“Unchanging bacteria” revisited: dreadful science reporting in The Washington Post

February 7, 2015 • 11:11 am

It’s a sad situation that the only newspaper in the U.S. that still has a full science section is the New York Times (it’s on Tuesday), and even much of that is devoted to “health”.  Other papers seem to act as “article aggregators,” with poorly-trained science journalists simply accepting a new finding at face value based on the authors’ claims or on what the authors’ universities put out in their press release (Science Daily is notorious for uncritically regurgitating such claims.)

But, as always with striking new results, it’s caveat emptor. Remember how the papers jumped all over the findings of arsenic bacteria (i.e., bacteria using arsenic in their DNA), a finding that was later refuted? Most of the papers that heralded this bacterium as a “new form of life” didn’t devote much (or any) space to the refutation. For showing that a fancy new result is actually a flash in the pan is merely “dog bites man” stuff.

A good example of uncritical reporting is a piece by Sarah Kaplan in Wednesday’s Washington Post: “The mysterious 2-billion-year-old creature that would make Darwin smile.” It is, of course the bacterium that I wrote about the same day: a sulfur-metabolizing microbe whose morphology (and metabolic sulfur products) seem to have been unchanged for over two billion years. Kaplan’s reference to “Darwin’s smile” refers to the authors’ claim that their results supports Darwinism’s “null hypothesis”: we don’t expect evolution in an unchanging environment.

There are two problems with both the original paper by J. W. Schopf et al. and Kaplan’s summary of it. See my critique for much more information:

1. “Darwin’s null hypothesis,” as the authors and Kaplan present it, is flatly wrong: we sometimes do expect evolution in an unchanging environment; and if we found it, it certainly wouldn’t be a severe problem for evolutionary theory (see below).

2. The authors show only relative stasis (lack of change) in the appearance of the sea-floor bacteria and in the compounds they excrete. They have no way of showing whether other traits or genes have remained static over two billion years. For example, any genes affecting the efficiency of sulfur uptake, or of the rate of reproduction of the bacteria, might have changed but simply couldn’t be detected in the material examined.

But Kaplan couldn’t be bothered to dig beneath the surface of the authors’ claims; in fact, the two people she quotes about the paper were both authors of it! Here’s part of her report:

“The microbes we see in the fossils are almost identical to what we see in the ocean now,” study co-author Malcolm Walter, a professor of astrobiology at the University of New South Wales, told The Washington Post in a telephone interview. “They have similar shapes and are doing similar chemistry.”

But the fact these particular organisms successfully avoided evolving for billions of years doesn’t disprove the theory of evolution — quite the opposite.

Darwin’s theory states that species evolve through natural selection in response to environmental changes — increased threats from predators, new competition from other animals, changes in access to water or air. But the inverse is also true: If there is no change in the environment of a balanced ecosystem, the organisms that constitute it should remain similarly unchanged — a principle dubbed evolution’s “null hypothesis.”

“These microorganisms are well-adapted to their simple, very stable physical and biological environment,” the study’s lead author, University of California at Los Angeles professor William Schopf, said in a university press release. “If they were in an environment that did not change but they nevertheless evolved, that would have shown that our understanding of Darwinian evolution was seriously flawed.”

(Note the reliance on the “university press release,” an organ dedicated to puffing up the results of university scientists.)

Schopf, otherwise a very good paleobiologist, is simply wrong here. I bet if you examined the genomes of the 2-billion-year-old bacterium and its modern descendants (if they are descendants), you’ve find ample genetic change, not just in “neutral” sites, but in genes that actually do something. Of course we can’t study that, for we can’t sequence the genome of an ancient bacterium; but even if we found such change, it wouldn’t violate evolutionary theory in the slightest.

It’s time for reputable newspapers to hire science reporters that do more than simply recycle press releases and do perfunctory puff-pieces based on superficial investigation. There are still some science writers who dig into papers, interviewing a variety of scientists—and not just authors of the paper at issue—who can shed light on new discoveries. These including Faye Flam, Carl Zimmer (who, along with several bloggers, called out the so-called missing link Darwinius), and Natalie Angier. Angier works for the paper, Zimmer publishes there often, and Flam has recently had a piece there. Where are the other papers?

