Canadian Health Care: Five Terrifying Testimonials

Posted on January 17, 2010 by Valerie Tarico

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/valerie-tarico/canadian-health-care-five_b_397424.html

I married a Canadian, which got me, among other things, some pretty awesome Canadian in-laws, a bunch of friends who think hockey is actually worth watching (not for the same reason I do, which is to nerd out on the fascinating phenomenon of mob psychosis), and two kids who are fiercely proud of their dual citizenship. It also provided me with a window into the Canadian health system, that bloated bureaucracy of ill-repute, which for some bizarre reason provided my father-in-law with an implanted defibrillator and solid, timely medical care during his final years.

Canadians, in my experience, follow American politics more closely than Americans do, and some of them even sign themselves up for my mailing list. So when I sent out my latest lament, "Ode to Health Care Reform: An Absurd Poem about Absurdities," one of the things I got back was a testimonial from the Middle America of the Great White North:

As a Canadian, I have comfort in the system being provided even with its imperfections. I lost a wife to breast cancer. All the treatments (diagnosis, surgery, chemotherapy and radiation) cost me NOTHING. I am willing to pay an extra tax so I and others can benefit from health care. May I sadly add that what the US has spent on recent wars (Iraq and Afghanistan) can build a nation? It is obvious that those who have less or no voice to voice are not on the ‘to do list’ of political leaders. – Ibrahim Sumrain (Edmonton, Alberta)

Reading Ibrahim’s note, it occurred to me that maybe we should expose our own Middle America more to the horrors of the socialized medical system under which our northern neighbors suffer out their shabby lives of quiet desperation. So, I solicited a few more comments from acquaintances and friends. They should terrify every blood sucking insurance lobbyist in D.C.

Dorthea Hangaard (Sointula, British Columbia)
Ten years ago I required surgery to have fibroid tumours removed. Because I live in a remote community, I was concerned I would end up in a rural hospital under the care of a second-rate surgeon. The Canadian health care system allowed me to choose my surgeon (I found a top-rated surgeon), and the hospital (I chose a teaching hospital in Vancouver that I knew would be well-resourced). Not only that, but my compassionate surgeon allowed me to extend my stay in the hospital because I had to travel such a great distance to get home again. While in the hospital, I received the best care available, including radical new procedures not readily available elsewhere.

All of this cost me nothing more than the small monthly premiums I have been paying in to the medical system since I began a career (those on a low income are exempt from paying premiums). To this day I feel overwhelmed with gratitude whenever I think of the experience. Canadians can’t even grasp that people are refused medical treatment in the U.S. because they cannot afford it.

Bill Jamieson (Mayne Island, B.C.)
At age 76, my dad had an abdominal aneurism, and, down the road, complications related to that aneurism ultimately killed him. If we were in the US and didn’t have health insurance the amount of care that my father received probably would have cost a million dollars. He had the provincial specialists working on him. It didn’t cost us anything. He was being fed through a TPN line through his neck, a liquid diet. It costs a thousand dollars/day, and he was on that for at least a month.

Most of the interventions that were done on Dad were like rocket science. They were the same techniques that would be done in a top hospital anywhere in the world.

He got timely care. His surgery was scheduled based on his ability to respond to the surgery and his strength at the time. We felt that his original surgical date, last spring,–if it was in the States it would have been done sooner, but it didn’t need to be done sooner. That is one of the differences between the US and Canada in my mind. You can get surgeries done faster in the States. But if you have a crisis there is no delay.

This fall, on a hunting trip with my brother, it became apparent that Dad was very sick. In the last surgery my dad had, he had three vascular surgeons, two anesthesiologists, a bowel surgeon and a kidney surgeon working on him over a period of thirteen hours. They were incredible. The ICU team was incredible. I would like to stress how compassionate the care was all the way through. There was real caring that was part of the reason he survived as long as he did.

Gloria Lee Clark (Vancouver, B.C.)
Anna’s experience: My sister Anna was at a climbing gym and fell over 25 feet. She managed to break her left femur and hip, smash her left heel, ankle and wrist, and break her right ankle in 2 places. She was taken to the local hospital where she was promptly x-rayed and diagnosed. She was in the hospital for 4 weeks and had a total of 4 surgeries to repair all that was broken. After she was released from the hospital, there were nurses, physiotherapists, and doctors who made house-calls to care for her. When she was able to leave the house she went to the hospital’s out-patient physiotherapist twice a week for many months. A year later she had to have a 5th surgery to remove some pins that were bothering her. Except for the rental of some of the equipment she needed; hospital beds, wheelchairs, etc. her entire care was covered by our Canadian medical system. As horrible as the accident was, and no she will not fully regain all her strength and flexibility, she had the best care possible at the cost of her regular monthly MSP (Medical Services Plan).

