When discussing and criticizing New Age, New Thought, pseudoscience beliefs (like The Secret, crystals, homeopathy, chiropractic, ESP, psychics, Tarot, astrology, chi, feng shui, ghosts, reflexology, etc. ad nauseum) people often say “Oh, what’s the big deal? It’s harmless; let people believe what they want,” it’s often because they themselves have some belief or three that they know fall into the category of superstition and credulity. Subconsciously they think, “Hmm, I better not be too harsh on people who believe in The Secret because I know some know-it-all busybody would have problems with my belief in alien visitation.”

But there is a harm to non-critical thinking and it can be as “small” as spending good money on bunk to as significant as death:

• Teen’s death blamed on faith healing

(_Another Child Dies from Faith Healing_.) A cousin of his also recently died due to lack of medical care thanks to religious beliefs. There’s a woman I work with who also believes in faith healing, and has ignored ever-increasing symptoms until she passed out at a chiropractor and was sent to the hospital. Seems she has a brain tumor. (No word yet if it’s malignant or benign.)

There’s no reason for this. I want to try hard not to disparage faith or spirituality, but let’s be realistic here: medical science over the last 200 years has literally turned the worldview of illness in the west completely upside down. What was once thought to be caused by demons and curses we know to be viruses, bacteria, and chemical disorders. No amount of praying has ever repaired anything visibly irreparable and known to be medically incurable or able to go into remission such as amputations or visible horrific burn damage. A recent massive double-blind study showed that of the three groups of heart surgery patients, (one prayed for by large amounts of cross denominational Christians and not told about it, one prayed for and told about it, and one not prayed for) the group not prayed for and the one prayed for and not told had no difference in post-surgery recovery or complications. In fact, the one prayed for and who knew about it fared statistically worse. (Hypothesis is that some of the patients felt increased stress and concern which lead to complications.)

Recently a girl with serious Autism had a teaching assistant who visited a psychic. The psychic told her a student of hers was being molested. She went to the school with her “evidence” and they turned it to the Canadian version of Family Services:

• The Mother, The Child, The School Board And The Psychic

(_Psychics and gullible people do REAL harm_.) Long story short, it was proven without a doubt that the girl was not being molested–the psychic was full of crap (surprise!) The result of her “for entertainment purposes only” seering was to throw a family into upheaval and cost them a great deal of money and emotional distress.

Neurologist Steven Novella has an excellent commentary on this story: _Psychic Alleges Sexual Abuse_:

Any reasonable assessment of the evidence, in my opinion, clearly shows that alleged psychics are frauds - yes, all of them. Some may be self-deluded, while others (by the techniques they use) must be con artists. But they are all frauds - they pretend to do something they cannot do. Spreading false beliefs about reality is harmful in and of itself. But this harm is greatly magnified by great mischief ensues when alleged psychics make serious allegations based upon their intuitions. This elevates fraud to negligence, and perhaps even depraved indifference.

My wife is often a voice of reason to me. When I go off on something, criticizing what I think is irrational thought, she usually has a point of view that pulls me back down to civility. On this issue she suggested that people should be allowed to believe whatever bogus ideas they want, but should be held accountable should negative results arise. Well, of course that makes sense–I don’t think we should outlaw gullibility or non-critical beliefs, that’s fascist and would actually be counter-productive. But there’s a problem: people AREN’T being held accountable because people are scared to death to publicly criticize religion, pseudoscience, superstitions, or other credulous beliefs. From that CNN article on the boy’s death:

After earlier deaths involving children of Followers of Christ believers, a 1999 Oregon law struck down religious shields for parents who treat their children solely with prayer. No one had been prosecuted under it until the Worthingtons’ case [last March].

We have reached a point in our culture where criticizing, examining, demanding evidence for people’s beliefs is verboten. That kind of Christian fundamentalism which eschews modern medicine and science and puts their children in harm damn well deserves to be criticized at its very foundation. All psychics are frauds, period, and should be treated as such by the legal system and society at large. Beliefs which can and often do lead to harm should not be tip-toed around and given a pass because of some misguided desire to give all beliefs respect and tolerance. Some don’t deserve it.

