Sheeple Report 1

In order to give my rants a bit of consistency, I’m starting a new series of posts called Sheeple Reports. A large part of skeptical inquiry is pointing out the blind following of numerous trends from religion to homeopathy. Sheeple Reports will give me a chance to vent my frustration in dealing with the various followers all around me. First on the agenda is an update to my previous snippet of frustration:

_____’s boys are still super congested and coughing horribly, but praise God they’re in good moods!

Yes, praise God for smiting my children with illness but having the decency to keep their spirits up. Such a merciful, loving god. Oh but wait… Them being sick is all part of His plan, of course. So, what if they were miserable? Would you still be praising the Lord who made them suffer in the first place? Just goes to show there’s no room for honesty in religion. Hypocrisy is the rule.

Thankfully (to the outcome, not to some mystical cause of the outcome), the children are beginning to feel better. Less-than-thankfully, as you might have anticipated, the mother is thankful to some mystical cause of the outcome (you know, the same mystical cause of the problem itself):

_____’s boys are starting to get better! Thank you, Lord!

I’m trying to think of the best way to describe the image of God she’s painting here. Münchausen Syndrome by Proxy seems to fit pretty well. This megalomaniacal being manifests illness in His children for the sole purpose of curing them and “earning” the praise of His other children. Yeah, I really want to worship Him now…

Next up we have someone who sadly confuses his own inner strength with that of God:

“Even the youths shall faint and be weary, And the young men shall utterly fall, But those who wait on the LORD Shall renew their strength; They shall mount up with wings like eagles, They shall run and not be weary, They shall walk and not faint.” - Isaiah 40:30,31

Tonight after youth group I went to the gym and got on one of the recumbent-style exercise bikes and started going (Level 12ish, kept it to about 80 rpm). Had my iPod blasting worship music by Everybodyduck. My first goal was 20 minutes or five miles, whichever came second. At 17 minutes (about four and a quarter miles), both calves started quivering; threatening to cramp at any moment. I closed my eyes, grunted once, and recited the verses above to myself. I then prayed, “Lord, please be my strength. I know you are made perfect in my weakness. Let me get to 10 miles.” At about 19 minutes, I made it to five miles and kept going. At 22 minutes, my legs started hurting a little more. I noticed my legs were hurting more when there was slack in the peddling, so I bumped up the level to 15 to keep constant resistance against my legs and pressed on. For the last mile and a half, I closed my eyes, tuned out everything and just focused on the worship songs. I finally hit 10 miles at 35:06 minutes. Pressed the cool down button and continued peddling for another 5 minutes at Level 3. In all, I went 10.94 miles in 40:06 minutes and not once did my calves go into full-blown cramping.

Yay God!

Why are you selling yourself so short? I guarantee you it’s not the prayer itself that did the trick. Here, I’ll highlight the key phrase from your note:

For the last mile and a half, I closed my eyes, tuned out everything and just focused

Any time you do that—whether it’s focusing on a prayer from the bible, visualizing some new-age imaginary energy field around your body, or listening to the violent and misogynistic lyrics of some hard metal band that you happen to enjoy—you’re going to discover an inner strength without any intervention from a divine being. Ask yourself a few questions:

• What makes you so certain you would’ve cramped in the first place?
• What if you had been reciting any other passage from the bible?
• Why would God even care about something so trivial as exercise cramps when people have been praying for far more worthy goals for millennia?
• Why won’t God heal amputees?

Snippets of Frustration

“Don’t sweat the small stuff,” they say. Taking each small thing in a vacuum, I couldn’t agree more. The sweat, of course, starts flowing when small thing piles on small thing, until you reach the proverbial backbreaking straw. A ton of feathers still weighs a ton. In order to wash off some of my sweat, here are a few small things that have me a bit riled up:

Artitstry [sic]

Why are Americans so offended by breasts? Save for the poor souls who grew up without a mother able or willing to breast feed, we’ve all sucked on them at one point or another. How can such a natural, normal part of life be perceived with such rage? My wife and I celebrated our seventh anniversary yesterday by taking lunch at our favorite Thai restaurant. We first dined here shortly after they opened, and were impressed by the remarkable atmosphere which included some beautiful—if possibly inauthentic—Asian paintings. Paintings with breasts. The horror. They’re gone now, replaced by mass-produced Pottery Barn-worthy “artwork.” The waiter confirmed it was due to a customer complaint. And this is in one of the most liberal towns in America.

