Wrath dodging

As a further indication of how completely unhinged our country is becoming, there is a resolution before the county commission in Blount County, Tennessee -- authored by Commissioner Karen Miller herself -- asking god's wrath to pass them by.

Here's the text of the resolution:

With a firm reliance upon the providence of Almighty God WE the BLOUNT COUNTY LEGISLATURE call upon all of the Officers of the State of Tennessee, the Governor, the Attorney General, and the members of the Tennessee Legislature, to join US, and utilize all authority within their power to protect Natural Marriage, from lawless court opinions, AND THE financial schemes of the enemies of righteousness wherever the source AND defend the Moral Standards of Tennessee. 

WE adopt this Resolution before God that He pass us by in His Coming Wrath and not destroy our County as He did Sodom and Gomorrah and the neighboring cities.  As the Passover Lamb was a means of salvation to the ancient Children of Israel, so we stand upon the safety of the Lamb of God to save us.  WE adopt this Resolution begging His favor in light of the fact that we have been forced to comply and recognize that the State of Tennessee, like so many other God-fearing States, MAY have fallen prey to a lawless judiciary in legalizing what God and the Bible expressly forbids.

The number of features in this resolution that are eyebrow-raising is impressive, given that it's only two paragraphs long.  First, there's the whole separation of church and state thing, which Miller apparently thinks is an optional clause in the Constitution.

But consider also the "financial schemes of the enemies of righteousness."  I'm no biblical scholar, but my impression is that Capitalist Jesus is a fairly recent invention.  My memory is more that there were dozens of biblical prohibitions against usury (lending money at interest) -- it's called an "abomination" more than once, and in fact has a good many more mentions in the bible than homosexuality does.  Deuteronomy 23:19 is especially unequivocal: "You shall not charge interest on loans to your brother, interest on money, interest on food, interest on anything that is lent. "

Then there's Leviticus 19:34: "The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.  I am the Lord your God."  Oh, and the thing Jesus said about the money-changers in the temple, the poor inheriting the Kingdom of Heaven, and how it's easier for a camel to pass through a needle's eye than for rich man to enter paradise.

Jesus sounds more like a socialist than a Republican, frankly.

Then there's the attitude that the all-loving and all-seeing god would smite the shit out of the people in Blount County because of something the Supreme Court did in Washington D.C.  Is it just me, or does Commissioner Miller not have much faith in the aim of the almighty?  It's something that has struck me before -- the way natural disasters are blamed on god's wrath, when in fact hurricanes and floods and wildfires and earthquakes don't discriminate much between the righteous and the unrighteous.  They more have to do with whether the geographical area in question was already prone to hurricanes, floods, wildfires, or earthquakes.

It's almost as if god wasn't choosing where to send natural disasters, that they're being directed by climate and plate tectonics.  Funny thing, that.

Besides, what kind of deity would hold Commissioner Miller, who is presumably a god-fearing Christian herself, guilty having anything to do with same-sex marriage?  She isn't a Supreme Court justice, and presumably has neither voted for legalization of same-sex marriage nor is in such a marriage herself.  So why would she need to "beg for favor?"  And why would Blount County, which according to a demographic survey is nearly 50% evangelical protestant, be singled out to be treated like "Sodom and Gomorrah?"

Seems to me that a god that smites whole counties, pretty much at random, is kind of an asshole, and not really all that worthy of worship.

But that is the sort of deity that Ms. Miller apparently believes in.  It'll be interesting to see if the commission approves her resolution tomorrow.  You have to wonder if there'll be any commission members who will be willing to vote against it, and go on record as saying, "No, I'd prefer to pass on the providence of the Almighty God.  I'm standing with the Lawless Judiciary and the Enemies of Righteousness."

I know that's what I'd do.  In fact, I'd not only vote against the resolution, but I'd devise a resolution of my own suggesting that Ms. Miller is unfit for public office in a secular democracy.  After all, I've already established that I'm deserving of God's Coming Wrath, so I'm pretty much screwed anyway.  At this point, it's Go Big or Go Home.

Live cells and zoonotic disease

I understand that there's a lot about our health care system that is downright awful.

