Kevin DeGraaf’s Blog

Yet another child has died of religious stupidity:

Authorities say a teenager from a faith-healing family died from an illness that could have been easily treated, just a few months after a toddler cousin of his died in a case that has led to criminal charges.

An autopsy Wednesday showed that Beagley died of heart failure caused by a urinary tract blockage.

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.

Benton said a board member of the Followers of Christ church contacted the authorities after Beagley died at his family’s home. The teen had been sick about a week, and church members and his family had gathered to pray Sunday when his condition worsened, Benton said.

The group of sociopaths responsible for his death also killed his 15-month-old cousin, Ava Worthington, back in March.  Fortunately, it looks like Oregon’s legislature is taking steps to force religious parents to seek medical assistance for sick children instead of merely praying over them.

I know that moderate Christians join me in recoiling in horror at this “faith-based healing” nonsense (and insist that I’m attacking a strawman, not their actual worldview).  However, what they need to realize, and soon, is that their “moderate” acceptance of Bronze Age mythology enables these raging lunatics.  The adherents of this dangerous cult would have their children forcibly rescued in a heartbeat if it weren’t for the fact that religion is so revered, so respected, so untouchable in our culture.

Those of you who avail yourselves of medical care while simultaenously praying for God’s intervention, babbling uselessly into the sky while insisting that the work of human doctors and human medical researchers is somehow a manifestation of divine providence, give ideological shelter to those who believe in the literal healing power of prayer.  Death ensues: not symbolic death, not figurative death, not “moderate” death — real death.  Real children are violently and painfully robbed of life because their faith-addled parents deny them care, or convince them (this case was about a 16-year-old) to reject care.

Only the steady march of rationalism can solve this problem.  I fervently hope that, within my lifetime, it shall.

Hudsonville, Michigan, where I attended high school, has attracted media attention over its mission statement:

The City Commission and Administration of the City of Hudsonville strive to serve God through the strengthening of family and community life and are committed to excellence in providing quality municipal services.

The city’s position was defended by the Grand Rapids Press.

I just sent an email to the city’s mayor, Donald VanDoeselaar:

As a former resident of Hudsonville, I’m disappointed to see the city espouse such flagrant disregard for the bedrock Constitutional principle of separation between religion and government.

Our country is a secular democratic republic, not a theocracy. Everyone is free to worship any deity, or no deity, as he/she sees fit. The proper role of the government is to attend to civic business, not to favor any establishments of religion.

If you want to worship an invisible man in the sky, that’s your business, but you have no right to officially endorse such belief in your capacity as a public official, or to use taxpayer funds to promote such an endorsement.

(Hat tip to Austin Cline.)

Mitt Romney is a douchebag.

Exhibit A: As a member of a religion so insane that Christianity looks somewhat rational by comparison, Mitt had to perform a careful tap dance two months ago on the subject of faith. Had he emphasized his Mormonism too strongly, or taken the alternate path of overly downplaying the importance of his religion, Romney would have alienated the slack-jawed mouth-breathers of the Religious Right (a crucial segment of the Republican electorate). Behold, the power of political pandering:

Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

How wonderfully generic. “Vote for me — I believe in a Big Sky Daddy (TM) just like you do! (Sort of…) We’re not so different, you and I, especially compared to those damn dirty atheists.”

As a decidedly non-religious person, I was surprised to learn that I oppose freedom. I must be a part of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy (TM) to overthrow democracy. Hmmmm.

Exhibit B: Good riddance — the crazy Moron Mormon is withdrawing his presidential bid. Rather than bowing out with the grace, style and decorum one might naively expect from a would-be leader of the free world, good ‘ol Mitt got off a particularly sanctimonious parting shot:

“Frankly, I’d be making it easier for Senator Clinton or Obama to win” if he stayed in the race, he said. “I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.”

Is this asshat actually implying that electing a Democratic president would be surrendering to terrorism? Unfortunately, the implication is quite unmistakable.

News flash, genius: damn near everybody (except for the stupidest one-fifth or so of the country, i.e. the uber-loyal Republican base that overlaps neatly with the aforementioned Religious Right) has figured out that the Republican occupation of Iraq was, to put it gently, a colossal clusterfuck that has ended up creating far more terrorists and anti-American sentiment than ever before.  The “vote for us or TEH TERRORISTS WILL 9/11 GET US!!!!!!!!!!! 9/11 OMGWTF9/11BBQ!!!!!” line of bull is wearing very, very thin.

The people rest their case.

A certain dangerous cult is currently being Google-bombed, and I am more than happy to help expose this dangerous cult by creating repeated links that say “dangerous cult” and point to a dangerous cult.

