I was excited and exhilarated to see this article.

Educators and policy makers, including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, have said in recent days that they hope President Obama’s example as a model student could inspire millions of American students, especially blacks, to higher academic performance. Now researchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.

Yeah…

I started thinking about things like that some time last spring, when I finally accepted that Obama wasn’t just a charismatic but basically random candidate. I started thinking about them even more once his nomination seemed more secure, and then during and after the convention, and then during the rest of the campaign. But I avoided thinking about them too much, because they prompted too much longing, and I was too afraid of disappointment in the end.

I was thinking about millions of children all over the country, in East St Louis and Detroit and Fresno and Philadelphia, Mississippi, and what it could mean for them to see Barack Obama in the White House. I was thinking about a potential Obama effect. I was thinking about Thurgood Marshall and the ‘colored doll’ –

In the “doll test,” psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark used four plastic, diaper-clad dolls, identical except for color. They showed the dolls to black children between the ages of three and seven and asked them questions to determine racial perception and preference. Almost all of the children readily identified the race of the dolls. However, when asked which they preferred, the majority selected the white doll and attributed positive characteristics to it. The Clarks also gave the children outline drawings of a boy and girl and asked them to color the figures the same color as themselves. Many of the children with dark complexions colored the figures with a white or yellow crayon. The Clarks concluded that “prejudice, discrimination, and segregation” caused black children to develop a sense of inferiority and self-hatred.

That haunting, painful study played a role in Brown v Topeka Board of Education and thus in the end of ‘separate but equal’ as a legal fiction and segregated schools in the US…So it seems pretty obvious that a hyper-intelligent, eloquent, impressive black person in the White House would enable children to select the black doll and attribute positive characteristics to it. This study seems to bear that out.

Not that we didn’t already know that (but it’s nice to have the data). We knew it up one side and down the other. We knew it all over the place for the past week – and a beautiful thing it is. I still have Wednesday’s New York Times hanging around, because I like looking at it – it has the Obamas taking up nearly all of the front page, walking down Pennsylvania Avenue with enormous smiles on their faces. They look…extraordinary. Any doll would give its left arm to look that good.

Bill Moyers talked to Patricia Williams and Melissa Harris-Lacewell on Friday. He reminded Harris-Lacewell that when he talked to her last spring she said Obama couldn’t win. I remembered that, once he mentioned it, and I remember the despairing pang it gave me. Harris-Lacewell beamed acknowledgement, and then talked about the intense sense of connection to this country that she felt for the first time in her life. Same here. Same here, same here, same here. One feels as if old wounds and old divisions really do have a good chance of being healed. (I know that sounds soppy – but it’s not sheer airy-fairy fantasy – see the doll experiment!) Furthermore…for the first time in my life I know what it’s like to feel ‘patriotic’ – the idea is suddenly no longer alien. I sang along with Aretha on Tuesday (and I wanted to wear her hat). I suddenly realized today that I don’t even mind American flag pins any more – I don’t have to any more – because they don’t stand for things I hate any more. Now they stand for closing Guantanamo and banning torture and respecting the rule of law.

On a more prosaic but still not altogether trivial level, I also no longer have to cut the sound whenever the BBC or NPR cuts to the president talking; on the contrary, I get to listen with actual pleasure.

The great thing about religion, you know, is that it teaches people humility.

The Vatican has condemned President Obama’s move to restore US funding for family planning clinics abroad that give advice on or carry out abortions. One Vatican official warned against the “arrogance” of those in power who think they can decide between life and death.

That’s terrific, isn’t it? An ‘official’ of an authoritarian moth-eaten hidebound reactionary gang of priests calls a guy elected in a landslide ‘arrogant’…What does the Vatican ‘official’ think the Vatican is if not arrogant? Humbly obedient to god, no doubt, being conveniently blind to the fact that it’s hard to obey someone who never communicates, and that what the Vatican chooses to pretend is what god commands is actually what the Vatican commands – that the Vatican selects its own laws and then pretends they are god’s laws. It’s a common practice, a familiar con-game, but that doesn’t make it any more acceptable.

And don’t forget the arrogance of the Vatican as ‘those in power who think they can decide between life and death’ by ordering people not to use life-saving condoms during an Aids epidemic.

In an interview published in an Italian newspaper on Saturday, senior Vatican official Monsignor Rino Fisichella urged Mr Obama to listen to all voices in America without “the arrogance of those who, being in power, believe they can decide of life and death.”

Mr Obama does listen to all voices in America, including that of Rick Warren, which I and others consider one voice too many; but really…how obtuse does a senior Vatican official have to be not to realize and keep constantly in mind that he is ‘in power’ and that the Vatican and its officials emphatically ‘believe they can decide of life and death’? Do they never embarrass themselves with this kind of brazen absurdity?

Some people are a little dubious about the, what shall I say, the emotionality surrounding the recent transition of power in the US. Our friend KB Player for instance.

Eyes fixed on the horizon? And with the inspirational statesman look? That was pseudo poetic bombast. As an outsider, I felt faintly embarrassed, and thought that a quick cup of tea with the Queen, a few words in front of Downing Street while the old incumbent leaves by the back door carrying a suitcase, that’s the way to do it. Democracy is a good thing, but it doesn’t need to be turned into a religion.

