Feeding the fame whore a little more

Scott Adams once again demonstrates his pointy-headed stupidity with an appallingly irrational rationalization of his sock puppetry. He’s got some new excuses, I will give him that.

Guess what, he may have been naughty, but at least he’s not a mass murderer.

On the scale of immoral behavior, where genocide is at the top, and wearing Spanx is near the bottom, posting comments under an alias to clear up harmful misconceptions is about one level worse than Spanx.

Great. So if ever I’m caught kicking a puppy or lying on the internet, all I need to do is explain that I didn’t kill six million Jews, so you can all forgive me. Of course, I don’t think anyone accused Adams of genocide or suggested that he needed to be locked up for life like a Hannibal Lecter, so that’s all rather irrelevant.

His other excuse is that he needed to create a sock puppet to correct misinformation about himself.

The messenger with a strong self-interest is automatically non-credible, and should be. There are some types of information that can only be communicated by an unbiased messenger. And the most unbiased messenger in the world is one that is imaginary, such as my invisible friend, PlannedChaos.

There is no such thing as an unbiased messenger, but we can still value independent input. The problem with a sock puppet is that it is an effort to create an illusion of independence and less bias, but we know it isn’t — that is, we know it if we’re a little smarter than Scott Adams. PlannedChaos, his pseudonym, is even less trustworthy and credible than Scott Adams himself because PlannedChaos has the same biases as Scott Adams, but is unconstrained by the consequences to his reputation.

Not that Adams seems particularly concerned about his reputation anyway—I think he has fully embraced his inner douchebag and is now simply happy to get people to look at him.

Can prayer help surgery?

The American Journal of Surgery has published a transcript of a presidential address titled, “Can prayer help surgery?“, and my first thought was that that was absolutely brilliant — some guy was roped into giving a big speech at a convention, and he picked a topic where he could stand up, say “NO,” and sit back down again. If he wanted to wax eloquent, maybe he could add a “Don’t be silly” to his one word address.

But a reader sent me a copy of this paper, and I was wrong. The author spent four pages saying “Yes”. It flies off to cloud cuckoo land in the very first sentence, which compares prayer to “chemotherapy and radiation as adjuvant therapies to surgery, working synergistically to cure cancers”, and then justifies it by pointing out that patients do internet searches for alternatives to surgery, and prayer is a popular result. So, right there in the first paragraph, we get the Argument from Extravagant Assertion and the Argument from Google. It’s not a good start.

This was given at a professional conference, though, so he has to talk about the data, and this is where it starts getting funny. He explains that there sure have been a lot of prayer studies lately, 855 in the past 15 years, and with 46 prospective randomized series in the Cochrane database, which he summarizes succinctly:

Equal healing benefit has been demonstrated whether the prayer is Hindu or Buddhist, Catholic or Protestant, Jewish or Muslim.

That’s the way to spin the data into something positive. Unfortunately, this is the happy peak of his foray into actually looking at the data, putting a cheerful universalist twist on the actual results, which he later grudgingly admits are non-existent. When they all show no benefit, that is equal benefit, after all.

Can medical science prove the benefit of prayer to im- prove the result of an operation? I refer you to the latest Cochrane review on this topic.5 This 69-page manuscript is a meta-analysis of 10 prospective randomized studies on intercessory prayer to help the efforts of modern medicine involving over 7,000 patients. Some studies in this meta- analysis showed benefit, while others did not. The conclusion of the authors was that there is no indisputable proof that intercessory prayer lowers surgical complications or improves mortality rates.

That’s the point where he should have stopped and stood down. The science has answered his question, and the answer is no. Unfortunately, this admission is at the top of page two, and he’s going to go on and on. He rants that the studies all basically suck — there can’t be good controls, people would pray for themselves, they didn’t check how devout the prayers were, and of course, that most excellent catch-all refutation, “What happens when the outcome being prayed for is not in accord with the will of God?”

The paper can be summarized so far as an argument that prayer helps because there have been a lot of studies on it, and those studies all show equal benefit, but that benefit is zero, and the studies are all bad science. How can his thesis be saved? Oh, I know: needs more anecdotes.

There is no indisputable proof that prayer can aid in healing. Those who believe do so by faith alone. I’ve seen the power of prayer work together with surgery many times firsthand. An example of this was witnessing my father-in-law miraculously survive an aortic arch dissection, outliving his surgeon by 20 years.

Wait, what? The family prayed, a skilled surgeon saved the patient, so prayer works? And also, from this one story, shouldn’t we just as reasonably conclude that prayer kills surgeons?

