Why did our government give special preference to Christian pseudo-insurance companies?

This country recently managed to pass a rather lame compromise on health care: there is now a mandate that requires everyone to have health insurance, even if it is from a hodge-podge of insurance companies, with the intent of fairly distributing the expense. Unfortunately, one group got singled out with an exception from this requirement. Can you guess who?

Yep, Christians.

Did you know that if you are a Christian you are exempt from the taxes, penalties and regulations imposed by the recently enacted health insurance law?

All you have to do is to affirm a statement of Christian beliefs and pledge to follow a code that includes no tobacco or illegal drugs, no sex outside of marriage, and no abuse of alcohol or legal medications and pay a monthly fee to join a religious health care sharing ministry plan, a plan that specifically does not guarantee the payment of your medical bills in any fashion and holds members solely responsible for payment of said bills.

And the reason for this exemption? According to the spokeswoman for the Senate committee responsible for writing much of the legislation, lawmakers granted the exemption out of respect for religious freedom.

That’s a rather large loophole, and it’s also preferentially sectarian. It’s also non-surprising. What it means is that a few Christian scam-artists get to get richer, while lots of gullible Christians get screwed. The con is to set up a Christian “bill-sharing” cooperative in place of a real insurance plan; members send in monthly premiums, which can be quite substantial, but do not have to buy in to any other insurance plan, and then the bill-sharing program offers to help cover medical expenses, but “The payment of your medical bills…is not guaranteed in any fashion.” It’s a great deal for the Christian bill-sharing plan; if your medical expenses get so high that they cut into their profits, they can just elect not to pay, and then you have to go begging to join some other insurance pool.

Absolutely brilliant. Send me money now, and maybe, if I feel like it, I’ll help you out with some bills later. But I am not obligated.

And this is such a profitable plan that they managed to lobby congress to support it, all under the cloak of Christianity.

Please perp walk the pope

Not that I have much expectation that these charges will be acted upon, but a couple of German lawyers have filed charges against Ratzinger in the International Criminal Court. My sense of justice rises in terrible joy at the accusation, though.

Their charges concern “three worldwide crimes which until now have not been denounced . . . (as) the traditional reverence toward ‘ecclesiastical authority’ has clouded the sense of right and wrong”.

They claim the Pope “is responsible for the preservation and leadership of a worldwide totalitarian regime of coercion which subjugates its members with terrifying and health-endangering threats”.

They allege he is also responsible for “the adherence to a fatal forbiddance of the use of condoms, even when the danger of HIV-Aids infection exists” and for “the establishment and maintenance of a worldwide system of cover-up of the sexual crimes committed by Catholic priests and their preferential treatment, which aids and abets ever new crimes”.

They claim the Catholic Church “acquires its members through a compulsory act, namely, through the baptism of infants that do not yet have a will of their own”. This act was “irrevocable” and is buttressed by threats of excommunication and the fires of hell.

It was “a grave impairment of the personal freedom of development and of a person’s emotional and mental integrity”. The Pope was “responsible for its preservation and enforcement and, as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of his Church, he was jointly responsible” with Pope John Paul II.

Catholics “threatened by HIV-AIDS … are faced with a terrible alternative: If they protect themselves with condoms during sexual intercourse, they become grave sinners; if they do not protect themselves out of fear of the punishment of sin threatened by the church, they become candidates for death.”

My one reservation is that by charging the Pope alone, they are letting the whole damnable hierarchy of the church and a few centuries worth of evil doctrines off the hook.

No Catholic hospitals for me, please

There have been some recent controversies in how Catholic hospitals handle ethics — most prominently in the case of the Phoenix hospital that carried out an abortion to save a woman, and got rebuked by the church for it. The Catholic church faces an ethical challenge here, and guess what their response has been: not to change their dangerous and amoral doctrines, but to emphasize emphatically that the church dogma must be followed.

The flaw is in the workers, who must be better indoctrinated in Catholicism. How that would help a dying pregnant woman is a mystery the church will not explore.

Controversies over bioethical standards at U.S. Catholic hospitals show the need for greater Catholic education for health care workers, Vatican officials said Thursday.

They have further decided that mere doctors and professional ethicists are not qualifed to judge medical dilemmas — instead, decisions must be made by old male theologians with no medical training and little awareness of life in the real world.

In the wake of public spats between the Catholic hierarchy and health care executives, the Catholic Health Association publicly acknowledged that bishops — not doctors or hospital ethicists — have the final say on questions of medical morality.