There’s a CNN article yesterday:

• Should I Vaccinate My baby?

It floored me. Because of vaccinations we’ve eradicated polio, a disease which used to kill or paralyze or cripple literally hundreds of thousands of people a year. Measles? Silly measles, we can risk it–why vaccinate. Because measles is a highly contagious disease with a 10-30% fatality rate and killed half a million unvaccinated people in 2003. There’s a reason we vaccinate children–it saves countless lives from many easily preventable diseases. And because of completely non-critical thinking, this process is thrown into question. Because of three converging conditions, this life-saving science is questioned and debated and needlessly avoided by many:

• Symptoms of Autism reveal themselves at the same age range in which we vaccinate kids–regardless of vaccination. We’ve known this for decades, we see this in places where vaccinations aren’t done. It is coincidence which confuses correlation with causation.
• We’re diagnosing more cases of Autism because of changes in methodology. It used to be that only the most severe cases of Autism were recognized as such–non-functional, “Rainman” style Autism. Now an extremely expansive continuum of symptom severity is being diagnosed. People with Ausperger’s Syndrome, a form of high-functioning Autism was virtually undiagnosed a couple of decades ago…now doctors are more readily recognizing and diagnosing cases. It’s always existed–we’re just diagnosing it more and it has nothing to do with vaccines.
• Parents understandably want to blame something. No one, parents, anyone, likes hearing “sometimes things just happen.” People want reasons, they want answers, they want something to blame. It’s completely understandable, perfectly human. It’s why people turn to ideas of “luck” and fortune, ESP, ghosts, aliens, what have you, for explanations to coincidence, accident, unexplained (in their mind) occurrences.

But the bottom line, is test after test, study after study, research after research, prove that there is no link between Autism and vaccines. In fact, one of the most vocal proponents of the connection was invited to help design what was one of the largest and most comprehensive studies examining the possible link. When the data was analyzed and it was becoming obvious that once again there was no link, she took her name off the study and started a propaganda campaign to distance her involvement and try to discredit the study.

Sometimes people want to believe something despite all evidence to the contrary. That’s delusion.

We should hold people accountable for the effects of their beliefs, absolutely. But what happens when those responsible for holding people accountable themselves rely on magical-thinking, superstition, and other woo? People get a pass. Children are being killed by medieval religious beliefs? Well, we have to be tolerant of religion (especially in this country if it in any way involves the words “Christian” or “…of Christ”.) “Psychics” like _Sylvia Browne_ crassly lie to grieving families, feeding on their pain and grief for their own fame and money? Well, it’s for “entertainment purposes” so they’re covered. (Or, hey, in Sylvia’s case it’s a “religious belief”! Two passes in one!) Besides, cultural leaders and gurus like Oprah advocate mysticism, New Age and New Thought, psychic beliefs, and pseudoscience–so, there must be something to it.

And so we continue to support and encourage un-critical thinking and credulous belief in woo as a culture in general, and that affects our legal system, politics, media.

The other day I heard a commercial for some “all natural” prostate health herbal supplement. “And it’s all natural, so you don’t have to worry about those annoying side effects that come with pharmaceutical products.” Got a message for you: poison ivy is “all natural.” Hemlock, toadstools, heroin, arsenic, Ebola, hepatitis, cancer, cyanide, anthrax…all natural, my friends! And here’s another clue: if something, like an herb, is capable of any kind of “positive” biochemical effect on your body, it’s capable of producing unwanted and negative side effects. The only difference, FDA regulated pharmaceuticals go through rigorous testing to find all or most of those side effects, their severity, cross medication reactions. Herbal remedies get none of that testing. St. John’s Wort? All natural, and promotes liver disease. Ginko biloba? All natural, and contributes to heart disease and strokes. (True) homeopathic “medicine” is the safest, being pretty much complete water, so what’s the harm? A lot if people trust water and sugar tablets instead of seeking needed medical advice for symptoms that may indicate something water and sugar don’t affect!

