Templeton prayer study meets expectations

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I have no idea how this stuff gets published. I’ve been sent a new paper that tests the effect of prayer, and I was appalled: it’s got such deep methodological problems that nothing can be concluded from it, but that doesn’t stop the authors, who argue that they’re seeing that Proximal Intercessory Prayer improves vision and hearing in people in Mozambique.Proximal Intercessory Prayer (PIP) is their very own term for what they do, to distinguish it from distant prayer. What is it, you may ask? Here is their protocol.

Western and Mozambican Iris and Global Awakening [two evangelical/missionary organizations that cooperated with the research] leaders and affiliates who administered PIP all used a similar protocol. They typically spent 1-15 minutes (sometimes an hour or more, circumstances permitting) administering PIP. They placed their hands on the recipient’s head and some- times embraced the person in a hug, keeping their eyes open to observe results. In soft tones, they petitioned God to heal, invited the Holy Spirit’s anointing, and commanded healing and the departure of any evil spirits in Jesus’ name. Those who prayed then asked recipients whether they were healed. If recipients responded negatively or stated that the healing was partial, PIP was continued. If they answered in the affirmative, informal tests were conducted, such as asking recipients to repeat words or sounds (e.g. hand claps) intoned from behind or to count fingers from roughly 30 cm away. If recipients were unable or partially able to perform tasks, PIP was continued for as long as circumstances permitted.

Vision and hearing tests were carried out before and after the procedure using eye charts and an audiometer. Subjects were recruited from a self-selected population of rural Africans who were attending a charismatic/evangelical revival…that is, people who knew they would be rewarded with acclaim if they publicly demonstrated dramatic improvements in their health under the influence of a priest. This experiment did not use single-blind trials — in fact, the subjects were hammered repeatedly with the protocol until they reported that it worked for them, subjectively.

It also wasn’t double-blind. Not only were the experimenters fully aware of what treatment the subjects received, but they knew that every single subject they tested had reported a positive effect. This study was wide open to experimental bias, and given that two of the authors of the study were not medically trained at all, but were instead members of schools of theology, and that all of the work was funded by the Templeton Foundation, we can guess what answer they wanted.

Most damning of all, there were no controls.

I repeat, no controls anywhere in the experiment.

No controls, experiment not done double-blind or even single-blind, a small number (24) of subjects self-selected from a suggestible population predisposed to demonstrate an effect…this study is total crap. All it would take to get their results is a tendency for people coming in for magical healing to exaggerate their afflictions, and minimize them after a few minutes of personal attention, and presto, PIP works. And that seems like an extremely likely situation to me.

Now there could be a real physiological effect: compelling attentiveness, physical stimulation, and just generally waking people up could generate an increase in blood flow to the head, which would lead to better sensory performance — I know I wake up bleary-eyed and wooly-headed until I’ve snapped myself awake with a little cold water and some physical activity, so we also know that sensory performance varies over time. But can we determine that from this work? No! No controls! This is completely worthless work.

What’s particularly galling is that the investigators go on to suggest that maybe the suffering people in the undeveloped world could benefit from PIP.

Although it would be unwise to overgeneralize from these preliminary findings for a small number of PIP practitioners and subjects collected in far-from-ideal field conditions, future study seems warranted to assess whether PIP may be a useful adjunct to standard medical care for certain patients with auditory and/or visual impairments, especially in contexts where access to conventional treatment is limited. The implications are potentially vast given World Health Organization estimates that 278 million people, 80% of whom live in developing countries, have moderate to profound hearing loss in both ears, and 314 million people are visually impaired, 87% of whom live in developing countries, and only a tiny fraction of these populations currently receive any treatment.

No, I think those hundreds of millions of people deserve something a little more substantial than a witch-doctor dribbling oil on their heads and chanting to their Jesus juju. And no, nothing in this work can warrant further investigation.

