Health Care, Not Paid Prayer

Last Sunday I blogged on some Manx woo woo therapists passing themselves off as health professionals and running a health fair.
Granted, this kind of thing will happen on an island over-run by gullible rich thickos. But maybe the Department of Fair Trading should put more effort into warning us about the real and present dangers of local ‘alternative therapists’ rather than the odd bogus roofer. The emphasis on the latter, I’m sure, has nothing to do with them being foreigners, while I’m told, confidentially, the worst snake-oil merchant married into the family of an (unelected) politician whose primitive superstitions are glaringly obvious, so will never go out of business.
But things could be worse, especially if you were living in the US.
For example, the L.A. Times reports:
“Backed by some of the most powerful members of the Senate, a little-noticed provision in the healthcare overhaul bill would require insurers to consider covering Christian Science prayer treatments as medical expenses.
The provision was inserted by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) with the support of Democratic Sens. John F. Kerry and the late Edward M. Kennedy, both of Massachusetts, home to the headquarters of the Church of Christ, Scientist.
The measure would put Christian Science prayer treatments - which substitute for or supplement medical treatments - on the same footing as clinical medicine. While not mentioning the church by name, it would prohibit discrimination against "religious and spiritual healthcare."
It would have a minor effect on the overall cost of the bill - Christian Science is a small church, and the prayer treatments can cost as little as $20 a day. But it has nevertheless stirred an intense controversy over the constitutional separation of church and state, and the possibility that other churches might seek reimbursements for so-called spiritual healing.”
(see http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-na-health-religion3-2009nov03,0,6879249,full.story for complete article)
The No God Blog at American Atheists (see
http://atheists.org/blog/2009/11/05/madeline-neumann-bill-fighting-back) moans:
“Here they go again. After losing the provision to force insurance companies to pay for Christians to kill their children by praying over them, Senators Orrin “Magic Underwear” Hatch and John “WTF” Kerry have re-started their efforts to have it included again.
Here is a prime example of policians who honestly don’t care. Children will die if this passes, and they don’t care. We will pay for the children who die, and they don’t care. This provision is clearly illegal, and they don’t care.
There is no mystery. There is no “other side” of this argument. Praying to deities is ridiculous, and forcing us to pay for witch-doctors is just another tax for the church.”
Exactly.

Three cheers for Ekklesia

I think it only fair to highlight cases where religious writers run a worthwhile story, and Ekklesia (see sidebar) do that often.
Yesterday they ran a story (Texas man executed after court case Bible row) on the Texan case of a man whose fate was decided after jurors consulted the Bible for guidance.
In brief, they decided he should die, and now he has. This despite a 30 day reprieve being requested to allow officials to examine a rifle for DNA evidence that someone else handled the weapon during the attack that led to a brutal murder.
Texas’s governor showed a lack of humanity, legal knowledge or, indeed, any intelligence at all probably not seen since the days of his most famous predecessor, George ‘Dubya’ Bush. We can only hope he doesn’t follow further in Dubya’s footsteps or we’re all in deep doo-doos.
Ekklesia’s Lizzie Clifford has also produced a fascinating paper on the latest wrangles over Thought For The Day, i.e. if the Beeb should allow non-religious contributors. Interesting update here, as Ekklesia’s Jonathan Bartley, always an engaging and provocative Anglican voice, was barred from the TFTD line-up after suggesting just that on Radio 4’s Today programme, which hosts TFTD.
Time For Religious To Kick The Broadcasting Habit gives a potted history of the programme, which flatly contradicts the Beeb’s claims of a fair-minded, non-evangelical stance.
As outlined in their press release:
“The new paper traces how the origins of TFTD came in a context of BBC religious broadcasting which was originally viewed as 'evangelistic and missionary'.
TFTD began as Lift Up Your Hearts, an innovation of extending religious programmes beyond Sunday into the working week. The original contributors were overwhelmingly Christian and Anglican. The slot's rebranding in 1965 to the more nominally neutral Ten to Eight was designed to reflect the changing beliefs of the listenership. But it was opposed by some in the Anglican Church as part of a general withdrawal of the BBC from its position as a central broadcaster in a 'Christian country'.
The paper also highlights how a number of other BBC radio stations, in particular regional programmes, have output which is similar to TFTD. But these successfully include contributions from the non- religious, as well as 'minority' religions, raising further questions about why TFTD has not followed suit.”
The Ekklesia paper can be found at http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/research/thought_for_the_day. And on that comment about regional radio, I should of course point out that Manx Radio is amongst the regionals with an open door for the non-religious, and I've done Thought For The Day slots myself as both an Amnesty International speaker and an Isle of Man Freethinker.
In fact, Manx Radio's only obstacle is a lack of willing speakers, not religious objections, and I suspect this might be the case on many a regional station. If you have one in your area, give it a shot. They'll probably bite your hand off!

