Godless money

Dole is losing to Kay Hagan in NC, and thus is using fear of us mean evil atheists to scare people away from her opponent. I just didn't know that there was such a thing as "godless money" lol.

Seed Magazine endorsed Obama. No surprise there.

A new article in Newsweek discusses belief in the paranormal and supernatural as a coping mechanism.

Hitchens debated the guy who wrote, "I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist".

Pretty random thing

A student that I had last year, who I genuinely like, came by randomly Friday and asked me, "What do evolutionists think happens after we die?"

After I corrected his notion that all believers in sound biology are necessarily non-believers in an afterlife, I used the frequent parallel between "before you were born" and "after you die" to try to explain what it means to lose consciousness.

By coincidence, Sunday, I read this article in SciAm: "Never Say Die - Why We Can't Imagine Death".

Today, I saw this and giggled.

Praying for Jamey didn't work out so well

When I first moved to Columbia, I saw lots of bumper stickers that said, "I'm praying for Jamey."

I finally found out what they're about: a guy who got pancreatic cancer. Well, he died this January (9 months ago). I have a feeling a lot of people will take those stickers off without even reflecting on their effect...that is, their lack thereof.

In one of my posts at Debunking Christianity, I looked at the question of whether or not there really is any scientific evidence that "prayer works" or a correlation between faith and health. Unsurprisingly, I found none.

The core methodology of such studies is flawed for three reasons:

1) Some studies examine how frequent churchgoing relates to health. The problem with this methodology is that the same correlation would appear between frequent football game attendance as well; anyone healthy enough to frequently attend anything that they enjoy will do so, and the more unhealthy you get, the less you will be able to attend...and so church attendance is not special.

2) Another big problem with studies designed to measure the "prayer effect" is that the people are often receiving medical care while being studied, and it is impossible to say that the prayer had an effect compared to their treatment. If you could study only patients who have exactly the same disease at exactly the same stage and receive exactly the same treatments, then you could truly control these other variables. However, it is basically impossible to control the other variables that will affect the prognosis.

3) The final problem is that it is impossible to separate people into "prayed for" and "not prayed for" groups by virtue of the fact that you'd have to ask each person and their extended families and their entire churches not to pray...and do you think that is going to work? If someone has a serious condition and is religious, they're going to stop praying for a few weeks or months? No. And so many of the people in the "not prayed for" group whose situation turns bad are lumped in as "evidence" that those who don't receive prayer are worse off...even though the people themselves as well as their families and church members were praying for them, especially if the health condition is serious, like cancer or heart disease.

And those are just the core methodology problems. In other studies, the ones cited as "evidence prayer works", the sample sizes are very small (n<20), and therefore the probability values are unimpressive: p>0.05. Whether or not you agree that the standard for statistical significance should be p<0.05, when p values approach 0.2, you have very little statistical evidence to back up a claim of a significant impact from whatever variable you're studying. But people conveniently ignore this when touting these meager studies.

In the only double blind, multi-year, multi-thousand-patient study ever conducted on the effect of prayer on health, God failed the test. Big time. Every empirical study has shown the same thing -- that nothing fails like prayer. Don't believe me? Find one documented amputee whose limb grew back from prayer. One. Ever.

Some studies purporting to support the idea that prayer works have been literally written by criminals and frauds.

Dr. Richard Sloan (M.D., not Ph.D.) has done a lot of work in examining these sorts of issues and wrote a book recently summarizing the facts -- there is no valid study supporting the idea that prayer changes anything (valid in the sense that they used a competent methodology and a large sample size and got a good p value).

On the logical side of things:

Does prayer move God to act? If yes, then God is callous/cruel, and God is not totally sovereign. If no, then God will act regardless of whether you pray or not.

If the desired goal does not happen after you pray, would you admit that God wanted things to turn out the way that they did, or do you believe that God wanted things to turn out differently? If God wanted things to turn out the way that they did, then your prayers don't matter, because God is sovereign. If God wanted things to turn out differently, then your God is weak or stupid or both.

See, God gets the credit when the desired goal occurs, but none of the blame when it doesn't.

So both from the logical and evidential sides, you really have an uphill climb in trying to show that praying for someone even makes sense.

Comment on "Extraordinary Claims Demand Extraordinary Evidence"

We've heard the phrase before that evidence ought to be inversely proportional to the ordinariness of a claim: the more ordinary, the less evidence we require for tentative belief; the less ordinary, the more evidence we require for belief. This seems a wise maxim to hold, no matter the area of espistemology. Many theists, though, toss this maxim out the window when discussing the paucity of evidence they rely upon (Scripture) to justify belief in the most extraordinary of all claims (miracles).

I just left the following comment at an old haunt of mine:

If something occurs that is outside of not only my own personal experience, but the cumulative experience of science, especially since science exists to test boundaries and conditions to see what the laws of nature are and when/if they change, much skepticism should be brought to bear on the claim.

I would say it is a good deal simpler than you are making it here, and perhaps this could be seen more clearly if we remove the context from "miracle" to "violation" of the laws of nature. Suppose that I, scientist X, am working under conditions that no one has worked under before: say, a particle accelerator of potential 20 TeV. If I see something under those conditions that "appears" to violate the laws of physics, the same amount of scrutiny should be brought to bear on my claim as any other claim that a violation has occurred, be it of divine origin or not. And the purpose of the doubt here is to actually find out the truth: the verification principle in the philosophy of science. If the claim is true, and if the violation is natural, then the conditions and test may be repeated and ought to produce the same "violation": at which time, and once fully described, it no longer is a violation, but another law of nature!

On the other hand, suppose that we aren't discovering new laws of nature by creating conditions and tests which are extraordinary, but rather we're in the realm of the mundane. In these conditions, a supposed violation would probably draw just as much scrutiny from you (a believer) as from me (an unbeliever). If I claim that I have a dragon in my shed (to use Sagan as you did in your post), for instance, you would be naturally skeptical and would require more evidence than my "say-so" about it. But if I claim to have a lawn mower in my shed, you won't even blink.

Ditto with religion: the issue is not whether or not a God logically could violate the laws of nature, but whether the evidence we have (the say-so of anonymous persons 2000 years ago) is enough to convince us that violations did happen.

Skeptical thoughts re the Bible

I've made no bones about my feeling that the resurrection is a myth, as well as the birth narratives. I've also explained why skepticism is warranted when approaching the Bible in general, given the nature of ancient superstition, the lack of fact finding capabilities for writers in the era, the relative dearth of gospel-related facts in the earliest NT (Pauline) manuscripts, the growth of legend as the gospels aged, and so forth.

I just wanted to highlight two posts at my old haunt that are very good on these issues:

1. Why I don't believe in the resurrection, by Matthew Green
2. Where is the 800 pound gorilla? by Bart Willruth

A lot of the stuff being written at DC is sort of "pop culture atheism", but the overall tenor of conversation there is much higher than, say, the RRS.

The Importance of Skepticism

When I am asked by my Christian friends how I can reject the historicity of the Gospels, I am reminded of the story of Ronald Edwin Hunkeler, the young boy who would later be depicted as a possessed child in The Exorcist book and movie.

About a year and a half ago, I strong-armed my wife into agreeing to watch The Exorcist with me. I was falling asleep about an hour into it, while she was starting to get frightened, and used the excuse of my non-interest to turn it off. I can remember her mentioning at some time that the demonic voices and sounds in the movie were from some "real" exorcisms, added for authenticity and scare effect; I'd heard this before. I can also remember people talking about how this movie, based on the novel of the same name, was derived from a true story. Now, this is where the title of my post starts to come in.

It turns out that there is a real story upon which the movie is based; it's definitely interesting to read about. Mark Opsasnick is to thank, or blame, if you want to see it that way, for correcting decades of misinformation, legend and myth about the story. For years, the location and identity of the boy had been misreported in newspapers, books and movies. The truth behind the story is that of a boy named Ronald Edwin Hunkeler, who originally hailed from the St. Louis area but then came with his family to the DC area at around the age of four (in late 1939). The young man was often in trouble growing up, and described by his best friend as "a mean bastard," but until about the 8th grade, lived a fairly unremarkable life. In the year 1949, he was felt to be possessed by his mother and grandmother, and sent out of town for it to be dealt with. He went through some sort of weeks-long exorcism process, beginning in March 1949, at both a rectory at St. Francis Xavier College Church on the Saint Louis University campus and in the Alexian Brothers Hospital. He was living elsewise at the home of an uncle in St. Louis, and then a short time later, returned the DC area. He then went on to graduate from Gonzaga College High School in 1954 and, presumably, lead a normal life.

