Laser therapy redux and retraction

About a year and a half ago, I stumbled upon a veterinary therapy that I immediately put in the "woo-woo" column; the idea of using laser light to stimulate wound healing.  It seemed completely counterintuitive, given what I know about biology.  How could the stimulation of animal cells by low-level polarized light have any demonstrable effect?

The site where I found out about this -- Dr. Kathryn Okawa's website, Healing Arts Mobile Laser Therapy -- described the benefits without explaining how it worked (although there were plenty of testimonials that it did work).  I was reminded of other times I'd come across "alternative medical" therapies that are also lauded by testimonials -- and so I went no further.  I assumed that this was in the same category as homeopathy, i.e., scientifically unsupported.

I was wrong.

Dr. Okawa contacted me yesterday, and courteously (although firmly) encouraged me to do some research and reconsider my statement.  I did so.  As a result, I have taken down my original post, and would like to apologize to Dr. Okawa and others who use this modality -- I fell prey to the cardinal sin of skepticism, which is to keep one's feet planted firmly on one's own biases.  As I've said repeatedly to my Critical Thinking students, "That sounds right" and "That sounds wrong" are really dreadful guides to what is true and false, and despite knowing this (and teaching it every year, for cryin' in the sink) I leapt right from "I don't see how that could possibly work" to "That doesn't work."

As suggested by Dr. Okawa, I did some research, and found that low-level laser therapy has been found to be effective in controlled, double-blind experiments.  (Next time, it'd be better to do the research before writing the damn post...)  If you'd like to check out the sources, here are a few I came across:

Hopkins, McLoda, Seegmiller, and Baxter, "Low-Level Laser Therapy Facilitates Superficial Wound Healing in Humans: A Triple-Blind, Sham-Controlled Study," Journal of Athletic Training, July 2004

Demir, Balay,and Kirmap, "A Comparative Study of the Effects of Electrical Stimulation and Laser Treatment on Experimental Wound Healing in Rats," Journal of Rehabilitation Research and Development, March 2004

Bolton, "Lasers in Wound Healing," Wounds, April 2004

Posten, Wrone, Dover, Arndt, Silapunt, and Aram, "Low-level Laser Therapy for Wound Healing: Mechanism and Efficacy," Journal of Dermatologic Surgery, March 2005


All of which is just a nice kick-in-the-pants reminder for me to be more careful, and practice what I preach re: being aware of one's own biases.

Thanks to Dr. Kathryn Okawa for setting me straight!

Retroactive prayer pay

Yesterday there was a story in News24, a media outlet in South Africa, that a Lichtenburg man, Nelson Thabo Modupe, has submitted a bill to Eskom, the South African electric company, for 250,000 Rand (about $23,000).

The reason?  There were storms during the 2010 FIFA World Cup finals, which were held in Johannesburg.  When the weather turned bad, Mr. Modupe prayed to god that there wouldn't be a power outage, and there wasn't, because by his prayers he "saved the power utility the burden and humiliation" that would have ensued had there been a loss of electricity during the game.  So he figures that Eskom owes him some big bucks for having had the foresight to pray.

[Spain vs. Portugal at the 2010 World Cup.  Image courtesy of photographer Andrew Deacon and the Wikimedia Commons]

Predictably, there has been a significant hue and cry against Mr. Modupe's case.  "I think he misunderstands the power of prayer," one person wrote, in the comments section of the News24 article. 

"(I)t seems like it's only Christianity, people use to make a quick buck," said another.  "I can give you a few quick quotes from the bible, but that won't be enough, you must know the Author, and the Author I know is not an Author of confusion."

"For money?" said a third.  "Imagine Moses charging admission fees for anyone wanting to cross the Red Sea."

Now, wait just a moment.  I can see your criticizing him for wanting to profit out of the whole thing; after all, Jesus himself had a few things to say about money, and none of them were good.  But I get the impression that most of the folks who wrote to respond to the story were religious themselves, and they were virtually unanimous in ridiculing Mr. Modupe and his FIFA World Cup Miracle.  And I was reading the comments, and thinking, "Aren't you people the ones who supposedly think that prayer works?"

I mean, I could understand it if one of us atheists made fun of the whole thing.  Whenever I hear of someone claiming, after the fact, that something happened because (s)he prayed for it, I always kind of roll my eyes a little, because it's pretty convenient to attribute to god's divine grace something that has already happened.