I was a teenage Freethinker

Can I point the less wrinkly readers of my efforts to the Young Freethought Blog which went up this week at http://www.youngfreethought.blogspot.com/. There is also a Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Young-Freethought/309273265572.
This is a chance to link up with other young atheists and also get your writing published.
The editors say:
“Young Freethought is here to try and give a voice to a small section of society that, we feel, is currently being ignored. Young atheists and freethinkers are abundant, but trying to find out just what they think is a difficult thing. This is why we will accept submissions from anyone aged 16-21, on issues relating to Freethought. This could be a book review, an opinion piece on current news or even a small essay.”
“…If you're an experienced writer, or have never tried your hand at it before, it doesn't matter. We consider all entries equally.”
The blog got off to a flying start with a heavyweight piece on John Polkinghorne, former Cambridge physics professor, now Anglican priest and 2002 recipient of the Templeton Prize – which is a bit like giving up astronomy for astrology, then having your new scribblings underwritten by the Moonies.
Seriously though – excellent stuff, and hope they find plenty of new talent to keep it up.

The 'tax dodgers' who produce 'anti-tax-haven' nonsense

I can’t stop giggling at a ridiculous story this week from Isle of Man Newspapers, (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/isle-of-man-business/Tax-haven-surveys-unexpected-boost.5789333.jp) because it proves something I’ve long suspected. A campaign group which touchy feely New Internationalist readers consider a major voice against the evils of international capitalism, the gnomes of Zurich, and all the other cartoon black hat stereotypes is…..run by right wing capitalist extremists!
It’s what us 1990’s culture jammers used to call ‘astroturf’. In brief, a bogus grassroots organisation set up by a PR agency, feeding fake research to gullible community activists who are encouraged to think they run the group, in order to serve the purposes of large corporations.
How do I know? Because a few months back I discovered the original research (partly, I admit, by accident), know who paid for it, who produced it, for who, and for what purpose. At the time I thought it so dumb that I just laughed and forgot about it, because I thought it had simply failed and that the perpetrators had no further plans for it.
Now according to the carefully created myth, a group which thinks offshore centres should all be shut and people everywhere should just pay way too much tax to governments who waste way too much money has done lots and lots of research to produce a state of the art ‘league table’ of offshore finance jurisdictions.
And according to IOM newspapers:
“the index produced by the Tax Justice Network — a vociferous critic of the Isle of Man — places the US state of Delaware at the top of its league table of tax havens, followed by Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and the City of London.”
At that point I fell off my chair laughing and rolled around the floor for about 10 minutes. Once I’d wiped the tears from my eyes and got my breath back enough to read some more I erupted again on being solemnly informed that:
“Delaware has an opacity score of 92 and coupled with a high global scale weight ranks it at number one.The City of London has a low opacity score of just 42 but its importance to world financial activity ranks it at number 5.The Isle of Man's opacity score of 83 is lower than 41 of the other jurisdictions listed including Jersey.”
Oh, it’s no good. I’d better explain the joke.
The reason Delaware comes top is that Chicago doesn’t have any tax havens, but Delaware is the home state of Joe Biden, now the US Vice President.
The thing is, a group of Bush’s closest allies had an easy ride from the US tax authorities and feared it would end if the Obama/Biden ticket won the last election. They also extensively used offshore entities to hide their assets and to avoid their substantial donations to political campaigns and policy makers being discovered.
When things got really bad they used a network of ‘educational foundations’ whose assets were ultimately controlled in jurisdictions which (unsuprisingly) come out rather well in the index in order to fund bogus research which, when funnelled back to the conservative US press, ‘proved’ that Biden and Obama, far from being tough on ‘tax havens’, were having their very well funded campaign underwritten by faceless tax dodgers.
It didn’t work, and the only interesting thing now will be to see if they continue to push the ‘research’ in order to undermine changes in US government policy, and if this unholy alliance between ultra right wing US businesses (some, by the way, also underwriting Christian ‘end timer’ enterprises), and supposedly lefty but quasi-religious greens and churchy ‘drop the debt’ types will continue.
I’d take a safe bet on something else though. Jokers like TJN and the Manx ‘Freedom to Fester’ PR spongers will continue to try and claim credit for research and campaigning they didn’t and couldn’t possibly do, and I’ll continue to point out what muppets they are.
That is, if I can stop laughing long enough to keep you updated.

Foreign aid or local ignorance?