My experience: Nine years ago I was pregnant with twins. I was under the care of an Obstetrician and had monthly ultrasounds. At 30 weeks the ultrasound revealed that I was 1 cm dilated and was promptly hospitalized and placed on bed rest, apparently the best prescription for avoiding pre-mature birth. I spent 5 weeks in the hospital under the care of a team of nurses and doctors. At 35 weeks the doctor determined that the babies needed to come out as they were not growing at the expected rate. After their birth I spent 1 more week with them in the hospital, and they stayed for another week. Between me and the babies there was a total of 7 weeks of hospitalization. The total cost for me was zero. Was it absolutely necessary for me to have stayed in the hospital for 6 weeks I will never know. What I do know is that I have 2 beautiful healthy children and I would never have been able to afford the cost of the hospital care had I not had the Canadian medical system supporting me.

Kent James (Toronto, Ontario)
My dad waited exactly 9 weeks after deciding that he wanted a knee replacement. My son has been treated for asthma since he was 18 months old. My mom is type 2 diabetic. None of them has ever had to wait for anything. None of them has ever had to worry about who would pay for anything. And none of them wants to pay a few less dollars in tax for the privilege of taking on those risks and responsibilities.

The Canadian system isn’t perfect. Do people die there from oversights or botched care? Of course! — just like they do — to borrow Bill’s words — in top hospitals anywhere in the world. But what is more terrifying, apparently, to half of our senators, is that our northern neighbors’ government-managed semi-socialized system works. In fact, for most people most of the time, it works great. Oh, and did I mention the premiums? Dorthea’s costs her $54/month. ("[It] gets me EVERYTHING I need. The best care I can arrange for myself. I choose the doctor, the hospital, my treatment.") Anna’s is $114, for a family of four. That’s Canadian

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Ode to Health Care Reform: An Absurd Poem about Absurdities

Posted on January 17, 2010 by Valerie Tarico
 

Since I’ve been told this is the season of doggerel . . .

The Party of No
had nowhere to go
but backwards
to get to the future.
"Uh, that doesn’t work,"
said a brazen Young Turk.
"Someone please shut them up
with a cloture!"

Now the No-men were mad,
’cause they wanted real bad
to deep-six health care
and Obama.
They had nary a plan–
just a funeral man
and Fauxx’s hot air
melodrama.

So, they called in the priests
who said "Gays are all beasts,
but fertilized eggs–those are people.
God’s real concern
(which could make your soul burn)
is keeping love gloves
off your steeple."

"You should know there’s a war
full of suffering and gore
being fought against
Christmas and Jesus.
Unless you’re well armed
your kids will be harmed
’cause the godless gay Dems
want to grease us!"

Then the Party’s mad hatter
Beck-o-Reilly did scatter
their hype, like buckshot from a Cheney.
"Death panels for vets!"
Cried a bimbo brunette.
"We want service that doesn’t
cost money."

"And those immigrant fools,
cleaning factories and schools
while hacking from flu,
are just swine.
They’re lazy as curs–
Their skin’s not like yours.
Public health care would make
them supine."

Then health reform failed
and while working folks wailed,
’bout their kids who were
feverish and sobby.
The prophets of greed
who prey upon need,
smiled quietly
out in the lobby.
*********

Will this be our fate? It isn’t too late for a profile in courage or two. Gop might think we don’t care or are just unaware. Rip the Right a new Dien Bien Fu.

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Huckabee Seduced by Cop Killer’s Christianity?

Posted on January 17, 2010 by Valerie Tarico
 

Seattle was still reeling from the cold blooded execution of a police officer on Halloween, when the news hit on Sunday that four more officers were dead.  Monday, as I was trying to weave my way through a city swarming with blue cars and uniforms, and drenched with anxiety and grief, I couldn’t help wondering about how an erratic serial criminal like Maurice Clemmons ends up on the streets.  And since Clemmons was pardoned by Mike Huckabee, the Arkansas governor and presidential hopeful who has made fundamentalist religion the center of his politics, I couldn’t help wondering if religion played a part.  

