Too high a price

If you wanted a further demonstration of why religious leaders and religious organizations should be subject to the same laws as the rest of us, consider the ruling last week in Louisiana in which a judge struck down a rule requiring priests to report suspected child abuse.

The rule, part of Louisiana's Children's Code, faced the challenge because of the case of Father Jeff Bayhi.  Bayhi had been sued by Rebecca Mayeaux, who had confided to Father Bayhi during confession that she was being molested by a sixty-year-old parishioner.  According to Mayeaux, not only did Bayhi not tell authorities, he gave Rebecca some stomach-turning advice:

Two years ago, Mayeux told us she went to Father Bayhi seeking advice when she was 14, because she trusted him more than her parents. Court records show when Mayeux went to Bayhi, Rebecca says he told her, “This is your problem, sweep it under the floor and get rid of it.”

When Mayeaux sued, Bayhi claimed that his religious freedoms were being infringed upon, based on the Roman Catholic doctrine of the inviolability of the "seal of confession."  And last week, State District Judge Mike Caldwell ruled that Bayhi was right.

I have a personal reason for finding this appalling.  When I was a teenager, I knew Father Gilbert Gauthé, who was one of the first priests tried and convicted for pedophilia.  He was the assistant pastor at Sacred Heart Catholic Church of Broussard, Louisiana, where my grandmother worked as the priest's housekeeper and cook.  Gauthé never approached me inappropriately -- fortunately for him, because my grandmother would have strangled him with her bare hands if he had -- but while he was there, he became a Youth Group and Boy Scout leader.  During his tenure in Broussard and in three other parishes, he molested dozens of young boys -- some say as many as a hundred.

Father Gilbert Gauthé (ca. 1983)

Part of the problem was that Gauthé was a charmer.  I remember that well.  He was funny, personable, and friendly; everyone liked him.  Even after he was caught, it was hard to believe that someone like him could do such horrific things.  His defense lawyer, Ray Mouton, found it difficult to stay impartial. "No one would have believed this nondescript, mild-mannered, soft-spoken person could have done the things he was charged with," Mouton said. "And then he began to speak about these things and being in that room with him was the creepiest experience of my life."

And the whole time Gauthé was hurting children, Bishop Gerard Frey knew what was happening, but because of the shame it would bring on the church, refused to turn Gauthé in.  Instead, he was transferred from parish to parish, bringing him into contact with fresh groups of children to violate.  Even when he was caught, the church leaders tried to do damage control for their own reputations rather than helping the victims.  "The church fought me at every turn," Mouton said.  "They wanted me to plead him out and make it go away."

Mouton himself was so disgusted by the whole thing that it drove him not only out of his law career, but out of the church as well.   "I honestly believed the church was a repository of goodness," he said.  "As it turns out, it wasn't...  When I decided to take that case, I destroyed my life, my family, my faith.  In three years, I lost everything I held dear."

And Caldwell's ruling last week, hailed as a "victory for religious liberty," is making it easier for predators to remain free, and for church leaders who are complicit in their abuses to retain their veneer of holiness.  Father Paul Counce, canon lawyer for the Diocese of Baton Rouge, explained that priests can be excommunicated for violating the seal of confession.

A fate, apparently, that carries a higher price than all of the lives ruined by pedophiles who will never come to justice.

Miracles for sale

Two of the many things I do not understand have to do with fake faith healers (not, in my opinion, that there's any other kind).

The first is how, after a fake faith healer gets caught at his game, he has the gall to ignore the fact that he was caught in a lie, and do the same thing again.  If I were taking people's money by claiming I could do magic, and I got nailed as a phony, I would be so humiliated I would never want to show my face in public again, much less stand up in front of a sellout crowd and shout, "Jesus is acting through me to heal you (despite what you may have heard from my detractors)!"

The second thing is how there can be sellout crowds after someone is uncovered as a fraud.  Are people really that gullible?  Is I-Want-To-Believe really that powerful a driver?

The answer to both questions is provided by none other than Peter Popoff.  Popoff, you might recall, is a hands-in-the-air hallelujah-praise-be type of televangelist, who claimed to be getting messages from god but turned out to have been getting them from his wife via an earpiece.  Besides being clued in on names, illnesses, and other personal details about the people in the audience, Popoff also received edifying messages like "Keep your hands off her tits... I'm watching you."

