Miscellanea Agnostica

One of the pitfalls inherent in setting public policy according to metaphysical beliefs, is that not only can you screw things up unintentionally, you can thereafter be unable to correct that screw-up, because doing so would run afoul of the metaphysics itself. A great example of this that was recently exposed, was reported recently by CNN:

s many as one in eight teens in the United States may take a virginity pledge at some point, vowing to wait until they’re married before having sex. But do such pledges work? Are pledge takers more likely than other teens to delay sexual activity?

According to a study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, pledge takers are as likely to have sex before marriage as other teens who are also religious, but don’t take the pledge. However, pledge takers are less likely than other religious or conservative teens to use condoms or birth control when they do start having sex.

While it’s great to teach that abstinence is the best way to avoid pregnancy — because, in fact, it is! — robbing kids of any knowledge of contraception hamstrings them in the event they choose to violate that principle … and that appears to be as likely among pledge-takers as among others. You end up, ironically, with more unintended pregnancies than you would have otherwise!

The problem is that the hyperreligious fundamentalist Christian beliefs that are the foundation of “abstinence-only” sex education, prevents this failing from being corrected. It is taken as axiomatic that teaching contraception is never acceptable … and this remains the case even if not teaching it turns out to be counter-productive!

I can think of few clearer examples of religionazi lunacy, than this.

There’s nothing like Christmas to bring out the lunacy of the religionazis. A small daily newspaper here in northwestern Connecticut published a letter-to-the-editor today which exemplifies all the fallacies and false beliefs of the religionists. This guy (Thomas Latina) uses Christmas as an excuse to complain about things ranging from the ancient Romans (who are long dead), to separation of church and state, to Black Baptist churches, to Kwanzaa, the atheist sign in Washington state, to Darwin and evolution, and more … along the way he comes up with the idea that atheists should not have Christmas off with pay, they should be forced to work. Here are a few excerpts from this hyperreligious nonsense, along with some notes by me:

believe what our founding fathers had in mind is where King James broke with the Catholic church and started his own religion that was a state sponsored religion that you had to follow. Christians were given the choice of to convert to Anglicism, or be killed.

Mr Latina is mixing up King James with Henry VIII, who launched the Anglican schism; as for people being killed if they did not “convert,” at first this was a non-issue since the entire Church presence in England came under Henry’s control, initially. There was no conversion since everyone was assumed, then, to be an Anglican. Strife came later as people within Britain returned to Catholicism or joined other sects.

And politicians? Why do you always see them in Black Baptist churches, but never preaching from a Catholic church? Double standard?

No Mr Latina, it’s called “facing your audience where they can be found,” and is what politicians do.

Then there’s Darwin’s theory. Does anyone wonder why it’s called Darwin’s theory, and not Darwin’s rule? Because, the same as God, you can’t prove it.

Mr Latina is having trouble understanding the meaning of “theory” as a scientific term, and is purposely confusing it with its colloquial, and technically incorrect, meaning of “estimate” or “guess.”

Now let’s get to the real world. If all those state employees (like teachers for instance) don’t believe in God, or Christmas, they should have to work that day for straight pay, no Christmas bonuses, no Holiday pay. Just another day at school.

Hmm, just another day? With the majority of kids out for Christmas? Really?

In sum, if there’s any crazy religionist idea that somebody obsessed with Christianity could come up with — and whose grasp of basic facts is poor or non-existent — it’s in this letter. Read more of this fact-deprived crap and laugh … or perhaps cry, knowing there are actually people in the world who think this way, and there are publishers willing to give them a platform from which they can ramble incoherently for Jesus.

I saw one of those standard stories that comes out every year, in which some whiny Christian dares claim to have been persecuted for his/her faith. (Sorry, but this just does not happen in a country which is somewhere in the 80s percentile Christian.) The crap about having to say “Merry Christmas” was the focus of a story about a woman in Florida who claims to have been fired from her job over it:

A Christian woman claims she was fired from her job because she greeted callers with “Merry Christmas,” but the vacation rental company says it’s no Scrooge and the woman is just a disgruntled employee. …

It’s the same bilge O’Reilly’s been spewing for over a month now. Wah, wah, wah. What made this story stand out over the rest of the bellyaching, though, was this interesting quote; quite simply, it’s an obvious lie:

“I hold my core Christian values to a high standard and I absolutely refuse to give in on the basis of values. All I wanted was to be able to say ‘Merry Christmas’ or to acknowledge no holidays,” she said Tuesday. “As a Christian, I don’t recognize any other holidays.”

