The Most Famous Fastest Hedgehog Alive In The World

UPDATE: This article has been featured at Saturday Morning Sonic, so you could zoom over and read it there instead.

Sonic is described as "the Most Famous Hedgehog in the World" on the original Mega Drive boxart, and as "the Fastest Thing Alive" in the theme song of the Saturday morning cartoon.

When I was young, I watched both Sonic cartoons - Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM) and Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog (AoStH) - at the same time as I played the Sonic games on the Sega (well, not the same time; I'm not that good at multi-tasking!)

I could tell there were marked differences between them all, but I never felt that they were in conflict. They all felt equally "Sonic" to me, and to this day I still like them all equally. (In the interest of full disclosure I should admit that I did go through a brief "purist" phase in the early 2000's. It was then that I was first discovering (through Sonic Adventure, the OVA, and information on the Internet) the original Japanese Sonic "canon". Being a big anime nut I temporarily considered it superior - mostly because Sonic was drawn so much cooler in the early Japanese art. This was as I say only a "phase" because after the dust settled I realised that I now had twice as much Sonic than before. There was no need for a false dichotomy that would only reduce it back to half.)

Sure, there were things in one version of Sonic that weren't in the others (most notably, the characters that never crossed over) but the thing that was important to me - Sonic's personality - was consistent across them all. I had no trouble imagining "the Fastest Thing Alive" Sonic in Sonic 2; when he turned toward me, impatient, tapping his foot and looking at his watch ('I'm waaaaaiting....'); as he blazed across hilly landscapes with Tails whirling after ('Up, over, and gone!'). In fact I had no reason at all not to imagine him that way. Likewise, the Sonic in the cartoons was still "the Most Famous Hedgehog in the World"; when he spun into a spiky ball and destroyed robotic enemies; when he used the power of Rings; when he fought to rescue his friends from being turned into robots by the mad Dr Robotnik. He was "the Most Famous Fastest Hedgehog Alive in the World." =P

I respect the opinion of those who personally dislike the cartoons but love the games (there are many of them) or don't care much for the games but love the cartoons (there are a few). I even sympathise on many points: I'm p.o.'ed that Knuckles never showed up in SatAM, I think Sonic's spines are depicted too much like fins in the American art, I wish my favourite Freedom Fighters had appeared in the games, and so on. Everyone's opinions are different, depending on what they grew up with or what happens to strike their fancy. There's no reason - or need - for me to oppose that.

But there's some things I just won't have said: that SatAM "isn't Sonic"; that it could have been about "any other furry" and been just the same; that the games (and their universe, and by extension Sonic Team's current characters and world) are objectively superior for some reason; or that SatAM just "doesn't count" because it throws out a lot of the games' concepts (or completely reworks them). Sometimes the haters will go so far as to to marginalise the American Sonic - such as the laughably and demonstrably false claim that the name "Mobius" is some sort of mistake - in an attempt to make Sega of America look like careless buffoons.

I don't know why there is so much resistance (in rare cases bordering on bigotry against the fans) to the side of Sonic that I grew up with. It would be one thing if I was talking about some obscure Icelandic version of Sonic that appeared only once on a gimmicky push-button picture book, but this is the portrayal of Sonic that was used in America - you know, that place where Sonic was the most successful? (And was more successful before Sega "internationalised" the franchise. Tcheh, what a filthy euphemism - it's not like they borrowed any Western elements besides the fleeting use of the name "Robotnik".)

Is there hate because a large swath of SatAM fans are furries? I mean, as open as I am to alternative sexualities, BunnieXAntoine porn is just too much... but that's really no excuse to dislike SatAM fans specifically. I mean, there's just as much inflatable Rouge smut in the other camp.

Is there hate because of the Archie comic? It's a katamari ball of turtles, mammoths, and other crap, and it's gone off the rails more times than I can count. There are plenty of good reasons to criticise its many examples of poor art and storytelling, but that shouldn't reflect on the SatAM universe - the Archie comic is a melting pot of all versions of Sonic. They've done just as much damage to Shadow, Amy Rose, and their own original characters as they have to any of the Freedom Fighters. Archie's suckage is equal opportunity suckage.

