Miscellanea Agnostica

It’s well-known that kids can drive their parents crazy. But I guess it takes metaphysics — in this case, Voodoo — to make them assault them in a cruel way. The New York Daily News reports on a bizarre example of metaphysics run amok:

Determined to drive evil spirits out of her daughter, a Queens mom performed a bizarre voodoo fire ritual that left the 6-year-old girl scarred for life, prosecutors say.

While young Frantzcia Saintil was “engulfed in flames,” Marie Lauradin let the screaming girl burn, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said Thursday.

But much worse than burning her daughter, was how Ms Lauradin dealt with the injuries:

Eventually, Frantzcia’s grandmother doused the flames with cold water, but the women then put the girl to bed instead of getting her help, Brown said.

Frantzcia suffered for a whole day before a relative begged them to take her to a hospital.

I guess it takes religioisity to make a mother both cruel and indifferent to her own child. Nice.

A real gem in this reporting is the following protestation by Ms Lauradin’s attorney:

“She denies these allegations,” lawyer Jeff Cohen said. “This is my client’s only child. My client would not hurt her.”

Counsel must live in a strange alternate universe, wherein it’s not a Voodoo-believing parent, but some unknown third party, who sneaks into homes, douses kids with rum, sets them on fire, and flees? Who, exactly, does counsel think set this child on fire … the Torch Fairy? Please! What an asinine thing to say.

Are we clear yet as to the massive amounts of harm that metaphysical beliefs can do to people? Have you had enough yet of this kind of story? (In case you’re not aware of the phenomenon of “killing one’s kids for religion,” have a look at this, and this, and this!)

You would think that, having had historical examples such as the Third Reich, and the literary example of Ray Bradbury’s famous Fahrenheit 451 well-ensconced in the occidental world, Americans would know by now that book-burnings are an intellectual and cultural atrocity that simply can never be tolerated — ever. But apparently this is not known to some ferociously doctrinaire Christians in West Bend, WI. They actually want a good old-fashioned book-burning. An Examiner.Com article tells this sorry and pathetic tale of hyperreligiosity gone out of control:

As reported by Laura Miller on Salon.com (and brought to my attention by Hemant Mehta, aka the Friendly Atheist), a group called West Bend Citizens for Safe Libraries approached the library back in February to get them to remove a list “of recommended titles about gay and lesbian issues for young people” from their Web site. …

The reason the group wanted the library to comply with their request was “‘to protect children from accessing them without their parents’ knowledge and supervision.’” Among the listed titles was [Francesca Lia] Block’s Baby Be-Bop. They [sic] library did not immediately comply.

Another group, called West Bend Parents for Free Speech formed as the opposition to West Bend Citizens for Safe Libraries. … Two petitions were presented — one from each group. There were 700 signatures from the Christian side of the issue and 1,000 signatures for the Free Speech side. …

In the end, the library board voted unanimously to leave the books as they were. This vote has not put an end to the debate. In fact, it seems the decision just added fuel to the fire.

A new group, Christian Civil Liberties Union, has taken it upon themselves to file suit against the library. According to the report, the group hopes to have Baby Be-Bop deemed “hate speech.” They claim that the book is “‘explicitly vulgar, racial (sic) and anti-Christian.’” They will not be happy to just have the book removed from the library all together – they want it “publicly burned.”

Yes folks, that’s right. In the enlightened 21st century US of A, in the great state of Wisconsin, we actually have a lawsuit filed demanding a book-burning. And people have actually complained that I’ve used the term “religionazis.” Well, here you are … living, breathing fundies doing exactly what Nazis did. How is this not “religionazism” at work?

Unbe-fucking-lievable.

When will these people decide to just grow the hell up, finally, and leave the rest of the world alone?

David Letterman sure stepped in it when he cracked some jokes about the family of Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, former VP candidate, and current heroine and idol of the Religious Right. He took on the wrong person, and clearly, the R.R. isn’t going to give up until he’s off the air.

This is in spite of the fact that Letterman made an apology (not just once, but twice), and Ms Palin accepted the second of them (as reported by CBS News):

Sarah Palin has accepted the olive branch handed to her by David Letterman, following his jokes about Palin’s daughter getting “knocked up” by a professional baseball player.

That Palin ultimately accepted Letterman’s apology, however, appears to mean absolutely nothing to the armies of the R.R. who are arrayed against him, as reported by a USA Today blog:

According to New York’s Daily News, Anna Barone, an official with FireDavidLetterman.com, says the apology is not enough. “An apology is a first step, but it’s not accountablity [sic] to me. CBS should at least suspend him for a little while.” The group is still planning to protest outside the show this afternoon.