It cannot be true that she celebrates no other holidays than Christmas. You see, there’s a much more important holiday on the Christian calendar — one which, unlike Christmas, has been important to the faith since it started — and that’s Easter.

You know, Easter … the Christian holiday that celebrates Jesus’ resurrection after his crucifixion … the central event in Christian doctrine? Yeah, that holiday.

I truly doubt this woman doesn’t celebrate Easter. Do you?

In fact, she is misrepresenting Christianity and lying about her own worship practices. She must be desperate, if she needs to lie in order to rationalize her persecution complex. I wonder if her own Jesus would approve of her lying in his name?

Yes, it’s true. (Or should I say, they aren’t true!) A lot of things you think about the holidays — even things you’ heard since childhood, oft-repeated maxims that you had presumed were solid and unquestionable — are actually a load of horsehockey! The British Medical Journal addressed some of these “truisms” and revealed them to have little or no truth at all. It turns out that all of the following are not true:

1. Sugar makes kids hyperactive


2. Suicides are more frequent during the holidays


3. Poinsettia plants are toxic


4. Nearly half of one’s body heat is lost through an uncovered head


5. Nighttime eating causes obesity


6. Hangovers can be cured

About the only one of these I might quibble with is poinsettia toxicity; my experience with cats and poinsettias is that the latter will make the former sick to their stomachs — I’ve seen it first-hand with a plant-nibbling cat I once owned. Poinsettias may not kill cats — or even harm them enough to require a vet visit — but I wouldn’t again have one in a house with a cat and risk making the cat sick.

Following my earlier blog entry today on the same topic …

The power of vitamins to accomplish miracles is widely touted in the US. While it is true that they are essential nutrients, a deficiency of which can lead to a wide variety of health problems, including diseases like scurvy and rickets, the fact is that vitamins are not miracle workers. The more they are studied, the less it appears they can do; for example, there’s this report from U.S. News & World Report:

Selenium, vitamin E and vitamin C won’t prevent men from getting prostate cancer.

In findings that were released early because of the public health implications, the results of two large randomized, controlled clinical trials showed the supplements failed to provide a cancer-prevention benefit, despite past findings that seemed to indicate great promise — particularly for selenium. Both studies were expected to be published in the Jan. 7 print issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“Our results showed no evidence of benefit from selenium and vitamin E on prostate cancer and other cancers,” said the lead author of one of the studies, Dr. Scott Lippman, a professor of medicine in the division of cancer medicine at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston.

This is not the only lesson conveyed in this USN&WR story; it goes on to point out:

These studies are just the latest in a long list of recent research that’s been discounting the use of individual vitamins and supplements for chemoprevention. Other recent studies have suggested that vitamins, B, C, D, E, folic acid and calcium taken alone, or in various combinations, aren’t effective for cancer prevention.

I have no doubt that essential nutrients such as vitamins enhance health and may even fend off disease. The problem here is “‘magic bullet’ thinking,” or the tendency to view one in particular as being the single best way to fend off or cure an illness. Somehow I doubt human biochemistry is as simple as that. It’s more likely that there is a complex interplay among nutrients which is more effective, but one that’s too complex to be able to isolate down to a single most-efficacious substance. Nonetheless, many people believe it is this simple, and I doubt the series of studies this article refers to will change people’s minds about that.

The mass media once again dutifully follow and relay, as if it were true, the “alternative medicine” narrative, trumpeting how often people resort to alternative or “complementary” remedies (I guess this was a slow news day, huh?):

Many Americans turning to unconventional medicine

About four in 10 U.S. adults and one in nine children are turning to unconventional medical approaches for chronic pain and other health problems, health officials said on Wednesday. …

About 38 percent of adults used some form of complementary and alternative medicine in 2007, compared to 36 percent in 2002, the last time the government tracked at the matter.

