This op-ed by Robert Grant, claiming that the New Atheists are ‘dangerous’, was infuriating. What a string of stupid cliches!
While their starting point was the lack of scientific evidence for God’s existence, they quickly expanded their target to argue that religion is the “root of all evil” in the world. Far from being tolerated, religion should be banished. It obstructs the progress of the human race; and progress based on the pursuit of science and reason.
Can anyone find a single quote by a prominent New Atheist that demands that religion be ‘banished’? Anyone? Anywhere? Bueller? How about any one of them stating that the root cause of all evil in the world was religion?
The New Atheists offer a binary world view, neatly divided into good and evil. Science and reason on the one hand, religion and faith on the other. The implication being: if we get rid of religion we get rid of evil.
Oh, nonsense. Morality is always going to be an ongoing struggle; it’s a process, not a state of bliss. Freeing yourself of religion rids yourself of one source of ignorance and flawed thinking. It does not make you perfect.
They make the mistake here of treating evil as if it exists exclusively within a set of beliefs or practices, rather than as an inherent part of human nature.
As journalist Chris Hedges puts it, they externalise evil. Fundamentalist religious groups do the same, only for them evil resides in liberal secularism.
Oops, -100 points for relying on the rabid anti-atheist Chris Hedges.
Again, why does Grant keep claiming these things that are simply not true? He got into an argument with Michael Nugent on this, and Michael rightly hammered him on this claim. He can’t cite one source or give even one quote to back up this assertion (neither can Chris Hedges, who in a recent talk was reduced to this same strategem of equating atheists with fundamentalists, so he could quote fundamentalists, and then announce, “Aha! see! That’s how atheists think!”)
Religion is a specific problem of traditional teaching of invalid and bad ideas. It’s not that we think people are perfect if their brains are freed of the poison of religion — quite the contrary, human brains are faulty and full of shortcuts and limited in their degree of comprehension of the real world. But it doesn’t help if we compound our flaws with lies and lazy excuses and incoherent moral teachings. That’s the objection to religion: that it is counterfactual and destructive.
It’s as if we’re trying to teach that 2 + 2 = 4 in our math classes, but swarms of people were to insist that in their cherished traditional folkways, and in the words of their holy book, 2 + 2 = 3, and they must teach it that way. We should be able to say that that will give them wrong answers. It does not in any way imply that if only they all accept the truth of fourness, math becomes easy and everyone will be doing calculus by the time they hit kindergarten.
On the other hand, teaching people to question religion does mean that maybe, just maybe, they won’t kill other people who also question it. Check out this horror story from Iraq: fanatical Sunni Muslims in ISIS are administering roadside tests to refugees. There is, apparently, an absolutely correct answer to how you hold your hands during prayers: a Sunni way, and a Shiite way, where praying like a Shiite is utterly wrong, and the penalty for failing the quiz is to be led off to the side of the road and get a bullet in the brain.
You won’t find the New Atheists sympathizing with that approach. Rather, we’re appalled that anyone finds these artificial distinctions within bogus superstitions, whether Sunni or Shiite, Catholic or Protestant, to be useful ways to order one’s life. That we point out the futility and waste of these divisions does not imply that we’re planning to take all parties to the side of the road and have them shot — that’s religious thinking, and that’s what seems to be infecting poor Robert Grant’s mind.
If anything, Atheists are all for free speech and free religion, because we know our ideas are better so we love the marketplace of ideas. It’s Christians who constantly tell others to shut up because they need to talk. Cowards.
Robert Grant is a serial killer!!! Of strawpeople. And very poorly made ones at that.
No, if we get rid of religion (meaning it shrinks itself down and then commits suicide in the bathtub i.e. religion gets rid of itself), then the world will be a better place.
Not much better but noticably better.
This is BTW, an empirical fact. The most well off societies in the world are mostly the least religious, Western Europe, Japan, Australia. The least successful are the most religious, Somalia, Afghanistan, Uganda, Texas, Mississippi.
Atheism won’t produce a Utopia. We humans don’t know how to make Utopias.
To be fair, the causality could be the other way: maybe if you’re in a horrible situation with extreme poverty and violence you’re more likely to turn to religion for comfort, even if it’s imaginary. I tend to think it’s a vicious cycle: greater poverty makes people turn to religion, religion keeps them in poverty. But I have no real evidence for that claim.