And although the evangelicals do think that god is obsessed with telling people not to have sex, I kind of doubt that's the way the Almighty would have phrased it.

In any case, it is a bit of a shock to find that Popoff's back.  Again.  There was some indication last year that he had returned to his faith healing game, but now he's going at it a different way, by sending people letters claiming they're going to receive lots of money, if only they'll use his "Miracle Spring Water" (a packet of which is sent with the letter), and, of course, send Peter Popoff a donation.  Here's an excerpt of a letter received by one Mark Smith and turned over to authorities (which you can read in its entirety here):

What I have to tell you deals with a powerful sequence of events that will begin unfolding for you in the very near future... I see in the vision of the Lord a series of "Golden Miracle Manifestations" happening for you, Mark, in rapid succession, bringing you phenomenal wisdom, success, prosperity, happiness, and an abundance of supply... 

During the first manifestation I see a sudden release of money.  This financial influx is showered upon you from a totally unexpected source.  I cannot say exactly what the total amount will be, but it is somewhere between £2,700 and £27,000...  It is possible that you will receive much more... 

You will notice that there is a SECOND SEALED ENVELOPE enclosed with this letter.  In that envelope there is: (1) a packet of miracle spring water for you to use; (2) another faith tool that will completely foil Satan's attempt to hinder you and stop your miracle manifestations; (3) an anointed prophecy for you to read out loud... 

Quick now, while God's spirit is moving upon you, release your best financial seed-gift.  Don't let Satan hold you back any longer.  This is your opportunity to take your best action of faith that you can towards your secret miracle pathway that only God can uncover.  Right now, give Him your best gift of £27.00 or more.  There's something about £27.00 that so often releases your faith.

He's then told that if he misses the first "manifestation," god's done with him -- there won't be any others forthcoming.  "Don't let Satan make that happen," Popoff tells him.  So send lots of money right away.  The more the better.

This is apparently only one of 34 different letters that Popoff's sent out recently, asking for cash for miracles -- letters that differ only in their details.  "Send me money, or Satan wins" is the theme of all of them.

And you know that some people will.  There's something about this man that makes common sense and critical thinking go right out the window.

I have to wonder, though, if he may have crossed the line into a prosecutable offense.  I'm no legal expert, but isn't this mail fraud?  Maybe not -- it's not like "miracle manifestations" are a real commodity.  But dammit, there should be some way to stop this guy from ripping people off, preying on credulity and misplaced faith to rake in money hand over fist.

The sad part, though, is that even if he's arrested and prosecuted, he'll just bounce back.  Look at Jim Bakker.  Look at Jimmy Swaggart.   You can't, apparently, keep a bad man down.

Or as P. T. Barnum put it, "There's a sucker born every minute."

Don't drink the water

It's been a while since we've had a new bizarre alt-med claim to poke fun at, so I was delighted when a loyal reader sent me a link yesterday to a site for something called "Starfire Water."

What is "Starfire Water," you might be asking?  Let me allow the website to speak for itself:

Starfire Water™ is a proprietary alkaline (pH 8.5) performance water produced using breakthrough 21st-century quantum water technology.  Starfire Water is treated with ultraviolet ozonation, infrared stimulation and electromagnetism for a negative ion charged water, as in nature, allowing deep, cellular intake through aquaporins, the floodgates to hydration.

So we're starting off the right way, with the mention of "quantum."  Everything in alt-med has to be "quantum."  As far as the rest, it appears to me that the writer of the above paragraph came up with this text by opening the glossary of a college chemistry text and pointing at random words, then stringing them together into sentences.

"Ultraviolet ozonation," my ass.

So then we get to find out how "Starfire Water" is made, and that adds a whole new layer of wacky woo-woo pseudoscience to the mix:

Our process utilizes a centrifugal vortex to implode the water and set the water in motion for several hours. This reorganizes the molecular order into a receptive state to receive high frequency vibration. The water is then passed through a chamber where magnetic resonance imprints a series of frequencies in an infinitely modulating sequence. Molecular order and frequency loading mutually reinforce each other to maintain the transformation of the water. 