Hold on a minute. You’ve named your group and its Web site “Fire David Letterman,” yet you claim you will be satisfied only with a suspension? Either Barone is lying when she says she’ll be happy with a suspension, or the name of her group is itself a lie. Ah, disingenuity … a hallmark of the religionazis! More lying liars for Jesus. They never met a lie they wouldn’t tell, in defense of their religion and their presumed right to impose it on the universe.

A blog entry at Time elaborates on the unwillingness of people — in the face of a moral victory — to accept that victory:

But really this controversy doesn’t belong to Palin and Letterman anymore, and both of them only have so much power to end it. That distinction belongs to the army of cable-news and online commenters using it as a proxy for every dispute under the sun, and they are too well invested in keeping it going. Yea, verily, it has been written down in The Holy Book of Partisan Grievance, and it shall be cited henceforth in culture wars to come.

You know how that works. A controversy like this comes up, and suddenly there’s a mad dash to the history books to cherrypick decontextualized examples and catch the other side in an act of hypocritical defense of / outrage against humor. Well, what about when Jay Leno made essentially the same joke last year!, Letterman’s defenders cried. But what about Imus!, Palin’s partisans countered. CBS fired Imus for his remarks! Well, what about all the jokes people made about Chelsea Clinton? Yes, but what about the ones about the Bush daughters? You’re a hypocrite! No, you are!

On and on it goes, the grievance and counter-grievance, the gotcha and counter-gotcha. And thus the discussion over a freaking tacky late-night joke becomes like adjudicating an ethnic conflict in the Balkans, where yesterday’s atrocity is rationalized by a massacre during World War I, which in turn was righteous payback for some atrocity in 1484, which in turn… Good Lord.

This article pefectly explains the tit-for-tat, schoolyard-style juvenile sniping involved in this case and many others like it. Isn’t it time for people to grow the hell up and move on?

Note to R.R.: GOP presidential candidate John McCain said as much, himself, as USA Today relates in an update:

David Gregory on the Today show asked Sen. John McCain about Letterman’s apology this morning and he said he appreciated that Letterman was sorry and said, “Now we need to move on.”

I doubt this will be enough for the R.R., however, since they do not consider McCain “one of them” … even if he did everything in his power to pander to their ferocious, relentless, and unforgiving hyperreligiosity, last year. They will ignore him, and rage on in their unending bellicose sanctimony.

P.S. I consider Letterman’s jokes about Palin and her family to have been in very poor taste. They included slurs about flight attendants and Alex Rodriguez, in addition to the Palins. His “jokes” were just not funny. But even with that concession, his apology and Palin’s own acceptance of it, means the controversy is over. The children in the R.R. need to let go and grow the fuck up, for once in their lives. Raging and fuming over bad jokes is just a waste of time and energy.

One would think the Republican party in the US — as fractured as it is by contests over who its spokesmen are and what it should stand for, not to mention it being handicapped by the fact that it’s now only a minority party at the federal level — would have better things to do with its time, than find a new enemy against whom it can declare war.

But that’s not the case, as reported in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Over the weekend, the Republican Party worked overtime to secure its place as the last bastion of religious and political Know-nothingism. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee headlined the “Rediscovering God in America” conference at a Virginia Beach church. …

“I think this is one of the most critical moments in American history,” Mr. Gingrich said in a speech broadcast live over God TV, an evangelical Web site. “We are living in a period where we are surrounded by paganism.”

Interesting. I wasn’t aware that the US was “surrounded” by paganism. Our neighbors to the north in Canada are majority-Christian, and most of Mexico is not only Christian, but specifically Roman Catholic.

So there’s not much paganism to the north or south.

Suffice it to say, I’m not sure exactly where all these teeming pagan hordes that Gingrich and Huckabee think are are assailing America, are coming from. Perhaps they exist only in the cavernous vaults of their own heads? Or perhaps they’re just a delusion, derived from their Christian persecution complex?

It finally happened. Even the Donald, who famously tolerated her antics (about whom I blogged a few times already), has finally had enough of Ms Carrie Prejean (as reported by the AP, via the Today show/MSNBC):

Miss California USA Carrie Prejean, who stirred up trouble for herself when she said gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry, got two dreaded words from pageant poobah Donald Trump on Wednesday: “You’re fired.”