The only reason that makes any sense to me whatsoever (though it's not a good reason by any stretch) is the one I have personal experience with: the whole "purity" thing. The feeling that maybe this isn't what Sonic is "supposed to be".

If this feeling can colonise and spread in a mind like mine, which was pumped full of Knothole, Robotropolis, Swatbots, and Uncle Chuck at a tender young age, then even the most die-hard American Sonic fan's loyalties can start to drift to a new Sonic iteration - especially when that new iteration is seen to be more "real" or "correct".

But this pernicious perception is only an illusion, and it doesn't do the victim any favours (I'm certainly not proud of the era I spent as a snobbish purist). I didn't quite alienate my friends who also liked SatAM, but I must have afflicted them with a fair amount of confusion and frustration. It was as if I wasn't doing my own thinking. Like some mind virus that makes one superstitiously and obsessively eat only white foods, I was restricting my Sonic "diet" arbitrarily.

What's that actually mean in down-to-earth language? It means I was not watching the show anymore, I was getting rid of old merchandise, and I wasn't drawing those characters. Also - since I've been designing my own Sonic fan games since I first had the physical strength to pick up a pen - it meant not including what used to be some of my favourite characters and concepts in my own creations.

On the other side of this, with the sobered hindsight of one who is no longer an angry teenager trying to fit life into neat partitions, I wish that I had seen the myth of purity for what it was. This is just about Sonic, but human nature is a continuum - I recognise this as the same "in-group, out-group" mentality that fuels racism and inspires atrocities. I'm very glad to be wiser.

All of the arguments I had used to assert SatAM's inferiority to the "real" universe of the games, as well as all the ones I hear bandied about online, fall apart on closer scrutiny - that is to say, even a brief second glance.

The first - and perhaps most important - thing to keep in mind is that the classic games don't even have a universe in any strong sense. There is a handful of events, less than a dozen characters, and no dialogue. Of course, the classic games are awesome, and Sonic Team did an amazing job of making Sonic compelling and cool with what they had. Sonic's personality oozed from his sprites, something we take for granted in today's world of fluid cartoon graphics and motion-captured acting. I'm certainly not going to argue in favour of SatAM by turning around and shitting on the games' world.

But there are some clear reasons why Sonic's world is far less developed in the games as opposed to the cartoons. Video games are not necessarily a more limited medium than cartoons, but the particular type of game that Sonic was - action platformer - is certainly more limited in terms of telling story. In fact, the whole reason why there's a SatAM universe in the first place is that very fact! If the creators of Sonic's first game had filled in all the blanks, the cartoons would have been a 1:1 copy and paste job.

Adapting an action video game to a story-based medium is fraught with difficulties, for the nature of early video games makes creating a compelling serial adventure saga out of one nearly impossible without great changes and total shifts in focus. Unless you want to have a show with a lot of jumping and gathering floating objects with the occasional interjected bonus round, something drastic need be done.

Take Pacman, for example. How does one tell an engaging story about running around and chomping Power Pellets? How about a new story each week? Hanna-Barbera actually took on this challenge, producing a Pacman cartoon in the early 80's. When I first learned of it (by watching re-runs on Boomerang a few years ago; the original show was a bit before my time) I was incredulous that such a thing was attempted because the Pacman "universe" was just so narrow in scope. (I really shouldn't have been surprised - television managed to scrape together Carmen Sandiego and Rubik's Cube cartoons as well, so I guess they'll try anything.) But I found the Pacman cartoon to be boring and silly precisely because it retained too many of the game's abstract gameplay elements.

The problem is the mentality that the show has to be about the actual video game. This is what leads to the Pacman problem that sees your show full of things that frankly don't make any sense to a television audience (unless they're the Scott Pilgrim consuming, canny audience of today). But let's shake the mentality by flipping it around. If one were to adapt a TV show to a video game, they'd never make it one long digital cinema scene! They'd work to add the elements that make a video game a video game, and worth playing instead of watching. Sonic doesn't gather Rings or jump on floating platforms in the games because it's something Sonic as a character must do to remain unmistakably himself - they're things he does because they're fun to do in a game. But they aren't much worth watching. In the same way, in a Home Improvement video game, Tim Allen fights dinosaurs - because (as we all know), that's what video games are for. Fighting dinosaurs.