These facts were only found out after Mark's extensive investigating, which turned up the suburban DC address as 3807 40th Ave, Cottage City, MD. The longstanding myth, reinforced by many news reports, had always been that 3210 Bunker Hill Road, Mount Rainier, MD, was the site, and that the family only came to the DC area for the exorcism. The myths were so pervasive that a book published to "set the record straight" in 1993 included false reports from neighbors of the Bunker Hill house reporting hearing "maniacal screams" and seeing strange lights around the house in question. It had to be republished after Mark's investigative work uncovered these falsehoods in 2000, and it included almost 100 more pages than the original.

Using Google Maps, it seems a mere 600 m separates the two houses, and the priests used a false address when talking to the media to protect the boy's identity. Mark's purpose had been served once he positively identified the house, name of the family, and general timeline of the events that transpired. He did not set out to chronicle the events of the exorcism himself.

Mark himself concludes, at the end of the investigation:

While Rob Doe was unaware of it at the time, the events that centered around the troublesome teenage boy from Cottage City between January and April 1949 would later have a profound effect on people all over the globe. As the inspiration for The Exorcist, this case emerged as one of the most significant examples of paranormal phenomena in history. It spawned movies, books, and videos, and influenced hundreds of “copycat” cases around the world that led to exorcism-styled assaults, mutilations, and even deaths.

Despite the widespread popularity of this story in the aftermath of William Peter Blatty’s novel and movie, no one had ever actually investigated this case prior to my involvement. Rob Doe had never been interviewed, nor identified. No investigator had ever talked with his childhood friends or people from the neighborhood in which he grew up. In fact, no journalist ever got the location right in the first place. All previous accounts had placed the boy at 3210 Bunker Hill Road in Mount Rainier, an inexcusable error.

With the completion of this adventure we now know who the boy was, where he really lived, where he attended school, who his friends were, what his family life was like, and what behavior and personality traits he exhibited before his alleged “possession.” The credibility of the mysterious diary has now been called into question. I have shown that Father Walter Halloran—the one living, talking eyewitness to the St. Louis exorcism attempts, maintains that he did not witness any supernatural behavior by Rob Doe—no strange foreign languages (other than mimicked Latin), no changes in tone of voice, no prodigious strength, no excessive vomiting or urinating, and—to top it off—he is uncertain about the nature of the markings or skin brandings on the boy’s body. Perhaps most important of all, this case illustrates the need in paranormal investigation for close scrutiny of both initial newspaper accounts and highly touted individuals as providers of information. In this instance, both sources muddled the picture by embellishing the story when facts were uncertain.

I am reminded, as I read this, of how the human ability to embellish and "finish" stories for other people (by filling in what we believe are reasonable guesses into the gaps) can not only start a simple rumor, but end up enshrined in news reports, books and lore. And what we have to realize is that at this time in history, post-WWII, people were generally prosperous and modernist in their thinking. Telephones, automobiles, tape recorders, typewriters...all tools with which we assume reporters were familiar and employed in their pursuit of truth. Given that to this day, reasonable, intelligent, educated people living in the 21st C still believe that the person in question lived in Mt. Rainier, that exorcisms took place in the house in MD, that one of the priests was severely wounded by a bed spring, &c., is it really that difficult to see how myths and legends and lore crop up? This is in the 21st century! Imagine in the time of the Romans, when no phones for long-distance conversation and interviews, no easy transport for conversation and interviews, no tools for rapid transcription, no tools for easy and permanent preservation of records...

Is it really hard to see why it is important to be skeptical of extraordinary claims?

River Front Magazine has a long investigative article on the St. Louis side to the story, where the exorcisms actually occurred, given that the boy, upon whom the book and later movie would be based, lived at 8435 Roanoke Drive in St. Louis for a little while in spring 1949, after being sent away from DC for his "treatment"...

I've posted the full-text of the article below.

In conclusion, all I can say is that if such myths as these were able to take root and enshrine themselves in newspapers, in a day and age when such technology and modernism exists that people are naturally skeptical of such stories...how much the more so in a day and age like that of the historical Jesus, when people already knew little to nothing of naturalism/science and were very superstitious and religious? If the basic facts of the story behind The Exorcist could be this far removed from that depicted in the novel and movie and news reports, how much more so the tales in the Gospels? See Dan Barker for more on this idea, and the way he charted the number of miracles and embellishments as a function of Biblical chronology.

Skepticism is important: if we don't have solid standards for belief, if we don't seek to justify and find warrant for our beliefs, then we can literally walk around confident in false knowledge. Credulity is one thing, arrogance in error is even worse.

Hell of a House
For sale: three-bedroom Colonial in charming neighborhood. Hardwood floors. Lots of personality. And, oh yeah: Satan slept here.
By Chad Garrison
Published on October 26, 2005
http://www.riverfronttimes.com/2005-10-26/news/hell-of-a-house/full

For the residents of this tidy, tree-lined Bel-Nor neighborhood, the haunting story that surrounds the home at 8435 Roanoke Drive may be their worst-kept secret.

"Oh yeah, that's the house," confirms neighbor Cris Coy when asked if he's aware of the occult history of the two-story brick colonial next door.

"That's what they say," acknowledges Jean Kustura, a 72-year-old widow who for twenty years has kept watch over the north St. Louis County neighborhood from her bungalow on the other side of the infamous house. "But all of that happened back in the 1940s. I'm told the victim is still alive. He won't talk about it."

Other neighbors, including the couple across the street and several families living on adjacent blocks, are also quick to share the mysterious story of the house. Indeed, it seems the only people who aren't eager to recount the sordid tale are the home's current owner, Gary Stafford, and the real-estate agent trying to sell the house.

"I don't want to talk about it," bristles realtor Patrick McLaughlin before quickly hanging up the phone. "It's not going to help me sell the home."

Stafford, a real-estate investor who has never lived in the three-bedroom house, says he became aware of the "rumors" only after he purchased it out of bankruptcy this summer. The last person to occupy the residence, a man named Elvis Fantroy, left the building in June and hasn't been heard from since.

"I don't think publicizing it is a good thing," says Stafford, who's asking $169,900 for the sturdy 63-year-old domicile that has been on the market more than two months. "It's certainly not something we'd need to disclose to the future buyer -- that, some 50 years ago, a boy who stayed in the house may or may not have been possessed."

"Besides," adds Stafford, attempting to further distance his investment from the events purported to have occurred there, "the exorcism didn't happen there. It happened at [Saint Louis University]."

But the fact remains that the real-life story behind author William Peter Blatty's best-selling novel The Exorcist had its origins in St. Louis.

Legend tells of an ill thirteen-year-old boy who, in the late winter of 1949, traveled to St. Louis from suburban Washington, D.C. Convinced the child was possessed by the Devil, Jesuit priests from Saint Louis University performed a grueling month-long exorcism on the boy, at last freeing the teen from Satan's grasp in the psych ward at Alexian Brothers Hospital.

Whether the child was actually possessed is still a matter of debate, but the fact that priests did perform the archaic ritual of the exorcism is not.

Blatty used a diary kept by one of the exorcists as the basis of his 1971 book, which rode atop best-seller lists for 54 weeks. When Blatty's seminal shocker hit theaters two years later, filmgoers across the nation threw up in the aisles and ran screaming from movie houses. There were also reports of people conducting their own gothic exorcisms, killing several "possessed" victims in the process.

Reacting to the hysteria, several priests with intimate knowledge of the St. Louis exorcism came forward to angrily deny some of the more outrageous claims made in the movie, such as the possessed child masturbating with a bloody crucifix and spewing pea-soup-like vomit.