Religion is a reliable source of hate, lies, and hypocrisy. Those are in fact, the three main sacraments of fundie xianity.
A minor sacrament is greed. Some of the religious leaders make hundreds of millions of dollars preaching hate and lying. Pat Robertson is a billionaire.
I”d never heard of Robert Grant. So many vaguely humanoid toad religious leaders, so little time. The link’s source is given as the Irish Times.
If ever a place screams the evils of religion, it is Ireland, a historical fact that is still ongoing. The last flickers of the 450 year old Reformation Wars between Protestants and Catholics are playing out in Northern Ireland.
It’s a correlation.
But the least one can say is that low religion doesn’t drag a society down to the level of Louisiana, Iraq, or Somalia.
In the USA, the most religious states are mostly the poorest and rate high in any measure of social dysfunction you care to name, murder rates, child poverty, divorce, teenage pregnancy.
Well, I have stated that religion is very, very good at preserving evil. Doesn’t create it, but religions do seek to preserve their privileges, as well as the privileges of all those who believe in the right way — the privileges of patriarchy, misogyny, sexism, racism, etc. Religion also actively supports poverty, lack of medical care, war, and other things that make the world a more painful, more evil, place. And no, religion is not the only part of society that does this (looking at you, Vacula), just the biggest and oldest.
Not the same thing, but, given the way some anti-atheists lie, misquote, and cherry pick, it would probably be read the same way.
(And yes, I know not all religions do all those things. Almost all of them, though, do some.)
The term “New Atheists” annoys me. It paints all atheists with a broad brush when atheists are very a diverse crowd of people.
The BBC did title a Dawkins documentary about religion, “The Root of All Evil?” Dawkins disowned the title.
What astounds me is the number of people so strongly motivated to write such a large number of articles criticizing atheism and the number of outlets willing to publish them while Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and others are killing each other for their religious beliefs all over the world.
One thing’s true about these articles: they’re deeply afraid of us. But given that there’s absolutely zero evidence of prominent atheists calling for any kind of violence or revolution or of atheists in general engaging in it outside of the lone nuts that attempt to associate themselves with just about any label you can think of and that there’s substantial evidence of the religious right in the United States calling for violent revolution even from high level elected officials and of religious leaders of virtually every stripe calling for and even participating in the most obscene violence, it should be quite clear that what they’re afraid of is not actually violence or any sort of pogrom or uprising or any kind of physical security issue.
What they’re afraid of is that their friends, their children, their families, maybe even they themselves will … stop believing in god. That those who believe may one day, in spite of their overwhelming numerical advantage now, be the minority. And honestly, being in the minority is truly terrifying for anyone who’s long been part of a a privileged majority and used taken advantage of that privilege at the expense of minorities. You can see this fear in the wails of white supremacists, of those who oppose any kind of immigration reform, and yes, of religious critics of atheists.
And it’s fear that makes someone truly dangerous.
1. Atheist haters are dime a hundred. Routine, pervasive as rain and slugs.
2. The basis of much religion is just hate. They use it as a motivating principle and in group out group identifier. No hate = No Religion.
It’s just tribalism. And very old. The bible is saturated with tribalism.
3. Atheist hate is also money. We all need money to live. It can be very profitable with little effort.
The xians say they are in it to save your soul. But they always seem more interested in power and money. And why not?
God, heaven, and souls may exist but probably don’t. Power and money definitely exist and are quite useful.
I find it laughable-to-annoying that the only “New Atheists” he could name were Harris, Hitchens, and Dawkins.
FFS: Hitchen’s corpse is most likely decomposed down to skin, hair, and bones by now. How in the name of anything non-deistic does that count as “new”?
Agreeing with Raven, and said so in the comments over there, that the only thing Grant is killing is strawmen.
The xians say they are in it to save your soul. But they always seem more interested in power and money.
Its just their god’s way of making sure they’re financially successful.
Does ISIS = ISIL?
Does ISIS = ISIL?
For all intents and purposes, yes.
@13 Yes, ISIS keeps switching between ISIS and ISIL. They’re the same organization.