By the way, you may wonder why they had to go to rural Mozambique to find subjects. There is no shortage of crazy preachers and gullible believers willing to be healed by magic in the US. They reveal the answer to that in an aside.

Conducting similar studies under controlled clinical conditions in North America would be desirable, yet neither Iris nor Global Awakening claims comparable results in industrialized countries (arguing that “anointing” and “faith” are lower where medical therapies are available)—see Supplemental Digital Content for our unsuccessful attempts to collect data in the US.

Ah, the incredible shrinking god — he just doesn’t work where conditions are amenable to more thorough examination. I am not surprised.

I’m also not surprised that this garbage was funded by the Templeton Foundation. It could only have been supported by an organization that places scientific rigor a distant second to making excuses for faith.

Brown CG, Mory SC, Williams R, McClymond MJ (2010) Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Proximal
Intercessory Prayer (STEPP) on Auditory and
Visual Impairments in Rural Mozambique. Southern Medical Journal, 4 August 2010.

Catholic taxonomy

The peculiarities of dietary restrictions by the religious are always entertaining. Catholics have their own weird practices: here’s a bit of strange information from a Catholic agony aunt forum.

Do alligators count as fish?
As a Catholic who observes the custom of abstaining from meat on Fridays, I would like to know if alligator would be considered meat or fish. Recently, on a Friday, I was in a local restaurant where I was sharing a dinner of alligator. I thought upon this, and decided, as a reptile, alligator would fall into the fish category. I hope I’m not sounding too scrupulous, but if it is considered meat, I will avoid it on Fridays in the future.

Uh-oh. This woman made a judgment on Catholic theology without consulting a priest. Doesn’t she know she could be getting an eternity in hell for her plate full of alligator? Fortunately, it turns out that going meatless still allows one to eat all the reptiles, amphibians, and insects you might want.

An alligator is certainly not a fish, and it certainly does have meat. But the custom of abstaining from meat on Fridays is abstinence from the flesh of mammals and birds. Fish, reptiles, amphibians, insects, etc., are exempt from this. Since an alligator is a reptile, those who abstain from meat on Fridays are free to eat alligator if they wish.

Why?

Does anybody ever just ask why these strange eating habits are a part of the doctrine? Does god like birds and mammals so much that he doesn’t want you to eat them on one day? Would he really be that pissed if you had a cheeseburger on Friday?

Ladies, you need to listen to what Christian guys tell you to wear

They’re Christian, so you can trust them to have your best interests at heart. The Modesty Survey is a bizarre instrument created by asking young Christian women to put together heartfelt questions about their clothing (“Are bikinis immodest?” “Are jeans immodest?”), and then teenaged Christian boys are surveyed to get their opinions. Because, of course, the girls need boys’ advice.

Reading through the questions is weird: they’re phrased in different ways, but one of the most common motifs is the “stumbling block”. The boys are asked to judge whether an item of clothing is something that might cause them to think wicked thoughts…so once again, the women are to blame for inciting men’s behavior by wearing tight jeans or a strapless dress.

They’re also explicit about it:

We’re not telling you what to wear — we’re just telling you what we, as guys, have to guard against. It is God’s Word, your own heart and conscience, and your parents and godly friends who should help you decide what to do about it.

What they have to guard against? They should be plainer. “We’re not telling you what to wear — we’re just listing the stuff that will justify raping you.”

I get a Taliban tingle just reading it. It’s a far more generous document than anything Islam dictates — young Christian men do not want young Christian women to wear burkas — but in principle, it’s the same thing. It’s men declaring ownership of women’s bodies and telling them what to wear, with the the threat of justifiable sexual assault if they do not obey.

It is a little disturbing, though, to see that their logo has a picture of a woman with a veil over her face.

Hey, UK! How do you reconcile these two facts?

This is a rather horrifying article about young girls reading Harry Potter one moment, and then dragged off to get their clitorises chopped off. It’s got these nasty little details like, if you pay extra, you can get the butcher to use a clean knife.