But the priests did not deny that the exorcism took place in St. Louis. Follow-up news articles, some based on excerpts from the diary Blatty used to pen his book, placed the exorcism at the rectory of St. Francis Xavier College Church on the Saint Louis University campus and in the Alexian Brothers Hospital.

But missing from almost all accounts is mention of the St. Louis residence where the boy stayed prior to being moved to the rectory and, finally, the hospital.

But that house was almost certainly the property Stafford recently purchased at 8435 Roanoke Drive. With both the church rectory and the Alexian Brothers Hospital having been razed decades ago, the home remains the last surviving landmark associated with the ghastly story.

It is within that nondescript brick home that some of the most spellbinding tales of the exorcism occurred.

Priests report arriving at the house on March 9, 1949, to witness the boy's bed shaking uncontrollably. At the mention of the scriptures, the boy screamed out in pain. Scrapes and welts -- some forming letters and words -- rose up inexplicably on his skin. A bottle of holy water flew through the air.

For two weeks the priests waged night-long battles with the demon inside the lone lit bedroom on Roanoke Drive.

That these scenes in the home are not addressed in the retelling of the exorcism is not surprising, given the extraordinary care the Jesuits took to conceal the identity of the possessed boy.

In fact, few of the St. Louis priests involved in the exorcism ever spoke of it. Father William Bowdern, who carried out the majority of the exorcism rituals, died in 1983 at the age of 85, never having disclosed what he knew of the case.

Father Raymond Bishop, who kept the diary of the exorcism, and Father William Van Roo, an attending priest, also remained tight-lipped, believing media attention violated the confidentiality of the possessed boy.

This past March, Father Walter Halloran, the last surviving Jesuit to take part in the exorcisms, died at 83.

Halloran was a 27-year-old history student at SLU when Bowdern recruited him for the exorcism. A handsome, athletic man who excelled in both football and track, Halloran provided much of the needed brawn, holding the flailing child while the priests read to him the rites of exorcism. During one episode the boy broke free of Halloran's grasp and punched him in the face, breaking his nose.

Unlike nearly all the other Jesuits with privileged information of the exorcism, Halloran shared what he knew of the case but always stopped short of saying anything that might identify the child. His most detailed recollections were told more than a decade ago to Washington, D.C.-based author Thomas B. Allen, who in 1993 published the book Possessed: The True Story of an Exorcism.

The book relied heavily on Halloran's account of the exorcism and, most important, an unedited copy of the exorcism diary he provided. The result is an enthralling day-by-day chronicle of the possession, beginning on January 15, 1949, when the boy's family first heard odd noises in their suburban D.C. abode, and ending April 19, when Bowdern is said to have finally cast Satan from the boy.

In one account, Allen describes the night the exorcism began in the Bel-Nor home's second-floor bedroom.

"Something now rippled on Robbie's right leg," writes Allen, using a pseudonym to identify the boy. "As Bowdern again commanded the demon to identify himself, red welts formed an image on the leg. It was, the witnesses later said, an image of the Devil."

The true identity of the boy and his family has never before been publicized. A dozen years following the release of his book, Allen still declines to disclose the name made available to him in Halloran's unedited diary.

"Soon after the book came out, a television show offered me $15,000 if I'd identify the kid," says Allen when contacted by phone at his home in Bethesda, Maryland. "I passed on it. During the research for my book I sent the kid -- then in his mid- to late 50s -- two letters to the address where I believed he lived. I never heard back from him, and I have to respect his privacy."

In the book, Allen identifies the St. Louis home as belonging to the boy's paternal uncle and depicts it simply as "a two-story brick house set back behind a front-yard lawn on a quiet street in a suburb a few miles northwest of St. Louis."

How, then, can we be sure the house on Roanoke was indeed the site of the exorcism? The answer comes circuitously, by way of Allen's report. While the author provides scant detail of the house, he does provide the address of the residence in Mt. Rainier, Maryland (just north of Washington, D.C.), where the boy is said to have lived at the time of the possession. That home, listed as 3210 Bunker Hill Road, received far greater notoriety than its counterpart in St. Louis.

Allen writes that the family moved away a short time after the exorcism. The property sat vacant for years. The home was known by locals as the "Devil's House"; teenagers dared each other to enter. Vagrants squatted in it, often setting parts of the house ablaze with their cooking fires.

By the early 1960s, the ramshackle structure -- believed by many to be cursed -- became such a nuisance that the local fire department used it as a training exercise, systematically burning the house room by room. Today all that's left is an empty lot, but that doesn't stop thrill-seekers from congregating on the very spot where they believe the Devil possessed a little boy.

Sadly for the thrill-seekers, the property is most likely not the true site of the possession. Prompted in part by Allen's book, Washington, D.C., writer Mark Opsasnick began researching the owners of the property on Bunker Hill Road. He discovered that the couple who lived there in 1949 did not have children. Working with clues gathered from Allen's book as well as dozens of news articles telling the "real-life" story behind The Exorcist, Opsasnick determined the boy grew up in nearby Cottage City, Maryland.

In 1998 Opsasnick published his findings in Strange Magazine, a publication dedicated to the unearthly and paranormal. In what is undoubtedly the most comprehensive investigation into the boy's identity, Opsasnick chronicles how his research led him to a home at 3807 40th Avenue in Cottage City. Dozens of interviews with people who knew the family living there at the time confirmed the author's hunch that the Cottage City address was in fact home to a family whose child became "sick" in the winter of 1949 and went to St. Louis for treatment.

Although Opsasnick never identifies the child or the family by name (he uses the pseudonym "John Doe" throughout the article), he leaves valuable clues for anyone wanting to out the family, including which census books, municipal directories and libraries he used to verify the family's name and address.

When reached by phone earlier this month, the periodicals clerk at the Hyattsville Library in suburban Washington, D.C., reported that the 1949 directory Opsasnick cited in his article had been stolen but proudly noted the library did have the same directory for 1954.

In his article Opsasnick writes that Maryland land records show the family lived at the same Cottage City address from the years 1939 to 1958, meaning the 1954 address should have the same name for the family living at the address in 1949. That name: Hunkeler. Mr. Edwin E. Hunkeler and his wife, Odell.

The same last name is listed for the home on Roanoke Drive, according to the St. Louis County municipal directory for 1949. Leonard C. Hunkeler -- the paternal uncle of the possessed boy -- and his wife, Doris, occupied the home from 1942 (the year the house was built) until sometime in the early 1950s.

As to the identity of the possessed boy: His last name was most certainly that of his father, Hunkeler. No verifiable media report has ever given his full name (or, for that matter, the last name of Hunkeler), but at least two Web sites, one claiming to have obtained the unedited exorcism diary and another that ostensibly retraced the clues given in Opsasnick's article, give the name as Ronald Hunkeler.

But just what occurred in the Hunkeler residence in the early morning hours of 1949? For that we turn to the diary of the exorcism, a copy of which Thomas Allen furnished the Riverfront Times.

Written in stark and stilted prose, the 26-page document begins at the home in Cottage City. It is there that the family reported hearing strange noises in the walls and beneath the floorboards. The scratching sounds continued for several days before becoming silent to everyone but the thirteen-year-old boy, who also complained of hearing "squeaking shoes" circling his bed at night.

In his book Possessed, Allen writes that the boy's favorite aunt, a spiritualist from St. Louis, introduced the child to the Ouija board during one of her earlier visits and suggests the boy may have channeled the possession through the board game. The diary, however, makes no mention of the Ouija board but does refer to the aunt. It was her ghost that the family first believed to be behind the noises.

But soon the spirit transformed from poltergeist to sinister specter. The boy's bed shook wildly throughout the night. Bibles and holy relics flew through the air. Claw-like scratches raked the child as he slept. When the word "Louis" rose up on his ribs, the family decided a trip to visit relatives in St. Louis might rid them of the haunting.

On Wednesday, March 9, 1949, Father Bishop visited the family at their relative's home on Roanoke Drive. Bishop, a professor at Saint Louis University and the author of the exorcism diary, blessed the entire dwelling before entering the bedroom, where he found the boy lying perfectly still on a bed that was rattling violently.

