Australian poll needs your help

I knew it would come to this. There’s been long-running contention over the government-sponsored chaplaincy programs in Australia — those crazy mad independent godless Aussies actually pay good money to have these goofy Christian wankers sit in their public schools and provide…heck, I don’t know what. But now it has suddenly and justifiable led to public outrage because the chief executive for one of the cults that provides chaplains has openly stated that Christians from other countries envy the access their proselytizers have to public school kids, and has bragged about converting kids.

In Australia, we have a God-given open door to children and young people with the Gospel, our federal and state governments allow us to take the Christian faith into our schools and share it. We need to go and make disciples.

Australians, what did you think this whole chaplaincy business was about? Of course it’s been about converting children.

And now The Age is running a poll on the subject, and although the results are going in the right direction, they clearly need some help from the international community. Go forth and adjust the poll to be more realistic.

Do you support religion in schools programs?

Yes

42%
No

58%

For your end-of-the-world planning…

Salon has a tidy summary of the end-of-the-world claims of Harold Camping.

On May 21, “starting in the Pacific Rim at around the 6 p.m. local time hour, in each time zone, there will be a great earthquake, such as has never been in the history of the Earth,” he says. The true Christian believers — he hopes he’s one of them — will be “raptured”: They’ll fly upward to heaven. And for the rest?

“It’s just the horror of horror stories,” he says, “and on top of all that, there’s no more salvation at that point. And then the Bible says it will be 153 days later that the entire universe and planet Earth will be destroyed forever.”

There you have it: plan your parties for next week at 6pm in your local time zone (how convenient!). You can all count down to the great big 6pm earthquake, and brace yourselves and your drinks just before it hits.

I’ll be hanging out with Jamie Kilstein just before our event at the Washington DC CFI. I’ll have the iPad with me, ready to blog about all the Republicans zooming up into the sky. I’ll be sure to mention any unusual signs and portents on Twitter (hashtag: #RAPTURE) as I stand in the heart of Babylon during the big show.

Obstinate and oblivious

This past weekend, I was feebly confronted by a Canadian creationist, David Buckna, with a list of his objections to evolution. I spent a fair amount of time trying to hammer him with the answers, and the most remarkable thing was that every time we’d start digging into a topic, he’d suddenly change subjects to another item on his list, and then, later, he’d switch back to the original topic at the very beginning of his harangue, as if I’d never said anything. And now he’s pestering me in email, sending me more quotes (that’s all he’s got — no thoughts, just quotes) and rehashing pointlessly the same things I explained to him before.

I thought of him when someone sent me a link to Dare2Share Ministries. It’s an evangelical site that supposedly teaches you how to argue with people of different beliefs. I believe I may have run into some of their zombies before.

Take, for instance, the section on how to convert Erin the Evolutionist. The first part is a section describing what Erin believes about evolution, god, the trinity, Jesus, the bible, the afterlife, and salvation — and oh, wondrous world, it actually gets it right. Erin thinks the Bible is a collection of myths, and doesn’t believe in any of those other things.

Then the second part is supposed to be about how a good Christian would handle each of those topics in a conversation, and there’s where it all goes wrong. Every entry on god, Jesus, etc. simply cites the Bible’s claims. That’s it. Somehow, they nominally recognize that we don’t accept the authority of the Bible, but their bot-like brains can only react with Bible verses. This isn’t a tactical guide to openly discussing ideas, it’s a regurgitation game that can only produce more mindless Bucknas.

And then they have suggestions for ideas to break through those Evolutionists sciencey minds.

For example, the earth is the perfect distance from the sun. If it were just a few miles closer, we’d all burn up. A few miles further out, and we’d all freeze to death!

They also suggest trying “Paschal’s [sic] Wager” on ’em. Or this:

If they ask questions like: “how do you know which God?” — focus on the claims of Christ as being the only way and his proving it by coming back from the dead.

I’m not impressed. Anyone following the suggestions at Dare2Share is simply going to flop there looking dead stupid. Is this a sneaky game by some clever atheist trying to sabotage evangelicals?

Wait, I thought they believed in an absolute morality?

It’s always interesting when some god-walloper honestly follows through on the logical implications of his beliefs — he basically is compelled to admit that if you worship a tyrannical monster, you have to end up rationalizing monstrous tyrannies. The latest to enlighten us with excuses for bronze age barbarisms and brutalities is William Lane Craig, who thinks that tales from the Bible of God’s Chosen People slaughtering babies is A-OK:

Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation. We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy. Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives.

Therefore, if I station myself outside a church door with an AK-47 and murder all the happy saved Christians exiting the service, I am doing the Lord’s work. Well, gosh, Willie, not only do I get to be a mass-murderer for fun, I can be self-righteous about it, too! It’s too bad I’m one of those atheists who doesn’t believe in a Happy Fun Land for the dead, so I can’t honestly do that in good conscience.

