NPR is a faith-based organization

I blame Barbara Bradley Hagerty — or at least, she is the face of religious inanity at NPR. She has a new piece up titled Christian Academics Cite Hostility On Campus, and does she have any evidence for this claim? None at all. Actually, she has evidence contradicting the claim.

There are two parts to the story. The first is someone who is fast becoming a usual suspect, Elaine Howard Ecklund, the person who studied faith among academics and was surprisingly surprised to discover that, golly gee whiz, nearly half go to church! This is a fact that is only news if you’ve bought into the biased view that academics are a monolithic bunch who are not only all atheists, but are also all communists, hippies, and Democrats. How the fact that a very significant minority of academics are religious argues that Christianity is oppressed on campus is a mystery.

So she moves on to pointing out that most of the religious academics are quiet about it; there’s a serious shortage of proselytizing evangelicals on the faculty. This, too, is a mystery to Ecklund, but shouldn’t be. Academics tend to be smart people. Evangelical/Charismatic/Fundamentalist religions are stupid. Figure it out.

Ecklund is also annoying because she is constantly harping on her thesis that higher education doesn’t erode faith, when the proper way to look at her data is to notice that more than half are freethinkers.

If you thought that was feeble, wait until you see the second part. They had to go looking for an evangelical Christian who has suffered discrimination for his faith, and who did they get? Mike S. Adams. That’s the most horrendous example of religious discrimination they could find? A far right lunatic who was tenured at his university but failed in his attempt at promotion to full professor?

Come on. Once upon a time when Christians complained about persecution, it was because a few of their members were getting fed to bears or getting nailed upside down to a stick…and now they’re reduced to squeaking about a college professor not getting a promotion?

Charming theodicy

Am I the only one who sees “theidiocy” whenever I read or hear the term “theodicy”? Just curious.

Anyway, take a look at this lovely example of rationalizing the death of children.

The most merciful thing an omnicient God might do is end the life of a child whom he knows will never seek Him.

-Pastor Doug Humphrey

I’m going to have to remember that one. Since the death of seeming innocents is all for a cause visible to an omniscient deity, abortion must be God’s way of purging the population of little potential Hitlers, then. Makes a fellow wonder how he missed the original Hitler, though.

Templeton prayer study meets expectations

i-e88a953e59c2ce6c5e2ac4568c7f0c36-rb.png

I have no idea how this stuff gets published. I’ve been sent a new paper that tests the effect of prayer, and I was appalled: it’s got such deep methodological problems that nothing can be concluded from it, but that doesn’t stop the authors, who argue that they’re seeing that Proximal Intercessory Prayer improves vision and hearing in people in Mozambique.Proximal Intercessory Prayer (PIP) is their very own term for what they do, to distinguish it from distant prayer. What is it, you may ask? Here is their protocol.

Western and Mozambican Iris and Global Awakening [two evangelical/missionary organizations that cooperated with the research] leaders and affiliates who administered PIP all used a similar protocol. They typically spent 1-15 minutes (sometimes an hour or more, circumstances permitting) administering PIP. They placed their hands on the recipient’s head and some- times embraced the person in a hug, keeping their eyes open to observe results. In soft tones, they petitioned God to heal, invited the Holy Spirit’s anointing, and commanded healing and the departure of any evil spirits in Jesus’ name. Those who prayed then asked recipients whether they were healed. If recipients responded negatively or stated that the healing was partial, PIP was continued. If they answered in the affirmative, informal tests were conducted, such as asking recipients to repeat words or sounds (e.g. hand claps) intoned from behind or to count fingers from roughly 30 cm away. If recipients were unable or partially able to perform tasks, PIP was continued for as long as circumstances permitted.

Vision and hearing tests were carried out before and after the procedure using eye charts and an audiometer. Subjects were recruited from a self-selected population of rural Africans who were attending a charismatic/evangelical revival…that is, people who knew they would be rewarded with acclaim if they publicly demonstrated dramatic improvements in their health under the influence of a priest. This experiment did not use single-blind trials — in fact, the subjects were hammered repeatedly with the protocol until they reported that it worked for them, subjectively.

It also wasn’t double-blind. Not only were the experimenters fully aware of what treatment the subjects received, but they knew that every single subject they tested had reported a positive effect. This study was wide open to experimental bias, and given that two of the authors of the study were not medically trained at all, but were instead members of schools of theology, and that all of the work was funded by the Templeton Foundation, we can guess what answer they wanted.