But why aren't the Christians cheering Mr. Modupe along?

I've thought about this before.  Back in biblical days, all sorts of weird shit happened -- donkeys talked (Numbers 22:21-39), the Earth stopped turning so that Joshua could finish fighting a battle (Joshua 10:12), and god told a man to slit his son's throat, only saying at the last moment that he was just kidding (Genesis 22).  These days, you have to wonder what would happen if someone claimed any of this stuff.  My general feeling is if someone killed a bunch of members of another religion, and then said that god had commanded him to do so (1 Kings 18:36-40), the judge -- Christian or not -- would throw the guy in jail, or worse.

So you have to wonder if the self-proclaimed bible-believing, god-obeying Christians really believe what they're saying.  If god told one of you to kill your own child, would you do it?  If he told you that you should jump off a cliff, because he would catch you with his Mighty Hand and Outstretched Arm and lower you gently to the ground, would you do it?  Why did such miracles happen every second Thursday, back in biblical times, but now people who believe such things are considered to be crazy -- even by the Christians themselves?

Kind of strange, isn't it?  Being an evidence-based kind of guy, myself, all it would take is one or two such miraculous occurrences to turn me into a True Believer, so you'd think it'd be in god's best interest to exert himself a little.  But there have been no talking donkeys, no times the Earth has stopped turning, nothing but things like "no power outages at the World Cup."

Oh, but wait.  "Thou shall not put the Lord thy God to the test."  (Matthew 4:7)  Mighty convenient, that.

In any case, I expect that Mr. Modupe will lose his lawsuit.  I mean, the power of prayer is one thing, but the power of the almighty dollar (or South African Rand, as the case may be) is another thing entirely.  But it does open up some pretty major philosophical questions, which I don't begin to know how to answer.

After all, I'm not the one who's claiming that all of this stuff works.

Lunar triangle anomaly

The UFO-and-aliens crowd (and also the conspiracy theorists) currently have their knickers in a twist over an object that showed up on a photograph of the surface of the Moon on Google Moon.  The object certainly is interesting; it shows seven evenly-spaced dots arranged along two lines at what appears to be a perfect right angle.

Certainly not something that looks... natural.

Speculation about what the object could be is running rampant.  So far, I've seen the following ideas:

• the leading edge of a crashed, and partly buried, alien spacecraft;
• a portal to another dimension;
• a secret NASA lunar base (the spots are streetlights);
• a secret alien lunar base;
• a remote signaling device of extraterrestrial origin, à la 2001: A Space Odyssey;
• or one corner of a gigantic lunar pasta strainer.

Okay, I made the last one up.  But c'mon, people; it behooves us to remember that all we really have is a photograph with an odd image on it.  At the moment, we don't know what it is.  So endless speculation about what it is is kind of pointless, because we have exactly one (1) piece of data.

Things like this always remind me of what Neil deGrasse Tyson said, when asked in a talk if he "believed in UFOs:"

Remember what the "U" in "UFO" stands for.  There's a fascinating frailty of the human mind, that psychologists know all about; and it's called "Argument from Ignorance."  And this is how it goes, you ready?  Somebody sees lights flashing in the sky.  They've never seen it before.  They don't understand what it is.  They say, "A UFO!"  The "U" stands for "unidentified."  So they say, "I don't know what it is... it must be aliens from outer space, visiting from another planet."  Well... if you don't know what it is, that's where your conversation should stop.  You don't then say it must be anything.  

Now, I know that it's only human to speculate, but what's really important is that we keep in mind that it is speculation... and that of all of the speculation we engage in, we need to be most wary of answers that seem appealing to us.  The answer that seems appealing -- that it's a downed spaceship, if you're an aficionado of UFO lore -- is going to be the one you're the most likely to accept without question, that you're likely to overlook evidence and logic against. 

As a philosophy teacher of mine once said, "Beware of your pet theories.  They'll turn on you when you least expect it."

And of course, in this case, we do have a rational (non-alien-based) explanation for the image.  Ross Davidson, a digital image specialist at the Newcastle-upon-Tyne based web development firm OrangeBus, gives the following analysis of the strange image:

Basically it's similar to the thing you get in all those 'UFO videos' you see these days from people with digital cameras - when they use digital zoom too much, you get 'artifacts' as the missing data is recreated using an algorithm which create regular shapes simply because of the nature of digital.

As such a simple point of light becomes something like this.