Some doubt was expressed in comments at Talking Philosophy but we ended up in more or less the same place. Anyway I asked myself (and not for the first time, being a suspicious type, and also being aware that since I make a habit of puncturing sentimentalities and pieties I sort of have to be cautious with my own) if I should be more skeptical. Am I making a messiah out of Obama?

That’s certainly possible, for obvious reasons – I really do admire him, to a very unusual and intense degree. I’m not accustomed to admiring public figures (much less presidents) in this way, in fact to be perfectly honest I have no precedent at all for my attitude to Obama. That is almost a guarantee of a susceptibility to mistakes and blindness.

I’m not so deluded that I think his plans for health care are any good though. Maybe I’ll use that as a meter – I’ll just keep checking myself – ‘Do you think “affordable health care” is meaningful or possible? No? Good; still functioning.’ I wish he hadn’t invited Rick Warren to do the invocation…but on the other hand, Michelle Goldberg pointed out that the outrage about Warren’s homophobia has caused him to remove some of the concrete signs of it, so perhaps the invitation has forced him to do better.

Ah, the hell with it, it’s not worth it; I still think Obama shouldn’t have invited him.

I wish we could ditch all the God-talk. I’m very glad he included non-believers, but I still wish we could ditch the God talk. But…(this is where things get really sinister) I don’t mind it as much as I would from someone else, or as much as I did from Bush or Clinton. Have I lost my mind? Partly, maybe – that is, the euphoria of the whole thing motivates me to bury my normal reaction so that I can go on being euphoric. That’s not what you’d call sound intellectual practice – so that’s a fair cop. I’m giving Obama a break that I wouldn’t give other people. (Fortunately, it makes no difference to him or to them – I don’t want to come over all self-important here! I’m just exploring how this stuff works, from the inside; I’m not saying What I Think Matters.) But some of that is because the God talk trails with it the old civil rightsy rhetoric. I wouldn’t want to be without The Promised Land or All God’s Children or (perhaps least of all) ‘Thank God almighty, we’re free at last.’ That’s in spite of the fact that in any other context that line would irritate the hell out of me, because stricly speaking it’s absurd – thanking god for freedom and just politely ignoring the previous four centuries. In any other context I would rudely ask why god gets the credit for the good stuff and none of the blame for the bad stuff; I would ask why, if god could free the slaves, god didn’t just prevent them from being enslaved in the first place. But – in the civil rights context, I don’t. If I had the choice, I would keep all the presidential language secular, but since I don’t…I feel inclined to turn a blind eye. That’s a double standard. Nolo contendere.

Now we’ve got that out of the way…well it’s the old Wordsworth line, you know, bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. Yes I know it’s soppy, but I do not care – I want to be soppy. I’ve never seen anything like this. None of us have. You don’t know what it’s like (well you do if you live here and it’s affected you too, but otherwise, you don’t) – you don’t know what it’s like to have all but everyone in the damn country feeling ecstatic and elevated and (cough) well I don’t know how else to put this, kind of united.

I can even explain one reason, one of many. For eight years we’ve lived with the unhappy awareness that everyone outside the US thinks of it as Bush country – with a few dissenters perhaps but at its core, Bush-like. Now it becomes apparent that the US is much more Obama country than it ever was Bush country.

Another reason is that the bliss (to call it that) was unalloyed by compromise. This was not hooray the firstblackpresident who is not otherwise so terrific – this was not (for instance) Al Sharpton. There was absolutely no need to think ‘well this is a great First but we had to compromise to get it…’ – so one could wallow with a clear conscience. Obama is a lot more talented than the usual white pol, not less so, so the First is more than legitimate.

And perhaps best of all – I have earnest hopes that the fashion for falling-down prison pants will die an abrupt death.

It’s always nice to get some spiritual advice, don’t you think? A Melbourne imam gave his male followers some of that a few years ago, in a lecture titled ‘The Keys to a Successful Marriage.’

He said under Islamic law, as described in a koranic verse, it was a man’s right to demand sex from his wife whenever he felt like it. “If the husband was to ask her for a sexual relationship and she is preparing the bread on the stove she must leave it and come and respond to her husband, she must respond,” Mr Hamza told his male followers on the video sermon. He then mocked Australia’s criminal laws, which required consent for sex to be lawful. “In this country if the husband wants to sleep with his wife and she does not want to and she hasn’t got a sickness or whatever, there is nothing wrong with her she just does not feel like it, and he ends up sleeping with her by force…it is known to be as rape,” Mr Hamza said. “Amazing, how can a person rape his wife?”

Well quite – one might as well call it beating a hammer if you use it to pound in a nail, wives being much the same kind of thing as a hammer and husbands being, as Mr Hamza indicates, persons. A man is a person, and his wife is an object owned by the person, so obviously a person can’t ‘rape’ an object – what a silly idea. Amazing.

“First of all advise them,” he said. “You beat them … but this is the last resort. After you have advised them (not to be disobedient) for a long, long time then you smack them, you beat them and, please, brothers, calm down, the beating the Mohammed showed is like the toothbrush that you use to brush your teeth.
You are not allowed to bruise them, you are not allowed to make them bleed.”

No, you’re only allowed to beat them, but fortunately you are allowed to do that much, because you are always right and they are always wrong, or if not, it doesn’t signify, because your will is the only one that counts, and theirs is mere disobedience. That’s fair, surely? It must be, because Islam is justice.

