The Power of Prayer and the Slippery Slope Toward Irrelevancy
PZ Meyrs has a nice little post about the (in)efficiency of prayer. What I love about it is that it shows up Rick Perry’s inane religiously inspired ideas as being just as idiotic as many say they are. Here, praying for rain had no effect on the drought in Texas. If anything, one could conclude that it made things worse. Perhaps they just weren’t doing it right and that made God upset which caused him to make the drought worse. Of course, this wasn’t a scientific study so it is really meaningless. Still, if the power of prayer were really as strong as Christians make it out to be, you’d think that by now there would be obvious, undeniable evidence for it. The fact that there isn’t, and that any supposed results, positive or negative, are purely subjective, seems to suggest that prayer isn’t effective.
There have been several well know studies on the effect of prayer. One looked at the effect of prayer on the recovery of cardiac patients and found no evidence that being prayed for had a positive effect on the outcome of the patient’s condition. In fact, the study showed that those who knew they were being prayed for actually had worse outcomes than those who didn’t know. There was no difference between those who didn’t know they were being prayed for and those who were not prayed for at all. This study indicates that prayer offers no benefit, and in the cases where people knew they were being prayed for, could actually cause harm.
The reality is that scientists can run a thousand rigorous studies on prayer that show that there really is no effect, and Christians will always find excuses and rationalizations to support their view that prayer really does work. The fact is that all the evidence in the world against the prayer being effective means nothing to those of faith. Faith trumps evidence and truth every step of the way, which is why religious faith is so insidious is its ability to keep people enslaved under the yoke of misbelief. It is one of the main reasons that the U.S. is quickly losing its scientific and technological superiority to places like Europe and China. When your faith makes you suspicious of science, makes you push for teaching religious faith in the guise of science in public schools, makes you abandon one of the best hopes of fighting disease since the invention of antibiotics, then you will soon find yourself living in a second world economy dependent on other countries for your technology.
If we continue on this track, the U.S. will become an completely consumer driven economy where almost every technology and most goods will come from outside the U.S, leaving us completely vulnerable to the fluctuations in fortunes and whims of other nations. Our economy has always been the bedrock of our ability to promote our power and to lead the word in almost every important field imaginable. Surrendering our lead in science and technology to the ineffectiveness of religious faith will only being about the weakening of our economy and our decent into irrelevancy in the world.
Another Example of Bad Science Reporting
The newspaper, The Telegraph, has published a story with the exciting title, Large Hadron Collider rumoured to have found God Particle. What makes this bad science reporting is that the actually text of the article is more along these lines:
“It is far too early to say if there is anything to it or not. There are 3,000 scientists working on ATLAS and they divide the analysis work up between them.
“This is an internal communication that highlights something interesting, but it has to go through several stages of assessment by the scientific team before it will be released as an official result by the collaborative team.
“The majority of these things turn out to be nothing at all. It is very speculative at this stage, but there is a great deal of excitement and anticipation that something will be found which is probably why this has found its way onto the internet.”
What the story is really about is this:
Despite the official caution, there was intense speculation on internet blogs and scientific websites that the results described in the memo signalled the first discovery of the Higgs boson.
This is a story about the rumors of the discovery of the Higgs boson, not about the actually discovery it’s self. This is not science reporting, this is rumor mongering. Isn’t the current state of the general public’s science knowledge bad enough without the media having to sensationalize a non-story?
I Seem to Have Hit a Nerve
My last post, Hitler – The Last Refuge of a Theist, seems to have hit a nerve among skeptics and atheists. I’ve seem some excellent comments regarding the truth about Hitler and his supposed support of Darwin and evolution. Among them is the following outstanding comment from fribnit.
“The single “scholarly” work of which I am aware that promotes a Darwin-Hitler connection is a piece of propaganda funded by an “Intelligent Design” promoting group called Discovery. The book, called From Darwin to Hitler by an “Historian” named Richard Weikart, is widely discredited as nothing more than propaganda.
As stated above, the Nazi’s burned Origin of the Species. Evolution was among the areas of scientific study derided by Hitler as “Jew Science”. Interesting in that Darwin was not Jewish.It offends me deeply when someone uses the Hitler card in such a patently false manner, intended to discredit with guilt by association.
As Jay points out, Hitler self identified as a Christian. He felt that “The Almighty” guided and approved of his actions. Certainly the Christian-Hitler connection is much stronger than any supposed Darwin-Hitler connection.
I do not blame “Christianity” for the actions of Hitler and the Nazi scum, nor do I blame “Christianity” for the atrocities of the KKK, who also consider themselves “God Fearing Christians”. I don’t even blame “Christianity” for the Spanish Inquisition (Hundreds of years before Darwin) or the Crusades. I hold as responsible the people that conceived and committed these atrocities.