The result is a liquid with the water formed into small, biocompatible water crystals that resonate at a designed and predictable frequency. The specific frequencies of the crystalline structured water solution are designed to be amplified by the cells of the human body, and transferred through resonant paths to tissues in need of “tuning”.

So, let's see here.  We have:

• a "centrifugal vortex."  Because apparently there's another kind.
• "reorganized molecular order."  Don't want to drink disorganized water, after all.
• "high frequency vibrations."  The higher the frequency the better, apparently.
• "infinitely modulating sequences" imprinted by "magnetic resonance."  I have a bachelor's degree in physics, and I have no idea what the fuck that means.
• "water crystals."  You mean ice?
• "frequencies of crystalline structured water solution amplified by cells and transferred through resonant paths."  Okay, fine, you win.  I give up.

But one more thing bears relating, which is the diagram that shows the highly scientific method they use to make this stuff:

So evidently electrons get sucked down whirlpools, and positive ions get flung out of it, or something.  But at least now we know how the water is "imploded in a centrifugal vortex."

What this product appears to be is mineral water that they spin around for a while and then sell for six dollars a gallon to unsuspecting gullible types.  And there are a good many gullible types, apparently; even their Facebook page has been "liked" 3,960 times, probably because they make a point of telling us that their water is "treated with S.S.R.T. , Sacred Sound Resonance Transmission, making it the world’s finest premium Cell Ready performance 'living' hexagonal water ever produced."

Which you have to admit sounds pretty impressive.

So that's our dip in the deep end of the ordinary-water-filled pool for today.  Spending an hour pawing through the nonsense on this site -- and believe me, what I've written here represents only the barest fraction -- is making me consider giving up on water entirely.

At the moment, I'm thinking of switching to scotch.

The paws that refresh us

New from the “You’ll Think I’m Joking, But I’m Not” department, I have received word that the Calvary Episcopal Church in Danvers, Massachusetts is offering a worship service for dogs.

The program, called the “Perfect Paws Pet Ministry,” is alleged by Reverend Thea Keith-Lucas to “give area pet owners a greater likelihood of their dogs going to heaven.”  Owners will receive communion at the service, and dogs will receive dog treats and blessings.  Barking will be allowed.

While this has all the hallmarks of a story from The Onion, I assure you that it’s 100% true.

You have to wonder what the bible reading is going to be. Maybe a few verses from the Letter of St. Paul to the Dalmatians: “And the Lord said unto them, ‘To the Good Dogs shalt be given biscuits and squeaky toys and pats on the head, and there will be much wagging and playing of Fetch-the-Stick.  But unto the chewers of shoes, biters of mailmen, and those who pee on carpets shall be said, ‘No! No! Bad dog!’ and they shall they be cast out into the Back Yard, even if it be raining, and lo, there shall be no biscuits.’”

It’s not that I don’t understand the desire of pet owners to hang on to their pets.  If you believe in an afterlife, it’s kind of a sad prospect to think that you are going to live in eternal bliss, and Rocky the Black Lab just… won’t.  Many people feel as close to their pets as they do to their friends, and it’s natural to project onto them our hopes and fears for the future, and to want for them what we want for ourselves.

 

[image courtesy of photographer Noël Zia Lee and the Wikimedia Commons]

It does open up some potentially iceberg-strewn theological waters, however.  If we decide that dogs have an eternal soul, then what about other animals?   I own two dogs and a cat, and I can state that from my perspective, the cat's niche in the religious world seems to fall more into the “Possessed by Evil Spirits” category.  But if pets, why not other animals?  Do cows have an eternal soul?  What about pigeons?  What about slugs?  I don’t know about you, but if there are hornets in the verdant woodlands of heaven, I’d have second thoughts about going there.

The other problem I have with all of this is one that I have with a lot of religious thought, and that’s the idea that because something appeals to you, it’s likely to be true.  A friend of mine once told me, “I can’t imagine a universe where there was no god to guide things and give purpose to life.”  Well, it may well be true that you can’t imagine it, but I can’t see that that has the least bearing on whether or not god actually exists.  Honestly, I’ve found that there seems to be little to no correlation between my finding an idea appealing and its being true.  So it may seem sad to picture heaven without dogs, but it’s hard to see how that has any impact on (1) whether heaven exists, and (2) if it exists, whether dogs are allowed or not.