Mr Hamza told his followers not to get carried away and become too physical with the beatings. “This is just to shape them up, shape up woman – that is about it,” he said. “You don’t go and grab a broomstick and say that is what Allah has said,” Mr Hamza said to sporadic laughter from his flock.

Oh, ha ha, that’s so funny, ha ha – of course you don’t, who would be so crude and vulgar as to do that? No no, you just hit them on the arms or legs, that’s all.

Mr Hamza runs the Islamic Information and Services Network of Australasia on Sydney Rd, Coburg, which offers spiritual advice, prayer facilities and boxing, karate and gym classes for Muslims.

Spiritual advice is it – yes very spiritual. Highly impressive and thoughtful and elevated, too – but at the same time, charmingly easy to understand. When a man wants to fuck, his wife has to be fucked, and if she refuses, the man can forcibly fuck her, or beat her and then forcibly fuck her, or if he’s really kinky, forcibly fuck her and then beat her. See? No complicated theological niceties, no chatter about ontology or the ground of being, just the man’s right to fuck his wife whenever he wants to; the root of all piety.

Mr Hamza yesterday stood by his comments and blamed controversy over them on a hidden Zionist agenda run by the media. Questioned about his teachings, Mr Hamza said a wife was allowed to be hit on the hand or leg, but “of course, not on the head”. He said if a Muslim wife disobeyed her husband, such as continuing to go out when requested not to, she was able to be subjected to moderate physical punishment. Mr Hamza also reiterated his belief that women should submit to sex when husbands required it. Asked whether it was impossible for a man to rape his wife under Islamic law, Mr Hamza said either male or female partners should be able to demand and receive sex.

And the poor and the rich are both allowed to sleep under bridges. Can’t say fairer than that, can you.

The joys of sharia again.

Islamic authorities in the northern Nigerian city of Kano have told organisers of a planned protest by divorced women to cancel the event. The head of the Sharia police, or Hisbah, said the planned protest was an “embarrassment”, and is “un-Islamic”…Women’s rights activists say divorced women are often thrown out of their homes, lose custody of their children, and many end up destitute. The Director General of the Hisbah…said the idea of street protests was “un-Islamic” and “morally wrong”. “Never in the history of Islam have women taken to the street to press for their demands,” he said.

Well of course they haven’t, because they haven’t been allowed to, but that is not a reason for continuing to not allow them to. It’s just a long history of oppression and coercion, which is not the same thing as a reason.

The Hisbah are in charge of policing the morals of Muslims to make sure they are “Sharia-compliant”…One of their duties is to reconcile quarrelling spouses and prevent divorce. But divorce in polygamous northern Nigeria is very common.

That is, the dumping of unwanted women by men in polygamous northern Nigeria is very common; the dumping of unwanted women who are thrown out of their homes and left destitute and without their children. But sharia forbids women to protest this, and the Hisbah are in charge of forcing all Muslims to be ‘Sharia-compliant’. It’s a nice racket for the men, not so nice for the women. Ho hum.

Once again the Anglican church drops the mask.

In a paper published on Monday, the Church will voice concern over how the [Human Rights Act] is being interpreted and claim that it has been used by secularists to advance a liberal agenda.

Yes…as opposed to a theocratic agenda. And a theocratic agenda would be better because?

Leading Church figures have claimed that there has been an overemphasis on equality legislation at the expense of faith groups…[Christians] have complained that law has failed to allow them freedom of their beliefs. The Church paper suggests that Christians should be wary of resorting to human rights legislation, which it claims has become a “tool of secular liberalism”.

Instead Christians should resort to religious law, which of course cannot be a ‘tool of secular liberalism’ because religious law is authoritarian, dogmatic, unaccountable, unarguable, based on unwarranted beliefs, unconcerned with justice or equality or freedom, and inherently oppressive. Naturally that is much better than poxy old secular liberalism, which viciously wants equal rights for everyone. What could be more loathsome than that?

“The language of human rights, interpreted as the basis for the State’s relationship to faith, is not one with which all Christians can be comfortable. It is all too easy to adopt the tools of secular liberalism as if they straightforwardly reinforce our case against secularism’s deficiencies…It is part of the calling of the Established Church never to be ‘domesticated’ by the administration of the day.”

In other words, it is part of the calling of the Established Church to consider itself above the law, and to do everything it can to defy it and encourage its members to defy it. In other words is part of the calling of the Established Church to pretend that the non-existent laws of a non-existent deity should and do trump the laws of flawed but more or less accountable elected representatives.

“The uncomfortable truth is that a purely secular account of human rights is always going to be problematic if it attempts to establish the language of rights as a supreme and non-contestable governing concept in ethics.”

Because the only supreme and non-contestable governing concept in ethics is that of a hidden (and non-existent) god as interpreted by an unaccountable elite of priests who pretend to know what the hidden non-existent god thinks is right and that whatever that god thinks is right, is right, whatever any pesky secular liberal may say about rights or justice.

Don’t let anybody try to tell you that the Anglican church is ‘liberal’ – it’s no more liberal than Rick Warren is.

Heresy Corner quotes David Deutsch, a theoretical physicist and computer scientist at Oxford, on the ‘anthropic principle’ as an argument for the existence of god.