Long before Darwin, The Greeks and Romans and many others, considered themselves separate races from, and superior to, other people on the planet. Long before Darwin people of a variety of races considered other races to be less than human and tried to eliminate or enslave them. Human history is littered with attempts at genocide.
Believing in Intelligent Design or Creationism in the face of all the SCIENTIFIC evidence to the contrary is a remarkable exercise in willful blindness.
Trying to discredit Evolution by claiming it inspired one of the greatest atrocities in the history of man is vile and despicable and a pathetic attempt to defend the indefensible: “Intelligent Design”.”:
There are several very good points made here. Hitler did self-identify as a Christian and did, if we can believe his written and spoken words, that the “Almighty” was guiding him and supporting him.
The Nazis did burn copies of On Origin of Species and considered evolution a “Jewish” science. Burning copies of a book that describes a theory you supposedly support is incomprehensible.
Eugenics is not based on Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, but rather artificial selection, or breeding. Just as humans have bred animals for thousands of years, Hitler and his cohorts believed that they could breed better humans and even set up communities where Aryan men and women were paired, married and had children. A major goal of the Holocaust was not just to kill the Jews and other “undesirables”, but to remove them completely from the human gene pool by both exterminating those who existed and breeding the various percentages out of these genes out of the remaining population.
This type of evolutionary selection is anything but natural, which is what Darwin’s theory is all about. Those who wish to use the Nazi example of eugenics against evolution show a gross lack of understanding of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and of history.
To compare Darwin and his theory of evolution by natural selection to Hitler and the Holocaust is intellectually dishonest and reprehensible. It is a desperate ploy by people who can find no reasonable and cogent arguments to support their religious beliefs. It shows the narrowness of their world view and the smallness of the intellect.
Happy Darwin Day!
It is Darwin Day! This is a day to remember the huge effect that Darwin’s On Origin Of Species and the theory it describes has had on the biological sciences. Everything we know today about modern genetics, micro-biology, and medicine has evolution at their foundations. The high yield crops that feed billions, the powerful antibiotics and vaccines that save millions of lives every year, the cutting edge medical technologies that promise cures for diseases as diverse as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and diabetes rely on knowledge that has evolution at their foundation. Evolution is one of the most powerfully explanatory, predictive, and useful scientific theories since Newton devised his theory of gravity.
To celebrate, go and read the 1st (and best) edition of On Origin of Species for free.
I’ll leave you with this picture from Tree Lobsters which expresses the awesomeness of Darwin and his theory:
Topic of the Week – Astrology
I haven’t written much about astrology before, except for one entry, and that is because I really have no interest in astrology and never have. I have always viewed it as a silly thing that was a left over from the time before science and empirical reason came to the forefront of human thought.
Growing up, I was fascinated with astronomy and was quite the amateur astronomer in my youth, spending countless nights, even in the coldest of winters, outside with my telescope. Knowing how the universe operated completely negated the possibility that astrology could possibly be anything but superstition and wishful thinking.
The Twitterspace has been, well, atwitter, about astrology ever since the director of the Minnesota Planetarium Society commented in a local newspaper interview that, due to the gradual shift in the orientation of Earth’s axis of rotation, called precession, that the Zodiac signs have changed since ancient times. Precession caused the stars to appear to gradually move over time in relation to fixed points on earth. For example, the current pole star, or north star, Polaris, will no longer be the pole star in another 12,000 years.
The precession also effects the ecliptic plane, which is where the Zodiacal constellations are located. As a result, the supposed sign you were born under is actually now not that sign anymore. As Phil Plait puts is on his Bad Astronomy blog:
“If you were born on March 22, you were an Aries… if you went by the original timing of when the Sun was in Aries. But now, millennia later, the Sun is actually in Pisces on that date. And it won’t be much longer before it’s in Aquarius in late March (hence “the dawning of the Age of Aquarius”)”
Basically, astrology is based on the positions of stars and planets as they were known well over 2000 years ago. Their positions in the sky in relation to earth change over time and astrology has no way to account for this, so even if there were something to it (which there isn’t), it would slowly have become more and more inaccurate over time. Or course, there is nothing to it. At all. As Penn & Teller have said on their show, Bullshit, astrology is – bullshit!
I was chatting with a friend today and he related to me a conversation that he had with a friend who believes in astrology. He told her that he thought astrology was a bullshit belief. She got indignant and said something to the effect of, “Oh, you wouldn’t say something like about someone’s religion.” He replied, “As a matter of fact…”. That ended the conversation pretty quickly.
If you really want an excellent explanation of why astrology is complete and utter BS, you can’t do better than Phil Plait’s in-depth take down of astrology. I’d also highly recommend reading his book, Bad Astronomy. In it he corrects many common astronomy misconceptions.
