The empty pews

Today I'd like to look at two articles that are mainly interesting in juxtaposition -- and a third that is as horrifying as it is enlightening.

The first is from Christianity Today and describes a one hundred million dollar ad campaign designed to bring the uncommitted, undecided, and "cultural Christians" -- what the people running the campaign call "the movable middle" -- back into the fold.  The money is being spent for television and online advertisements, billboards, and YouTube videos, all designed to make Christianity look appealing to the dubious.  The program is called "He Gets Us," and focuses on Jesus's warm, human side, his struggles against people who judged him, and his commitment to dedicate himself to God's will even so.

I'm perhaps to be forgiven for immediately thinking of the "Buddy Christ" campaign from the movie Dogma.

The reason for "He Gets Us," of course, is that in the last ten years Christian churches in the United States have been hemorrhaging members, especially in the under-30 demographic.  A 2019 study found that 66% of Americans between 23 and 30 stopped going to church for at least a year after turning 18; most of the ones who left didn't go back.  The main reasons they gave for leaving were church involvement in politics (especially support of Donald Trump), issues of contraception and women's bodily autonomy, and policies and attitudes discriminating against LGBTQ+ individuals.

Haven, the group running the campaign, summed up the problem thusly: "How did the world’s greatest love story in Jesus become known as a hate group?"

The second article is a paper in the Journal of Secularism and Nonreligion, and attempted to quantify the degree of in-group favoritism and out-group dislike amongst various religions in the United States, agnostics, and atheists.  Contrary to the common perception that "atheists hate the religious," the researchers found that the converse was closer to the mark:

Atheists are among the most disliked groups in America, which has been explained in a variety of ways, one of which is that atheists are hostile towards religion and that anti-atheist prejudice is therefore reactive.  We tested this hypothesis by using the 2018 American General Social Survey by investigating attitudes towards atheists, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and Muslims.  We initially used a general sample of Americans, but then identified and isolated individuals who were atheists, theists, nonreligious atheists, religious theists, and/or theistic Christians.  Logically, if atheists were inordinately hostile towards religion, we would expect to see a greater degree of in-group favouritism in the atheist group and a greater degree of out-group dislike.  Results indicated several notable findings: 1). Atheists were significantly more disliked than any other religious group. 2). Atheists rated Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and Hindus as favourably as they rated their own atheist in-group, but rated Muslims less positively (although this effect was small).  3). Christian theists showed pronounced in-group favouritism and a strong dislike towards atheists.  No evidence could be found to support the contention that atheists are hostile towards religious groups in general, and towards Christians specifically.

The fact is, it's not the atheists who have a hate problem to address.  I find Haven's disingenuous question about Christianity and hate groups wryly funny, especially since they have also run ad campaigns for Focus on the Family, one of the most virulently anti-LGBTQ+ groups in existence (they are on record as calling LGBTQ+ marriage and parenting equal rights as "a particularly evil lie of Satan").

Maybe the first thing to do before trying to market a kinder, gentler Jesus is for the Christians themselves, as a group, to confront the Religious Right's ongoing campaign of persecution against queer people.  (And if you think I'm overstating the case by using the word "persecution," allow me to remind you that only six months ago, a pastor in Texas told a cheering congregation that anyone identifying as queer should be stood up against a wall and shot; only two months ago, a right wing nutjob went to a nightclub in Colorado Springs and did exactly as told; and shortly afterward, a different pastor told a different cheering congregation he was glad it had happened.)

And they wonder why people are looking at the church, shaking their heads, and walking away.

The last story I probably wouldn't have bothered commenting on if it hadn't been for the first two; in fact, when I first saw it, I thought it was a joke.  It's about former United States Representative and current complete lunatic Michele Bachmann, who since her failed attempt at re-election has turned herself into a spokesperson for the evangelicals.  She was on the Christian radio program Lions & Generals a couple of days ago, and proudly told the interviewer that she had spent Christmas day warning her grandchildren about the fires of hell.