So the trick is to picture the Sonic games not as the be-all, end-all perfect template that all other Sonic iterations must slavishly adhere to, but as video games adapted from some hypothetical story - the Platonic Sonic, if you will. =P

Seen like this, it's obvious that things like SatAM can't be denigrated for not being just like the games, any more than the games can be denigrated for not being just like SatAM. Which came first is irrelevant - they are both windows to a grander whole, in the style of their own particular medium. Clung-to ideas like "Sonic should be a silent character" because "he never talked in the games" are revealed as silliness - it would be like arguing that Final Fantasy Advent Children should have exclusively employed blue text boxes to impart its story (though, in fairness it might have made more sense that way! =P)

One might fairly say that this is no excuse for Sega (or a fan like me) to justify making a Sonic game full of tedious story, exposition, or a preponderance of SatAM characters to the exclusion of what makes the games great. But no one would want story to get in the way of their game in the first place, no matter what universe it took place in. It's fine to not want a heavy-handed Sonic game (none of the good ones have been, after all), but why should it really offend if the side characters are from SatAM, new folks like Chip and Professor Pickle, or even a mix suited to the tastes of the developer? I know some would scream foul if Sega ever had the nerve to give a nod to what's fast becoming the "lost" Sonic of the west, but would it really hurt? Wouldn't it finally patch the gaping divide that every Sonic fan has to deal with? They've taken the first step with chili dogs in Sonic Unleashed. I for one would be happy if they went even further, perhaps even half-and-half.

"Modern" Sonic is now well-established, and over a decade old. It's still as maddeningly tight-lipped as ever when it comes to acknowledging a significant slice of Sonic's legacy. For many fans, maybe it's starting to slowly erase how they used to picture Sonic. With time (and repeated beatings) comes acceptance, and learned helplessness. But there's no good reason to take it sitting down - you can stand up for yourself and your childhood and ask "why?" Why be so quick to accept that Sonic has moved on? (It's like the infuriating people who like to say "Classic Sonic is never coming back, so deal with it!", as if they can predict the future or something. PROTIP: They can't.) Most of the latest Sonic games have been crappy, by fan consensus and critical review alike. It's not like Sega has proven they can do just fine and dandy without the American universe, thanks. So let's - amidst the endless barage of those who would love to shout us down with cries of "it's not even really Sonic" - remember what's actually what here.

Am I reacting too strongly? Is there really that much resistance to the SatAM elements in the larger Sonic community? Well, to me it sometimes feels like there's a SatAM mitigation brigade, just waiting for you to mention it at which point they are moved to post, all but telling us we're fools for continuing to consider the show to be Sonic. This happened just recently at Sonic Retro when Richard Kuta (the force behind the nascent Animated Sonic Fan Film) said this:

However, Sonic is a rare case where Americans made the franchise better! If I was introduced to Sonic during the whole Sonic Adventure/Sonic X era, I would have no interest cause it comes off as a generic, paper-thin anime stereotype. Excluding Sonic Colors, everything beforehand [in the modern Sonic era] was garbage. Sonic had little to no personality and his ballooned cast of friends had no character development. Even though Adventures of Sonic and Sonic Underground were cheesy and campy, Sonic actually had a likable personality.

(For context, the discussion was basically about how Sega of Japan appears to want to have nothing to do with Sega of America's Sonic anymore, even going so far as to attempt to kill Kuta's film.)

But then David the Lurker replied:

But I guess what I'm saying here is that SatAM was not the be-all, end-all of Sonic the Hedgehog. The main writer of the show, Ben Hurst, took one look at the games and threw out EVERYTHING that made it Sonic. I'll admit that when I was a kid, I loved the show.

Which doesn't refute Kuta's point one bit! He was saying how Sega of America bolstered the Sonic franchise with valuable elements, but he gets this thrown in face as if the improvements don't count because it's not exactly like the games. (Also, to nitpick a little, Ben was not actually "main writer" of the show, just particularly prominent, especially in Series 2. And to lay all the blame for SatAM's format on him is misleading, he and the story team would have been working with Sega of America's production bible concepts that were evolving then. Pressed for time, the writers never were given a grand tour of the Sonic franchise, apprised of each detail by Yuji Naka, and then proceeded to chuck it all out in favour of pet ideas. That's a fantasy.)

