Dear Mike Siegel listeners,

I would like to apologize to you for my behavior, Wednesday, June 7 on the Mike Siegel show. Though I might not believe in God, it doesn't mean I don't have feelings or am as desensitized to the world as you might imagine. Consequently, when I feel attacked, I can tend to become defensive making me behave in a way that, as you saw that night, is both unattractive and unprofessional. All I was hoping for was a chance to be heard, to be given a fair and open forum in which you, the audience, might suspend your beliefs for one evening and allow me to convey a new way of looking at the age old problem of whether or not there is a God.

Now, I realize that most people are believers and have had some experience in which they are convinced they have had contact with "the other side." Now as much as many of you might like to challenge me with your personal epiphanies, there is no effective way for me to counter such expositions. To be confronted with each person's miracle or ghost story is not productive in that it is impossible for me to contest your assertions over the radio. If you tell me that an angel saved your brother from cancer or an alien force field lifted you off the ground and burnt your cows, how can I possibly contest it? I say I don't believe you, and you insist that it happened. Consequently, instead of engaging in an intellectual debate that addresses the possibility of our possessing a spiritual function in the brain, the show becomes reduced to a volley of "he said, she saids" resulting in an empty contest of wills. Though it wasn't my intention to get caught up in such a contest, feeling cast into the melee, I lessened myself to bitter sarcasm and rudeness all of which I regret and for which I apologize. Please realize that my only intention was to try to stimulate new ideas and to open people's minds to a new way of spiritual exploration. Even if you feel that there is nothing to be gained from my ideas, what is lost in merely considering an alternate possibility? Anyway, for those I may have stimulated, I am grateful and for those I might have insulted I apologize.

Sincerely,
Matthew Alper