How Many Times Does It Have To Fail?

  CNN.com/crime is reporting that a 16 year old Oregon boy, whose parents raised him in a faith-healing only church called the Followers of Christ, has died of a urinary tract blockage. The blockage caused a buildup of urea in his bloodstream, which poisoned his organs and caused heart failure.

He probably had a congenital condition that constricted his urinary tract where the bladder empties into the urethra, and the condition of his organs indicates that he had multiple blockages during his life, said Dr. Clifford Nelson, deputy state medical examiner for Clackamas County.

"You just build up so much urea in your bloodstream that it begins to poison your organs, and the heart is particularly susceptible," Nelson said.

Nelson said a catheter would have saved the boy's life. If the condition had been dealt with earlier, a urologist could easily have removed the blockage and avoided the kidney damage that came with the repeated illnesses, Nelson said.

  In March, the boy's 15 month old cousin died of bronchial pneumonia and a blood infection, after her parents refused to do anything but pray for her recovery. The two children are the latest in a series of deaths among younger church members, which in 1999 prompted the state of Oregon to remove protections based on religion for parents who treat - or rather, FAIL to treat - their children with prayer rather than actual useful medicine.

  Unlike the parents of the little girl, who were charged with manslaughter and criminal mistreatment, the parents of the latest victim have another out. Oregon law allows minors over the age of 14 to refuse medical treatment. If it turns out that the boy was offered treatment and refused it, his parents are off the hook.

  Two things spring to mind. First, these people are serial child abusers. Points to Oregon for having the stomach to prosecute them. We can only hope that their planned religious freedom defense doesn't stand up in court. A competent adult should have the right to refuse medical treatment for any reason, but withholding medical help from a sick toddler is crazy and criminal, and no amount of faith should shield willfully neglectful parents from prosecution.

  Freedom of religion, like every freedom, has to have practical limits. Freedom of speech doesn't protect the proverbial guy shouting "fire" during the premiere of the latest summer blockbuster. Freedom to practice one's religion without government interference shouldn't protect parents who routinely let helpless children die from easily treatable diseases. We as a society need to come to some kind of consensus that exempting churches from property taxes is acceptable, but subjecting children to potentially fatal neglect isn't.

  Second, and more personal, are some variations on the question I asked above. How many times does the power of prayer have to fail before these parents will wake up and stop letting their children die? I don't expect them to stop believing in their god, but is a healthy dose of "those who help themselves" to much to ask? How deeply indoctrinated do you have to be to believe that your all-powerful, benevolent deity has a plan that includes your son or daughter dying for want of a bottle of penicillin? Is there any way to shake these people awake before another child dies? If anybody has answers to any of these, I'd love to hear them.

PA House Fumbles Over Definition of "God"

  A routine resolution to formally recognize a convention taking place in Harrisburg stalled because the group in question practices the wrong religion.

  The 60th annual convention of the U.S. chapter of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community is scheduled to take place in the state capital this weekend. Speaker Dennis O'Brien (R., Phila.) proposed the resolution for formal recognition by the House, noting the convention's mission to "increase faith and harmony and introduce various humanitarian, social and religious services."

  Unfortunately, there was a slight problem with the whole "Muslim" thing. Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (R., The Crusades) objected. "The Muslims do not recognize Jesus Christ as God," Mr. Metcalfe helpfully pointed out, "and I will be voting negative."

  After this impromptu lesson in comparative theology, Rep. Gordon Denlinger (R., Bigotry) tried to classy-up the debate by invoking September 11th.

"Certainly this nation went through an attack some years ago that is well-burned into the subconscious of our society," he said. "What I sense on our floor today is that, for some people, this evokes very strong passion and emotion."

  You know what else evokes strong passion and emotion? Legislators who fail to grasp the basic principles of the Constitution. I'll admit that I think the resolution itself is a bit of a time-waster; shouldn't the approval of their god be enough to sustain them? But to squash the resolution because the subjects don't worship the same god as you and your colleagues? You've in effect created a religious test for resolutions by a legislative body. And did you not notice that you've now said on the record that some portion of our state legislators hear the word "Muslim" and immediately think "terrorist?"

