Death by religious ignorance

Hodgkin lymphoma is one of the more curable forms of cancer — the 5 year survival rates for patients who are middle-aged or younger is over 90%, and for kids, it is over 95%. These results assume, of course, that the cancer patient is actually treated with modern medicine — neglect that, and all bets are off. You’re almost certainly going to die of it.

Daniel Hauser is a 13 year old victim of Hodgkin lymphoma here in Minnesota. Doctors give him a 5% chance of surviving the disease, not because he has some particularly lethal form of the cancer, but because his mother is a religious fruitcake who who wants to deny her child treatment. Her reasoning is insane.

Hauser, whose son was diagnosed in January with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, said conventional treatments such as chemotherapy conflict with the family’s religious beliefs. She said they prefer natural remedies such as herbs and vitamins.

Asked where she learned about the alternative healing techniques, Hauser said, “on the Internet.”

If one of my kids was deadly ill, and I had a doctor who was telling me that she has a very good treatment, and she can tell me how it works, and she could show my statistics and clinical trials that backed up her claims, and on the other side I had priest waving his bible and telling me that it was a sin to treat the disease with secular medicine, but had no track record of success, and no solution other than vague claims of herbs from the internet, I would not be facing a difficult choice. I would commend my child into the hands of the person who had evidence of a 95% cure rate, without hesitation. There is simply something wrong with a parent who selects the 5% success rate over the 95% success rate, no matter what their motivation.

It would be easy to write them off as taking the Darwinian cure — that harsh statistical view that they’ll simply be extinguishing their contribution to the gene pool — especially since Daniel Hauser is agreeing with his parents. But he’s a 13 year old boy — no 13 year old is informed enough about medicine to make a good decision, and no 13 year old deserves to die of cancer because all he is given for treatment is “herbs”.

And this is all about religion. What a sick, stupid, wasteful thing to die for.

The Hausers declined to speak to reporters after Friday’s court session. But Dan Zwakman, a member of the Nemenhah religious group to which they belong, acted as the family spokesman. He argued that this is a case about religious freedom, noting that the group’s motto is “our religion is our medicine.”

Your medicine doesn’t work, and it’s going to kill a child. If you’re going to equate the two, the reply is obvious: your religion is wrong and lethal.

You know, this could also be a factor in the declining appeal of religion

Some of these cults are stocked with puritan prudes. Baptists, in particular, are a bit nuts.

A student at a fundamentalist Baptist school that forbids dancing, rock music, hand-holding and kissing will be suspended if he takes his girlfriend to her public high school prom, his principal said.

The student is named Tyler Frost, not Kevin Bacon, by the way.

You want to dance, dance. You want to sing, sing. The two of you want to kiss, kiss. I think those are all beautiful acts, and as long as no one is harmed, it is ridiculous to forbid them.

I also think the school has stepped way out of bounds when it tries to control activities well outside the domain of the school itself. But sure, go ahead and act like repressive tyrants — Mr Frost may well go looking for a more tolerant religion, or will perhaps leave that body of superstition altogether.

Happy news!

Look at what’s happening to the opinion on religion in our country:

Historically, the percentage of Americans who said they had no religious affiliation (pollsters refer to this group as the “nones”) has been very small — hovering between 5 percent and 10 percent.

However, Putnam says the percentage of “nones” has now skyrocketed to between 30 percent and 40 percent among younger Americans.

Putnam calls this a “stunning development.” He gave reporters a first glimpse of his data Tuesday at a conference on religion organized by the Pew Forum on Faith in Public Life.

It’s a poll, so it doesn’t say much about causes, but I can guess that two factors have been at work: that religion has become associated with the spectacular failure of reactionary conservative politics, and that at the same time, atheists have become more vocal and made the option of avoiding religion altogether viable. I suspect the former is more directly causal, but don’t discount the latter — young people aren’t leaving their obnoxious old church to find a new church, they are leaving the whole rotten shebang altogether.

Mormon ghoulishness exposed

Five months before the election, and thirteen years after her death, the Mormon Church posthumously baptized Barack Obama’s mother into their church. This is a common practice. It’s harmless and stupid, but it does highlight the fact that the church is a collection of ghouls. They’re also chronic liars about it all.

Mormon Church spokeswoman Kim Farah said that “the offering of baptism to our deceased ancestors is a sacred practice to us and it is counter to Church policy for a Church member to submit names for baptism for persons to whom they are not related. The Church is looking into the circumstances of how this happened and does not yet have all the facts. However, this is a serious matter and we are treating it as such.”