A reader sent along a suggestion, that I take a look at the mission statements for some of our regional hospitals. Mission statements tend to be the places where institutions place a pile of fluffy vague expressions of wishful thinking, and they usually aren’t going to be the places to look for substantive differences, but I was surprised — there was a huge difference. It’s actually rather frightening to see what a Catholic hospital publicly, cheerfully and unashamedly considers the most important job it has.

Mercy Medical Center, a Catholic hospital

Mission

The Mission of Catholic Health Initiatives is to nurture the healing ministry of the Church by bringing it new life, energy and viability in the 21st century. Fidelity to the Gospel urges us to emphasize human dignity and social justice as we move toward the creation of healthier communities.

Values

  • Reverence
  • Integrity
  • Compassion
  • Excellence

Mercy Medical Center is strongly committed to diversity at all levels of the Mercy organization and in our community. Our mission, values and traditions firmly embrace inclusion, acceptance and compassion. Mercy is actively participating and responding to the unique and diverse needs of its patients, families, visitors, students and employees.

Hennepin County Medical Center, a secular institution

Our Mission

We are committed:

  • to provide the best possible care to every patient we serve today;
  • to search for new ways to improve the care we will provide tomorrow;
  • to educate health care providers for the future; and
  • to ensure access to healthcare for all.

Our Vision

We are committed to being:

  • the best place to receive care;
  • the best place to give care; and
  • the best place to work and learn.

Whoa. So the job of the Catholic hospital is to “nurture the healing ministry of the Church” and make the church healthier in the 21st century. The job of the secular hospital is to improve medical care for its patients.

Now when you get sick, you know where to go, and it’s not your local Catholic hospital. Unless, that is, you think it important to prop up the power of your bishop, in which case you deserve the medical care you’ll be getting. Make sure to leave a substantial portion of your estate to the church in your will!

Richard Dawkins Goes to Heaven

Here is the last of Anthony Horvath’s ghastly morality tales. This one is the easiest to summarize, because there isn’t much to say about it: Richard Dawkins dies, goes to heaven, is judged, and sent to hell. It’s short, only seven pages long, and five of them are spent in loving description of the disintegration of Dawkins. It’s nothing but a horror story for Christians in which the bad guy meets a grisly end.

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The hypocrites of Polk County, Florida

Polk County, Florida has a public school board that meets in the county school district auditorium to discuss the secular, governmental functions of running the public schools. Despite their purpose, though, they insist on opening with a prayer, a practice which has encountered some criticism and which they have dealt with evasively and dishonestly.

Earlier this month, the School Board began a new practice in which the board placed a disclaimer on the meeting agenda and held a prayer before the meeting officially began.

The policy change came after a letter from the Freedom From Religion Foundation threatened a lawsuit if prayers during regular meetings continued.

The disclaimer reads: “Voluntary invocation may be offered before the opening of the School Board meeting by a private citizen. The views or beliefs expressed in the invocation have not been reviewed nor approved by the School Board, and the Board is not allowed, by law, to endorse the religious beliefs or views of this, or any other speaker.”

So they invited a local minister to say a prayer before the meeting officially began. Everyone is present, sitting in their chairs, ready to get to work on public business, but they’re just pretending the meeting hasn’t actually started until their god-botherer has finished begging Jesus to come into their lives.

It’s a lie and a game. They are still making religion part of the session, and there is no reason any gods need to be invoked prior to handling secular affairs. But of course the purblind Christian wankers on the board don’t see any problem with stuffing their religion in everyone’s faces.

John Kieffer sees the problem. He announced that “Prayer has no place in government!” — and he’s right — during a recent hypocritical flaunting of Jesus jabber before the meeting, and has been arrested for disorderly conduct. Apparently, invocations that are pro-god are legal, but invocations that reject gods will get you arrested in Polk County.

That challenging dogma is a criminal act isn’t the biggest issue in the county though. What’s even more appalling is the discussion that the school board then had in their meeting — they seem to think the problem will be resolved by packing more jeebus-jabber into the proceedings.

Audience member Tabitha Hunt told board members that the invocation needed to return as a part of the regular meeting.

“They (the atheist group) are very outspoken and I think as Christians we need to be just as outspoken,” she said.

Retired School Principal L.D. Wilcox said the incident brought tears to his eyes because of the children who were sitting in the audience.

“We talk about not leaving debts for our children, but what about integrity and responsibility?” Wilcox said. “It’s all right to disagree, but we have to learn how to respect one another.”