Most damning of all, there were no controls.

I repeat, no controls anywhere in the experiment.

No controls, experiment not done double-blind or even single-blind, a small number (24) of subjects self-selected from a suggestible population predisposed to demonstrate an effect…this study is total crap. All it would take to get their results is a tendency for people coming in for magical healing to exaggerate their afflictions, and minimize them after a few minutes of personal attention, and presto, PIP works. And that seems like an extremely likely situation to me.

Now there could be a real physiological effect: compelling attentiveness, physical stimulation, and just generally waking people up could generate an increase in blood flow to the head, which would lead to better sensory performance — I know I wake up bleary-eyed and wooly-headed until I’ve snapped myself awake with a little cold water and some physical activity, so we also know that sensory performance varies over time. But can we determine that from this work? No! No controls! This is completely worthless work.

What’s particularly galling is that the investigators go on to suggest that maybe the suffering people in the undeveloped world could benefit from PIP.

Although it would be unwise to overgeneralize from these preliminary findings for a small number of PIP practitioners and subjects collected in far-from-ideal field conditions, future study seems warranted to assess whether PIP may be a useful adjunct to standard medical care for certain patients with auditory and/or visual impairments, especially in contexts where access to conventional treatment is limited. The implications are potentially vast given World Health Organization estimates that 278 million people, 80% of whom live in developing countries, have moderate to profound hearing loss in both ears, and 314 million people are visually impaired, 87% of whom live in developing countries, and only a tiny fraction of these populations currently receive any treatment.

No, I think those hundreds of millions of people deserve something a little more substantial than a witch-doctor dribbling oil on their heads and chanting to their Jesus juju. And no, nothing in this work can warrant further investigation.

By the way, you may wonder why they had to go to rural Mozambique to find subjects. There is no shortage of crazy preachers and gullible believers willing to be healed by magic in the US. They reveal the answer to that in an aside.

Conducting similar studies under controlled clinical conditions in North America would be desirable, yet neither Iris nor Global Awakening claims comparable results in industrialized countries (arguing that “anointing” and “faith” are lower where medical therapies are available)—see Supplemental Digital Content for our unsuccessful attempts to collect data in the US.

Ah, the incredible shrinking god — he just doesn’t work where conditions are amenable to more thorough examination. I am not surprised.

I’m also not surprised that this garbage was funded by the Templeton Foundation. It could only have been supported by an organization that places scientific rigor a distant second to making excuses for faith.

Brown CG, Mory SC, Williams R, McClymond MJ (2010) Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Proximal
Intercessory Prayer (STEPP) on Auditory and
Visual Impairments in Rural Mozambique. Southern Medical Journal, 4 August 2010.

Lawrence Krauss is becoming a bit of a firebrand

Not that he’s ever been soft on religion, but this recent column in SciAm makes him sound like one of those shrill, militant, rabid, dangerous Gnu Atheists.

I don’t know which is more dangerous, that religious beliefs force some people to choose between knowledge and myth or that pointing out how religion can purvey ignorance is taboo. To do so risks being branded as intolerant of religion. The kindly Dalai Lama, in a recent New York Times editorial, juxtaposed the statement that “radical atheists issue blanket condemnations of those who hold religious beliefs” with his censure of the extremist intolerance, murderous actions and religious hatred in the Middle East. Aside from the distinction between questioning beliefs and beheading or bombing people, the “radical atheists” in question rarely condemn individuals but rather actions and ideas that deserve to be challenged.

Surprisingly, the strongest reticence to speak out often comes from those who should be most worried about silence. Last May I attended a conference on science and public policy at which a representative of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences gave a keynote address. When I questioned how he reconciled his own reasonable views about science with the sometimes absurd and unjust activities of the Church—from false claims about condoms and AIDS in Africa to pedophilia among the clergy—I was denounced by one speaker after another for my intolerance.

Religious leaders need to be held accountable for their ideas. In my state of Arizona, Sister Margaret McBride, a senior administrator at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix, recently authorized a legal abortion to save the life of a 27-year-old mother of four who was 11 weeks pregnant and suffering from severe complications of pulmonary hypertension; she made that decision after consultation with the mother’s family, her doctors and the local ethics committee. Yet the bishop of Phoenix, Thomas Olm­sted, immediately excommunicated Sister Mary, saying, “The mother’s life cannot be preferred over the child’s.” Ordinarily, a man who would callously let a woman die and orphan her children would be called a monster; this should not change just because he is a cleric.

