Cystic Fibrosis is all your fault

Cystic Fibrosis is a serious genetic disorder caused by the inheritance of a defective transporter protein. It leads to an accumulation of mucus and fluids in the lungs that can cause progressive scarring and damage to the tissue, and eventually loss of so much lung function that respiration is inadequate, and the victim dies. It’s a terrible disease, and it’s in the news today because a ten year old girl just received a lung transplant to deal with CF.

If you want to learn more or do more, read the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation website. That’s a reasonable source of public health information.

But do not read the Guardian Express.

The Guardian Express has published an article that suggests lung transplants aren’t the best option for CF. I just want to say…lung transplants are a last-ditch effort when no other recourse is available; nobody would suggest casually getting a transplant when other precedures are available for amelioration and maintenance. You get a lung transplant when your lungs are on the verge of failing to function.

So this article is talking nonsense from the title onwards. And then you discover why they’re arguing against transplants.

The problem is, after receiving a lung transplant, the new lungs do not have CF, but Cystic Fibrosis still exists in the sinuses, pancreas, intestines, sweat glands and reproductive tract, which may find their way to the new lungs eventually.

Let that sink in. CF is a genetic disease. This article is giving out medical advice, written by an author who thinks genes migrate out of the sweat glands into the lungs.

And what does this author suggest in lieu of a transplant? Oregano oil, yoga, rubbing essential oils on your skin, and herbs.

You may be thinking this all sounds terribly ineffective in the face of a disease that destroys the tissues of the lungs. But you’d be wrong. It’s an emotional disease, believe it or not.

According to metaphysics and those who study the relationship between our emotions and the body have found a correlating belief for nearly every physical manifestation in form. Often these beliefs are passed down to us from our parents and we aren’t even aware we are carrying them. In those with what is known as cystic fibrosis, this could be the case – as more often than not, individuals are born with this condition.

Louise Hay, a famous proponent for linking emotional causes to physical ailments has written several books on the subject (You can Heal your Life; Heal your Body) after healing herself from serious health problems by addressing her thoughts and emotions. The correlation she places for those suffering with cystic fibrosis is that they have a ‘thick belief that life won’t work for them.’ In order to combat or heal this belief, she offers the daily affirmation: “Life loves me and I love life. I now choose to take in life fully and freely.” If this is a condition you or someone you love is dealing with, perhaps it would be beneficial to look at the emotions behind the dis-ease. We are a whole being, not just a body, and when we can address our problems more holistically we have a greater chance at success.

Holy crap … I thought the article was a solid wall of garbage until that point, but when they stoop to victim blaming and telling people that cystic fibrosis is a “choice”, I suddenly find myself sympathizing with those people who believe in a Hell, because I want this person to go there.

But don’t worry! They include a disclaimer at the end!

(Information in this article is not intended to diagnosis, treat or cure and is not medical advice, but rather the researched opinion of the journalist. Please discuss options with your health care professional)

The article is full of medical misinformation and medical advice. The disclaimer fools no one, Stasi Bliss, you ignorant fraud.

It’s not just this one author, though. The Guardian Express regularly publishes tripe, such as this one about “Organ Transplants Cellular Memory Proves Major Organs Have Self-Contained Brains?”.

Organ transplants cellular memory is a premise which exemplifies that our brain is not the only organ that stores personality traits and memories because major organs may have self-contained brains. This is not a new theory because imaginative writers have already written about this concept in the 17th century, which is long before organ transplants were even believed possible.

In our modern culture, cellular memory was first studied in heart transplant recipients when the patients displayed strange cravings, change in tastes, cravings and mild personality. Major organs like the heart, liver, kidney, and even muscles are known to contain large populations of neural networks, which are self-contained brains and produce noticeable changes. Acquired combinatorial memories in organ transplants could enable transferred organs to respond to patterns familiar to the organ donors, and it may be triggered by emotional signals. Science discovered evidence that nervous system organs store memories and respond to places, events, and people recognized by their donors.

When your ideas are supported by 17th century fiction, you have a problem. They do cite one contemporary source: Gary Schwartz, the life-after-death charlatan from Arizona.

This Silverman guy seems to be saying a lot of the right things

He did an interview at Netroots Nation that was pretty darned good. Ophelia has already covered Silverman’s comments about feminism, but I also liked his general comments about secular politics.