Writing in third-person and referring to the possessed boy by his first initial of R, the author reports: "Bishop sprinkled St. Ignatius Holy Water on the bed in the form of a cross. The movement ceased quite abruptly. During the course of fifteen minutes of activity a sharp pain seemed to have struck R on his stomach and he cried out. The mother quickly pulled back the bed covers and lifted the boy's pajama top enough to show zig-zag scratches in bold red lines."

Friday, March 11: Bishop returned with Father Bowdern, the pastor of St. Francis Xavier College Church. "The boy was dozing when the bottle of St. Ignatius Holy Water was thrown from a table two feet from R's bed into a nearby corner, a distance of approximately six feet." Five minutes later: "A bookcase was moved from alongside the bed and turned completely around facing the entrance of the room."

Wednesday, March 16: The priests obtained approval from St. Louis archbishop Joseph E. Ritter to administer the rites of exorcism as spelled out in the centuries-old Catholic prayer book, the Roman Ritual.

That night, the diary reports, "Father Bowdern in surplice and stole began the prayers of exorcism. On the first 'Praecipio' there was immediate action. Three large parallel bars were scratched on the boy's stomach. From then on at the names of Our Lord and His Blessed Mother and St. Michael scratches appeared on the boy's legs, thighs, stomach, back, chest, face and throat. The most distinct marking on the body were the pictures of the Devil on R's right leg and the word 'HELL' imprinted on R's chest."

The nightly interventions at 8435 Roanoke Drive would continue for the next week, the child's reaction to the exorcism growing more extreme by the day.

From the Friday, March 18, entry: "The prayers of the exorcism were continued and R was seized violently so that he began to struggle with his pillow and the bed clothing. The arms, legs, and head of R had to be held by three men. The contortions revealed physical strength beyond the natural power. R spit at the faces of those who held him and at those who prayed over him. He spit at the relics and at the priests' hands. He writhed under the sprinkling of Holy Water. He fought and screamed in a diabolical, high-pitched voice."

The night of Sunday, March 20, Bishop reports, the boy reacted with more violence than on any previous occasion: "The high point of the evening were urinations which really burned R, breaking wind through rectum three different times, and cursing the exorcists. Some of the vulgarity follows: 'Go to hell, you dirty sons of bitches. You dirty assholes.'"

Monday, March 21, the family, having had little sleep since the exorcism began, agreed to move the boy to Alexian Brothers Hospital for the night. For the next several weeks, the boy would move from the hospital to the College Church rectory and back to the home on Roanoke Drive, even returning to Cottage City for a few days when the priests erroneously thought the boy was cured.

The climax came the day after Easter -- Monday, April 18 -- when the boy awoke in a furor inside the psych ward of the Alexian Brothers Hospital. His seizures and spells continued through the morning, with the priests placing medals, rosaries and relics around his neck. In his hand they placed a crucifix.

The boy mocked the priests, saying, "He has to say one more word, one little word, I mean one BIG word. He'll never say it. I am always in him. I may not have much power always, but I am in him. He will never say that word."

Still, the priests endured, holding council over the boy in one final push to exorcise the demon. At 10:45 p.m. the boy lay still. In clear, commanding tones he shouted out: "Satan! Satan! I am St. Michael, and I command you Satan, and the other evil spirits to leave the body in the name of Dominus, immediately. Now! NOW! N-O-W!"

Seven minutes later the boy awoke to announce, "He's gone."

During his final spell, the diary reports, the boy saw a vision of the Devil and "ten of his helpers" engaged in a fiery battle with St. Michael the Archangel. At one point during the dream, the angel smiled at the boy and said "Dominus" (Latin for Lord), the word the boy vowed he'd never say that morning.

The exorcised boy, presumably Ronald Hunkeler, is reported to be living somewhere on the East Coast. He is now 70 years old. Rumor has it he named his first son Michael, after the archangel who rescued him from Satan's clutches. He supposedly has never spoken about the exorcism.

A brief addendum to the diary reports that the boy and his family returned to visit the Alexian Brothers in August 1951. The entry describes the boy, then sixteen, as a "fine young man" and tells that his father and mother converted to Catholicism shortly after the exorcism.

Little else has been officially reported on the event by SLU or the Alexian Brothers. Neither institution claims to keep extensive records of what is arguably the most famous, if not sensational, event in their history.

"Oh yeah, we get this question every year around Halloween," says SLU archivist John Wade, barely suppressing a yawn. "We have a file on the exorcism, but it's mostly just newspaper clippings."

In suburban Chicago, at the national offices of the Alexian Brothers, archivist Donna Dahl keeps a tight rein on any information regarding the case.

"This person was a patient and covered under the clause of confidentiality," says Dahl. "We don't release any information on our patients, no matter how bizarre the circumstances under which they were admitted."

Within the chancellery, Fathers William Faherty, 90, and Frank Cleary, 76, are two of the handful of people still living with any institutional memory of the exorcism, and both men knew several of the SLU priests involved.

"I was an undergraduate at SLU in 1949 when this was going on," recalls Cleary, who retired from teaching theology at the university a few years ago. "There were plenty of rumors about it at the time."

Cleary says it was only after the release of the film The Exorcist -- 24 years after the St. Louis exorcism -- that anyone made a big deal out of the case. "I tell students that it was probably not a bona fide case of possession," says Cleary.

As for the welts and scrapes that rose up on the boy during the rites of the exorcism?

"I'm told," says Cleary, "that is something people can do psychologically. It's like blushing."

Father Faherty, professor emeritus of history at SLU, isn't so sure. He knows his friend Father Halloran continued to believe in the possession up to his death earlier this year.

"You see from the gospel evidence of evil's influence on the individual, and the gospel took those to be possessions," reflects Faherty. "I'll leave it up to the experts."

Regardless of the veracity of the possession, the exorcism clearly put an emotional and physical strain on all involved, especially Father William Bowdern, who fasted throughout the duration of the lengthy ordeal.

"He must have lost thirty to forty pounds," recalls 80-year-old Betty LaBarge, a relative of Bowdern who had the priest over for dinner late into the exorcism. "He looked terrible, just fatigued. When we asked him what was wrong, he simply turned the conversation. It wasn't until years later we learned he played the leading role in the exorcism. Still he never did talk about it. The word came from others involved."

The only person still living in St. Louis with first-hand knowledge of the exorcism may be 86-year-old Brother John Grider. He was one of dozens of Alexian Brothers working in the hospital in 1949.

"I've never talked to the media about it, and I prefer to keep it that way," says the frail voice over the phone. "It's not something that should be publicized."

But try telling that to the residents on Roanoke Drive, where rumors persist that the "Exorcist house" remains a portal to the netherworld.

Next-door neighbor Jean Kustura tells how the young couple living in the house years earlier complained of the northwest bedroom -- where the exorcism is said to have occurred -- being eerily cold and drafty.

Greg LaFontain, a Bel-Nor neighbor on nearby Bellerive Drive, recalls the time he and his wife, Elizabeth, toured the house years ago when it was up for sale. Upon ascending the stairs an illness swept over Elizabeth, who ran from the house. When her husband joined her on the front lawn, Elizabeth was adamant that they not purchase the home.

Mark Willingham has heard all the tales and laughs them off.

From 1991 to 1999 he and his wife, Diane, lived at the home before moving to the Central West End and later to a house in mid-county. A no-nonsense insurance adjuster, Willingham says he learned of the home's occult past only after he purchased it.

"Sure, it came as quite a shock," he recalls. But Willingham maintains that nothing out of the ordinary ever occurred in the house while he lived there, and he assures future homeowners that they, too, have nothing to fear.

"We loved that house," he adds wistfully. "Way I see it, the place was blessed so many times during the exorcism, it's probably the safest home in all St. Louis."

It really isn't so hard to think that just as modern-day legends abound on Roswell and UFO encounters and exorcisms, so too do ancient ones abound about magic Messiahs and miracles.
________________
Technorati tags: Skepticism

Kennedy's parishoners on threats to faith & anti-intellectualism

D. James Kennedy, who I love to critique, had his church vote on perceived spiritual "threats" in our country. I was amazed to see the list:

How dangerous are the following to the spiritual health of America?

