Crème de la Chick

The latest Chick tract is a wonderful summary of modern fundamentalism. It’s got all the totally non-Biblical dogma: the anti-christ will be appointed pope, the Rapture, the weirdly fabulous Wedding of Jesus with his Church (everyone gets crowns!), Armageddon, the mark of the beast…it’s all in this one. Also, raging anti-Catholicism. Cute ending, too.

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After reading everything that comes before, Delores’ “He’s nuts” is just perfect. If I were in a conversation with a fundy, and he suddenly vanished in a clap of thunder, I wouldn’t freak out, though: I’d applaud.

Faith is a choice made without concern for the truth

Harriet Baber is a philosopher, and I say that with the most sneeringly disparaging tone I can muster. I don’t normally dislike philosophy, but there are a lot of philosophers I detest, and Baber exemplifies why. She has a remarkable article in The Guardian in which she says a series of astonishing things — which is often one of the good things philosophers do, surprising me with weird ideas that make me think. In this case, though, she makes some stupid pronouncements, doesn’t explain why she thinks she’s making a good argument, and then thoroughly undercuts her own credibility.

She starts by announcing that she’s a Christian who arrived at that idea via Pascal’s Wager. I know Pascal was a brilliant fellow, but his wager is bollocks — it’s built on the premise of the unreliability of reason and the deficiencies of evidence, reducing our choices to desperate gambles, where we make decisions only on the basis of the desirability of outcomes — a strategy, by the way, that makes casinos rich and gamblers paupers. Accepting Pascal’s Wager is admitting the defeat of reason, a very peculiar position for a philosopher.

But then Baber says something really bizarre, that actually does explain why she falls for the Wager. She declares that the truth is overrated.

People in any case overestimate the value of truth and underestimate the difficulty of arriving at it. There are a great many truths in which I have abolutely no interest – truths about the lifecycle of Ctenocephalides felis, (the common cat flea) or the extensive body of truths about the condition of my teeth that my dentist imposes on me. I see no reason why I should bother with these truths or make a point of believing them.

This is actually a consistent position with her appreciation of Pascal’s Wager, but she’s also sawing off the limb she’s standing on. Why should I care what she says when she admits the truth is unimportant to her? The title of her article is “My faith is an informed choice” (I’ve chosen to retitle her article more accurately for this post) — what does “informed” mean when you’ve confessed that truth is irrelevant and information is not to be bothered with? And what kind of scholar dismisses curiosity about the world with such casual contempt?

Although she did get me wondering about one thing, which is a virtue of fools: I wonder how much misery and death has been caused by dental disease in human history? I suspect that it has been a significant player, but I don’t have any sources of information on that — but there must be a forensic anthropologist or two out there who has some idea.

Oh, wait, sorry — curiosity, an interest in the evidence and the truth, and an expectation that truths about the condition of people’s teeth actually matter assumes that the truth actually does matter. Forgive me.

(The gang at Ophelia Benson’s place are also discussing this strange article.)

Shopping for gods

I have to call shenanigans on this cartoon:

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It left out Mormonism. And since Mormonism is halfway between $cientology and Christianity, given the principle that the right answer is always the one in the middle, she would have found the Mormons just right.

I think that’s right, anyway. People keep telling me that we have to flee from the extremes, i.e. Fundamentalism and that horrible rational evidence-based thinking, to find contentment in the median, i.e. soppy sloppy casual Jesusology. So how can the protagonist of this story actually find happiness in the flaming extremism of science-worshipping godlessness?

NPR is a faith-based organization

I blame Barbara Bradley Hagerty — or at least, she is the face of religious inanity at NPR. She has a new piece up titled Christian Academics Cite Hostility On Campus, and does she have any evidence for this claim? None at all. Actually, she has evidence contradicting the claim.

There are two parts to the story. The first is someone who is fast becoming a usual suspect, Elaine Howard Ecklund, the person who studied faith among academics and was surprisingly surprised to discover that, golly gee whiz, nearly half go to church! This is a fact that is only news if you’ve bought into the biased view that academics are a monolithic bunch who are not only all atheists, but are also all communists, hippies, and Democrats. How the fact that a very significant minority of academics are religious argues that Christianity is oppressed on campus is a mystery.

So she moves on to pointing out that most of the religious academics are quiet about it; there’s a serious shortage of proselytizing evangelicals on the faculty. This, too, is a mystery to Ecklund, but shouldn’t be. Academics tend to be smart people. Evangelical/Charismatic/Fundamentalist religions are stupid. Figure it out.

Ecklund is also annoying because she is constantly harping on her thesis that higher education doesn’t erode faith, when the proper way to look at her data is to notice that more than half are freethinkers.

If you thought that was feeble, wait until you see the second part. They had to go looking for an evangelical Christian who has suffered discrimination for his faith, and who did they get? Mike S. Adams. That’s the most horrendous example of religious discrimination they could find? A far right lunatic who was tenured at his university but failed in his attempt at promotion to full professor?

Come on. Once upon a time when Christians complained about persecution, it was because a few of their members were getting fed to bears or getting nailed upside down to a stick…and now they’re reduced to squeaking about a college professor not getting a promotion?

Charming theodicy

Am I the only one who sees “theidiocy” whenever I read or hear the term “theodicy”? Just curious.

Anyway, take a look at this lovely example of rationalizing the death of children.

The most merciful thing an omnicient God might do is end the life of a child whom he knows will never seek Him.

-Pastor Doug Humphrey

I’m going to have to remember that one. Since the death of seeming innocents is all for a cause visible to an omniscient deity, abortion must be God’s way of purging the population of little potential Hitlers, then. Makes a fellow wonder how he missed the original Hitler, though.

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?