ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 487

What ISIS Women Want

By Simon Cottee

What do Western women who join Islamic State want? One prominent theory is what these women “really” want is to get laid. Another is that they don’t know what they “really” want, because what they want has been decided for them by male jihadi “groomers.” Both theories are meant to resolve a seeming paradox: How can any woman who enjoys democratic rights and equality before the law join or support a group which actively promotes her own oppression? But both are misconceived. Indeed, they say more about the gendered assumptions of those who proffer them than about the women they are trying to explain.

The idea that Western Islamic State “fangirls” — as they are often derogatively called — “just wanna have fun” (to paraphrase Cindy Lauper) is the thesis of, among others, Shazia Mirza, a British comedian whose latest show is called “The Kardashians Made Me Do It.” The show’s title references a comment made by one of the sisters of the three East London schoolgirls who absconded to Syria in February 2015. “She used to watch Keeping Up With the Kardashians and stuff like that, so there was nothing that indicated that she was radicalized in any way — not at home,” Sahima Begum said about her missing sister, Shamima. This gives Mirza’s show its central theme, which is that the Western girls who join the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, share the same banal and all-too-human concerns as their non-jihadi Western peers —including, and especially, when it comes to love. Mirza’s argument is that the Islamic State, for teens like Begum, is just another teenage crush. Indeed, the Islamic State, she suggests, is like a boy band — only with guns.

“I’m not being frivolous,” Mirza said in a recent TV interview, “but, these ISIS men, as barbaric as they are, you have to admit, they are hot. They’re macho; they’re hairy; they’ve got guns. And these girls think, ‘These are a bit of all right.’ What they’ve done is sold their mother’s jewelry and bought a one-way ticket to Syria for some halal meat.” Or as Mirza phrased it in her 2015 Edinburgh show, referring to the three East London runaways: “They think they’ve gone on a Club 18-30 holiday to Ibiza.… They’re not religious; they’re horny.”

This is funny — and Mirza, after all, is a comedian. But it isn’t serious as a commentary on the motives of the Western women who have joined, or aspire to join, the Islamic State. Yet many news organizations have taken up the idea as though it were. Earlier this year, for example, CNN ran a news story titled “ISIS using ‘jihotties’ to recruit brides for fighters.” This was only slightly more cretinous than a BBC Newsnight report from March 2015 proclaiming, “Attractive jihadists can lure UK girls to extremism.”

Another way of not taking Islamic State “fangirls” seriously is to suggest that they have been “groomed” over the Internet by shadowy, charismatic men into believing that the Islamic State is the solution to all their problems. In March 2015, Hayley Richardson wrote in Newsweek that militant fighters “are using similar online grooming tactics to paedophiles to lure western girls to their cause.” Sara Khan, the founder and co-director of the anti-extremism NGO Inspire, echoed this. “Just like child abusers groom their victims online and persuade them to leave their homes and meet them,” she claimed in the Independent, “male jihadists contact women through social media and online chatrooms, and build trust with them over time.”

This is a gendered reading of radicalization: Young men are not “groomed” by charismatic women who prey on their emotional weaknesses and naivety. Only women are groomed. Only women lack the necessary agency and political engagement to want to support or join the Islamic State. Mirza’s reading of women’s radicalization is similarly patronizing, but it at least puts women on an equal footing with male Islamic State jihadis, who, presumably, from within her one-dimensional worldview, also want to get laid.

The problem with the grooming narrative is that it seriously misrepresents women’s radicalization as an essentially passive process and obscures, as numerous studies show, the striking degree to which young women themselves are actively involved in recruiting like-minded “sisters” to the cause. It also presents an unreal picture in which women and young girls are somehow “targeted” and then seduced by online recruiters, drastically overestimating the recruiter’s powers of selection and persuasion. Everything we know about radicalization suggests otherwise: that potential recruits actively seek out the message and the messenger (and that the decisive facilitator in radicalization is typically not an anonymous predatory online recruiter, but a trusted friend or family member).

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Threatened with Death, Bangladeshi Blogger Gets Asylum in Germany, Helped by Center for Inquiry

By CFI Staff

A secular writer and activist targeted for death by militant Islamists in Bangladesh has been granted asylum in Germany. After receiving several threats due to her advocacy, Shammi Haque sought help from the U.S.-based Center for Inquiry, which supplied her with emergency assistance to help ensure her safe relocation.