There's price-gouging for medications.  There's the molasses-in-January-slow process for getting approval for drugs that desperately unhealthy people need now.  There's the terrible inequity between health care availability and quality for the rich and the poor.

But for all of that, there is a reason that regulations and bureaucracy exist.  No, it doesn't work all of the time.  It could certainly do with an overhaul.  But when people circumvent the rules that are set up to protect them from the effects of their own stupidity and gullibility, bad stuff happens.

Take, for example the five New York State residents who traveled to Germany to receive something called "live cell therapy" -- a dubious "alternative medicine" treatment wherein people are given live cell infusions from non-human animals (e.g. sheep) in order to...

... well, I dunno.  Given that it doesn't work, it's hard to tell what exactly they were trying to accomplish.  Proponents of "live cell therapy" tout its benefits, claiming that it treats everything from cancer to autoimmune diseases to aging symptoms.  Of course, the downside is obvious to anyone who received a passing grade in high school introductory biology; given that the cells you are receiving are not human, your immune system will certainly recognize them as foreign and set up a reaction against them.  The result at best would be redness and swelling, and at worst allergy and anaphylaxis.

Or, as the five New Yorkers found out, a zoonotic disease.  Zoonotic diseases are pathogens carried by other species but transmissible to humans -- rabies being a particularly well-known example.  There are lots of others, however, including various parasitic worms, cat scratch fever, giardia, toxoplasmosis, leptospirosis, and the bubonic plague.

And, apparently, Q fever.  Q fever is a contagious disease caused by the bacterium Coxiella burnetii, and causes flu-like symptoms.  Possible complications are liver enlargement, endocarditis, and pneumonia.  Apparently the injections of live sheep cells that were given to the New Yorkers in Germany were contaminated with the bacteria, and all five of them became ill.

Coxiella burnetii, the causative agent of Q fever [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

All seem to be recovering, but like Lyme disease, it can leave behind a latent infection that can cause problems months are years later.  It is definitely a disease I wouldn't want to trifle with.

Okay, I know that the FDA is often depicted as a bunch of stodgy traditionalists, unwilling to gamble anything or anybody on new therapies that might carry risks.  I also agree with the fact that if I were dying of an incurable disease, I would certainly want to take my chances with a promising but untested drug, given that my only other option was an early death.  But there are a lot of therapies that are unapproved for a reason -- because they are worthless.

And "live cell therapy" is one of those treatments that is downright dangerous.

All of this brings back to mind Tim Minchin's trenchant line, from his performance piece Storm (which, if you haven't seen it, you must watch immediately): "There's a name for alternative medicine that works.  It's called... medicine."

The tour guide in CrazyTown

I'm being driven to the conclusion that Ben Carson is insane.

This has very little to do with his stance on actual issues.  From what I've heard, when he sticks to talking about policy, there's not much to distinguish him from the other candidates for the Republican nomination.  But as soon as he veers off script, Carson very quickly ends up leading us on a guided tour of CrazyTown.

[image courtesy of photographer Gage Skidmore and the Wikimedia Commons]

Let's start with his comment earlier this year that there's no such thing as a war crime. "There is no such thing as a politically correct war," Carson said, in an interview on Fox News.  "We need to grow up, we need to mature.  If you’re gonna have rules for war, you should just have a rule that says no war.  Other than that, we have to win."

You have to wonder if he thinks the Nuremberg Trials were justified.  After all, the Nazis didn't have to fight a politically correct war, right?  They were just trying to win.

Then we have his dire claims about Obamacare, which ring a little hollow after a Rand Corporation study done earlier this year that found that 17 million more Americans have health insurance since the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

But no reason to let a little thing like facts get in the way.  Obamacare is the "worst thing since slavery" (direct quote, there), Carson told us on one occasion.  On another, he said that the ACA "has been even more damaging to the United States than the terrorist attacks of 9/11."  When the aghast interviewer asked him to elaborate, Carson said, "Things that are isolated issues as opposed to things that fundamentally change the United States of America and shift power from the people to the government.  That is a huge shift.”

Then we have his comments that the events that occurred in Nazi Germany could happen right here in the United States -- which is actually sensible until you put it in juxtaposition with some of his other statements.  At a campaign event in New Hampshire, Carson said that some people believed that the rise of something like Nazism would never happen in the USA.