In a world in which science is becoming ever more important, and in which vital political decisions demand scientific literacy (e.g., vaccinations, global warming, and so on), it’s shameful that newspapers are simply pruning the science out of their columns. Or, in the case of the Post, publishing fluff that will produce a serious misunderstanding of what evolutionary theory says.

Naturally the petulant Professor Ceiling Cat has left a comment on the Post site. I hope it stays up.

 

Travel photos: India

February 7, 2015 • 9:40 am

I thought I’d put up some of the rest of my India photos (I suspect there will be two or three more installments, one featuring d*gs). I found that I still had food pictures, and some others as well.

A sari shop at night, Kolkata:

Sari shop

The king of Indian yogurt sweets: misthi doi (also called mitha dahi, or “sweet yogurt” in Hindi). It is silky, creamy, and scrumptious. This was served to me at a small, unprepossessing but locally famous sweet shop—one that’s so humble that you’d never enter unless an Indian friend told you about it. Wikipedia describes this famous Bengali snack as follows;

Mitha Dahi is a popular dessert in the states of West Bengal, Odisha and Bangladesh. It is prepared by boiling milk until it is slightly thickened, sweetening it with sugar, either guda/gura (brown sugar) or khajuri guda/gura (date molasses), and allowing the milk to ferment overnight. Earthenware is always used as the container for making Mitha Dahi because the gradual evaporation of water through its porous walls not only further thickens the yoghurt, but also produces the right temperature for the growth of the culture. Very often the yoghurt is delicately seasoned with a pinch of elaichi (cardamom) for fragrance.

This portion was indeed scooped from a big earthenware pot:

Mishti
Another sweet shop that we patronized. Sweets are always made on the premises. My host, Shubhra, is on the left:

Sweet shop
One of the sweets for sale. I’m not sure what this was, as we didn’t buy it, but it’s attractively decorated with rose petals and cost 10 rupees (16 cents) each:

sweets

Lunch at a friend’s: a home cooked vegetarian meal of cauliflower, peas, and kachuri (Bengali bread filled with mashed peas). This was one of the best home-cooked meals I had, and was washed down with mango juice. There were, of course, sweets afterwards.

Lunch

Offerings on sale at a nearby Hindu temple; they include food, incense, and other stuff. You buy yourself merit by offering these to the gods in a private ceremony, off limits to Western eyes. After the god (goddess in this case) “eats” the food (metaphorically) in a ceremony called darshan, they’re then offered to the poor:

Offerings

South Indian food in Kolkata: medhu vadai: savory “donuts” (not sweet) made with lentil flour. Eaten as a snack, they’re dipped into the coconut chutney (on the left) and nommed with sambar, the spicy soup on the right.  Here they were served in traditional fashion on a banana leaf.

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Perhaps my favorite South Indian dish: an uttapam (this one with tomatoes and onions), a savory pancake made with a rice- and lentil-flour batter. You must eat it with copious lashings of the wonderful coconut chutney that’s ubiquitous in South Indian meals:

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A paan shop, where various mixtures are rolled into betel leaves to act as a digestive or as a stimulant. Stalls have different reputations; this was supposedly one of the better ones in Kolkata:

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Here’s the paan-maker, whpping up a bunch of mitha paans (sweet paans) for ourselves and the extended family:

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A fancier paan stall at the Poush Mela fair in Santiniketan. Note the variety of ingredients you can choose:

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A chaat (savory snack) stall at the same fair. Indians are very good at arraying their noms in an attractive and tempting way:

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Breakfast: an Indian kedgiree, but made with non-rice grains (I have yet to suss this out) served with bananas and fresh papaya:

Breakfast

 Jhal muri: a savory snack with puffed rice and spices that I’ve shown before:

Jalmuri

Finally, one of the beautiful sights of India: a woman in a sari with glossy braids draped over her back. The women often anoint their hair with coconut oil:

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Caturday felid trifecta: zombie cat story gets complicated, heroic cat saves abandoned human baby, and cat finds The Door into Winter

February 7, 2015 • 6:59 am

Cat news seems to come in threes: here are this week’s Caturday news items, with an extra photo for lagniappe:

Remember Bart the Zombie cat, who was supposedly hit by a car, and then, supposedly showing no sign of life, was buried by his owner? Bart then supposedly revived, clawed his way out of his grave, and was returned to that owner.