The rest of the paper is empty noise about how many patients want to pray and how it makes them feel better emotionally, and how the author is wonderfully open and supportive in praying with his patients. Meandering over the field of anecdote and citing his patients’ wishful thinking does not rescue his premise from the pit of rejection, I’m afraid; the only accurate answer to the question of whether prayer helps in surgery is “No, but people like to think it does.” It certainly doesn’t justify the author’s conclusion.

So, have I answered the question, “Can prayer help surgery?” While there is not conclusive scientific proof that prayer improves surgical outcomes, it certainly can help
relax an anxious preoperative patient and may help enhance the relationship between patient and surgeon. A surgeon must be comfortable with prayer to offer it. Professionalism can be maintained provided the prayer is offered in a non- confrontational manner and reflects the spirituality of the patient. Surgeons who want the best for their patients need to utilize every tool available, and to quote one of my patients, “Prayer is a powerful tool.”

Nah. Let me add a better quote: “The author is a powerful fool.” If he actually escaped unscathed from this address without being splattered by flung rubber chicken and puddin’ cups, my opinion of surgeons will be shattered.

Schroder DM (2011) Presidential Address: Can prayer help surgery? The American Journal of Surgery 201:275-278

I get email

This one is from Bad Pitt. Read it while keeping in mind that we atheists are the ones called militant extremists…while good Judeo-Christian lunatics have these sick, psychopathic, violent fantasies of murder and execution.

GLORIOUS BASTERDS

Inglorious Basterds is a Jewish psycho-fantasy based on the delusional notion of retroactive vengeance against Nazi forces in France at the end of World War II. It is an artful, but ultimately pointless, exercise in orgiastic gratuitous violence. The only redeeming value of this film is:

(1) The not so subtle encouragement of the viewing audience not to take contemporary evils lightly and to act before it is too late to avert their tragic consequences.

(2) The possible equation of suave and sophisticated Nazi SS officers with intellectual and academic elites in our own American society of the 21st century.

Thus I would like to propose a sequel to this film: Inglorious Basterds II, or more properly Glorious Basterds.

This would project the urbane and intellectual SS officers onto the modern American academic milieu, specifically the Darwinian Evolutionists, whose scheme is irrational, illogical, and with many destructive consequences for society at large.

Thus this is the delicious scenario I would like to see Quentin Tarantino render into a sequel:

Brad Pitt leads his gang of Jewish vengeance seekers (along with a couple of idealistic Gentiles) onto a modern American college campus. There they lay siege to the Department of Biological Sciences. They round up all the faculty members inside a large meeting room where they place them under armed guard and lock all doors and windows.

Then they order the department chairman to recite a script over the phone to FOX or CNN. The script would read thus:

To Members of the American Mass Media,

We professors of Biological Science at the University of ___________ are being held hostage by a band of spiritual fanatics who condemn us for disseminating anti-spiritual falsehoods and irrational myths disguised under the cloak of scientific respectability called Darwinist Evolution. These falsehoods, our captors maintain, have harmed the hearts, minds, and souls of countless numbers of American youth and have poisoned the entire culture at large against the reality of the Creator God depicted in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. We are being judged as destroyers of society and traitors to America, whose Declaration of Independence clearly speaks of a Divine Creator. We have been given two options: to publically renounce our fraudulent evolutionist views and to live, or to stubbornly maintain these views and to die. We have one hour to decide our fates.

Then Brad Pitt randomly selects one of the faculty members to be shot and killed instantly, in an act of “natural de-selection”, just to demonstrate his determination. Suspense builds as the faculty members desperately seek ways to avoid further acts of “natural de-selection” as they recognize that they are faced with a choice of admitting their lives have been dedicated to disseminating a vile lie or to dying for what they know to be a complete deception. The professors attempt to engage in various philosophical and scientific arguments to dissuade the Basterds from their course of vengeance, and every so often the Basterds lose patience with their convoluted reasoning and randomly shoot and kill an academic offender.

In the end the surviving faculty members take a vote and decide to renounce Darwinism rather than their lives. Brad Pitt then tells them that though they have chosen wisely, they cannot get off so lightly and he proceeds to carve into their foreheads a large D to identify them wherever they go as former Darwinists who endeavored to destroy the fabric of American society with their anti-intellectual and God-hating ideas. And then he says: “I never realized that Nazis could come in any size, shape, color, nationality, or profession! Who would have dreamed that many of America’s own intellectual elites would turn out to be Nazis too?!”

The malignant Jack Cashill

Perhaps you have no idea who Jack Cashill is — he’s not a person of great consequence, but he is representative of the deranged right. I first ran across him as a creationist activist, which tells you right there that he’s a few bushels short of a hogshead. He was featured on A Flock of Dodos as the fervent but somehow, supposedly, reasonable political voice of creationism. He didn’t have two heads, he didn’t tie anyone to a stake and set them on fire, so by golly, he must not be that bad a fellow…which is an interesting phenomenon, that we so readily set aside significant intellectual differences when we humanize our opponents.