  Thank you, Reps. Metcalfe and Denlinger for showing the world just how intolerant and prejudiced Pennsylvania politics can get, over something as silly as a pat on the back for a locally scheduled convention. It's a proud day for all of us.

Seven Year Bitch

  Despite millennia of being consistently mistaken, charlatans and true believers alike continue to predict that the end of the world is just around the corner. The latest entry in the Book Of Inevitable Failure comes from pastor Mark Biltz, of El Shaddai Ministries in Bonney Lake, Wash. Pastor Biltz has determined that a series of lunar eclipses that will appear in 2015 are a likely herald of the long awaited second coming. Why? Because they happen to fall on the same days as his religious festivals.(video)

  This prediction has all the classic elements. Regular, predictable astronomical phenomena, reference to vague bible verses, coincidental timing with arbitrarily dated church holidays, current political unrest and enough wishful thinking to kill a yak at 20 paces.

  My favorite part of this whole scenario is that Hal Lindsey, crackpot and lifetime member of the failed prophets club, dismisses Biltz's theory as "pure speculation." Talk about the 100% non-reflective surface calling the kettle black.

  Someone remind me to send Mr. Biltz a postcard in 2016. I'm sure I'll be way too busy not burning in hell to remember by myself.

Blog Spotlight: Losing My Religion

  Like a lot of atheist agnostic skeptic humanist freethinkers, I didn't just wake up one day with morning wood and the realization that god was kind of a silly idea. I was raised in a church. We went every Sunday. I sang in the choir, performed in plays, and went to camps during the Summer. (We were Methodist, the plain toast of Protestant denominations). While I don't ever remember being wholly enthralled by visions of an omniscient, miracle-slinging, invisible sky-grandpa, it didn't occur to me to really question the idea until long after I'd ceased to be a regular churchgoer.

  Notwithstanding the people who make the most noise on the Internet, the world isn't cleanly divided into true believers and soulless atheists. There are a lot of people who are in the midst of a long fall away from a childhood religion, and there are also nonbelievers who come to (or back to) some religious faith. People on either side of the divide may yell the loudest, but there are plenty of interesting perspectives that fall somewhere in the middle.

  My new favorite representative from the middling masses is frequent Skepchick commenter Improbable Bee. Her blog Losing My Religion tracks her trajectory out of her religious upbringing toward a more skeptical, evidence-based worldview.

  I'm sure that I'm biased because of the direction in which she's heading, but she's talking about it in a thoughtful, articulate way that's very appealing. She's wrestling with more intense versions of a lot of the things I faced, but she's far more insightful than I was. Regardless of your place on the believer-skeptic continuum, it's worth your time to take a look.

Question #121: Sin Silly

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  As a post-modern heathen, I find myself terribly bored with the traditional sins. While I'm sure that my soul is irretrievably soiled with the caustic filth of my decadent lifestyle, I find that living like a character in an Anne Rice novel just isn't as fascinating as it was when I was 17. How can I preserve the smear of acidic, putrid ichor that I call a soul, while trying new things at the same time?
- Soul Possessor

Dear Soul Possessor,
  There's good news for those of you who consider the mundane dalliances with lust and sloth to be horribly banal. After 1,500 years, the fun-loving scamps at the Vatican have finally doubled their list of seven deadly sins. The seven newest deadly sins (now 100% deadlier!) are supposed to reflect the moral decline of the modern, secular world. They are, in no particular order:

* Abortion
* Damaging the environment
* Carrying out morally questionable scientific experiments
* Allowing genetic manipulation which alters DNA or compromises embryos
* Dealing or using drugs
* Pedophilia
* Social injustice that causes poverty or
the excessive accumulation of wealth by a few.

  The mind-stomping irony of the last two items notwithstanding, this represents a boon for those of you who are tired of the trite, clichéd evil of the old list. Now you can enjoy the tingly thrill of mocking god every time you don't recycle.

  One only hopes that the church will commission someone to write The Divine Comedy 2: Electric Boogaloo, so that we'll know for certain what eternal punishments await us for each of the new infractions. I can't see the deterrent effect being really powerful unless we know the penalties up front.