22-year-old Shammi Haque has built a reputation in Bangladesh as a respected, outspoken, and fearless activist on behalf of secularism and free expression. On her blog, she wrote in support of democracy and human rights, and spoke against radical Islam. In public protests and demonstrations, she became a highly visible critic of religious extremism, a recognized symbol of secular resistance. This made her a target of those same militants who brutally murdered several writers and activists associated with secularism and criticism of radical Islam.

After receiving threats on her life and seeing her name appear on a public hit list of secular bloggers, Haque contacted the Center for Inquiry, a U.S.-based organization that advocates for reason, science, and secular values. The crisis in Bangladesh had become a central focus of CFI’s efforts, and in 2015 they launched the Freethought Emergency Fund, a program which lends assistance to those activists in places like Bangladesh who face mortal danger for exercising their right to free expression.

“When I was targeted, I was so afraid,” said Shammi Haque. “Every day I thought, this may be my last day, I may not see the next day’s sunrise. Connecting with the Center for Inquiry was a big opportunity in my life, for without CFI, I couldn’t have done anything. And CFI helped me immediately. Now I have asylum here, so I can live safely. So I am very thankful to the German government for giving me asylum so quickly.”

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery. It’s Matter.

By Galen Strawson

Every day, it seems, some verifiably intelligent person tells us that we don’t know what consciousness is. The nature of consciousness, they say, is an awesome mystery. It’s the ultimate hard problem. The current Wikipedia entry is typical: Consciousness “is the most mysterious aspect of our lives”; philosophers “have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness.”

I find this odd because we know exactly what consciousness is — where by “consciousness” I mean what most people mean in this debate: experience of any kind whatever. It’s the most familiar thing there is, whether it’s experience of emotion, pain, understanding what someone is saying, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting or feeling. It is in fact the only thing in the universe whose ultimate intrinsic nature we can claim to know. It is utterly unmysterious.

The nature of physical stuff, by contrast, is deeply mysterious, and physics grows stranger by the hour. (Richard Feynman’s remark about quantum theory — “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics” — seems as true as ever.) Or rather, more carefully: The nature of physical stuff is mysterious except insofar as consciousness is itself a form of physical stuff. This point, which is at first extremely startling, was well put by Bertrand Russell in the 1950s in his essay “Mind and Matter”: “We know nothing about the intrinsic quality of physical events,” he wrote, “except when these are mental events that we directly experience.” In having conscious experience, he claims, we learn something about the intrinsic nature of physical stuff, for conscious experience is itself a form of physical stuff.

I think Russell is right: Human conscious experience is wholly a matter of physical goings-on in the body and in particular the brain. But why does he say that we know nothing about the intrinsic quality of physical events except when these are mental events we directly experience? Isn’t he exaggerating? I don’t think so, and I’ll try to explain. First, though, I need to try to reply to those (they’re probably philosophers) who doubt that we really know what conscious experience is.

The reply is simple. We know what conscious experience is because the having is the knowing: Having conscious experience is knowing what it is. You don’t have to think about it (it’s really much better not to). You just have to have it. It’s true that people can make all sorts of mistakes about what is going on when they have experience, but none of them threaten the fundamental sense in which we know exactly what experience is just in having it.

“Yes, but what is it?” At this point philosophers like to give examples: smelling garlic, experiencing pain, orgasm. Russell mentions “feeling the coldness of a frog” (a live frog), while Locke in 1689 considers the taste of pineapple. If someone continues to ask what it is, one good reply (although Wittgenstein disapproved of it) is “you know what it is like from your own case.” Ned Block replies by adapting the response Louis Armstrong reportedly gave to someone who asked him what jazz was: “If you gotta ask, you ain’t never going to know.”

So we all know what consciousness is. Once we’re clear on this we can try to go further, for consciousness does of course raise a hard problem. The problem arises from the fact that we accept that consciousness is wholly a matter of physical goings-on, but can’t see how this can be so. We examine the brain in ever greater detail, using increasingly powerful techniques like fMRI, and we observe extraordinarily complex neuroelectrochemical goings-on, but we can’t even begin to understand how these goings-on can be (or give rise to) conscious experiences.