I think we’re going to see a growth of atheism, it’s going to be an exponential growth. And driving that, of course, is going to be the young people. Approximately 30 percent of the under-30 crowd are non-religious. That’s a big market, that’s a big voting bloc. And as that 30 percent of the under-30 ages, and it becomes 30 percent of the under-40 market — assuming no growth — and 30 percent of the under-50 market in another 20 years, I think we’re going to see an inevitable shift from a “You have to be religious to get elected,” to a “Why are we even talking about God when we’re talking about politics.” And I think that’s the question we have to bring in. Why do we talk about God when we talk about politics?

Exactly. What possible relevance does religion and god have to politics? Politics is the art of working out what’s possible in our real world; the diverse delusions about what happens in a fantasy world full of dead people is incredibly unimportant to those concerns. Let the religious go to church and play “let’s pretend” all they want, but please leave the wishful thinking behind when it’s time to buckle down to real work.

Announcing…FtBConscience

This blog network has decided to put on a show. We go to conferences a lot, we have conversations with all kinds of atheists, we have things to say and we know you do, too, so we have decided to put on our own conference, with our themes and interests. And because we’re a blog network, we’re entirely comfortable with doing it all in our pajamas, so we propose to do this entirely with the technology our readers have on hand already: the internet. And further, we’re going to do it entirely for free — if you can get on the internet, you can access the talks and panels. If you can type, you can converse with everyone in our chat room.

A conference for atheists with a conscience

An Online Conference
19-21 July 2013

FtBCon is a free, online conference organized by the Freethought Blogs network. It will take place on July 19-21 and will focus on social justice, technology, and the future of the freethought movement. Without travel, registration, or hotel costs, FtBCon will be accessible to freethinkers around the world. Conference sessions will be held through Google+ hangouts, and attendees will have the opportunity to interact with each other in chat rooms and to submit questions to moderators.

We are currently assembling our schedule. If you or your organization are interested in participating, submit your session ideas for consideration by e-mailing PZ Myers with a proposal.

See that last bit? The event is a month away, and our schedule is filling up, but we also want to make this a participatory event that draws out your voices. If you’re part of a group that you’d like to see represented, if you have something valuable to say that fits into our overall theme, contact me soon and we’ll see if we can fit you into our programming grid.

There is a long list of scheduled speakers at FtBCon.org. Want to listen to them? Want to join them? Come right here to FreeThoughtBlogs on 19-21 July.

Now that we have the formula, we have but to implement it

I decided I didn’t believe in gods when I went through Lutheran confirmation classes and realized what a load of codswallop it all was. That’s not easy to repeat with other people; the other side has many tried and true techniques to win people over to their culty silliness. We’ve all heard about love-bombing, and the thing is…it works on some people. But you know us atheists, we just can’t do the love thing, we’re all coldly rational and satanically ruthless in our criticism. But Jonny Scaramanga describes how he was weaned from fundamentalism, and suddenly, our strategy is clear.

Then, on my 19th birthday, someone bought me a vodka and Coke. And this was brilliant, because it just tasted like awful Coke. I could drink awful Coke. I already did when I went to my step-gran’s house and she produced a bottle that had been sitting open, in direct sunlight, for a month.

The discovery of vodka and Coke, which meant that I could go to the pub and join in, changed everything. I immediately started going to a Wednesday night rock club, where a double vodka and Coke was about £2. Because I’d never drunk in my life, I could get absolutely hammered for less than a tenner. And I did. A lot.

The first time I went clubbing, a girl took it upon herself to sit in my lap, before leading me to the dancefloor and kissing me passionately. This was the future.

OK, got it. Cheap alcohol, check. Rock music, check. Dancing, check. Kissing, check.

This is the solution. We can do this. If every one of you atheists carries out this procedure on one Christian each this weekend, we can double our numbers by Sunday morning. By my conservative estimate, if we repeat that every week, we’ll have deconverted the entire population of the US by late August. And it’s all stuff we do all the time anyway!

Man, all the time we’ve wasted with arguing when we could have just been partying…

Aren’t “Superman” and “physics” incompatible?

This afternoon, at 3pm EDT, James Kakalios, Sean Carroll, and E. Paul Zehr are going to do a live chat about the Science of Superman. I’d say it needs MOAR BIOLOGISTS except just the physics of that movie alone ought to fully occupy the panel.

I’m a little afraid that the movie will get praised (it provides so many “teachable moments”!) rather than reamed out, but we’ll see.

Darn UK show-offs

The Girl Guides, which is the original name for the Girl Scouts, have just made an amendment to their policies to be inclusive to non-believers.