"I beg to differ," Carson said.  "If you go back and look at the history of the world, tyranny and despotism and how it starts, it has a lot to do with control of thought and control of speech...  If people don't speak up for what they believe, then other people will change things without them having a voice.  Hitler changed things there and nobody protested.  Nobody provided any opposition to him."

Hitler also swayed a lot of Germans by convincing them that they were at risk of losing their cultural identity from such threats as the Jews.  Kind of curious, then, that Carson is employing the same kinds of tactics, but aimed instead at gays -- whom he said were responsible for the fall of Rome:

I believe God loves homosexuals as much as he loves everyone, but if we can redefine marriage as between two men or two women or any other way based on social pressures as opposed to between a man and a woman, we will continue to redefine it in any way that we wish, which is a slippery slope with a disastrous ending, as witnessed in the dramatic fall of the Roman Empire.

Of course, he may not be all that sure of his own facts, because he said at another time that political correctness was what destroyed the Roman Empire:

You know, there is no society that can long survive without values and principles.  And if we get so caught up in political correctness, that nothing is right and nothing is wrong, then we go the same route as Ancient Rome.  They did exactly the same thing.  And they forgot who they were.  They stood for nothing and they fell for everything and they went right down the tubes.

So the fall of Rome couldn't have had anything to do with mismanagement by crazy leaders and their being attacked by a shitload of barbarians?

I can understand why Carson wouldn't want to draw attention to the former, at least.

The whole thing may be a moot point anyhow, because Carson went on record as saying that there "may be so much anarchy going on" in 2016 that the elections will be cancelled.

I'm willing to believe that a lot of the candidates, on both sides of the aisle, are pandering to their voter base, and saying whatever it takes to get elected.  When you look at campaign statements, and then what the victors actually do once they're in office, it becomes pretty clear that there's often a pretty big disconnect between the stump-speech rhetoric and the reality of policymaking.

Carson, though... when he speaks, in that soft, patient, utterly reasonable tone of his... I think he honestly believes everything he's saying.

Which makes his position as a frontrunner for the Republican nomination absolutely terrifying.  If this man gets the nod, and has even a prayer of a chance of winning the presidency...  well, let me just say that there are precedents in world history for insane but charismatic ideologues taking control of a country -- and none of them end well.

The meaning of "Two dignified spinsters sitting in silence"

A loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me an email a couple of days ago with a link and the following message: "Okay, I know about the Tarot and all, but what the hell do you make of this?  I think we may have found something that is even weirder than the Tarot.  Astrology x Tarot = WHEEEEE!  Have fun."

Below was attached a link to a website called, "The Degrees and Meanings of the Sabian Symbols."

For those of you who would prefer not to risk valuable brain cells even opening this link, allow me to explain that the Sabian Symbols are mystical images, one for each of the 360 degrees of the zodiac. Another site, simply called "Sabian Symbols," describes them as follows:

Renowned worldwide as both an uncanny divination system and an insightful tool for astrologers, the Sabian Symbols were channeled in San Diego in 1925 by Marc Edmund Jones, a well reknowned [sic] and respected astrologer, and Elsie Wheeler, a spiritualist medium.  They consist of 360 word images corresponding to the 360 degrees of the zodiac (each zodiac sign comprising of 30 degrees)...  The Sabian Symbols are extraordinary for insight, revelation and guidance.  Miracles, big and small, happen in your life when you tap into their field... (it is) an "ancient mind matrix."

Well. Alrighty, then. Let's just take a look, shall we?  Here are a few selected Sabian Symbols from various degrees of the zodiac.  Let me know of any insight, revelation, or guidance you got from them, okay?

• Aries, 7-8 degrees: A large woman's hat with streamers blown by the east wind.
• Taurus, 15-16 degrees: An old teacher fails to interest his pupils in traditional knowledge.
• Leo, 1-2 degrees: An epidemic of mumps.
• Virgo, 15-16 degrees: In the zoo, children are brought face-to-face with an orangutan.
• Sagittarius, 20-21 degrees: A child and a dog wearing borrowed eyeglasses.
• Capricorn, 16-17 degrees: A repressed woman finds psychological release in nudism.
• Aquarius, 22-23 degrees: A big bear sitting down and waving all of its paws.