For the first time, the survey looked at use of such medicine by children under age 18, finding that about 12 percent used it, officials said. The reasons included back pain, colds, anxiety, stress and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to the survey.

Folks, this is not proof that alternative or complementary medicine works. Just because people do something, or believe something is true, does not grant it veracity. To believe this is known in Latin as argumentum ad populum, and in English by various names, such as appeal to popularity, bandwagon fallacy, argument by consensus, or authority of the many. Whatever name you give it, it’s wrong. Once upon a time most of humanity believed the earth was the center of a cosmos only a few thousand miles in diameter, with the sun, moon, etc. revolving around it. All of those people turned out to have been wrong.

In a similar way, that lots of Americans resort to questionable remedies, does not mean they actually work. It just means that lots of people think they work. Big difference.

The Reuters story continues:

Overall, the most common category of complementary and alternative medicine used was natural products such as herbal medicines and certain other types of dietary supplements other than vitamins and minerals.

The problem with this is that, it turns out a lot of these herbal remedies don’t work! The more studies are done on them, the more we find out out how useless they are. Here are some stories showing how this is the case:

Echinacea unproven to have value as cold treatment

Ginkgo Biloba Does Not Reduce Dementia Risk, Study Shows

Saw Palmetto No Better Than Placebo For Enlarged Prostate

… and many more, all available by Googling “<herb name> effectiveness”

In fact, I will have more to say about the effectiveness of dietary supplements in my next blog entry …

The widely-exalted Dalai Lama, considered one of the wisest people in the world, has come up with a solution to human ills. It’s a solution one might expect of him — given his personal history and vocation — but I’m not sure how realistic this advice is. If everyone followed the Dalai Lama’s advice, humanity would be doomed — not saved — because that advice is not to have sex:

The Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual and temporal leader, on Friday said sex spelt fleeting satisfaction and trouble later, while chastity offered a better life and “more freedom.”

“Sexual pressure, sexual desire, actually I think is short period satisfaction and often, that leads to more complication,” the Dalai Lama told reporters in a Lagos hotel, speaking in English without a translator.

He said conjugal life caused “too much ups and downs.

“Naturally as a human being … some kind of desire for sex comes, but then you use human intelligence to make comprehension that those couples always full of trouble. And in some cases there is suicide, murder cases,” the Dalai Lama said.

He said the “consolation” in celibacy is that although “we miss something, but at the same time, compare whole life, it’s better, more independence, more freedom.”

Celibacy as a spiritual ideal is widely observed, and in more places than just in Tibetan Buddhism … many Greco-Roman mystics, such as the Pythagoreans, had ascetic and celibate lifestyles. Christianity itself adopted something of a celibacy ethic early in its history, as found in the New Testament:

For there are eunuchs who were born that way from their mother’s womb; and there are eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men; and there are also eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to accept this, let him accept it. (Matthew 19:12)

Now concerning the things about which you wrote, it is good for a man not to touch a woman. (1 Corinthians 1:7)

However, becoming a eunuch or remaining celibate was never an expectation of all Christians, as Paul acknowledges later, himself:

But I say to the unmarried and to widows that it is good for them if they remain even as I. But if they do not have self-control, let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn with passion. (1 Corinthians 7:7-8)

So celibacy — while still viewed as a kind of ideal spiritual state — has never been a requirement, even in otherwise-furiously doctrinaire Christianity.

Yet the Dalai Lama never acknowledges this, and happily declares it to be a universal goal.

As I said, this is not unexpected, since the Dalai Lama was raised a monk from the age of 2 and knows no other life. For him, sex perhaps truly is optional. Aside from his travels and public-speaking, he was raised in, and remains in, isolation. Which only exemplifies how “out-of-touch” with reality he is — through no fault of his own.

