When Religion Kills

It seems religious tolerance is in fashion nowadays. There are those who try to spread the myth that Christians in the US are persecuted, as if they're the minority, and that atheists (or Christians of various sects) need to be tolerant of other people's views.

But what about situations where these religious beliefs lead to someone dying?

What if that someone was a child?

That's exactly what happened in this story where a woman was convicted for letting her child die from a condition that was easily and readily curable right up to the very end but instead of taking the child to a doctor she used prayer to save...well, not save...her eleven year old daughter.

I'm all about the philosophy of not caring what you do as long as you don't bother me. I don't care what you do behind closed doors. I don't care if you talk to invisible friends and I don't care about the plain brown wrappered boxes you have delivered to your home. If I don't hear it or smell it or have to participate and you don't disturb me, I could really not care less about what you do with your own time in your own home with consenting adults.

But when a person's religion ends up killing people, innocent people, I have an ethical problem with that. The most convenient bit of religious dogma is that all of this fits perfectly with the family's worldview; they pray for her to get well, and God would have saved her if He wanted her to live. She died, so it was His will to have this happen. Amen.

I see this as being superstitious nonsense akin to the murders in Africa happening today in the name of witchcraft; people are hunting and killing people because they're suspected of being witches. It's amazing what a lack of education can do. How can anyone see video footage like this and not condemn the perpetrators yet still call for tolerance for other people's beliefs leading to the death of children because of a preference for prayer over medical help? You can't have it both ways, saying there needs to be tolerance and respect for all other beliefs (although I'm led to believe that when someone says this, they actually mean respect and tolerance for their beliefs) while condemning some loons on a witchhunt in a remote village.

Unfortunately I would say that if I were to believe in the existence of a single Almighty God, I would have to also believe that since He allows all this to happen that it is all good. Otherwise He would have stepped in and done something about all of this. Since He hasn't, I'm led to believe that either He doesn't, in fact, exist, or it's okay since He's not intervening. One could argue about what He actually wants using passages from various scriptures but I'm afraid that without His clarification there is still room for you to be making interpretations of what is meant, meaning you could be wrong. The only authoritative conclusions would come from the horse's mouth. Seems pretty simple to boil it down. I've seen too many incidents similar to this to not have come to these conclusions.

Columbine and the Cassie Bernall Myth: I Believe in God!

My wife has been enthralled with the book Columbine by Dave Cullen. I haven't read it but as she hits interesting bits she's been sharing excerpts with me. She highly recommends it.

The bit she shared that really bugged me concerned the story of Cassie Bernall. If you followed the Columbine aftermath at all you heard this story; one of the killers looked Cassie in the face and asked her if she believed in God. She said yes. He shot her pointblank for it, martyring her.

The problem was that this story never happened. It was a myth. Fabricated. With evidence to back it up. And the press knew about it as they reported it. The local papers didn't even come out with the truth until after Misty Bernall published the book She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall about the mythical incident passing it off as truth.

Emily Wyant was an eyewitness, hiding under the table with Cassie at the time of the shooting. She said that there wasn't any such exchange before Cassie was shot...the killer slapped the table, said, "Peekaboo!", and shot her before walking away with a broken nose from the recoil of the weapon.

The Bernall family later came out with a press statement saying "'Our intent was to share Cassie's story in an effort to encourage parents and teenagers. If any of our actions have hurt or offended anyone, we sincerely apologize.'"

The truth is that the story was hijacked from a young woman named Valeen Schnurr. From the Salon article:

**********
Schnurr was down on her hands and knees bleeding, already hit by 34 shotgun pellets, when one of the killers approached her. She was saying, "Oh, my God, oh, my God, don't let me die," and he asked her if she believed in God. She said yes; he asked why. "Because I believe and my parents brought me up that way," she said. He reloaded, but didn't shoot again. She crawled away.
**********

According to Cullen's book Schnurr, when telling the truth of the incident, was accused of trying to steal attention from Bernall. She was ridiculed and threatened.

