BY JEREMY FREEMAN

In print | November 15, 2007

There were four Letters to the Editor in the Nov. 8 issue of The Phoenix. Each was an instance of tiresome self-righteousness, and each carried the rank stench that arises whenever hypocrisy and poor argument intertwine.

In the first letter, Alicia de los Reyes describes the turmoil of entering Swarthmore as a Christian. She claims that had her faith not stood up to secular skepticism, she would have rejected it. But it stood up. So she is still a Christian. However, Reyes gives no positive evidence on behalf of her beliefs, no examples of how they “held up [to] all those questions.” She doesn’t think she needs to. Her implicit claim is that as long as one feels his or her beliefs hold up to questioning, one should continue believing them – moreover, that they are “correct.”

By this reasoning, if I grow up believing that babies are delivered by storks, and no one manages to convince me otherwise, the mere fact of my inconvincibility proves that babies are delivered by storks. This is, I hope, clearly false. The mere endurance of an individual’s conviction entails no truth and justifies no belief.

The second letter is more incoherent than irrational. Jeff Weaver and Mi Zheng claim that their faith comes from the “mounting evidence in favor of the biblical God” but fail to mention any such evidence. They claim that faith “springs from experiential evaluation of truth claims” but fail to mention any such evaluation of any such truth claims. Most bizarrely, Weaver and Zheng claim that there is “experiential evidence” for God even while asserting that any evidence for God exists independent of the “naturalistic” world that we all experience. Like so many apologists before them, they try to have it both ways, only to tear themselves apart.

That brings me back to hypocrisy. And Charlie Decker’s parody of Josh Cohen. Yes, Cohen is probably correct that Decker “should have been bold enough to put his name and face” on his embarrassingly unfunny parody. But for Cohen to call Decker’s piece “immaturely offensive” is hypocritical. Let’s consider just one of Cohen’s columns: the piece from March 29th, 2007 titled “Holding onto our bad memories in the face of science.” To people suffering from serious mental illness, Cohen crowed: just “use your imagination” and get over it. Unlike Decker’s piece, this was not a parody (although it was certainly hard to tell). It was also blindly offensive —and Cohen believed it all. I suspect Cohen now regrets the piece. I don’t care. His words were, and continue to be, stunningly insensitive and willfully ignorant of relevant facts. Having written them, he is a hypocrite to call anyone offensive now.

Phoenix editor Martha Marrazza wrote a letter defending Cohen from Decker. She called Decker’s parody “racist,” and Spike editor Jon Peter’s choice to publish it “irresponsible.” Apparently Marrazza considers it the responsibility of an editor to hold back publication of groundlessly offensive material. Where, I wonder, were her responsibilities last March 29 when, as editor of the Phoenix’s Opinion’s section, she ran Cohen’s piece on depression?

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