It may seem like I'm doing a petty thing here and complaining about the behaviour of an individual from the safety of my blog rather than responding critically in the original thread. This is not my intention; I've got nothing against David the Lurker. I am merely using this (mild) incident from a public forum as an example of what I'm talking about, because it's bad form to complain about a phenomenon without citing a single example of it.

It illustrates exactly the type of thing I mean about folks, not just disliking Americanised Sonic, but actively trying to dissuade others from considering it part of the Sonic whole. And this quote is from someone who professes to have liked the show when younger! Why, then, drink Sega's koolaid and allow your concept of Sonic's universe to be replaced piece by piece until it's nothing like it was when you first fell in love with it?

The lack of Item Monitors, Lamp Posts, and cyclical Robotnik boss confrontations make SatAM no less Sonic than the lack of the "SCORE-TIME-RINGS" counter. On the other hand, the use of samey Swatbots, or the underuse of the Tornado biplane... these are legitimate complaints and I do wish these things had appeared in the show (no more or less, though, than I wish that elements of the show had been in the games, so this in no way reflects badly on SatAM). The fact remains that Sonic the Hedgehog - the real Sonic the Hedgehog - fought for the freedom of his friends and his planet from the robotic tyranny of Robotnik. And isn't that what really counts?

First Attempt

I thought it would be funny to show off my very earliest attempt at making a Sonic engine in Game Maker, so here's the link.

Now you can laugh at all the glitches and mistakes I made 5 years ago! I know, it's a poor way to tide folks over until the new shiny version is released.

!SCIENCE #4

As promised...

This, my friends, is why I should concentrate on programming. =P

!SCIENCE #3

I can't believe it's been a whole year since I made the first one of these!

In honour of its anniversary I'm going to post one today and tomorrow, so be sure to come back for the second helping. =)

Afterthoughts on the SFR article

If you're subscribed to Game Informer or follow the Sonic news around the 'Net, you've probably already heard that Sonic Fan Remix has been covered in the magazine.

The article takes the form of a short interview with Pelikan and me. It's the first time I've ever really been interviewed (let alone in print, though that means increasingly little in today's digital age), so I'm understandably chuffed; but I'm also excited that SFR is getting the added publicity... just in case there's any stragglers in the Sonic community who haven't heard of it yet.

The interview was conducted by email, so I gave my answers as thoughtfully as I could and sent them along, hoping that the editors at GI could whip them into something manageable for their article. Of course, they did a great job. Understandably a few tweaks were made, and some content was cut that would have been repetitious or wouldn't have flowed with the rest of the article.

However, for anyone who's interested in the dirty underbelly, here's what was cut:

(isn't having a personal blog great?)

"One of the most striking elements of Sonic Fan Remix is the fact that it’s visually superior to the Sega-made Sonic 4. How was a team of two able to make a better looking game than a major game studio?"

First, I don't think it's fair to say it's visually superior. While I certainly prefer the look of SFR, I know quite a few folks who don't. Artistic beauty is very subjective. Second, it's not even two people, it's one - I had nothing to do with the visuals. And I'm as mystified as anyone else how Pelikan is able to make such gorgeous graphics. It's like some kind of crazy superpower!

Understandably, the part about how it's not really that fair to compare the graphical styles was dropped, because Pelikan already put it better. But I'm sort of sad that the bit showing my admiration for Pelikan's skills was omitted - I'm honestly in awe of his abilities. I know he works freelance in the game industry, which means he's a professional, but his work would be impressive even for a team of artists. It is like a superpower.

To actually answer the question, though - speaking for myself - I think that SFR succeeds where Sonic 4 fails because it's more surprising. There are so many details that you're just not expecting to see, and that's what makes it so exciting.

You'll notice here that the first part was removed. The loss of those three crucial words "speaking for myself" changes the tone of the whole quote. I'm actually trying to describe why SFR delights me more than Sonic 4 did, but the final GI article makes it look like I'm expansively claiming Sonic 4 to be objectively worse. (They embiggened my nuts. =P) But one can't really blame them for trying to stir up controversy, because controversy is interesting. Also, I am responsible for phrasing it in such a provoking way.

