Oh, no — she’s questioning everything they taught her!

One of those agony aunts, Dear Margo, got an amusing request for help.

Dear Margo: Our daughter started college a year ago, and we’ve noticed during her visits home that she’s not the sweet, innocent girl we sent away for higher learning. We raised her with strong Christian beliefs, but lately she’s saying that she’s joined an atheist club on campus and is questioning everything we taught her. Now my husband refuses to let her in the house and is threatening to turn her in to the FBI. I’ve tried to cure our daughter and reconcile with her, but nothing seems to work. I’ve prayed over her at night while she sleeps, enlisted friends in a phone prayer tree and even spoken to my priest about the possibility of an exorcism. I’m at my wits’ end. How can I recover my daughter and keep her from hell? — God-fearing

There’s a regular stampede of young people doing exactly what “God-fearing” describes — isn’t it wonderful? This is exactly what happens when you send your kids off to college: if it works, they start thinking for themselves, develop surprising new opinions, and aren’t afraid to share them with other people. Hooray for college students, some of my favorite people!

As for these poor parents, they shipped their daughter off to college with the wrong idea. They thought college would just confirm them in their same old traditional beliefs. We really ought to send little information packets to the parents of our students, carefully explaining that there will be little shocks like this, because their kids will come back as smart, independent human beings.

Margo’s answer isn’t bad — she tells them that it is normal for people to think for themselves — even if she does bend over backwards to give some unwarranted sympathy to freaky religious beliefs.

And that fanatical devotion to peculiar Christian dogma? Well…

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The forgettable Mr Birdnow

Timothy Birdnow is one of those common wingnuts: he worships GW Bush, thinks global warming is a hoax, homosexuality is evil, evolution is a lie, and history is all about the triumphant ascent of Judeo-Christian America. I’ve laughed at him a few times before; now he’s venting his diseased, shriveled spleen at atheism. It’s funny stuff.

A lot of it is the usual ahistorical tripe which can be summed up in this cliche:

This prohibition was clearly intended to restrain governmental interference with the right of the individual to believe and worship as he sees fit. The “Wall of Separation” was put in place to secure freedom of religion, not freedom FROM religion.

So, apparently, Americans do not have a right to be godless, and we can be compelled to join some church, any church, just to keep us from marching around free FROM religion. It’s the weirdest argument, though, because at the same time he’s damning us for being free of religion and insisting that we have no right to be god-free, he’s insisting that atheism is a religion. The inconsistency doesn’t matter when your brain is as scrambled as Birdnow’s; but I am amused by his most extreme efforts to shoehorn atheism into his narrow vision of what a religion is. Behold: we are trinitarians now!

Radical Atheists hate it when their belief system is categorized as religious, but it is. What is religion after all? It is a system of beliefs about the nature of the Universe, of Man, and of the Hereafter. It generally has a moral code. It has a creation story, and often a prophecy of the end of the world. Atheism has all of these things.

Atheism is triune in nature in many ways; we have Universe the Father (Let there be light, and there was the Big Bang), Earth the Son (all life evolved from the mechanistic determinism of the Blind Watchmaker), and the Holy Spirit of Human intellect. As a result, atheism incorporates several beliefs into one system.

Atheism worships (they hate that word) the Cosmos, Evolution, and Reason. The Big Bang and Darwinian Evolution are the creation myths, and the Big Crunch the prophecied cataclysm. Oh, I know; these are scientific concepts and not simply faith-based stories. Still, the atheist has decided that he will not believe in anything that cannot be given in evidence by the senses. Of course, this means that the ultimate questions of where this random, mechanistic universe came from cannot be answered. God is as good of an answer as any, but most atheists simply insist there can be none and believe in a mechanical universe that generated spontaneously with physical laws balanced just right for the evolution of life and human consciousness.

Oh, yes. And bdelloid rotifers are our Madonna, and ichneumonid wasps our Satan. Could he possibly stretch the comparison a little further?

Why is he concerned about this? We’re destroying Western Civilization!

That is why our society is sliding down the long, greasy pole; too many believe in nothing. This is evident in every facet of our lives. All of society`s problems can ultimately be traced back to the severing of human reason from human passion, and that is the fruit of Western Civilization`s arrogant belief in himself, the material world, and his disbelief in the Divine. The looming triumph of Atheism is bringing forth the demons of the human abyss, as surely as did Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, or the other Atheists who ruled over their kingdoms for one hour. The bell is now tolling for we.