If he rotated the camera the shape would rotate with it...

You can get similar things with still photos when you blow them up - the moon pic shows a 'triangle' because it's digital - made up of pixels.

If you look at the dark lines in the pic they all align in the same way - it's just a shadow which pretty much aligns with the pixels and when compressed/zoomed looks perfectly triangular.

So there's that.

Not, mind you, that I wouldn't love it if it did turn out to be a crashed spaceship.  If I had to pick one thing that I would love to have evidence of in my lifetime, it's extraterrestrial intelligence.  But thus far, I don't think this is it.  Does it deserve further investigation?  Of course.  Do I think it's a spaceship, or a lunar base, or even a giant pasta strainer?

Nope.  Not yet.

Remember what the "U" in "UFO" stands for.

The "flap" comes to upstate New York

An article today in The Examiner has thrilling news for anyone who lives in upstate New York: we are apparently now at the epicenter of an outbreak of woo-wooness.

This is especially exciting for me, because I live in upstate New York, and heaven knows there's little enough else to be thankful for in this part of the country in January.  Tomorrow's high is supposed to be 4 degrees, and for those of you who think in metric, that's Fahrenheit, not Celsius.  If you convert it to Celsius, using the formula that we all learned in 7th grade and then promptly forgot, you get a fairly significant negative number.  And even if you were to measure it in Kelvin, a scale which tries to fool you into thinking that you are warmer than you really are by setting "zero" at "so cold that all molecular motion ceases," I'm guessing that you would not be tricked for a moment.  Regardless of what scale you put it into, 4 F is in that range that is classified by scientists as "really fucking cold."

And I haven't even mentioned the wind chill factor.

So right about now, we upstaters are looking for any possible reason to be optimistic.  And it appears that we have one; according to an article entitled "Yes, New York, You're Seeing Things," this part of the world is currently in the middle of a "flap," which means that all sorts of weird things can be expected to happen.

The term "flap" was coined by author John Keel, whose biggest claim to fame is the truly terrible book The Mothman Prophecies.  I tried to read The Mothman Prophecies once, and got only about halfway through it before I gave up.  And it bears mention that I have a fair tolerance for goofy paranormal writing.  I grew up on books that had titles like Twenty True Tales of Terror, and I still proudly own a copy of Ivan T. Sanderson's Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life.

But Mothman defeated me.  Maybe it was the rambling, incoherent prose; maybe it was the fact that very little of it turned out to have anything to do with the Point Pleasant Mothman.  But I just couldn't do it.

I also found out, when researching Keel, that he wrote several scripts for Lost in Space.  And given that this was one of the most completely abysmal shows ever to hit the airwaves, I suppose it all makes sense.

But I digress.

A "flap," according to Keel, is "any geographical region where a large number of strange sightings and experiences are clustered over a period of time, usually about 12-18 months."  The problem is, Keel said, that investigators in various areas of the paranormal -- UFOs, say, or ghosts, or Bigfoot, or psychic manifestations -- don't usually communicate much with one another.  So a UFO enthusiast might not be aware if there'd been an outbreak of ghosts nearby, for example.

But these flaps are real things, said Keel, and so does Keel's successor (Keel himself died in 2009) Andy Colvin.  Here's how Colvin describes a "flap:"

People who previously had no odd experiences at all will suddenly find themselves deluged...  Similarly, regions that are suddenly awash with UFO reports will also be awash with an increase in reports of hauntings, Bigfoot sightings, even mysterious fires and other odd events.  In correlating reports over a couple of decades from all over the country, Keel was eventually able to determine that these 'waves' of flaps occurred in a broad swath that moved pretty regularly through the same areas of the country every few years.  His clues to whether a true flap was going on include: Are parallel events happening at approximately the same time in different parts of the country? And, are a wide variety of phenomena being reported all at once in the 'target areas?'

And apparently, Colvin thinks that upstate New York is currently flapping like a flag in a hurricane:

(T)here has been a sharp increase in the number of odd nocturnal lights being observed up and down the Hudson Valley, from New York to Albany with some up to Rochester.  These numbers can be found at this national data base which simply collects reports, records them and chooses some of the more complicated ones for further study.  It has always been true that most UFO reports are basically reports of strange lights in the sky.  What's important about this information is the relative increase...  (J)ust in the last six months, there have a sharp increase in the number of people reporting encounters with Cryptids, in this instance, possible Bigfoot type creatures, in the Hudson Valley and Catskills proper.  While many of these reports could also be bear sightings, a number of them are quite interesting and include reports of associated sound and electromagnetic disturbance (cameras and phones suddenly not working, odd electrical outages), the classic terrible stench (which is not associated with bear) and some intriguing thermal imaging.  Many of these reports are collected and posted regularly at this Facebook page.