While I’m sure her supporters in the Religious Right will whine and complain that this happened because of her religious and ideological positions, but that’s not the reason:

Trump and other pageant leaders said Prejean was being sacked not because of the remarks but because she hadn’t been holding up her end of the agreement she signed when she entered the pageant.

“This was a decision based solely on contract violations, including Ms. Prejean’s unwillingness to make appearances on behalf of the Miss California USA organization,” the California pageant’s executive director, Keith Lewis, said in a statement.

You see, Ms Prejean has been exploiting her newfound position as a heroine of the Religious Right, making appearances around the country for them. So she hasn’t been showing up to appearances that the pageant has booked for her, and at she was contractually obliged to appear.

Still, I’m sure the Religious Right will lie for her and say otherwise. They will actually defend her breaking her own contract. Because, you see, she did it for God. And that makes it right even if it’s wrong.

Maybe she’ll parlay her breach of contract and firing as Miss California USA into a political career in the Religious Right, just as Alabama’s Roy Moore — that champion of governmentally-sponsored Ten Commandment monuments who was consistently ruled against by all the courts that heard his case and who was so defiant that he was run out of his office as head of Alabama’s state Supreme Court — has exploited his own utter defeat and remade himself into a Religious Right martyr.

(Because we all know Christians just love martyrs, they can’t help themselves.)

The religionazis who are currently in charge of the state of Oklahoma, took a hit recently in their effort to use Ten Commandment monuments on government sites to proselytize their religion (as reported by the AP, via Google News):

Backers of a new law authorizing a privately funded Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of Oklahoma’s Capitol didn’t get good news this week.

A three-judge panel of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday that a similar display at the Haskell County Courthouse in Stigler was an unconstitutional endorsement of religion, prompting both sides to wonder if legal wrangling over the state law is next.

Both of these laws were rationalized in the wake of cases such as Glassroth v. Moore, which collectively made it clear that government-funded religious monuments were unconstitutional. They figure that having someone else pay for the monument somehow made it acceptable to put it on government grounds and convey the inevitable impression that that’s the government religion.

Nice try, but no dice, folks … or so the 10th Circuit basically said.

I’ve remarked previously on Oklahoma’s hyperreligiosity (see e.g. this blog entry, and this one); it sure looks as though it’s becoming the next Kansas, a state that the Religious Right is trying to rework into a bastion of evangelical Christian religionism, and perhaps a beachhead in the dominionism movement. Fortunately, their maneuverings are transparent and predictable, making it easy to counter them.

The Web site Religion Dispatches is pithy and interesting. Today I saw a post there which is particularly important. It concerns the assassination of Dr George Tiller, as well as the killing of one soldier and wounding of another at a military recruiting station in Little Rock AR. I’ll discuss the Religion Dispatches posting with only limited comment of my own:

Muslims Murder, Christians Don’t: What Went Missing in Analysis of Tiller’s Executioner

… As the Times headline [i.e. "Seeking Clues on Suspect in Shooting of Doctor"] suggests, there must have been something in [Tiller's assassin Scott] Roeder’s background that everyone missed, which would explain why he crossed the line from protest to murder.

Similar questions regarding the motives for murder apparently do not linger around the June 1 killing of an army recruiter, Private William A. Long, in Little Rock, Arkansas. The June 2 headline in the Times purports to give the “Report of Motive in Recruiter Attack,” and introduces the alleged killer, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, as “an American convert to Islam.”

Dan Mathewson of Religion Dispatches goes over, at length, the ways in which the media have emphasized religion (in his case, Islam) as a motive for Mujahid Muhammad, but have avoided discussing the role religion (in his case, Christianity) in Roeder’s motivation.

The case has been made, and the mass media have bought into exactly the principle in the post’s headine; they assume that “Muslims murder, but Christians don’t.” That they ignore religiosity in Roeder’s case, does everyone a disservice.

She is, despite her nearly-unrivaled success and popularity, one of the most dangerous people in the United States. That may sound like an extreme statement … but it’s no joke. I mean it. The woman is truly dangerous.

I’m referring, of course, to the famously New Agey and feel-goody Oprah Winfrey. She has long peddled amorphous New Age metaphysics — pushing e.g. the quasi-mysticism of Marianne Williamson — but over the last couple of years has begun seriously trafficking in pseudoscience, particularly, pseudomedicine. Given the extent of her influence over her audience, the possibility that lives are at stake, is extremely real.