I became a bit suspicious about it all when I found out that the cat’s owner (Ellis Hutson) and the woman who found Bart had jointly set up an online GoFundMe account asking for money for Bart’s vet bills, but that the Florida Humane Society taking care of Bart hadn’t received any money (Bart’s care is free, anyway). That smelled like a scam. (The account is now up to $6,614.)

Sure enough, an executive of the Humane Society of Tampa Bay pronounced that Bart had probably been buried alive while still moving. And now I wonder whether his injuries, too, were inflicted by his owner (he had a broken jaw, severe facial lacerations, and lost an eye). Here he is getting treatment:

Bart-the-zombie-miracle-cat-jpg
Photo: Tampa Bay Humane Society

KY3 reports:

Sherry Silk of the Humane Society of Tampa Bay told the The Huffington Post she thinks those who buried the cat knew Bart was breathing.

The cat’s owner, Ellis Wayne Hutson, told news outlets last month that Bart rose from the grave. Hutson said he had neighbors bury the cat after Bart was hit by a car and appeared dead. The cat showed up five days later covered in dirt and seriously injured, according to reports.

According to HuffPo, Silk is suspicious because of a YouTube video in which a woman’s voice can be heard saying that the cat might not have been dead. She also said the chronology of when Hutson sought care for Bart after his Lazarus act keeps changing.

CNN reports that the Humane Society will not return Bart to his owner:

Since the attention Bart received after he allegedly “rose from the dead,” more information has surfaced about Bart’s “home environment and the circumstances leading up to his burial,” Sherry Silk, executive director of the Tampa Humane Society said in a release.

According to Polk County, Florida, court documents, Hutson was arrested in 1998 and charged with cruelty to animals. The nature of the charges is unclear, and the charges were later thrown out.

PuffHo reports a bit more:

Silk says that though the video was the first red flag, she has other reasons for not wanting to return Bart.

One point of contention is the length of time that Hutson took to seek care for Bart — whose injuries included severe head trauma, a broken jaw and a dead eye — after Bart came home. She says the owner’s timeline regarding when he found the cat and when he brought the cat in for care keeps changing.

Hutson, however, told HuffPost his story has remained the same from the get-go. He says as soon as he found Bart, he called the Humane Society, and the staff member who answered the phone told him that he should bring Bart in the next morning “if he was still alive.” Hutson says he then attempted to treat the cat’s injuries himself, and brought Bart in the next day as instructed.

Silk says there is no way that a Humane Society staffer would say this without urging Hutson to seek emergency care for Bart immediately.

She also expressed concern about Hutson’s ability to provide a home environment suited to Bart’s needs. Silk said Hutson seemed unwilling to keep Bart inside if he goes back home, which would be necessary for an animal recovering from such severe injuries. Hutson, however, told HuffPost that “Bart will be an indoor cat for the rest of his life,” and added that he has been telling Silk this from the start.

We don’t know all the details here, and perhaps never will, but this is sufficiently suspicious that I think Bart should be removed from his owner and given to a loving home. (I don’t know what can be legally done about this.) And that, I hope, is what will happen, though Hutson vows to go to court. If he doesn’t, you’ll know that there was foul play afoot.

In the meanwhile, Bart took his first bites of food four days ago, an event recorded by the Humane Society, which notes: “he will still need the feeding tube and feedings every 4 hours for the next few weeks as he is unable to eat enough on his own to sustain him.”

Good luck, Bart!

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*******

The Humane Society saved Bart’s life, and here is Ceiling Cat’s reciprocation: a cat saved the life of a baby. Or so The Dodo reports:

A baby found abandoned in a box on a cold winter day in Russia is alive and well today — all thanks to one cat’s life-saving cuddles.

As Russian news outlet Pravda reports, the two-month-old baby boy was discovered near the dumpsters of an apartment complex in the city of Obinsk, after resident Nadezhda Makhovikova heard the desperate meowing of the building’s communal cat, Murka.