She’s lying. The church is slack about who submits the names — they maintain vast genealogical records, records that are continually growing as they scavenge the world for more information, and they rather freely toss the names into the baptismal font.

They only regard it as a serious matter because they’ve been caught at it. It’s one good sign: they have a little bit of shame left. But, you know, it’s kind of like visiting the graveyard and discovering that a ghoul has dug up your grandma; maybe he looks a bit abashed and quickly hides a gnawed-upon femur behind his back, but that wins him no sympathy and you still have to choke back your disgust and revulsion, and resist the urge to kick him until he is bruised and bloody.

The Eagleton Delusion

The other day, I read this fawning review by Andrew O’Hehir of Terry Eagleton’s new book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, and was a little surprised. I’ve read a smattering of Eagleton before, and the words “brisk, funny and challenging” or “witty” never came to mind, and the review actually gave no evidence that these adjectives were applicable in this case. I felt like ripping into O’Hehir, but was held up by one awkward lack: I hadn’t read Eagleton’s book. Who knows? Maybe he had found some grain of sense and some literary imperative to write cleanly and plainly.

So I was in New York the other day, and was offered a copy of Eagleton’s book, and took the first step in my imminent doom by accepting it. Then I tried to fly home on Saturday, one of those flights that was plagued with mechanical errors that caused delays and long stretches locked in a tin can, and also flights that were packed tightly with travelers…so crammed with people that they actually took my computer and book bag away from me to pack in the cargo hold, and I had to quickly snatch something to read before the baggage handlers took it away. I grabbed the Eagleton book. Thus was my fate sealed.

I was trapped in a plane for 8 hours with nothing to read but Eagleton and the Sky Mall catalog.

This is an account of my day of misery.

[Read more…]

Why do we even have chaplains in the military?

They’re dangerous and destructive, and erode the mission of our soldiers — and they also seem to be remarkably stupid. In the latest incident, people in Afghanistan are unhappy with the Christian evangelism that accompanies the US military. I can’t blame them.

In one recorded sermon, Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, tells soldiers that, as followers of Jesus Christ, they all have a responsibility “to be witnesses for him”.

“The special forces guys – they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down,” he says.

“Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That’s what we do, that’s our business.”

I think it’s the business of the secular officer corps to hound these vermin with courts-martial.

BioLogos?

Oh, no…it’s an irresistible magnet. Francis Collins and Karl Giberson, with funding from the Templeton Foundation (who else?), have put together a whole website full of fluffy bunnies and pious weasels to reconcile science and faith. It’s a rich vein of the worst of pseudo-scientific apologetics, and I am stunned by it — not because I am impressed by the substance, but because it is such a target-rich environment. Having read both Collins’ Language of God, with it’s amazing conversion experience that had to have impressed all with its depth and majesty, and the equally wooly-minded Karl Giberson’s book, Saving Darwin, I can say I knew these two would have put together a web site exactly like this.

Like I say, I’m overwhelmed with the tripe available on that site, so I’ll just have to take a poke at one small example. They actually have a page to address the question of How does the evil and suffering in the world align with the idea of a loving God?. As one who often hears the atheists accused of being philosophically shallow, this page is a consolation: it’s a collection of tired cliches that don’t answer the question. There’s the usual “Free will!” blather, and the “god works in mysterious ways” nonsense, and as a special bonus, there’s the extra-special “We Christians are special because our god suffered, too” excuse (which answers nothing, but raises many more questions about this contradictory deity of theirs). One curious thing about the approach this site takes is that it is slathered with Jesus everywhere — if you aren’t already a New Testament lovin’ evangelical, you are not going to be at all impressed.

But here’s one special case of their problem of evil logic, of interest to us non-Jebusites.

Suffering is Also a Problem for Atheists

Evil also poses problems for the nonbeliever. Claims that torture is wrong even though the victims of torture might be terrorists with useful information appeal to some external standard. But what is this standard? Such claims need to be grounded in something if they are to be asserted with such confidence. So, while some naturalistic philosophers have developed ethical systems without God, many other naturalists acknowledge this doesn’t work and that such ethical systems are entirely arbitrary. If God does not exist and there is no grounding for how things ought to be, then moral — as opposed to emotional — outrage at horrendous evil has no basis. The fact that we cannot escape our sense of horror and outrage at evil actually points us to God’s existence.

