Here's a silly letter to the editor from a local theist.
How many examples of bogus reasoning can you find? It's practically a classroom exercise in shoddy thinking.
Responding to the assertion that we can be good without a god, the writer claims "this has been tried in a number of countries with disastrous results". Let's look at homicide rate as a proxy for "goodness". Notice anything? The US's homicide rate (5.0 per 100,000) and Canada's (1.81) are both distinctly higher than many countries that are largely secular, such as the Czech Republic (1.33), Sweden (1.25), and France (1.60). Similarly, religious states such as South Carolina and Florida have high homicide rates, while more secular states such as Oregon and Maine have much lower rates. So belief in a god is not a controlling factor for the goodness of a society.
The writer goes to say "Without biblical guidelines, countries such as Russia descended into moral chaos." Now I'm not going to defend the totalitarian regimes of Stalin et al., but one can hardly say that Christian Russia before communism was a moral paragon. Has the writer never heard of the Massacre of Novgorod? Or the word "pogrom"? And now that Christianity is practiced openly in Russia, has the country's moral tone improved? Hardly.
The next paragraph begins "Just look at has happened in our own schools since they took out prayer and Bible readings and instruction in moral behaviour. There has been an increase in violence, drug problems, teen pregnancy and defiance against authorities". (But evidently a decrease in commas.)
This is a good example of the "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" fallacy. There is no evidence that either prayer or Bible readings has much effect on crime. In the US today, for example, the homicide rate is at the rate it was back in 1965, in the good old days envisioned by the letter writer. Yet prayer and Bible readings have not returned. What is responsible for the change?
Crime is a multifactorial problem, and it's not easy to simplistically assign causes. (Read Walker's Sense and Nonsense About Crime if you want pretty much everything you knew about crime to be overturned.) Some changes in the crime rate are due to simple demographics: the change in the number of males aged 15-24 in the population. Others may be due to changes in abortion law. No serious analyst of crime, however, thinks changes in the crime rate are simply linked to policies like prayer in the schools.
Showing posts with label prayer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prayer. Show all posts
Monday, January 10, 2011
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
When Faith Healing Kills
Via Hemant Mehta (the Friendly Atheist), here is the sad story of Neal Beagley, a 16-year-old killed by his parents' failure to seek adequate medical care, and their choice to rely on prayer instead.
Their son died, and the Beagleys have been sentenced to 16 months in jail. Yup, nothing fails like prayer.
I have a slightly different take on the case than Hemant does. I don't see any reason to doubt that the parents were sincere in their beliefs that they were doing what was best for their kid. And we don't always criminalize actions (or failure to act) that result in death: look at all the people that die during surgery - or perhaps, in a better parallel, look at all the people that died in the early history of medicine from the mistaken belief that being "bled" would help cure them. I don't see any "mens rea" in the Beagley case. Stupidity isn't a crime, and the parents have already paid a heavy emotional and genetic penalty for their stupidity.
The real criminals in this case are not the Beagleys, who were just doing what they had been told by authority figures would work. The real criminals are the religious leaders who make the bogus claim that "prayer heals", despite the fact that there is no good evidence that this is the case. Reportedly their church, the Followers of Christ, has a long history of letting children die by treating them with prayer instead of modern medicine.
I'll concede that we need laws against what the Beagleys did -- but purely for their deterrent, and not their punitive value. If people who rely on prayer alone to cure serious illnesses in children know that their failure may result in prison time, maybe they'll be less likely to rely on prayer alone. I'd definitely like to see a repeal of all religiously-based exemptions of child abuse charges for faith-healing deaths.
But more importantly, I'd like to see a law that makes it a crime for someone who is not a medical professional to counsel someone to withhold medical care for seriously ill children where there is a well-established and safe remedy known for the condition. Such a law could be very narrowly written and still have a beneficial effect.
Their son died, and the Beagleys have been sentenced to 16 months in jail. Yup, nothing fails like prayer.
I have a slightly different take on the case than Hemant does. I don't see any reason to doubt that the parents were sincere in their beliefs that they were doing what was best for their kid. And we don't always criminalize actions (or failure to act) that result in death: look at all the people that die during surgery - or perhaps, in a better parallel, look at all the people that died in the early history of medicine from the mistaken belief that being "bled" would help cure them. I don't see any "mens rea" in the Beagley case. Stupidity isn't a crime, and the parents have already paid a heavy emotional and genetic penalty for their stupidity.
The real criminals in this case are not the Beagleys, who were just doing what they had been told by authority figures would work. The real criminals are the religious leaders who make the bogus claim that "prayer heals", despite the fact that there is no good evidence that this is the case. Reportedly their church, the Followers of Christ, has a long history of letting children die by treating them with prayer instead of modern medicine.
I'll concede that we need laws against what the Beagleys did -- but purely for their deterrent, and not their punitive value. If people who rely on prayer alone to cure serious illnesses in children know that their failure may result in prison time, maybe they'll be less likely to rely on prayer alone. I'd definitely like to see a repeal of all religiously-based exemptions of child abuse charges for faith-healing deaths.
But more importantly, I'd like to see a law that makes it a crime for someone who is not a medical professional to counsel someone to withhold medical care for seriously ill children where there is a well-established and safe remedy known for the condition. Such a law could be very narrowly written and still have a beneficial effect.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
