Katherine Lanpher in The New York Times:

On Leap Day 2004 I took an actual leap, leaving behind the Midwestern city where I came of age, married, divorced, worked, lived, loved, and prospered for more than two decades, to move to New York. I cried so hard at the airport curb that the strangers milling around me must have thought I was on my way to a funeral. If they had offered me condolences, I would have accepted them. I felt, in fact, that a loved one was dying, that a life so known and dear to me was ending: my old, soon-to-be-former, settled life, in which I knew the tracks of the coming days the way I knew without looking where the spoons were in my silverware drawer. Someone was pushing that woman off the platform, and it was me. There was no safety net. Before that day, I had been an earthbound creature: think root vegetable. Now I was on my way to a new job, a new life, and a new city where I could count the number of friends I had on one hand. I was a few months shy of my forty-fifth birthday, a confirmed daughter of the prairie who had grown up in Moline, Illinois, gone to college and graduate school in Chicago, and then moved to St. Paul, Minnesota. I was as Midwestern as weak coffee at supper and ham sandwiches at a funeral lunch. I never did understand why Chicago was called the Second City when it was always the First City to me. The water and the valleys of the Hudson were unknown to me; I was bound for life to the muddy currents of the Mississippi.

So why was I getting on a plane to New York? Well, as I like to tell people, on Leap Day 2004 I moved to midlife and had a Manhattan crisis.

Picture: Katherine Lanpher with her Air America co-host Al Franken in March 2005.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Studies of pet dogs with cancer can offer unique help in the fight against human malignancies while also improving care for man’s best friend. Imagine a 60-year-old man recuperating at home after prostate cancer surgery, drawing comfort from the aged golden retriever beside him. This man might know that a few years ago the director of the National Cancer Institute issued a challenge to cancer re­searchers, urging them to find ways to “eliminate the suffering and death caused by cancer by 2015.” What he probably does not realize, though, is that the pet at his side could be an important player in that effort.

Picture: Dogs and humans often fall ill with the same kinds of cancers. Scientists contend that the similarities between these tumors, including genetic resemblances, can be instructive. (The back­ground represents the DNA sequence from a tissue sample.)

More here.

Our friend Lindsay Beyerstein of the blog Majikthise has been nominated for the 2006 Weblog Awards in the category Best Individual Blog. Her blog is sooooo much better than Sullivan’s Daily Dish. Have a look, and if you like her blog (better than those of the other candidates) consider voting for her.

From Time:

A long-awaited report paints a devastating picture that shows the plight of Arab women extends far beyond debates over the veil. Talk to Arab women and you’ll quickly learn that the controversy over the Muslim veil that rages endlessly in Europe is the least of their concerns. They face a daunting array of hardships, from spousal domination at home to gender discrimination in the workplace, and even if they happen to agree that the veil symbolizes their plight, they tend to dismiss criticism of it as a Western attack on their culture.

Because the topic of women’s rights in the Arab world can be as confusing as it is culturally explosive, the report released on Thursday by a panel of distinguished Arab thinkers is a welcome guide to Arabs and outsiders alike. The latest report debunks the Arab conspiracy theory that promoting women’s rights is part of a Western plot against Islam. On the contrary, the panelists point out, the advancement of women has long been an Arab goal — Egyptian women’s rights organizations date back to 1881, for example.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Natural selection argues against cooperation. If all organisms, including humans, are pitted in a ceaseless struggle for survival and sex, those who help others would quickly find themselves swamped in a rising tide of selfishness, especially if those they helped bore no relation to them. Yet, most humans reflexively help another person in need even if there are no family ties or a direct benefit to be gained. This conundrum has puzzled evolutionary biologists since the time of Darwin, but a new study shows how internecine warfare among early humans might have allowed for the spread of a dominant group of altruistic tribes.