As an aside, the manner in which he was selected for his exalted spiritual (and political) office is a curious and somewhat hilarious tale. After the death of the 13th Dalai Lama (Thubten Gyatso) in 1933, monks followed various omens throughout the land, in search of his successor. (The Dalai Lama at any given moment is believed to be the reincarnation of the first Dalai Lama, Gendun Drup, who was the reincarnation of Chenresig, a bodhisattva or an “enlightened” soul who could ascend to Nirvana but chooses, out of compassion for others, to reincarnate and guide the unascended masses). These monks found a house in a village which matched one that a monk had seen in a vision; inside was a two-year-old Lhamo Thondup, who — upon seeing some of the most recent Dalai Lama’s things that the monks had brought with them — exclaimed “That’s mine!”

The rest, as they say, is history.

When I first heard this story, I found it difficult not to laugh. This is no way to select a nation’s sovereign (which the Dalai Lama was, prior to the PRC’s invasion and annexation of Tibet in the 1950s)! It reminds me far too much of this scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. (Can you imagine a similar dialog being played out in Tibet? Instead of, “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government,” you’d have, “Little kids claiming ownership of trinkets is no basis for choosing the Fount of All Buddhist Wisdom!”) If by chance you’ve never seen it before, this movie scene is available on YouTube.

At any rate, if everyone followed the Dalai Lama’s advice, I suppose contention among human beings would end … because within a generation there would be no more human beings to contend with one another! It’s not a solution to a problem, any more than amputating a limb is the way to heal one if it breaks.

Now that Barack Obama has won the presidential election, the lunacy of campaigning is over, but the lunacy of building a new administration has begun. Rumors about who will serve in the new Cabinet have popped up. Among those is a Politico report that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may be appointed the new chief of the EPA.

It makes political sense for Obama to make this appointment … the Kennedys were instrumental in helping Obama win the primary over Hillary Clinton. Naturally a Kennedy or two is going to get a prime position in the Obama White House.

But despite this, appointing RFK Jr to this position would be horrific for science. Skeptical blogs are letting the world know that RFK Jr is an anti-scientific nut; specifically he wants to ban vaccines for childhood illnesses, claiming they cause autism. His campaign against vaccines includes factually untrue claims, including one mentioned by the Science-Based Medicine blog:

Note one particularly outrageous example of confusing correlation with causation as RFK, Jr. points out that thimerosal first started to be used in vaccines in the 1930s and “almost immediately” the syndrome of autism was noticed. Of course, autism was first described as a syndrome in 1943 by Leo Kanner; before that there was no condition generally recognized as autism; so this observation is completely spurious …

It is literally not possible, therefore, for there to have been a sudden spike in autism in the 30s. RFK Jr, therefore, is telling a factual lie.

I remarked previously on the religiosity of Obama’s followers. I hope they are willing to look at an RFK Jr appointment critically and demand better of their sacred prophet as he steps into the Oval Office. But I’m none too hopeful about that … especially given how revered the Kennedys are by the Left, and how much Obama owes them for his election.

Finally … after almost 2 years of near-constant sniping, posturing, nuancing, yammering, bellyaching, and frequent taking of umbrage, the election is over! The pollster calls are done (I received well over a dozen just in the month of October, I assume I’m on someone’s list of “likely voters”), as well as the robocalls (most of the ones I received dealt with Question 1 on the Connecticut ballot, but one informed me that John McCain crashed several airplanes and can’t be trusted to pilot the country). This means it’s time to look back and see what we learned — or should have learned — from 20 months or so of horror:

First, the Republicans shot themselves in the foot, by not distancing themselves sufficiently from Bush. They essentially allowed the Democrats to elevate each and every GOP candidate in every race to the level of Bush’s co-president and blamed him/her for everything Bush did wrong. Their collective failure to sever themselves from Bush proved to be stunningly stupid. One wonders why they performed collective suicide in this way … and there is only one answer: the Religious Right™. They know the evangelical Protestants still worship Bush — in spite of the man’s monumental idiocy, inability to accept reality, and obstinate refusal to listen to anyone who knows what s/he’s talking about — and they also believed they needed their support in order to win. Well, guess what — the evangelicals weren’t enough. They found this out back in 2006 when they suffered a number of electoral setbacks, but like their hero Bush, refused to acknowledge reality. Way to go, Republicans, you’ve just relegated yourselves to irrelevance.

