Homeopathic Science!

It’s a wholly different system–
There are data, but you missed ’em,
In the infinite dilution of our minds!
Modern medicine is bleaker
Cos our evidence is weaker,
Which is stronger, as our different system finds!

All those articles and studies
That you put out with your buddies,
Which you think will make your evidence more strong?
It is our determination
Through our less-is-more translation,
Each one proves that Western Medicine is wrong!

While you losers have fun losing
We’re diluting and succusing,
Gaining power modern science can’t assess–
And our strongest contribution
May be found in this solution:
Common sense (at just one molecule, or less)!

Cuttlecap tip to P-Zed.

Atheist Billboard Hypocrisy! (Or Not)

When they pass the plate on Sunday, and we put our money in,
They assure us that it lets the Church do good
So we dig a little deeper—being selfish is a sin—
And we donate like the Bible says we should.

Though we haven’t got much money, we still give as best we can,
Every Sunday morning, roughly ten o’clock
Now we see our small donations help a much, much bigger plan,
Cos we’ve got the biggest billboard on the block!

Every church around has got one, and there’s some with five or six
Praising Jesus and inviting folks to come
There are dozens in the city, and there’s more out in the sticks
And they must have cost a mighty godly sum!

When “Our Lady Of The Blessed Heart”, the local Catholic Church,
Put their new one by the highway overpass
We just couldn’t let it stand like that, with us left in the lurch;
Our humongous billboard really kicked their ass!

We’ve competed now for decades, with our steeples and our signs,
Till the megachurches left us in their dust;
And it might be steeple envy, if you read between the lines,
But there’s something now that fills us with disgust!

Yes, the godless heathen atheists, the lowest of the low,
Have a billboard that they want to put in town!
If they try it, though, I’m telling you (and really, I should know)
If they put it up, we’re gonna burn it down.

What a waste of their resources! Why, that money’s better spent
Housing homeless, feeding hungry, helping poor;
For a message on a billboard should be strictly heaven-sent—
That for all your problems, Jesus is the cure!

****

I got a comment (thanks, Mariano!) on the “Starving? Have a bible!” thread, linking to a hilarious article accusing atheists of hypocrisy with regard to our reaction to the Audio Bible story. Now, to be fair, the Audio Bible person (not Mariano) who commented assured us that they are not sending these bibles instead of relief items, but along with them, and by request of people in Haiti. Moreover, he or she is trying to get the future runs of the device to include a radio receiver, so that it will be of practical use in disaster areas. I maintain that, although the actions of Faith Comes By Hearing are good, and their intentions perfectly honorable (although they certainly don’t need my approval), the Audio Bible, as is, does nothing to alleviate the real problems in Haiti. (It does work to alleviate some illusory problems, though; problems that stem from their belief in the first place. It may comfort them when they feel they have been abandoned by god; a solution to a problem that never needed to exist.)

From Mariano’s article:

Certainly, atheists, being absolute materialists, do not see how human beings are anything but bio-organisms and require nothing but bio-organic fuel, housing, etc. Yet, the Christian view is holistic and thus, organizations such as Faith Comes By Hearing seek to provide both; food for the body and food for the soul.

Actually, the atheist view is holistic, if by “whole” you mean “all that is there, without making shit up.”

Now, what of atheistic hypocrisy?

The fact is that for at least the last couple of years atheists worldwide have been literally wasting hundreds upon hundreds of thousands upon thousands of dollars in donated money not in order to help anyone in need during times of recession, war, poverty, etc. but in order to purchase anti-theistic and pro-atheism bus ads and billboards in order to attempt to demonstrate just how clever they consider themselves to be.

Now, they suddenly anoint themselves the charity police, complain and condemn based, by the way, on relative-subjective-personal preference based “morality.”

Well, my dear atheists friends; first repent of your own astonishingly wasteful back-patting boasting and then, perhaps, eventually, get around to criticizing those who are feeding, housing the needy body and soul—those who have been doing it for millennia upon millennia by the way.

I’ve seen atheist billboards. None in person, mind you; only online. I’ve seen religious billboards. Hundreds. Online, on the road, on the hill, on the bus, in the paper… By Mariano’s logic, think how much money has been thus wasted, that could have been used to help those in need.

Mariano is right about one thing–the churches have been doing it for millennia. We disagree on precisely what they have been doing. I hope that Mariano himself is free of hypocrisy, and will perhaps join Sarah Silverman’s “Sell the Vatican: Feed the Poor” campaign.

