Responsible reporting
To the Editor:
In response to the article published about the "Ask a Skeptic" panel ("Student group panel affirms atheist beliefs" 9/20/2007), we would like to clarify important points, the first of which being that Ellen Johnson does not represent our organization.
Our objective in having her was to have a well-known public figure, the head of a national organization for atheists, represented on the panel.
The Inquiry and Freethought Forum members have no collective ideology beyond rational thought. Our purpose in hosting the panel was to discuss various topics from differing skeptical viewpoints.
Additionally, the reporter maliciously misquoted our representatives numerous times. For example, Mr. Arneson's quotes were taken out of context and misappropriated.
We at IFF expect better coverage and more responsible reporting from our school newspaper and its representatives.
Alez Tozzo
The author is the President of the Penn Inquiry & Freethought Forum
Reactions to Ahmadinejad
To the Editor:
Ms. McBride's ("Let Ahmadinejad Speak" 9/24/2007) rationalization of Columbia's invitation to Ahmadinejad suffers from a well-documented and well-understood affliction.
The fallacy of moral equivalence is a pervasive and insidious one. It makes otherwise reasonable people and liberals believe that detaining people who shoot guns at American soldiers in a foreign conflict is just as bad as presiding over and actively developing the Nazi Germany of our time.
It makes people believe that listening in to telephone conversations taking place in foreign countries among foreign nationals without a domestic open warrant is as bad as stoning people to death without any kind of trial.
It makes people think that a private entity's withholding active assistance and working to provide a forum is equivalent to a dark night of totalitarianism descending on Harlem.
People like you, people who would not only believe that 2 + 2 = 5 but would spend your lives dedicated to debunking that racist/imperialist/phalocentric fiction that no matter what you say, no matter who you are, and no matter what you believe, 2 + 2 invariably = 4, it's people like you who don't deserve the forum.
Shame on the DP for drinking the leftist Kool-Aid and overlooking the glaring and profound errors in basic arithmetic that underlie the thinking that went into this column.
There are plenty of better, if not particularly "good" reasons to say that Columbia's invitation to Ahmadinejad was a legitimate move, ("Know thy enemy" comes to mind), but a call for a self-flagellating bow before the alter of Moral Relativism is not one of them.
Roman Geykhman