Economist Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute examines the evolutionary forces at work on early human populations. He posits two distinct groups: the altruistic and the selfish, divided into many different tribes, which Bowles refers to as demes. Altruists are disposed to take an action helping others, but such actions have a specific cost. For example, an altruist might jump into the river to save a drowning child at the cost of her own life but to the overall benefit of the tribe. Reducing these sets of conditions to a mathematical equation reveals that altruists can only prosper if their altruism enables their group to acquire more territory.

More here.

Written as a series of alternating sections or flashbacks, What Is the What—bad title, terrible cover—calls itself a novel but was created closely out of the story told to Eggers by Valentino Achak Deng, who reached Atlanta, after 14 years in refugee camps, in 2001. Achak survived the government helicopter gunship obliteration of his village in southern Sudan and a frightening and painful trudge to safety in Ethiopia. His personal experiences, as he says in a preface, are in essence no different from those depicted: Every event in the book could, and indeed did, take place, but not all to him, nor in the order presented. As such, the narrative reads very much like reporting, which accounts perhaps for its power—but also poses a number of interesting questions. Would the punch have been greater or smaller had Eggers stuck to nonfiction? What would have been lost in terms of detail or emotion had he kept to the literal truth? My feeling is that in a book like this, told in the first person by Achak, using his own name, it actually makes extraordinarily little difference. The liveliness and drive of the story are what count, and the accuracy of what he describes has been widely corroborated by others. Achak’s personal testimony, whether in reality or in fiction—the tale of his walk; his constant hunger; his sense of helplessness when a boy is pulled out of line in front of him by a lion and eaten in the tall grass; his horror as he watches starving boys, many of them totally naked, tearing the flesh of a dead elephant into strips to carry away and eat; the blood trickling down their faces—is what brings the story alive. Calling it fiction becomes no more than a device, a way to build an engrossing story while remaining scrupulously honest.

more from Slate here.

These are fundamental issues, touching on the way in which different peoples conceive their relationship to nature, to people, to machines and to God. One may argue that attitudes to questions arising from the new technology of organ transplantation will clarify such differences. But maybe we should just say that we haven’t yet negotiated our relationship to the new biotechnology. We need the keen eye of the ethnographer to point out that transplant technology, whose practitioners think of themselves as relying on proven knowledge, experimental hypothesis and mastery of techniques, is in fact embedded in its own ideology. Transplantation, Sharp writes, ‘rests on a paradoxical set of ideological or moral premises that guide medical conduct, professional outreach efforts, and dominant lay understandings of death, the body and gift giving’. She lists seven premises taken for granted in the transplant world, from master surgeon to donor’s weeping sister or brother. True, they are taken for granted, but there is a tension between them that produces what she calls paradoxes: transplant engineering is a medical miracle; body parts must never be commodified; reusable organs are precious; brain-death criteria are needed to generate transplantable parts; the scarcity of available human organs needs radical solutions; merging different human bodies is a natural progression as we learn how to do it better and better; even as organ transplantation becomes an industry requiring corporate management, dying patients still require absolute compassion and trust. There are many things in Sharp’s book to make you feel uneasy, but if you ask of yourself the questions she asks of the communities she has studied, you may find out a good deal about yourself that you did not know before.

more from Ian Hacking at the LRB here.

To write the Life of Thomas Hardy is an epic undertaking. You have to disinter two complicated marriages, while wading through the interminable Dynasts and the no longer famous Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall. Epic must begin not stolidly ab ovo in the manner of traditional biography, but arrestingly in medias res. The first decision is therefore the choice of vignette for your prologue. Ralph Pite and Claire Tomalin begin as follows: “You have to leave your car in the car park and walk up the lane” and “In November of 1912 an ageing writer lost his wife”. Admirers of Tomalin’s work will have no difficulty in assigning these openings to their respective authors, not least because she is too elegant and economic a writer ever to use the word “car” twice in any sentence, let alone the all-important first one. Her best books are about marriages or quasi-marital relationships: Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, above all Dora Jordan and the future King William IV. Her prologue accordingly turns Emma, the first Mrs Hardy, into a version of the madwoman in the attic, sleeping alone on the top floor of Max Gate, reading and writing all day in a second attic room, having her breakfast and lunch brought up by her maid. The writerly decision to take the trouble to record the latter’s name (Dolly) is the authentic Tomalin touch

.

more from the TLS here.