The German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz made the point vividly in 1714. Perception or consciousness, he wrote, is “inexplicable on mechanical principles, i.e. by shapes and movements. If we imagine a machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and be conscious, we can conceive of it being enlarged in such a way that we can go inside it like a mill” — think of the 1966 movie “Fantastic Voyage,” or imagine the ultimate brain scanner. Leibniz continued, “Suppose we do: visiting its insides, we will never find anything but parts pushing each other — never anything that could explain a conscious state.”

It’s true that modern physics and neurophysiology have greatly complicated our picture of the brain, but Leibniz’s basic point remains untouched.

His mistake is to go further, and conclude that physical goings-on can’t possibly be conscious goings-on. Many make the same mistake today — the Very Large Mistake (as Winnie-the-Pooh might put it) of thinking that we know enough about the nature of physical stuff to know that conscious experience can’t be physical. We don’t. We don’t know the intrinsic nature of physical stuff, except — Russell again — insofar as we know it simply through having a conscious experience.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

There’s No Such Thing as Free Will

By Stephen Cave

For centuries, philosophers and theologians have almost unanimously held that civilization as we know it depends on a widespread belief in free will—and that losing this belief could be calamitous. Our codes of ethics, for example, assume that we can freely choose between right and wrong. In the Christian tradition, this is known as “moral liberty”—the capacity to discern and pursue the good, instead of merely being compelled by appetites and desires. The great Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant reaffirmed this link between freedom and goodness. If we are not free to choose, he argued, then it would make no sense to say we ought to choose the path of righteousness.

Today, the assumption of free will runs through every aspect of American politics, from welfare provision to criminal law. It permeates the popular culture and underpins the American dream—the belief that anyone can make something of themselves no matter what their start in life. As Barack Obama wrote in The Audacity of Hope, American “values are rooted in a basic optimism about life and a faith in free will.”

So what happens if this faith erodes?

The sciences have grown steadily bolder in their claim that all human behavior can be explained through the clockwork laws of cause and effect. This shift in perception is the continuation of an intellectual revolution that began about 150 years ago, when Charles Darwin first published On the Origin of Species. Shortly after Darwin put forth his theory of evolution, his cousin Sir Francis Galton began to draw out the implications: If we have evolved, then mental faculties like intelligence must be hereditary. But we use those faculties—which some people have to a greater degree than others—to make decisions. So our ability to choose our fate is not free, but depends on our biological inheritance.

Galton launched a debate that raged throughout the 20th century over nature versus nurture. Are our actions the unfolding effect of our genetics? Or the outcome of what has been imprinted on us by the environment? Impressive evidence accumulated for the importance of each factor. Whether scientists supported one, the other, or a mix of both, they increasingly assumed that our deeds must be determined by something.

In recent decades, research on the inner workings of the brain has helped to resolve the nature-nurture debate—and has dealt a further blow to the idea of free will. Brain scanners have enabled us to peer inside a living person’s skull, revealing intricate networks of neurons and allowing scientists to reach broad agreement that these networks are shaped by both genes and environment. But there is also agreement in the scientific community that the firing of neurons determines not just some or most but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams.

We know that changes to brain chemistry can alter behavior—otherwise neither alcohol nor antipsychotics would have their desired effects. The same holds true for brain structure: Cases of ordinary adults becoming murderers or pedophiles after developing a brain tumor demonstrate how dependent we are on the physical properties of our gray stuff.

Many scientists say that the American physiologist Benjamin Libet demonstrated in the 1980s that we have no free will. It was already known that electrical activity builds up in a person’s brain before she, for example, moves her hand; Libet showed that this buildup occurs before the person consciously makes a decision to move. The conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion.

The 20th-century nature-nurture debate prepared us to think of ourselves as shaped by influences beyond our control. But it left some room, at least in the popular imagination, for the possibility that we could overcome our circumstances or our genes to become the author of our own destiny. The challenge posed by neuroscience is more radical: It describes the brain as a physical system like any other, and suggests that we no more will it to operate in a particular way than we will our heart to beat. The contemporary scientific image of human behavior is one of neurons firing, causing other neurons to fire, causing our thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain that stretches back to our birth and beyond. In principle, we are therefore completely predictable. If we could understand any individual’s brain architecture and chemistry well enough, we could, in theory, predict that individual’s response to any given stimulus with 100 percent accuracy.