No, I'm not making this up.  Here's a direct quote:

I was with two of my grandchildren this weekend, a two-year-old and a six-year-old, and I was just compelled to talk to them about, when we die, it’s judgement," she said.  "We talked about what heaven is, and we talked about what hell is.  That hell is just as real as heaven.  And in hell, there’s eternal fires and damnation and it’s a real place, we do not want to go there, that’s where the wicked will go.  And then I explained how they don’t go — that they receive Christ and confess their sins … [Jesus] cleanses them and then because of his righteousness, they go to heaven...  And so my little granddaughter immediately started saying, ‘I don’t want to go to hell, I want to go to heaven.’ I said, ‘Bella, can I pray with you? Let’s pray.  Do you want to pray?’ … And I think, why miss an opportunity?

Or, more accurately, "why miss an opportunity to subject a six-year-old and a two-year-old to religiously-justified emotional abuse?"

And once again, they wonder why people are looking at the church, shaking their heads, and walking away.

Look, I know, "not all Christians."  Not, perhaps, even most Christians.  As I've said many times, I have lots of Christian friends, as well as friends of various other belief systems, and mostly we all get along pretty well.  But unfortunately, in the United States, Christianity has allowed itself to get hijacked by the loudest, ugliest, and most vicious minority, and those are the people who are creating the image American Christianity has.  Until the Christians who really do stand for Jesus's command to "love thy neighbor as thyself" -- and that includes thy brown neighbor, thy immigrant neighbor, thy homeless neighbor, thy queer neighbor, thy Muslim neighbor, and thy atheist neighbor -- stand up and shout down the bigots and extremists, no multi-million-dollar ad campaign is going to do a damn thing to stop the pews from emptying.

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Ebola, epidemics, and the danger of making decisions out of fear

The news has been filled in the last couple of weeks with stories about the ongoing epidemic of Ebola fever in west Africa.  And certainly, there's a lot here that's newsworthy.  An emerging virus, long known for lightning-fast outbreaks that killed whole villages deep in the jungle and then disappeared as fast as it came, has finally appeared in two large cities, Conakry, Guinea and Monrovia, Liberia.  The disease itself is terrifying; it has a mortality rate of between 60% and 90%, depending on the strain, and kills victims when their blood stops clotting, causing them to "bleed out."

Which, unfortunately, is exactly what it sounds like, and about which I won't say anything further out of respect for my more sensitive readers.

The Ebola virus [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

This epidemic has two of the features that tend to make people overestimate risk: (1) it's gruesome; and (2) it's novel.  We react most strongly to things that are new, unfamiliar, and scary, and Ebola certainly qualifies.  And it is a regrettable feature of human nature that when our fear centers are engaged, we make dumb decisions.

Let's start with the desperate desire on the part of people who are scared by the virus to protect themselves against it, although the current state of affairs is that there is no vaccine, and no way to prevent catching it except by avoiding close contact with ill individuals.  This hasn't stopped the hucksters from seeing this as an opportunity to extract money from the gullible.  Starting with the site Essential Oils For the Win!, which makes the bizarre claim that we "shouldn't be scared of Ebola" because "it can be treated with the proper essential oil."

Well, it's true that there's probably no real reason to be scared of Ebola unless you're planning on a visit to west Africa, but I would invite the owner of this website to go there himself armed only with a vial of lavender oil, and see how confident he feels then.  That the author of the website has a slim grasp of science, and probably reality as well, is reinforced by the diagram wherein we're shown that essential oils work because unlike conventional medicines, they are good at "penetrating cell walls."

So it's reassuring to know that your tomato plants and petunias won't get Ebola.  As for us, being animals, our cells don't even have cell walls, so I'm thinking that I'd rather see what the actual scientists come up with.

Which definitely does not include the homeopaths, who are also weighing in.  No worries, they say... according to an article at The Daily Kos, they already have their "remedies" at the ready!