Andrew Wakefield Goes Down Hard
I’ve written before about my strong support for vaccinating children and how, in the past decade or so there has been an anti-vaccination movement that has literally cost the lives of dozens of children in the US and UK of pertussis and measles. Now, the man who started it all, the darling of all the anti-vaxers out there has been shown to be, not just unethical and a sloppy researcher, but a fraud. I’m still digesting everything in the article and I’ll have more to say on that later, bur for the meantime, read it.
It’s good to know that sometimes the truth can win out.
Ignorance is Strength
I was thinking about something I read lately about how some preachers are telling their congregations that if it is a choice between science and the Bible, the Bible has to be right. They explicitly teach putting faith over the evidence of not just science, but their very senses.
This thought had been rattling around in my mind for a few days when I happened upon a picture that someone had created based on the slogans of Ingsoc from George Orwell’s 1984. They were:
War is Peace
Hate is Love
Ignorance is Strength
It was the last one that really hit me like a bolt between the eyes and actually gave me a shock. This is exactly what these preachers, ministers, priests and imams are teaching the flocks: Ignorance is strength. It is the same kind of dangerous ignorance that is taught in Winston Smith’s dystopian world; not just the ignorance of the unknowing, but willful ignorance in the face of facts and even your own senses.
How different is what these religious leaders teach from what the Party of Ingsoc taught in 1984?
It is said that if you repeat a lie enough people will believe it. If you keep telling people that God will heal them, that he will fulfill all their needs, that if you ask it will be given unto you, people will stop relying on themselves to make decisions and put their faith instead in nothing but superstition. What is the difference between believing that carrying a rabbit’s foot or four leaf clover will bring you luck and that an invisible entity will answer your prayers? How does one have anymore more validity than the other? The truth is that they don’t because neither has any validity what-so-ever.
Children die because their parents choose to pray for them rather then get them qualified medical help. Albinos in Africa are killed because it is believed that their body parts have magical powers. Women are killed in other parts of Africa because someone believes they are witches. All of these terrible things are the consequences of superstition and magical thinking.
When we allow ourselves to believe that there is strength in ignorance, that learning and education is somehow dangerous because it is a sign of “elitism”, we put ourselves at the mercy of superstition and fear, and lives are destroyed because of it.
Ignorance is weakness of the mind and one of the greatest evils that our species faces and can lead to nothing but suffering and darkness.
Stealing Our Children’s Futures: The Evils of Childhood Religious Indoctrination
Surly Amy has a post today on Skepchick.org giving advice to a reader who is working on a project in an education class. The issue is that the class is reviewing a proposal for an educational rights amendment, which included the notion that children have the right to be indoctrinated into a religion in public schools. The reader express outrage that everyone except them is in favor of this proposal. Amy, as usual, gives some good advice. I highly encourage you to read the post.
There has been an ongoing debate about the harm of the religious indoctrination of children by their parents and other adults such as teachers and pastors. There are plenty of stories, admittedly all anecdotal, of young adults filled with anger at the people who indoctrinated them and caused them to have a very difficult time adjusting to the real world outside of their given faith community. They have problems with depression, socializing, and navigating a alien culture, even though they were born and raised right here in the United States.
It seems to be almost natural that parents should be able to raise their children in their own faith. The question becomes when does indoctrination into their parent’s beliefs become abuse?
There are the obvious answers such as when the parents’ religious beliefs compel them to physically or sexually abuse their children, but what about mental abuse?
My personal opinion is that if a child is living in fear due to things their parents do or say, for whatever reason, this constitutes abuse. I am not talking about an occasional spanking or threat of punishment. I’m talking about a child living in constant fear of physical harm. I think most people would agree that if a parent is always threatening to beat a child in order to get them to behave as they want them to, this would be abuse. So how is this different from the constant threat of burning and torture in hell that many religious parents threaten their children with on a continuous basis? “Don’t do that, or God will send you to hell!”, “You listen to your mother or God will punish you!”, “Be nice to your brother, God is watching you!”
Unlike the parents who threaten direct, physical harm to their children, religious parents who threaten their children with God’s terrible wrath are never questioned. What police office would ever think to arrest a parent who threatened their child with the torment of hell? How many prosecutors would consider charging “good Christian” parents will child abuse for telling their children, day-in and day-out, that they are sinners and are going to hell?
The fact is, Christians get a free ride in this country when it comes to child rearing (and most everything else). They can threaten their children with the most horrible, terrifying tales of burning flesh, and being ripped apart limb by limb and no one thinks that there is anything wrong with this. These visions of hell are very real in the mind of an impressionable child, as is the terror they create. Sure, some people might go as far as to call these parents “strict’ but the fact is their actions toward their children is abuse, plain and simple.
