Next time, try it without the antibiotics, then I’ll be impressed

Jake Finkbonner was in big trouble: a minor injury led to necrotizing fascitis, and the bacteria chewed up his face, head, and neck in a horrible life-threatening infection. Fortunately, the family placed a relic from a 17th century Native American convert to Catholicism named Tekakwitha on his pillow (it is not clear whether it was a chunk of Tekakwitha’s bones, or one of these lockets, which you can buy for $19.99), and he got better! A miracle!

Now they’re planning to canonize Tekakwitha.

On Monday, the Vatican announced that Pope Benedict XVI formally recognized the miracle attributed to Tekakwitha – the last step on her way to canonization.

Tekakwitha, known as “the Lily of the Mohawks,” was born in 1656 in upstate New York to a Mohawk chief and an Algonquin mother. A smallpox epidemic killed both her parents and left her with partial blindness and a disfigured face. She converted to Catholicism after meeting several priests. Ostracized from her tribal community, Tekakwitha devoted herself to a life of deep prayer. She died in 1680 at age 24. According to the Catholic Church, witnesses said that within minutes of her death, the scars from smallpox completely vanished and her once-disfigured face suddenly shone with radiant beauty.

Oh, I forgot to mention…in addition to the magic locket, Jake spent 9 weeks in a modern hospital, received major surgeries to extirpate the infected tissue, massive doses of antibiotics, and apparently substantial cosmetic surgery. If only St Tekakwitha had been able to get the same, instead of relying entirely on Catholic hoodoo — maybe she wouldn’t have died at 24.

Oh, and there’s a poll. It’s got over 60,000 votes on it already, so I doubt we’ll be able to budge it much, but you can take a stab at it anyway.

Do you believe in miracles?

86.9% Yes
9.5% No
3.6%Not sure

“Do you believe in modern medicine?” would have been a better question. They never ask that one, though.

I do have to say I’m much more impressed with Jake Finkbonner. Here’s what he had to say about it:

There’s been a lot of media around me lately especially with the announcement of Blessed Kateri becoming a Saint based on my story. Please don’t confuse the issue which is that my survival is a miracle. We thank the doctors at Children’s Hospital for all that they did to save my life. I wouldn’t be here without them. I also thank all the people that prayed for me. Obviously, God heard their prayers. This decision to canonize Blessed Kateri is something that the Vatican and the Pope declared, not us. Although we are a part of this story, we did not have any influence on this decision. Congratulations to the Catholic Church and the Native American culture in the canonizing of the now Saint Kateri.

He seems like a gracious and sensible young man.

Seriously? This is your grand plan?

I boggled at the pettiness and stupidity of the Until Abortion Ends campaign. It’s a collection of videos by people who have promised to give something up ‘until abortion ends’.

I have two problems with the whole premise.

  1. Abortion can never end, short of establishing a theocratic tyranny with no privacy and absolute control of the population. Even when abortion was illegal, abortions still happened in back alley clinics, and with far greater loss of life. And then, of course, it would be inexcusably immoral to end abortion for cases where the mother’s life was at risk. These people haven’t thought it through.

  2. The sacrifices the participants make are embarrassingly petty. Most promise to stop drinking soda pop until abortion ends; one swears off Taco Bell; others give up coffee. Yeah, like I’m going to be persuaded to take away women’s right to choose because Billy Joe Bob in Augusta, Georgia is pinin’ for a Coke, or Betty Rae in Provo, Utah has been deprived of her french fries for far too long.

This silly effort is never going to work. I suggest stepping it up a notch: everyone who doesn’t like abortion should threaten to hold their breath until they turn blue if women don’t stop needing abortions.

The ghouls are gathering

Ophelia has found a live one: a Christian zealot happily anticipating Christopher Hitchens’ deathbed conversion. He also claims to have diagnosed Hitchens’ cancer when he briefly met him months before his real diagnosis, which makes me wonder why the bastard didn’t take him aside and let him know.