Dr. Gail Derin studied the symptoms of Ebola Zaire, the most deadly of the three that can infect human beings. Dr. Vickie Menear, M.D. and homeopath, found that the remedy that most closely fit the symptoms of the 1914 "flu" virus, Crolatus horridus, also fits the Ebola virus nearly 95% symptom-wise! Thanks go to these doctors for coming up with the following remedies:
1. Crolatus horridus (rattlesnake venom) 2. Bothrops (yellow viper) 3. Lachesis (bushmaster snake) 4. Phosphorus 5. Mercurius Corrosivus

Yup.  Here's their logic: because the venom of "Crolatus horridus" is 95% fatal, and so was the Spanish flu, and so is Ebola Zaire, the venom must be useful for treating Ebola.  Only, of course, if you dilute it until all the venom is gone.

I only have three objections to this:

1. I'm assuming you're talking about the timber rattlesnake, which is in the genus "Crotalus," not "Crolatus."  And the Spanish flu occurred in 1918, not 1914.  But those may be minor points.
2. Many other things have a very high fatality rate, including gunshots to the head.  Does this mean you could also add a sixth "remedy" for Ebola, Essentius Leadus Bulletus, made by shaking up bullets in water and diluting it a gazillion times?
3. Are you people insane?

 The fear tactics didn't stop with loony cures, though; the politicians began to weigh in, and (of course) attempt use the whole thing to score political capital.  And once again, they are targeting people who are thinking with their adrenal glands rather than their brains.  No one is as good at that as the inimitable Michele Bachmann, who instead of fading into richly-deserved obscurity, has kept herself center stage with commentary like this:

People from Yemen, Iran, Iraq and other terrorist nations are making their way up through America’s southern border because they see that it’s a green light, they can easily get in.  Not only people with potentially terrorist activities, but also very dangerous weapons are going to cross our border in addition to very dangerous drugs, and also life-threatening diseases, potentially including Ebola and other diseases like that... 

Now President Obama is trying to bring all of those foreign nationals, those illegal aliens to the country and he has said that he will put them in the foster care system.  That's more kids that you can see how - we can't imagine doing this, but if you have a hospital and they are going to get millions of dollars in government grants if they can conduct medical research on somebody, and a Ward of the state can't say 'no,' a little kid can't say 'no' if they're a Ward of the state; so here you could have this institution getting millions of dollars from our government to do medical experimentation and a kid can't even say 'no.'  It's sick.

So, let's see if we can parse this.  People from the Middle East are coming in across the border between the United States in Mexico, and they did so by coming via Liberia, where they picked up Ebola, and they're going to pass that disease along to innocent Americans, but some of the kids got infected along the way, and now President Obama is going to place them in medical facilities where they will be experimented upon in unimaginably cruel ways.

Is it just me, or does Michele Bachmann seem to have a quarter-cup of PopRocks where the rest of us have a brain?

 What I find ironic, here, is that people are flying into a panic over a disease that (1) is rather hard to catch, and (2) has caused only 500 deaths thus far.  I say "only" to highlight the contrast with another disease, measles -- which according to the World Health Organization, killed 122,000 people in 2012 and is set to break that record this year, despite the fact that it is completely preventable by a safe and effective vaccine.

Oh, but we've all heard of measles.  So it can't be that bad, right?

And if you are still unconvinced that vaccination is the best way to go -- swayed, perhaps, by claims that the most recent measles outbreaks in the United States were among the vaccinated -- take a look at this brilliant explanation over at The LymphoSite, which explains why even if vaccines have some side effects and sometimes do not work, we still should all be vaccinated.

All of which re-emphasizes that we're better off considering actual facts, and listening to actual scientists, rather than falling prey to hucksters or listening to loons like Michele Bachmann.  Which means engaging our brains, and trying to think past our fears.

The problem with Michele

Today I'm going to ask two questions that are probably going to rub some people the wrong way:

1)  Does there come a time when a political figure's statements become so completely loony that they should be removed from public office?
and
2)  Is there a point where "being religious" crosses the line into being a mental illness?