I do not believe that the ‘fine-tuning’ of physical constants provides any sort of argument for the existence of God or anything else supernatural. That is because if the constants had been set intentionally by supernatural entities, then the intentions of those entities must themselves have been at least as ‘fine-tuned’ when they set the constants, and that fine-tuning would remain unexplained. Hence that supernatural hypothesis does not even address the fine-tuning problem, let alone solve it.

More generally arguing for supernatural explanations on the grounds that the current scientific explanation for something or other is flawed or lacking is always a mistake. There are two main reasons for that. One is that there are always unsolved problems. But they get solved. Science continues to make progress even (or especially) after making great discoveries, because the discoveries themselves reveal further problems. Therefore the existence of an unsolved problem in physics is not evidence for a supernatural explanation any more than the existence of an unsolved crime is evidence that a ghost committed it.

The second reason is that supernatural explanations are always empty explanations. That is to say, ‘the gods did it’ is invariably a bad explanation because, as you can see, to invoke that explanation I didn’t even have to say what it is they did. It could ‘explain’ anything whatsoever and hence actually explains nothing.

That second one is very compelling, I always think. ‘The gods did it’ is an absolutely crappy explanation, because it can mean anything or everything or nothing – and as Dr Deutsch indicates, if it can mean anything or everything, then it means nothing – it’s just a gesture. It might as well be X. X did it. Okay…well that gets us precisely nowhere; now let’s try to dig a little deeper.

Wendy Kaminer has some thoughts on ‘vain and unctuous right-wing pastor Rick Warren’ (what an elegant way of putting it).

Obama justified appointing Warren as his inaugural invocator-in-chief as a gesture of inclusiveness. Warren’s own notion of inclusion has its limits, considering his belief that millions of his heretical fellow citizens are going to hell.

Quite, and that’s certainly one reason I find the man rebarbative.

[D]espite Warren’s extreme social and religious conservatism – reflected in his denouncement of stem cell research, reproductive choice and homosexuality, and his belief that only good Christians are bound for glory…- he is widely regarded as a moderate evangelical by the mainstream press and centrist intellectuals.

And that’s the problem – he defines rabid conservatism downwards. Religious lunacy has gotten so rancid and off the map here that a guy who believes in hell and the ‘sinfulness’ of homosexuality is seen as ‘moderate.’

Warren described God’s positions on social programmes and war as ‘debatable’ for ‘Bible-believing Christians’, but he singled out as ‘non-negotiable’ five issues that should determine the votes of good Christians: abortion rights, stem cell research, gay marriage, cloning, and assisted suicide. In a subsequent 2005 email exchange with Warren, I wondered why God was clear about his ‘non-negotiable’ positions on the Culture War but equivocal about war and social programmes: ‘Does God really care more about gay marriage than the obligation to alleviate human suffering?’, I asked. Not surprisingly, I received no response.

Just what I wonder.

How ridiculous – how pathetic. Stem-cell research, gay marriage, cloning are ‘non-negotiable’ and everything else is more trivial. What a tiny-minded man he must be if he really thinks those are the five worst crimes in the world.

We see a pattern here, don’t we – the Vatican thinks cracker-damage is more serious than genocide, Rick Warren thinks stem-cell research and gay marriage are among the worst things. These people have a hideously warped sense of morality – which is not new, but they do keep performing it in public…

Kaminer and Warren had a brief correspondence after she wrote a critical piece about him, in which she called his book ‘childish and platitudinous and questioned his commitment to religious pluralism and civil liberty for all.’

A few months later, on the occasion of Yom Kippur (which I do not observe), I received an email from Warren assuring me of his personal love and friendship, and seeking my forgiveness ‘for any ways that I may have ever unknowingly hurt you. Your article showed a lot of hurt by, and fearfulness of, what you think I represent … I want you to know that I would like to be your friend. I thank God for you, for your talent at writing, and I ask you, on this sacred day, to forgive me.’…He concluded by assuring me that I was in his prayers and his heart: ‘I respect you, thank God for you, and I am praying for God to bless you this new year. With love in my heart for you.’

Have you ever read anything quite so sickening?

Warren didn’t know me…I have no love in my heart for him, or other people I have briefly or never met. But Warren, it seems, is more like a benevolent deity, who doesn’t simply harbour indifferent goodwill towards others but loves them – loves us all, despite our sins and failings. In fact, Warren’s email to me was apparently a variation of a Yom Kippur form letter that he sent to Jewish journalists. In any case, I didn’t see myself anywhere in his extravagant protestations of love for me and requests for forgiveness; I saw a reflection of Warren’s self-image.

And very cloying and disgusting it is, as well as effrontery in someone who sorts people into sinners and the other thing for the arbitrary reasons that Warren does. Sanctimony and bigotry: a nasty combination.

Religious bastards are not limited to the Vatican, of course.

Saudi Arabia’s most senior cleric was quoted Wednesday as saying it is permissible for 10-year-old girls to marry and those who think they’re too young are doing the girls an injustice. “It is wrong to say it’s not permitted to marry off girls who are 15 and younger,” Sheik Abdul-Aziz Al Sheikh, the country’s grand mufti, was quoted as saying. “A female who is 10 or 12 is marriageable and those who think she’s too young are wrong and are being unfair to her,” he said…”We hear a lot about the marriage of underage girls in the media, and we should know that Islamic law has not brought injustice to women.” The mufti said a good upbringing will make a girl capable of carrying out her duties as a wife and that those who say women should not marry before the age of 25 are following a “bad path.”

