The Atheist Blogger

Greetings, I’m S.A. Alenthony, and as Adrian was kind enough to give me a bit of blogging time, I’ll do my best to write a few interesting (I hope) bits here and there, interspersed with Samantha’s Odyssey into the Heart of Creationism.

There have been several moderately publicized court cases this summer that involve religious parents being tried for the deaths of their own children. Below I’ll explain why I feel a strong resonance with these stories, and what they motivate me to do in turn; but first, I’ll summarize the details for anyone that isn’t familiar with the cases.

In the first case, the AP reported on July 31 that an Oregon man convicted of criminal mistreatment in the “faith-healing” death of his young daughter was sentenced to a whopping 60 days in jail. (Two months?! That’s it?)

A jury convicted Carl Worthington of a misdemeanor charge of criminal mistreatment after acquitting him and his wife of felony manslaughter in the March 2008 death of their 15-month-old daughter, Ava, from illnesses that could have been treated with antibiotics.

The pair belong to the Followers of Christ Church, which avoids doctors in favor of “spiritual healing.”

As for the second case, the AP reported on the following day that a Wisconsin man, Dale Neumann, that was accused of killing his 11-year-old daughter by praying instead of seeking medical care, had been found guilty of second-degree reckless homicide.

Neumann was convicted in the death of his daughter, Madeline, from undiagnosed diabetes. Prosecutors contended he should have taken her to a hospital when she couldn’t walk, talk, eat or drink. Instead, she died on the floor of the family’s home as people prayed.

Sentencing will be in October for both parents, who face up to 25 years in prison. (Which sounds far more fitting than 60 days.)

Neumann, who had studied to be a minister, testified Thursday that he believed God would heal the child, and that he never expected her to die. “If I go to the doctor, I am putting the doctor before God,” Neumann testified. “I am not believing what He said He would do.“  (Some might wonder, as I did, what this fellow must be thinking about his God now, given that he followed directions but the girl still died… Certainly I’m sure he’s rationalized something.)

The capability that religion has for inducing this sort of mindless, death-affirming behavior is, of course, just one of its many problems. I hardly need to point out, as a guest writer on an atheist blog, what an indictment of faith-based thinking these examples are. (Mainstream and liberal Christians will protest that such behavior is a fringe occurrence and not representative of them – and they are right. But that isn’t because of anything religion per se has done, but because of the steady progress of secular enlightenment over the centuries.)

These stories are troubling, exasperating and revolting, of course, but occasionally they don’t have bleak endings; it turns out my life provides one rare example. For I had the very bad luck of not only being born to a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses, but to also have developed a condition at birth requiring medical intervention.

If you are familiar with the cult that is the Witnesses, you’ll know that they have odd interpretations of certain biblical passages. There are several that they read as injunctions against blood-transfusions, regardless of the medical emergency at hand. So when I was diagnosed with Hemolytic Disease of the Newborn, a condition where the red blood cells are slowly destroyed by the immune system (another example of that intelligent human body design, eh?) my father told the hospital staff that the fact that I could die was not sufficient reason to perform the abominable transfusion. Luckily for me, the state of New York issued a court order for the procedure. (I learned about this well into my adult life from my mother, who was horrified at the time that my father had actually proposed trying to remove me from the hospital.)

Afforded a chance at a life that religion would have taken, I’ve tended to direct my energies in the direction most opposite to those of the Witnesses and other godly fanatics: I pursued a science career and married an atheist biologist. We’re raising two freethinking kids, and more recently, we’ve become active in volunteering with our state Academy of Science in order to try to motivate more young people to study in our fields. And I have bigger plans as well.

I bring all this up because, as important as it is for we secularists to speak out against ongoing outrages such as those demonstrated by “faith-healing” parents, it is equally important to try to be inspirational and motivational about what we are for. Too often, atheism appears as a viewpoint that only opposes something. A religious friend of mine says that many Americans view atheists negatively because they see us as being something like The Grinch That Stole Christmas. While we know this isn’t the case, the perception is out there, and it works against us.

If my experience has any motivational power to it at all, I hope I can use it to plant a seed in the minds of other freethinkers to get more involved, if they are not already: to sign up to judge a science fair competition at a nearby school; to support a local museum; or to spoil their own kids with telescopes and chemistry sets.

And may they help find the world its next Carl Sagan. And help put the Doctor before god.