Worse, the church, despite later knowing the truth, continued to perpetuate the myth because it served their purpose of recruiting more followers on the tail of the tragedy. Members with only a small shred of decency to respect truth over hype at most concede that it's the symbolism behind the story that's important, not the truth (NOTE: the link I put in here is from someone who is reviewing Cullen's book and stated that he regrets perpetuating the myth to a youth group upon learning the truth...this isn't accusing him of being one of those against which I'm spearing here. Read his entry for the section regarding his thoughts on that incident).

This is one more illustration of my "problem" with the state of organized religion in the US. Reason, truth...they don't mean much to the institution. Here it's illustrated that they'll knowingly perpetuate myths and falsehoods in order to further the collective agenda while even marginalizing or denigrating, in this case, a young woman who was actually victimized. They essentially victimized her twice, once through the Columbine incident, once by having a Christian institution try to silence the truth.

It's horrible to me seeing such cognitive dissonance among self-proclaimed believers as well; it hardly strikes me as Christian to see this kind of behavior from the church. Yet it doesn't merit a second thought from congregations.

Shameful.

Lottery Jackpot

I had a post not long ago where I mentioned the lottery and hope in the context of people perpetually falling for email hoaxes. Coincidentally I ran across this article discussing the American Powerball lottery and at what point it is worth playing, mathematically and statistically, playing the lottery.

I play the lottery sometimes when I have a couple spare dollars in the wallet. I play in casinos once in a great while as well. I am well aware of the statistics, and even if I weren't aware then five minutes of reflection should lead you to the conclusion that the casinos manage to air condition those huge spaces somehow and paying large sums of money to the hundreds and hundreds of people elbowing you away from their favorite lucky slot machine isn't the reason.

The summary of the article should be no surprise. The best way to make millions is to already have millions...

Nutrition Controversy for Skeptics

The cover story of the May/June 2009 issue of Skeptical Inquirer, a magazine that I rarely pick up unless the cover has a particularly eye-catching lead, held the headline "Science & Pseudoscience in Nutrition."

With a title like that, I had to take a look.

The article was actually titled Science and Pseudoscience in Adult Nutrition Research and Practice by Reynold Spector and started on page 35 and postulated that "Human nutrition research and practice is plagued by pseudoscience and unsupported opions. A scientific analysis separates reliable nutrition facts from nutritional pseudoscience and false opinion."

The article wasn't so much a debunking of various myths and ideas in nutrition as much as it was an analysis of the fact that such myths exist and why; it made me sad to see how much crap is out there more than clearing up some of the myths that exist. I suppose if it was an article trying to spread the truth of various myths then it wouldn't be much different from the articles you can find in most supermarket checkouts, though (except that one of the exceptional features of Skeptical Inquirer is that it does actually have reference notes in articles that take up more than two lines at the end of the piece...I was about to shorten the title to SI, but I really don't think Sports Illustrated is noted for putting in such footnotes).

The article sets out to answer four questions, paraphrasing:

1. What do we know about adult nutrition?
2. Is there an optimum body weight?
3. Why are there so many confusing or contradictory data and opinions in literature, media, and books, regarding things like whether certain foods even in moderation are harmful and are food supplements like megavitamins helpful?
4. Why are there so many erroneous or uninterpretable nutritional experiments...pseudoscience...in the literature?

The article is surprisingly readable and at 7 pages in length doesn't take long to get through and the conclusions were unsurprising to a cynic like me but may be interesting to the average Joe spending his day being assaulted by various weight-loss and nutrition headlines by magazines and news media. The sad part is that the conclusions won't be anything we want to hear.

Even a healthy skeptic like myself still woke up finding that I wanted to have a weekly trip to Red Lobster for my once-a-week fish serving because...vaguely...it's supposed to be healthy.

I suppose old habits die hard. At least I added a little more to my knowledge store.

The New Enterprise NCC-1701

My son was playing with a Hasbro model of the new starship Enterprise from the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie and I started thinking about the various starships from the Star Trek franchise over the years.

It suddenly occurred to me that in Star Trek V, the brand new Enterprise-A was depicted as being in a constant state of disrepair. It was "brand new" and as such had all sorts of glitches and problems to work out in a shakedown cruise. It was new, undergoing refit (retrofit?), and that was the excuse given for the running gags of half the ship not working properly.