Ah, a good upbringing will make a girl capable of carrying out her duties as a wife; so the important thing in this subject is whether the girl can be useful to the man or not, it’s not what is good for the girl. And how exactly will a good upbringing make a ten year old girl capable of being penetrated by an adult man? Is part of a ‘good upbringing’ for a girl having her vagina mechanically enlarged, say by the slow introduction of cylindrical objects in graduated sizes? And if it is, that doesn’t make a girl of ten or eleven capable of giving birth without damage, so how does a good upbringing help there? It doesn’t – but doubtless the mufti just meant that a good upbringing brings a girl up to know so thoroughly and without question that she is an inferior, a nothing, an object that belongs to whatever man she is handed over to at age ten, that she will not utter a peep about any of this.

“Our mothers and before them, our grandmothers, married when they were barely 12,” said Al Sheikh, according to Al-Hayat.

No doubt, but that is not in itself a reason to go on making girls get married at that age forever, and Al Sheikh’s defensive nostalgia for his mommy and his granny is not a reason to impose slavery on all girls forever. But clerics of course are not expected to think.

The Vatican is different from you and me; it has an eccentric way of ordering its priorities – a way so eccentric that it passes human understanding.

It has this secret tribunal, you see, which it has only now decided to open to the public, or rather to that portion of the public known as ‘the faithful.’ This secret tribunal ‘handles confessions of sins so grave only the pope can grant absolution.’ Ooh – the pope’s a busy guy, so they must be some truly grave sins then. (But then, ‘sin’ is a silly idea, and the Catholic church’s ideas of what sin is are also silly – but still, the pope is a busy guy, so they’re not going to get things too backward, surely.)

By lifting the veil of secrecy surrounding the tribunal’s work, the Vatican hopes to emphasize the fundamental role the sacrament plays in saving souls, the Vatican’s No. 2, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, said in a paper delivered at the conference. “Today it seems as though the sense of sin has been forgotten,” he said.

The sacrament saves souls, and if souls are not saved, bad things happen, though the bad things happen to souls, not bodies, so whether what happens has anything to do with actual burning or not is not altogether clear, at least not to me. But that’s okay, because people who believe it are bound to be scared in some way, and that’s the important thing. It’s very worrying when the sense of sin has been forgotten, because then people don’t have this pervading but nebulous sense of anxiety and worry and dread in case they are commiting ‘sins’ without knowing it.

Confessions of even the most heinous of crimes and sins — such as genocide or mass murder — are handled at the local level by priests and their bishops and are not heard by the tribunal. Its work involves those sins that are reserved for the pope — considered so serious that a local priest or bishop is not qualified to grant absolution, said Cardinal James Francis Stafford, an American who heads the Apostolic Penitentiary. These include defiling the Eucharist, which Catholics believe is the body and blood of Christ. Stafford said this offense is occurring with more and more frequency, not just in satanic rites but by ordinary faithful who receive Communion and then remove the host from their mouths and spit it out or otherwise desecrate it.

Read that carefully. Then read it again. Then again. The Catholic church actually thinks that spitting out a cracker is a more serious ‘sin’ than genocide or mass murder.

I thought I already knew how horrible the Vatican is, but it just isn’t possible to know, is it; they keep so much of their horribleness a secret. I should have known – I did know they put Montaigne’s book on the Index partly because he was against torturing heretics before killing them, and said so – I did know how they treated Irish children until shockingly recently – I did know they tell credulous people that condoms don’t work. And yet, I still didn’t know. They take spitting out a cracker more seriously than genocide. And they mean it.

Denialism and death threats.

A new book defending vaccines, written by a doctor infuriated at the claim that they cause autism, is galvanizing a backlash against the antivaccine movement in the United States. But there will be no book tour for the doctor, Paul A. Offit, author of “Autism’s False Prophets.” He has had too many death threats…[Offit] is also the co-inventor of a vaccine against rotavirus, a diarrheal disease that kills 60,000 children a year in poor countries.

So…Paul Offit collaborated on the invention of a vaccine that if implemented can save the lives of at least 60,000 children a year in poor countries – and yet ‘antivaccine activists’ think he’s evil and some think he should get death threats. That’s odd.

“[A] few years ago this ceased to be a civil scientific discourse and became about crucifying individuals,” said Dr. Gregory A. Poland, chief of vaccine research at the Mayo Clinic, who says he has had threats against his children.

Vaccines prevent lethal diseases – yet people get so angry about a non-existent link between vaccination and autism that they want to kill or at least threaten people who are working on vaccines. That’s deranged.

Of course, having grown up in a world where lethal contagious diseases, apart from AIDS, are no longer commonplace, they don’t know what it’s like to live with the constant risk and sometimes reality of cholera, typhoid. TB, polio – and measles. But if they’re going to become activists on the subject, then they ought to find out what it’s like. It’s not all that difficult.

Many doctors now argue that reporters should treat the antivaccine lobby with the same indifference they do Holocaust deniers, AIDS deniers and those claiming to have proof that NASA faked the Moon landings.

In other words reporters should treat the antivaccine lobby like whack jobs.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Excuse me – I can’t help it.