Despite the growing vehemence and miltancy of her campaign to mislead, the mass media have been largely unwilling to take her on. Until now. Newsweek recently profiled the insanity Oprah has been foisting on people. (A hat tip to R.T. Carroll of the Skeptic’s Dictionary for pointing me to it).

The Newsweek article begins with Oprah selling Suzanne Somers and her questionable medical habits (her own ad hoc form of hormone-replacement therapy), and describes how Oprah staged this presentation so as to make Somers appear authoritative:

[Somers says her "bioidentical hormones"] block disease and will double her life span. “I know I look like some kind of freak and fanatic,” [Somers] said. “But I want to be there until I’m 110, and I’m going to do what I have to do to get there.”

That was apparently good enough for Oprah. “Many people write Suzanne off as a quackadoo,” she said. “But she just might be a pioneer.” Oprah acknowledged that Somers’s claims “have been met with relentless criticism” from doctors. Several times during the show she gave physicians an opportunity to dispute what Somers was saying. But it wasn’t quite a fair fight. The doctors who raised these concerns were seated down in the audience and had to wait to be called on. Somers sat onstage next to Oprah, who defended her from attack. “Suzanne swears by bioidenticals and refuses to keep quiet. She’ll take on anyone, including any doctor who questions her.”

Oprah is, therefore, convinced that Somers — who is not a doctor, or a scientist, and has absolutely no healthcare credentials I’ve ever heard of — must be correct, because her defiance is evidence of that. This is exactly the kind of emotionalistic justification Oprah has found to support the pseudoscientific claims of others like Jenny McCarthy … whom Oprah assumes to be more of an authority on the causes of autism than doctors and researchers, because McCarthy is a mother, and simply “knows better” than everyone else.

The article even suggests why Oprah is so susceptible to this sort of thing and why she so ferociously defends the pseudoscientists and New Agey freaks she peddles:

Oprah takes these things very seriously. They are, after all, the answers she hopes to find for herself. If Oprah has an exquisite ear for the cravings and anxieties of her audience, it is because she shares them. Her own lifelong quest for love, meaning and fulfillment plays out on her stage each day. In an age of information overload, she offers herself as a guide through the confusion.

The article goes over how much influence Oprah has on her viewers and explains the extent of her influence over them:

Her most ardent fans regard her as an oracle. If she mentions the title of a book, it goes to No. 1. If she says she uses a particular wrinkle cream, it sells out. At Oprah’s retail store in Chicago, women can purchase used shoes and outfits that she wore on the show. Her viewers follow her guidance because they like and admire her, sure. But also because they believe that Oprah, with her billions and her Rolodex of experts, doesn’t have to settle for second best. If she says something is good, it must be.

Therein lies the danger in taking her too seriously, as the article continues to say:

This is where things get tricky. Because the truth is, some of what Oprah promotes isn’t good, and a lot of the advice her guests dispense on the show is just bad. The Suzanne Somers episode wasn’t an oddball occurrence. This kind of thing happens again and again on Oprah. Some of the many experts who cross her stage offer interesting and useful information (props to you, Dr. Oz). Others gush nonsense. Oprah, who holds up her guests as prophets, can’t seem to tell the difference. She has the power to summon the most learned authorities on any subject; who would refuse her? Instead, all too often Oprah winds up putting herself and her trusting audience in the hands of celebrity authors and pop-science artists pitching wonder cures and miracle treatments that are questionable or flat-out wrong, and sometimes dangerous.

Ms Winfrey and her staff, of course, have a convenient way to swerve out of the path of this criticism:

Oprah would probably not agree with this assessment. She declined to be interviewed for this article, but in a statement she said, “The guests we feature often share their first-person stories in an effort to inform the audience and put a human face on topics relevant to them. I’ve been saying for years that people are responsible for their actions and their own well-being. I believe my viewers understand the medical information presented on the show is just that—information—not an endorsement or prescription. Rather, my intention is for our viewers to take the information and engage in a dialogue with their medical practitioners about what may be right for them.”

So you see, everything she shows is just someone’s “first-person story” and not to be taken seriously. This is contradicted, of course, by what Oprah herself says on the show, and by how she stages things (as shown in the example of Ms Somers).

The anti-vaccine campaign of Ms McCarthy is something I’ve covered already, and something that Oprah has helped fuel. But Newsweek goes over another, lesser-known example of Oprah’s peddling of pseudoscience, by Dr Christine Northrup:

Oprah turned to Northrup for advice in 2007, when, as she put it, she “blew out” her thyroid after a stressful season of work and travel. She felt sick and drained and she gained weight. She asked the doctor to come on the show to explain what was going on. “When I called her to talk about this whole thyroid issue,” Oprah told the audience, “she always connects the mind, the body and the spirit.”