Fields said she would meet with School Board Attorney Wes Bridges about returning the prayer to its former spot on the meeting agenda.

O’Reilly said that while district officials want prayers at the meeting, it will be a costly legal fight and the district needs the community’s support.

“So if there are people who say we want prayers, then you better step up,” he said. “You go to your churches and synagogues and tell them they’ll need to help us.”

So they have a little dodge and disclaimer that they’ve implemented to justify their claim that they aren’t including religion in official county business…but now they’re arguing that they need to get more prayer into their governmental functions and that they want the local churches to help them do that. I think their cover is blown: these are wannabe theocrats in action.

Antony Flew Goes to Heaven

Anthony Horvath is responding to my reviews with some flustery bluster. He’s insisting that you must buy his stories in order to have any credibility in questioning them, which is nonsense: I’m giving the gist of his fairy tales, and he could, for instance, clarify and expand on the themes of his story, explain what I’ve got wrong and where I’m actually seeing the True Christian™ message, but instead he chooses to run away and hide while flogging people to buy his stories.

He does throw out a hilarious complaint cloaked in his refusal to address anything I’ve written, like this:

As before, I have no interest in responding in any detail, although I might say some things when he is done. I will say: “PZ, what makes you think Antony awakes in a garden?”

Well, hey, how about the fact that the very first sentence of the story is:

When the man opened his eyes the first thing he beheld was a garden.

I’m looking forward to his denials that the Dawkins story isn’t torture porn tomorrow.

This is the weakest of Horvath’s trilogy of morbid tales of dead celebrities. It’s just not very interesting. One flaw is the protagonist: not to disparage Flew, who was an entirely respectable philosopher, but he wasn’t much of a star outside the world of academic philosophy. His sole claim to any kind of popular prominence was driven by the fact that evangelicals loved that he backed away from atheism to adopt a kind of fuzzy deism in his dotage.

He was a rational atheist until almost the end, though. He was best known for arguing that one should follow the evidence, and that until real evidence for any gods was disclosed, one ought to assume atheism as the default position. He later converted to deism, claiming (erroneously!) that the argument from design was persuasive.

Horvath’s story is mainly a tiresome exercise in mocking Flew’s arguments. The vehicle is that dead Flew wakes up in a garden, and a gardener comes along and has a boring dialogue with him.

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Mother Teresa goes to heaven

I’m reviewing a series of three fundagelical short stories about famous people entering a Christian afterlife. Anthony Horvath is going to pretend that his dogma is true, and in the first story place the dead Teresa in his version of heaven to play out events as his puppet. It’s not a pretty story at all; the main lesson I took away from it is that Horvath is a proponent of a vile doctrine that cheapens our lives and turns an imaginary afterlife into an exercise in servility. Later in this series, he’s going to send Richard Dawkins to hell in an explicit and horrible way, but it says something about Horvath’s religion that I still find his hell more appealing than his ghastly heaven.

Warning: there will be lots of spoilers.

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Christians are morbid ghouls. No one is surprised.

How tasteless, tacky, and dishonest can a Christian get? This will do: selling fictional fantasies about what will happen to people when they’re dead.

What’s going on? Are all universally saved, after all? Did Richard Dawkins become a Christian? Did he… remain an atheist, and STILL go to heaven? Such questions leap to mind when presented with title of the newest short story collection released by author and Christian apologist Anthony Horvath: “Richard Dawkins, Antony Flew, and Mother Teresa Go to Heaven.”

Written over a span of two years, these three short stories detail what happens as each of the individuals come face to face with the reality of life after death. From Mother Teresa, who devoted her life to God but felt abandoned by Him to Antony Flew who vowed to ‘follow the evidence,’ to Richard Dawkins, who with Bertrand Russell said, “Not enough evidence!” these stories draw from what is known publicly to imagine what would happen in this most private of moments.

I thought to myself that someone who isn’t one of the ghouls ought to pick this book up and review it, even though it puts $2.99 into the pocket of a rather repulsive apologist. Since I have a strong stomach, I volunteered myself, and I’ll actually review the three stories right here on Pharyngula for you. Not just yet, though…let me draw out the suspense and space them out over a day or two. They won’t be drawn out for long, though, because there isn’t much to review. These stories aren’t particularly substantial, and it’s rather appalling that the guy took two years to write such fluff, and is then overcharging everyone by selling them for almost $3.