When Makhovikova arrived to investigate, she found the long-haired tabby cat cuddled alongside the helpless infant, sheltering him from the sub-freezing temperatures like she would her own kitten.

“One side [of the baby] was already hot — [the] cat warmed [him] in the few hours he spent in her box,” Makhovikova says, as translated by Google.

Murka remained close by, reportedly licking the baby until paramedics arrived to take him to the hospital. Fortunately, the child is said to be “completely healthy,” no doubt because of Murka’s help.

Here’s a video of Murka, and you can see that he must have had substantial warming abilities. But a “communal cat”? Is this still Soviet Russia?

*******

Reader Taskin sent a video of a cat trying to find the Door Into Summer, but discovers only more snow. He seems to have dug himself though that large drift, but gets affronted when he gets outside and finds—more snow!

The video was apparently filmed in St. John, New Brunswick, Canada, and has the caption “rudiger only kind of loves the snow”, with the ancillary information, “battle cat trying to deal with the four foot snow drift.”  Battle cat, indeed! Taskin added that New Brunswick got 140 cm (55 inches, or 4.5 feet) of snow in a week! And the video has garnered over 1.25 million views since it was posted four days ago.

*******

Finally, as lagniappe, Matthew Cobb reports that his new kitten, Harry, despite some initial bumps as he entered a house with two adult male cats, is finally getting comfortable with them. Here’s Harry snuggled up with one of the residents, Ollie:

Ollie and Harry

Saturday: Hili dialogue

February 7, 2015 • 4:43 am
Hili must have been reading about religion again, for she’s quoting Luther at the Diet of Worms (Hili, of course is at the Diet of Mice). Here she speaks on the veranda:
Hili: Here I sit and can no other.
A: I understand that you want to come inside?
Hili: Yes, my paws are freezing.
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In Polish:
Hili: Tu siedzę, inaczej nie mogę.
Ja: Rozumiem, że chcesz wejść do domu?
Hili: Tak, łapki mi zmarzły.

 

This is an ex-monk (but Buddhists say he’s alive)

February 6, 2015 • 2:59 pm

Trigger warning: frozen Buddhist

This is an ex-monk. He has ceased to be. Bereft of life, he rests in peace. He has joined the choir invisible:

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According to the BBC News, this monk’s body (his robes are beside him in the photo) was found frozen and preserved in Mongolia. There’s no telling how long he’s been dead, but the Mongolian climate probably freeze-dried the body, explaining the remarkable preservation.

The thing is, though, that some Buddhists think he’s alive!

But Dr Barry Kerzin, a physician to Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, told the Siberian Times that the monk was in a rare state of meditation called “tukdam”.

“If the meditator can continue to stay in this meditative state, he can become a Buddha,” Dr Kerzin said.

The monk was discovered after being stolen by a man hoping to sell him on the black market.

Mongolian police have arrested the culprit and the monk is now being guarded at the National Centre of Forensic Expertise.

The Siberian Times piece adds this:

Dr Barry Kerzin, a famous Buddhist monk and a physician to the Dalai Lama, said: ‘I had the privilege to take care of some meditators who were in a tukdam state.

‘If the person is able to remain in this state for more than three weeks – which rarely happens – his body gradually shrinks, and in the end all that remains from the person is his hair, nails, and clothes. Usually in this case, people who live next to the monk see a rainbow that glows in the sky for several days. This means that he has found a ‘rainbow body’. This is the highest state close to the state of Buddha’.

He added: ‘If the meditator can continue to stay in this meditative state, he can become a Buddha. Reaching such a high spiritual level the meditator will also help others, and all the people around will feel a deep sense of joy’.

Now perhaps you can be dead and still be in a “meditative state,” but I don’t know how that works, nor have I heard anything about that in my fragmentary readings about Buddhism.

Regardless, though, this nonsense shows that not all Buddhists are rationalists. Buddhism is often praised for not having the supernatural beliefs that cast doubt on other faiths, but even the Dalai Lama (often praised for being science-friendly) believes in reincarnation and karma—unevidenced spiritual doctrines.

In the meantime, although the doctor says that this monk is just resting and pining for the Potala, he is in fact a late monk, one who’s expired and gone to meet his maker. He’s a stiff.

