A Letter from Michael Shermer to KPFA

To: Quincy McCoy, KPFA General Manager, and Laura Prives, KPFA Program Director

Dear Quincy and Laura,

I am writing to protest the cancellation of the Richard Dawkins event. According to your notification statement “KPFA does not endorse hurtful speech” or “abusive speech” that Dawkins allegedly expressed in his twitter account and other sources. I have known Richard for a quarter century and follow his twitter feed and other public commentary sources, and I have never once seen him express hurtful or abusive speech against any person or any group of people. Richard is critical of wrong, bad, and dangerous ideas, not people, and although he has been critical of religion, as a great many scientists are (myself included), it is the religion’s ideas, not followers, of which we are skeptical.

As well, you appear to be hypocritical in this recent denunciation of Dawkins inasmuch as you have hosted him many times in the past, as a quick search of your website shows. In 2012, for example, Richard talked about “the virus of faith”, particularly Christianity. In 2013 in spoke about his book The Greatest Show on Earth, which was highly critical of creationism.

This is consistent with my own appearances on KPFA when I’m in Berkeley on my book tours. Your hosts—and by extension your station—never once objected to my critical comments on creationism in particular or Christianity in general, which I expressed many times.

So it would seem that KPFA has bought into the hypocritical stance held by many on the left that it is acceptable to criticize Christianity and Judaism but not Islam, even if it is just the ideas of these religions one is critiquing. Why?

Sincerely,

Michael Shermer

Skeptic Magazine

Scientific American

P.O. Box 338

Altadena, CA 91001