In the New Yorker, George Saunders offers some ideas for the “Borat” DVD.

Got your note, deeply honored. Being new to the company, really appreciate opportunity to outline some ideas for “Borat” DVD. As Josh mentioned, we do indeed have a wealth of footage that could be put to good use as DVD extras. In other cases, have taken liberty of suggesting some reshoots:

OPENING “VILLAGE” SECTION: How about a high-speed montage of the actual difficult, brutal lives of the villagers in Romania—the hours of debilitating toil, their oppression at the hands of their corrupt government, premature loss of teeth, death of infants, etc., etc.—culminating in a panning shot of the village on the morning of the day when they first realize they’ve been had, and that, as far as posterity goes, they will always be remembered, if remembered at all, as savages, rapists, prostitutes, etc., and they stumble out of their little sheds or whatever, looking traumatized? (Would be good if one or two could fall into depression/commit suicide as a result = confirmation of their “subhuman” status? Rich social commentary.)

ALT: The scene where the one-armed old man, many months later, weeps in his room at the memory of being tricked into wearing a sex toy on his arm. Priceless!

SOUTHERN DINING SOCIETY SECTION: Do we have footage of the woman Borat identified as unattractive being consoled in her darkened living room later that night by her husband? Particularly good if, all her life, she’s fought the feeling that she was not attractive, and only recently has come to feel pretty, owing to the steady love of her husband, who does, in fact, find her pretty, in part because of her kindness to him and others in their community—and now all those wounds have been reopened! Also, although she is crying, she tries to cry quietly, so as not to alarm the kids. Super!

(H/t Maeve Adams.)

In American Scientist:

The exhibition “Blow-up” (and the accompanying book) shows remarkable images of real things seen at tremendous magnification. But … “image,” “show” and “real” are fuzzy words, even for a dyed-in-the-wool (now there’s an image!) realist. There’s more to this story than meets the eye.

“Blow-up” shows the work of scientists associated with the National Center on Nanostructures and Biosystems at Surfaces in Modena, Italy, headed by Elisa Molinari. The images have been manipulated in a variety of ways by an excellent photographer, Lucia Covi. She in turn was inspired by the work of Felice Frankel. (Frankel writes the “Sightings” column in American Scientist.)

We are so used to looking at photographs, on film and now digital, that we think of these extremely small-scale images—the other-worldly mountain landscape of the gold tip of a near-field scanning optical microscope (a), or the diffraction pattern of a silicon crystal (b)—as snapshots, perhaps taken through some microscope. But they are not photographs.

Are they faithful images? Not really. But neither are “real” photographs, as anyone knows who has developed her own film or tinkered with an image electronically in a computer. The process of representing an underlying reality in these images is set into motion by some perturbation, usually electromagnetic in nature, of the object. A sensor transforms signals from the sample into an electronic signature (in classical photography, neat chemistry intervenes) that is manipulated and amplified, eventually becoming an array of black or colored dots on the paper before you. Light reflecting off the paper is transformed by the retina into another electrical signal that our brain processes into an image.

Security Council Report has a brief on the current state of affairs in Darfur and the world community’s response.

Council members are likely to support the proposed hybrid force in Darfur, but without enthusiasm and only as a last resort if it’s essential in negotiating an agreement with Sudan. At press time, the outcome of the 30 November AU Summit on this issue was still unknown.

In light of the recent UN assessment mission in Chad and the Central African Republic (CAR), the Council may also address a possible UN peacekeeping presence in both countries, but discussions may have to be left for January. A Secretary-General’s report on the CAR is also expected.