The Pope has instructed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly the Holy Office of the Inquisition, to draw up a new handbook to help bishops snuff out an explosion of bogus heavenly apparitions. Benedict XVI plans to update the Vatican’s current rules on investigating apparitions to help distinguish between true and false claims of visions of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, messages, stigmata (the appearances of the five wounds of Christ), weeping and bleeding statues and Eucharistic miracles.

Well yes, certainly, of course; one can quite see why he would. Only…is it really, actually, genuinely possible to distinguish between true and false claims of visions and stigmata and the like? Or are they much of a muchness? Oh no, surely they have a method; they can’t be just gesturing at the air.

[A]nyone who claims to have seen an apparition will only be believed as long as they remain silent and do not court publicity over their claims. If they refuse to obey, this will be taken as a sign that their claims are false. The visionaries will then be visited by a team of psychiatrists, either atheists or Catholics, to certify their mental health while theologians will assess the content of any heavenly messages to see if they contravene Church teachings.

Ah good! That’s a good method – that should definitely weed out the bogus claims, because Church teachings are the infallible checking mechanism for telling Up from Down, gold from dross, wheat from chaff, wine from vinegar, and heavenly from not so good.

If the visionary is considered credible they will ultimately be questioned by one or more demonologists and exorcists to exclude the possibility that Satan is hiding behind the apparitions in order to deceive the faithful.

Yes but…how does that work? What questions are there that demonologists and exorcists can ask that would reveal Satan hiding behind the apparitions? Isn’t Satan clever enough to answer their questions in such a way that they can’t spot Satan hiding? Oh well, I shouldn’t ask such questions, demonologists and exorcists are professionals and they have techniques and tools and skills that they learned and got degrees in, so I’ll just bow deferentially and go eat lunch.

The Vatican is in TRUB-BLE . The Dutch Foreign Minister is going to YELL AT IT. It might have to GO TO BED WITHOUT ANY DESSERT. HA ha ha HA ha.

The Vatican envoy to the Netherlands, we learn with enormous pleasure this weekend, is about to receive a well-deserved arse-kicking from Dutch Foreign Affairs Minister, Maxime Verhagen…[T]he envoy – Monsignor François Bacqué – has been called to a meeting to explain the Catholic Church’s stance on sexuality and marriage, and answer charges the Church opposes gay rights…LifeSiteNews said that, in December, the Vatican was attacked in the international press for refusing to endorse the UN motion claiming to “decriminalise homosexuality”…The Vatican’s representative at the UN, Archbishop Celestino Migliore, said in December that although there was agreement that persons with homosexual inclinations should not be subject to arrest or other forms of unjust discrimination, the motion would lend support to the movement to create homosexual “marriage” or other legal recognition for homosexual unions.

And therefore the Vatican is content to keep the criminalization of homosexuality, in other words the Vatican has presumptuous intrusive trivial unwarranted objections to homosexual marriage and therefore it wants homosexuality to go on being a crime. In other words the Vatican prides itself on being pointlessly bigoted and having contempt for human rights.

The Vatican also opposed the use in the document of expressions such as “gender identity” and “sexual orientation,” saying they are not defined in international law but are only cultural concepts promulgated in the media and the homosexualist political movement.

Ah! Ah yes – so they are! Whereas the Vatican’s concepts are…what, exactly? They’re not concepts but truths engraved in nature? Edicts ratified by the seldom-seen but always groveled-to absentee deity? Well no doubt the Vatican would like to think so, but guess what, the Vatican’s rules and regs and refusals and foot-stampings are ‘only cultural concepts’ too, promulgated in the Vatican press office and the Catholic political movement. They’re made up. They’re not based on anything. They’re bullshit. I oppose the use of such expressions as “Holy Father” and “Holy See” and “Vatican envoy” because they’re just cultural concepts promulgated by a bunch of reactionary obscurantist deeply mistaken men in robes.

So is the BBC a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Church of England or god’s favorite offspring or what? What’s it playing at?

The BBC has been forced to apologise to an acclaimed psychologist and writer after editing her derogatory comments about religion so that a radio programme broadcast “the opposite” of what she had said…[Dorothy] Rowe, best known for her work on depression, had attempted to comment on the subject proposed by the programme’s producer: “Why so many people want to believe in God and search for faith.” But she was aghast to hear how her words were eventually used…She said the interview “sounds like I am giving unqualified praise to religious belief. There is no mention of what I talked…about at length, that religious belief can cause immense misery. I often summarise this with: ‘The church keeps me in business’.”

What happened…someone’s foot slipped and all the critical parts got accidentally erased?

The row has provided ammunition for secular critics who accuse the BBC of using its programmes to promote religion. Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, who was interviewed for the same programme as Rowe, said: “I gave a long interview, but when I listened to the finished product it contained just a couple of very brief soundbites from me which were not representative of the thoughts I had expressed…This programme was the most blatant piece of religious propaganda I have heard for a long time.”

Sad, isn’t it. The god-huggers want the rest of us to shut up about god, so they start distorting the evidence, so we get more irritated than we were before, so we make more noise, so they even more desperately want us to shut up, so they distort the evidence in even more brazen (and stupid) ways, and round we go.

Deepak Chopra uses a lot of code too. His is quite familiar.

[T]he writer opened his piece by pledging allegiance to “scientifically proven, evidence-based medicine.” He next declared opposition to integrative medicine…

Scare-quotes on evidence-based, no scare-quotes on ‘integrative medicine’…Code in the form of misallocation of bullshit-indicator.