Since Ophelia has dealt with him with a more than adequate curl of the lip, I’ll just mention one paragraph that annoyed me immensely.

I wouldn’t tell Christopher Hitchens that now is the time to get right with the Lord, or to pray or read the Bible. I wouldn’t try and convince him of the resurrection. I would only ask him to entertain the notion that love — the love he has for his life, his wife and his children, the love his readers have for him and the love that the doctors and nurses are showing him — is a real thing whose origins are worth exploring without glibness (sorry, saying “love for your fellow mammals” doesn’t require religion, as Hitchens did once, doesn’t cut it). It also can be done without Christophobia. I know that my discovery that I had cancer focused my mind on discovering the true nature of things, and I’m not talking about wishful thinking.

There’s practically nothing more supercilious and obnoxiously sanctimonious than a Christian deciding to lecture an unbeliever on love…because these prissy assholes all believe they have a monopoly on the One True Love™, which is servile obedience to a domineering tyrant. I trust that Hitchens knows love just as well as I do, and there’s nothing of gods in it — it’s between people, dammit, not fantasies. That is the way it always has been, and to taint it with the nonsense of religion and the slimy author’s submission to an imaginary lord is to diminish the reality.

Oh, the “true nature of things” on which the author, Mark Judge, focused after being diagnosed with cancer himself? Catholicism, that stodgy humbug and haven of horrible old men who think they’ve found love in the rape of children, that citadel of cowards who retreat from reality to find meaning in the dust and lies of antique theology.

Horrifyingly delusional anti-vaxxers in Australia

Take a look at the ad copy for this evil book by a friend of Meryl Dorey, the anti-vaccination kook.

i-ce4ff688bea5275423b795b5d5779041-marvellousmeasles.jpeg

“Marvellous measles”? “Embrace childhood disease”? This is rank madness. Here is what WHO says about measles:

  • Measles is one of the leading causes of death among young children even though a safe and cost-effective vaccine is available.
  • In 2008, there were 164 000 measles deaths globally – nearly 450 deaths every day or 18 deaths every hour.
  • More than 95% of measles deaths occur in low-income countries with weak health infrastructures.
  • Measles vaccination resulted in a 78% drop in measles deaths between 2000 and 2008 worldwide.
  • In 2010, about 85% of the world’s children received one dose of measles vaccine by their first birthday through routine health services – up from 72% in 2000.

Measles kills children. The reason these loons can babble about measles as if it were a harmless game that strengthens your immune system is that world-wide vaccination campaigns have been so effective in reducing the incidence of the disease, and because children who are healthy and have good nutrition are very likely to survive it. So what Stephanie Messenger and Meryl Dorey propose to do is to put sick, immuno-compromised, and hungry children at far greater risk of death, and make their own spoiled children miserable and contagious for a few days to a week, and also put them at a lesser risk of death, all so they can smugly promote their hare-brained cause.

Something else that irritates me about these people is that often they align themselves with the left — it’s gormless liberals who readily buy into this nonsense. Another scandal developing in Australia is that the Woodford Folk Festival has invited Meryl Dorey to speak. It looks like a big event, and there among the environmentalists and local foods proponents and polynesian and aboriginal singers, is this great stinking turd of a woman advocating infecting small children with awful diseases. This Meryl Dorey:

She has described measles (the disease which has killed more children than any other in the history of the world) as “benign;” she suggested the slogan “Shaken Maybe Syndrome” as a way of implying that Shaken Baby Syndrome does not exist but is always damage caused by vaccines; she provided strong support to a man imprisoned in the US for the murder of a ten-week-old boy, her support being based on the idea that the dreadful injuries to the child had to be the effects of a vaccine, not the actions of a violent man; she is on record as an AIDS denier; she said on television that “whooping cough didn’t kill us thirty years ago and it’s not kill anybody today”. If she isn’t implacably opposed to vaccinations then she hides any other position well.