It turns out that, in fact, religion may have played several different roles in the tragedy, just as it did in the recent slaughter at Fort Hood.   This time, though, Islam had nothing to do with it.  At Fort Hood, fundamentalist Christianity created an adversarial, proselytizing, holy war atmosphere, while Islam released the trigger lock.  In the Seattle killings, Christianity stands as the one theological ingredient in the lethal brew.  It consumed the mind of the killer, who possibly had apocalyptic delusions.  A Seattle Times headline today quoted his uncle:  “He was all about money . . . suddenly, he was all about God.” 

One of the challenges in identifying and responding effectively to religious delusions is that we all have been taught to turn off our critical faculties when people spout dogma.   In Religulous, Bill Maher put a wild-eyed actor on the streets of London to recite the tenets of Scientology.  He sounded like a paranoid schizophrenic.  But when those same ideas are touted by Tom Cruise, polite society smiles and nods, and no one makes a move to get him meds.

When it comes to their own religion, moderate people of faith often defer publicly to even the wildest fellow believers.  Most mainline Christians maintain downcast eyes while fundamentalists rant about demons and witchcraft and spiritual warfare.  Mainstream Muslims are painfully quiet about terrorism in the name of God.  The Rick Warrens and Joel Olsteens of the world go mute when the book of Psalms is used to invoke God as a celestial hit man against Mikey Weinstein (Military Religious Freedom Foundation) or Barack Obama.   Christian Science lobbyists make straight-faced attempts to get “prayer treatments” paid for by any national health plan, and somehow lawmakers maintain straight faces.

Social psychologists have pointed out that we humans often fall prey to a “similar-to-me” bias.  When assessing job applicants for example, we give higher ratings to people who are like us in superficial and irrelevant ways:  people who went to the same school, who look like us, who cheer the same sports team, or who share our religion.  The same may be true of applicants for penal clemency.

What role did religion play in how other people responded to Clemmons, in the “system breakdown” that cost four people their lives?  Let’s look at just Mike Huckabee’s role.  Was Huckabee influenced to pardon Clemmons because of their shared Christian belief?  We cannot read Huckabee’s mind.  What we do know is that Clemmons certainly played that card, pointing out his Christian upbringing and telling Huckabee that he was praying that Huckabee would grant him clemency.   This approach would make sense given Huckabee’s reputation.    Per Joe Conason at Salon, “Huckabee granted mercy to prisoners whom he chanced to meet, to prisoners who had personal connections to him or his family, and especially to prisoners who were vouchsafed to him by the pastors he had befriended during his years as a Baptist minister and denominational leader.”

Mike Huckabee’s  Christianity is the same kind I grew up in: Evangelical  fundamentalism.  One of the core aspects of Evangelicalism is that if you are saved, the past is wiped clean.  The worst murderer can go to heaven as long as he accepts Jesus as his savior through a deathbed conversion.  The most thoughtful, compassionate Buddhist will be tortured in hell.  It’s all about being born again.   Once you are born again, you are a new man in Christ. 

In general, Republican biblical literalists like Huckabee (sometimes called “Rebiblicans”) talk about being tough on criminals.  But an appeal from a fellow believer can complicate the tough-on-crime thing.  Christians seek to be godly in their behavior which can take you in the direction of advocating the mortal equivalent of eternal punishment – or in the direction of a pardon, especially for those who claim the blood of Jesus (which is, after all, the only way any of us can demonstrate real repentance.)  As one Huckabee fan said, “I can not in good conscience condemn Huckabee for this. He was doing what Jesus would want done. You know forgiveness.”   

Forgiveness is one thing.  Religiously motivated ignorance is another.  Ironically, neither of the two biblical approaches to immorality (blanket condemnation or blanket forgiveness) is a particularly good fit for the real world complexities that lead to murder.  The one ignores how much each of us is a mixed package of genetics and life experiences, hopes and fears, failings and strivings, growth and continuity.  The other ignores—-well, actually, it ignores the same package. 

 In psychology, there is an old adage: “The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.”  There’s no such thing as a clean slate.  That is not to say that people can’t change.  But it is to say that the past is relevant, and that change usually is an evolutionary, incremental, complex process.   People can  and do have transformative, born again experiences.  These occur in small counter-cultural cults like scientology as well as Christianity. (SeeJim and  Flo Siegelman’s excellent book, Snapping.)  But what can toggle in one direction can toggle in the other.  The kind of clean slate that evangelicals and career criminals are looking for is, in my mind, a dangerous delusion.   