This research and its implications are not new. What is new, though, is the spread of free-will skepticism beyond the laboratories and into the mainstream. The number of court cases, for example, that use evidence from neuroscience has more than doubled in the past decade—mostly in the context of defendants arguing that their brain made them do it. And many people are absorbing this message in other contexts, too, at least judging by the number of books and articles purporting to explain “your brain on” everything from music to magic. Determinism, to one degree or another, is gaining popular currency. The skeptics are in ascendance.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Europa Is Even More Earth-Like Than We Suspected

By Ria Misra

Europa, Jupiter’s watery ice-moon, has long attracted attention as a possible site for someday finding life. Now, a new analysis shows that its oceans may be even closer to our own than we knew.

A study from researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory looks at the chemical composition of those lunar oceans in comparison to our own. Oxygen production in both Earth and Europan oceans exceeds hydrogen production by almost exactly 10 times. This similarity in the proportions already has researchers pointing out that it could mean oceans on Europa could play a similar role to Earth’s oceans in spawning life.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Baghdad Rocked by New Blasts Amid Deadly Wave of ISIS Attacks

By Ghassan Adnan and Asa Fitch

Another wave of explosions in the Iraqi capital killed at least 70 people on Tuesday, the latest in a surge of urban violence that has the government, beset by political crises, looking increasingly paralyzed.

Bombings almost every day over the past week in or around Baghdad have killed at least 194 people, and the political strain from the bloodshed has begun to show on U.S.-backed Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s government.

Islamic State’s success in breaching cordons around the city have politicians and security forces openly trading blame for the gaps.

The attacks represent a shift in strategy amid recent losses by the group in Anbar province, which borders Baghdad. Dislodged from the cities of Ramadi and Hit and under pressure on the front lines, militants have stepped up suicide bombings in populated areas they don’t control.

Despite the growing threat to the capital, the U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State is urging Iraq not to divert any forces from the front lines, according to coalition spokesman Col. Steve Warren.

“If you want to stop these bombs, you have to keep forces in the field,” to defeat Islamic State there, he said. He added that the Iraqi government already had almost half its military deployed in Baghdad.

U.S. officials have noted the city couldn’t be made completely secure even when thousands of U.S. troops were deployed there. They describe the new string of attacks as opportunistic attempts by Islamic State to sow discord in Baghdad and gain international attention.

“We are seeing them use more traditional terror tactics to strike out in part because they’re weaker,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said. “They don’t have the same quasi-military capabilities that they once had.”

Iraqi officials and some analysts say the Sunni extremists have been aided by the poor training of Iraqi security forces as well as bad equipment, faulty intelligence and a lack of coordination among the agencies that police the city.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Question of the Week- 5/18/2016

This week’s question comes from Rob R. Rob asks, “‘Should secular people be offended when described as having ‘no faith’ or ‘no beliefs’?’ I know it often comes from a good place, people wanting to be inclusive of ‘people of all faiths and none’, but the implication that I have faith in nothing bugs me.”

Our favorite answer (non repeating winners only) will receive a copy of “A Brief Candle in the Dark” by Richard Dawkins!

Want to suggest a Question of the Week? Email submissions to us at qotw@richarddawkins.net. (Questions only, please. All answers to bimonthly questions are made only in the comments section of the Question of the Week.)

More Iowans are seeking vaccination exemptions

By Tony Leys

The number of Iowa parents seeking religious exemptions to vaccination requirements continues to climb, despite efforts to dispel worries the shots cause health problems.

A new state report shows 6,737 Iowa school children obtained religious exemptions to vaccinations this school year, up 13 percent from the year before and more than four times the number 15 years ago.

“It’s not the trend we want to be seeing,” said Don Callaghan, who oversees immunization programs for the Iowa Department of Public Health.

Callaghan predicted the state will face more pressure to tighten restrictions on vaccination exemptions if the numbers keep rising.

Iowa doesn’t require parents to cite specific religious teachings against vaccination in order to obtain an exemption. The state only requires them to sign a statement claiming immunization “conflicts with a genuine and sincere religious belief.”

Public health officials say they’re unaware of any major religion that teaches vaccinations are wrong.