Actually, it kind of sickens me to read the sort of thing Mariano has linked to. The church-going people I knew while growing up were the first to donate, the first to volunteer, and never gave a thought about who else was donating or why. It was their own business. Of course, I found out years later that at least one pillar of that religious community was himself an atheist; the church was simply the best way he could help.

The billboards are up because atheists are treated as second class citizens. It’s nice to see, for once, that we are considered good enough to actually hold to a higher standard than believers themselves.

On God And Haiti

“We stand here by the grace of God”
The quake survivors said,
And thanked Him they were not among
Two hundred thousand dead.
“What happened is the will of God”
But God receives no blame;
Survivors gather humbly, and
Sing praises to His name.
One wonders, in the aftermath,
If God is really there—
But which is worse: no God at all,
Or gods that do not care?

In a Saturday NYTimes op-ed, author James Wood ponders the various different invocations of God in the reactions to Haiti’s devastation, from Pat Robertson, to President Obama, to the Haitian survivors themselves.

[A] 27-year-old survivor, Mondésir Raymone, was quoted thus: “We have survived by the grace of God.” Bishop Éric Toussaint, standing near his damaged cathedral, said something similar: “Why give thanks to God? Because we are here. What happened is the will of God. We are in the hands of God now.” A survivor’s gratitude is combined with theological fatalism. This response is entirely understandable, uttered in a ruined landscape beyond the experience of most of us, and a likely source of pastoral comfort to the bishop’s desperate flock. But that should not obscure the fact that it is little more than a piece of helpless mystification, a contradictory cry of optimistic despair.

It is an interesting look at the use of God in such times.

For either God is punitive and interventionist (the Robertson view), or as capricious as nature and so absent as to be effectively nonexistent (the Obama view). Unfortunately, the Bible, which frequently uses God’s power over earth and seas as the sign of his majesty and intervening power, supports the first view; and the history of humanity’s lonely suffering decisively suggests the second.

Interesting, that either view still maintains a God. I wonder why it is that a god who either causes or allows such suffering is not consigned to history. My universe works just fine with no god at all.

****

In an update, I had a visit in the comments on the “Starving? Have a bible” thread. A representative of the company says he will bring the idea of including a radio receiver, to make the audio bible more useful in such disaster scenarios. I think there are contact details in the link to the company website from my older post, if anyone wants to deliver words of encouragement.

Starving? Have A Bible!

They were starving; they were homeless; they were dying; they were dead.
There were bodies to be buried; there were children to be fed.
There were broken heaps of rubble where the houses used to stand
There was utter devastation; there was chaos in the land.
There were frantic cries for rescue; there were howls of fear and pain
There were heroes risking life and limb, with much to lose or gain.
There were millions in donations—drinking water, food to cook—
And the most important gift of all… The Christian Holy Book.

While it cannot stave off hunger, and it cannot slake your thirst,
It’s the most important item, when your life is at its worst;
No, it cannot heal a broken bone; it cannot make you whole,
But a Bible, in your time of need, could save your mortal soul!
It’s the timeless sacred message from the Bearded Guy Upstairs,
And it speaks of His omnipotence, and tells you that He cares.
When your world is torn asunder, as your very country bleeds,
Who could doubt, the Holy Bible is the thing that Haiti needs?

It’s the latest, greatest model; it’s a solar powered job!
It can shout the Holy Scripture out, in Creole, to the mob
That has gathered there, expectant, in the hopes of some supplies—
When instead they hear the Word Of God, imagine their surprise!
We are sending them six hundred, and that takes a lot of space,
So we bumped some crates of water, and put Bibles in their place;
Planes will bring the Holy Bibles in, like manna from above…
Cos it’s Bibles, and not medicine, that shows True Christian Love.

News Item: “Earthquake survivors get solar-powered bibles“

The Proclaimer, “a ministry tool like no other” (hey, I thought that was Pat Robertson’s title!) could have been a solar-powered radio (it also has a hand-crank dynamo backup), but instead of a radio which could tell Haitians where to go for food, water, or medicine, it has a microchip with Scriptures in Haitian Creole. The rechargeable battery could play the entire New Testament a thousand times or more. Some 600 are on their way to Haiti, where with any luck the batteries and solar panels will be scavenged for other uses.

Cuttlecap tip to PZ, of course.

Raising The Dead!

A man is crumpled by a car;
He’s lying dead, and there you are–
Don’t waste your time with CPR,
Just bow your head and pray.
No need to call for EMTs;
The Holy Bible guarantees
Just fall down praying on your knees
The proper Christian way.

From prairie plains to shining shores
The hospitals will close their doors;
The pow’r of life and death is yours
If only you believe.
No more a need for any meds,
Or research messing up our heads,
Since raising people from the dead’s
So easy to achieve.