Okay, so that gives you an idea.  And no, I didn't make any of these up.  All I can say is: whatever drugs Marc Edmund Jones was on when he came up with these, can I have some?

Of course, the people who believe in this stuff don't think that it was drugs.  They think that Jones was really channeling a mystical presence.  Once again, quoting from "Sabian Symbols:"

The Sabian Symbol story is embedded in the ancient cultures of the Middle East. Marc Edmund Jones felt that there was an "unseen agency" - an external, esoteric mind-set at work in the birthing of the Sabian Symbols . Connection was made through a 'Brother', a member of the ancient Mesopotamian brotherhood, the Sabian Brotherhood.  He believed that they were the 'voices' that were spiritually behind Elsie Wheeler, delivering the messages that became the Symbols...  As we move out of the Piscean age and into the Aquarian age, we are transmuting in many ways, with the vibration of our spiritual and intellectual minds moving into higher gears as we evolve.  In such hectic times, we hunger for meaning and guidance, but often don't have the time or the patience to pause and reflect deeply on our situation.  The Sabian Oracle opens the doorway between our inner feelings and intentions and our conscious mind.  They do this by helping to put what is within us into words.  Being provided with possibilities enables us to act positively and confidently, and think rationally. 

My general response to all of that is that if you were thinking rationally you wouldn't be relying on astrology in the first place.  And, of course, the usual problem with symbolic fortunetelling occurs here, just as it does with the Tarot, the I Ching, runes, and so on; the symbols are so weird and open to interpretation that you can make just about anything out of them that you want. 

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Suppose that for some reason, the "oracle" told me that my symbol for today was Libra, 29-30 degrees ("Three mounds of knowledge on a philosopher's head.")  My first response would be that I didn't know that knowledge came in mounds.  But after that, what does it mean?  Is it saying that I'm smart?  Or that I'm not smart enough and should go study some more mounds of knowledge?  Or that today would be good for philosophical contemplation?  Or that I should be looking for guidance from three different sources?  Or that I could find answers in books by philosophers?

This is why the "Sabian Symbols" site offers "professional Sabian astrology consultations" -- for a hefty fee, of course -- because slobs like me just aren't qualified to interpret what "A butterfly with a third wing on its left side" (Libra, 23-24 degrees) means.

The take-home lesson here, I suppose, is that there is no realm of woo-woo so goofy that someone can't elaborate on it in such a fashion as to make it way goofier.  Wondering whether there might be anything else I could learn from all the time I spent reading this stuff, I clicked on the link that said "Clear your mind and click on this picture of a galaxy" to get wisdom from the oracle.  I got Scorpio, 16-17 degrees, which is "A woman, fecundated with her own spirit, is the father of her own child." Which, I think, was a symbolic way for the oracle to tell me to go fuck myself.

Oracles can be so hostile, sometimes.

The haunted forest

Thanks to a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, I now have a new travel destination to add to my list.

Like I need one.  I'm always saying things to my wife like, "Honey, can we set aside a little money from each paycheck?  I'd like to go to Madagascar."  Fortunately, having a wife who is amazingly tolerant of my various eccentricities, I've gotten to fulfill a lot of this wanderlust, and have been to places as exotic as Iceland, Malaysia, Trinidad, Ecuador, and Estonia.

But not Madagascar yet.  I'm working on it.

And neither have I visited Romania, home to the vacation site suggestion I received a couple of days ago.  Romania is, of course, the site of Transylvania, of Dracula fame, but is also where you can visit a place called the Hoia-Baciu Forest, which sounds like a must-see.

It's in northwest-central Romania, and was set aside some years ago for recreation and outdoor activities.  There are biking and hiking trails, a rugged and beautiful valley called Cheile Baciului where there are picturesque rock formations and a lake for swimming and canoeing, and tracts set aside for paintball games and archery.  The whole thing sounds awesome, and even more so when you find out that Hoia Baciu Forest is...

... haunted.

And not just by ghosts.  This place is home to every paranormal phenomenon you can think of.  There have been UFO sightings, mysterious disappearances, orb-like apparitions, disembodied voices, visitors experiencing time slips... you name it.  It sounds like your one-stop shop for woo-woo-ism of all brands.