I stand by what I said about being surprising, though. Just like the single word of advice "consent" has extraordinary mileage when it comes to questions of sex, when it comes to game design, "surprise" is the word.

Take Sonic 3, for example. Sonic gets punched in the face, the island gets set on fire, and then you get carpet bombed. And that's just the first zone.

Well, here's looking forward to a cover feature when SFR is a complete, surprising whole. =)

Baww Green Eyes!

When "Project Needlemouse" was revealed to be Sonic 4, and the first trailer was shown, it immediately became clear that Sega wasn't going to use Sonic's classic design. This was disappointing to many fans, and not just because the hype had promised a return to classic form. It also hurt because it had a ring of finality to it - if Sega didn't bring back classic Sonic for Sonic 4, they're probably never going to do it.

This perceived betrayal caused what's called a "shitstorm" by indelicate people. I did my bit with this post, angrily complaining about Sonic's modern design. Of course, to any backlash there is always another backlash, and people began to complain about the complainers: "It's just his design! It's not a very important detail! Just shut up!" And so, the "Baww Green Eyes!" meme was born. (I like to think that my post is at least partly responsible, but I'd probably be over-inflating its impact.)

When it comes to any argument - for example, "Black Eyes VS Green Eyes" - I can respect the two opposite views. Those arguing for one design over the other are both passionately defending something that matters. It's the third group, those who say "shut up!" that I can't stand. Telling someone that their argument doesn't matter and that they should desist is doubly toothless: first, it's antagonistic - it opposes their viewpoint and will be seen as just as disagreeable as their opponents; second, unlike their opponents, it contributes nothing to the argument.

This is why I dislike the "Baww Green Eyes!" meme so much. It seeks to delegitimise an entire conversation, a conversation that I feel is worth having. Suddenly any discussion of Sonic's design and its strengths and weaknesses can be hijacked by any fool who brays "Baww Green Eyes!" like it's the most brilliant possible rejoinder. "This subject doesn't matter! You're all whiny bitches!"

If it's such a minor detail that it truly doesn't matter, then why does this third group of "shut-uppers" seem to care so much? If they aren't interested in the details of Sonic's design, why don't they leave the discussion altogether? They aren't contributing anything, and by their own admission they wouldn't care whatever the outcome.

Argue for black eyes. Argue for green eyes. (Or peach/blue eyelids, or short/long spines, etc). But don't say it doesn't matter at all.

I've been accused of nerdrage and bitching enough to know that it stings. I'll probably be accused once more, because of this post. God knows I'm painfully aware of how pathetic it sounds to talk about Sonic's eye-colour as though the future of mankind depends on it. But I will not have it said that it doesn't matter, for a very good reason. That mentality dismisses the work of talented people to whom it very much does matter - the game designers themselves.

You may be a layperson who only plays the games, and to you the details are just that - details. Many of them you won't remember, or ever be consciously aware of. But the developers and designers sweat blood to get these details right, so there actually is a quarter of the world wherein Sonic's design does supremely matter - in the mind and the workplace of his designers.

Do you really think that Naoto Ohshima or Yuji Uekawa just slapped their Sonic designs together with an "anything goes" attitude? "It doesn't matter what our character looks like. He'll be appealing anyway, because he can jump!"

Because I'm interested in designing Sonic games myself, these details are of interest and importance to me. This doesn't make me a whiner - it just means I'm not a passive player in the Sonic experience. Being invested doesn't make me any weirder than the people who took care to create Sonic in the first place. No one would dare think to fault them for caring about their own designs, upon which their careers may even hinge. Obsession isn't automatically a bad thing.

Methinks I doth protest too much. Perhaps it's time I make a stab at outlining why I dislike the green eyes on Sonic. It's not a knee-jerk hatred of "Modern Sonic" (though rest assured I do hate the design), it's got a rational basis. As such, I could be argued out of my position if this basis were shown to be silly.

There are two major reasons why they don't work. First, it's a bad colour choice. Sonic's red, white, and blue design is iconic, partly inspired by the emblematic flags of the UK and US.