On the other hand, like many things, I suppose that attending a worship service with your dog isn’t doing any harm, even if the basic theological underpinnings of the idea are a little shaky.  So, if it makes you happy, by all means bring Rex along to church with you.  If it gives him some encouragement to be a Good Dog, all the better.  Me, I think I’ll stay home until Reverend Keith-Lucas hosts a Rite of Exorcism for the cats.

Milk of human kindness

I'm not a big believer in schadenfreude -- taking pleasure in other people's misfortune.  The habit of compassion is just too strongly ingrained in me.  But there are times that a person who richly deserves it receiving swift comeuppance is simply impossible to ignore.

Take, for example, the West Virginia lawmakers who passed a bill last week to legalize the sale of raw milk.  Raw milk was eliminated from the market in 1987, when the FDA mandated the pasteurization of all milk and milk products.  For good reason; there are a lot of bacteria in raw milk, and in fact the consumption of raw milk was a major pathway for the transmission of such horrible diseases as brucellosis and tuberculosis.

The FDA's statement on the topic is unequivocal:

Milk and milk products provide a wealth of nutrition benefits. But raw milk can harbor dangerous microorganisms that can pose serious health risks to you and your family. According to an analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), between 1993 and 2006 more than 1500 people in the United States became sick from drinking raw milk or eating cheese made from raw milk. In addition, CDC reported that unpasteurized milk is 150 times more likely to cause foodborne illness and results in 13 times more hospitalizations than illnesses involving pasteurized dairy products. 

Raw milk is milk from cows, sheep, or goats that has not been pasteurized to kill harmful bacteria. This raw, unpasteurized milk can carry dangerous bacteria such as Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria, which are responsible for causing numerous foodborne illnesses. 

These harmful bacteria can seriously affect the health of anyone who drinks raw milk, or eats foods made from raw milk. However, the bacteria in raw milk can be especially dangerous to people with weakened immune systems, older adults, pregnant women, and children. In fact, the CDC analysis found that foodborne illness from raw milk especially affected children and teenagers.

But there are always people who are (1) doubters of hard science, and (2) resent any government interference in their god-given right to do stupid stuff.  And when these two characteristics meet, we have problems.

So the lawmakers in West Virginia passed their bill allowing the sale of raw milk, and the delegate who sponsored the bill, Scott Cadle, decided to toast their success by drinking some.

The whole lot of them were laid low a day later by nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.

[screen capture from video]

Of course, that's not enough for people who ignored all of the FDA's warnings to begin with.  Delegate Pat McGeehan, in between elbowing his fellow lawmakers out of the way to reach the bathroom in time, said, "I highly doubt raw milk had anything to do with it, in my case."

I think if I had to choose my least favorite common contagious disease, it would have to be stomach flu.  Fortunately, I don't get it often, but the time I had it the worst -- a never-to-be-forgotten twelve hour period of presumed food poisoning in Belize -- I would have happily jumped off a cliff to end my misery, had I had the strength to do anything other than kneel on the floor with my face in the toilet.  But even so, I have to admit I laughed when I read about this.  It's all very well to rail against government regulation, and I actually agree that governments often go way overboard in trying to license and regulate and restrict damn near everything.  (Take, for example, a law still on the books in Philadelphia that requires bloggers to purchase a $300 business privilege license, a practice that puts 99% of bloggers in the red.)

On the other hand, there are some regulations that are there for a reason, and the restrictions on selling unsafe foods are among them.  And as far as the sick West Virginia delegates, I hope they're all feeling better by now.

But I still think it's kind of funny.

Outnumbered by the extremes

Some years ago, I remember being struck by a quote about democracy from C. S. Lewis when I read his book The Weight of Glory.  While I don't accept a lot of his premises, I think his argument has merit:

I believe in political equality.  But there are two opposite reasons for being a democrat. You may think all men so good that they deserve a share in the government of the commonwealth, and so wise that the commonwealth needs their advice.  That is, in my opinion, the false, romantic doctrine of democracy.  On the other hand, you may believe fallen men to be so wicked that not one of them can be trusted with any irresponsible power over his fellows.

When the democratic system works, it is because the votes of a few lunatics or extremists are outweighed by the votes of the (presumably more reasonable) average citizen, and good sense prevails.