New Humanist
Times Online

Question #113:

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  What's the best thing about being a blind, stupid, bleeding-heart, unrealistic, Satanloving, hellbound, hippie liberal cockface?
- One Nation Under GOD

Dear One Nation,
  I'd say it was the sense of smug superiority, but I suppose there's plenty of that at every point on the ideological spectrum. Self-righteous boobs of every political bent succumb to the temptation to cocoon themselves in the silky softness of like-minded opinion. Of course, affirmation addiction strikes non-political types as well. Without it, Michael Jackson might still have a nose and the Star Wars would likely have been Jar-Jar free.

  There are a lot of good things about being a liberal/progressive/lefty. Our girls are hotter. Our scientists don't waste time trying to prove that an invisible sky man made it all from scratch. Our gene pool tends to be broader and more diverse. We're allowed to acknowledge the cognitive dissonance that comes from a living in a country that listed equality as a sacred principle while simultaneously enshrining slavery in its founding document.

  On the whole though, the most awesome thing about being on the ideological left is the inevitable approbation of history. The progress of freedom and justice is a little like the stock market. In the short term, there are ups (Brown v. Board of Education) and downs (the USA PATRIOT Act). In the long term, it's all upward momentum. Social taboos evaporate and political barriers to individual expression erode. The doomsayers who warned that suffrage for women would ruin us, and that interracial marriage would destroy the American family, are dismissed as misguided fools. The uptight moralists claiming that gay marriage will tie "traditional" marriage to a stake and beat it to death with pink-handled hammers will eventually get the same treatment. Say what you will about self-confidence and the courage of your convictions, but it's awfully pleasant that history, and hindsight, keep proving us right. Er, correct.

Happy Birthday, Earth!

  And let me say, for a sprightly lass of 6,010, you're still looking great. Don't worry about that slight equatorial bulge. It happens to all of us after our mid-5,000s.

In Case You're New Here

  You should know that I have a lot of problems with deism/religion. There is the usual complaint about the exclusiveness inherent in any belief system that purports to reveal the one true path to the divine. But when deists look to their patron spirit(s) as the driving force behind natural events, I start foaming at the mouth and gnawing on chair legs.

  The world is, almost completely at random, a stunningly beautiful and unfathomably horrible place. Invoking a supernatural explanation for unpredictable events is a double-edged sword. Also, both edges are coated in battery acid, and they're aiming for your exposed throat at the same time.

  At best, ascribing events like these to the influence of magical sky beings fosters the belief that natural events occur because of the everyday behavior of the persons affected. (At its logical extreme, of course, is the delusion that these events can be influenced or even controlled by good behavior, dietary restriction, virgin sacrifice, etc.) At worst, a default deistic explanation makes us less safe, by acting as a disincentive to actual productive inquiry.

  Our only hope for minimizing the damage from pandemic illness and natural disasters lies with objective scientific investigation. Better prediction of geological and meteorological events. Structures built from modern materials and designed to survive extreme stresses. Efficient, workable evacuation plans. Vaccines to prevent communicable diseases. These things don't just happen, no matter how humbly we petition or how hard we pray. They happen as the result of brain work and perseverance, and the underlying assumption that events that kill a lot of people should and can be prevented. If we call it the will of god(s) and trust in the power of prayer to save us, we're leaving it to chance. Without the will to make our own way in the Universe, and the scientific diligence to learn how it all works, we're signing on as the future test subjects in an experiment testing the power of fervent prayer to alter the trajectory of a civilization-killing asteroid. In that scenario, my money's on the giant rock.

Boy on a Stick and Slither:
  It brings the funny. I especially enjoyed this recent entry.

One Thing Athiests Never Do:
Pray for the deaths of people who disagree with them.

  When Wiley Drake, pastor of a Baptist church in Buena Park, California, used church letterhead and a church-affiliated radio show to endorse former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee's candidacy for president, it raised some red flags. Under federal tax law, non-profit organizations (religious or not) aren't allowed to endorse candidates. Those that do so risk losing their non-profit status, and the attending tax benefits.