If the answer to both of those is "yes," then it seems like Michele Bachmann may be the index case.

(Photograph courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons and photographer Gage Skidmore)

She's already distinguished herself by making statements that are completely batshit crazy, to wit:

About President Obama:  "He has a perpetual magic wand and nobody's given him a spanking yet and taken it out of his hand."

About natural disasters:  "I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?'"

About the men who framed the Constitution:  "We also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States."

About gay rights:  "And what a bizarre time we're in, when a judge will say to little children that you can't say the pledge of allegiance, but you must learn that homosexuality is normal and you should try it."

On climate change:  "[Pelosi] is committed to her global warming fanaticism to the point where she has said she has even said she is trying to save the planet. We all know that someone did that 2,000 years ago."

On minimum wage:  "If we took away the minimum wage — if conceivably it was gone — we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level."

But now, she seems to have crossed some kind of threshold of insanity in a recent interview on the Christian radio show Understanding the Times.  She implied that President Obama is Muslim (he isn't), and that he's working hand-in-glove with Al Qaeda in Syria (he isn't), but it only got worse from there.  Here's the relevant quote:

This happened and as of today the United States is willingly, knowingly, intentionally sending arms to terrorists.  Now what this says to me, I’m a believer in Jesus Christ, as I look at the End Times scripture, this says to me that the leaf is on the fig tree and we are to understand the signs of the times, which is your ministry, we are to understand where we are in God’s End Times history.

Rather than seeing this as a negative, we need to rejoice, Maranatha Come Lord Jesus, His day is at hand.  When we see up is down and right is called wrong, when this is happening, we were told this; these days would be as the days of Noah.

I... okay.  What?

I'll say, as I've said before, that I have no issue with people believing what they like, as long as they don't try to push their beliefs on others, or decide that it's okay to lop folks' heads off with a machete if they disagree.  But... this woman is an elected official.  She helps to frame policy.  She is speaking publicly, and influencing people.  For cryin' in the sink, she is on the House Intelligence Committee, which should somehow have made it into Alanis Morissette's song about irony.

And there she still sits, babbling on about leaves on fig trees and End Time Prophecies and the days being like the days of Noah (not to mention basically making up her "facts" as she goes along; I swear, if the woman said the sky was blue, the probability of it being some other color is nearly 100%).  A lot of her detractors just laugh -- there are whole websites dedicated to "crazy things Michele Bachmann has said."  But at some point, don't we have to say, "Okay, time to step down and get some psychological evaluation?

Worst of all, she is going to other countries, on the public dime, and making idiotic statements that should embarrass every American -- such as her recent trip to Egypt, with fellow raving wingnut Louie Gohmert, where in a speech that should go down in the annals of condescension, she said, "We have seen the threat that the Muslim Brotherhood has posed here for the people in Egypt.  We have seen the threat that the Muslim Brotherhood has posed around the world.   We stand against this great evil.  We are not for them.  We remember who caused 9/11 in America.  We remember who it was that killed three thousand brave Americans.  We have not forgotten."

Allow me to point out that 9/11 was perpetrated by Saudi nationals who had been living in Afghanistan.  But one Scary Mooslim is pretty much like any other Scary Mooslim, right, Michele?

Now, I'm the first to admit I'm no expert in politics.  It's why I tend to stay out of political discussions entirely, except where they cross into areas I do know something about (such as evolutionary biology).  But we seem to have here an example of someone who has so clearly lost whatever grip on reality she ever had that she is unfit for public office.

I know it can't be easy to remove someone from an elected position, especially since she hasn't done anything explicitly wrong except for being a complete wackmobile.  And the good news is that I learned on her website that she won't be seeking reelection.  But heaven help us, that leaves another year's worth of damage to our global reputation that she can potentially do.

Makes you almost pine for the days of Ronald Reagan, doesn't it?