Slapping around the Dalai Lama? Good on you, Dr Krauss.

And a bright and cheery good morning to you, too!

You know, every morning I get up and try to plow through the flood of email I get overnight, and it’s always full of these dire stories and horrible events. So here I will share with you a little sense of how I feel when I open my mailbox.

It’s amazing that I’m still such a happy fellow. I think the giggles are a consequence of being punch-drunk, though.

Belief can be dangerous

Gullibility really does destroy lives. A Vietnamese couple in Australia, the Trans, were missing a purse, so they made mistake #1: they went to a fortune teller to find out where it was. Really, magic doesn’t work.

Mistake #2: the fortune teller told them that a young woman, Leilani dos Santos, who was living with them had stolen it. The fortune teller had no way of knowing, but made this potentially destructive accusation anyway.

Mistake #3: The Trans believed the fortune teller.

Mistake #4, and this is the really big one: The Trans believed that torture was an appropriate method of getting the purse back.

Ms Tran also allegedly told Ms dos Santos they would cut off her fingers, but they loved her and would inject her with heroin, so she would not feel it.

Ms dos Santos said Mr Tran beat her in the back with a meat cleaver, threatened her with a samurai sword and burnt her arm with a cigarette.

Ms dos Santos said the couple had a Lady Gaga CD playing loudly. “I was screaming,” she said. “I was hoping maybe somebody would break down the door and help me.”

Ms dos Santos eventually escaped, and the Trans are currently on trial. Let’s hope the court doesn’t make mistake #5 and let those insane people go — the Trans are clearly infected with a delusional belief system that they use to justify horrific acts against others.

I mean, really…Lady Gaga?

I am the wrong person to answer this email

I am not a fan of homeschooling; in fact, if I had my way, I’d make it illegal. Too often it’s an excuse to isolate kids and hammer them full of ideological nonsense, and in a troubled public school system, it doesn’t help to strip students and money from a struggling district — it should be part of the social contract that we ought to provide a good education to everyone.

Before you start protesting (aw, who am I kidding? Some will be howling in protest anyway) I know that there are good homeschool programs, and I have students who were homeschooled and were better prepared than kids coming out of the public school system. You may be one of them. But I don’t think sending everyone to be taught by your mom and dad is a good solution, and I think we’re better off investing in good public education.

OK, but now on to the email. Here’s a sincere and worthy request from a homeschooling mom in Arizona.

Next summer, Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis is coming to Phoenix to speak at the local homeschool convention. As a secular homeschooler in Phoenix, I am appalled. I feel like I must respond in some way, stand up and say, “This guy does not represent me or others like me!”

I am interested in creating some kind of large, public response, but not sure where to begin. I thought that one of you might have some ideas.

See what I mean? This is one of the big problems of homeschooling: for every good, science-oriented parent, there are dozens or hundreds who buy into the awful, horrible, no-good nonsense peddled by Ken Ham and other creationists.

So I recuse myself as an opponent of homeschooling, but I appreciate that as long as we are going to have homeschoolers, something needs to be done about this ridiculous association between homeschooling and bad education. I turn it over to the readers here: what should be done? What can be done in the short term to protest damning choices like bringing Ham in to speak to a convention, and what can be done in the long run to get better quality science into homeschool programs? That last one will be a real challenge, given that my impression of the majority of homeschoolers is that they’re doing it specifically to indoctrinate their kids in a specific conservative Christian ideology.

Are constant reminders OK, too?

Writing about the role of the NAACP in swatting down the endemic racism in the Republican party, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes something beautiful.

I have, in my writing, a tendency to become theoretically cute, and overly enamored with my own fair-mindedness. Such vanity has lately been manifested in the form of phrases like “it’s worth saying” and “it strikes me that…” or “respectfully…”

When engaging your adversaries, that approach has its place. But it’s worth saying that there are other approaches and other places. Among them–respectfully administering the occasional reminder as to the precise nature of the motherfuckers you are dealing with.

It’s worth saying, respectfully, that I have never been overly enamored with my fair-mindedness, so it’s the second paragraph that resonates most strongly with me.

(via Mike the Mad Biologist)