So I was planning on doing a YouTube Thursday, but our BBQ party turned into a night of card games (Phase 10 FTW!) culminating in a poker game that ended quite early Friday morning. Of course whilst we were playing, the news of Michael Jackson’s demise arrived through a text message. At first, we were certain it was a joke, so I fired up TweetDeck (news travels faster in the Twitterverse), expecting to see nothing but the random tweets of people I follow. This was not to be, as my screen was suddenly filled with the words “Michael Jackson”, “heart attack”, “dead”, and links to various news sources that were covering the story. My heart sunk, and I said to my stunned friends “Oh my goodness…it’s true”.

We got the news quite early on, so early that when we turned on the T.V to watch the BBC news flash, the reporters were still saying that nothing was confirmed, that the LA Times were the only ones saying he was dead, and that other reports claimed he was in a coma, but still alive. I hoped that the LA Times had received a bad source, but 30 minutes later and all the networks were showing the official reports from the hospital; that Michael Jackson had collapsed at his home, fallen into a coma, and had died on the way to hospital. For an hour, medical staff attempted to revive him, but they were unsuccessful.

So for this special YouTube Saturday, here are some of his greatest songs. Oh, and to get away from the dreary and religious “R.I.P”, I say L.I.M (Live In Memory) which is much more upbeat.

Black or White:

Earth Song:

Thriller:

Bad:

I Want You Back (Jackson 5)

ABC (Jackson 5)

“Would You Like to Know the Truth?” is the title of a Jehovah’s Witness leaflet that was given to me the other day. I was in a hurry to my friends house, and a guy stopped me and told me that “there are some questions that people have tried to answer over the years but never got a good response to. This leaflet explains some of them”.

I took one look at the document in my hand and saw the word “God” mentioned a couple of times. Together with the picture of the sunset, I knew I was dealing with a religious guy. My mind worked through several scenarios; I could stay and talk to the man, telling him I don’t believe, and be late for my friends, or I could go be sociable. I chose the latter (mainly because of the aforementioned rush I was in), thanked the man, and went on my way.

Of course, I’m not going to let the questions in the document go unanswered…

Does God really care about us?

No, because there probably isn’t a God, and if there were, does it really look like it gives a shit?

Will war and suffering end?

No; humans are very social creatures, but we tend to subscribe to different types of society. Unfortunately, these societies do not like each other very much. Major suffering might end when we cure all major illnesses, but that doesn’t stop new illnesses, inflicted wounds, etc.

What happens to us when we die?

We rot in the ground, although I personally want my body donated to medical science and then the remains cremated and scattered somewhere (waste not people).

Is there any hope for the dead?

Is there any hope for other inanimate objects like spoons? No.

How can I pray and be heard by God?

Once you accept that you are talking to yourself, I’m certain you’ll be able to hear.

How can I find happiness in life?

Try new things, find out what makes you happy. Pursue it.

You might also notice none of my answers involve believing in a ridiculous doctrine made up by men thousands of years ago who thought the sun was magic. It’s a slight bonus.

I do hope the Jehovah’s Witnesses come round again; I’ll be able to give them my answers!

When I die, I won’t know that I’d been correct all these years. :P

Ray Comfort was feeling particularly lazy today, and so instead of making up a new branches of science or claiming he looks like Einstein, he just wrote a title and said “bugger it” to the actual article. The title is a quote, so it’s not even his own work. I think that’s a little too lazy.

Anyway, to make Ray look more of an idiot, I’ll write an article for him. The quote was from Plato, and simply said:

No one ever dies an atheist

This is an obvious attempt to provoke the old “there are no atheists in foxholes” argument, something that has been thoroughly debunked by the number of atheists in the military. Such a preposterous quote as the one above can be debunked quite easily though.

Seeing as the last thoughts going though a dying person’s head are their own, and nobody else can even imagine what they are thinking, this argument is already pretty weak. Even if an atheist says “I believe in God” at the end of his/her life, that doesn’t mean they truly believe it. Since the person is completely dead after their “last thought”, there is no way for them to verify their final belief, so not only is Plato’s argument weak, it is both scientifically and factually invalid.

Perhaps the most humorous thing about this argument is that it is easily reversible, and because of the above properties, nobody can argue against me when I claim:

No one ever dies a theist

Go on, prove that every single person who has ever died has not converted to atheism at the last possible chance. What’s that? You can’t? Don’t use pathetic arguments then.

Here endeth the lesson.