All religious belief is irrational, but Scientology is straight-up insane and evil.

One of our most fundamental rights as Americans, codified in the Second Amendment to our Constitution, is the freedom to “keep and bear arms”. While it would certainly be nice to live in an environment in which there was never any need to defend ourselves against violent threats, those of us who live in the real world must accept the harsh reality of the situation and deal with it accordingly.

Muggings, home invasions, rapes and murders happen every day, and while the risk of being the victim of one of these crimes is low and can be further minimized through smart decision-making, it can never be eliminated. So we are faced with a question: do we want to rely on the police to protect us, or should we be proactive and be prepared to respond to threats of violence ourselves?

The importance of the right to bear arms becomes even more clear when we remember the circumstances under which the Bill of Rights was ratified. Our country’s freedom was won only after a lengthy war against a brutal, unreasonable, tyrannical government, and the Founding Fathers correctly realized that firearm ownership was an important protection against the new federal government turning into the very type of oppressive regime that had just been violently thrown off.

Make no mistake, I am not advocating the overthrow of our government; I am simply pointing out that if we continue to head down the path of secret prisons, sanctioned torture, surveillance without oversight, the suspension of habeus corpus, and supreme executive power in general, it would be nice to have a way to press a political “reset button” and restore our cherished American liberties.

So, in order to protect myself and those around me, I chose to take a concealed-carry course back in October. Michigan is a “shall-issue” state, meaning that as long as a person meets a stringent list of criteria, the state shall issue him/her a permit to carry a concealed pistol in public. I received my concealed pistol license (CPL) last week, and then purchased a .40-caliber Glock 23 semiautomatic handgun (info, specs).

Those of us with civilian CPLs (as opposed to the CPLs issued to retired police officers) may carry our pistols anywhere in the state, except in the following “gun-free” zones:

• Per state law: schools, day-care centers, sports arenas, bars, houses of delusion worship (unless the presiding official approves), entertainment facilities with 2,500+ seats, hospitals, colleges, casinos, and courthouses.
• Per federal law: federal buildings and Post Offices.

These restrictions are ludicrous and exist only to pacify sheeple who would rather feel safe than actually be safe.

We CPL holders are at least 21 years of age, have been subjected to detailed background checks (no felonies, mental illnesses, restraining orders, dishonorable discharges, DUIs, etc.), have passed training courses covering safe firearm handling, marksmanship and the justifiable use of lethal force, and are legally bound to register our weapons and completely abstain from alcohol while carrying them.

In other words, we are exactly the sort of people who should be carrying firearms in schools, day care centers, arenas and the like. We, as responsible, law-abiding, armed citizens, serve as a useful adjunct to the police. When some deranged nutcase opens fire in a crowded building, having CPL holders around means that the bad guy can be neutralized without waiting for the police to arrive. Where concealed carry is banned, the innocent-bystander body count can soar.

Do proponents of gun control really think that criminals willing to use firearms to commit theft, rape and murder are going to give a second’s thought to laws preventing them from possessing guns in these locations in the first place? As nice as that would be, this isn’t utopia and we can’t stop criminal gun usage by simple legislative fiat. These restrictions simply increase the asymmetry between the good guys (who are shackled by the law) and the bad guys (who aren’t).

In closing, I’d like to quote from this blog post. I disagree with a fair number of the author’s positions, but he’s correct when he says:

I don’t carry a gun to kill people. I carry a gun to keep from being killed.

I don’t carry a gun to scare people. I carry a gun because sometimes this world can be a scary place.

I don’t carry a gun because I’m paranoid. I carry a gun because there are real threats in the world.

I don’t carry a gun because I’m evil. I carry a gun because I have lived long enough to see the evil in the world.

I don’t carry a gun because I hate the government. I carry a gun because I understand the limitations of government.

I don’t carry a gun because I’m angry. I carry a gun so that I don’t have to spend the rest of my life hating myself for failing to be prepared.

I don’t carry a gun because my sex organs are too small. I carry a gun because I want to continue to use those sex organs for the purpose for which they were intended for a good long time to come.

I don’t carry a gun because I want to shoot someone. I carry a gun because I want to die at a ripe old age in my bed, and not on a sidewalk somewhere tomorrow afternoon.

I don’t carry a gun because I’m a cowboy. I carry a gun because, when I die and go to heaven, I want to be a cowboy.

I don’t carry a gun to make me feel like a man. I carry a gun because men know how to take care of themselves and the ones they love.

I don’t carry a gun because I feel inadequate. I carry a gun because unarmed and facing three armed thugs, I am inadequate.

