Credit where credit is due...

I'm bothered sometimes when people "thank God" for that magnanimity of other human beings. Over the weekend I was watching one of the myriad variations of The World's Most Gruesome Animal Maulings Caught on Tape which contained footage of some lady being smote down by a polar bear at a zoo. She had jumped two guard rails and leaned into its cage to get a picture of the animal, and the bear, correctly noting that she was made of meat, made a truly heartfelt attempt to rip her leg off in return. Luckily for the woman, several zoo workers and other passers by leapt into action, fighting the enormous animal with sticks and their bare fists for several minutes until it eventually let go.

While the interview segment isn't available on the Youtube clip of the incident, the version I saw included several minutes of the lady talking about how she had just "looked up to heaven and begged God to make that bear let go". She then went on about how it was a miracle that the bear turned her loose, seeming to completely miss out on the fact that there were actually other people there, strangers, risking getting their own faces ripped off to save her from her ursine assailant. All in all I suppose that's a pretty minor example, but give credit where credit is due. This lady isn't alive because an ancient Palestinian sky god saved her, she's alive because a bunch of other human beings, none of whom knew her, were willing to put their own lives on the line for the sake of a stranger.

Another formulation of this comes up almost every single time that survivors are interviewed after some sort of disaster. The most egregious example I can think of is an interview I once saw with the mother of a survivor of the Columbine school shootings. "I just can't thank God enough for pushing my baby out of the way of those bullets," she said repeatedly. The unspoken flip side of that coin, unmentioned and perhaps completely absent from her train of thought, is that if God was pushing bullets away from one child, where was He when it came to the other children that were injured or killed during the attack? It would be foolish to begrudge a life spared, but there's a maddening implicit arrogance in those sorts of statements. After all, this woman's child was special enough that the Creator of the Universe intervened on their behalf even as others were slaughtered all around them.

In the scheme of things I suppose this is a relatively minor and idiosyncratic concern of mine, but it seems to me to be just another manifestation of the arrogance of the saved.

The National Day of Pandering is Upon Us...

Today is the National Day of Prayer, an event sponsored by our federal government to pander to the all the religious folks. Yay. Now, technically, if your really want to stretch things, the government can establish "days of prayer" and whatnot so long as they're so limp-dicked and ecumenical that they aren't specifically endorsing any religion. That's also one of the strategies that some states have used to try and sneak prayer into public school. That was the original strategy of the National Day of Prayer folks, but it has metamorphosed relatively quickly into a purely Evangelical Christian event that is headed by James "Focus on the Family" Dobson's wife Shirley.

The National Day of Prayer was Harry Truman's cross-eyed brainchild way back in 1952, and 20 years later it began to become a more organized affair with committees and taskforces and everything else that smacks of both needless bureaucracy and "excessive entanglement". Again, it was originally intended, nominally, to be a "holiday" for all faiths, as well as "spiritual people with no organized religion", but it has turned, predictably, into just another Christian Dominionist enterprise, defended by it's adherents not on Constitutional grounds but by sheer naked assertion that the United States should not be seperated "from our God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob".

Wow, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Real ecumenical. Honestly man, even religious folks should be concerned about this kind of government involvement. Do you honestly want the government in charge of the way you worship, even peripherally? The NDoP website even has a special section to remind its thralls how to pray.

In any event, as this particular farce carries on, today is also the National Day of Reason, which happens to fall every year on the first day of May. The traditional activity for we secularists on the National Day of Reason is to donate blood, since, you know, that actually does something to save lives.

The stupidity is just pristine...

I don't mean to steal topics from PZ Myers, but his discussion today about the retroactive intercessory prayer study out of the Rabin Medical Center in Israel really got me thinking, and not just about how patently laughable that is. My question is this: How in the hell does someone work up the nerve to ask for funding for that sort of thing? I have trouble convincing myself to ask for petty cash at work to buy food for the cooking class, so it is beyond me how anyone could prepare themselves to go before a grant committee to pitch an expensive study on the retrocausal effects of petitions to Yahweh.

The methodology went a little something like this - They pulled a bunch of 6-10 year-old patient files out of the hospital records room, shuffled them up, divided them into piles, and prayed over one pile for a beneficial outcome to something that already happened 10 years ago. I would expect something like this out of a 5th grader or, I dunno, a crazy guy, but not a doctor. Surprise, surprise, the results were "inconclusive". Mortality rates were identical, but the prayer pile apparently had slightly shorter average hospital stays.

Amazingly, the Dr. Leibovici who ran the study had the cast iron sack to state in its conclusion that retrocausal prayer (he glosses this over by using the term "remote" to imply a spatial rather than temporal distance) "should be considered for use in clinical practice."

Simply. Freaking. Amazing.

Lookin' for a miracle man...

Well, Georgia's never exactly been a bastion of the Enlightenment, but it's recently crossed the threshold into, dare I borrow the phrase, "Endarkenment". Sonny Perdue, Georgia's governor, led a prayer session on the state's capitol steps Tuesday to beg Yahweh for rain. (Take that, Jeffersonian ideals!) And, amazingly, they got rain yesterday, just as had been predicted by meteorologists. Must be a miracle! Plus, since rain had been expected before the prayer vigil, God must have KNOWN IN ADVANCE that they'd pray for rain and set things in motion accordingly. A double miracle! That's like 10,000 points!. Georgians, that's your tax dollars at work.

Of course, they only got a measly .14" of rain, which did precisely jack to remedy the region's severe drought, so maybe we shouldn't get so excited just yet. Or maybe God just missed and sent the storm to Bangladesh, which is about to be smote down with a category 5 tropical cyclone. In any event, I'm sure we'll be hearing about this one from the woo-woos for a long time to come.

Oh, and speaking of woos, Bill O'Reilly will be hosting that imminent paragon of scientific understanding and rational thought Shirley MacLaine tonight to have a discussion about the existence of aliens. Huzzah.