But there’s an odd disjoint here, too. It’s the UK, a modern western nation. They have laws to prohibit mangling children.

The UK Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act 1985 makes it an offence to carry out FGM or to aid, abet or procure the service of another person. The Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003, makes it against the law for FGM to be performed anywhere in the world on UK permanent residents of any age and carries a maximum sentence of 14 years imprisonment. To date, no prosecutions have been made under UK legislation.

That’s clear: a strict law and strong penalties, but no prosecutions — so it must be an effective law, right?

Wrong.

Some 500 to 2,000 British schoolgirls will be genitally mutilated over the summer holidays. Some will be taken abroad, others will be “cut” or circumcised and sewn closed here in the UK by women already living here or who are flown in and brought to “cutting parties” for a few girls at a time in a cost-saving exercise.

It’s happening right now. It seems to me that there ought to be 500-2000 arrests in the UK this year, maybe more, since they’ve got a 7 year backlog of neglected criminality.

If medical neglect of children can be a prosecutable crime here in benighted America, why isn’t the UK doing something to stop active, vicious mutilation of children?

A cult that kills in Oregon

Alayna Wyland is 7 months old, and she is suffering.

The area started swelling, and the fast-growing mass of blood vessels, known as a hemangioma, eventually caused her eye to swell shut and pushed the eyeball down and outward and started eroding the eye socket bone around the eye.

There are pictures at the link. It’s not pretty. I know if my babies had a growth that was almost the size of a tennis ball that was destroying their face, I’d have been camped out at the hospital. But not Alayna’s parents! They have a special treatment plan.

The Wylands and their church reject medical care in favor of faith-healing — anointing with oil, laying on of hands, prayer and fasting. The parents testified at a juvenile court hearing last week that they never considered getting medical attention for Alayna.

According to court documents, Rebecca Wyland anointed Alayna with oil each time she changed the girl’s diaper and wiped away the yellow discharge that seeped daily from the baby’s left eye.

There they go with the magic anointing oil again! Does that stuff do anything? If we can waste time with homeopathy, maybe it’s about time someone did some clinical trials with anointing oil and put that crap to rest (not that it would make a bit of difference…).

The Wylands are rather vile, but at least this is taking place in Oregon, where “it is a crime for parents to intentionally and knowingly withhold necessary and adequate medical attention from their children”. Alayna has been placed in state custody for treatment, and both parents have been charged with first degree criminal mistreatment.

But wait, there’s more! The father was previously married.

Wyland’s first wife, Monique, died of breast cancer in 2006. She had not sought or received medical treatment for the condition, said Dr. Christopher Young, a deputy state medical examiner who signed the death certificate.

She died of untreated breast cancer? That poor woman — that’s a hard death, an agonizing death, and often, an unnecessary death — can that entire wretched cult be indicted for torture-murder? They seem to be leaving quite a pile of dead women and children.

Because even the moderate, liberal Christians think God is more important than a dog

There are now a few more details on the story of the dog given a communion wafer: the dog’s name is Trapper, the majority of the congregation was happy to see him get a cracker, it’s just one person who complained, and now dogs have been officially excommunicated from the church. And this is exactly why I despise the so-called “moderate” Christians.

Peggy Needham, the deputy people’s warden at the church, said that no further action would be taken.

“The backlash is from just one person,” she said.

“Something happened that won’t happen again. Something our interim priest did spontaneously.

“This person went to the top and emailed our bishop to make a fuss and change things. But he misjudged our congregation.”

No, he didn’t. He got exactly what he wanted. Notice that for most people in that church the incident with the dog was heartwarming — it fit well with their charitable vision of Christianity as a welcoming, friendly institution. One person complained, one bitter, dogmatic little man, and you know exactly what arguments he used: it was disrespectful to his imaginary god, it was a departure from church-sanctioned ritual, it gave worth to a mere animal that was reserved for good Anglicans. And the church bought it.