So there you are, then.  My general attitude is: bring it on.  There's nothing like actual evidence to convince me, and if we're in the middle of a flap, it should mean that someone will be able to get some hard data.  Unless, of course, it's all a bunch of nonsense, which could well be.

There's just one downside to all of this, though, and we're warned about it later in the article:

Finally, and most disturbingly, Keel noted that true flaps are often signaled by the untimely, sudden deaths of individuals who are known to have investigated these phenomena. The deaths often occur at the peak of the flap or right as the flap is beginning a sharp increase to reach its climax. In a number of his writings, Keel lists the individual researchers who passed on during clustered reports of the very things that most interested them. A few of these unusual deaths are recounted at this site, even though it's not as reliable as Keel.

The phrase "not as reliable as Keel" strikes me as strangely hilarious, given that most people tend to think that the stuff he wrote about ranked right up there with Lost in Space in terms of technical accuracy.  So I'm not really worried, despite my (1) having a deep and abiding interest in paranormal phenomena, while (2) not really believing much of any of it, and (3) living more or less in the center of the "flap."  Oh, yeah, and (4) being basically a big coward.  I am not the person you'd want by your side if there were some sort of real paranormal occurrence, because I'd faint and then you'd have to drag me to safety, unless you decided to save yourself and leave me to be eaten by zombies.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

 

Logic and reason, not to mention friendship, only get you so far.

But anyway.  I'm happy to hear that for once, I appear to be where the action is.  I'm sick and tired of the Pacific Northwest and the Himalayas getting all of the Bigfoot sightings, and the UFO visitations favoring the American Southwest.  Maybe I'll finally have a shot at seeing something weird happen.  And when I do, trust me -- you'll be the first to know.

As soon as I regain consciousness.

Jewish dinosaur evolution hoax!

Yesterday I came across the world's dumbest conspiracy theory.

I know I've said this before.  I said this about the claim that President Obama was selling us out to the Canadians.  I said this about the claim that CERN was designed to reawaken the Egyptian god Osiris.  I said this about the claim that Siri was programmed to open the Gates of Hell this coming July.

Each time, I thought we'd reached some kind of Conspiracy Theory Nirvana, that there was no way anyone could come up with something more completely ridiculous.

I was wrong.

Yesterday, I ran across a conspiracy theory that is so perfect in its absurdity that it almost reads like some kind of bizarre work of art.  You ready?

Dinosaurs never existed.  The whole thing is an elaborate hoax designed to give us the impression that organisms have evolved.  All the fossils ever "found" were either manufactured from plaster ("Is it possible," the author writes, "that dinosaur skeleton replica are secretly assembled or manufactured in private buildings out of public view, with bones artificially constructed or used from a number of different modern-day animals?  Why bother having any authentic original fossils at all if alleged replicas can please the public?") or are assembled from the bones of contemporary animals.

[image of Triceratops skeleton courtesy of photographer Michael Gray and the Wikimedia Commons]

Along the way, we learn that (1) radiometric dating is a method fabricated to give the dinosaur claim credibility, (2) fossilization is impossible, (3) the biblical creation story is true and the Earth is about 6,000 years old, and (4) paleontologists are big fat liars.  All of the evidence, in the form of fossil beds such as the ones at Dinosaur National Monument and the extensive fossil-rich strata in North and South Dakota, were planted there.  "Finds of huge quantities of fossils in one area, or by one or few people, goes against the laws of natural probability," we are told, despite the fact that once something occurs, the probability of its having occurred is 100%.

But so far, there's nothing much to set this apart from your usual run of creationist nonsense.  The pièce de resistance, though, is who they think is behind all of this falsehood, duplicity, and deception.  Who is it that has invented all of these fake "theories" about radioactive decay, geostratigraphy, and evolutionary descent?  Who planted all of these artificial fossils all around the world?

The Jews, of course.

I shoulda known. 

So last night, over dinner, I had a chat with my wife, who is Jewish.  I asked her why she spent her spare time creating a fake Jewrassic Park in Utah.  She already has her art -- isn't one hobby enough?