I don’t carry a gun because I love it. I carry a gun because I love life and the people who make it meaningful to me.

On Tuesday, PBS aired a much-anticipated episode of their NOVA science documentary program entitled Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, which covered the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover court battle.

If you’ve been living under a rock, I’ll catch you up: back in 1987, the SCOTUS smacked down the teaching of creationism in public schools as the blatant First Amendment violation — and utter disgrace to real science — that it is. Never ones to give up easily, the creationists repackaged their nonsense by removing explicit references to “God” and changing the name of their position to “Intelligent Design“.

According to Wikipedia, ID holds that “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.” The blatant mischaracterization of natural selection as being “undirected” aside, this assertion is the intellectual equivalent of “I can’t think of how this might have evolved… so… umm… God did it! (Err, I mean, an unspecified intelligent entity did it!)”.

Naturally, the scientific community, which has this closed-minded, dogmatic tendency to reach conclusions based on things like “facts” and “evidence” and “logic”, overwhelmingly rejects both creationism per se and its modern politically-correct incarnation.

Anyway, the NOVA documentary was very well-done. It was my impression that they presented both sides of the argument fairly, and did a good job of explaining, in an accessible manner, why ID is such a horrible idea — it is obviously not science, and it clearly is religion in disguise.

Here are some excerpts from the transcript:

KENNETH MILLER: Intelligent design is a science stopper.

KEVIN PADIAN: Intelligent design is not anywhere a scientific concept. It’s not a field of science. It’s not being actively researched by anyone.

KENNETH MILLER: It’s a violation of everything we mean and everything we understand by science.

NARRATOR: Citing what he called the “breathtaking inanity” of the school board’s decision, [the judge] found that several members had lied “to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the intelligent design Policy.”

JUDGE JOHN E. JONES III: The crushing weight of the evidence indicates that this was a, a considered pattern by this School Board that the board set out to get creationism into— science classrooms. And intelligent design was— simply— the vehicle that they utilized to do that.

JUDGE JOHN E. JONES III: In an era where we’re trying to cure cancer— where we’re trying to—prevent pandemics, where we’re trying to keep science and math education on the cutting edge in the United States. To introduce and teach bad science to ninth grade students make very little sense to me. You know, garbage in, garbage out. And it doesn’t benefit any of us who benefit daily from scientific discoveries.

I’d highly recommend watching the episode, which is available on PBS’s website. (If, like me, you’d prefer to download the whole episode as one Xvid file, you can easily go through the usual channels to do so.)

Another stupid email chain letter has been making the rounds lately:

There will be a new Children’s movie out in December called THE GOLDEN COMPASS. It is written by Phillip Pullman, a proud athiest who belongs to secular humanist societies. He hates C. S. Lewis’s Chronical’s of Narnia and has written a trilogy to show the other side. The movie has been dumbed down to fool kids and their parents in the hope that they will buy his trilogy where in the end the children kill God and everyone can do as they please. Nicole Kidman stars in the movie so it will probably be advertised a lot. This is just a friendly warning that you sure won’t hear on the regular TV.

They are hoping that unsuspecting parents will take their children to See the movie, that they will enjoy the movie and then the children will want the books for Christmas. That’s the hook. Pullman says he wants the children to read the books and decide against God and the kingdom of heaven.

The Catholic League has issued a warning against allowing Christian children to see the movie or read the books (and for the low, low price of $5, they’ll send you a booklet with further details).

In related news, Lisa recently sorted through some of her papers and found a “membership booklet” from her former church. I thought I’d share an interesting portion of that booklet:

• Sound doctrine is of high priority (Jude 3; I Timothy 4:1-4).
• Doctrine is the basis of fellowship (Ephesians 4:11-16; I John 1:5-7; 2 John 1-4).
• Falsehood is dangerous because it is infectious (I Corinthians 15:33; Galatians 5:7-9; II Timothy 2:15-18).
• Those who teach falsehood are to be identified (Romans 16:17; I Timothy 1:19-20; II Timothy 2:17; 4:15-15).
• Those who teach falsehood are to be avoided (Romans 16:17; II Corinthians 6:14; 7:1; Ephesians 5:11; II John 10-11).

Why are Christians so scared of exposing themselves to (or allowing their children to be exposed to) anything that might corrode their position?

If Christianity were true, why would Christians need to urge each other to steer clear of children’s fantasy movies with (gasp!) anti-religious tones? Why would a God who actually existed have any problem with his adherents being exposed to the “infectious” reasoning of those who reject his existence? If Christian doctrine really were grounded in reality, shouldn’t it gladly welcome challenges (atheist or otherwise), all of which could be easily defeated through reason and evidence?