A briefing by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) on investigations into Darfur is expected…

The situation in Darfur deteriorated to unprecedented levels in November, with increasing attacks against civilians and aid workers as well as general lawlessness and chaos. While visiting Darfur in mid-November, Under Secretary-General Jan Egeland was prevented from travelling to some areas.

The spillover into Chad and the CAR is increasing. There are now 68,000 displaced Chadian persons and 218,000 Darfurian refugees in Chad, and an unknown number in the CAR. Rebel activity has increased sharply, with Chad declaring a state of emergency and reports at press time indicate that rebels may attempt to attack N’Djamena. In the CAR, rebels have taken over at least three cities in the north, and have requested talks on power-sharing.

In The Nation, Bashir Abu-Manneh reviews Rashid Khalidi’s account of the failure of the Palestinian national movement, The Iron Cage, and Ali Abunimah argument for a bi-national state, One Country.

When Palestinian and Jewish socialists, notably Noam Chomsky and the Israeli Matzpen group, advocated a binational state in the 1970s (an issue ignored by Abunimah), its realization was premised on large-scale social and political transformation: Radical movements on both sides, with strong and capable constituencies, would pull toward each other and end their separation. When that option evaporated with the deepening colonial expansion of Israel and the rise of Jewish fundamentalism, many socialists shifted toward advocating a two-state solution, while remaining hostile to political Zionism. With the global retreat of radical politics since the mid-’70s, there is even less reason to believe a binational constituency exists in Israel-Palestine today. “Binationalism without social, political agents on the ground is an idea: an interview here, an article there,” says Azmi Bishara, the Palestinian leader of the National Democratic Assembly in the Israeli Knesset, who, as a supporter of a state for “all its citizens,” can hardly be accused of hostility to binationalism. “Are there masses–social movements–that are raising binationalism? I say no. There are not…. Among the Palestinian masses, the mood is still national. National-Islamic. Not binational.” And if the binational idea remains largely divorced from politics, it has no legs to stand on.

Bishara is hardly mentioned by Abunimah, who ignores much of the literature on binationalism. The binational idea has a history in both societies, and it cannot be encompassed in a few passing references to PLO documents and to Martin Buber’s writings. Unlike Khalidi, Abunimah overlooks Towards a Democratic State in Palestine (1970), the only one-state proposal ever produced by Fatah, written in English by a group of Palestinian intellectuals at the American University of Beirut. (Written for foreign consumption under the aegis of PLO official Nabil Shaath, the document mainly sought to convince a Western audience that Palestinians accepted the Jewish presence in Palestine.) Abunimah’s discussion of the PLO amounts to two paragraphs, one of which is a long quote. He ends with this: “But if a single state was unthinkable in the past, many of the conditions that made it so have changed. Perhaps the most important is that the majority of Israelis and Palestinians now understand that the other community is here to stay.”

But the fact that they know this doesn’t mean that the conditions for binationalism are emerging. Nor does it make sense to describe the Israeli-Palestinian relationship as “intertwined,” as Abunimah often puts it.

The New York Times gives us this on how the blogosphere is expanding the world of jazz. (The article also directs attention to our friend Darcy James Argue’s blog, of the same name as his band, Secret Society.)

[O]ver the last six months, a far-flung contingent of musicians and aficionados has made an effort to upend that prevailing notion, armed with stacks of vinyl, high-speed Internet and a shared conviction that things back then were really far from moribund. Along the way, they touched off the year’s most animated public discourse on jazz, a democratic exchange that culminated last weekend in the debut of behearer.com, an interactive database devoted to the music’s most conflicted period.

The movement, so to speak, has its origins in a posting by the trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas on his label’s blog, greenleafmusic.com. “I’m reading a new book by Philip Jenkins called ‘Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America,’ ” Mr. Douglas wrote at the beginning of the summer, “and I think there are some pertinent tie-ins to the elusive history of the last four decades of American music. Those are the decades Ken Burns couldn’t handle, and this may help explain why.”

