By Roberto Rivera|Published Date: October 20, 2009
Mark Shea gives us the news we've been dying to hear: this year's winner of the Richard Dawkins Award, which honors the person whose
contributions raise public awareness of the nontheist life stance; who through writings, media, the arts, film, and/or the stage advocates increased scientific knowledge; who through work or by example teaches acceptance of the nontheist philosophy; and whose public posture mirrors the uncompromising nontheist life stance of Dr. Richard Dawkins
goes to Bill Maher, the creative mind behind Religulous. The same Bill Maher
who tells us that germ theory is bunk, who says vaccination is a fraud, who knows more than the whole medical community about the illusion we call "AIDS", who is a vocal and dangerous advocate of all manner of scientific quackery. That's the guy the Apostle of Reason and Science Richard Dawkins selected to receive his prize. Why? Because he's a noisy atheist and that's all that matters.
The savage irony is that Dawkins has chosen to "lionize a guy whose scientific ignorance and quackery really could lead to actual physical harm and even death for people who take him seriously." Yet
nobody will ever die from thinking God created the universe or having some doubts about the proposition that hydrogen is a substance which, if you leave it alone for 13.5 billion years, will turn into Angelina Jolie.
That's because "no cost is too great when your real project is not 'promotion of science and reason' but 'attacking Jesus Christ, no matter how stupid and irrational your ally is.'"
Many are working to bring the disparity in sentencing between cocaine and crack to an end. Pharmacologically they are almost the exact same substance. Personally, I think the disparity should be reduced a bit, but I also think that community-based treatment for non-violent offenders should be used on a much larger scale.
William Saletan of Slate observes that we're in a "war between the worlds": the world of reality and the world of virtual reality. The frightening thing is that some of the casualties in this war are not virtual casualties. They're real ones.
The compromise [Uganda] had accepted, which the president [Yoweri Museveni] presented as reconciliation, was actually something more complex and less sturdy. It was as if, having found themselves unable to forgive, his people had concentrated on forgetting, and when they’d failed at forgetting, they’d chosen to believe what they wanted to believe. So long as nothing disturbed their conception of the past or exposed them to scrutiny, the nation could continue its halting procession along Museveni’s chosen path. To the president’s way of thinking, therefore, justice was a threat to progress, not because it promised verdicts and punishments, but because it forced people to remember.