The answers to these questions (”they wouldn’t”, “he wouldn’t”, and “of course”) and the implications thereof should be obvious. Christianity, like any other religion, is a delusion. “Holy” books such as the Bible are laden with “in-group/out-group” warnings, exhorting the faithful to avoid fraternization with evil unbelievers, precisely because religious belief systems are completely unfounded (to put it gently) and cannot stand the bright light of rational scrutiny.

Update: here is another great example.

There’s a great deal of “buzz” in the blogosphere about Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas), a Republican presidential contender. (For more information, see his Wikipedia entry and his official campaign website).

As a card-carrying Libertarian, I agree with the vast majority of Ron Paul’s positions. He is opposed to the occupation of Iraq, unbalanced budgets and deficit spending, high taxes, the USA PATRIOT Act, a national ID card system, torture, warrantless surveillance, ceding of sovereignty to the UN, restrictions on free trade, amnesty for illegal aliens, abuses of eminent domain, the mandated Post Office monopoly, unnecessary government agencies (e.g. the IRS, Dept. of Education, Dept. of Energy, DHS, FEMA, ICC), gun-control laws, Social Security, the welfare state, the draft, prohibition of drugs, the curtailing of civil liberties including that of habeus corpus, and unconstitutional governmental “scope-creep” in general.

So far, so good. I find myself cheering “Yes!” (well, figuratively, anyway) to Ron Paul’s opposition to everything I just mentioned. Compared to the mess that the (normal) Republicans and Democrats have made of our country, a Ron Paul presidency would seem to be a breath of fresh air. His decision to remain affiliated with the Republican party, as opposed to the Libertarian party, could be seen as a purely tactical decision, since third-party candidates are basically unelectable under the current system.

But wait — there’s a problem: he’s a fundy religious nutbag whose rantings make Bill O’Reilly sound sane:

The Christmas spirit, marked by a wonderful feeling of goodwill among men, is in danger of being lost in the ongoing war against religion.

Through perverse court decisions and years of cultural indoctrination, the elitist, secular Left has managed to convince many in our nation that religion must be driven from public view. The justification is always that someone, somewhere, might possibly be offended or feel uncomfortable living in the midst of a largely Christian society, so all must yield to the fragile sensibilities of the few. The ultimate goal of the anti-religious elites is to transform America into a completely secular nation, a nation that is legally and culturally biased against Christianity.

[...] The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers. On the contrary, our Founders’ political views were strongly informed by their religious beliefs. Certainly the drafters of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, both replete with references to God, would be aghast at the federal government’s hostility to religion. The establishment clause of the First Amendment was simply intended to forbid the creation of an official state church like the Church of England, not to drive religion out of public life.

The Founding Fathers envisioned a robustly Christian yet religiously tolerant America, with churches serving as vital institutions that would eclipse the state in importance. Throughout our nation’s history, churches have done what no government can ever do, namely teach morality and civility. Moral and civil individuals are largely governed by their own sense of right and wrong, and hence have little need for external government. This is the real reason the collectivist Left hates religion: Churches as institutions compete with the state for the people’s allegiance, and many devout people put their faith in God before their faith in the state. Knowing this, the secularists wage an ongoing war against religion, chipping away bit by bit at our nation’s Christian heritage. Christmas itself may soon be a casualty of that war.

Ugh. Tearing down the wall of church-state separation (or pretending it never existed at all), thereby allowing religion to intrude upon people’s lives, is definitely not a libertarian position.

I strongly believe that religion is a delusion. I realize that not all of my readers agree, but any thinking person should be able to grasp the idea that using public property (funds, real estate, etc.) to advance one’s religious beliefs is not only unconstitutional, but arrogant and self-centered.

Furthermore, the statements that the Founding Fathers envisioned a Christian nation and that the Constitution is replete with references to God are so laughably wrong as to be scary. Do your own research, and you will see that the Fathers were, in general, deist, not theist (and certainly not Christian). You will also find a glaring lack of references to God in our Constitution.

More commentary along these lines is available here and here.

Would I vote for Ron Paul? Based on his current poll numbers, the question is largely academic, but at this point, I would, reluctantly, have to say “no”. I can’t, in good conscience, vote for someone who wants to dismantle American religious separation, and the protection it brings, even if his policies are otherwise overwhelmingly appealing.