We believe that Salerno’s piece is the opening salvo from the right aiming to influence the incoming administration as it strategically allocates resources for improving the U.S. health and wellness system.

Classic – the pretense that criticism of woo-medicine comes from the right, along with the pretense (more fully expressed later) that critics are as opposed to good preventive practices as they are to manipulation of chakras.

A new integrative medicine system would marry the superb options of high tech emergency care…by empowering and educating its citizens to maintain wellness and prevent disease, through improved nutrition, exercise, stress-management, and a wide range of other proven integrative approaches.

Orac comments on this tactic:

CAM/IM apologists like Chopra try very hard to appropriate science- and evidence-based modalities like good nutrition and exercise, along with health maintenance measures, as being somehow “alternative” or “integrative” (the bait) when they are in the purview of “conventional medicine.”…Today, nutrition and excercise, tomorrow homeopathy. To CAM/IM advocates, it would seem, it’s all the same. Far be it from them to worry themselves about doing the actual hard work to do the science that determines what treatments do and don’t work.

Naturally not, when they can get so rich and famous by not doing the actual hard work.

No no no no no no no no.

I can tell you what I think I’d bring to this, which is, you know, I’m not a conventional choice, I haven’t followed the traditional path, but I do think I’d bring a kind of a lifetime of experience that is relevant to this job. I think that what we’ve seen over the last year, and particularly and even up to the last — is that there’s a lot of different ways that people are coming to public life now, and it’s not only the traditional path. Even in the New York delegation, you know, some of our great senators — Hillary Clinton, Pat Moynihan — came from, you know, other walks of life. We’ve got Carolyn McCarthy, John Hall, both of them have an unconventional background, so I don’t think that that is, uh — so I think in many ways, you know, we want to have all kinds of different voices, you know, representing us, and I think what I bring to it is, you know, my experience as a mother, as a woman, as a lawyer, you know…

That’s Caroline Kennedy explaining with a startling lack of articulacy why she should be appointed a US senator. I’m always on the lookout for code, and that’s a code I don’t think I’ve seen before. ‘Other walks of life’ and ‘all kinds of different voices, you know,’ is code for people with no relevant experience whatsoever going into politics, and it’s not in and of itself a thing to be cheered. Total lack of relevant experience is not absolutely always a disqualifier, but it does at the very least need to be offset by conspicuous talents and skills of the right kind – like, for instance, being able to talk in an adult way in public. Caroline Kennedy is 51 years old and a lawyer, and she talks like a teenager. So – she has no relevant experience, and she’s remarkably bad at talking in public, and the only reason to suggest her at all is because she is a Kennedy. Hmmm…that reminds me of something…what could it be…Oh yes, it’s the current president. And even he doesn’t say ‘you know’ every five words like a high school kid.

In my book, her being a Kennedy is a reason not to appoint her, and also a reason not to vote for her, just as in my book Hillary Clinton’s being a former president’s wife was a very strong reason not to vote for her. I detest this nepotism thing we’ve got going and I wish people would stop encouraging it. I don’t want a Kennedy dynasty or a Clinton dynasty any more than I want a Bush dynasty; I don’t want any damn dynasty. And I don’t want people from you know, other walks of life, either. This isn’t a game.

It’s all very well to diss the very idea of alternative medicine (alternative to what? the kind that works?) but what you don’t seem to understand is that people will spend money on it, and not in small quantities, either.

Feeling a tad listless? Perhaps your DNA is insufficiently activated. You may want to consult the healers at Oughten House Foundation, specializing in “tools and techniques for self-empowerment . . . through DNA Activations.” Oughten House recommends regular therapy as part of its DNA Activation Healing Project, at $125 per hour-long session.

$125 for…waving your hands around gently, or turning the dials on a convincing-looking Machine of some sort, or handing out a banana milkshake, and calling that ‘DNA Activation.’ Not a bad haul.

[W]hat was once a ragtag assortment of New Age nostrums has metastasized into a multibillion-dollar industry championed by dozens of lobbyists and their congressional sympathizers. Among the most popular therapies are acupuncture, at $50 to $100 per session; reflexology, which involves massaging various parts of the hands and feet, starting at $35 an hour; and aromatherapy, which relies on the supposed healing properties of about 40 “essential oils,” with treatments at $30 to $90 an hour.

Well – look, at least those people probably won’t be needing a bailout or an emergency loan or an adjusted mortgage. At least the practitioners are making a living. Maybe we should all do it, and then there’d be no more Economic Disaster.

Major hospital systems, notably Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins and New York’s Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, incorporate CAM-based programs like aromatherapy and therapeutic touch, often bracketed as “integrative medicine.”… “We’re all channeling East Indian healers along with doing gall-bladder removal,” says Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics. Mr. Caplan harbors no illusions about what’s behind the trend: “It’s not as noble as, ‘I want to be respectful to Chinese healing arts.’ It’s more, ‘People are spending a fortune on this stuff! We could do this plus our regular stuff and bill ’em for all of it!'”

Well quite. I’m strongly tempted to hang out a shingle myself. I think I’d be really good at activating people’s DNA.

Another excellent piece about HIV/AIDS denial.