Hoia-Baciu Forest and the town of Grigorescu, Romania [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

According to the tourism promotional site I linked above:

The Hoia-Baciu Forest (World’s Most Haunted Forest) is situated near Cluj-Napoca, Romania covers an area of ​​over 250 hectares and is often referred to as the Bermuda Triangle of the country.  Hoia-Baciu Forest (World's Most Haunted Forest) has a reputation for intense paranormal activity and unexplained events.  Reports have included, ghost sightings, unexplained apparitions, faces appearing in photographs that were not visible with the naked eye, and in the 1970s, UFO sightings were reported. 

Visitors to the forest often report intense feelings of anxiety and the feeling of being constantly watched.  Moreover, the local vegetation is somehow bizarre in appearance, like something out of a make-believe story with strangely shaped trees, and unexplained charring on tree stumps and branches...  Many of the locals who have been brave enough to venture into the forest complained of physical harm, including rashes, nausea, vomiting, migraines, burns, scratches, anxiety, and other unusual sensations. 

Yes!  Unexplained intense anxiety, vomiting, and migraines!  That's what I want in a vacation spot.

But the weirdness doesn't end there:

Some people believe that the forest is a gateway to another dimension. Within the dark interior of Hoia-Baciu Forest (World’s Most Haunted Forest), people have been known to disappear, strange lights have been seen, the wind seems to speak.  Several stories tell of people entering the forest and experiencing missing time.  Some have known to be missing for quite some time with no recollection of how they had spent that time.  One such story focuses on a 5-year-old girl who wandered into the woods and got lost.  The story goes that she emerged from the forest 5 years later, wearing the same untarnished clothes that she wore on the day she disappeared with no memory of where had happened in that interval of time.

And worse still, through all of this you might get laughed at by invisible women:

People also report hearing disembodied female voices breaking the heavy silence, giggling and even apparitions,  There are many cases of people reportedly being scratched.  All these things happen with no reasonable explanation.

Well, all I can say is these people really need some advice about how to write a travel website.  For one thing, you don't need to tell us every single time that it's "The World's Most Haunted Forest."  We remember, okay?  Also, you might dream up a better sales pitch than, "Please come visit us!  We have archery, paintball, hiking, and disembodied female voices!  Spend your days swimming and cycling, when you're not puking!  Try not to disappear for five years!"

Of course, maybe they have the right idea.  Paranormal travel is becoming quite a thing, and I'll bet people go there solely to experience all of the aforementioned attractions.  I have to admit that if I go to Romania, I'm going to make a point of visiting Hoia-Baciu Forest (World's Most Haunted Forest), if for no other reason, to see what all the buzz is about.  I'm still struggling with my disappointment over not getting to visit Borley Rectory when I was in England this summer, so I wouldn't want to miss this one.  I'll just make sure to bring along my migraine meds.

So, many thanks to the loyal reader who sent me the link about Hoia-Baciu Forest (World's Most Haunted Forest).  It's now on my list.  Right behind Madagascar.  I'll see what Carol has to say about setting aside a little more money in our travel fund.

A visit to the PARCC

The PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) test scores are coming in, and it ain't pretty.

PARCC is part of the whole Common Core, Test-Students-Till-They-Drop system that upper level educational administration seems so fond of lately.  I'll admit that the basic idea -- to provide all children with a common set of educational standards, and assess them all the same way -- sounds good.  Few could argue with a drive to raise standards, improve literacy, increase deep understanding of math.  In fact, part of its mission statement is, "PARCC helps ensure that all students, regardless of income, family background or geography, have equal access to a world-class education that will prepare them for success after high school in college and/or careers...  set(s) consistent expectations in English and mathematics for every student, and... provides a valid and reliable evaluation of each student’s progress toward them."

Sounds awesome, doesn't it?

But for an educational movement that comes out of a drive for equity and accountability, the implementation of these high-flying goals has been haphazard, and the assessments themselves are riddled with flaws.  The roll-out of new standards was rushed, leaving many teachers without adequate training and materials to deliver a completely new curriculum, and the end-of-year exams have been poorly aligned with curriculum expectations and, in some cases, at difficulty levels that are completely grade-level inappropriate.