"I'm just that evil," she responded.

I asked her if she had any kind of Official Statement to make, now that her wicked plot has been uncovered.

She thought for a moment, and then said, "I'd have gotten away with it, if it hadn't been for you crazy kids and your dumb dog."

So there you have it.

She did ask one question, though, after making her Official Statement:  "Don't these people realize that the creation story is in the Jewish bible, too?  That, in fact, the first five books of the Christian bible are exactly the same, word for word, as the Torah?"

I said I didn't know, but if I had to hazard a guess, that logic had very little to do with any of this.

So that's it, folks: the Jews have gone all over the world, including Antarctica, planting fake fossils so as to fool the true believers.  Then they invented radiometric dating, evolutionary biology, and the entire science of geology.  There it is -- the single dumbest conspiracy theory ever.  If you run across a dumber one, please don't tell me, because then I'll have to post about it, and I feel like my IQ dropped at least 20 points just in doing the research about this one.

Euler's identity, and seeing the divine in mathematics

Yesterday I ran into a "proof of the existence of god" I'd never seen before; the idea that there are mathematical patterns that suggest the hand of a deity.

One of the most popular patterns that religiously-inclined mathematicians point to is "Euler's identity:"

And on the surface of it, it does seem kind of odd.  "e" is the base of the natural logarithms; "i," the square root of -1, and thus the fundamental unit of imaginary numbers; pi, the ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter.  That they exist in this relationship is certainly non-intuitive, and the non-intuitive often makes us sit back, and go, "Wow."

Euler's identity isn't the only such set of patterns, though.  A gentleman named Vasilios Gardiakos goes through a good many mathematical gyrations to show that god wrote his signature in number patterns, including the presence of "Pythagorean triplets" in the decimal expansion of pi.  (A "Pythagorean triplet" is a set of three integers that solve the Pythagorean theorem, that the sum of the squares of the two sides of a right triangle is equal to the square of the hypotenuse.  The most famous one is 3, 4, and 5.)

Gardiakos's messing about seems to me to stray a little too close to numerology for my comfort.  If you've already have decided that number patterns Mean Something, and you're willing to use any pattern you find, you're already off to a good start.  Add to that the fact that he was searching for patterns in decimal expansions that are infinite (pi, e, and √2), and it's a sure bet that given enough time, you'll come across whatever you need.

The use of the Euler identity, though, is a little harder to answer.  It certainly seems... well, perfect.  It relates five fundamental constants in mathematics -- e, pi, i, 1 and 0 -- in one simple, elegant equation.  And the mathematicians themselves have waxed rhapsodic over it.  Mathematician and writer Paul Nahin calls it "the gold standard for mathematical beauty."  Mathematician Keith Devlin of Stanford University states, "Like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler's equation reaches down into the very depths of existence."

Which is all well and good, but does it prove anything beyond a fascinating and complex mathematical relationship?  First of all, the fact that it's true might be non-intuitive, but it is hardly a coincidence.  For a lucid explanation of why Euler's identity works, you have to go no further than the Wikipedia page on the subject, which leads us step-by-step through a proof of how it was constructed.

And honestly, all of the theologizing over beautiful theorems in mathematics seems to me to turn on one rather awkward question; if you are claiming that Euler's identity, or any other mathematical pattern, proves the existence of god, you are implying that had god wanted, he could have made the math work differently.  God exists -- we get Euler's identity and various patterns of numbers in the decimal expansion of pi.  God doesn't exist -- we don't.

So then, can you conceive of a mathematical system in which Euler's identity is a false statement?  Because if not, then god (should he exist) was apparently constrained to creating a universe where Euler's identity was true, and the god/no god models end up looking exactly the same.

Kind of a poor proof, honestly.

What this sort of thing seems like, to me, is an extension of the Argument from Incredulity: "I don't really understand how this could be true, so it must be god."  Understanding Euler's identity does require that you know a good bit of mathematics; easier, maybe, just to marvel at its beauty, and attribute that beauty to a deity.

For me, I'd rather just try to understand the reality, which is marvelous enough as it is, and worth reveling in a little.  It might be time to break out Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid and K. C. Cole's The Universe and the Teacup again.

God, games, and prayers

Many years ago, when I lived in Seattle, I was intermittently part of an amateur theater group.  I had several minor roles, but then finally, in what turned out to be the last play I'd be in, I got a lead role in Paul McCaw's musical comedy The Trumpets of Glory.

