Dear Little Bald Bastard,
How are you going to celebrate the national day of Prayer?
- Belief/relief

Dear Belief/relief,
In the classic Christian tradition of co-opting other people’s holidays (and crotch-punching the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause), U.S. evangelicals have managed to shove poor, neglected May Day 2008 aside in favor of a federally sponsored day for people of faith to beseech their favorite deity. This putatively ecumenical event has been entirely hijacked by evangelical Christians, led by Focus on The Family’s Shirley Dobson. Dobson heads the National Day of Prayer Task Force, and requires all of her coordinators to sign a statement explicitly stating belief that Jesus was both a ghost AND a zombie.

I’m going to spend my day like I spend any other. I’ll be angry that the rights of those who opt out of the supernatural aren’t as important as those of believers. I’ll be appalled at how tolerance of diverse faiths doesn’t apply to people who place their faith in the natural rather than the fantastic. I’ll be aghast at this country’s sad, greasy slide toward outright theocracy. Most of all, I’ll wish I was surprised by any of it.

[x-posted from Ask The Little Bald Bastard]

CNN.com/crime is reporting that a 16 year old Oregon boy, whose parents raised him in a faith-healing only church called the Followers of Christ, has died of a urinary tract blockage. The blockage caused a buildup of urea in his bloodstream, which poisoned his organs and caused heart failure.

He probably had a congenital condition that constricted his urinary tract where the bladder empties into the urethra, and the condition of his organs indicates that he had multiple blockages during his life, said Dr. Clifford Nelson, deputy state medical examiner for Clackamas County.

“You just build up so much urea in your bloodstream that it begins to poison your organs, and the heart is particularly susceptible,” Nelson said.

Nelson said a catheter would have saved the boy’s life. If the condition had been dealt with earlier, a urologist could easily have removed the blockage and avoided the kidney damage that came with the repeated illnesses, Nelson said.

In March, the boy’s 15 month old cousin died of bronchial pneumonia and a blood infection, after her parents refused to do anything but pray for her recovery. The two children are the latest in a series of deaths among younger church members, which in 1999 prompted the state of Oregon to remove protections based on religion for parents who treat - or rather, FAIL to treat - their children with prayer rather than actual useful medicine.

Unlike the parents of the little girl, who were charged with manslaughter and criminal mistreatment, the parents of the latest victim have another out. Oregon law allows minors over the age of 14 to refuse medical treatment. If it turns out that the boy was offered treatment and refused it, his parents are off the hook.

Two things spring to mind. First, these people are serial child abusers. Points to Oregon for having the stomach to prosecute them. We can only hope that their planned religious freedom defense doesn’t stand up in court. A competent adult should have the right to refuse medical treatment for any reason, but withholding medical help from a sick toddler is crazy and criminal, and no amount of faith should shield willfully neglectful parents from prosecution.

Freedom of religion, like every freedom, has to have practical limits. Freedom of speech doesn’t protect the proverbial guy shouting “fire” during the premiere of the latest summer blockbuster. Freedom to practice one’s religion without government interference shouldn’t protect parents who routinely let helpless children die from easily treatable diseases. We as a society need to come to some kind of consensus that exempting churches from property taxes is acceptable, but subjecting children to potentially fatal neglect isn’t.

Second, and more personal, are some variations on the question I asked above. How many times does the power of prayer have to fail before these parents will wake up and stop letting their children die? I don’t expect them to stop believing in their god, but is a healthy dose of “those who help themselves” to much to ask? How deeply indoctrinated do you have to be to believe that your all-powerful, benevolent deity has a plan that includes your son or daughter dying for want of a bottle of penicillin? Is there any way to shake these people awake before another child dies? If anybody has answers to any of these, I’d love to hear them.

In the Saturday May 31, 2008 edition of The Guardian, Ian McEwan has an interesting study of historic and modern apocalyptic movements [The Day Of Judgment]. Despite consistent failure by stodgy theologians and crazy cult leaders alike to accurately predict the end of civilization, new prophets and new warnings of our collective demise appear with an almost tedious regularity. McEwan’s piece examines the rise of modern fundamentalist doomsaying, and places it in context as only the latest stanza in a centuries-old epic poem of cultural solipsism and utterly useless prophecy.

We sometimes think of doomsday cults as a modern phenomenon, but they’re really just notes in the margins of an age-old script. A time of political or social turmoil, a charismatic leader, a vision of impending awfulness, and a bunch of disaffected followers so caught up in the ruckus that they do things the rest of us think of as unfathomably crazy. The biggest difference these days is that they’ve replaced slaughtering Jews with holing up in compounds, oiling their vast collections of firearms, and having sex with underage girls.

All of that was really an excuse to point out McEwan’s conclusion, which sensibly notes that salvation, for the faithful and the faithless alike, is going to come (if at all) from the same source. Specifically, from us.