Um, no. This is all wrong. Evil is not a problem for us. I believe that we are a rare cosmic accident in an impersonal and hostile universe — the natural state is one which is largely inimical to our existence. I also don’t think human beings are designed at all, but evolved by natural mechanisms, and that we are not by any means optimized for anything, let alone any kind of local definition of goodness. That bad things happen, that accidents occur, that many normal events can lead to our death or suffering, that humans are flawed and can harm one another…all of that is to be expected. We atheists certainly do not have the kind of problem with evil that a believer in a universal benignity would have, so this is a bit of a dodge.

Now you could turn it around and say that atheists have a problem with goodness, which is ultimately what Collins/Giberson are trying to say. But once again, Collins makes the same mistake he did in his book — he can’t imagine any source of morality other than an external imposition by a moral entity, and reveals again that he doesn’t actually have any understanding of evolution.

We are social animals. We are the children of a particular kind of animal that improved their chances of survival and reproduction by cooperation, working together as a family/tribe/nation. We have an operational, working definition of what is good and evil that is defined by our history: goodness is that which has promoted the survival of our community and ourselves. Anyone who has a reasonable grasp of Darwinian logic ought to be able to see that this is the kind of property that can emerge from forces entirely within a group’s history, with no exogenous agent required.

I certainly do have grounds to be outraged at the use of torture. Those are fellow human beings who are experiencing pain: I empathize with them, I see them as fellow members of the greater community of humanity, and I can rationally see that a society that allows torture is one in which I and my family are less safe. I do not need a little god sitting on my shoulder, whispering in my ear, “Oh, PZ, you aren’t supposed to enjoy that person’s suffering”.

My sense of horror and outrage points me to a common humanity, not some invisible magic man who wills it because he works in mysterious ways.

Oh, and by the way, any rationalization that claims that “if god doesn’t exist, then you have no reason to be moral” is making the fallacy of arguing from consequences. It does not imply the truth of the statement. You’d think a couple of high-powered Christian apologists flying high on buckets of money from a billionaire might have been able to avoid errors in logic 101, but nah…these are guys with brain-poisoning from an overdose of faith.

Also by the way, Jerry Coyne has his own favorite parts of the site. Maybe you do too!

Not enough Christians read books, I guess

In a promising sign of the decline of some forms of Christianity, a major Christian book show has been cancelled.

The show won’t go on in Dallas. The Christian Book Expo, an innovative consumer-focused book show, won’t be repeated next year. The board of Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, show sponsor, decided not to stage another event in 2010. Attendance at this year’s show, held March 20-22 at the Dallas Convention Center, was 1,500; organizers had hoped for 10,000 to 15,000. The show left the organization with a $250,000 shortfall, according to ECPA president and CEO Mark Kuyper. “We want to clean up the debt before we consider future options,” Kuyper told PW in an e-mail.

Once you’ve got your Bible and your copies of the Left Behind books, your good evangelical doesn’t need much more. And most of ’em won’t even read those.

Making Florida highways that much more scenic

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Aren’t you looking forward to seeing a tortured corpse adorning cars in your neighborhood?

That hideous plate is one of the options railroaded through the Florida legislature.

Religious specialty plates offered by Sen. Ronda Storms, R-Valrico, and Sen. Gary Siplin, D-Orlando, made it onto a bill Friday even though many members had not seen images of those plates and none was produced for the debate.

Siplin didn’t mince words when asked what his “Trinity” plate looks like, saying, “It has a picture of my Lord and savior Jesus Christ.” It, along with a “Preserving the Past” plate offered by Siplin, would benefit the Toomey Foundation for the Natural Sciences.

Storms’ “I Believe” plate would benefit Faith in Teaching, an Orlando company that funds faith-based programs at schools. Its design features a cross over a stained-glass window.

It’s not just the hideous design and offensive obeisance to religion by the state…it’s that the money from these idols will be siphoned off to dubious organizations. “Faith in Teaching” is obviously non-secular; the Toomey Foundation might be a bit better, but I’m immediately suspicious of purported science organizations that plaster bible verses on all of their web pages.

Religion as byproduct of useful cognitive processes

This is an excellent talk by Andy Thomson on the biological and psychological origins of religion.

It’s also precisely my position on the matter. There are many people who argue that religion provides a direct evolutionary advantage — I find them unconvincing. Thomson is explaining how religion’s origin is indirect, as a byproduct of properties of the brain that we find useful in modeling our world and social interactions…and religion is a parasite that hijacks these traits to promote a caricature of these properties.

(via Richard Dawkins)