The festival sounds like fun, but if I were in the region, nothing could persuade me to attend — it’s poisoned through and through by its endorsement of a child-killing monster who will be given a stage to lie from.

(Also on FtB)

Horrifyingly delusional anti-vaxxers in Australia

Take a look at the ad copy for this evil book by a friend of Meryl Dorey, the anti-vaccination kook.

“Marvellous measles”? “Embrace childhood disease”? This is rank madness. Here is what WHO says about measles:

  • Measles is one of the leading causes of death among young children even though a safe and cost-effective vaccine is available.
  • In 2008, there were 164 000 measles deaths globally – nearly 450 deaths every day or 18 deaths every hour.
  • More than 95% of measles deaths occur in low-income countries with weak health infrastructures.
  • Measles vaccination resulted in a 78% drop in measles deaths between 2000 and 2008 worldwide.
  • In 2010, about 85% of the world’s children received one dose of measles vaccine by their first birthday through routine health services – up from 72% in 2000.

Measles kills children. The reason these loons can babble about measles as if it were a harmless game that strengthens your immune system is that world-wide vaccination campaigns have been so effective in reducing the incidence of the disease, and because children who are healthy and have good nutrition are very likely to survive it. So what Stephanie Messenger and Meryl Dorey propose to do is to put sick, immuno-compromised, and hungry children at far greater risk of death, and make their own spoiled children miserable and contagious for a few days to a week, and also put them at a lesser risk of death, all so they can smugly promote their hare-brained cause.

Something else that irritates me about these people is that often they align themselves with the left — it’s gormless liberals who readily buy into this nonsense. Another scandal developing in Australia is that the Woodford Folk Festival has invited Meryl Dorey to speak. It looks like a big event, and there among the environmentalists and local foods proponents and polynesian and aboriginal singers, is this great stinking turd of a woman advocating infecting small children with awful diseases. This Meryl Dorey:

She has described measles (the disease which has killed more children than any other in the history of the world) as “benign;” she suggested the slogan “Shaken Maybe Syndrome” as a way of implying that Shaken Baby Syndrome does not exist but is always damage caused by vaccines; she provided strong support to a man imprisoned in the US for the murder of a ten-week-old boy, her support being based on the idea that the dreadful injuries to the child had to be the effects of a vaccine, not the actions of a violent man; she is on record as an AIDS denier; she said on television that “whooping cough didn’t kill us thirty years ago and it’s not kill anybody today”. If she isn’t implacably opposed to vaccinations then she hides any other position well.

The festival sounds like fun, but if I were in the region, nothing could persuade me to attend — it’s poisoned through and through by its endorsement of a child-killing monster who will be given a stage to lie from.

(Also on FtB)

A glimpse into the vague and blurry mind of a proud None

I don’t go to church on Sundays anymore, so it’s so kind of the New York Times to serve me up a bit of that familiar sanctimonious, self-congratulatory bullshit from a guy named Eric Weiner. Weiner is a smug member in good standing, he thinks, of that demographic called the Nones: people who don’t belong to a church, but maybe believe in a higher power. Or maybe not. It’s a broad catch-all category, so their beliefs are hard to categorize.

All I can say is that if Eric Weiner is at all representative, a lot of Nones are idiots.

For a nation of talkers and self-confessors, we are terrible when it comes to talking about God. The discourse has been co-opted by the True Believers, on one hand, and Angry Atheists on the other. What about the rest of us?

I believe xkcd has already addressed this attitude.

I can also quote myself: “squatting in between those on the side of reason and evidence and those worshipping superstition and myth is not a better place. It just means you’re halfway to crazy town.”

I must also point out that Weiner is making a common mischaracterization of atheists: we aren’t sitting around fuming at the world, and we’re not primarily angry. Most of us are pretty damned happy with the universe (or at least, aware of reality), and we mainly get angry at denialists and fools — people with whom we should be angry — and if you aren’t pissed off at people who set environmental policy by the backward whims of their bible, or who deny civil rights to people because they don’t like their private behavior, or who vote for political candidates on the basis of how loudly pious they are, then there is something wrong with you.