	Very	Somewhat	Not very
The ACLU and similar groups	96	3	1
Pro-homosexual indoctrination	95	4	1
Abortion	93	6	1
Islamic terrorism	91	8	1
Hollywood	89	10	1
News Media	87	12	1
Darwinism/evolution	85	14	1
Cults and false religion	82	16	2
Atheism	82	16	2
Courts	81	18	1
Apathetic/uninformed Christians	79	20	1
Colleges and Universities	78	21	1
Public education (K-12)	69	29	2
Congress	63	35	2

As PZ joked, we "very dangerous" atheists are slacking off if we're way down at #9 below teh gayz. Now, the comment I want to make is especially directed towards "colleges and universities" as well as "public education"...

While there can be no doubt that there is a certain anti-intellectual crowd within the faith community, I would by no means suggest that this is the "best" crowd. In fact, while it may or may not be a plurality, such a group would probably be the rural, uneducated religious follower rather than a smart and sophisticated believer with apologetic resources. *UPDATE: A new study is underway at BU to gauge and improve the image of Evangelical scholarship and to highlight the existence of the Evangelical intelligentsia. Groups like Kennedy's here do this study no favors.*

I've pointed out before that I think the IQ issue doesn't work when comparing believers to non-believers: I think it's bunk. So let's clearly set aside questions of intelligence and focus on the question of education (not one and the same).

First, the facts show that getting a college education does not lead to a loss of religious belief in general. At best, it may lead to a large percentage of students changing religious affiliation and/or becoming more generous with their orthodoxy.

Second, while faculty at universities tend to be far less likely to be "born again" or Evangelical-types, 4 in 5 describe themselves as "spiritual" and so it's factually false to say that most professors are materialistic atheists.

Third, it is crystal clear that the younger generation is trending towards nonreligious attitudes.

What sorts of conclusions can we draw from these facts? It seems that both educated and uneducated younger people are trending away from organized religion. However, there is still a clear aversion to self-identify as an atheist, and it doesn't seem that we can blame universities and colleges for the trend.

My interpretation is that basically, the anti-intellectual sentiment expressed by the average believer is more a reflection of attitude towards arrogance and self-reliance, perceived effects of education, than actually believing that education is evil or wrong. While majors in the sciences certainly seem to believe in God far less than other people, perhaps cause/effect should be investigated there: consider the possibility that people majoring in the sciences are skeptical by nature. Therefore, all the repeated studies (including these) which have shown that fewer than 50% of scientists believe in God, that more than 60% are atheists and agnostics, that belief in God among "elite scientists" (NAS Members) is a mere 7%, and that 95% of NAS biologists are either atheists or agnostics, can't be blamed on science itself.

See:
1) SciAm Article 1999
2) Nature 1997

Ask yourself this: why is it that people who have to think logically to survive in their careers, to depend upon evidence and critical inquiry, are much more likely to reject the God hypothesis? Pride? You can see it that way, I suppose, if you want. But doesn't that imply that science itself is prideful, in saying that we ought to use our brains and the best evidence available to establish knowledge and valid beliefs? If that's pride, call me the devil, I guess...

I think that people who are drawn to science are people who are analytically-oriented and skeptically-minded by nature. We're the types who want evidence and logical arguments to persuade us. Perhaps we can simply be viewed with equity by those unlike us, and learn to view them likewise, rather than elevating ourselves unduly because of our genetically or environmentally-determined natures, which we cannot ourselves claim credit for. And perhaps others (believers) can stop denigrating us unduly for the same reason; skeptics may be hardwired for skepticism.

My polycarbonate bottle

So I bought a Trudeau water bottle from Target and today I was wondering if it is made with BPA. Luckily, it doesn't seem to be, given that Trudeau is a Canadian company and they've been looking into BPA for a while now.

I think the fear over BPA is a lot of hype. It's probably a good idea to buy BPA-free baby bottles, because infant development is so sensitive. However, adults should not fear. For one thing, the solubility of BPA is 120-300 mg/L at around room temperature, which basically means that it is nearly insoluble in water and thus migration from the plastic into your drink is going to be next to nonexistent.

I really love my Trudeau brand bottle -- the double wall design is very useful as it avoids all condensation and keeps your hands dry. Also, the drinking straw is wonderful because it sucks to completely unscrew and rescrew the top on a bottle for each drink. It's also proven nearly spill proof. Try one!

A reminder of the incoherence of the resurrection narratives

Glorious Ishtar! Isn't it lovely how the Christians co-opted all the fun pagan festivals for boring prudish commemorations? Have a wonderful myth day!

1. Did Jesus Really Rise From The Dead?
2. Easter: Did Jesus Arise? The Choice is Obvious
3. Why Wasn't There any Veneration of Jesus' Empty Tomb?
4. Is There Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus?
5. The Martyrdom Argument
6. Why I Don't Buy the Resurrection Story
7. The Historicity of Jesus' Resurrection: The Debate between Christians and Skeptics
8. Misc. others

Since Dan Barker has already invented the wheel, why should I reinvent it? From his article, "Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead?" we see the parallel passages from the gospels (and Acts) laid out so as to show us the impossible task of harmonization of the resurrection stories.

What time did the women visit the tomb?

1. Matthew: "as it began to dawn" (28:1)


2. Mark "very early in the morning . . . at the rising of the sun" (16:2, KJV); "when the sun had risen" (NRSV); "just after sunrise" (NIV)


3. Luke: "very early in the morning" (24:1, KJV) "at early dawn" (NRSV)


4. John: "when it was yet dark" (20:1)

Who were the women?

1. Matthew: Mary Magdalene and the other Mary (28:1)


2. Mark: Mary Magdalene, the mother of James, and Salome (16:1)


3. Luke: Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and other women (24:10)


4. John: Mary Magdalene (20:1)

What was their purpose?

1. Matthew: to see the tomb (28:1)


2. Mark: had already seen the tomb (15:47), brought spices (16:1)


3. Luke: had already seen the tomb (23:55), brought spices (24:1)


4. John: the body had already been spiced before they arrived (19:39,40)

Was the tomb open when they arrived?

1. Matthew: No (28:2)


2. Mark: Yes (16:4)


3. Luke: Yes (24:2)


4. John: Yes (20:1)

Who was at the tomb when they arrived?

1. Matthew: One angel (28:2-7)


2. Mark: One young man (16:5)


3. Luke: Two men (24:4)


4. John: Two angels (20:12)

Where were these messengers situated?

1. Matthew: Angel sitting on the stone (28:2)


2. Mark: Young man sitting inside, on the right (16:5)


3. Luke: Two men standing inside (24:4)


4. John: Two angels sitting on each end of the bed (20:12)

What did the messenger(s) say?

1. Matthew: "Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified. He is not here for he is risen, as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay. And go quickly, and tell his disciples that he is risen from the dead: and, behold, he goeth before you into Galilee; there shall ye see him: lo, I have told you." (28:5-7)


2. Mark: "Be not afrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him. But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you." (16:6-7)


3. Luke: "Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen: remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee, Saying, The Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again." (24:5-7)


4. John: "Woman, why weepest thou?" (20:13)

Did the women tell what happened?

1. Matthew: Yes (28:8)


2. Mark: No. "Neither said they any thing to any man." (16:8)


3. Luke: Yes. "And they returned from the tomb and told all these things to the eleven, and to all the rest." (24:9, 22-24)


4. John: Yes (20:18)

When Mary returned from the tomb, did she know Jesus had been resurrected?

1. Matthew: Yes (28:7-8)


2. Mark: Yes (16:10,11[23])


3. Luke: Yes (24:6-9,23)


4. John: No (20:2)

When did Mary first see Jesus?

1. Matthew: Before she returned to the disciples (28:9)


2. Mark: Before she returned to the disciples (16:9,10[23])


3. John: After she returned to the disciples (20:2,14)

Could Jesus be touched after the resurrection?

1. Matthew: Yes (28:9)


2. John: No (20:17), Yes (20:27)

After the women, to whom did Jesus first appear?