How does one solve a problem like projection? That’s both a Rodgers and Hammerstein reference and a serious question. I figure Grant is interpreting ‘New Atheism’ as he is becasue he’s projecting. He has no other way to interpret the world, so he sees the actions of atheists as governed by the same kinds of religious thinking as that in which he engages, the only sort of thinking he knows. How does one break that cycle?
BTW and FWIW: I disagree with the last statement somewhat. The fuckers who are kidnapping girls in Nigeria — I’m in favor of shooting them. And a few select others. I was definitely in favor of shooting Bin Laden. Which is probably odd because I’m 100% against the death penalty. That makes me a moral relativist — and I can live with that.
But in general…yes…shooting people isn’t really much of a solution to anyone’s problems. … except for those fuckers in Nigeria.
Robert Grant: The New Atheists offer a binary world view, neatly divided into good and evil. Science and reason on the one hand, religion and faith on the other. The implication being: if we get rid of religion we get rid of evil.
Down with binary world views! No Christian would ever sink so low as to espouse a binary world view.
Oh, wait…
Well, you’re not alone. The CIA probably had the same antipathy toward Bin Laden once they found out what a huge fucking mistake that was.
I figure lying about atheists was always pretty good red meat. They’re such a good ‘them’ to contrast with the ‘us’, for so many. And it was easy, since many of them had been convinced the right way to behave (or just intimidated into accepting this state of affairs) was to shut it; it meant you could say pretty much anything you’d like; there was no one to gainsay.
Lying about the gnus/news seems to me to have slightly different/added dimensions. You can still get away with it with a big enough megaphone just by shouting and repeating, but since they’re not quite so convinced they should pipe down and take it, it takes more shouting, more repetition, to drown out the gainsaying, I figure. Basic big lie strategy. Maybe the general hope is: heap enough offal on the existing prominent figures they can make examples of them, impress anyone else might speak too publicly and succeed in building an audience just what’s waiting for them.
… with, probably the additional impetus that yes, actually visible unbelievers do pose more of a threat, what with the whole refusing to hide/defer to religion/pretending you wish you did share the socially dominant superstition thing.
I figure this is some of what those ‘banishment’ and ‘root of all evil’ wheezes comes from, saying the probably obvious: the realization that yes, actually, some of us really do dislike religion as a general phenomenon. And the fact that yes, we quite apologetically do say it’s a key contributing cause of some evil, at least, absolutely…
Now, as to banishing, in fairness, I’m pretty sure I’ve muttered here and there it would be a lovely thing if we could regulate the sale of religion to children. You know… Kinda the same idea as with tobacco products. But then, I’m not exactly what you’d call a major figure. And as to how serious I was? Well, not especially, and as if. And hey, bear in mind the Anabaptists are already sorta with me on this in theory; so how out there is this, really? Call it more an illustration. And as to actually banishing? Again, as if. You might as well try to banish the weeds from the garden.
More seriously, I predict, going out on a total limb here*, given the dimensions of all this so far, much more shouting and repeating, much more libel and slander, all in the same vein, from pamphleteers of questionable ethics like Grant. And I figure the underlying message is: ‘crawl back into your closets or we’ll have at you daily’, pretty much. Note also all the voices trying to say, clearly enough, listen, the good atheists are the quiet ones; those ones are okay…
So yeah, you want to continue to live in the open, you’re probably going to have to call lying shits like Grant out regularly. Until he gives it up or dies of old age still wheezing out his sleazy bullshit, I guess. Whichevs.
Odds on which is more likely? Well, I figure ‘dies still wheezing out the same smears’ is at something like eighty to one, now.
(*/Sarcasm, too, yes.)
Yes. Neither acronym is actually used by the group itself – acronyms are seldom used in Arabic, and ISIS and ISIL are both acronyms for dubious English translations of the Arabic name of the group: al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi Iraq wa al-Sham. See here.
@19: Well, it’s obvious the feeling was mutual.
raven: “We humans don’t know how to make Utopias.”
Not so! Its just hard to make one with an occupancy larger than one.
You’d think all the religiosi killing one another would know as they all claim their god will make the planet a utopia someday. Apparently all that killing is somehow a requirement for it.
@8
Thanks – I was wondering if “root of all evil” was in scare quotes or actual quotes. Too often scare quotes are used to put words into the mouths if adversaries (I.e., as strawmen).
@24 I just put quotes on it to format it as a title. BBC named it The Root of All Evil?. The question mark was added after Dawkins objected to the title.
