The ‘detox’ question is pretty amusing.

In the majority of cases, producers and retailers contacted by the young scientists were forced to admit that they are renaming mundane things, like cleaning or brushing, as ‘detox’. They range in price from £1-2 for a detox drink to £36.95 for detox bath accessories.

Hahahaha – are there detox rubber duckies? Detox loofahs? Detox washcloths? All priced at ten times the normal rate because of their magical detox powers which the producers and retailers have admitted they don’t actually have?

The dossier shows that, while companies and individuals now use the claim ‘detox’ to promote everything from foot patches to hair straighteners, they are unable to provide reliable evidence or consistent explanations of

Do we need empirical evidence to warrant thinking that telling children that people suffer torment in hell forever is harmful and bad? I don’t think so. There are things that we know without evidence. For instance we know that telling people they are stupid or ugly or boring or generally repulsive is bad. We also know that bad news is bad, so we know that it’s bad to tell people bad news if it’s not true – we know it’s bad to tell someone: ‘your cat/dog/best friend/mother/child is injured and in terrible pain’ if that’s not true.

We don’t need evidence for that. It’s part of how the world is. Imagine telling a child: ‘Your cat is caught in a … Read the rest

What I’ll bother with instead is a little musing about the subject of hell and the afterlife and heaven, and how bizarre it all is.

Hell, for instance. Imagine a child of 4 eats a cookie after her mother told her not to, and her parents sentence her to be constantly tortured for the rest of her life as punishment. That idea looks quite gentle and benign compared to the idea of hell that is in some sense orthodox (though in what sense is not altogether clear to me, but of that later). We live a few decades, and then after that, if we are ‘sinners,’ we are tortured forever. It’s sadistic enough, but along with that, it doesn’t … Read the rest

Heh heh. Andrew Brown answered my comments today. He said he admired my ‘rhetorical technique’ – by which of course he meant he didn’t, but anyway, I don’t think it was rhetorical technique, I think I was just pointing out his inaccuracy.

So I replied, and then he replied again.

What you are accusing me of is not getting the facts wrong. It is wrongly interpreting a passage that you read differently. I don’t think that’s such a monstrous offence in general and certainly not in this particular case where my interpretation was the plain and natural one. If bringing up children to be fundamentalists is comparable to child abuse, then the sanctions for it must be comparable too.