1. Matthew: Eleven disciples (28:16)


2. Mark: Two disciples in the country, later to eleven (16:12,14[23])


3. Luke: Two disciples in Emmaus, later to eleven (24:13,36)


4. John: Ten disciples (Judas and Thomas were absent) (20:19, 24)


5. Paul: First to Cephas (Peter), then to the twelve. (Twelve? Judas was dead). (I Corinthians 15:5)

Where did Jesus first appear to the disciples?

1. Matthew: On a mountain in Galilee (60-100 miles away) (28:16-17)


2. Mark: To two in the country, to eleven "as they sat at meat" (16:12,14[23])


3. Luke: In Emmaus (about seven miles away) at evening, to the rest in a room in Jerusalem later that night. (24:31, 36)


4. John: In a room, at evening (20:19)

Did the disciples believe the two men?

1. Mark: No (16:13[23])


2. Luke: Yes (24:34--it is the group speaking here, not the two)

What happened at that first appearance?

1. Matthew: Disciples worshipped, some doubted, "Go preach." (28:17-20)


2. Mark: Jesus reprimanded them, said "Go preach" (16:14-19[23])


3. Luke: Christ incognito, vanishing act, materialized out of thin air, reprimand, supper (24:13-51)


4. John: Passed through solid door, disciples happy, Jesus blesses them, no reprimand (21:19-23)

Did Jesus stay on earth for more than a day?

1. Mark: No (16:19[23]) Compare 16:14 with John 20:19 to show that this was all done on Sunday


2. Luke: No (24:50-52) It all happened on Sunday


3. John: Yes, at least eight days (20:26, 21:1-22)


4. Acts: Yes, at least forty days (1:3)

Where did the ascension take place?

1. Matthew: No ascension. Book ends on mountain in Galilee


2. Mark: In or near Jerusalem, after supper (16:19[23])


3. Luke: In Bethany, very close to Jerusalem, after supper (24:50-51)


4. John: No ascension


5. Paul: No ascension


6. Acts: Ascended from Mount of Olives (1:9-12)

He is risen! Not.

The logical incoherence of prayer

I'm sure everyone has heard of or seen idiot Gov. Sonny Purdue howling to Jesus for water. I'm not mad about that; he's just another stupid politician who scheduled his "rain prayer" (on government property during his own taxpayer-funded workday) on a day that it was already supposed to rain according to the weather service (though it didn't). What makes me mad is this:

Twenty-two protesters were forced to stay more than a block away, out of earshot and out of sight of the prayer service, on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. They were members of the Atlanta Freethought Society. Signs include "Hail Priest-King Perdue" or "Pray on the Church Steps, not the Capitol Steps."

Now that, friends, pisses me off. Preventing a group of freethinkers' First Amendment-given right to freedom of speech, assembly and petition is just over the frigging top. That sort of thing should bring a lawsuit against every government office from dogcatcher to the "guvnah" himself.

Rational people already understand the logical conundrums that render prayer completely incoherent:

Imagine for a moment that Sonny's wisely-planned timing had paid off and it had begun to rain at the end of the day, as was predicted a week ahead of time (when he planned the event) by the weather services. Of course, everyone there would have claimed that their prayers had moved God to act on their behalf. Ditto if it rains the next day or the next...and basically up to and including the day it finally does rain -- prayer will be credited with the rain.

What about the fact that there is already a terrible drought that has cost the state a great deal of money? And that it is only going to get worse from here? How many farmers or residents with gardens have lost a great deal of money (the former maybe even being bankrupted, the latter having to buy food they planned to grow)? Whether God did it that very day, the next day, next week, month, year...the negative consequences of failing to act ahead of time still deserve to be accounted for. And how will theists do it?

They will blame US, of course! They'll say that God is angry about abortion or gay marriage or whatever. The funniest thing is the idea that God will stop being mad if people pray about it, or after some arbitrary amount of time punishing us all.

Basically God has the perfect system: getting all the credit for "answers" and none of the blame for "failures"! Think of it this way: heads, God wins; and tails, you lose!

If God exists, and wants to do something, then God will do it, right? Why does God need your help (prayer) to do it? Is God lacking confidence? Does God need encouragement? Or is God forgetful, and you're like the helpful pager that goes off before a meeting? He's got Alzheimer's?

Perhaps all prayer is horizontal -- for our own benefit?

Perhaps people think God doesn't really give a shit about things, and they have to raise God's conscientiousness about it...? That little girl dying of leukemia will just have to suffer and die, because God doesn't f-ing care...until you pray, that is. If God doesn't care enough to actually act until asked to do so, what kind of "goodness" does God possess, anyway?

God's like a grumpy old uncle whose ties to the family are so weak that he has to be prodded to attend holiday dinners, but, importantly, still cares just enough such that he can still be prodded to do so. He won't come on his own, though...

Perhaps they think that God is democratic in nature, and that a tally of votes is necessary for God to act -- God only cares about majority popularity: argumentum ad populum, anyone?

The only answer to these questions that renders coherence to reality at all is the simplest answer, and the most likely to be true: there is no God or gods, and if there are, then they don't give a shit and your prayers are you, as a grown-up adult, talking to your invisible magic friend, just like you did when you were a little child. Every empirical study has shown the same thing -- that prayers do nothing. Don't believe me? Find one documented amputee whose limb grew back from prayer. One. Ever. Here are documented cases of the flaws in these studies I've cited, and here are some of my thoughts on those studies.

Credulity Demonstrated

At my school (UF), we have a "free speech zone" or two on campus that are heavily trafficked; campus preachers and student groups use them for advertising/proselytizing purposes on a regular basis -- especially Turlington Plaza. Brother Jed Smock had been on campus recently, so I went out to watch him for entertainment value a little on Thursday and Friday -- where I met a man who had a "free energy" device (FED). I and two other skeptics challenged him to demonstrate this marvelous supernatural device, and he did.

Long story short, he brought this little fan-driven motor to my lab bench and asked me to test the batteries connected to it with a voltmeter. Then, he started it turning (he input mechanical energy) and let it go on for a long time. The fan was kept running by the batteries connected to the motor. The key is, one of the batteries was running the motor against the resistance, while the other battery was supposed to be charged at a rate greater than the first battery's depletion!

Afterwards, I tested the batteries and found that the voltage reported was actually higher than before he started. What I should've realized at the time was the energy he input was far greater than the resistance the fan encountered. Voltage is not energy. But at the time, I told him I was a bit confused. I adamantly declared his idea of a FED was nonsense, but I told him I'd have to go home and think over how his device generated more voltage in the battery. Also, I should've made him stay there for more than 4 minutes.

The difference in the energy put in (when he started the motor by spinning the fan) versus put out would've become quite clear as the fan eventually slowed and stopped. The initial turn of the fan's rotor put in exactly as much charge into the batteries as they lacked, as this was the load on the motor.

Basically, the guy ran Bedini's "School Girl Experiment":


First, when you click the link of the schematic above, you see that this guy is spouting off complete and utter nonsense:

On this slide, we show a theoretical scheme which several researchers have discovered and used to build simple free energy motors. In this scheme, we drive an ordinary d.c. series motor by a two wire system from an ordinary battery. The motor produces shaft horsepower, at -- say -- some 30 or 40 percent efficiency, compared to the power drained from the battery. This much of the circuit is perfectly ordinary.
The trick here is to get the battery to recharge itself, without furnishing normal power to it, or expending work from the external circuit in the process.

To do this, recall that a charged particle in a "hooking" del-phi river moves itself. This is true for an ion, as well as for an electron. We need only make the del-phi in correct fashion and synchronize it; specifically, we must not release the hose nozzles we utilize to produce our del-phi river or waves.

The inventors who have discovered this have used various variations, but here we show a common one. First, we add an "energizer" (often referred to by various other names) to the circuit. This device makes the del-phi waves we will utilize, but does NOT make currents of electron masses. In other words, it makes pure Ø-dot. It takes a little work to do this, for the energizer circuit must pump a few charges now and then. So the energizer draws a little bit of power from the motor, but not very much.

