Maybe it’s like a lottery

Mary MacKillop has been officially canonized as an Australian saint on the basis of two purported miracle cures — two women reportedly dying of cancer had spontaneous remissions after praying to her. Adele Horin puts them in context.

At the time Mary MacKillop answered the prayers of a woman dying of leukaemia, there was a lot of static in the air. In China 43 million people were dying of starvation in one of the world’s worst famines.

Thirty years later in the 1990s, when MacKillop answered the prayers of a woman dying of lung cancer, 3.8 million were dying in the Congo wars, 800,000 in the Rwanda genocide, a quarter of a million in the Yugoslav wars.

The connection between these two women praying for healing and the dead MacKillop was so tenuous to be nonexistent, while millions beg in vain for a reprieve from day-to-day misery. Praise the gods.

Drinking bleach is good for you?

I haven’t heard much about Rhys Morgan in the US (if you follow Ben Goldacre, though, you know all about him), but he won an award at TAM London for his skeptical work, so I thought I should do my part to spread the news. Simply put, he was participating in a forum on Crohn’s Disease and boldly took on peddlers of evil woo: they were selling some crap called Miracle Mineral Solution, which is nothing but bleach.

Amazing, isn’t it? It takes some gall for a quack to prescribe a treatment for a chronic intestinal disorder that involves glugging down a corrosive poison, and then when the poor patient suffers with a painfully sore throat, vomiting, and diarrhea, to claim that they should drink more, that’s a sign that it is working…but that’s what they were doing.

Morgan took the step of being aware of what constitutes an unlikely medical claim and looking it up.

First off, I found an FDA safety bulletin posted on 30th July 2010. From the FDA page which can be found here, I learned that MMS was an industrial bleach, when made up as according to the instructions. It produces chlorine dioxide, which is used for stripping textiles and industrial water treatment. I’ll come back to the FDA warning in a minute. After learning what it actually is, I went to the official MMS website. It is utterly disgusting. It claims that MMS is a cure for AIDS, cancers, hepatitis A, B and C, malaria, herpes and tuberculosis. This started my alarm bells ringing. The website screams DANGEROUS WOO to me.

Then he went further and alerted people about the dangers. And for that he was harrassed and threatened with expulsion from the discussion.

You should read his blog. Realize too that he’s only 15 years old, so we can look forward to another hundred years or so of Mr Morgan shredding the quacks. I almost feel sorry for the poor lying frauds.

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The Amazing Meeting: London

Do you expect a full report? TAM London is over, I have no sense of time left, I just got back from a late and very entertaining dinner with the ferocious Rebecca Watson and the fabulous Richard Wiseman, and I think I need to pass out.

It looks like you can get a video feed of the various talks at the live feed — they’re playing back the recorded events right now. You can read the #TAMLondon hashtag to get an idea of the audience reaction, and Martin Robbins has liveblogged the whole weekend. Or if you’d rather, you can read few short sound bites.

My talk went fine, I think, although it’s hard for the speaker to get a good impression. I did let everyone know my excuse ahead of time: Tim Minchin sang The Pope Song the night before, completely stealing the entire text of my planned talk, so I had to rewrite it at the last moment. By the way, the live song was fantastic, far better than the youtube recording — he had a hard, angry tone to the whole song that made it even more biting.

TAM is always a fun meeting. You should have gone!

Pressworthy controversy and sour grapes

The New York Times has what I consider a skewed but also personally flattering summary of the Secular Humanist convention. Skewed, because it focuses rather more on the disagreements on tactics that were on display, but weren’t really the focus of most of the discussions — it was actually an amicable meeting. Personally flattering, because it dwelt more on that firebrand Myers (my full remarks are on the record) than was actually deserved. It read as if I were flailing among the dissenters, smiting the impure atheists with the jawbone of an ass, when I was really one among many in diverse discussions.

I’m going to take it as favorable coverage, though, because the conclusion does accurately convey my views.

Mr. Myers and other “confrontationalists” surely do alienate some potential Christian allies. But they may also give comfort to people like Claire, who feel like an invisible minority. Mr. Myers is way out of the closet as an atheist — proudly, outrageously so. We’re here, he’s saying. And we don’t believe. And we have science and reason on our side. Get used to it.

Yay, me.

Not everyone is happy, though. Matt Nisbet calls inviting me a “strategic blunder”, whines about me being a “bomb-thrower” and compares my readers to “libertarians” (!) and the Tea Party movement, and also uses his vast “framing” skills to mischaracterize the discussion in the most misleading possible way.

On one side, “accommodationists” argue that non-believers should build bridges with others around shared values in order to work on common problems such as climate change and failing schools. On the other side, “confrontationalists” argue that they should close ranks and engage in relentless attack and ridicule against all forms of religion, a Holy Grail pursuit to eliminate religious faith from the world.

That last bit? Completely wrong. But then, Nisbet doesn’t care — he’s built his whole career on spin and avoiding uncomfortable truth…he really ought to be selling soap. Although that probably wouldn’t work out so well, since he’d just spend all of his time complaining about those annoying people flaunting their good hygiene, and suggesting that maybe we ought to aspire to more rapprochement with filth.

The good news, though, is that I’m finding it hard to imagine a more irrelevant kibitzer than Matthew C. Nisbet.

Two Scots in a bar

I was hanging out in the hotel bar last night when a pair of great Northern savages came up to me and handed me a beer and a flyer and told me, “Here! Promote our meeting!” Or at least I think they did. They were a bit fierce in how they handle the English, you know, for which they have a bit of a reputation.

But sure, I’m happy to mention the Glasgow Skeptics and their upcoming event, Skeptics in the Palace on 21 November. Everyone should go and tell them I sent you, so they’ll know they got good value for their beer.

And now you know the price of advertising on Pharyngula…

They hypocrisy of “don’t ask, don’t tell”

It will be interesting to see if anyone squawks about this revelation: Army Chaplain Lt. Col. William McCoy seems to have a wild and frolicsome sex life, while writing pious little books promoting Christianity. There’s absolutely nothing suggesting male homosexuality in his online personal history, but isn’t the occasional menage a trois or voyeurism session as sinful to an evangelical Christian?