Second, for most of 2008, Obama’s supporters have made the president-elect into a religious figure. Sure, talk-radio windbags like Limbaugh sarcastically refer to Obama as “the Messiah” — but as the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day, and in this case the windbags are correct — Obama is, in fact, regarded as a prophet. This is, of course, thoroughly ironic, since many on the Left who supported him are non-religious. One wonders if there is any way that an ordinary human being could live up to the expectations they’ve made about Obama. He’d best walk on the water of the Reflecting Pool and part the Potomac on the day he takes office, or he’ll be in trouble! Although I’m glad that the Republicans have been “spanked” for having appealed to religiosity and emotion, let’s be honest, the Democrats have done much the same (though in a very different way). The Obama-messianism is nearly as disturbing as anything the Religious Right™ has done, and ultimately is not very comforting.

Third, perhaps most poignantly, Liddy Dole, who ran an ad I already blogged about, paid the ultimate political price for having done so, and lost what had been, just a few months ago, a guaranteed re-election. Far from being shamed by this, Dole is actually defiant about it:

In her concession speech, Dole (wife of former Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole) made no apologies and continued to play the God card.

She used religion to take a dig at Hagan one more time. Dole subtly invoked her infamous “godless” ad when she talked about the need to sacrifice for “one nation under God” and received rousing applause.

What a bitch. Don’t let the door hit you in the rear on your way out of the Senate, Liddy.

A little over a month ago I blogged about the UK Royal Society’s director of education, Michael Reiss, demanding creationism teaching in science classrooms. I wondered, then, what might have been going through the guy’s head. It turns out that in addition to his scientific degrees, Reiss is an Anglican priest — so my question was answered!

He resigned within a few days, claiming that he was misunderstood, and that he was talking about how to address creationism if a student brought it up in class. While he did discuss such a scenario in his remarks, and he later claimed to believe that creationism is not appropriate in a science classroom, his initial remarks included the following sentence:

I feel that creationism is best seen by science teachers not as a misconception but as a world view.

Reiss’s problem, of course, is that — scientifically speaking — creationism is most assuredly a “misconception.” Whether or not it’s a worldview, is irrelevant, in light of that.

Reiss’s remarks and his subsequent resignation are controversial in Britain’s science world. There are some who think his position reasonable and that he should not have been fired for it. He also has vehement critics. A sampling of the matter:

A defender of Professor Reiss’ position on the BBC radio I heard argued that the creation myth was a metaphor, not to be taken literally. Hence scientists should not be so touchy. A critic could argue, however that if that were the case then that is exactly why the teacher should indeed to refer the pupil to poetry, drama or religious studies where parables as metaphor are appropriate. The problem is that as soon as you bring it into a science lesson you risk confusing science and parable. This is not helped by creationists who insist that the creation myth is not a parable but true and should at the very least be taught as a valid theory alongside evolution. This then makes a mockery of science.

That, of course, is the real problem here. If we were talking about a kid who — say — denies the reality of gravity, that’s easily addressed in science class, by explaining the workings of gravity and devising an experiment to show that it works.

But if a kid says, “Mah preacherman dun tol’ me we ain’t no apes, ’cause the Bobble dun says so,” there is really no way for a science teacher to address and debunk this … because nothing the teacher says or does can do so! The kid’s preacherman has pre-empted any possible scientific response, by convincing the child to take the literal word of the Bible over anything and everything else — including valid, time-tested science. It is, in short, a game that the science teacher cannot win.

What’s more, the science teacher’s failure would only become further “evidence” of creationism’s truth, in the eyes of the child. (There are, in fact, already apocryphal stories of believers demolishing atheist teachers, which are — in spite of their known apocryphal nature — used among other believers as “evidence” of the intellectual bankruptcy of atheism. So don’t think this cannot happen.)

Yes, creationism teaching is an insidious force in the lives of the world’s youngsters. Its goal is not only to indoctrinate them in certain metaphysical beliefs, but also to cheat them of the possibility of ever learning the truth. In short … it’s evil.