wait, isn’t nature a scientific publication?
Generally, and under normal circumstances, Nature is devoted to publishing the latest peer reviewed science for those who can afford to pay to read top quality research papers. But recently, one of its editors decided that there clearly hasn’t been enough sub-par, overwrought religious science fiction in all those papers on physics and biology, and published an aspiring sci-fi author who composed what reads like a Jack Chick tract. The straining-to-be-high-brow plot of this mess? Evil atheists running a sinister New World Order straight out of a caricature of Orwell’s 1984, detect people praying via satellite and give them a lobotomy which makes former believers feel lonely, empty and depressed. I find myself agreeing with Nature commenters wondering what’s next for the publication: alien abductions and 2012? After all, the bar has now been set disturbingly low…
Believe it or not, the scenario of Li’s story is hauntingly close to an actual, honest to goodness Chick tract and yes, I have the link to the actual tract in question to prove it. Cut out the Biblical quotes and add the satellites detecting believers’ brainwaves, and you pretty much have the same thing with roughly the same quality. And that’s really what ticks me off about this short story. It’s just so badly done. The characters are crude cartoons of the worldviews they’re supposed to represent, the plot seems one dimensional, the story is oversimplified, hackneyed and unwillingly drudges along, and when confronted with an opportunity to explore the implication of the biological pathway of belief in the supernatural, Li absolutely refuses to do it, sticking to her parable. It’s like reading a more vague and vacuous S.E. Cupp, or listening to televangelists’ supposedly divinely inspired gibberish for crying out loud! I realize that there’s not a lot of room for a complex plot in a short story, but all I’m asking to see is an effort and I see none whatsoever.
Humans do seem to have a biological predisposition to believe in the supernatural, although its probably not genetic, and the actual religious custom they’ll follow depends on their cultural experiences rather than the booming voices from the sky asking them to choose, or being suddenly zapped with divine knowledge. Even more interestingly, brain surgery can and does affect religious fervor, demonstrating that we could alter the feelings of a religious person through external manipulation. But why would we? Even the most militant public atheists who refer to all religious belief as a scourge of superstition say they would be fine if religion wasn’t a handy excuse for imposing one’s will on our common laws, or justifying discrimination and acts of brutality by pointing to a passage in a holy book. Giving lobotomies to believers seems more like a fundamentalist’s projection since it’s usually religious zealots asking what it will take to make sure atheists adopt their faith or bragging about how many atheists they converted in a very notch-on-the-belt way that always leaves me, and I’m sure quite a few other non-believers, with a rather uneasy feeling.
Really, the absolute last place I want to see Chick tracts and fundamentalist paranoia is right between current papers about groundbreaking science, and I would really appreciate it if the editors at Nature didn’t make this sort of stuff a habit. If anything, Li’s attempt at storytelling almost makes me pine for Templeton’s word salad science and apologetics instead. Though let’s note the qualifier there: almost.