But Jack Cashill has gone on to grander and ever more insane things. He’s a regular contributor to Wingnut Daily, that awful online rag of credulous far right wing pseudojournalism, and he authors the kinds of dishonest hackwork that Teabaggers drool over. His latest effort is penning paranoid conspiracy theory books about Obama, and he’s in the news right now for an absurdly bad photoshop job: he or his sources edited a photo of Obama with his grandparents, snipping Obama out of the picture and then claiming that the photo of the three of them had been the real photoshop job. Too bad their hackwork was so awful that they managed to leave Obama’s knee in their so-called ‘original’ photo.

And now, hilariously, Joseph Farah, the kook who publishes WND, has openly admitted that they “publish some misinformation by columnists”, referring to Cashill.

I knew he was bad from the start. It ought to be a gigantic red flag on anyone’s credibility when they are peddling the kind of intellectual dishonesty that we see in creationism, and it’s no surprise when liars of that sort metastasize into politics.

Sadventists, badventists

This afternoon, a couple of smiling, glassy-eyed young ladies stopped by my house to talk about Jesus. I was delighted, but I made the mistake of telling them up front that I was an atheist, and didn’t believe in their religion…and they backed away slowly, said “goodbye!”, and scurried away. It’s so hard to bait the trap when you insist on using honesty.

Anyway, I did get a little online satisfaction reading this great ferocious rant about Seventh Day Adventists.

The Seventh-day Adventist cult’s “prophet” and founder, the alcoholic, masturbation-obsessed habitual plagiarist Ellen G. White, was astonishingly fanatical and legalistic, and let’s face it, folks, crazier than a bag of wet cats. At the age of nine, Ellen was hit in the head with a rock, which resulted in her being comatose for three weeks. Many think this trauma damaged her brain in ways that could have caused her extreme zealotry — I prefer to call it religious lunacy — which involved what she claimed were visions shown her by god, visitations by angels, and even a trip to Jupiter. Others think she was a calculating, greedy, power-hungry fraud. Some think she was a combination of both. Then there are the Sadventists, who believe even today in 2011 — despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary, all of which is poorly explained away by the cult, although the explanations are good enough for the believers — that she was a true prophet of god whose writings were divinely inspired and remain an infallible supplement to the word of god. The cult holds Ellen in the same regard as the biblical prophets (something else they deny vehemently to outsiders but acknowledge within the invisible walls that surround the cult). Over the years, there have been endless revisions and changes made in Ellen’s writings by the Sadventist Powers That Be to cover up some of her more embarrassing statements or obvious errors, which seems odd if her infallible writings are divinely inspired. Nevertheless, nearly a century after her death, Ellen’s writings are still the arbiter of doctrine and scriptural interpretation in the cult.

The really fascinating thing about Ellen White is that most other Christians consider her and her cult heretical — the whole thing about a wild-eyed prophetess declaring a privileged status with God and Jesus and witnessing miracles doesn’t sit well with all the other wild-eyed fundamentalists and evangelicals who declare that they have a special relationship with divinity. And yet the modern young earth creationists, the kooks who trace their interpretation of the Bible and our origins to Whitcombe and Morris’s The Genesis Flood, are actually promoting Ellen White’s version of the creation story. Ron Numbers has traced it all back in his book, The Creationists, and basically what Ken Ham and the Hovind’s are pushing is Seventh-Day Adventist doctrine, sanitized of any mention of the crazy Millerite lady from Maine.

True Americans will enforce One True Way of thinking

Bryan Fischer (if you know the name, you know lunacy will soon follow) has a plan.

Allowing Muslims to immigrate into the United States, a Christian nation by origin, history and tradition, without insisting that they drop their allegiance to Allah, Muhammad, the Qur’an, and sharia law, is to commit cultural suicide. We believe in freedom of religion for Muslims like we do for everybody else. But if they insist on clinging to their religion, they will need to exercise their freedom of religion in a Muslim country which shares their values: death for those who leave Islam, the beating of wives by their husbands, and the labeling of Jews as apes and pigs.

It’s a very incomplete plan, though, and I have a few questions.

What about those who convert to Islam once they’re in America, or those Muslims who already reside here? And what about those of us who are non-Christians? Will we have an American Expulsion?

I understand Mr Fischer isn’t asking for the death penalty for those who leave Christianity (yet). I will assume he isn’t going to regard apostasy as a crime, then. If a majority of Americans leave Christianity — something that could happen in our lifetimes — will this still be a Christian nation?

It’s nice to take a stand against wife-beating and racism. Say, have you noticed that a lot of Christians do both?