I will be interested to see if Craig now has a Christian perspective on abortion, that is, that it is a process that releases blameless innocents to heaven’s incomparable joy, and is therefore to be encouraged.

But you know who was really suffering when soldiers rampaged through a village, smashing babies’ heads against walls and raping the women and stabbing them to death afterwards? Not the women and children, oh no. Think of the rapists and murderers!

So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgement. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged? Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalizing effect on these Israeli soldiers is disturbing.

No. No, I can’t imagine that. I can imagine parts of it: I can imagine a long, heavy piece of sharp metal in my hands. I can imagine a frightened, unarmed woman in front of me, trying to shelter her children. The part I can’t imagine, the stuff I’m having real trouble with, is imagining voluntarily raising my hand and hacking them to death. I have a choice in that situation, and I know myself well enough that if have to choose between killing people and letting them live, I’d let them live, not that it would be a difficult decision at all. I also have no illusion that, in this imaginary situation where I have all the power and my ‘enemies’ are weak and helpless, I am the one who is being wronged.

I also tried imagining myself with a nasty cruel weapon standing before a cowering William Lane Craig. Nope, still doesn’t work; I’d set the blade aside. Except in this case I’d take a great more care to make sure Craig couldn’t get his hands on it — I don’t trust that amoral bastard.

Greta Christina makes a very good point about this. I don’t think William Lane Craig is an intrinsically evil human being. But this is a case where it is clear that religion is a tool that allows good people to bypass decent moral positions and find justification to do evil.

There is no case for Hell

I cannot imagine being Ross Douthat. There’s just something so bizarre and twisted in his brain that I cannot empathize at all with his point of view — it’s a brain in which all the proteins have been crosslinked by the fixative of religion. Now he’s arguing that Hell must exist.

As our lives have grown longer and more comfortable, our sense of outrage at human suffering — its scope, and its apparent randomness — has grown sharper as well. The argument that a good deity couldn’t have made a world so rife with cruelty is a staple of atheist polemic, and every natural disaster inspires a round of soul-searching over how to reconcile with God’s omnipotence with human anguish.

These debates ensure that earthly infernos get all the press.

Wait. There might be another factor here, you know. How many unearthly infernos have occurred, and how would we get news about them? Douthat is unhappy that all we hear about is mere “ordinary” infernos like the Holocaust and disasters in Haiti, and we’re all worked up about those, but hey, what about the Queekwan Rebellion on Fomalhaut VII, or the outcome of the theological debate on the nature of ectoplasmosis in Heaven’s sixth ward? Why aren’t the newspapers making a big deal about those catastrophes, huh?

This is just weird enough to discombobulate me already, but where he loses me is where he thinks the omission of supernatural news from beyond is a very bad thing.

Doing away with hell, then, is a natural way for pastors and theologians to make their God seem more humane. The problem is that this move also threatens to make human life less fully human.

So we’re less human because we care far more about real human catastrophes than we do about lobstermen in outer space or archangel celebrity gossip? This does not follow. This does not make sense.

There’s also a peculiarly inverted perspective on the issue. Douthat argues that Hell must exist because we wish it to exist, to create a particular desirable environment to shape humanity’s moral development.

As Anthony Esolen writes, in the introduction to his translation of Dante’s “Inferno,” the idea of hell is crucial to Western humanism. It’s a way of asserting that “things have meaning” — that earthly life is more than just a series of unimportant events, and that “the use of one man’s free will, at one moment, can mean life or death … salvation or damnation.”

No, no, no. This is so backwards. That he wishes something to be so does not mean it must exist; it is so primitively theological to argue that “X exists because it should” rather than “X exists because there is evidence for it”. But worse, there it is again, the diminution of the real for the fantasies of his poor imagination.

The birth of my children was not an unimportant event to me. It is not humanism to look down on a wonderful, human event like two people joining together to produce a child and declare it meaningless unless we’re also dwelling on an existential horror invented by self-serving priestly parasites. I could see important choices on the horizon, real-world responsibilities and actions, that would make a huge difference in the lives of myself, my wife, and my kids, and I don’t need imaginary goads to motivate me.

So confused is Douthat about what is real and imaginary that he chooses to end his little essay with a ‘difficult’ theological question that is…well, you have to see it to believe it.

Is Gandhi in hell? It’s a question that should puncture religious chauvinism and unsettle fundamentalists of every stripe. But there’s a question that should be asked in turn: Is Tony Soprano really in heaven?

No. Not only does heaven not exist, but Tony Soprano is a fictional character who did not really exist in the first place.

Also, about Gandhi? He’s dead. He has ceased to exist. He’s not anywhere anymore.

These are not difficult questions, unless your brain has been addled by religious damage.

Jerry Coyne’s open letter

Go read Open letter to the NCSE and BCSE. Or read it here:

Dear comrades:

Although we may diverge in our philosophies and actions toward religion, we share a common goal: the promulgation of good science education in Britain and America–indeed, throughout the world. Many of us, like myself and Richard Dawkins, spend a lot of time teaching evolution to the general public. There’s little doubt, in fact, that Dawkins is the preeminent teacher of evolution in the world. He has not only turned many people on to modern evolutionary biology, but has converted many evolution-deniers (most of them religious) to evolution-accepters.