The idea of The Trumpets of Glory is that angels are constantly interfering with human affairs, all the way from major world events (wars) down to minutiae (sports).  Angels take sides, and manipulate things so that their side will win, thereby scoring points and moving up in the hierarchy.  I played the villain (which will come as no surprise to former students) -- an archangel named Zagore, who was undefeated in the past 3,000 years, until he meets up with a hapless newbie in a contest over the outcome of a high school football game.

Of course, being musical theater, the underdog wins, and Zagore goes down to ignominious defeat.  Still, it was a fun role, especially since I got to strut around on stage being extremely badass while wearing renaissance garb, including a cloak and a velvet hat with an enormous feather in it.

All of this comes up because of a recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute, which indicates that half of the Americans polled actually believe that the universe works more or less like McCaw's play -- in spirit if not in exact detail.

"As Americans tune in to the Superbowl this year, fully half of fans — as many as 70 million Americans — believe there may be a twelfth man on the field influencing the outcome," PRRI CEO Robert Jones said.  "Significant numbers of American sports fans believe in invoking assistance from God on behalf of their favorite team, or believe the divine may be playing out its own purpose in the game."

Of the fifty-odd percent of Americans who believe that god cares about the outcome of the Superbowl,  26% reported that they have prayed that their team will win, 19% say that the winner is determined by god, and 25% suspect their team is cursed by the devil (this year, this last group probably includes 100% of the fans of the New Orleans Saints).

Furthermore, 62% of white evangelicals who responded to the poll said they thought that god favored athletes who were Christian themselves.

[photograph courtesy of Ed Clemente Photography and the Wikimedia Commons]

Now, I know that being an atheist, I'm to be expected to view all of this with a wry eye.  But even trying to be open-minded and ecumenical, and putting myself in the shoes of religiously-inclined sports fans, I find myself asking: how could this possibly work?  Does god employ an accountant, who keeps track of the number of prayers offered up on behalf of each team, and then he awards victory to the team that showed the greatest number of prayers?  (If so, the Washington Redskins fans may have some 'splainin' to do.)  Does the fervency of the prayers have an effect?  If so,  how do you measure the intensity of a prayer?  ("O Lord, the Seahawks fans offered up a total of 14,879 prayers, but their average prayer intensity only measured 3.47 tebows.  Do I let them win?")

What if everything comes out about even -- both teams have equal numbers of religious players, and the fans are all praying about the same amount?  Does god then just kind of sit back, crack open a beer, and say, "Heh.  Maybe I'll just wait and see what happens this time."

In all seriousness, I find the whole thing really puzzling.  As I've mentioned before, the concept of petitionary prayer has always struck me as the weirdest idea from conventional Christianity, as it seems to imply that you can change god's mind.  Even C. S. Lewis was uncomfortable with the idea, and in his essay "Does Prayer Work?" said that prayer doesn't exactly change god's mind, but it does influence things in some vague way: "He allows soils and weather and animals and the muscles, minds, and wills of men to cooperate in the execution of His will."

I dunno, the whole thing sounds kind of peculiar to me.  It boils down to my asking for god to do something, which either he already intended to do ("Yay, god is so awesome!") or else not ("Oh, well, god works in mysterious ways.").   Either way, it's hard to see how my praying (or not) had any influence whatsoever, and honestly, it seems to be more a way for me to feel good about having done something to help the situation without actually doing anything to help the situation.

But in the case of sports, it's even weirder, because then you not only have to believe that god exists, and considers the content of prayers, but cares who wins the Superbowl.  Which is just stretching credulity too far, even considering some of the other things religious people believe.

Of course, I guess it's to be expected that I'd have this response, and I'm writing this more in complete mystification than I am out of disapproval.  If any religious people who read this are so inclined, and want to explain to me how any of this could possibly work, I'd be willing to listen, even though I have to say up front that I doubt it'll convince me.  The suspension of disbelief I'd have to undergo in order to buy into any of this is just too great.

So I'm left where I started, which is that I really don't understand maybe half of the people who live in this country.  Which, I guess, is not all that shocking, considering the material I write about daily.  And if I'm entirely wrong, and there is a god up there, and he does factor in prayer in determining the outcome of events, allow me to say that had I known, I would have put in a good word for the Saints, because when they lose I kind of stop paying attention.