In the latest Star Trek movie, the eleventh in the series, the Enterprise wasn't even given a proper christening; her first voyage out of spacedock was to respond to a call for help from Vulcan. The ship not only performed admirably but managed to go toe-to-toe with a ship that is supposedly five miles long (heck, the new Enterprise is supposed to be over 700 meters in length...)

I then realized that the Enterprise from Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the fresh refit transitioning between the old series and the first movie, worked without problems (except for the imbalance in the engines causing a wormhole...).

Unless I'm missing something, apparently the only time the running gag of "it's new, so it's expected to not work right" was in Star Trek V. Maybe it was such a dud that they decided not to revisit that plot device, unlike, say, time travel screwing up the timeline...

Seatbelts, Smoking, and Our Dignity

I hope you can forgive this post; it's late, I'm tired, but these thoughts are troubling me as of late. So there may be a little rambling. I'm hoping that as I try to sort the thoughts out you'll find some form of coherent thought threading through the words that follow. Please feel free to leave your thoughts on the matter...

Our society is very troubling in that we tell each other that we live in the land of the free (in the United States) and yet there's a bit of cognitive dissonance where we ignore the fact that we're obviously not free. It's much like our students in school are told we live in a democracy (well...to be honest...most adults seem to think we live in a democracy as well). It's not true. We're a representative republic.

We can get ticketed for not wearing our seatbelts if we're pulled over on our nation's roads. I didn't understand this idea. If you're in a car accident and end up maimed or killed because you didn't wear a seatbelt, who else did you really hurt? Without counting the argument that you harm your family by dying, the fact is you didn't infringe on anyone else's freedom or rights by not wearing your seatbelt. You put yourself at risk by not wearing it. You don't put your passenger at risk of anything more, really, than extreme mental or emotional trauma if they see how the accident affects your body.

It's a simple idea...why don't you have a right to act as you wish if you're not harming or infringing on someone else's rights, within reason?

This same country allows you to purchase sticks of nicotine laced with all sorts of additional poisons like arsenic, tar, and...well,...nicotine. Among lots of other trace chemicals. These things are known to cause cancers as well as aging your skin and increasing your risk for strokes, clots, heart attack, etc. etc...our government even imposes a so-called sin tax on such items to "discourage" customers from using them. There are laws imposing limitations on where and when you can smoke as well as what age you must be before purchasing them. Worse, these do infringe on my lungspace...if you're smoking near me, I inhale your fumes. Yet they're still legal and are a billion-dollar industry.

Hmm...what could be in common with these two things, aside from hypocrisy? Possibly it's the fact that these are both industries with powerful lobbies behind them pushing their interests above those of your rights. We are told that seatbelt laws are imposed to protect you, for your own good. No. Seatbelts protecting you are a positive side effect of the insurance industry lobbying for laws to keep their costs down. On the flip side cigarettes are sold because taking them away would be infringing on your right to make decisions for yourself of what risks are or aren't acceptable, and you should be allowed to purchase these things if you're of age and are willing to take the risk. No. If that was really what the government was trying to do then you wouldn't have seatbelt laws. The truth is that cigarettes are socially acceptable and bring in a metric crapload of cash.

Am I the only one that sees such double-dealing going on? I often stop and wonder about people in our society, wondering if anyone else stops to think about the lies we're told and often seem to accept without question, like the idea that we're a democracy or that the founding fathers of the United States founded this country to be a Christian nation. We're not, they didn't. No matter how many times you find the evidence refuting such ideas you soon find someone else repeating the same lies.

I got to thinking about our rights and people's blind acceptance of contrary ideas because my wife's grandmother is in a precarious position right now, healthwise. She was found laying on the floor of her family's bathroom one morning, unconcious, blood sugar off the charts. She's survived several days so far but isn't out of the woods, and last I knew doctors were saying that it appears she has had several small strokes over time and suffered a heart attack the first night she was in the hospital. She is in her mid eighties and has had deteriorating health.

From my understanding some family members were throwing a fit when they found out Grandma had a Do Not Resuscitate order on file.

This poor woman has been through a lot in life. Her children have been fortunate enough to have a chance to say goodbye in case the eventuality of passing on occurs in the near future; those that wished to take advantage of the opportunity appear to have been able to do so. She has come to terms with the possibility of death.