It’s really quite a simple game:
Just find a corpse, and then proclaim
“Rise up! Rise up, in Jesus’ name!”
And that’s what it will do.
But if by chance he will not stand;
The corpse won’t do as you command,
The fall-back is already planned:
We put the blame on you.

Over on Pharyngula, PZ has posted a video of a man who claims to have raised the dead. Says it’s not that hard to do, really. In the comments to that post, there are a number of commenters who doubt the man’s sincerity. I wish I could. I really do.

But, the thing is, I have known people who honestly believed that prayer could raise the dead. Despite the fact that it did not work for their son, my friend. So, of course, it demonstrated that their faith was insufficient.

I hear there are groups that are actively praying for the victims of the Haitian earthquake. I hope that praying was the second thing they did, after donating. I remember my own church, decades ago, donating far more money than they feasibly could, to the victims of a tornado-struck town. Churches can be a tremendous vehicle for good in a situation like this; they are an organized group of people with a structure in place that can be put to this use. Of course, so can clubs, sports teams, schools, and even internet communities. There is little or nothing that a church can do that these other groups cannot. On the other hand, they could easily do less, if they choose to pray instead of work.

Mocking Pat Robertson (A Guest Post by Dr. Adequate)

There is, or ought to be, a close-knit community, a guild if you will, of pseudonymous internet poets. As I have said before, I am friends with a number of them who do what I do better than I do it (I, however, make up for quality with quantity). One of our proud fraternity has recently lost his internet home, but not his penchant for skewering fools with a pen much mightier than Excalibur itself. (I note, now, that Podblack has also posted this verse. Only fair–it was she who introduced him to me.)

What Podblack does not have, though, is his very own introduction. I do. Ladies, Gentlemen, Virtual Entities, I give you the inimitable Dr. Adequate:

You will, of course, have seen Pat Robertson’s latest bit of crazy, and those who know me know that I can’t see a fish in a barrel without getting an itchy trigger finger and a strong craving for bouillabaisse.

I therefore give you this little ditty, which I call …

Unmysterious Ways

Jehovah, as I understand,
holds all creation in his hand:
the Bible leaves no doubt.
And yet he always intervenes
with great economy of means,
and takes the easy route —

sends droughts to nations that defy
his will (and which are hot and dry);
to prove his power is great, he
judiciously supports this boast
by flooding regions on the coast
and causing quakes in Haiti.

For God, it seems, has got a chronic
dislike of anything tectonic
as Pat Robertson’s revealed,
and he’ll pour his wrath and hate on
folks who don’t live on a craton
on a continental shield.

For petty sins like genocide
and torture, he lets those abide
and wisely stays his hand;
but saves his deadliest assaults
for those who have tectonic faults —
that’s one thing he can’t stand.

The wage of sin is death, it’s written:
and yet I somehow stay unsmitten
by earthquake or tsunami:
for God forgives the rather large sins
of those who shun tectonic margins,
and chooses not to harm me.

And so, as far as I am able
I stick to regions that are stable
and thus avoid my sentence.
This clever little dodge, I call
most geo-theo-logical …
and more fun than repentance.

We Have To Have A Talk About Vaccines

We need to have a talk about vaccines–
The evidence is right before your eyes,
And everybody knows just what that means

When journalists can peek behind the scenes
And see the anti-vaxxers through disguise
We need to have a talk about vaccines.

Their science isn’t worth a hill of beans
And so the anti-vaxxers turn to lies
And everybody knows. Just what that means

May not be clear. The argument careens
From point to point, and if you cross your eyes,
We need to have a talk about vaccines.

But if you look more clearly, through the screens
And clouds, their falsehood dies,
And everybody knows just what that means.

They use, instead, publicity machines
Which amplify their pseudoscience cries:
“We need to have a talk about vaccines!”
And everybody knows just what that means.

*****

Some context. Two of my favorite bloggers, Orac and PalMD, have each written about Barbara Loe Fisher and her early attempt at winning the “Hypocrite of the year” contest in the first month. For me, this is a bit of an opportunity–most importantly, it gives me a chance to link to them, and to do what tiny bit this little-fish blog can do to add to the side of right… but also, I think this is my first villanelle! I have wanted to do a villanelle for some time now, and this finally does it. I must offer my thanks to Barbara Loe Fisher, for epic hypocrisy; without you, I could not have written this.

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Raising The Dead!

Mocking Pat Robertson (A Guest Post by Dr. Adequate)

We Have To Have A Talk About Vaccines