That book’s principal argument is that the 1970s saw the failures and excesses of ’60s idealism compounded by national horrors like Vietnam and Watergate, resulting in the rise of a paranoid conservatism. On his blog Mr. Douglas drew a parallel. “There’s a demonization of musicians who pushed the boundaries, successfully and importantly, in that period,” he wrote, “and it has crept into the way history is told and music is taught.”

Noting that “jazz” became an impossibly broad designation around this time, Mr. Douglas posed a rhetorical question: “Is there a writer who can take on the project of an unbiased overview of music since the end of the Vietnam War?” And borrowing Mr. Jenkins’s benchmark of Richard M. Nixon’s resignation as the official end of the 1960s, he proposed a new jazz history that would acknowledge “a generation of multiplicity,” beginning in 1974 and stretching to the end of the cold war.

The call hung in the air for a while.

(H/t DJA.)

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

A street is named after her. Back-to-back conferences celebrate her. New books champion her. Hannah Arendt, who was born 100 years ago this past October, has joined the small world of philosophical heroes. Nor has this attention come to her only since her death in 1975. During her life, she received honorary degrees from Princeton, Smith, and other colleges and universities. Denmark awarded her its Sonning Prize for “commendable work that benefits European culture,” also bestowed on Albert Schweitzer and Winston Churchill. When she gave public lectures, students jammed the aisles and doorways.

Arendt fits the bill for a philosophical hero. She was a German Jewish refugee drenched in classical education and worldly experience. With its frequent references to Greek or Latin terms, her writing radiated thoughtfulness. She was not afraid to broach big subjects — justice, evil, totalitarianism — or to intervene in the political issues of the day — the war in Vietnam, civil rights, the trial of Adolf Eichmann. She was both metaphysical and down-to-earth, at once profound and sexy. Alfred Kazin, the New York critic, recalled her as a woman of great charm and vivaciousness — a femme fatale, even.

Yet if her star shines so brightly, it is because the American intellectual firmament is so dim. After all, who or where are the other political philosophers?

More here.

From Nature:

Cocaine–a stimulating alkaloid crushed out of the leaves of the coca plant–has been reported to increase euphoria and energy as well as to trigger a mind-killing addiction in humans. The appeal is not limited to our species; rats and other animals given access to the drug will pursue it with a vigor normally reserved for procreation. This vigorous drive for the drug derives from its ability to stimulate the brain’s reward pathways, altering the chemical dance of neurotransmitters that tells us what is good to do–again and again and again. Neuroscientist John Wang of the University of Missouri-Kansas City and his colleagues have now traced that effect to one of the brain’s most basic molecular mechanisms.

Previous research has shown that cocaine triggers the reward pathway by activating the mesolimbic dopamine system–a series of neurons that originate near the base of the brain and project signals to its front. Their first stop en route is a section known as the striatum, where the of signals are first received. These signals inhibit the release of the neurotransmitter glutamate and increase the amount of the neurotransmitter dopamine by blocking the latter’s normal reabsorption into the synapses that released it.

More here.

The accusation tha Ian McEwan plagiarized parts of Atonement from a 1977 memoir by Lucilla Andrews elicited this response and now words of solidarity and support from other authors, including the reclusive Thomas Pynchon. McEwan on the charge

It was extraordinary, then, to find in the Wellcome Trust medical library, in Oxford, No Time for Romance, the autobiography of Lucilla Andrews, a well-known writer of hospital romances – my mother used to read her novels with great pleasure. Contained within this book was a factual account of the rigours of Nightingale training, the daily routines and crucially, of the arrival of wounded soldiers from the Dunkirk evacuation and their treatment. As far as I know, no other such factual account exists. Andrews even recounted an episode that paralleled my father’s experience of being told off for swearing.