@18
Of course he has already preempted this by declaring that only fundamentalists “externalise evil” while healthy moderates such as himself simply accept it as “an inherent part of nature”. Never mind the fact that this is still perfectly consistent with the binary view as it fits the script that Jesus is the only cure for our nature and Christians have a monopoly on morality due to their direct pipeline to God. I also seem to recall that the Bible had a few unsavory words to describe those who failed to dance in lockstep to God’s tunes. Not to mention having an ultimate good guy and a diametrically opposed ultimate bad guy at the root of all things seems kinda strange for a worldview that isn’t binary in the slightest.
from discussions on other threads here and other places I can see why this believer is attacking none belief besides it is easy to do. When I was a child I heard many sermons that demonized none-belief so it is an old subject to exploit.
The only places where religion and religious belief is growing are in the poorer countries and in the poor segments of the more prosperous regions. Certainly in the developed countries of Europe faith in gods is not a strong growing thing except in the poorer immigrant segments of the population.
Certainly moderate christianity is no longer a growing vibrant segment of society.
My only question is will the fear of their disorder that would result from openly hostile and repressive acts in favor of one religious belief or set of religious beliefs be greater than their fear of the reduction of faith in importance that result from allowing things to continue in a natural way.
I see no need to make a comment about the actual paranoid BS quoted here.
uncle frogy
sorry that should be “their fear of the disorder” not “the fear of their of their disorder”
It is my fear of their disorder that worries me, It is an old fear of mine that I should be found to openly disagree with defensive irrational some times violent people.
uncle frogy
You know, it ought to be pretty obvious that a debate which consists of “Here is what you believe and I’ll show why it’s stupid” vs. “Yes that’s stupid but it’s not what I believe” is not a debate. It ought to be the opening moves of an attempt to understand and clarify prior to an actual debate. If it’s all they got — if they just keep insisting over and over again that “oh yes you do so believe that” and won’t cite quotes — then it’s time to kick the troll. That’s just basic #atheism AOP Rules of the Room.
Far from being tolerated as if religious beliefs were just an inherent part of human nature or a private mark of a person’s identity, religion ought to be analyzed objectively to see if any of the claims which define and justify it are likely to be true. If they are not, then they ought to be thrown out for something more accurate. Assuming of course that anyone actually cares about anything beyond themselves. Right, Grant?
Doing otherwise entrenches dogma and classifies irrationality as a sort of virtue. If we want to eliminate illiteracy or disease we do not round up the illiterates or the sick and imprison or kill them. We try to help people access the tools for change. Reason will work against irrationality. It’s the gnu’s chief weapon (well, that and surprise of course.)
With faith, all you’ve got against the non-believer is bribes, force — or some form of isolation.
To the question of can anyone think of a prominent atheist who said anything like “the root of all evil”, I thought of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Root_of_All_Evil%3F
Of course, maybe this writer missed the part where Dawkins hated the title and was against it.
The best honest quote I can think of is “religion poison everything”. However, “religion poisons everything” != “religion is the root of all evil”.
By the way, I was very relieved to see that the OpEd wasn’t by this ‘Robert Grant.’
(That’s a good book.)
“There is, apparently, an absolutely correct answer to how you hold your hands during prayers: a Sunni way, and a Shiite way, where praying like a Shiite is utterly wrong, and the penalty for failing the quiz is to be led off to the side of the road and get a bullet in the brain.”
This is absolutely barbaric. It should be based on how one pronounces “shibboleth”. (Judges 12:6 for the unwashed.)
It’s like arguing Math with Ma & PA Kettle
I’m a n00b to the atheist community, and while I’ve been a humanist for about a year, it hasn’t been until recently that I’ve called myself an atheist because, to be completely honest, I believed in Robert Grant’s caricature of atheists.
Travis Mamone:
Genuinely curious here–why did you believe that caricature?
Religion may not be the “root of all evil” in the world, but it’s way ahead of what ever is in second place.
The increasing use of ever-more-desperate straw-man attacks on atheism is a sure sign that the religious are running out of arguments. Or that they’re becoming more aware (as is the general public) that they never had any good arguments to begin with.
Went to a United Way Leaders lunch last week to listen to ‘giving’ leaders and during what turned out to be a cozy small group ran into what I normally only read online; the bias that giving has to do with religious morality and generosity.