This hasn't stopped the anti-public-school movement from treating those scores as if they were actually reliable.  The PARCC data for the state of Illinois were just released last week, and showed a considerable drop in average scores from previous assessments, prompting claims of incompetence against teachers and local administrators, withering criticisms of unions for protecting inadequate faculty members, and calls for defunding public schools and replacing them with charter schools and voucher systems.  It also prompted one Illinois teacher to write a concise list of the flaws in PARCC exams, which include the following:

• giving children exams on computers in schools that don't have functional computer labs for kids to practice on
• requiring all students to type their answers, thus adding "typing speed" as an unspoken parameter for success on the test
• vague standards that are assessed by highly specific exam questions, leaving teachers uncertain about the depth to which they are supposed to address concepts
• a "formative evaluation" on 75% of the standards, given 3/4 of the way through the school year -- but no information about which 75% of the standards would be tested
• no scores released on the formative evaluation until after the school year ended and students had taken the final ("summative") assessment, leaving one wondering who the scores were supposed to be "formative" for

And need I add that the scores on these flawed exams are being used not only to evaluate children, but to evaluate teachers, administrators, schools, and entire districts?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

You know who stands to gain here?  Pearson Education, who holds the extremely lucrative contract for designing all the exams, pre-tests, practice tests, review materials, and curriculum guides.  States are spending millions of taxpayer dollars to purchase a framework for assessment that, to put it bluntly, does not work, and then using that framework as a weapon with which to destroy public schools.

It's not just the teachers who are beginning to realize this.  Some institutions are recognizing the inherent flaws in the design and administration of standardized tests -- and are rebelling against the stranglehold they have over the educational system.  Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts, chose last year to stop accepting SAT and ACT scores from applicants; its president, Jonathan Lash, stated outright that "standardized test scores do not predict... student success" and that "multiple-choice tests don't reveal much about a student."

US News & World Report, which each year releases its rankings of US colleges and universities, retaliated by deleting Hampshire from its rankings.  Lash reacted with a shoulder shrug: "We surveyed our students and learned not one of them had considered rankings when choosing to apply to colleges," Lash said.  "Instead they most cared about a college’s mission... At college fairs and information sessions, we don’t spend time answering high school families’ questions about our ranking and test score 'cut-offs.'  Instead we have conversations about the things that matter: What does our unique academic program look like, and what qualities does a student need to be successful at it?"

Lash said that the experiment thus far has been an unqualified success:

Without the scores, every other detail of the student’s application became more vivid. Their academic record over four years, letters of recommendation, essays, in-person interviews, and the optional creative supplements gave us a more complete portrait than we had seen before. Applicants gave more attention to their applications, including the optional components, putting us in a much better position to predict their likelihood of success here.

I have some hope that these sorts of decisions are indicators of a coming sea change in our attitudes towards paper-and-pencil exams.  But we have a long way to go.  PARCC and the Common Core aren't going anywhere soon; Pearson Education, and people like Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (who famously stated that the only people critical of Common Core exams were "white suburban moms who are upset because they have discovered that their kids aren't as brilliant as they thought") are still pushing flawed assessments down our throats, along with all of the other outcomes -- loss of diversity in curriculum, loss of teacher autonomy in curriculum design and implementation, and a drastic increase in anxiety over testing in the children themselves.

So the fight's not over, not by a longshot.  I can guarantee that the failing scores on PARCC assessments in Illinois are not going to lead any of the powers-that-be to come to the conclusion that it's the assessment itself that is at fault.  They have too much at stake, both philosophically and financially, to reverse course that easily.  

So the power is in the hands of the parents, which is why it is so critical that the opt-out movement not lose its momentum.

I'll end with a repeated call for action: opt your children right the hell out of all of the state-mandated standardized grade-level exams -- at least the ones that have no impact on your child's passing a course (which, honestly, is most of them).  Keep them home.  Give Pearson no data to work with.  State departments of education have made unilateral bad decisions about how to assess your children, and it's time to take the control of education back to the local level -- where it should be.

Time to vote with your feet.