And yes, there is something wrong with Eric Weiner.

Nones are the undecided of the religious world. We drift spiritually and dabble in everything from Sufism to Kabbalah to, yes, Catholicism and Judaism.

He says that like it’s a good thing. Does he even realize that these are mutually antagonistic religious views? Does he care that they say very different things about the nature of the universe? Nah. Here’s the heart of Weiner’s essay:

We Nones may not believe in God, but we hope to one day.

WHY? I may not believe in Emperor Ming the Merciless, but I hope to one day. I may not believe in Satan, but I hope to one day. I may not believe in Ceiling Cat, but I hope to one day. I may not believe in elves, but I hope to one day. These are absurd statements. They speak of someone who has decided what the answer should be, and is prepared to rationalize that conclusion.

The atheists he doesn’t like have a better answer: we will embrace reality, whatever it is. And we will work to discover that truth, not bury it because we have a fantasy we like better.

Weiner’s concluding solution is so oblivious to history that I read it with disbelief. How does something this stupid get into the pages of the New York Times? (I know, it’s incredibly common, but it’s just so annoying.)

What is the solution? The answer, I think, lies in the sort of entrepreneurial spirit that has long defined America, including religious America.

We need a Steve Jobs of religion. Someone (or ones) who can invent not a new religion but, rather, a new way of being religious. Like Mr. Jobs’s creations, this new way would be straightforward and unencumbered and absolutely intuitive. Most important, it would be highly interactive. I imagine a religious space that celebrates doubt, encourages experimentation and allows one to utter the word God without embarrassment. A religious operating system for the Nones among us. And for all of us.

It’s been done. The entrepreneurial spirit of America spawned Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Jim Jones, David Koresh, JZ Knight, the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Mary Baker Eddy, Helen Blavatsky, Werner Erhard…we are the home of thousands of wacky, weird, novel religions which flourish unchecked and draw in all those mentally unmoored people who drift spiritually until they waft into the orbit of the latest cult fad.

Guess what, Mr Weiner? They’ve made god an even greater embarrassment.

I have a better idea. Instead of inventing yet another religion designed to make the gullible feel good about themselves, how about if we grow up, shed the superstitious preconceptions, and instead strive to see the truth about nature? How about if we all become atheists?

Once again, I am embarrassed to be an American

I have really been looking forward to seeing David Attenborough’s latest, Frozen Planet, here in the US. I’ve seen brief snippets of the show on youtube, and like all of these big BBC nature productions, I’m sure it’s stunning. And then I hear that the Discovery Channel has bought the rights! Hooray!

But wait, experience cautions us. Remember when American television replaced Attenborough’s narration with Sigourney Weaver? And <shudder> Oprah Winfrey? ANd when the Oprah version dropped the references to evolution? What kind of insane butchery would they perpetrate this time around?

Well, the word is out. The Discovery Channel only bought 6 of the 7 episodes. They dropped the seventh because…it talks about global climate change.

Goddamnit.

It’s not just our dimbulbs in government, it’s active collusion by the media to suppress scientific evidence because it might be unpopular with our undereducated booberati. Jerry Coyne suggests that you contact the Discovery Channel’s viewer relations page and express your displeasure. I will not be watching a neutered version of the program on Discovery; instead, I’ll wait until I can pick up the BBC DVDs.

You know what else is annoying about this? My wife and I are having a pleasantly quiet evening at home, and what she’s been doing is watching youtube videos…of David Attenborough. She’s been gushing over these spectacular videos all night long, and I swear, I’m beginning to feel pangs of manly jealousy. At least I get to tell her that the American media has decided that he’s seditious and dangerous.

And that will probably make him even more attractive. I can’t win.

Just to end on a more pleasant note, Mary almost orgasmed over this one. You’ll like it too. Too bad the Discovery Channel thinks you hate reality.

