This will be the last I post on this subject, I think, but I spent a
while on a nice 30-mile spin on the fix this morning doing a little
critical thinking and it would be interesting to put it into electrons.
Mark Hickey wrote:
>
> Still, you ascribe more moral importance to YOUR "religion" and don't
> want to allow those with other viewpoints the same visibility.
> Replace "religion" with "mores" or "beliefs" and it's the same thing.
> Pure hypocrisy.
[...bizarre ranting about Al Quaeda snipped...]
This is what I mean by exploiting the American cultural instinct for
fairness: I have a religious belief system. Therefore any belief system
you have is necessarily religious, and therefore must be held to be on
equal footing with _my_ religious belief system.
The problem with this logic is that there is something called
"reality", and there is a systematic way to understand reality:
science. Science is a way of understanding and cataloging facts. A
famously controversial example among fundamentalists might be
evolution: evolution is a fact. It doesn't matter if Jesus or the
Flying Spaghetti Monster or the aliens talking to you through your
fillings tell you otherwise, evolution will continue to be a fact.
Evolution does not care whether or not you believe in it. There are
many facts in biology which make fundamentalists outraged. The facts do
not care about this. They continue to be facts.
A case in point: human papilloma virus (HPV). According to the Centers
for Disease Control, 3,952 women died in the U.S. of cervical cancer
in 2002. Cervical cancer is caused by human papilloma virus. These are
facts. It is also a fact that there is now a vaccine for HPV, which, to
be effective, must be given to women prior to the onset of sexual
activity. That is, you have to vaccinate young girls before they start
having sex. Fundamentalists have used their political muscle to stifle
issuing this vaccine to children the same way one might vaccinate them
against measles or mumps or polio, specifically because it is a vaccine
against a sexually transmitted disease and such a vaccination would
weaken the message of abstinence.
If widespread vaccination of girls against HPV becomes the norm,
cervical cancer can be eradicated, saving thousands of lives. This is a
fact. If the vaccinations do not take place, women will continue to
suffer and die needlessly. That is also a fact. But the religious
zealots do not care about the facts. Like Brandi and Mark and many
others, they actively campaign to have facts about sexual biology --
science -- withheld not just from their own children, but from
everybody else's children too. This is not a simply rhetorical
distinction -- to the extent the nutjobs are successful, innocent girls
suffer and die.
This is tragic. I honestly do not know how the people campaigning
against HPV vaccination sleep at night.
Science does not give all ideas an equal playing field. Science is
designed to do exactly the opposite: the scientific process weeds out
incorrect ideas (like creationism) and strengthens correct ideas (like
evolution). Hypotheses which conform to the facts are retained, and
those which do not are discarded. Science does not treat everyone's
opinion equally. It shouldn't. This distinguishes science from both
politics and religion: democratic politics demands that everyone be
allowed to speak their opinion. Religious tolerance demands that each
of us allow the other to envision God as he wishes. Science need not,
and should not, treat all opinions equally.
Not everything which is believed to be true in science at any given
time is in fact true. Some currently held scientific ideas will
eventually be discovered to be wrong. If this were not so, science
would cease to function, because it would produce no new ideas. This
does not mean, as fundamentalists would have you believe, that all
ideas in science are equally open to criticism. It does not mean that
every theory of, for example, the origin of the universe deserves equal
consideration. Some things are simply true, and science would be
wasting its time debating things which are known to be true.
Free speech? Free speech demands that no one group be allowed to
suppress facts -- science -- for religious reasons. Citizens of a free,
democratic society have a right to access the truth about the world.
This includes education about sexual biology, evolution, the Big Bang.
Scientists have not just the right, but the obligation to make the
facts about these things available to everyone, including your
children. Even if you don't like it.
And I use brass nipples exclusively.
CC