  There's a minor piece of oft-ignored legal jargon called the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. It's supposed to keep religious zealots from interfering in government, and vice versa. Despite the creeping theocratic bent of the current administration, maintaining federal tax benefits for a religious organization that endorses candidates is still a no-no. So, a group called Americans United for Separation of Church and State asked the IRS to investigate the church's non-profit status.

  Instead of defending his actions, Drake called on his flock to join him in praying to their god for the deaths of two of Americans United's leaders. While I'm pretty confident that there's no grumpy bearded man in the sky, grinding fresh points onto a pair of lightning bolts and aiming for Americans United's headquarters, it does raise some interesting questions.

  Drake is asking for help to petition the omnipotent creator of the Universe to kill two human beings. How is that substantively different from trying to hire a hitman? The question of there actually being an omnipotent creator of the Universe is immaterial; Drake believes a god exists, and he's asked that god to pop a cap in his enemies.

  It's the belief that is the key here. If I believe that I've hired a hitman to kill someone, I've committed a crime. It doesn't matter if my "hitman" is an undercover FBI agent, and my intended target was never in any real danger. I've engaged in a conspiracy to commit murder. In many jurisdictions, the penalty for this crime is on par with what I'd face if I'd actually done some killing.

  I'll say it again, because I think it bears repeating. Drake believes that he and his followers are asking an omnipotent (and not at all imaginary) being to kill his enemies. He has clearly shown the intent to cause the deaths of two people. This has to be a criminal act. If it wasn't all so laughably stupid, I'd say Drake should be prosecuted for his threats.

ReligionNewsBlog
Americans United for Separation of Church and State
LA Times (registration required)

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  Is this all there is?
- Desperately Seeking Soothing

Dear Desperately Seeking Soothing,
  I like to think so. Who wants to slog through life hoping for a reward after it's over?

  The concept of a post-off-mortal-coil-shuffling reward is one of the oldest tools of religious authority. If the faithful believe that there's a fabulous reward coming later on, they'll shoulder their burdens (or strap on their dynamite corsets) and trudge on until it's their turn as the bug on the cosmic windshield.

  It's tempting, when my faith in human nature is at its lowest ebb, to believe that the concept of a reward in heaven is nothing more than a carrot, meant to keep the masses quiet as they bear the burden of crushing poverty, while their church amasses a sizable (an non-taxable) fortune. But I suspect that the truth is a bit more complicated.

  If people knew that this was the only life on the agenda, they might work a lot harder trying to make this life as good as possible: taking chances, trying new things, helping out their fellow short-timers. If you die and there's no there there, then the journey finally becomes more important than the destination.

  Then again, some of us might use that as an excuse to treat the world and our fellows even more callously, if that's possible. If you're not going to punished in the afterlife, why should you care about whose feelings (or face) you stomp on?

  All of that was a roundabout way of saying yes, this is all there is. You get one life, just like everybody else. Don't wait around expecting to get all the things you want once your body lies mouldering in the grave. Planning for retirement is daunting enough; planning for eternity is impractical and unnecessary. Just try to keep in mind that everyone else is living their one life too, and it's not a zero-sum game.

  I'll ditch the philosophy and get back to the snark next time, I promise.

For The Love Of Astronauts!
  For the love of astronauts, DO NOT wear flip-flops to work and then complain about injury or discomfort of your feet. That's what they make shoes for. You're basically wearing a dry sponge held on by a rubber thong. Of course it's going to be uncomfortable. By choosing to wear such impractical (and onomatopoeic) footwear in a professional environment, you've forfeited your right to complain about the state of your feet.

For The Love Of Astronauts...
  I've decided that, in situations where a believer would invoke an omnipresent deity, I'm going to start swearing to astronauts.* After all, astronauts are the only beings that I know for sure have been smiling down on us from above the clouds.

*For purposes of this exercise, "astronauts" will include Russian cosmonauts, Chinese taikonauts, and any whatever-nauts from future manned space programs. My admiration for those who've flown in space is not bound by anything so silly as nationality.