The problem is, the whole thing falls apart when the extremists become so good not only at spreading their message but at demonizing the opposition that voters pledge themselves to people who are, to put not too fine a point on it, insane.  Then you find the system sowing the seeds of its own destruction, when by some unimaginable co-opting of the process, someone truly horrible ends up getting elected to office.

And no, I'm not talking about who you probably think I'm talking about.  The person I have in mind is Mary Lou Bruner, leading candidate for a seat on the Texas State Board of Education.

Bruner has established over and over again that she has a screw loose.  Below are a few of her more bizarre pronouncements.

On President Obama:

Obama has a soft spot for homosexuals because of the years he spent as a male prostitute in his twenties.  That is how he paid for his drugs.  He has admitted he was addicted to drugs when he was young, and he is sympathetic with homosexuals; but he hasn’t come out of the closet about his own homosexual/bisexual background.

 On the Kennedy assassination:

Many people believe the Democrat Party had JFK killed because the socialists and Communists in the party did not want a conservative president.  Remember who followed JFK as president — (LBJ).  The exact opposite of Kennedy — a socialist and an unethical politician.  It does seem like this might have been the master plan: They sneaked the bad guy (LBJ) into the administration on the coat-tail of a good guy (JFK).  Then they got rid of the good guy; in the end, they got a socialist president which is what they originally wanted.

On paleontology and the geological history of the Earth:

When the flood waters subsided and rushed to the oceans there was no vegetation on the earth because the earth had been covered with water…  The dinosaurs on [Noah’s ark] may have been babies and not able to reproduce…  After the flood, the few remaining Behemoths and Leviathans may have become extinct because there was not enough vegetation on earth for them to survive to reproductive age.

On climate change:

Climate change has nothing to do with weather or climate; it is all about system change from capitalism (free enterprise) to Socialism-Communism.  The Climate Change HOAX was Karl Marx’s idea.  It took some time to “condition” the people so they would believe such a ridiculous HOAX.

On the United Nations:

In regards to a statement I made about the United Nations wanting to reduce the population of the USA from 325 million to 125 million the question was asked to me: So how do you think the government and the UN plan to do away with 200,000,000 people from the United States under the agenda 21 plan? 

This was my answer: when the people die the government does not want them to be replaced.  That is how they propose to reduce the population from 325 million to 125 million.  They plan to use Obamacare to make sure people die a little sooner than they would have died.  When elderly people with heart problems or diabetes have to wait months to see a doctor, they die before their appointment comes around.  When the government says they cannot have the operation or the medicine they need they die sooner than they would have if they had gotten the operation or the medicine they needed.  The government may get to the point where it starts euthanizing people.  Part of Obamacare is to ask elderly people if they think their life is still worth living now that they can no longer get around well, or now that they are in a wheel chair, or now that they can no longer control their bladder or other functions, or now that their hands are not steady enough to feed themselves.  Some people become depressed and say that their life is not worth living under those conditions and that is just what the government wants to hear.  Those elderly people are not going to last long once the government gets their signature on that piece of paper.  There also will be more abortions paid for by the government.  Abortion is a method of reducing the population.

And last but not least, on school shootings:

School shootings started after the schools started teaching evolution.

This woman is now widely expected to win an election to the board that oversees public education in one of the most populous states in the United States.

The problem is, the Republican party has encouraged this sort of free-floating fear talk and religious mania for quite some time.  Witness the angry, America-is-being-destroyed-before-your-eyes railing of people like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh. Fox News has for years been notorious for scary talk about Wars on Christmas and President Obama Coming To Steal Your Guns. Only now are there level-headed conservatives who are coming to the horrid realization that the message that they have been pushing has come back to bite the entire party in the ass, in the form of paranoid loons like Bruner standing a good chance at becoming a leading voice in driving educational policy in Texas -- and the Republican nomination for president being a contest between a loud-mouthed, fact-free neo-fascist and a religious nutjob who is so reviled by members of his own party that one of them said, "If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you."

The problem is, now that this snowball has been set in motion, I'm not sure what can be done about it.  The Republican old guard, apparently appalled that they might end up having to face either backing Donald Trump as presidential nominee, backing a Democrat, or not endorsing anyone, have tried to stage a last-ditch effort to block Trump from getting the nod, an effort which is almost certain to fail.  But the problem goes deeper than a man who is politics' answer to a carnival sideshow barker being a stone's throw from the presidency.  This embracing of extremist rhetoric has colored races all the way down to the local level.