The believers should know in their hearts by now that, even if they are right and there actually is a benign and watchful personal God, he is, as all the daily tragedies, all the dead children attest, a reluctant intervener. The rest of us, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, know that it is highly improbable that there is anyone up there at all. Either way, in this case it hardly matters who is wrong - there will be no one to save us but ourselves.

Lift your head, unfold your hands and get of your knees. All of that stuff is about as useful as male nipples. Despite an untold multitude of fervent prayers, the levies collapsed in New Orleans, the Rwandan Hutus murdered almost a million Tutsis, and Fox cancelled Firefly. Changing things requires passion, commitment and (above all) hard work. Flinging urgent missives into the sky will not make one jot of difference.

Unless you’re trying to bring about your personal vision of the apocalypse. In that case, keep on praying.

The trauma a ten-year-old experiences watching a bear attack - even a fictionalized account on screen, stage or page - is enough to send the child into a mild form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This is what I believe I have, no matter how many doctors tell me it’s all in my head. The “learned professionals” are constantly bandying about words like “psychosomatic” and “hypochondriac,” but they still charge my insurance for services rendered. (more…)

“I’m praying for you,” or “you and your family are in my prayers.” They’ve become the all-too familiar refrain of people who want to do or say something meaningful to someone in crisis, but don’t have the desire or the knowledge to actually do anything.

Admittedly, when one faces a deadly disease (or sees someone close to them go through it), there isn’t much you can actively do to get well. You can follow doctor’s orders, you can try to enjoy life, you can do any number of things to take your mind off of the impact that the disease is having, and will have on the rest of your life. For those who don’t know how to do anything else, there’s prayer.

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I’ve had a bit of bad luck when it comes to deadly or near deadly diseases. Well, cancer, at any rate.  Most of my family has gone through cancer treatment. I’ve had cancer, and then 2 recurrences of the same disease in different areas of my body, which meant more and more aggressive treatment. I’ve gone through so much radiation and chemotherapy that I should have superpowers by now.*

During the first two recurrences I was pretty cool headed, and just took everything with a smile, a joke, or a small laugh and I didn’t worry too much about the outcome. With the third round and the extensive, life-altering, body-altering treatment at the ripe old age of 34, I began to look at the world with a slightly darker view.

The most interesting thing about cancer was the effect it had on other people, and how they would respond when someone they knew contracted the immune system defect. It still carries such a thought of death, as well as the general stigma associated with those suffering through the treatments and disease, that it’s easy to be dumbfounded when talking to someone with cancerme, I still flip and flop and tie my tongue around my bicuspids any time I deal with someone else with the disease.

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A search of the transcripts confirms what I thought I noticed last night. In an hour-and-a-half of verbal pillow-fighting, neither John McCain nor Barack Obama once mentioned prayer or invoked a deity. God was, for once, relegated to the audience.

Isn’t this a little surprising? Both candidates spoke at length about the economic “crisis,” as well as dwindling energy supplies, global climate change, healthcare expenses, national security and the looming insolvency of Social Security and Medicare. All massive, all imminent, and all potentially devastating. If they gang up on us in the next few decades, they could radically change or even completely remake this country. Yet these candidates, who have at times sounded like they were competing for swing votes in heaven, failed to invoke the assistance or protection of the supernatural.

Is this a victory for rational thinking, or a fluke of circumstance? My money’s on careful campaign planning. The candidates shelved appeals to the invisible in favor of massaging the collective ego of the electorate. They lit the candles, poured the wine, and whispered in our ears about how amazing we are. “American worker baby, times are tough,” they crooned. “But you and me, American worker baby, we can do anything we put our minds to. Even that naughty thing that you don’t want to admit you’re curious about. More massage oil?” They were busy trying to turn a backrub into an anxiety-driven roll in the hay, and they didn’t have time to give a shout out to sky-grandpa.

It should be refreshing, in a country where tolerance for faith has turned into a de facto religious test for government office, that the candidates for the highest executive office are limiting their solutions to the real world, rather than calling on the invisible for help. Unfortunately, this rational approach to problem solving is, in crisis-prone America, the exception rather than the norm. It’s taken us 232 years to (hopefully) put a black man in the White House. It’s going to be a lot longer before the resident of that house doesn’t have to pander to belief in ancient deities in order to get elected.

On my way into Center City recently, I was randomly struck again by the perfection of the scam that’s presented in The Secret, a book and video (and load of metaphysical hogwash) by Rhonda Byrne. If you’re not familiar with this particular wad of Oprah-promoted crud, The Secret pretends to have discovered a long-hidden principle called “The Law Of Attraction,” which basically says that you can have whatever you want, as long as you wish hard enough.

The book takes a simple concept from quantum mechanics - that observing a system effects the outcome - and reads into it the absurd notion that your very own brain power can influence the workings of the universe. If you think hard about the thing you want, the universe will have no choice but to provide it to you, accompanied by a smiling senior citizen.

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