The reason why these colours work is because they are complementary. If you introduce another colour from a wildly different band of the spectrum, things go terribly wrong. That's why you'll often see American flags with gold tassels or edging, but never anything like this:

Simply, having all of the primary colours present in the same scheme looks totally wrong. This is why Sonic's peach muzzle and tummy, or golden shoe buckle, look alright. They share the "red" aspect of the scheme, and don't conflict. The minute green is introduced, though, it all goes wrong.

You may say, "yes, but it's such a small amount of green, nothing like the treasonous vandalism you visited upon those flags." You'd be right, of course (also, the eyes are very far away from the red of the shoes, mitigating the conflict somewhat) - but the eyes are the part of the design you're supposed to be drawn to. They're the most important part; they aren't described as "windows to the soul" for nothing. Everything else can change, but if the eyes don't look right, the whole picture is ruined. For example:

These are not faces.

A minor change, in the grand scheme of things, but an enormous change in the character of the "face".

So, would changing the colour of Sonic's eyes help matters? If I'm complaining about the green, would I be happy with blue or cyan? Well, let's find out:

A small improvement; less violence is done to the colour scheme, certainly. But I find I still don't like it. So what is my complaint with the "green eyes" if not the "green" part? Let's take a look at my favourite picture of classic Sonic:

Sonic doesn't just have black (or very dark brown) eyes, but there is an obvious "shine" to them. The little white circle does wonders. Without it, he looks like this:

There's a reason why, in anime and manga, characters are often depicted without a shine in their eyes to make them look dead or mind-controlled. There's an eerie lifelessness to it. So Sonic has shiny eyes in all his classic forms:

CD Sonic goes really far. Practically the top half of each pupil is white!

But it's not just the shine or lack thereof that makes the eyes, it's the position. If we move the shine to the dead centre of Sonic's pupils, he starts to look weird:

Derp!

It makes him look less like he's looking at you, and connecting with you, and more like he's just a drawing. It's a subtle detail, but for designers, it's details like these that make or break a design.

The trouble is, the way they shade Sonic's eyes these days, with the green iris, the shine ends up being almost dead centre in his pupil. Examples:

If this looks familiar, it's because Mario has been doing it forever:

Sonic's has Mario's eyes! And overall shading style, to boot. (What was Sega thinking, if you can't beat 'em join 'em?)

So it's not so much that Sonic has green eyes as it is that he has green irises that force his pupil to be much smaller, putting the shine closer to centre. If the eye, both pupil and iris, were treated as a single unit with one large shine, I think it'd be improved a lot:

To be fair, many of the more recent renderings of Modern Sonic are gravitating toward looking like this, and I think that's helping him look better. But they need to do it consciously and consistently to bring back his "cute" look.

Klonoa has had irises for years and still looks cute and appealing because the artists did just that:

To close, I'll also give props to Sonic Battle's bold design, which looks great despite the green:

I think Sega should take a hint from Sonic Battle and use flagrantly different designs for their games more often. The plain vanilla "Modern Sonic" has been with us for over a decade and we could do with some artistic licence. Hey, if Disney can make a dark, intelligent platformer about Mickey Mouse (a Mickey Mouse that reverts to his classic design, no less) to critical acclaim, so can Sega do with Sonic.

Wright is Wrong

Some folks get their jollies by watching competitive sports. Not me, though - I insist on being weird. When I want to watch a competition where one side gets soundly beaten, I watch debates. The latest of these was between Sam Harris and Robert Wright. (Watch it on YouTube.)

Now, both Harris and Wright are technically atheists, but they disagree on the details. Wright agrees with Harris that religion is wrong, but parts ways with him when it comes to religion being bad. It's Wright's contention that religion is always neutral in any situation, neither bad nor good. He claims that the bad that Harris would attribute to religion is actually caused by other factors: cultural, political, socioeconomic, etc. He even goes so far as to characterise the the Israeli-Palestine conflict as a "land dispute".