What Andrews described was not an imaginary world – it was not a fiction. It was the world of a shared reality, of those War Museum letters and of my father’s prolonged hospital stay. Within the pages of a conventional life story, she created an important and unique historical document. With painstaking accuracy, so it seemed to me, she rendered in the form of superb reportage, an experience of the war that has been almost entirely neglected, and which I too wanted to bring to life through the eyes of my heroine. As with the Dunkirk section, I drew on the scenes she described. Again, it was important to me that these events actually occurred. For certain long-outdated medical practices, she was my sole source and I have always been grateful to her.

I have openly acknowledged my debt to her in the author’s note at the end of Atonement, and ever since on public platforms, where questions about research are almost as frequent as “where do you get your ideas from?”.

Naila Tiwana reports on the 2006 the Congress of Islamic Feminism conference in Barcelona, in muslimwakeup.com.

The Congress of Islamic Feminism was founded as a movement by the Islamic Board of Catalan. The Islamic Board of Catalan is the Spanish federation of Islamic institutions. It was born out of the need to have a unified organisation which could look into matters of import facing the Muslim community in Spain and also in the world at large. Its main aim is to adopt a significant social approach, which it deems, will promote better social behaviour. It wows to struggle against the biases and misconceptions plaguing Islam. It nurtures a multi-cultural and multi-religious approach to promote a peaceful understanding of Islam, so vital for the lifeline of humanitarian values to be kept intact.

The Congress of Islamic Feminism called together voices from all over the globe to express solidarity with its cause the first time last year. The resounding success that it encountered after its first congregation led to the second one now in November in an expected course of many successive ones to follow. The organizers candidly admitted not having envisioned such a snowball effect in its popularity. The phenomenal response that it received just goes to show the intensity of its need and relevance today. The head of the Islamic Board opined, “The denial of women’s rights leads to the necessity of Islamic feminism. Islamic feminism is a movement within the framework of Islam.”

The multi-cultural voice of Islam was represented by an equal diversity of ethno-cultural representation in the form of speakers at this forum. From the Americas in the West to Indonesia in the East, the cream of academics in the field of Islamic issues, came together to deliver, debate, and analyze related theories and practice in the greatest and widest of perspectives.

Symmetry Magazine provides 60 second explanations of a series of physical phenomena, including the Acceleration of Particles, the Higgs Boson, superconductors, even The Standard Model, and much more. On CP Violation:

Are the laws of nature the same for matter and antimatter? Physicists use the term “CP” (for “charge parity”) to talk about matter-antimatter symmetry. If nature treated matter and antimatter alike, then, in physics-speak, nature would be CP-symmetric. If not, CP is violated.

Experiments have shown that nature’s weak force—which is responsible for the decay of particles—does in fact violate CP. Yet CP violation poses a mystery.

The big bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, with subsequent annihilation leaving neither behind. And yet, the observable universe has about ten billion galaxies that consist entirely of matter (protons, neutrons, and electrons) with no antimatter (antiprotons, antineutrons, and positrons). Very soon after the big bang, some forces must have caused the CP violation that skewed the equality in the number of matter and antimatter particles and left behind excess matter.

Katharine Sanderson in [email protected]:

Photographs snapped of Mars show gullies that must have grown sometime in the past seven years. That, researchers say, is strong evidence that liquid water is still flowing on the red planet today. And with running water comes a better chance of finding life.

Previous work had suggested that some gullies on the planet are new in geological terms. But that could have meant anything from millions of years ago to just yesterday. The latest data, collected by the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) before its recent demise (see ‘Goodbye Mars Global Surveyor’), suggest that water flows are happening now.

“Recognizing new contemporary processes is always a thrill,” says Michael Malin of instrumentation company Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, California, who led the investigation. “The current gully activity was anticipated, but to find it actually happening was very cool.”

Scientists are a long way from finding any evidence of little green bacteria on Mars, but now, they say, they have a better idea where to look. “If I were looking for life on Mars, I’d bias my research in the direction of these features,” says Mike Ravine, one of Malin’s colleagues.