As we all know, sliding down a long, greasy pole is the homophobe’s worst nightmare, which is why they dwell on it so much. The poor man is deranged, so I’ll just have to forgive him for his very typical, hateful attitude. Unfortunately, I have to despise him forever for “The bell is now tolling for we.”

You can always trust a Dane, right?

One of my goals for this coming week is to get the book piles sorted and put away. I’m one of those academics: if you visited my house right now, probably the first thing you’d notice is a few dozen piles of books stacked up on the floor of the living room. Some I’ve read and just need to shelve properly; some I’ve glanced over with amusement and will be adding to my growing collection of creationist literature; and some will put ready to hand because they’re on my list of books I should get read this summer. One in that last category is Phil Zuckerman’s Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us about Contentment(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). I guess I’ll have to sort it somewhere towards the top of that pile, now that I’ve seen a review by a Dane that says it actually gets the godless Scandinavian culture right. Apparently, what Zuckerman finds noteworthy also says a lot about American culture.

Scandinavia isn’t quite perfect yet, though. Here’s a story of a Norwegian doctor who prescribed Christianity for depressed patients (google translation). A few kooks still slip through, but the culture as a whole seems to regard that doctor as a nut — here in the US we’d be having sober, serious discussions in the opinion pages of our newspapers about how maybe he was doing something positive.

Evolving Thoughts has moved!

John Wilkins has left Scienceblogs to start anew at Evolving Thoughts Mk. III. I’m pretty sure it’s because of a) pure philosophical bloody-mindedness, b) chronic embarrassment at his inability to spell “Mghrz’z” properly, and c) something to do with being Australian, which is a legitimate excuse for all kinds of contrary behavior.

Unfortunately, he’s still planning to occasionally chew over my heathenish ways, so I guess I’ll have to continue to keep my eyes on him.

Didn’t we do this one already?

Oh, yeah, we did…but now this silly poll has popped up elsewhere, sans previous pharyngulation. I’m sure you can fix that.

Do You Believe You Evolved From An Ape-like Creature?

No (68.0%, 327 Votes)
Yes (32.0%, 153 Votes)
I do not know (1.0%, 3 Votes)

You know, I’d like to know what kind of creature they think they did evolve from. And if there is “nothing”, they ought to re-word their poll to “Do You Believe You Evolved?”

(By the way, dig a little deeper into that site — it looks like christwire.org is a parody site. It says something that the very same poll that onenewsnow.com presented seriously can be a joke to anyone else.)

Dangerous idiot with bogus medical advice

I have just read the most awesomely insane but calmly stated collection of dangerous medical advice ever. Andreas Moritz claims cancer is not a disease — it’s a healthy response to stress. Guess what causes cancer? Guilt, low self-esteem, and insufficient spirituality.

Cancer has always been an extremely rare illness, except in industrialized nations during the past 40-50 years. Human genes have not significantly changed for thousands of years. Why would they change so drastically now, and suddenly decide to kill scores of people? The answer to this question is amazingly simple: Damaged or faulty genes do not kill anyone. Cancer does not kill a person afflicted with it! What kills a cancer patient is not the tumor, but the numerous reasons behind cell mutation and tumor growth. These root causes should be the focus of every cancer treatment, yet most oncologists typically ignore them. Constant conflicts, guilt and shame, for example, can easily paralyze the body’s most basic functions, and lead to the growth of a cancerous tumor.

After having seen thousands of cancer patients over a period of three decades, I began to recognize a certain pattern of thinking, believing and feeling that was common to most of them. To be more specific, I have yet to meet a cancer patient who does not feel burdened by some poor self-image, unresolved conflict and worries, or past emotional trauma that still lingers in his/her subconscious. Cancer, the physical disease, cannot occur unless there is a strong undercurrent of emotional uneasiness and deep-seated frustration.

