Under-mentalists kill their child

Dale Neumann and Leilani Neumann are contemptable subhuman filth. Why? Because they killed their child, through denying her medical care which would have saved her life. Why would anyone do that, you ask? Because their religious beliefs told them to:

Wisconsin authorities will consider filing charges in the case of an 11-year-old girl who died on Easter Sunday of complications from diabetes that went untreated because police say her parents’ obscure religious beliefs do not allow medical intervention.

(via Balloon Juice)

Why should religion get a free ride?

Chris Dillow notes that Gordon Brown is privileging religion:

What is a conscience? This is the question Brown opened when he said that “exercising your conscience will mean for Labour Party members a free vote” on parts of the embryology bill.

But, as Janine asks, why should conscience only permit a free vote here? To take just one example, many Labour MPs consciences might - or should - stop them wanting to put people in jail for 42 days without charge. But there’s little hope of a free vote on the Counter Terrorism bill.

What Brown means by “conscience”, then, is “religious belief.” Which raises the question: why should religious beliefs have a special status in politics that allows MPs free votes when they don’t get them on other grounds?

Why should religion be privileged above other belief systems? Dillow says it shouldn’t be. I go further than that: religious beliefs should be accorded less respect, less status, than for example secular liberal beliefs.

There are about 6 billion people in the world, and about 100 million of them die every year. Most of these people die of diseases, many (or all) of which could be curable over time with medical research. So medical research saves lives, and being against medical research — which opponents of the embryology bill are — kills people. Hitler only killed 50 million or so; these people want 100 million potentially preventable deaths to happen every year.

Most of the religious people who oppose the embryology bill are I suppose in their private lives good and decent people; certainly the vast majority don’t personally go round killing people. Which leads me to the conclusion that although good people do good things, and bad people do bad things, it takes religion to make good people do bad things.

Why science is good and religion is crap

I’ve so far not commented on the debate regarding Dr Rowan Williams’ remarks on sharia law — it’s a debate that’s caused more heat than light, expecially in the popular press which has wilfully misrepresented Williams’ remarks. But I will pass on this tidbit from Quaequam blog:

The point which much of the media has ignored is that Williams has argued for a system of exceptionalism whereby we atheists (or, as he put it in his speech on Thursday, sterile positivists) must abide by the rule of law while anyone of faith can negotiate whatever opt-outs they wish. At the same time, of course, he insists that the Church should be established and retain its existing seats in the House of Lords. Gay marriage, and even same-sex registered partnerships, is apparently a threat that undermines the institution of marriage, yet we should at least be open-minded about the idea of Muslim polygamy. People of faith can say what they like about atheists, but atheists should be locked up for slagging off the religious. In short, he believes absolutely in equal rights with the modest proviso that the religious are more equal than the rest of us.

This I think gets to the nub of what Williams is arguing for. It’s obvious what the attraction of such a point of view is to a religious leader such as Williams; it is also obvious to any fair-minded person what’s wrong with it. Why should any belief system be priviledged over any other? The only reason is that some beliefs are correct, or at least more correct than other beliefs. For example consider:

Belief A: Strawberries are good to eat.

Belief B: Broken glass is good to eat.

It happens that one of these beliefs is more true than the other one. How do we know? By observing reality. Now there’s a special way of observing reality that consists of considering procedures which if carried out will give a different result based on with belief is true, and then carrying out those procedures. This way is called experimentation and it’s how science works.

Sometimes its impossible to do experiments — for example it would be unethical to force people to smoke cigarettes to see if doing so harmed their health — but what you can do is observe the health of smokers and non-smokers and use statistical techniques to infer a correlation. Correlation isn’t causation (of course) but it does strongly hint that something is going on.

Now consider another belief:

Belief C: The world was created with apparent age by my pet cat last Tuesday.

There are no experiments that can tell whether Belief C is true or false. Thus it is said to be unfalsifiable. This has two implications: first, we don’t know whether it is true or not, and secondly we don’t (or shouldn’t) care anyway, because all observable phenomena behave exactly the same regardless of whether it is true or false.

Society (and the state) should respect and priviledge those beliefs that have been shown by observation or experiment to be true — or at least that have the evidence in their favour (beliefs such as Belief A). So for example,it’s reasonable for the state to say smoking is bad for people and therefore to tax it highly and restrict its sale.

Regarding beliefs that are wrong or unfalsifiable (such as Belief B and Belief C), these should not be respected or priviledged in any way. In fact, it’s best for society to actively ridicule such beliefs, in order to reduce the number of people who believe them.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill

Over at Liberal Conspiracy, Kate Belgrave writes:

This is a quick blog to update LC readers on the latest god-based outrage against women. As most of you probably know, Gordon Brown’s cabinet contains a number of career Jesus freaks - Ruth Kelly and Des Browne are the main offenders, and there are a couple of other perpetrators whose names and point in our lives escape me for the moment.

