult to generate an appropriate comparison. I’d want to see the causal and molecular basis for this behavior in women, but again, it’s going to be so complex that I doubt we’ll find simple relationships, let alone molecular evidence of selection. I’d want to see historical evidence that women who lacked a lubricity response to the prospect of unwanted sexual activity were more prone to injury that affected childbearing, but that doesn’t exist.

While not doubting the physiological relevance of the research, this too-willing cooption of evolutionary explanations just bugs me.

As an antidote, I have to recommend a book I’ve mentioned before, an excellent survey of evolutionary explanations for female sexuality, The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Elisabeth Lloyd. It steps through various proposed scenarios and shows the lack of legitimate evidence or, in quite a few cases, neglect of evidence that contradicts the hypotheses. It’s one of the best books around for demonstrating how rigorous evolutionary logic should be applied.

Unfortunately, that book doesn’t tell me what women want, either. The conclusion is that the female orgasm is probably an evolutionary byproduct, and that adaptive explanations are inappropriate and unjustified. I suspect the same answer applies to the work on female arousal.

Fogel speaks

This gets better and better. President Daniel Fogel of the University of Vermont has given several interviews on the Ben Stein affair, and clarified quite a few matters. He explicitly says he did not ask Stein to withdraw from the commencement ceremonies, but when you read these comments, it’s clear that that there was a lack of support from the UVM administration and that he was confronted with some serious objections, and Stein withdrew knowing that if he persisted it was going to get ugly. Here’s one interview with Fogel:

I think the fundamental concern of the people that wrote to me was that, while they are quite open to having a speaker with Mr. Steins views on campus, they felt that he should not be honored at the commencement ceremony when so many of his views seemed to be affronts to the basic premises of the academy, about scientific and scholarly inquiry and collaterally, people were deeply disturbed by his views on the roll of science in the Holocaust.

…

But I have to say, the issue here, and this is important, is not freedom of expression. Ben Stein has come to our campus to speak, and some of the faculty that are colleagues here wrote to me to say that they have no objection to him coming here to speak.

It was the legitimate concern among members of the community regarding the implications of granting an honorary degree to someone whose ideas fundamentally ignore the basics of scientific inquiry.

That’s a smart and important point: this was not about freedom of expression, since Stein clearly has a surfeit of venues in which he opens his tendentious mouth, but a question of a scientific research institution giving a science denier and propagandist a platform to validate his anti-university views. He reiterates this position in another interview:

“This is not, to my mind, an issue about academic freedom or the openness of the campus to all points of view. Ben Stein spoke here last spring to great acclaim,” UVM President Dan Fogel said. “It’s an issue about the appropriateness of awarding an honorary degree to someone whose views in many ways ignore or affront the fundamental values of scientific inquiry and I greatly regret that I was not attuned to those issues.”

Fogel just shot way up in my esteem…and ouch, that has got to sting Stein’s well-padded keester.