Nevertheless, your employees, present and former, have chosen to spend much of their time battling not creationists, but evolutionists who happen to be atheists. This apparently comes from your idea that if evolutionists also espouse atheism, it will hurt the cause of science education and turn people away from evolution. I think this is misguided for several reasons, including a complete lack of evidence that your idea is true, but also your apparent failure to recognize that creationism is a symptom of religion (and not just fundamentalist religion), and will be with us until faith disappears. That is one reason–and, given the pernicious effect of religion, a minor one–for the fact that we choose to fight on both fronts.

The official policy of your organizations–certainly of the NCSE–is apparently to cozy up to religion. You have “faith projects,” you constantly tell us to shut up about religion, and you even espouse a kind of theology which claims that faith and science are compatible. Clearly you are going to continue with these activities, for you’ve done nothing to change them in the face of criticism. And your employees, past and present, will continue to heap invective on New Atheists and tar people like Richard Dawkins with undeserved opprobrium.

We will continue to answer the misguided attacks by people like Josh Rosenau, Roger Stanyard, and Nick Matzke so long as they keep mounting those attacks. I don’t expect them to abate, but I’d like your organizations to recognize this: you have lost many allies, including some prominent ones, in your attacks on atheism. And I doubt that those attacks have converted many Christians or Muslims to the cause of evolution. This is a shame, because we all recognize that the NCSE has done some great things in the past and, I hope, will–like the new BCSE–continue do great things in the future.

There is a double irony in this situation. First, your repeated and strong accusations that, by criticizing religion, atheists are alienating our pro-evolution allies (liberal Christians), has precisely the same alienating effect on your allies: scientists who are atheists. Second, your assertion that only you have the requisite communication skills to promote evolution is belied by the observation that you have, by your own ham-handed communications, alienated many people who are on the side of good science and evolution. You have lost your natural allies. And this is not just speculation, for those allies were us, and we’re telling you so.

Sincerely,
Jerry Coyne

Richard Dawkins has also commented on it.

I really feel that the NCSE has lost its way on this issue. I want to support the NCSE, but it has become increasingly hard to do. I have heard these arguments over and over again that they have to coddle religious believers because they need them to support science. They don’t. As we’ve said repeatedly, we aren’t asking that the NCSE give atheists even as much support as they do the religious: imagine if they had “atheist projects” or an “atheist coordinator”—there’d be rejection from the Christian community. We’re not stupid, and we know that the NCSE has a delicate political game to play as well, so all we ask is that the organization we’d like to support should be genuinely secular, and stay entirely out of the religion/atheism argument. It’s what they say they’re doing, but it’s not what they’re doing. And the hypocrisy is corrupting.

Nothing will change in what atheist scientists are doing. We will continue to support science and science education, but that doesn’t mean we will feel obligated to support the NCSE.

It’s funny. The organization has such a finely tuned political sense and diplomatic strategy to promote science to the whole of the United States, and have managed to profoundly alienate that segment of our society that is most dedicated to promoting science. That’s quite an accomplishment. Maybe we should stop supporting them because they’re that incompetent at the political side of their mission.

Christian barbarians

The destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban was a clear example of the destructive power of religious intolerance — it takes a religious mind to turn the demolition of art into a virtue. Now we have another example of extremism attacking art: Catholic fundamentalists in France have destroyed Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ.

On Saturday, around 1,000 Christian protesters marched through Avignon to the gallery. The protest group included a regional councillor for the extreme-right Front National, which recently scored well in the Vaucluse area in local elections. The gallery immediately stepped up security, putting plexiglass in front of the photograph and assigning two gallery guards to stand in front of it.

But on Palm Sunday morning, four people in sunglasses aged between 18 and 25 entered the exhibition just after it opened at 11am. One took a hammer out of his sock and threatened the guards with it. A guard grabbed another man around the waist but within seconds the group managed to take a hammer to the plexiglass screen and slash the photograph with another sharp object, thought to be a screwdriver or ice-pick. They also smashed another work, which showed the hands of a meditating nun.

I don’t want to hear another word from Catholics about my destruction of a mass-produced cracker. Their extremists use violence and the destruction of private property to deface a work of art in a museum.

It’s not even a particularly anti-religious work — that luminous golden glow is as reverential as the bloody, gory, suffering Christ figures mounted in Catholic churches all around the world.

i-fa3fdc6435bd30ca77f694ac633ad519-pisschrist.jpeg

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 nice and short, and for a change, I’m willing to be…accommodating.

Please respect ALL religions equally. You are being prejudiced if you continue this disrespect of the Catholic religion.

My correspondent has persuaded me. I will respect ALL religions equally from now on.

To poop on!