(Also on FtB)

Once again, I am embarrassed to be an American

I have really been looking forward to seeing David Attenborough’s latest, Frozen Planet, here in the US. I’ve seen brief snippets of the show on youtube, and like all of these big BBC nature productions, I’m sure it’s stunning. And then I hear that the Discovery Channel has bought the rights! Hooray!

But wait, experience cautions us. Remember when American television replaced Attenborough’s narration with Sigourney Weaver? And <shudder> Oprah Winfrey? And when the Oprah version dropped the references to evolution? What kind of insane butchery would they perpetrate this time around?

Well, the word is out. The Discovery Channel only bought 6 of the 7 episodes. They dropped the seventh because…it talks about global climate change.

Goddamnit.

It’s not just our dimbulbs in government, it’s active collusion by the media to suppress scientific evidence because it might be unpopular with our undereducated booberati. Jerry Coyne suggests that you contact the Discovery Channel’s viewer relations page and express your displeasure. I will not be watching a neutered version of the program on Discovery; instead, I’ll wait until I can pick up the BBC DVDs.

You know what else is annoying about this? My wife and I are having a pleasantly quiet evening at home, and what she’s been doing is watching youtube videos…of David Attenborough. She’s been gushing over these spectacular videos all night long, and I swear, I’m beginning to feel pangs of manly jealousy. At least I get to tell her that the American media has decided that he’s seditious and dangerous.

And that will probably make him even more attractive. I can’t win.

Just to end on a more pleasant note, Mary almost orgasmed over this one. You’ll like it too. Too bad the Discovery Channel thinks you hate reality.

(Also on Sb)

Poll on the appropriate way to decorate a Christmas tree

The Gay Straight Alliance at Washington & Jefferson College has put up a tree* decorated with condoms as part of a campaign to increase HIV-AIDS awareness. The Young Republicans (can we please change their name? I think “Young Assholes” would be more accurate) are irate and are demanding that it be taken down, because it’s “a direct attack on Christianity and borderline obscene”. They’re also joining forces with the Christian Student Association and the Newman Club to try and get it removed.

And of course there’s an online poll.

Should the college force the club to remove the condom tree?

Absolutely. It’s offensive! 57.04%

Nope. Free speech! 36.61%

I’m in the middle on this one. 6.35%

Special bonus!The poll is on the Glenn Beck site, The Blaze, and we all know how much they love it when we crash their polls!

*Missing information: There is no word on whether the Gay Straight Alliance calls it a “Christmas tree”, a “holiday tree”, or a “phallic tribute to raging orgiastic hedonism tree”.

Victor Ivanoff is a slimy stalker

I have been forwarded a message by Franc Hoggle aka Felch Grogan aka Victor Ivanoff. He is planning to attend the Global Atheist Convention in April, and has announced his intent to ‘stalk’ the people he doesn’t like…the “baboons” as he calls them. Looking at the speakers list, though, that seems to be just me.

Alas, if I am to accomplish any stalking, it would be foolish to make myself so readily identifiable. I will seek to surreptitiously besmirch as many baboons as possible by sitting next to them without them realising anything is amiss and then silently wandering off after a happy snap is taken.

It would be a grave disservice on my behalf to not feed their collective derangements and paranoias. They are martyrs remember? They have turned me into a hairshirt. I have obligations to live up to. PZ should keep checking his pockets too. I will deposit a strange, yet entirely innocuous and harmless, token of my affection for him in there. It’s up to him to catch me.

Doo-doo-doo-doo, they are entering the Twilight Zone… If they choose to make themselves insane, it’s entirely none of my concern.

I don’t consider myself a martyr, and I’m certainly not the insane deranged one here. Ivanoff is extraordinarily creepy: if I find him approaching me, I won’t be checking my pockets, I’ll be contacting event security.

By the way, I do know what he looks like. I’ve also been informed that he’s a heavy smoker and reeks, making identification even easier.

Mr Ivanoff: Stay away from me. I have no interest in communicating with you, and I’m definitely not interested in having you rifle through my pockets.