Girlguiding UK has announced a new version of its Promise – ‘the core expression of values and the common standard that brings everyone in guiding together’ – which is inclusive for the first time of those who don’t believe in any god. The British Humanist Association, which responded to Girlguiding consultation and met with Girlguiding in the course of their work to reformulate the Promise, has welcomed it.

The new formulation will have Guides promise to ‘be true to myself and develop my beliefs’, in place of the previous formulation to ‘love God’. It is the twelfth amendment to the Promise in guiding history, but the first version to open guiding up fully to non-religious girls.

It’s not clear in the article whether this change will translate to the American Girl Scouts, although they stopped discriminating against atheist girls 20 years ago — but I think they still have to promise to “serve God”. I know the Boy Scouts had to be dragged with great drama and breast-beating into allowing gay kids to enroll, and still reject atheist boys.

But good work, Girl Guides. Now we just need to fix America.

Do the creationist shuffle and twist!

Don’t you hate it when you get up in the morning and the first thing you read on the internet is the news that your entire career has been a waste of time, your whole field of study has collapsed, and you’re going to have to rethink your entire future? Happens to me all the time. But then, I read the creationist news, so I’ve become desensitized to the whole idea of intellectual catastrophes.

Today’s fresh demolition of the whole of evolutionary theory comes via Christian News, which reports on a paper in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution which challenges the ape to human evolutionary theory. Wait, that’s a journal I read regularly. What did I miss?

[Read more…]

CFI response roundup

Despite all my purported attempts at mind control and cunning psychological manipulation, we don’t get all that much unanimity here on freethoughtblogs. Sure, we occasionally get some outrage on the far right wing or the Catholic Church or the wacky patriarchal Religious Right that get a bunch of us fired up, but rarely do we get so many similar posts expressing outrage at one of our own.

But then, a sense of betrayal will do that.

Here’s a collection of FtB posts made in the last day about that astonishingly brief and empty statement from CFI. I have no idea what they were thinking; it was absolutely the worst PR effort since the BP oil spill. Ron Lindsay playing Tony Hayward would have been a better response.

Here’s what the locals had to say:

Be sure to read Dana’s post — she’s an under-appreciated warrior around here.

Center for Inquiry has really blown it, and I’m getting so much email and seeing so many comments from people who are abandoning the organization. It’s terribly sad. Please don’t forget that the staff at CFI are a fine and dilligent and dedicated and aspirational group of people who have always impressed me, and that this is a failure at the top — they could still rebound from this when Lindsay retires (as long as bad leadership doesn’t perpetuate itself, that is).

In the meantime, there are plenty of other organizations that haven’t gone full metal asshat on us. Throw your support in these directions, as your temperament suits you:

Also, a matter of significant importance: build your own local groups. It’s fine to have national organizations that provide leadership, but what really counts is your community. Build one. You don’t have to bow in obedience to any pope of skepticism, you know, and we biologists know that building networks from the bottom up rather than top down always produces more complex and rewarding results.

Do Texas legislators have some kind of bet on who says the dumbest thing?

I have to ask, because a Texas Republican has just argued that abortion needs to be banned because fetuses are masturbating.

As the House of Representatives gears up for Tuesday’s debate on HR 1797, a bill that would outlaw virtually all abortions 20 weeks post fertilization, Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX) argued in favor of banning abortions even earlier in pregnancy because, he said, male fetuses that age were already, shall we say, spanking the monkey.

“Watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful,” said Burgess, a former OB/GYN. “They stroke their face. If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to believe that they could feel pain?”

Hey, I watch embryonic zebrafish do all kinds of flips and kicks at an age before any of the descending motor outputs have grown into the spinal cord. Motor activity is simply not a necessary indicator of cognition.

But also, I think the good Christians of Texas ought to regard this as an argument for abortion — the sinful little self-polluters must be punished!

Amanda Marcotte politely discusses the consequences of the CFI statement

Far more politely than it deserves, anyway.

If you want an effective movement with a broad reach, this is roughly the dumbest move you could make. However, if your goal is to reinforce the public’s belief that secularism and atheism particularly is nothing but a bunch of misanthropic white guys whose only real goal is feeling superior to believers but who don’t care about making real change in the world, well job well done. And fuck you.

I really wish I could have overheard what was going on in the CFI boardroom, because while straining to avert a PR disaster, they seem to have instead launched a PR armageddon. What were they thinking?

Even if they were trying to chart the maximally inoffensive course between jagged shoals, that horribly written limp noodle of a mindless document was going to offend simply due to it’s astounding vapidity.