It goes on and on like that — it’s a whole chapter of a book that I presume must go on even longer with this quackery. The whole thing is this illogical mish-mash of unsupported claims and ridiculous conclusions. Cancer has been known for ages; it wasn’t that rare. Animals get cancer, and I doubt that it is caused by “emotional uneasiness”. We see more cancers now than we did a thousand years ago because today you are less likely to be slaughtered by the pox, poor sanitation, or a spear in the belly, and are more likely to live a longer life. We know many of the genetic causes of cancer: somatic mutations that knock out portions of the apoptotic pathways (cells are always on the knife edge of spontaneously killing themselves if errors occur in replication, for instance, and removing the hair trigger can allow more errors to accumulate) will increase the cell’s predisposition to become cancerous. Those mutations are not induced by subconscious worries.

The entire premise behind this guy’s schtick is false. Anyone who thinks an essential question to ask yourself if diagnosed is “What is the spiritual growth lesson behind cancer?” is a quack who’s out to take advantage of you and the worries that having cancers will naturally cause.

Another clue is to look at his qualifications.

Andreas Moritz is a medical intuitive; a practitioner of Ayurveda, iridology, shiatsu, and vibrational medicine; a writer; and an artist.

Dear sweet jebus, if that guy asked me to blow my nose I wouldn’t trust his medical advice. What the hell is a “medical intuitive”? Someone who doesn’t have a scrap of knowledge or evidence, but diagnoses and prescribes on the basis of his feelings? That’s the impression I get from the collection of lies he has written.

Guilty, guilty, guilty

The woman who prayed instead of getting medical help when her daughter was dying of diabetes, Leilani Neumann, has been found guilty. I found the defense argument ludicrous and revealing.

Linehan countered, saying Neumann didn’t realize her daughter was so ill and did all she could do to help, in line with the family’s belief in faith-healing.

He said Neumann is a devout Christian who prays about everything and took good care of her four children.

“Religious extremism is a Muslim terrorist,” Linehan said. “They are saying these parents were so far off the scale that they murdered their child. The woman did everything she could to help her. That is the injustice in this case.”

Charming redefinition there — so only Muslims can be terrorists? I think everything this crazy woman did fit perfectly into the definition of religious extremism.

The Darwinius hype is beginning to burn

Oh, man. I’m willing to keep saying that Darwinius masillae was an important discovery, but the PR machine is making it hard to do so without cringing. Carl Zimmer has the History Channel ad for their program on it.

Oh. My. Dog. “The most important find in 47 million years”? “A global event: this changes everything”? This is not helping. It is inflating a good discovery beyond all reason, and when the public hears the creationists declare that it’s one fossil of a monkey-like creature, and they’re right, it’s going to damage the credibility of science.

Seed Media has a bit of a scoop: they’ve got an interview with a PLoS One editor, a History Channel executive, and Jørn Hurum, the scientist behind all the promotion. It’s appalling. They’re bragging about how a “production company got in on the ground floor”. Shall we anticipate the brave new world when paleontologists have to beg for McDonald’s happy meal tie-ins to get funding?

And I’m sorry, but Hurum comes off as a complete ass.

But in order for the story and the film to pack the most punch–and to reach the public–Hurum and the production company knew they had to keep it secret. Hurum seemed particularly preoccupied with the way the blogosphere is able to dissipate a story, mentioning an Arctic excavation he worked on several years ago that was picked-up by a blog in Japan within three hours of posting his pictures on the internet. “I’ve seen Chinese specimens of dinosaurs and so on destroyed like this with lots of bad early descriptions [from] blogging,” he says. Hurum wanted to subvert the system and take his story straight to the masses in a way that would appeal to the average person, especially kids: “If we really want kids to get involved with exciting scientific findings, no matter what kind of field, we really need to start [thinking] about reaching people other than [our] fellow scientists. This paper could have been drowned in other papers and would have been read by 15 people around the world.”

That’s revealing. The fossils would not be destroyed by someone blogging about it prematurely; what would be destroyed would be Hurum’s chance to play P.T. Barnum and make himself the center of the show. Apparently, those are the same thing to him. And he thinks it a problem that his paper would be “drowned” in a large volume of papers on the fossil? Jebus. This is what we want in science, lots of open discussion.

And if he thinks a few bloggers chatting prematurely about a find would ruin it for him, he should take a look at the damage this commercial hype and bogus hysteria about the specimen is doing. Misperception is rife, and the exaggeration is diminishing the importance of other finds.

It gets worse. Here’s the trailer for the show.