A culture that believes in woo won’t and can’t hold people who harm others or themselves, based on woo, accountable in any significant degree.

• Carl Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.
• James Randi’s Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions.
• Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time.
• Madeleine L. Van Hecke’s Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things.
• Thomas E. Kida’s Don’t Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking.
• Robert Burton’s On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not.
• Podcast: Point of Inquiry
• Podcast: Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe
• Blog: Memoirs of a Skepchick
• Blog: NeuroLogica
• Blog/podcast: Skeptoid
• Common logical fallacies
• Comprehensive list of logical fallacies
• Cognitive bias

…with one of these great tees!

♦ Wear Science- Teach the Controversy

(Thanks BoingBoing!)

The latest Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast is really fantastic.

♦ Skepticast #150: 6/4/2008

It starts with a wonderful criticism of the anti-vaccine/autism movement versus reasoned thinking. For example, one of the main tactics of the anti-vaccine movement is to claim vaccines contain known dangerous chemicals. But to do this, they scan ingredient lists and pick out “bad sounding” chemical partial names and hold those up as being a significant and viable ingredient.

It’s like saying: “Salt is dangerous because it contains chlorine!” because they found that salt is sodium chloride. These people paid no attention in high school chemistry when you learned that a chemical when bonded with another creates entirely new properties. And this is just a small sample of the lack of critical thinking among this group. And the media is just furthering this erroneous pseudo-science by giving them all the support they need without offering any kind of skeptical scientific counterpoint.

Also in the show is a great interview with Walter Isaacson, author of the biography, Einstein: His Life and Universe. The fact that he was a relatively uneducated patent clerk may have helped allow him to become the genius on the level of Issac Newton and Aristotle that he was.

And in their weekly game, (spoiler warning!) they discuss the counter-intuitive findings that talking about (read: reliving) a public trauma, like 9/11, is actually potentially more psychologically harmful than keeping it inside!

Good show, I highly recommend it!

These pictures from the Bad Astronomer are…amazing! Properly awesome.

♦ When galaxies collide

This is one of my favorites:

These are pictures of galaxies colliding. Galaxies. GALAXIES! Not billiard balls, not smoke rings, not anything you can hold in your hand… things that contain BILLIONS of stars and hundreds of billions of planets! Zooming through space at inconceivable speeds and tearing each other up.

The universe is so frakkin’ awesome!!

Last month I commented on a conversation over at NewSojourn, “Where Does ‘Ought’ Come From?“, where he commits the fallacy of the false dilemma by saying that you either believe morality, ethics, “proper” civil behavior is dictated by a (the Christian) god, or else there is no such thing and any claim to believe in ethics and morality if you’re not religious (Christian) is a lie. Or his word, “hogwash.”

Well of course, as an atheist and a naturalist (no, NOT nudist!) I’m also a secular humanist, so I take great offense at the idea that you have to be either a religious believer (Christian specifically) or a nihilist. There is something in between that is perfectly complimentary to the idea that morality exists (because it does) without the need for any god (because there aren’t (–even so, why specifically Yahweh and not one of the other 2400 gods?)

But better than any response I’ve given, I just listened to the latest Point of Inquiry podcast with an interview with naturalism philosopher and Vice President for Research and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Inquiry:

♦ John Shook - Naturalism and the Scientific Outlook

It’s not a very long episode, only 25 minutes, and I think the way he discuses the argument for naturalism as a philosophy and a worldview is pretty much the final word in my book. He also discusses the role of science in society and the way science is not a study of scientists (which is what creationists and anti-scientists want to make it out to be), but an examination purely of nature and the evidence from the examination of nature regardless of the people involved.