The statewide increase in religious exemptions this school year was not as large as Polk County’s 33 percent jump, which the county reported earlier this spring. But Callaghan had hoped to see a decrease, especially in light of a highly publicized outbreak of measles in California two years ago. That outbreak, linked to Disneyland, took hold among unvaccinated children.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

The Mercy Girls

By Jennifer Miller

1. “He Grants Sleep to Those He Loves.”

Life wasn’t easy for Hayley Baker before the rages began, but it was tolerable. She attended a small Christian college near her home in Folsom, California, where she majored in architecture, studied astronomy in her spare time, played the harp, and taught herself to make sushi. But Hayley also suffered from major depression, social anxiety, occasional suicidal ideation, and an eating disorder. Doctors couldn’t agree on how to help her—since childhood, they’d cycled her through 15 different drugs—though most attributed her problems to childhood abuse. Caretakers had repeatedly molested her between the ages of 3 and 6, and she’d been humiliated at age 4 by a babysitter who tied her to a chair and taped her mouth shut while the sitter’s own kids ran around her in circles. Her anxiety became so extreme that she dropped out of school.

In her mid-20s, Hayley was diagnosed with a heart condition, which doctors told her was a side effect of her medications. But when she stopped taking the drugs, she lost control, punching walls and cutting herself out of frustration. Once, her mother became so frightened for her own safety that she called the police. Hayley spent the night in the psychiatric ward. Meanwhile, the family could barely cover its expenses, let alone Hayley’s therapy. “It was a dark time,” she says.

Then, in 2009, something cut through the darkness like a signal fire. Mercy Ministries, a network of in-patient facilities that treat young women with mental illness, addiction, and life trauma, and which has the backing of some of the most prominent names in evangelical Christianity, was opening a new residence in Lincoln, California, close to Hayley’s home. Hayley knew about Mercy because a Christian band she liked, Point of Grace, supported the program. And she learned online that Mercy’s unusual fusion of biblically inspired healing and what it described on its website as “best-practice clinical interventions” could help hurting women like herself “break free from the destructive cycles controlling their lives.” Mercy’s literature boasted that its four U.S. residences were state-licensed and that 80 percent of its counselors had master’s degrees in psychology, social work, or a related field. Hayley’s family believed that the Lincoln home would provide her with a truly integrated approach to mental health—the secular and the spiritual. Best of all, Mercy was free.

Hayley, who is a devout Christian, believed God had answered her prayers. “I thought the new home was a sign,” she says. “I wanted to believe that God would make a change in me. I wanted it desperately.”

Like all new applicants, Hayley landed on a waitlist. She was instructed to read books by Mercy’s founder, Nancy Alcorn, and testimonials from Mercy graduates who had overcome all manner of mental illness and trauma. She discussed audio sermons and response papers over the phone with a Mercy intake representative. After seven months, Hayley’s acceptance letter finally arrived.

Compared to the tidy bungalow where Hayley lived with her mother, Mercy’s sprawling, light-filled facility was magnificent. On the first day, the staff was every bit as welcoming as Mercy’s literature had promised. But that night, alone in a strange dorm room, Hayley roiled with panic. She asked attendants for her prescription Xanax but says they refused. Instead, they offered to pray with her and gave her a sheet of paper titled “Peaceful Sleep,” with a bolded line from Psalm 127:2: “He grants sleep to those he loves.” Hayley tried to pray, but sleep didn’t come. For the rest of the night, she lay awake, still panicking, wondering if God had abandoned her.

Over her seven months at Mercy, Hayley says staff often denied her requests for Xanax, instead emphasizing prayer as a better way to treat the panic attacks. She also says she was punished with extra reading and chores for infractions as minor as sharing her CD player. When her brother died unexpectedly a month into her stay, Mercy didn’t bring in the certified grief counselor that her parents had requested, she says. According to Hayley, Mercy staff unswervingly held her and others to a one-size-fits-all counseling curriculum. Six years after leaving Mercy, Hayley continues to wrestle with mental illness.

Mercy—which, after 32 years of operating as Mercy Ministries, rebranded as Mercy Multiplied this past October—touts that upward of 3,000 women have come to one of its centers somehow broken and left feeling whole. Hayley desperately wanted to be one of them. Instead she says she encountered a program that demanded total submission to its methods and to God. It was, and is, a place that treats the devil as something frighteningly real—the kind of approach that may work for many residents but overwhelms others with guilt and fear.