UPDATE: I just received this email, which I won’t dignify with a reply save to say that here we have a fruitcake with extra brandy:

you cant leave anyone alone can you.you are absolutely sure that no form whatsoever of reincarnation takes  place what is it when a ray of sunlight hits a leaf you don’t know what 90 per cent of the universe is,but you arrogantly assure the unwashed what it isn’t.pure hubris

h/t:Barry

 

Canada’s Supreme Court rules in favor of assisted suicide

February 6, 2015 • 12:12 pm

Amid a morass of bad news, there’s also some excellent news today. According to many Canadian sources, including the Globe and Mail and the CBC, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled unanimously this morning that terminally ill adults cannot be prosecuted for having a doctor help them end their lives. Assisted suicide had previously been a criminal violation. The ruling won’t take effect for a year, but that’s only to allow the provinces to develop regulations about the procedure. Quebec already has such a law, which was in some limbo as it violated Canada’s criminal code, but now it looks kosher.

Doctors do not have to comply with these requests, either, but I suspect that many compassionate ones will. How could they not—unless they were religious? The terminally ill people.

According to the CBC, the court ruled on a suit initiated by two women who were terminally ill, but the ruling came too late for both:

The case was brought by the B.C. Civil Liberties Association on behalf of two women, Kay Carter and Gloria Taylor, both of whom have died since the legal battle began. Both women had degenerative diseases and wanted the right to have a doctor help them die.

A lawyer on behalf of Carter and Taylor argued that they were being discriminated against because their physical disabilities didn’t allow them to kill themselves the way able-bodied people could.

Carter went to Switzerland with her daughter, Lee, to die. Taylor died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 2012.

There are those who object to this ruling, of course. I suspect the Anglican and Catholic churches will raise a fuss—after all, it was the Anglican Church’s refusal to give any credence to priest Eric MacDonald’s wish to help his M.S.-afflicted wife die with dignity that eventually made Eric (who used to comment here), leave the Church. And according to the Globe and Mail, an organization of Canadians with disabilities have also objected:

Critics of the ruling said it puts disabled people at risk. In a joint statement, the Council of Canadians with Disabilities and the Canadian Association for Community Living said they are “profoundly disappointed” with the ruling.

“As we each near the end of our lives, at the time when we are likely to be most vulnerable to despair and fear, we have now lost the protection of the Criminal Code,”the groups said. “Where shall we now find that protection? CCD and CACL caution that our collective response to this question must go far beyond the technical exercise of so-called ‘safeguards.’ ”

The protection, of course, will come with stringently written laws that require psychological evaluation, a terminal illness, and absolutely verified consent of the patient. It’s not as if anybody is going to pass laws allowing people to be killed willy-nilly! As far as I’m aware, places that allow assisted suicide have not had any cases of abuse, or even questions about abuse. One thing that I’ve learned from reading about assisted dying is that people who are given prescriptions that will end their lives painlessly—barbiturates—feel a great sense of relief that they have some control about how and when they die. And some don’t even use the prescriptions.

This ruling is very good news—another move upwards on the moral arc—and I hope that the U.S. courts will take notice of this, for assisted suicide is legal in only a few places in the U.S. Wikipedia lists them:

OR, WA, VT have legalized assisted suicide through the legislature or popular referendum; assisted suicide is de facto legal in Bernalillo County, NM and MT through court decisions; New Jersey’s House has passed legislation legalizing assisted suicide; bills in CT and CA are under review in the state legislatures.

Map_of_U_S_states_that_allow_physiian-assisted_suicide

That is not a lot of territory.

You can find the Canadian Supreme Court’s full decision here; I present just a few excerpts of how they nullified existing law:

Section 241 (b) of the Criminal Code  says that everyone who aids or abets a person in committing suicide commits an indictable offence, and s. 14  says that no person may consent to death being inflicted on them. Together, these provisions prohibit the provision of assistance in dying in Canada.

The trial judge found that the prohibition against physician‑assisted dying violates the s. 7 rights of competent adults who are suffering intolerably as a result of a grievous and irremediable medical condition and concluded that this infringement is not justified under s. 1  of the Charter . She declared the prohibition unconstitutional, granted a one‑year suspension of invalidity and provided T with a constitutional exemption.