Hundreds of people value the humane, community-centered aspect of their church, and all that gets thrown out for one little pissant who truly believes in the petty, bogus disciplines of his poisonous faith.

I’ll believe he misjudged that congregation when at the next communion, every one of them brings up a loved pet to the rail, and the priest serves every one of them. It won’t happen, though, because the fear of god now compels them to obey.

God hates dogs?

This story is nice and sad at the same time. At an Anglican church in Canada, a parishioner attended with his dog, went up to take communion and his pet followed him, and after giving the man the magic cookie, the priest placed a communion wafer on the dog’s tongue, too. Hey, he was just waiting there with his tongue hanging out, it was the most natural thing to do. Unfortunately, and entirely predictably, some prissy-pants whiner in the congregation didn’t like it.

Days later, the church and diocese received a complaint from one parishioner, who felt the church offended the sacred ritual. The bread and wine are meant to represent the body and blood of Jesus Christ and are only to be given to those who have been baptized.

It’s a cracker. Come on. I’d rather make one dog happy than please all the dogmatists in the world.

And these speculations as rationalizations annoy me.

“In his email, the man’s argument was that Christ wouldn’t have liked it,” said Needham. “But in my opinion, Christ would have thought it was neat. It was just being human. And it made everyone smile.”

Face it, your god is simply a projection of your own personality and beliefs. He isn’t there. If you like dogs, you’ll imagine that your god likes dogs; if you think noisy smelly animals are a nuisance, your god bars the gates of heaven to them.

Mel Gibson is a product of his sick ideology

Christopher Hitchens addresses the latest media meltdown by Mel Gibson. It’s great stuff; people are making all these excuses for him, that he’s not really a racist, he’s not really violent, he’s not really a misogynist, he’s not really a loathsome wackjob…but Hitchens cuts through it all.

This is extraordinary. We live in a culture where the terms fascist and racist are thrown about, if anything, too easily and too frequently. Yet here is a man whose every word and deed is easily explicable once you know the single essential thing about him: He is a member of a fascist splinter group that believes it is the salvation of the Catholic Church.

And then he follows up with damning examples from Gibson’s father and Gibson’s own actions.

It adds a fresh new perspective to all those fans of Gibson’s labor of love, The Passion, a sadistic piece of bloody anti-semitism. What Gibson rages about in (imagined) private and what he put on the screen in that movie are awfully hard to separate. One of Gibson’s most ardent defenders is right-wing Catholic kook Bill Donohue:

Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It’s not a secret, OK? And I’m not afraid to say it. That’s why they hate this movie. It’s about Jesus Christ, and it’s about truth. It’s about the messiah.

And Donohue is still flogging this line against anyone who criticizes Gibson:

[Frank] Rich is particularly angry at anyone who dares to mention the role played by secular Jews in fomenting anti-Catholicism. I am one Catholic who will not run from this charge. It is painfully obvious, that most of the anti-Catholicism that exists today comes from two major sources: ex-Catholics (and those with one foot out the door) and secular Jews.

It’s a disorder that isn’t restricted to Catholicism, though; the other recent expression of these anti-semitic views is none other than Glenn Beck.

Jesus conquered death. He wasn’t victimized. He chose to give his life. He did have a choice. If he was a victim, and this theology was true, then Jesus would have come back from the dead and made the the Jews pay for what they did.

Any day now they’ll be talking about blood libel. Isn’t it time now to stop pussy-footing around? These people are anti-semitic proto-fascists, their prejudices propped up by truly weird religious beliefs.

Stop the Stoning of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani

If you do nothing else. Please take a moment and sign the Petition.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/stop…
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/s…

Contact information for e-mailing the White house.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

And the President of Iran
http://cp.president.ir/en/

His e-mail (possibly)
[email protected]
http://www.siawi.org/article882.html

And some other details that might help
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/s…
Currently there are only 427 signatures on this site. I am sure there are other Petitions out there. I think making people aware is the most important thing. That and voicing our condemnation of this sentence.

This woman needs to be released.