Mike Huckabee recently suggested that every young American ought to be required to listen to every David Barton (you know, the liar and fraud who makes up stories of American history) speech at gunpoint. Have you considered, as an intermediate step, simply requiring listening to 24 hours of continuous David Barton fabulisms, at gunpoint, for all immigrants to this country? It would probably scare all of them away.

Faitheist wins Templeton prize

Another year goes by, and yet again the Templetonians have failed to throw a million pounds at me. I feel the same way I do when they announce the Powerball lottery winners and my ticket isn’t among the winners — of course, I never buy lottery tickets anyway, but that just makes the analogy even more perfect. The word for the seething emotional and intellectual turmoil I’m feeling right now is…”meh.”

So this year the Templeton Foundation has made the cunning decision to suborn somebody already sympathetic to their cause and with a respectable scientific reputation: an astronomer who doesn’t believe in any gods but does suck up to the church and who detests vocal atheists. I do love how he sneers at Stephen Hawking for knowing “little philosophy and less theology,” and then when discussing his own philosophy of supporting the church, he says he likes the architecture of cathedrals and the hymns. Yeah, there’s a deep thinker. I read the interview; it’s like a conversation with a soggy piece of toast.

Now he’s a rich slice of soggy toast. Mediocrity pays!

Jerry Coyne has a nice piece in the Guardian on the award.

It was awfully nice of him not to demand my immediate arrest

R. Joseph Hoffmann really doesn’t get it. He’s written an article that is basically doing nothing but decrying blasphemy on some very strange grounds: that it’s stupid and pointless and cowardly. He also compares me and the desecration of a cracker with Terry Jones and the burning of a Koran that led to riots in Afghanistan, differentiating between the two of us in that I was just a petty grandstander, while Terry Jones’ intent was to purposely fire up Muslims into violence, and therefore Terry Jones “needs to be charged with and convicted of murder”.

Well. I guess the trial would be only a token formality if Hoffmann had his way — he’s calling for a conviction already.

I am put in a weird position. The purpose of his essay is to contrast Myers and Jones: I am merely a stupid, shallow showman, while Jones is an actively evil thug, and therefore, Myers can be dismissed while Jones must be arrested for murder. I suppose I should be grateful that I’m not going to have charges brought up against me, but again, Hoffmann misses the point.

Let us grant Mr Hoffmann the full weight of his characterization. Imagine (it’s easy if you try) that I’m some capering fool, posturing annoyingly from my remote, secure, isolated fastness in the godless fortress of Morris, Minnesota, surrounded by 5000 atheist fanatics (I shall call them…my athassins!). I am completely safe, since there isn’t a single religious person anywhere in Minnesota who has any clout with the university board of trustees or the local gun club, and I am free to give religion the raspberry, which I do. Let us also assume that Terry Jones is a brilliant evil mastermind who has devised a nefarious plan to destroy the entire Muslim world with an elaborate sympathetic magic ritual in Florida, inflaming the passions of devout Muslims far beyond anything mere Predator drones and bombs can do, and setting them to commit an orgy of violence which, so far, seems to mainly have led to the death of UN peacekeeping forces, rather than any Muslims.

So yes, let us assume that we are both, in different ways, malign feces-flinging subhumans, a clown and a monster.

In what way does this rationalize the Catholic and Muslim reactions? Hoffmann is straining mightily to turn all the focus on a jerk and a hate-monger, while neglecting the actual results of religion’s actions: that some people are so dedicated to their delusional superstitions that they will threaten or even commit violence at slight provocation. We live in a world where some Catholics will froth at the mouth and send death-threats and call for people to be fired over insults to a scrap of magic, holy bread; we live in a world where some Muslims will kill random people if someone insults their magic, holy book. That ought to be recognized as the real problem and a call for more criticism, not less, of religion, yet what is Hoffmann’s desired solution? Lock up the transgressor in Florida for the murders in Afghanistan.

I don’t much like Terry Jones — he’s just another religious fanatic — but it seems rather illiberal and self-destructive to start imprisoning critics of religion because ignorant mobs might indulge in religiously-motivated violence in response. Personally, Hoffmann has left me off the hook this time, but that could change: if an outraged Catholic had retaliated against my cracker offense by shooting a nearby Unitarian, Hoffmann-logic would make me guilty of murder. In a world ruled by Hoffmann-logic, martyrs for the faith would get a two-fer: kill an atheist, and then blame another atheist for incitement. And then, as a bonus, the killer’s actions would be excused as justifiable homicide.

What?

Newt Gingrich is thinking about running for president, and has predicted the future:

I have two grandchildren: Maggie is 11; Robert is 9. I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they’re my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.

The next election is going to be hilarious, except for the painful face-palming.