Participant after participant spoke up about how their first role model/guide for philanthropy was ‘their church’. Not people in the church but ‘their church’ or ‘the church’. Reasons didn’t vary much; about how people gave substantial monies to the church that then did…something with it.
One elder even proselytized, although I’m not sure she was conscious of doing so, given the apparent monoreligiosity of the room. About how the older she got the more she was sure there was somebody upstairs guiding yadayada. She’s a very generous person with her philanthropic volunteerism.
Normally, I don’t even think about not being a believer but in that atmosphere, I developed a tic, especially given that the United Way is secular and no one seemed to be deviating from the philanthropy=church origins and it looked like if I kept shut that equation would stand. I did speak up that I was atheist, wasn’t sure where money given to a church went and had learned from my family and other people in my childhood community and stories of people looking out for others. There was an awkward pause after I finished and then a friend leapt in to do the equivalent of ‘look a condor!’ and conversation moved on.
It’s people like the down-nosing columnist writing the atheopocalypse equivalent of Bill Murray’s “human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria” speech in “Ghostbusters” that annoy people like me enough to demand credit for good deeds instead of a makebelieve authority. But it’s still a very mixed feeling of being crass just to be counted.
But then, I guess people like R. Grant are counting on my discomfort and are tone trolling to make sure I remain reticent.
The United Way is [ostensibly, nominally, or officially] secular.
Fixt that for ya. ;) My experience with the UW has been similar to yours, and the pressure to give was as bad or worse than many churches I remember from when I was a kid. I refused to give them money the whole time I worked for my former employer. They are one of the worst charities in many ways (especially in terms of how much of the money they collect actually goes to charity).
Well, Tony, it’s a long story. I was religious for about 12 years, and never actually read anything by Dawkins, so I judged him based on what little snippets I heard off of television. I was always pretty liberal, so naturally I was like, “Not all Christians!” Long story short, I finally read Dawkins, saw that he wasn’t as bad as I thought, and eventually became an atheist. That’s the Readers Digest version of my story.
Amen to that.
The Irish Times article actually raises a good and very important issue here. OK clearly Dr.Grant is a creep: as noted, his claim that this new atheist movement asserts that “far from being tolerated, religion should be banished” is a foul piece of dishonest slander. Another little trick he delights in trying to play on us is to use the phrases ‘science and technology’ and ‘science and reason’ interchangeably, thus confusing three concepts that are among our most important weapons in the struggle against confusion itself. Nice work, Doc.
But there are shortcomings in the writings of the famous atheists as well, and Grant zeroes in on an important one. It’s possible to see scientific and moral progress as connected, and Richard Dawkins most definitely talks as if they are, without dealing satisfactorily with the obvious problems with that notion, problems that Grant delineates for us here. When people ignore these difficulties, this science = progress = morality schtick just turns into rhetoric. And the article points to important aspects of how this can go horribly wrong:
A sentiment that I believe most ecologically-minded folk would have no difficulty concurring with, just for a start.
But Grant manages to avoid the equally clear truth that, problematic though the symbiosis between science and morality is, it is most certainly real. For example science demands the practise of honesty, to ourselves and to others; it is premised on an unambiguous search for the Truth; it reinforces and advertises the necessity of rationalism, which is an idea closely related to those of justice and fairness; and it raises clear and vital ideals about the right way to relate to and inform children — to respect and nurture their sense of curiosity and their individual cognitive personalities. And science clearly parallels and strengthens the ideals of liberal democratic government.
Our author really fucks up when he says:
Grant claims not to be conventionally religious, so it’s not so surprising that he describes religion as a tool. But with the above conception, he guts all these enormously important “practises” and taxiderms them into being nothing more than a collection of puppets manipulated by the controllers of institutions.
If even “knowledge” is just a morally neutral “practise,” ( ? ) how shall we ( or the controllers of institutions for that matter) obtain our judgement about what is right or wrong? And while politics could be described as a morally neutral concept, democracy is not; and since we are nearly always talking about democracy, or the lack of it, when we think and talk about politics, this is really a silly and noxious argument. Education is neither good nor bad? Well you can use the word in such wise that this makes sense. But education has a very important other meaning, as we all know: one that includes a moral dimension. I don’t mean the inculcation of moral precepts in children, but rather that the concept of education demands respect and concern for the educated.