The Michigan state government is, at the time of this writing, on the verge of shutting down. Our fiscal year begins on October 1st (Monday), and unless the Republican retards and Democratic douchebags can end their eight-month budgetary battle this weekend, all non-essential services will be shut down and Michigan will officially become a national laughingstock.

If you want to be disgusted, read more: NY Times, MLive, Free Press.

As if that weren’t bad enough, the sleazy politicians are finding plenty of time to produce attack advertisements.

I have had it with this economy. I have had it with the contemptible creeps in Lansing. I’ve rejected several out-of-state job offers in the past, due in no small part to loyalty to my home state. Screw that. When the next good offer comes along, Michigan is going to lose yet another college-educated technical professional, and I will shake the dust from my shoes as I cross the state line.

For what it’s worth, I’m issuing a plea to email users everywhere: if you receive a message and feel the urge to forward it along, please engage your critical thinking skills instead of blasting it out to everyone in your address book. If an email makes too-good-to-be-true promises, warns of dire consequences for failing to take some action, or spreads vicious rumors about well-known people, there’s a good chance that it’s complete nonsense. Don’t assume that something is true simply because it came to you through the series of tubes in the interwebs.

Note: In this particular blog post, I’m not really arguing against the forwarding of jokes, optical illusions, brain-teasers, tests, religious stories and the like. While such forwards are irritating to most technically-savvy users of email, what I’m really complaining about are those email chain letters that make specific, absurd, and easily debunked claims about the nature of reality.

Example #1:

REMINDER 11 days from today, all cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketing companies and you will start to receive sales calls. You will be charged for these calls! Even if you do not answer, the telemarketer will end up in your voice mail and you will be charged for all of the minutes the incoming (usually recorded) message takes to complete. You will then also be charged when you call your voice mail to retrieve your messages. To prevent this, call 888-382-1222 from your cell phone. This is the national DO NOT CALL list; it takes only a minute to register your cell phone number and it blocks most telemarketers calls for five years.

Example #2:

My name is Bill Palmer, founder of Applebees. In an attempt to get our name out to more people in the rural communities where we are not currently located, we are offering a $50 gift certificate to anyone who forwards this email to 9 of their friends. Just send this email to them and you will receive an email back with a confirmation number to claim your gift certificate.

Example #3:

Back in 1969 a group of Black Panthers decided that a Black man named Alex Rackley needed to die. [...] Rackley was first tied to a chair. Safely immobilized his “friends” tortured him for hours by, among other things, pouring boiling water on him. When they got tired of torturing Rackley Black Panther member Warren Kimbro took Mr. Rackley’s outside and put a bullet in his head. [...] How in the world do you think that these killers got off so easy? Well, maybe it was in some part due to the efforts of two people who came to the defense of the Panthers. These two people actually went so far as to shut down Yale University with demonstrations in defense of the accused Black Panthers during their trial. [...] O.K., so who was the other Panther defender? [...] The other Panther defender was, like Lee, a radical law student at Yale University at that time. She is now known as The Smartest Woman in the World. She is none other than the unofficial Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from the State of New York - our lovely First Lady, the incredible Hillary Rodham Clinton. [...] And now, as Paul Harvey said; You know the rest of the story. Pass this on! This deserves the widest possible press. Also remember it when she runs for President.

All three of these letters either made it to my inbox directly, or were submitted to me for analysis. All three are, to put it gently, crap. The offer mentioned in Example #2 is ludicrous on its face. Example #1 is a well-intentioned, plausible-sounding warning, but it, too, is false. Example #3 is not only fabricated, but a disgusting personal attack.

A little bit of Googling will reveal the truth about these deceptive emails. In particular, I’d like to mention the excellent Urban Legends Reference Pages (a.k.a “Snopes”) website. This site contains an enormous repository of refuted hoaxes, including the three I mentioned: cell phones, Applebee’s, and Hillary. If you receive a suspicious email, verify its claims against Google and Snopes. It will almost certainly turn out to be garbage, and you should delete the email and/or set the sender straight.

The latter myth deserves further commentary. I am aware that several of my readers are die-hard Republicans who passionately loathe Hillary Clinton. Although I am not a Republican, I am not a Democrat either (as explained elsewhere, I am a Libertarian) and I’m not a fan of Hillary’s policies. However, when presented with blatantly-false trash-talk about someone, I feel compelled to stand up for the truth and protest the spread of bald-faced lies.

It’s one thing to vote Republican because you have given serious thought to a wide range of issues (not just abortion and gay marriage) and have come to honest conclusions, but it’s quite another to deepen an existing hatred of a Democratic candidate based on a completely fabricated story. It’s even worse to spread such misinformation, uncritically, due to a strong confirmation bias.