The least among us

In Ava Norwood's gripping novel If I Make My Bed in Hell, we read about the ordeal of Annabeth Showers, who has spent her seventeen years on Earth under the control of parents who belong to a cult called the Tabernacle of the Living Word.  She is forbidden to cut her hair, read any outside literature, listen to music.  Transgressions are punished by beatings and public humiliation.  Annabeth's journey from repression and fear to peace, freedom, and the right to self-determination is impossible to put down -- and should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the role of religion in the oppression of women and children.

It is also a true story.

I don't mean in the details; there is no such person as Annabeth Showers.  The other characters in the story are equally fictional.  But for those who get to the last page of Norwood's book and heave a sigh, and say, "Well, at least none of this is real," I have news for you.

There are people now, in our modern society, who use the threats of god and hell and sin, and sometimes physical punishment as well, to control children through fear.

Coppo di Marcovaldo, Hell (ca. 1301) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Let's start with the Fort Wayne, Indiana elementary school teacher who shamed a seven-year-old boy and gave him three days' worth of detention for telling another child he didn't believe in god.

Second-grade teacher Michelle Meyer found out that the boy -- who is referred to only as "A.B." -- was asked by another child if he went to church.  He said no, and allegedly, the other child "started to cry."  This brought the situation to Meyer's attention, who instead of using it as a teachable moment about tolerance of differences, proceeded to tell A.B.  that she was "very concerned" about his disbelief in god and about "what he'd done," and that she was going to call his mom.

She never did.  Probably realized that if A.B. doesn't go to church, neither does mom, and so a call home would be a losing proposition.  So Meyer came up with her own way of dealing with the situation.  According to the news story:

Ms. Meyer required that A.B. sit by himself during lunch and told him he should not talk to the other students and stated that this was because he had offended them.  This served to reinforce A.B.’s feeling that he had committed some transgression that justified his exclusion.

And to make matters worse, Meyer had A.B. and the girl whose religious sensibilities he'd offended talk to another adult, who also apparently believes in the Bring Children To God Through Humiliation approach:

Upon hearing [the story], the adult employee looked at A.B.’s classmate and stated that she should not be worried and should be happy she has faith and that she should not listen to A.B.’s bad ideas. She then patted the little girl’s hand.

A.B., who used to love school, is now afraid to go there because "everyone hates him," and frequently comes home crying.

Praise Jesus and hallelujah.

Of course, this is mild.  There's only so much you can get away with in a public school.  But take away the protection conferred upon children by the eyes of outsiders, and you end up with the Twelve Tribes -- a group that sounds so much like Norwood's Tabernacle of the Living Word that the phrase "art imitates life" barely suffices.

In an exposé of this repressive cult by The Pacific Standard, I read with an increasing sense of horror about what these people do to their children out of a false belief based in fear -- the beatings, the terror talk about hell and the fiery furnace, the prohibition against play, the compulsory work starting as early as age five.  Like the Tabernacle, the Twelve Tribes is good at putting on a pleasant public face, running places such as the Blue Blinds Bakery in Plymouth, Massachusetts and the Maté Factor Restaurant in Ithaca, New York.  Their shops have a cool, back-to-the-earth vibe, and their food is high quality.

But you don't see what's behind the scenes.  Children being whipped with bamboo canes on their naked posteriors for minor offenses.  The oppression of women, who are forbidden to use painkillers during childbirth to "atone for Eve's sin."  The message that any doubt, any questioning, any hesitation is of Satan, and will result in eternal damnation.

The article I linked -- which is as hard to read, but as necessary, as Norwood's If I Make My Bed in Hell -- tells about a few children who successfully escaped from the cult's grip.  One girl was so perpetually terrified of punishment that her jaw would lock shut, preventing her from talking or eating, for hours or days at a time.

"If one is overly concerned about his son receiving blue marks," wrote cult founder Gene Spriggs in 1973, "you know that he hates his son and hates the word of God."

"Blue marks," by the way, are bruises.

Freedom of religion, like any freedom, has its limits; when you use your freedom of belief to oppress others, there is something seriously wrong.  As my mother put it, "My rights end where your nose begins."  And the situation stands out in even starker relief when the exercise of freedom of religion involves putting the powerless in a situation that amounts to physical and psychological torture.

It makes you wonder why the ultra-religious are so focused on the reality of hell in the afterlife, doesn't it?  They've already created something very like hell, here on Earth, for their own children.