Nicholas Kristof in a column at the New York Times, as quoted at Darwiniana:

If God is omniscient and omnipotent, you can’t help wondering why she doesn’t pull out a thunderbolt and strike down Richard Dawkins.

Or, at least, crash the Web site of www.whydoesgodhateamputees.com. That’s a snarky site that notes that while people regularly credit God for curing cancer or other ailments, amputees never seem to enjoy divine intervention.

“If God were answering the prayers of amputees to regenerate their lost limbs, we would be seeing amputated legs growing back every day,” the Web site declares, adding: “It would appear, to an unbiased observer, that God is singling out amputees and purposefully ignoring them.”

That site is part of an increasingly assertive, often obnoxious atheist offensive led in part by Professor Dawkins — the Oxford scientist who is author of the new best seller “The God Delusion.” It’s a militant, in-your-face brand of atheism that he and others are proselytizing for…

More here. Responses by Harris, Dawkins, others in the New York Times:

To the Editor:

Re “A Modest Proposal for a Truce on Religion,” by Nicholas D. Kristof (column, Dec. 3):

Contrary to Mr. Kristof’s opinion, it isn’t “intolerant” or “fundamentalist” to point out that there is no good reason to believe that one of our books was dictated by an omniscient deity.

Half of the American population believes that the universe is 6,000 years old. They are wrong about this. Declaring them so is not “irreligious intolerance.” It is intellectual honesty.

Given the astounding number of galaxies and potential worlds arrayed overhead, the complexities of life on earth and the advances in our ethical discourse over the last 2,000 years, the world’s religions offer a view of reality that is now so utterly impoverished as to scarcely constitute a view of reality at all.

This is a fact that can be argued for from a dozen sides, as Richard Dawkins and I have recently done in our books. Calling our efforts “mean” overlooks our genuine concern for the future of civilization.

And it’s not much of a counterargument either.

Sam Harris
New York, Dec. 3, 2006
The writer is the author of “The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.”

•

To the Editor:

Nicholas D. Kristof is one of many commentators to find the tone of the newly resurgent atheism “obnoxious” or “mean.”

Ubiquitous as they are, such epithets are not borne out by an objective reading of the works he cites: Sam Harris’s “Letter to a Christian Nation,” my own “God Delusion” and www.whydoesgodhateamputees.com (I had not been aware of this splendid Web site; thank you, Mr. Kristof).

I have scanned all three atheist sources carefully for polemic, and my honest judgment is that they are gentle by the standards of normal political commentary, say, or the standards of theater and arts critics.

Mr. Kristof has simply become acclimatized to the convention that you can criticize anything else but you mustn’t criticize religion. Ears calibrated to this norm will hear gentle criticism of religion as intemperate, and robust criticism as obnoxious. Without wishing to offend, I want “The God Delusion” to raise our consciousness of this weird double standard.

How did religion acquire its extraordinary immunity against normal levels of criticism?

Richard Dawkins
Oxford, England, Dec. 4, 2006

More letters here.  Response from Daniel Dennett at Edge.org:

Presumably Mr Kristof chose the most inflammatory passage he could find in Richard Dawkins’ book to illustrate his point about how “mean” and “obnoxious” the tone is, and what he came up with is Dawkins’ short but appalling list of some of religion’s blemishes: from the Crusades and witch-hunts of yore to today’s 9/11, honor killings and “shiny-suited bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money.” Good riddance to them all, says Dawkins. Would Kristof choose to defend any of these, or is he just shocked that Dawkins would be so impolite as to remind the devout of these dishonorable episodes? There is nothing “dogmatic” or “fundamentalist” about Dawkins’ tone; he is simply speaking truthfully about matters that most people have trained themselves not to mention, or else to allude to in mealy-mouthed terms.

And much more interesting debate on religion here at Edge.org.