I will give you an overview right now, though. The author is capable of stringing English words together grammatically and competently…and that’s the kindest thing I can say about it. The stories are mostly incoherent and not very bold at all; all but one rely on ambiguity to make a case for their highly fundamentalist, extraordinarily nasty version of heaven. The one that doesn’t is poor Richard Dawkins, who I will tell you is not saved, and receives a sanctimoniously cruel eternal punishment.

Oh, I forgot to say: there will be spoilers in my discussion of each story.

My overall impression of the book is that the author basically demonstrates Richard Dawkins’ point: their heaven is a hell, and these believers are a vile lot that would turn even paradise into an eternity of disgust.

Anyway, if you were itching to get your hands on this hot and exciting property, you might want to wait a little while until you’ve seen the full review.

Ludicrous religious behavior compounded by altitude

Here’s some more sophisticated theology for you. “Prayer Warriors” in Colorado Springs are hopping into helicopters to fly over the city and deliver prayers from on high. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it’s the same urge I had when hiking in the mountains in the Rockies and Cascades, and every time I stood at the edge of a high cliff, I felt a temptation to unzip and sprinkle a little shower on the objects below me. I resisted, but gullible Christians apparently lack self control.

The Alister McGrath sneaky side-step shuffle

McGrath is back, straining to refute atheism. This time, his argument is with the claim that faith is blind. Is not, he says! And then proceeds to muddle together faith with belief with morality with science until he’s got a nice incoherent stew, at which time he points to a few floaty bits in the otherwise unresolvable mess and calls that support for his superstitions. It’s pathetic and unconvincing, except perhaps to someone who wants to believe anyway.

Here’s an example of where his whole argument falls to pieces. He wants to claim that faith is simply a reasonable extrapolation from evidence.

The simple truth is that belief is just a normal human way of making sense of a complex world. It is not blind — it just tries to make the best sense of things on the basis of the limited evidence available.

Well, OK, Alister, if you say so…so then where’s your evidence that there is an afterlife, or that god listens to prayers, or that Jesus rose from the dead? If you’re planning to argue that the atheist dismissal of faith as an evidence-free leap of irrationality is incorrect because you do have an evidential foundation, then perhaps you’d be so kind as to shut down the gripes of those damned empiricists by citing your evidence.

Nope, it’s not forthcoming anywhere in his essay. He’s just going to insist that his faith is actually based on evidence…without mentioning what that evidence might be.

However, he does go on to argue that some human convictions cannot be demonstrated with logic or observation; apparently, he wants to have it both ways, where he claims his faith is both based on logic and observation and undemonstrable with logic and observation. He can’t lose! Well, he can, of course, because he’s arguing inconsistently and stupidly, and also because he goes on to justify faith in god by giving examples of undeducible and unobservable beliefs that we accept all the time.

It is immoral to rape people. Democracy is better than fascism. World poverty is morally unacceptable. I can’t prove any of these beliefs to be true, and neither can anyone else. Happily, that has not stopped moral and social visionaries from acting on their basis, and trying to make the world a better place.

But it’s another sneaky side-step! Now he’s conflating moral decisions with verifiable observations. Take his first point: we know that people are raped. We know that unraped people try to avoid being raped, and that raped people will say that it makes them unhappy. These are provable facts. We desire to live in a society where we are not raped, and because we are social animals who empathize with others, in a society where others are not raped, too. Therefore we make a moral decision that rape is wrong. So what if I can’t prove rape is morally wrong; I can show that it has undesirable consequences to individuals and society, and therefore should be discouraged. Those moral and social visionaries reduce undesirable consequences, which is what makes the world a better place.

But this has nothing to do with believing in supernatural entities in the sky!

It reminds me of a common misguided tactic believers sometimes take. They confront some hard-bitten atheistic realist, and challenge him or her by saying they believe in invisible, intangible things, too: they believes their spouse loves them, for instance. The reasoning, apparently, is: “Aha! You believe in an invisible attraction between your spouse and yourself, therefore, my belief that an invisible god-man with holes in his hands and magic powers loves me is perfectly reasonable!” Never mind that the partner is visible, communicating, and capable of action, and may have made many long-term commitments — the theist makes a false equivalence and thinks he’s won a significant point.

That’s McGrath. Incoherent and contradictory, vacuous and vapid, and bumbling along, triumphantly making fallacious arguments that he thinks are irrefutable.

Jebus, but I love “sophisticated theology”. It makes its practitioners look like such hopeless dolts.