This isn't the first time Wright has argued for this position. I've seen him do it once before with Christopher Hitchens. It seems to be his "shtick". He even admits when challenged that the question of religion's neutrality is a hard one to answer; that he hasn't done enough research or gathered enough evidence to be firm in his conclusion; and that it's his "intuition" about it. This is starting to sound more and more like an a priori assumption to me. It's amazing the wriggling he'll do to defend it, as well. In the debate with Harris, Richard Dawkins happened to be in attendance. During the Q&A, he asked Wright (in so many words) whether the conflict in Northern Ireland would exist without the artificial religious labels that continue to fuel it. Wright's prevaricating answer suggested that the conflict grew out of an imbalance in the two groups' access to power. This didn't go a long way to answering Dawkins' question - the concept of being two distinct groups would never have existed in the first place if not for theological differences - but whatever.

Basically, any time someone gives an example of an evil in the world that is ostensibly caused by religion, Wright will dutifully trot out a rationalisation that conveniently absolves religion. As he's not religious himself, one wonders why he bothers - but one can uncharitably speculate. When Harris asked him why he's against criticising Islam, but not against criticising the comparable (and quasi-religious) situation in North Korea, he said "Well, what are they gonna do?" Perhaps Wright is being hypocritical. He's okay with stepping on an ant hill, but not knocking on a bee hive.

Anyway, it's not my intent to figure out why Wright argues for the neutrality of religion. It's my intent to refute it. You'd think Sam Harris could have done so amply in the debate, but he seemed a little off his game (though Sam Harris on a bad day is still a force to be reckoned with). Unfortunately, the conversation turned to Islam more often than not, and much time was wasted with Harris reiterating its dangers. "There's a reason why we're not all lying awake at night worrying about the Amish," he said, making a great point in his great quotable style. But he said nothing that began to cut through Wright's argument and kill it at its root.

Wright's clung-to position that "religion is always neutral" is twofold: when an example of an evil of religion is brought up that he can't quickly dismiss, he'll move the goalpost, shifting the meaning of neutral to mean that while religion actually can inspire bad after all, it also inspires enough good that it's on balance neutral again. Once more, of course, he says this is difficult to measure and that he doesn't have any concrete foundation for his claim. (One wonders, then, why he makes the debate circuit arguing such a shaky claim.)

Both claims of neutrality, however, are easily and quickly dismissed. It's a shame Harris didn't do so, because maybe we'd be spared further flogging of the idea by Wright in the future. Anyway, I'll tackle them.

First claim of religious neutrality: "Religion never inspires bad things, people do bad things anyway and use religion to defend them. Take religion away and they'll just justify the bad things with something else, such as bastardised science."

This seems like you could dismiss it easily by finding something bad that a holy book tells people to do, and find an example of people doing it. For example: Not treating gays equally. That's a foul thing to do, and it's caused by religion, right?

Well, it may or may not be (though I'd say that in most cases, yes, it is), but Wright's rejoinder would probably be something like, "Yes, but there are lots of religious people - even ones who follow the very same holy book - who don't do it. Therefore, the bigots are practising homophobia because of their culture or some other reason, and simply using "God's word" to justify their behaviour."

That's a pretty sneaky response, and it can send one reeling just long enough for the subject to be changed. And it works with pretty much any minority group.

Except one.

Atheists. Pray tell, without religion, how there could possibly be such a phenomenon as discrimination against atheists? This is at least evil that can't be explained away as due to "socioeconomic factors" and completely hamstrings the argument that religion itself generates no evil.

Second claim of religious neutrality: "Okay, you might have got me there. Maybe religion causes that. But it causes enough good to make up for it in the end!"

This second claim is so facile that one wonders who couldn't shred it, but here goes. Doing good after doing bad doesn't make one good, or even neutral. The guilt of having done bad remains. For example, if I murdered someone, and then donated one of my kidneys or lungs to save someone else, would I be "neutral"? No, I'd still be in gaol for having murdered someone! At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, Wright's claim is tantamount to saying that the Nazis were on balance neutral because, hey! they rebuilt Germany's economy while they were at it.

Unless I've grossly mischaracterised Wright's position, it's pretty clear that it's pathetically easy to take apart. Fortunately for him Harris was fixated on Islam for so much of the talk; because if the light of reason had fully shone on his silly notions, they would have been embarrassingly revealed as unclothed in logic or consideration.