Here are some nice bits:

Naturalism is a worldview, a philosophy of you like, that understand reality through experience, reason and science. And I break it down into these three more simpler elements but it’s necessary to understand: they work together. …

You cannot have naturalism without science. But, we have to understand, science itself is based upon our experience of the world, and, reasoning about the world. We draw inferences, we test hypotheses, we draw tentative conclusions about what reality is like. Sometimes, opponents of naturalism, love to appeal to experience independently of science, or to reason (let’s say some rational arguments for the existence of god), again–completely unhinged from science. …

The diversity of human experience is incredible! Of course religious experience is part of this. What naturalism simply demands is that… experience is not enough. Experience has to be tested by rational standards of coherence and common sense, and also it has to be consistent with science. …

Strictly speaking, science itself as a list of cutting-edge theories, that are best tested by experiments, you can’t directly infer moral conclusions about how human beings ought to live. You can’t read them off…. You can’t detect values with a microscope. There have been some objectionable philosophies that have attempted this. For example Social Darwinism once proliferated: ‘Rich people ought to survive because obviously they’re more fit,’ this sort of bogus, junk science really is a logical dead end. … Humorously, this junk science, this propaganda of Social Darwinism, was actually playing a card played by theologians played by time immemorial. ‘If it’s natural, it’s right.’ This presumption being by theologians: God set up nature so God must have deemed it right. That principle just have to be thrown out as completely illogical and unsupportable, so scientists shouldn’t do it either.

What I would suggest is that instead we remind ourselves that as naturalists we rely on experience, reason, and science–it’s the unity of the three of them that really allows naturalism to tell us real information about how human beings ought to live. Especially the experience. Sometimes naturalists think by discarding supernaturalism they have to completely discard the religious cultural heritages of humanity too. And we don’t have to do that. What we can do is we can distinguish between what doesn’t work anymore in religion and what still may work. For example: moral wisdom, about how human beings ought to live. Now of course it’s couched too often in mythological language… and it is horribly outmoded.

So, naturalism would recommend, not that we start from scratch, some blank slate, some a priori principles of pure reason to deduce how we ought to live; instead what we ought to do is we ought to critically examine and test this cumulative body of moral wisdom that comes from the world’s cultures. After all, there’s sort of an evolutionary wisdom here. Most of these cultures have lasted for hundreds if not thousands of years, human beings have to a certain extent, successfully flourished, why discard this body of wisdom? So a naturalist would say: ‘We could build a new non-religious, secular culture–not in some a priori fashion or by consulting intuitions or anything like that, but simply by taking from the best of the other world cultures. …

And from there they discuss value of life, the meaning of life, and cosmic ego versus personal ego and what may be in between when defining meaning and passing values on.
It’s a good listen!

Welcome to the 21st century!

♦ Girl, 6, thrown on fire for being ‘lowest class’

If anyone denies that the earth is composed of literally two different worlds, they’re living a completely sheltered life in theirs. Here in the year 2008, we have machines that can literally detect thought before you have the thought, we can map the genome and know what each gene is for, we’re perhaps just years before we can use nanobots to treat cancer, we have telescopes which can see the remnants of post-Big bang radiation.

And we still have places where women are forced to cover their bodies lest they offend men and Allah’s sensibilities, where people are relegated to class divisions based on levels of reincarnation, where virgins are raped because it’s against the Koran to kill a virgin if they fall in love with a non-Muslim, where priests discourage condom use in AIDS and famine plagued places because it’s against God’s will, and let’s also include just plain stupid and ridiculous ideas of war in this contradiction, whether religious or not.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s hard not to comment on the horrific screed that is the movie “Expelled”. I’ve not seen it, and I’m not sure I want to (just as I’m not interested in seeing Michael Moore’s manipulative and half-truth pseudo-docs). But Scientific America has a great article listing a few things that the movies gets horribly wrong–and not accidentally!

♦ Six Things in Expelled That Ben Stein Doesn’t Want You to Know…

For example:

During Scientific American’s post-screening conversation with Expelled associate producer Mark Mathis, we asked him why Ken Miller was not included in the film. Mathis explained that his presence would have “confused” viewers. But the reality is that showing Miller would have invalidated the film’s major premise that evolutionary biologists all reject God.

(Ken Miller is an evolutionary biologist, AND is publicly religious.)

And, they cut and edit Darwin’s writing to make it sound like he’s the father of “social Darwinism” and advocates the eradication of the weak…when he actually wrote the exact opposite!! It’ll make you plotz when you read this.