Praise the Lord’s Status

Two of my friends’ recently-posted Facebook statuses have proven to be a great exercise in self-restraint. The first one appeared yesterday on the profile of a friend who recently injured his knee:

_____ is praying for healing. Being in constant pain is no fun.

Pray all you like, buddy. You’d have better luck with Vicodin. It was all I could do to keep myself from commenting with just that sentiment. And it’s definitely a good thing I didn’t… Three of his local (Bible Belt) friends responded with various “we’re praying for you too”s.

The other friend’s status is so wrong on so many levels:

_____'s boys are still super congested and coughing horribly, but praise God they're in good moods!

Yes, praise God for smiting my children with illness but having the decency to keep their spirits up. Such a merciful, loving god. Oh but wait… Them being sick is all part of His plan, of course. So, what if they were miserable? Would you still be praising the Lord who made them suffer in the first place? Just goes to show there’s no room for honesty in religion. Hypocrisy is the rule.

Happy Darwin Day!

Celebrate your inner fish!

If you're in the Santa Rosa area, there's a party at 6:30 tonight at the Glaser Center/Unitarian Universalist Congregation. You can find more information on their website.

Frankencorn

Having family members who come to me for my take on various issues makes for great blog fodder. This time we have someone asking for my thoughts on a petition going around to stop the FDA from approving a new genetically modified variety of corn. My response follows:

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I love that you come to me for this sort of thing. It’s a great way to keep my brain exercised through the occasional stints of mindless tedium at work. Without spending the 4 hours of research I took on our last topic, I do have a few thoughts on the matter.

First of all, as mentioned in the article this is simply a preliminary approval. This means the FDA has seen research showing it’s safe, and it’s en route to general approval. This is exactly when public input is at its most meaningful, but the tone of the article makes it seem like they’re trying to pull one over on us. In spite of that attitude, I fully recommend people share their thoughts, scientifically based or otherwise. If there were indeed shenanigans during the Bush administration, now is the perfect time to ferret them out.

As to the science itself, you can probably imagine I’m less cynical about GMO and herbicides/pesticides (-cides) in general. One interesting side-effect of the organic food movement is that synthetic -cides have become safer for humans and more effective on the target organisms. Oftentimes, there is a far higher quantity of organic -cides on organic crops than there are synthetic -cides on conventional crops (i.e. you should still be washing all your produce). Another side effect of organic farming is that it takes many more acres to produce the same amount of food. Ironically, organic farming is a pretty big contributor to deforestation. But this is starting to get away from the topic...

Back to GMOs, a lot of the fear is simply fear of the unknown. New technology has scared people since the dawn of time (the church’s enforcement of this fear is known as the Dark Ages). If you understand the science behind GMOs, they lose a lot of their mystical ominousness. GM research is really nothing more than accelerated selective breeding and hybridization. Instead of selectively breeding whole organisms, though, they directly select an individual trait from one organism and incorporate it into the other. The vast majority of modifications are simply usurping otherwise naturally-occurring genes. If it’s safe in the original organism, there’s an extremely small chance that it would be dangerous in the new one. And the difference would likely be obvious in the rare case it did have a deleterious effect.

Even if we do design genes from scratch (I’m not sure we’re there yet, at least as far as work on GM food goes), the end result is nothing but the addition, removal, or modification of one or more proteins from the resulting organism. Proteins themselves are completely broken down by digestion. Since they can catalyze other chemical reactions in the organism they may end up producing unexpected substances, but these would be easily detected when comparing the GM organism with the original. Assuming the side effects are safe, the proteins themselves wouldn’t pose any threat.

To reiterate, if you take the message as a simple request to share your thoughts with the FDA, then have a blast. As for their points of fact, it’s worth being a bit cautious though. For what it’s worth, we always default to organic when shopping, but we aren’t afraid to fall back on conventional if selection or quality dictate.