. . . The appeal is allowed.  We would issue the following declaration, which is suspended for 12 months:

Section 241 (b) and s. 14  of the Criminal Code  unjustifiably infringe s. 7  of theCharter  and are of no force or effect to the extent that they prohibit physician-assisted death for a competent adult person who (1) clearly consents to the termination of life and (2) has a grievous and irremediable medical condition (including an illness, disease or disability) that causes enduring suffering that is intolerable to the individual in the circumstances of his or her condition.

h/t: Norm

Nonbelievers respond to David Brooks: Don’t tell us how to do secularism

February 6, 2015 • 9:00 am

There seems to be a penchant these days for some atheists and secularists to tell us how we need to replace religion with secular alternatives. Philip Kitcher wrote a pretty good book about it, Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism, but there are others who argue in a more annoying fashion, viz., Alain de Botton.

My response to most of this palaver that if we finally manage to dislodge religion from the American consciousness, people will find their own satisfying ways to make their lives. Do we need “Sunday Sermons”? Well, maybe for the recently-converted who simply can’t do without  some group activity on Sundays, or for the lonely people who need to find a coterie of like-minded people. But they don’t have these things in those Northern European countries like Sweden, Denmark and France—nations that are largely atheistic. In France, where I lived on and off for about a year, people just sleep in on Sundays. They seem pretty ethical, too—so you clearly don’t need God or religion to be moral. And I haven’t noticed that Sweden and Denmark, among the most atheistic countries in the world, are hotbeds of crime and perfidy.

It’s my feeling that as religion wanes, other, secular activities gradually fill the vacuum. That, at least, is the lesson of the secularism of Europe, and although the lessons of Europe may not fully apply to the increasingly secular U.S., I simply can’t get exercised about the “we-need-to-replace-religion-with-something-else” trope. I haven’t, for example, noticed that any of the atheists I know suffer from nihilism, ennui, or existential angst. (Such feelings, of course, are required if we’re to be “serious atheists”—or so say the Sophisticated Theologians™ like David Bentley Hart and Terry Eagleton.) Maybe once in a while we feel sad about having to die, but it doesn’t dominate our lives. After all, most religious people have the nagging worry that there’s no hereafter, too. If they didn’t, why are they so afraid to die?

By and large, atheists seem to me a happy, well-adjusted group.

But David Brooks doesn’t think so. Several readers called my attention to his column in Tuesday’s New York Times, “Building better secularists.” It’s one of the more sanctimonious and tut-tutting attempts to chide atheists that I’ve seen in a while. Brooks has taken it upon himself to tell secularists how we must fill the void left by the death of God.

Here’s the problem he sees:

The point is that an age of mass secularization is an age in which millions of people have put unprecedented moral burdens upon themselves. People who don’t know how to take up these burdens don’t turn bad, but they drift. They suffer from a loss of meaning and an unconscious boredom with their own lives.

I haven’t seen that—have you? Are there more drifters now than, say, in the 1950s, when the Beat Generation (who, by and large, had a nebulous spirituality, often derived from Buddhism), were seen as “drifting”? Are the kids whose heads are glued to their iPhones doing that because it’s a failed substitute for God? Where are Brooks’s data?

But he apparently doesn’t need data to wag his fingers at us and tell us what we must do. Here’s his remedy:

But I can’t avoid the conclusion that the secular writers are so eager to make the case for their creed, they are minimizing the struggle required to live by it. Consider the tasks a person would have to perform to live secularism well:

• Secular individuals have to build their own moral philosophies. Religious people inherit creeds that have evolved over centuries. Autonomous secular people are called upon to settle on their own individual sacred convictions.

• Secular individuals have to build their own communities. Religions come equipped with covenantal rituals that bind people together, sacred practices that are beyond individual choice. Secular people have to choose their own communities and come up with their own practices to make them meaningful.

• Secular individuals have to build their own Sabbaths. Religious people are commanded to drop worldly concerns. Secular people have to create their own set times for when to pull back and reflect on spiritual matters.

That’s right: I need a Build Your Own Sabbath kit! It comes with tapes of inspirational music and a some books by Deepak Chopra.