( I don’t actually like the word education myself, since it sounds like a process of manufacture, but that is another issue. )
Even if this silly, verbal argument were valid, however, our author is not advancing it for its own sake, but in order to secrete about its person an unequivocal, and unequivocally nasty, bit of fakery. Namely the supposition, which would be starkly odd if expressed in isolation, that religion is neither good nor bad; merely a social tool.
Our philosophy tutor appears to be saying that our interpretations of religious creeds and texts have varied so widely and wildly throughout history that there is no realistic point in describing a religion, or any religion, as good or evil. People will make of it what they will, or more accurately, they will make of it what they are told to make of it. Therefore these religions are not in themselves good or bad.
And this is not only nonsense, but virulent, toxic nonsense. True, most religious folk, Christian and Muslim alike, ignore most of what is in their holy books, and true, the vast majority of them follow the instructions of their leaders as to what bits to write on their souls in letters of fire, and which bits to not see. And it’s almost certainly true, that the reason that these two creeds are the most successful dogmas in the World is precisely because their sacred texts, whilst pretended to be the unadulterated Word of God, are indeed riven with contradictions. Flexibility is one of the secrets of survival, after all. When our governors want us to kill, they can reference lots of stuff in the Bible that tells us to kill. When they want us to be peaceful and sociable, as in the current dispensation, they can find quotes for that as well. ( Always on the understanding that we’re scum, and will fail to do it properly of course.)
All of this concurs nicely with what our author is saying. What jars, and what makes this argument so lamentable, is the contention that such a carry-on could possibly be described as neither good nor bad. That contradictory, hypocritical religions are morally neutral, because they are contradictory and hypocritical. Let’s have that quote again –
Well even if that were not, rather obviously, highly objectionable crap, we might point out that Dr. Grant seems oblivious to the necessary reflection that to use a creed on which people base their lives, as a tool to manipulate them, is in itself a profoundly morally troubling act, an extremely fundamental issue, & in fact when you’re talking about the population of the World, one of the biggest moral issues it is possible to imagine. And if indeed religions are and can be nothing else but the tools that our leaders use to shape our thoughts and behaviour, then the moral question goes right the way back to the existence and practise of these religions themselves. Somebody is using someone. How can that not be an issue of right or wrong?
It’s apposite to note again that Professor Grant has published this in Ireland predominantly for an Irish audience. Part of the aftermath of the recent revelations here of the crimes of the Catholic Church has inevitably been an attempt on the part of many people to convince themselves that the slave-labour and the child molestation and rape were a symptom of Christianity being perverted and corrupted by human beings, and, significantly, by human organizations. This is what the article is actually saying: the religion of Christianity cannot be regarded as a cause for all these abuses against children and the poor.
What this is attempting to subliminally infuse in the reader is that just as we fooled ourselves into thinking that trusting people as mentally warped as the Catholic clergy with the care of children and the most vulnerable in society, ( resulting in organized child abuse, & systematic slave-labour), when human nature is so corrupt and complex, we would be equally as naive to think that organizing the World in terms of science and reason ( or was that technology? Same difference. ) is going to stop the same sort of abuses from happening again.
So science, knowledge, religion, they’re all social tools. There all the same thing, and they all belong to institutions. The powers that be are in charge.
We’re corrupt. We’re complex. We’re essentially helpless here. We don’t understand ourselves, we can’t understand ourselves, because science and knowledge themselves are just institutional tools. So we’d better not try to understand ourselves.
We’d better stick with this Christianity thing. Better the devil you know……
( All this, of course, does not make any sense, but it is the content of Grant’s rhetoric after it is decoded. )
The apposite and necessary response to all this bilge is to point out that, whatever the faults of human nature, the best way to propagate our virtues and control our vices is not to school us in a religion that is so blatantly, vilely contradictory and hypocritical in its ethical precepts. And that essentially guarantees the concept that we must be decent to each other, by associating it with a set of atrociously silly fairy stories. Morality deserves, nay it demands, better than this. And of course that is one of the key issues that atheists who care about the state of human existence want to get across to religious folk.
But those who want to continue on just as we have before need not be troubled by this burning issue; not while Dr. Grant and his ilk are around to obfuscate things nicely for them.