But there are people who persist in the idea that life, no matter what, must be saved. How can we live in a land of the free when we can't choose our own destiny? It's our own life. If it is a divine gift then it is still nonetheless a gift for us to do with as we please; to not have respect for this idea is to undermine our right to basic human dignity.

The lies we are fed, that seatbelts are there to protect us (says the insurance lobbyists) and cigarettes purchases are exercising our capitalist freedoms (say the tobacco lobbyists) and even the idea of America as a democracy (representative republic! Stay awake in your social studies classes!) are an insult to our human dignity; worse we allow others to keep us ignorant to awareness of these issues, so we're insulting our own dignity. Educate yourselves. Become aware of what is going on around you, and become aware of when others are trying to pursuade you for their own benefit.

Retake your dignity. Because if you're willing to be taken advantage of, there's no shortage of people willing to profit from your ignorance and push their own agendas.

Gay Marriage and History

Beauty contestant Carrie Prejean was bashed for her silly off-the-cuff answer, which she apparently characterized as biblically correct instead of politically correct, to a question from Perez Hilton about her opinion of same-sex marriage rights in states.

Too often I hear people justify the anti-same-sex stance as being anti-biblical.

Just today I ran across a couple articles that may question the validity of that idea...or at least give a little history lesson on the origins of marriage.

Chilling Effects in Teaching and Offending the Religious

I couldn't help but be intrigued when I stumbled across another site listing a student as a litigious douchebag. So I started looking around to find out what the hubub was.

Apparently a high school teacher was found guilty in a federal lawsuit of violating the first amendment by saying that Creationism was "religious, superstitious nonsense" during a lecture and thus offending a former Advanced Placement European History student by the name of Chad Farnan.

The news story can be found here.

Predictably this is causing a class A crapstorm, where Christians claim they are under attack in America (despite being the majority) and secular humanists yelling that this is simply rediculous to have such an idiotic lawsuit in the first place. PZ Myers, respected professor and biologist, had an interesting point in that Creationism as a movement is quick to point out that Creationism is a "scientific theory" (it isn't) that is separate from religion (it isn't) so it should be allowed in classrooms, but with this lawsuit finding in favor of Farnan, how can dismissing Creationism as superstitious nonsense offend someone's religious rights?

What perpetually amazes me is we still have people with some form of sense shut off when they decide to become teachers in schools today. This guy was expressing a personal opinion and due to some twerp getting offended gets...this being America...sued. Because of course appealing to a sky wizard to intervene, as is consistent with his beliefs, simply doesn't have any effect. Somehow the law of man must intervene to make an example of him.

Teachers are expected to shut off any sense of self when teaching lest they become the target of some pissed parents or lawsuit when some form of personality offends one of the kids or their overprotective, or in some cases plain ignorant, parents.

Express an opinion contrary to a student's belief? May get sued.

Maybe you are contrary to a student belief. Openly gay? Better watch your opinions being expressed. But you should tread lightly when breaking Suzy and Billy's liplock in the hallway between classes because it may be because you're not the same persuasion.

Just being a different gender carries dangers. Male teachers seeing a thirteen year old exposing her thong have to find a female teacher to address the issue or risk sexual harrasment...for enforcing a (GASP!) dress code!

Don't get overly friendly with students. Don't interact with them outside classes unless you must. Keep doors open. Don't touch them either.

Try explaining why Creationism isn't science in class. It's pretty simple...it doesn't fit the scientific method. It cannot. It does not. Here the application of actually explaining the issue in a class where it has legitimate reason to be taught may offend someone...and cause a royal crapstorm because it offended someone in the class.

I'm amazed there are still people with some form of crazy optimism that they can make a difference in teaching. There's simply too many drawbacks for me to see a positive benefit to doing it; this is just a rant about offending some nutters to feel bad about something you may or imply while going about the course of teaching while suffering from the condition of being human. Teachers are expected to be teachers, counselors, substitute parents, moral pillars, all while be accountable for the utter lack of ambition and getting the blame for parental failures in actually raising their kids while not having the tools for holding the students themselves accountable for their behavior. Oh, and teachers are expected not to have lives, opinions, or personalities of their own.