WTF? Anyway, the technical take-down of all FEDs based on this sort of scheme can be found here by Eric Krieg. Krieg is like the James Randi of "over unity device" skepticism.

Now, if this sounds familiar to my long-time readers, they may recall that I mentioned a company called Steorn using similar technology/concepts as the aforementioned device. I said at the time not to hold your breath waiting on a demonstration, and...whattya know? I was right!

The fellow at UF with the earthshatteringly-important FED is named Rick Friedrich. Rick runs truthinheart.com, specializing in publication of various obscure titles in theology...and overunity electronic technology developed by John Bedini and Tom Bearden. His page describing John Bedini's new book (that he has published) alludes to the details of the devices that supposedly defy the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics (LoT). John had these details up on a web page, now archived here, that includes scans of the patents he received and shows the schematic diagrams for these devices.

Although his credentials appear to have come under some scrutiny, Bearden's work got published (somehow) in an obscure journal. You can read his scans of the article here at his site. Probably the funniest thing from the article is the circular references -- he says that his results have been independently verified by "Naudin", and supports this with an endnote [2]. Go to reference 2, and you find the words, "Communicated in Ref. 1". Hilariously, reference 1 is quite difficult to even understand, but claims a paper by Bearden himself, in Adv. in Chem. Phys. 114. This is a print-on-demand book selling for $245. Not exactly an easy reference to check, but the table of contents doesn't mention Bearden or any of his co-authors.

Basically, if something sounds too good to be true, it is.

See here for a skeptical investigation into a similar bunch of nonsense perpetrated by Dennis Lee.
________________
Technorati tags: God, Religion, Atheism, Church-state, Politics, Philosophy, Intelligent Design, Evolution, Creationism --

Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine

We have all heard the various arguments that religion is good for your health in some way or another. We have all heard that there are "numerous studies that show/support this"...where is the proof?

Some time back, I took a serious look at this question, and found, with no exception whatsoever, that no study had ever established any such correlation. (Make sure to check out the comments section of that post)

The problems with all studies purporting to support this correlation are consistently demographic and sociological in nature -- for example: studies that show that older people who attend church are twice as likely to be healthy as those who don't are flawed when they do not take into account the question of whether those who do not attend are still religious, and those who physically cannot go out to church because they are sick. That is, it is cherry-picking an already-healthy group (those who can go out [at all] every week) and comparing them to a group that certainly contains some bedridden and shut-in elderly persons.

These sorts of flaws pervade the studies claimed to support the contention that I have looked at, without exception. The best-controlled studies show no statistical significant effects of prayer or religion upon health, and many show the converse. The researchers are quick to point out that many sick persons adopt more religious beliefs as their illness progresses, though, in order to "protect" cherry-picking in the opposite way from that mentioned before. Also, the newest and most comprehensive studies on intercessory prayer proved to have no good effect whatsoever upon those being prayed for. See here for serious analysis of that study.

I have also pointed out that the correlation between health and religion is one we expect, given the numerous promises to "covenant health" throughout the Bible. Dr. Richard Sloan has done more research in this field than any other medical doctor I'm aware of, and he agrees that the bottom line is, "no evidence":

When you suggest that religious activity is associated with better health, you implicitly suggest quite the opposite: that poor health is a product of insufficient devotion, insufficient faith. It's bad enough to be sick. It's worse still to be catastrophically ill. To add the burden of guilt and remorse on top of that is simply unconscionable. And that happens all the time.

So for a variety of ethical reasons, it seems clear to me, regardless of what the empirical evidence is, that bringing religion into medicine not only makes no sense, it's simply wrong to do, even if there were solid evidence--which, of course, there isn't.

So . . . there's just no solid evidence, and the ethical problems are so serious they have to be addressed. We should simply not tolerate attempts to bring religion into medicine until these matters have been resolved.

I am posting below an excerpt from the Chronicle from his new book, Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine, which takes the longest and most comprehensive look at the connection between medicine and religion that has ever been published. It will not help give the religious any more faith, and will instead present unequivocal evidence that their prayers are being uttered to uncaring, dead, empty space, rather than an all-loving and knowing Being. But, those I know who waste their time wailing to walls and uncaring air are somewhat unlikely to allow empirical evidence to sway their supernatural "feelings".

The Critical Distinction Between Science and Religion
By RICHARD P. SLOAN
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i11/11b01301.htm

The view that all human experience can be reduced to the function of biological activity may be satisfying to scientists, but it is anathema to theologians. The researchers Marguerite Lederberg and George Fitchett recognize this problem in an interesting article with the provocative title "Can You Measure a Sunbeam With a Ruler?" In it, they explore the scientific problems with attempts to reduce the experience of religion to the measurable quantities of science. The point of their title is to reiterate a longstanding concern in science: the difficulty of quantifying human experience. By attempting to measure a sunbeam and in so doing reduce it to that which can be quantified by a ruler, we lose the character of the sunbeam itself. While such measurement may be possible, it cannot capture the essence of the sunbeam and in fact may distort it.

Trying to quantify religious experience by counting the number of times a person reports attending church, the most commonly used index of religious involvement, is like trying to measure a sunbeam with a ruler: It may be possible, but the essential character of the experience is lost in the process. It is like trying to quantify the aesthetic experience of listening to a Beethoven symphony by counting the number of times a listener smiles. No doubt we could conduct brain-imaging studies to demonstrate differences in the activity of cerebral structures while listening to the Ninth Symphony and to white noise. Would that tell us anything about the aesthetic experience? Would it mean that this experience is explained by the activity of that specific brain region? Is that all there is to it? Is the majesty of listening to Beethoven, viewing the Grand Canyon, or appreciating the vastness of the universe merely the product of increased activity of certain regions in the brain? And could we reproduce these experiences simply by administering the right medication or electrical stimulation?

As productive as this strategy of reductionism has been and as promising as it continues to be for science, we ought to question seriously what insights it yields in the study of religion. Religion and science are independent approaches to knowledge, and neither can be reduced to the other. Religion and science are fundamentally different, with the former relying on faith as a source of wisdom and the latter demanding evidence. Religious truths generally are considered to be enduring and not subject to change. Scientific truths, on the other hand, are completely dependent on evidence, and as new evidence emerges, scientific truths change accordingly.

For these reasons, attempts to understand religious experience by scientific means can never be satisfying to religion. They can satisfy only science.

Using the methods of science to examine religion has another seemingly unintended consequence: It has led to attempts to establish the relative merits of different religious traditions by scientific means. After all, if we can determine scientifically whether frequency of attendance or frequency of prayer is associated with health outcomes, then shouldn't we begin to test whether the type of service makes a difference? If we are truly interested in collecting information relevant to health outcomes, then we should want to know whether it is better for our health to attend a Catholic mass or a Quaker meeting. Are Orthodox Jewish services better for our health than Reform services? Is there a health advantage to praying five times a day, as Muslims do, as opposed to the three times of Orthodox Jews? Why is it acceptable to determine that more-frequent attendance at religious services is better for your health than less-frequent attendance, but it is not acceptable to determine that Christian services are better for your health than attending Jewish or Muslim services?

Most researchers in the field of religion and health do not address this matter. My guess is that if they were asked, they would oppose contrasting the health benefits of different religious denominations. But why should they object? Presumably, the objection to studying the different health effects of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, for example, is that it would be offensive if we discovered that one religion was superior to the other two. The offense lies in the implication that those who practice the medically less beneficial religions would be better off converting to the medically more beneficial one.

Such a recommendation would be seen as out of bounds by most people. But why should it be? Attending services at an Orthodox synagogue or a Catholic church is a religious behavior that we can measure, just like attending services more or less frequently. Why is recommending conversion from one religious denomination to another for hypothetical health benefits more offensive than recommending that people who attend services only once per month attend more frequently because the latter, some believe, is better for their health, or recommending that people increase the amount of time spent praying?

We are on dangerous ground here, and the danger lies once again in a critical distinction between science and religion. It is a distinction that proponents of the religion-health connection obliterate, whether they intend to or not. Science permits us, in principle, to answer these questions. Without a doubt, we could conduct a study contrasting the health effects of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, for example. It could be done in precisely the same way that researchers have examined the effects of higher versus lower frequency of attendance at religious services, or greater or lower frequency of private prayer or reading the Bible or listening to religious radio programming. From the scientific perspective, there is no fundamental difference between using religious denomination or religious attendance as the predictor variable.