In a larger sense, Mercy illustrates what happens when a hard-line, religiously oriented organization inserts itself into a gaping hole in the United States’ mental heath system. Because organizations like Mercy are barely subject to government oversight, it’s likely not an anomaly.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

PUC students march amid concerns over academic freedom

By Jesse Duarte

Pacific Union College, a small Seventh-day Adventist school, is in the midst of a debate about academic freedom after a controversial psychology professor said he was going to be fired.

About 60 PUC students marched through the Angwin campus on May 4 in defense of the professor. Heather Knight, college president, met with the demonstrators outside her office, led them in prayer, and agreed to hold a town hall meeting the next day that was attended by about 250 students.

The march came a week after psychology professor Aubyn Fulton wrote on his Facebook page that he would be fired at the end of the spring quarter for having invited a well-known Seventh-day Adventist pastor-turned-atheist to speak to psychology students last fall.

Knight cancelled the invitation once she heard about it four days before Ryan Bell’s scheduled appearance.

Fulton, who has a doctoral degree in psychology and previously worked as a staff psychologist at Napa State Hospital, has been a professor in PUC’s Psychology and Social Work Department for 28 years.

His sometimes provocative teaching style and championing of liberal causes has made him a controversial figure at PUC. He previously clashed with the administration in 2013-2014 over comments he made during lectures regarding premarital sex and homosexuality.

“You either love him or you hate him,” said Miranda Mailand, a psychology major set to graduate in June. She praised Fulton for showing unconditional love for all, Christian or non-Christian, gay or straight.

“He gave us permission not just to think and inquire and learn in class, but to live the way that we should as psychologists and social workers, practicing unconditional love toward everyone, even if we disagree,” Mailand said.

Fulton declined to comment, but in a Facebook posting last fall he referred to Knight’s cancellation of Bell’s appearance as “the most egregious violation of academic freedom” he’d ever encountered at PUC.

Students started a “Free PUC” movement on social media, and marched on Knight’s office last week to request a town hall meeting.

In an interview with the St. Helena Star, Knight called Fulton’s statement that he was going to be fired “misleading,” and said “he has not been told that by me.”

“I have not fired anyone, and I have not personally told anyone that they’re going to be fired,” said Knight, adding that confidentiality laws limit what she can disclose about personnel matters.

Knight said the college has set up an Academic Freedom Task Force to foster a campus-wide conversation about the issue and examine the wording of the college’s academic freedom policy.

She said she’s also open to a proposal by the college’s Academic Senate to create an Academic Freedom Advisory Council where professors could consult with their colleagues on potentially controversial topics or guest speakers.

Atheist speaker invited

Aj Scarpino, a film and television major who’s set to graduate in June, filmed and participated in the march and the town hall meeting. He said there’s a perception among many on campus that the college is catering to its more conservative alumni, parents and donors, and being less than transparent with students.

“There’s a lot of anger and passion and miscommunication right now,” said Scarpino. “But if we go the rest of our lives without standing up to what we deeply feel is wrong, then we have no point in being given this wonderful blessing to be at PUC.”

Mailand, who’s taken many of Fulton’s classes, was disappointed that the administration cancelled the scheduled appearance by Bell, who became an atheist after spending “a year without God” as a thought experiment.

“I was looking forward to hearing him speak, especially because he was going to be interviewed by Fulton, who’s not an atheist,” Mailand said. “There was going to be an interesting give-and-take between them.”

Bell has publicly criticized the Adventist church, including for its attitudes toward women, gays, lesbians and transgender people. Knight said Fulton’s Facebook post announcing Bell’s scheduled appearance praised Bell’s “courage, honesty and vulnerability.”

“If you’re going to bring someone like that who’s repudiated church doctrine, who has publicly attacked the church and publicly attacked God, you wouldn’t want to seem like you’re making this person into a hero,” Knight said.

She said faculty members would ideally consult with colleagues or the administration before inviting such a controversial speaker. She said there might have been an appropriate way for Bell to address students. But since she heard of the appearance only four days in advance, as she was preparing for an out-of-state trip, “there wasn’t enough time to figure it out.”

“We’re not saying students shouldn’t be exposed to these ideas,” Knight said. “I think it’s how it’s done, and by whom. But I can’t think of a topic that we couldn’t discuss here at PUC.”

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.