Here’s an interesting videotaped lecture from a Biblical scholar and former Christian evangelical (until, get this, after he learned Biblical scholarship), discussing how, well, basically how the masses’ religion is kept alive by people who don’t want it known what Biblical scholars know about Biblical history and validity.

♦ Hector Avalos: How Archaeology Killed Biblical History

No, this isn’t some grand “da Vinci” Code conspiracy! It’s simple propagation of ideology despite the erosion and devalidifying (I’m making that a real word) of the foundation on which the ideology is based. And Biblical scholars by and large know this!

There’s a movie coming out called Expelled, which tries to argue that there are people in academia being fired and denied tenure because of Intelligent Design beliefs. And more ridiculously, how “Darwinism” (which is really a silly term) was the basis for Nazi holocaust.

Well, let me allow others, involved in the film and the issues, explain how horrible this movie is and irresponsible it’s premises:

♦ Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Integrity Displayed
♦ The Expelled Hitler Fallacy
♦ Lying for Jesus

Update (15 April): I’m embarrassed to admit I left off the most vital Web site, which very clearly and with ample evidence exposes the lies and fraud the makers of the film have perpetrated, and how terribly and disgustingly wrong they are in their film’s content.

♦ Expelled: Exposed

Richard Dawkins is just the coolest!
(Author of such books as The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion.)
Here is a video (22 min long) of his talk at TED a couple of years ago where he discusses just how fantastically weird the universe is, because of the way our brains have evolved to apprehend our universe in a way that assists our survival:

Next is a very short clip (1min20sec) of his response to someone who asks Pascal’s Wager:

Finally, an also brief (2min25sec) clip of astronomer and educator Neil deGrasse Tyson admonishing Dawkins (and rightly so) for perhaps alienating people he could be helping bring to rational thought and science, due to his caustic nature:

(Sorry for invoking the specter of Austin Powers with that title.)

I almost never discuss sex and gender issues on my blog. I think I have only twice in the five years I’ve been blogging:
♦ The free market corrects (for errors in being trusting).
♦ For the Bible tells me so.
♦ Time for secret gay sex for straight men fading away.
♦ Right to privacy…with your vibrator.
♦ Contraception, abortion foe to head family-planning office - CNN.com
♦ Why Gay Marriage is Wrong, Redux

Hmm, guess I’ve blogged more on the subject than I thought. But usually, based on a search of my blog, I mention in conjunction with Judeo-Christian (and Islamic) hatred of sex. Seems most every other non-Abrahamic religion in the world has a significantly more open and healthy attitude regarding human sexuality. The Abrahamic religions are nearly pathological when it comes treating human sexuality as wrong, dirty, evil, sinful, shameful, etc. ad nauseum. And since our western culture has been greatly influenced by and infected affected by the Abrahamic religions, our patriarchal society has taken on many of the same neurotic issues with sexuality. And even more so in the United States, which is the most Christian of all “civilized” western nations.

At risk of confusing causation with correlation, Read the rest of this entry »

Read:

A report in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that some 50,000-100,000 Americans die each year from lung cancer caused by particulate air pollution, the biggest cause of which is coal-burning power plants in the midwest and east. Even taking the maximum predicted death toll from Chernobyl, we would need a Chernobyl-sized accident every three weeks to make nuclear power as deadly as coal and oil already is. Shall I repeat that? If the world was filled with Generation I reactors run by feuding coal miners, we would need a worst-case scenario every three weeks just to match the US death toll we’ve imposed upon ourselves by clinging to our current fossil fuel system. Next time you see a hippie cheering the defeat of nuclear power in the US, realize that a healthy environment and saving lives are clearly not their priorities.

This is a quote from a recent Skeptoid episode:

♦ The Terror of Nuclear Power
(you can read the transcript, or listen to the 18 minute audio file)

In this episode, Brian examines the reason why Americans are so scared of nuclear power–and why it’s, today, unfounded. Not only unfounded, but harming us by allowing us to continue to create many times more deaths and illness due to coal and oil, and keeping us addicted to these non-renewable energy resources, when nuclear power is today safer and cleaner than any alternative.