How else could you explain that a certifiable whackjob like Mary Lou Bruner is predicted to garner the support of over 50% of Texas voters?

I don't know what could be done to return the United States to a position where rational dialogue was happening, or even possible.  The screeching of the extreme sides of both parties has done nothing but deepen distrust of our fellow citizens -- not to mention making it more likely that Lewis's view of democracy, that the votes of the reasonable majority would outweigh the votes of the unreasonable fringes, is unlikely to be realized any time soon.

We've got your number

As a science teacher, one of the things I find fascinating and perplexing is the phenomenon of innumeracy.

An innumerate person is someone who doesn't understand numbers.  We're not talking about simple ignorance of algebra, here; we're talking about someone who has no fundamental comprehension of quantity.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

As an example, take a student of mine who took physics with me, perhaps 25 years ago.  We were studying electrical force, and there was a problem set up that allowed you, with a few given parameters, to calculate the mass of an electron.  So after working for a time, this kid raised her hand, and asked, "Is this the right answer?"

She'd gotten the answer "36 kilograms."

Now, I'll point out from the get-go that she'd made a simple computational error -- divided when she should have multiplied.  What struck me is that she had no idea her answer was wrong.  When I said, "Doesn't your answer seem a little large, for an electron?" she replied, "Is it?  It's what my calculator said."

What's curious about innumerate people is that they're frequently quite good at rote cookbook math -- they can follow lists of directions like champs.  But they have no real sense of numbers, so they have no way to tell if they've gotten the wrong answer.

What's also interesting is that there are people who are pretty competent with small numbers, but lose it entirely with large numbers.  An exercise I used to do with my physics students to help correct this -- which, allow me to say up front, wasn't particularly successful -- was to have them do order-of-magnitude estimation problems.  Within an order of magnitude, how many ping-pong balls would it take to fill the classroom?  How many 1'x1' floor tiles are in the entire school?  How many telephone books in a stack would it take to reach from the Earth to the Moon?  And so on.  Once again, these kids could do the problems, once you'd established a protocol for how to solve them; but I don't think they really got any better at understanding magnitudes through doing it than they had to start with.

Now, scientists at Imperial College in London have gained an insight into why this big-versus-small number comprehension issue might exist; they have found that big and small numbers are processed in different parts of the brain.

The study, led by Qadeer Arshad of the Department of Medicine, said that the idea for the study came from studying victims of strokes whose damage interfered with very specific abilities apropos of number processing. "Following early insights from stroke patients we wanted to find out exactly how the brain processes numbers," Arshad said.  "In our new study, in which we used healthy volunteers, we found the left side processes large numbers, and the right processes small numbers.  So for instance if you were looking at a clock, the numbers one to six would be processed on the right side of the brain, and six to twelve would be processed on the left."

The team then used a procedure to activate one side of the brain more than the other, and asked the volunteers to do various estimation tasks.  Interestingly, people had a systematic tendency to err in a opposite directions depending on which side of the brain was stimulated.  "When we activated the right side of the brain, the volunteers were saying smaller numbers," Arshad explained.  "For instance, if we asked the middle point of 50-100, they were saying 65 instead of 75.  But when we activated the left side of the brain, the volunteers were saying numbers above 75."

Apparently, the context of the task was also critical.  "If someone was looking at a range of 50-100 then the number 80 will probably be processed on the left side of the brain," Arshad explained.   "However, if they are looking at a range of 50-300, then 80 will now be small number, and processed on the right."

Which at least gives a preliminary explanation of why there are students who do just fine with manipulating small numbers, but fall apart completely when dealing with large ones.  I deal with kids for whom 10,000 years ago, 1,000,000 years ago, and 1,000,000,000 years ago all sound about the same -- "big" -- making it difficult to give them any real sense of the time scale of evolutionary biology.

Anyhow, I think the study by Arshad et al. is fascinating, and gives us a further window into understanding how our brains work.  Which is all to the good.  Although it still doesn't quite answer how someone could think that a 36 kilogram electron sounds reasonable.