There’s an item on Manxnet’s news page today that further undermines my faith in the intelligence or integrity of Manx businesses.
Not only did the Steam Packet help one of the worst charity scams running on the island. They boasted about it at http://www.manx.net/default.asp?id=18&articleid=9351
The item, about a building firm getting free ferry tickets to (in theory) take aid to Romanians, ends with Isle of Man Steam Packet Company Chief Executive Mark Woodward saying: “We are delighted to be able to show our support for such a worthwhile charity. This expedition will make a difference to the poor, needy and homeless in Romania.”
Congratulations, muppet, you just helped a US evangelical outfit , not the imaginary victims they invented, and you may even be party to a major fraud or attempts to destabilise another country’s economy and democratic sytem.
You see,contrary to what they’d have you believe, Hands of Hope isn’t a Manx charity. It’s run by some very dodgy US evangelists operating from London who my wife and I once had contact with. That contact, amongst a lot of other very iffy business, caused us to advise anyone against ever helping these chancers.
It began when my wife offered some simple minded local biblebashers help getting documents translated for an apparently innocent trip to Romania. The more we spoke to folk, the more things didn’t add up, and the more worried we got that something far nastier was going on.
For example, their strange insistence on buying stuff locally, instead of over there at twice the quality and a tenth of the price at building merchants Romanian friends (including a Lutheran priest) offered to introduce them to. Or their refusal to use local labour to build some very shabby huts the average Romanian farmer wouldn’t keep a pig in (passed off as ‘houses for the needy’). Or the shady US evangelicals continually avoiding revealing who they really were or worked for, and an apparent interest in getting Romanians into the UK on tourist visas.
We worked out the overpriced goods scam when they admitted they’d cut a deal with a fellow Manx evangelical (a salesman for a building supplies firm) to split his commission with him. We guessed how big that deal was when he ‘retired’ to a country with no expedition treaty.
Some of the other curious stuff? Well, we just gave up trying to track down the truth. The sudden reluctance to answer questions told us all we needed to know to walk away fast, i.e. that the project wasn’t just another bunch of unemployable Manx semi-literates blundering around a foreign country getting sniggered at until they wised up.
How do they still get away with it, and why isn’t anybody in the Manx business community or government asking better questions before dispensing overseas aid and charitable donations?
Better ask them that, and, if you do, hope the answers only reveal us as a nation governed by village idiots.

Gay humanism's own goal

I have to post an item in support of my fellow freethinkers over at the Pink Triangle Trust blog. Seems they’ve been the victims of censorship – ironically by others in the gay and humanist community.
It seems GALHA (Gay & Lesbian Humanist Association) refused a post to their discussion forum alerting people to the latest edition of the PTT e-magazine ,Gay & Lesbian Humanist. It’s a publication I’ve endorsed, and even written for, just as I’ve endorsed GALHA for years and written a couple of pieces for GHQ (Gay Humanist Quarterly), their now discontinued magazine. I’ve supported both enthusiastically because I consider gay rights to be a good litmus test of contemporary secularism.
The censorship seems to be over a reference to Gaytheist, PTT’s own discussion forum, which itself partly came about because PTT thought setting up another forum, where free speech was a higher priority than GALHA’s, might be useful. Funnily enough, I’ve also blogged on the earlier little censorship battle which led to that!
You can see more on the latest row at http://ptt-blog.blogspot.com/2009/11/censored.html, and as I didn’t previously mention the latest G&LH is out, I’ll also tell you that there’s a direct link to the issue and the Gaytheist forum (equally open to gay or straight contributors alike) from that item.

Danger - quack convention

According to Radio Cowshed (see http://www.manxradio.com/newsread.aspx?id=40105 ) there’s something called the Isle of Man Health Fair being organised by the Isle of Man Health Network at Centre 21 today.
Oh good, we could all probably do with a spot of sensible, responsible health advice.
But this isn’t. In fact, when you look further, it gets quite disturbing.
Because we’re told that: “Organised by the Isle of Man Health Network, it involves around 30 therapists coming together and demonstrating all manner of alternative and complementary therapies, from Reflexology to Raiki.”
In other words it’s a quack consortium looking for rich, intellectually challenged punters to fleece.
Let’s be clear about this. A gang of snake-oil merchants hold themselves out to be ‘health professionals’, even forming themselves into a pseudo-professional body whose very name suggests medical competence. Yet there is no attempt from the Manx Department of Fair Trading to suggest they, at least, market themselves under a more accurate name.
Admittedly, the Manx Department of Fair Trading is so pathetic it should itself be prosecuted for a misleading product description. Also, if I’m honest I couldn't care less if the cream of Manx society (i.e. the rich and thick) get robbed blind while suffering the side-effects of whatever dubious ‘therapy’ is flogged at such freak shows.
Still, if there is even an outside chance that someone poorer and more vulnerable could get really harmed by a rancid aromatherapy ‘cure’ shouldn’t the DFT, or even the police, be having a word?