Anyway - Ruthie and her fellow holy-rollers have revealed themselves concerned that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill will make it possible for lesbians to avail themselves of IVF and become parents.

I’m still trying to grasp the exact reasons why the thought of a couple of dykes pushing a pram is considered such a disaster - who gives a stuff, basically - but I’ll go out on a limb for you here and posit the theory that the big concern is that two women who bring a child up without male input will wash its hair and teach it to bake and turn it into a Gay.

My understanding is that it is government policy to allow for civil partnerships between gay people which are marriages in all but name. Furthermore, civil partnerships include the possibility of bringing up children, and IVF for lesbian couples is an obvious extension of that. If Kelly and Browne disapprove, then they are entitled to their opinion, but if they oppose government policy what are they doing in the cabinet? If they had any integrity, they would resign, instead of demanding a free vote on the issue.

Pay up, or we kill your children

The Observer reports on what amounts to a religious protection racket in Nigeria:

But an exploitative situation has now grown into something much more sinister as preachers are turning their attentions to children - naming them as witches. In a maddened state of terror, parents and whole villages turn on the child. They are burnt, poisoned, slashed, chained to trees, buried alive or simply beaten and chased off into the bush.

Some parents scrape together sums needed to pay for a deliverance - sometimes as much as three or four months’ salary for the average working man - although the pastor will explain that the witch might return and a second deliverance will be needed. Even if the parent wants to keep the child, their neighbours may attack it in the street.

This is not just a few cases. This is becoming commonplace. In Esit Eket, up a nameless, puddled-and-potholed path is a concrete shack stuffed to its fetid rafters with roughly made bunk beds. Here, three to a bed like battery chickens, sleep victims of the besuited Christian pastors and their hours-long, late-night services. Ostracised and abandoned, these are the children a whole community believes fervently are witches.

Even by the standards of organised religion, this is disgusting. It’s time that all decent people stopped respecting “faith” — their word for irrational nonsense — communities, and recognised religion for what it is. At best religion is silly and misguided harmless nonsense, and at worst it is the most evil set of ideas humans have ever produced, with the proven ability to incite millions of killings.

Religion should never be respected; at best it should be grudgingly tolerated.

(via Randy McDonald)

Shock as British government says something sensible

Feòrag writes:

The British government has issued the promised guidelines for teaching creationism in school, and they make it perfectly clear that the only place it has is in the science curriculum is to explain why it’s not science.

One of the advantages of being a cynic is you can be pleasantly surprised when the powers that be get something right.

Religion as child abuse

From New Humanist:

Richard Dawkins’ description of religion as child abuse riled a lot of people, but it’d be hard to view dressing children in this delightful range of clothing as anything else.

Sold on Amazon, the T-shirts carry the slogan “If you miss the Rapture, where in Hell will you go?”. They’re available in both adult and children’s sizes, and there’s even a baby grow version for parents who want to indoctrinate tots with the fear of God from the moment they enter the world.

Some religious thinking is deluded; maybe all is?

Bel is thinking this:

9/11

The 19 suicide-bombing hijackers are today marking their sixth anniversary in hell.

Poor souls, and they thought they were set for paradise. Six years of torment done, ages more to follow.

Still, they have forever to get used to it.

They thought they were going to paradise; Bel thinks they went to hell instead.  Clearly not everyone can be right here.

Let’s generalise that thought: there are lots of religions. They say things that are incompatible with each other, therefore they cannot all be right. Some of them must be wrong — maybe all are wrong?

Can Bel prove that her religious beliefs are right and the beliefs of others are wrong? Can religious believers even prove that “paradise” and “hell” exist anyway — I mean prove as strongly as I can prove that London or Moscow exist.

Dutch religious fundamentalists censor evolution

Dutch religious TV channel Evangelische Omroer (meaning Evangelical Broadcaster) has broadcast and put on DVD a Dutch translation of David Attenborough’s series Life of Mammals. Unfortunately they left out all the references to evolution. So there you have it: the Dutch allow their airwaves to be used to broadcast irrationalist propaganda. Shame on them.

I’m not saying that the Dutch should censor irrationalists such as Evangelische Omroer, merely that they shouldn’t go out of their way to help them, such as by allocating them scarce resources such as radio frequencies. (I don’t know if EO is publicly funded; it shouldn’t be if this is what they do with the money). I’ve no objection to people producing and distributing nonsense with their own money.

Martin Wisse has the details.