On Science-Based Medicine, we strive to apply the light of science and reason on all manner of unscientific belief systems about medicine. For the most part, but by no means exclusively, we have concentrated on so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) because there is an active movement to infiltrate faith-based, rather than science-based, modalities into “conventional” medicine. Indeed, such efforts are well-financed, both by public and private organizations, and are alarmingly successful at insinuating postmodernist and pseudoscientific beliefs into academia to form an unholy new monster that has been termed by some as “quackademic medicine.”

So science is under heavy suspicion while CAM is given the revolutionary salute. Yee-ha.

However, one pseudoscientific belief system about medicine that we at SBM have perhaps not dealt with as much as we should is the belief that, contrary to the overwhelming scientific consensus built up over 25 years, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) does not cause Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS)…Before I go on to do a case study of the tragic price of HIV/AIDS denialism, perhaps it is worthwhile to take a moment to discuss just what HIV/AIDS denialism is. It is not “skepticism” or “rethinking” any more than creationism is a “rethinking” or “skepticism” of evolution, although denialists like to try to claim the mantle of those labels. Seth Kalichman, author of the book Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy has written a good primer of the phenomenon…

Yes and he’s going to write about it for B&W. Put that on your calendars.

Indeed, denialism, specifically the denial of scientific medicine, tends to be at the heart of the quackademic medicine movement, just as the denial of evolution is at the heart of the anti-evolution movement known as “intelligent design” creationism. It is a more general phenomenon that involves a dogged clinging to pseudoscientific or pseudohistorical beliefs (creationists and antivaccine advocates are a good example of the former; 9/11 Truthers and Holocaust deniers are a good example of the latter) and the use of logical fallacies and conspiracy theories to bolster their world view.

Read the whole piece; it’s long and thorough and full of horrors, and impressive.

It’s good to question conventional wisdom, except when it isn’t. Conventional wisdom holds that a bridge designed by engineers and built by reputable builders is safer to drive across than one designed by shamans and built by hairdressers. Questioning that conventional wisdom is not really all that productive, and if anyone listens to the questioning, it’s downright lethal.

So with Christine Maggiore.

Until the end, Christine Maggiore remained defiant.On national television and in a blistering book, she denounced research showing that HIV causes AIDS. She refused to take medications to treat her own virus. She gave birth to two children and breast fed them, denying any risk to their health. And when her 3-year-old child, Eliza Jane, died of what the coroner determined to be AIDS-related pneumonia, she protested the findings and sued the county.

That’s the risky kind of questioning conventional wisdom – and it risks other people as well as oneself. That’s why Prince Charles makes me angry when he indulges his passion for denouncing non-alternative medicine, and it’s why Juliet Stevenson made me angry when she used her celebrity to denounce the conventional wisdom about the MMR vaccine and autism, and it’s why Christine Maggiore makes me angry even though she’s now dead. It makes me angry that she breast-fed her children and it makes me angry that she went on television to denounce research showing that HIV causes AIDS. People shouldn’t do that. People shouldn’t take on life and death medical issues when they have no training or expertise in the subject. People shouldn’t trust their own judgment that completely.

For years, the South African government joined with Maggiore in denying that HIV is responsible for AIDS and resisting antiretroviral treatment. According to a new analysis by a group of Harvard public health researchers, 330,000 people died as a consequence of the government’s denial and 35,000 babies were born with the disease.

It’s not a subject for hobbyists or cranks or princes or actors. Children must never play with matches.

Norm points out, as Ian MacDougall did in comments, that I said too much when I said I didn’t think we need empirical evidence to warrant thinking that telling children that people suffer torment in hell forever is harmful and bad. He points out that extrapolating from experience is itself a form of evidence – ‘The experience we have contains various forms of evidence.’ Well yes, and if that is included in what is meant by empirical evidence, then I do think we need it, but I was making the (usual? common?) distinction between subjective evidence about first person experience and intersubjective evidence about the world outside first person experience.

Part of my point was that for empirical questions about the real world, personal experience is not considered evidence (except by some theists). My claim was that for questions about what it is or is not cruel to do or say to people, personal experience can be considered evidence because experience is what it is about; that extrapolation from subjective reactions is reasonable there while it is not reasonable when discussing, say, ‘alternative’ medicine.

I’m not sure about this part:

[I]n principle we have to allow for the possibility that new evidence might show – though I don’t, myself, believe this is likely – that the beneficial effects on children of hell-talk outweigh the harmful ones. Could be, you know, that it toughens kids up and better prepares them to meet the harshness of the world. Unlikely, as I say; yet, although there are claims that don’t depend on empirical evidence – such as that it’s wrong to cause unnecessary suffering – I can’t see that a claim (of fact) about what harms people can do without the support of such evidence.

I balk at that – so now all I have to do is figure out why, and figure out if it’s irrational or if I have a reason. I balk in the sense that I think even if there were robust evidence that hell-talk made children braver than they would otherwise be – it’s still wicked and wrong. Why?

I know – I have it. It’s what NB said in comments. Well done Neil! It’s because hell itself is wicked, so a God that is responsible for it shouldn’t be worshipped. That’s why. Believing in hell and worshipping the God that sends people there puts an appalling principle right at the center of what one believes about the world. Being tougher or braver is no good if you’re someone who endorses sadistic power in that way – so evidence that belief in hell made people tougher or happier wouldn’t touch the basic flaw.