I doubt that I need to spend much time refuting Brooks’s contentions, except to say that the French “sabbath” consists of going to the country and eating good food; and I suspect that goes for Danes and Swedes as well. The moral philosophy part is just dumb, but I’ll leave that to Dan Dennett, who, among others, replied to Brooks’s misguided screed. It’s not as if nonbelievers have to build a moral philosophy from the ground up, you know—we can draw on the work of dozens of secular philosophers from the Greeks to Peter Singer. Is Brooks really that pig-ignorant?

And this unctuous paragraph really irks me:

The only secularism that can really arouse moral motivation and impel action is an enchanted secularism, one that puts emotional relations first and autonomy second. I suspect that over the next years secularism will change its face and become hotter and more consuming, less content with mere benevolence, and more responsive to the spiritual urge in each of us, the drive for purity, self-transcendence and sanctification.

My response to the call for an “enchanted secularism” is this:

Dear Mr. Brooks,

We’re doing great, thank you.  We don’t need more stinking spirituality: the awe and emotions we feel now before things like science, music, art—and cats!—are just fine. And a good meal with friends and wine, combined with some activities that help others, go a long way toward establishing our sense of community.

Yours,
The secularists of America

Fortunately, although readers literally begged me to take on Brooks at length, others have filled the breach, and so I don’t have to re-till the fields. Have a look at two of the four letters that came in to the Times in response, published under the header, “Secularists: We’re fine without God, thanks.” First, Dan Dennett takes on the philosophy issue:

To the Editor:

Re “Building Better Secularists” (column, Feb. 3):

David Brooks says secular individuals have to build their own moral philosophies, while religious people inherit creeds that have evolved over centuries. Autonomous secular people are called upon to settle on their own individual sacred convictions.

Secularists don’t have to “build” anything; we can choose moral philosophies from what’s already well tested. If religious people think that their “faith” excuses them from evaluating the duties and taboos handed down to them, they are morally obtuse.

Does Mr. Brooks think that religious people are not “called upon to settle on their own individual sacred convictions”? Children may be excused for taking it on authority, but not adults.

Mr. Brooks writes, “Religious people are motivated by their love for God and their fervent desire to please Him.” We secularists have no need for love of any imaginary being, since there is a bounty of real things in the world to love, and to motivate us: peace, justice, freedom, learning, music, art, science, nature, love and health, for instance.

Our advice: Eliminate the middleman, and love the good stuff that we know is real.

DANIEL C. DENNETT
Medford, Mass.
The writer, a professor of philosophy at Tufts University, is co-author of“Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind.”

Well said! If Brooks thinks that all religious people get their moral codes from faith, or even have them buttressed by faith, he’s living on Mars.  What about the many Catholics who deliberately violate church dogma on stuff like extramarital sex and homosexuality, seeing that dogma as immoral? And does Brooks know about the not-so-good stuff that comes from religiously-inspired morality? Look at the Republican party, or at ISIS.

A bioethics professor also slaps Brooks down:

To the Editor:

How presumptuous of David Brooks to instruct us “secularists” on how to live the moral life. We have to build our own moral philosophies? Nonsense. I learned mine from my atheistic parents and from teachers throughout my education (not to mention Aristotle, Kant, Mill and the many other moral philosophers I studied).

We have to reflect on spiritual matters? No, I reflect on the injustices in this world, why so many children in the United States go hungry, and why centuries of violence continue to persist in the name of religion.

In place of the religious spiritual life, we atheists may be enraptured by a Beethoven symphony, moved by the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, enchanted by a Rembrandt portrait. We have to build our own Sabbaths? No, thanks; I’ll spend my secular weekends at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, attending a New York Philharmonic concert or rereading “A Theory of Justice,” by John Rawls.

RUTH MACKLIN
Bronx
The writer is a professor of bioethics in the department of epidemiology and population health at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Finally have a look at the other two letters on the site.  One, from a Mennonite minister, says this:

God is not some idea that you believe is either true or false. Faith is not so coldly rational.

Once again we see a person of faith claiming to speak for all believers, and getting it wrong in the process. “Not true or false”, really? Tell that to Alvin Plantinga!