Thyroid dysfunction, which affects millions of Americans (mostly women), occurs when the thyroid gland located in the neck produces too much or too little thyroid hormone. Too much (hyperthyroidism) and the metabolism races, sometimes causing anxiety and weight loss. Too little (hypothyroidism) and it slows, which, if severe, can lead to depression and weight gain. Many things can trigger the disease, especially autoimmune disorders.

But Northrup believes thyroid problems can also be the result of something else. As she explains in her book, “in many women, thyroid dysfunction develops because of an energy blockage in the throat region, the result of a lifetime of ‘swallowing’ words one is aching to say.”

Here is a doctor, then, who says thyroid disorder is caused by swallowing words. That’s right, swallowing words. Not by germs, or allergic reactions, or toxins, or the environment … but swallowing words.

Oprah, you see, is big on the “mind-body-spirit” thing. She goes in for stuff like “holistic medicine” in which “the ‘whole’ person” is treated. This is opposed to conventional medicine, which — in her thinking anyway — never treats “whole people.” (I’ve never heard of a conventional doctor treating, say, a broken leg by amputating it, setting the bone, then reattaching it … so I’m not sure how it can be said that conventional doctors never treat “whole people.” But hey, what do I know?)

In any event, Newsweek goes on to punch the obvious hole in this particular little scenario:

An interesting theory—but is there anyone who believes that what Oprah suffers from is an inability to express herself?

The article concedes that some of Oprah’s frequent guests are not all space-cadets peddling absurdity:

Right about now is when you might be asking, is there anything Oprah gets right? In fact, there is. For one, she gives excellent diet and fitness tips. Two of her longest-serving resident experts, Dr. Mehmet Oz and trainer Bob Greene, routinely offer sound, high-quality advice to Oprah and her audience on how to lose weight and improve overall health. For the most part, it is free of the usual diet-industry hype, perhaps because so many of her viewers are on to those scams by now. Oz’s and Greene’s philosophy amounts to: eat nutritious foods, and exercise.

So it’s not all doom-&-gloom on Oprah’s show, but even so:

Oz isn’t without his faults. He sometimes keeps quiet on the show when Oprah’s out-there experts are spouting their questionable theories. There seems to be an unwritten rule that one Oprah expert may not criticize or correct another, and Oz has an interest in keeping Oprah happy. She has turned his books into mega-bestsellers, and features him on her Web site and in her magazine. Her production company is also bankrolling his own syndicated TV show, Dr. Oz, which debuts in the fall.

Way to go Dr Oz … sell out your own science, to satisfy the metaphysics of your meal-ticket.

Only on rare occasions is Oprah ever willing to say she’s gone too far. After selling a book and video called “The Secret” — which asserts that thoughts, not reality, govern our lives, and can bring success, wealth, and even cure disease — the following happened:

In March 2007, the month after the first two shows on The Secret, Oprah invited a woman named Kim Tinkham on the program. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and her doctors were urging surgery and chemotherapy. But Tinkham wrote Oprah to say that she had decided to forgo this treatment and instead use The Secret to cure herself. On the show, Oprah seemed genuinely alarmed that Tinkham had taken her endorsement of The Secret so seriously. “When my staff brought this letter to me, I wanted to talk to her,” Oprah told the audience. “I said, get her in here, OK?” On air, Oprah urged the woman to listen to her doctors. “I don’t think that you should ignore all of the advantages of medical science and try to, through your own mind now because you saw a Secret tape, heal yourself,” she said. A few weeks earlier, Oprah could not say enough in praise of The Secret as the guiding philosophy of her life. Now she said that people had somehow gotten the wrong idea. “I think that part of the mistake in translation of The Secret is that it’s used to now answer every question in the world. It is not the answer to all questions,” she instructed. “I just wanted to say it’s a tool. It is not the answer to everything.” The Law of Attraction was just one law of many that guide the universe. “Although I live my life that way,” Oprah said, “I think it has its flaws.”

Hopefully Ms Winfrey will realize her support for Ms Somers and Ms McCarthy may be just as dangerous, and suggest that maybe they have flaws, too.

But somehow, I doubt it.

Note: Newsweek has gotten a lot of feedback about this exposé of Oprah. Far from being intimidated, they’re thrilled, and have said so in one of their blogs.