Although science allows us to conduct such a study, ethics and religion ought to tell us how ridiculous such a comparison would be. In today's world (and in the past as well), we have ample evidence of religious strife. This should not diminish the value that religion has for many people, but no one can dismiss the fact that religious factionalism has been responsible for conflict at the societal and familial level for thousands of years. Even if we could, hypothetically, demonstrate that Protestant prayer is better for one's health than Catholic prayer, why would we ever want to do so?

It undoubtedly is true that we can submit religious ritual and experiences to scientific study to determine if they are associated with beneficial health outcomes. But to do so runs the risk of trivializing the religious experience, making it no different from other medical recommendations made by physicians. If attending religious services becomes no different than consuming a low-fat diet or getting regular exercise, a great deal will have been lost. Bringing religion into the world of the scientist must by definition reduce religion to measurable indices that strip it of the sense of transcendence that distinguishes it from other aspects of our lives. Doing this dumbs religion down, making it so bland and universally acceptable that it has lost all of its meaning.

Ironically, this reductionism is precisely the problem that many in the religious community have railed against. Steven Goldberg, author of Seduced by Science, wrote, "When prayer is innocuous, it is no rival to the materialistic view of the world." Bringing religion into the "laboratory" of the scientist cannot help but contribute to the inevitable comparisons of the "scientifically established" virtues of one religion, or one type of religious practice, over others. In a world riven with religious factionalism and strife, it's hard to think of a worse idea.

Richard P. Sloan is a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University. This essay is excerpted from Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine, published this month by St. Martin's Press.

The Chronicle Review
Volume 53, Issue 11, Page B13
________________
Technorati tags: God, Religion

Who is John Galt? Why, Steorn!

Those of you familiar with Ayn Rand's favorite character, John Galt, may recall his development of an engine that ran on static electricity in the air. Well, it appears the next best accomplishment has been claimed: Steorn claims to have built a technology capable of deriving >100% energy from magnetic fields! Not only do perpetual motion/energy machines violate basic physical principles, they hold unlimited fantasy potential to fascinate us. The company has issued a challenge and set up a scientific "jury" system to test their invention. Word of advice: don't hold your breath.

HT: SciAm Observations
________________
Technorati tags: Physics

Spock is My Hero, Too

I was just reading over an article in Skepchick entitled, "Logic vs. Emotion," and had some thoughts. The writer tells us her childhood hero was Mr. Spock, the paragon of Stoicism, and she discusses the commonly-held misconception that atheists/skeptics are emotionless creatures, by choice or by necessity.

Human beings are animals. As animals, we have biological and physiological functions over which we have very little control. Our emotions are the result of biochemical responses to stimuli, responses that are shared qualitatively by many other primates. The selective advantages to these responses are fairly clear: emotional bonding to our mates occurs as a function of oxytocin and other chemicals, functioning as a "glue" which confers beneficence to reproductive fitness.

As some of us are obviously predisposed towards more emotional displays than others, it doesn't reflect upon any notion of free will (laughable as that is). We really don't have a lot of control over our levels of sentimentality or propensity towards weeping. And it may be the case that the more control we have (genetically speaking), the more proclivity we have for rational thinking, rather than wishful thinking. But no matter how rational we are, we cannot deny the animal part of us that feels.

I think the problem isn't that we some of us lack control over our emotions, and make decisions emotively. I think the problem is that the nature of some decisions is that there is no logical argument that can be constructed from known true premises.

As Donna Druchunas writes:

What I have outgrown is my naive belief that logic trumps personal experience and emotions in every situation.

Examples here would include how to handle forgiveness in a relationship, whether or not to change careers...&c. Even if we can throw a few true premises in, like, "Well, she's never cheated before," or, "I'll make more money as a patent attorney than a teacher," there are always lacking threads to join these premises together to reach a conclusion. For example, you just don't know if she will have the capability or opportunity in the future to cheat, or whether or not the job market will be in the future where it is today. Thus you can't rely on these premises to take you to a straightforward conclusion.

Spock is my hero because he uses reason as far as he can, and then admits when there is uncertainty involved in a decision. Humans must live with and make decisions from uncertainty and doubt. That doesn't mean we can't rely on logic and reason, jettisoning them in favor of how we feel, as most analyses can include at least some logic. It's just part of the human condition not to know everything about anything.

Tangled Bank #55

Welcome to the *55th edition of Tangled Bank. I hope you enjoy the reading as much as I have.

Let's dig right in:

⊆Animal Biology
•Bird-brained

1. “101 Ways to Help Birds”, Grrlscientist, Trackback
2. "Mocking After Midnight", Mike Bergin

•Bug-brained

1. "Emergent behavior in desert locusts", Josh Rosenau
2. "Eight Hours a Circadian Rhythm Do Not Make", Courtnix

•Dog-brained

1. "Flappin' in the Wind", Always Learning

•Dino-brained

1. “Giant Armored Dinosaur Discovered”, Grrlscientist, Trackback

•Primate-brained

1. "Artificial Parts Versus Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine", Reason
2. “How Long Does It Take To Dress Your Monkey?”, Benjamin Cohen
3. "Breathing Liquid: The Frontiers of Human Respiration", Joe Kissell, Trackback

⊆Diet/Nutrition

1. "The missing nutrient?", Cat Davies
2. "Water - How much is enough?", Cat Davies
3. "Two Interesting Calorie Restriction Papers", Reason
4. “People with chronic back pain more sensitive to taste”, Dave Munger

⊆Environmental Science

1. "Let's Remove the Radioactive Metals Spewing Out from Coal-fired Power Plants!", Ruminating Dude

⊆Evolution

1. "Writing the right poll question", Josh Rosenau
2. “Electrifying Speciation”, Grrlscientist, Trackback
3. "Origin of Biological Diversity", Courtnix
4. "Evolution of Biological Diversity", Courtnix
5. "Current Biological Diversity", Courtnix
6. “Chelifores, chelicerae, and invertebrate evolution”, PZ Myers
7. "Emerging Disease and Zoonoses #16--the origins of HIV", Tara Smith
8. “Here is the ultimate question for which the answer is 42”, Arunn Narasimhan

⊆General Science/Seed/Other Stuff

1. "Justify my existence?", Orac [answer to Seed Question re "Brain Drain"]
2. "New York City trip - Part III: SEED", Courtnix
3. "Fish Story", Science Made Cool
4. “Oxford Scientific Activists Take Their Message to the Streets”, Nick Anthis
5. “Religion and Science”, Paul Decelles
   
6. "NASA to Build Litterbox for International Space Station", Hazel, Trackback
   
7. “Nonviolent Communication”, Brandon Peele, Trackback, Carnival ping [only non-science post accepted, for its moral fiber]

⊆Molecular Biology/Biochemistry

1. "Genetics Interview with Dr. David Moskowitz of Genomed", Hsien Hsien Lei
2. “Cell Rigidity and Protein Recruitment”, Dan Rhoads
3. “Chromosomes Involved in Color Blindness”, Daniel Fluck
4. "Piling in on Lipofuscin", Reason
5. "Antisense RNA Therapies", Reason
6. "RNA Interference as the New Gene Therapy", Reason
7. "Reducing the genome of E. coli", ¡Viva La Evolución!

⊆New blog alert: Conservatives Against Intelligent Design

⊆Plants

1. “Death Itch 3000”, Mark Rayner, Trackback
2. “Unintended consequences of invasive species”, Paul Decelles
3. "Poison ivy is sexy", James Hrynyshyn

Thanks for reading! The next Tangled Bank will be held at Centrerion. Please alert me in the comments section of any broken links or other errors.

*Thanks to Neil for the heads-up about me erroneously posting this as the 54th, rather than the 55th, edition of the carnival. Courtnix hosted #54, this is #55. Unfortunately, I can't fix the link without losing a huge amount of readers, so it will have to stay 54.
________________
Technorati tags: Tangled Bank