The big question is what can we do about this? There is no easy answer, but I think that education is key. I’m talking about creating a safe, accepting, secular environment in our public schools. I’m talking about keeping religion out of politics and our public institutions. This means we, as non-believers, as well as anyone else who believes in religious freedom and the separation of church and state, let our politicians know that we don’t want religion in the public spaces. We need to let them know that we value reason and science as a guide for public policy. As more people, especially young people are exposed to reason and science, the less tolerant society will become as a whole of superstitious beliefs. It may take a generation, but it can happen. It will take all of us speaking out and supporting those organizations that are fighting for reason, science and separation of church and state to make a difference.
Cognitive Dissonance Revisited
I have written about cognitive dissonance here before (here, here, here, here and here). In brief, cognitive dissonance is holding two contradicting ideas in your head at the same time and the emotional discomfort that causes.
Cognitive dissonance is something that we all experience to one degree or another on a fairly continuos basis. Most of the time, the dissonance is easily and painlessly resolved simply by making a decision. For example, say you know that you need complete a project deadline by the day after tomorrow and you have planned on completing it today, but then you get a call from a friend asking you to go out for lunch and shopping. You feel unease because you know you need to get the project done. If you decide to work on the project instead of go with your friend, you have resolved the dissonance and the unease gone now that you know you will complete your project today. If, on the other hand, you decide to go with your friend, the dissonance remains. You justify your decision by telling yourself that you have all day tomorrow to complete the project. In this case you haven’t really resolved the dissonance, but you have rationalized it to yourself effectively enough so that you are able to go out and enjoy your time with your friend, even if the dissonance may be nagging at you in the back of your mind.
We deal with situations like this all the time. The vast majority of times, we resolve it by making a decision that makes the dissonance go away. Sometimes, we choose to let the dissonance remain and we rationalize it away in order to allow ourselves to function without the emotional discomfort.
In situations where the dissonance involves a very important idea to us though, it becomes much harder to remove the dissonance because that could mean making a very big change in our worldview. A good example of this is religious belief.
I was a devout believer in god for much of my life, but was constantly changing my reasons for believing because the more I thought about it the more I saw that the evidence for god’s existence was non-existence. For a while I found ways to rationalize the dissonance that arose from keeping the ideas of a perfectly good and loving god and of suffering and evil in the world in my head at the same time. Eventually, I could no longer justify away the dissonance and accompanying emotion distress without abandoning either my rational, scientific view of the world, or my belief in god. As those of you who have been regular readers of this blog know, I abandoned the later.
How we deal with cognitive dissonance has huge implications for our society’s future because those who are devout believers in god are actively trying to interfere with and limit government funding for much important scientific research. From climate change to stem cell research, vital research into subjects that will have a profound impact on our future is in danger.
I will be continuing to research, think about, and write about cognitive dissonance and what can be done to successfully deal with it here on this blog.
Skepticon 3 – Day 2 – Personal Report
I’m going to report on the cool experiences I had outside of the convention itself. I need to go back and review the videos of the talks to really do justice to a review of the conference and speakers.
I went to the hotel’s breakfast buffet. I got my food and was looking for a place to sit, but all the tables were taken. I heard someone say, “You look like a man who needs a place to sit”. I introduced myself and found out her name was Christy. She saw my American Atheists pin and figured that I was there for Skepticon as well. She was a fascinating person. We talked about the gun show next door and she told me that she used to work gun shows and also worked technical support for a gun company. She mentioned that how brave she thought I was to wear my American Atheists button in public. I explained that it took me a while to work up the courage to do it, but that I felt like I had a moral responsibility to. She said that she went through the same thing when she came out transgender.
She had this wonderful story about how a woman called support and asked how far away she had to be from her husband to avoid power burns! It was a really cool conversation.
At the party the night before, I was drinking screwdrivers. The vodka they had tasted like turpentine (and yes, I have tasted turpentine by accident). So, at the dinner break, I drove up the street in search of Stolichnaya vodka. I found it. It was $23.00 a bottle but worth every penny!
We were back in room 201 again. The gracious host, who’s name I unfortunately forget, and I had a great conversation about a variety of topics. What those topics were are lost in the foggy, glowing haze of inebriation, but trust me, it was a stellar conversation!
I spent some time talking with David Fitzgerald, one of the speakers I missed on Friday morning. He gave me some great tips on writing and getting my message out there.
I then met the sparkling, engaging and lovely Kaleena Menke. I wish I could remember exactly what we talked about, but once again, the vodka must have zapped the brain cells that were meant for those memories. I can tell you that she made a really wonderful impression on me as someone who is fun, smart, witty and totally awesome.
I got to back to my room after 4:00am and was up the next morning at 8:00am. I felt great! But, I do think this does explain my creeping exhaustion at this moment. 
Coming tomorrow, Skepticon 3 – Day 3 – Personal Report.
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