Would Huckabee have been so forgiving if Clemmons was a Wiccan or an atheist or a Muslim?  That depends on how much he was driven by his Evangelicalism.  Evangelicals of Huckabee’s sort think that morality comes from belief.  That is why they are passionate about taking “dominion” and ruling the country according to biblical principles.  They ignore the fact that the lowest crime rates and teen pregnancies in the world are in the nations that also happen to have the lowest rates of religious belief.  They ignore the fact that the lowest rates of divorce and teen pregnancy in the U.S.A.  are in the least religious regions.  Despite all evidence to the contrary, they think that the problems we face as a nation are caused by our increasing godlessness. 

Conversely, in their estimation, a born-again Christian can be counted on to be a good person, to run an ethical business, or to make good decisions about war.  That is why evangelical businesses often display a Jesus fish or another Evangelical symbol.  It is their way of saying this business can be trusted.  It is also why, for many Evangelicals, it is irrelevant that G.W.  Bush or Sarah Palin might know little about foreign policy.  That they know Jesus is enough. 

I for one am weary of “Christian” ignorance posing as righteousness and “Christian” tribalism posing as compassion.  We will never know for sure if either played a role in Huckabee’s decision to commute the sentence of Maurice Clemmons, but we shouldn’t have to even wonder.  Clemency decisions should be based on the best evidence available.  It is long past time for articles like this one to become irrelevant.

 
 
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Like Alcohol, Religion Disinhibits Violence, Doesn’t Cause It

Posted on January 17, 2010 by Valerie Tarico

violence - religion as drugReligion is just one part of the lethal cocktail, but it is a powerful intoxicant.

With the possible exception of Buddhism, the world’s most powerful religions give wildly contradictory messages about violence.  The Christian Bible is full of exhortations to kindness, compassion, humility, mercy and justice.  It is also full of exhortations to stoning, burning, slavery and slaughter.  If the Bible were law, most people you know would qualify for the death penalty. The same can be said of the Quran.  The same can be said of the Torah. Believers who claim that Islam or Christianity or Judaism is a religion of peace are speaking a half truth—and a naive falsehood.

The human inclination toward peacemaking or violence exists on a continuum. Happy, healthy people who are inherently inclined toward peacemaking focus on sacred texts and spiritual practices that encourage peace.  Those who are bitter, angry, fearful or prone to self-righteousness are attracted to texts that sanction violence and teachers who encourage the same. People along the middle of this continuum can be drawn in either direction by charismatic religious leaders who selectively focus on one or the other.

Each person’s individual violence risk is shaped by a host of factors: genetics, early learning, health, culture, social networks, life circumstances, and acute triggers. To blame any act of violence on religion alone is as silly as blaming an act of violence on guns or alcohol. But to deny that religion plays a role is as silly as denying that alcohol and guns play a role.  It is to pretend that religions are inert, that our deepest values and beliefs about reality and morality have no impact on our behavior.

From a psychological standpoint, religions often put a god’s name on impulses that have subconscious, pre-verbal roots. They elicit peak experiences like mystic euphoria, dominance, submission, love and joy. They claim credit for the moral emotions  (e.g. shame, guilt, disgust and empathy) that incline us toward fair play and altruism, and they direct these emotions toward specific persons or activities. In a similar way, religions elicit and channel protective reactions like anger and fear, the emotions most likely to underlie violence.

A case from my own field, mental health, tells the story. On November 5, 2009, Muslim US army psychiatrist, Nidal Malik Hasan, shot and killed thirteen of his fellow soldiers on the Fort Hood military base, injuring another thirty. His case  shows how religion can combine with other ingredients to produce a lethal brew.

What was the role of religion in the Fort Hood shootings? The answer isn’t simple. From the swirl of conjecture and hype emerged the image of a man who was lonely, who couldn’t quite seem to win at love, and who was profoundly troubled by the horror stories brought home by his soldier clients. Do therapists experience vicarious trauma?  Absolutely. Does this trauma put their own mental health at risk?  Absolutely. Many of them deal with this risk by seeking professional consultation, asking for support from loving family and friends, and limiting the number of post-traumatic clients that they see.

It appears that Hasan made at least tentative attempts in several of these directions. But primarily he turned to forms of Islam that only deepened his sense of alienation and anger. In what must have been an anguishing conflict of loyalties, piety helped him to resolve the conflict in favor of co-religionists over compatriots. Ultimately, rage won out—righteous, sanctified rage—which came to matter more than any value he as a healer placed on his own life or the lives of his colleagues and clients.

I would argue that, like alcohol, religion disinhibits violence rather than causing it, and that it does so only when other factors have created conditions favorable toward aggression. I might also argue that under better circumstances religion disinhibits generosity and compassion, increasing giving and helping behaviors. Religion often is centered around authority and text worship (aka “bibliolatry”). Because of this, it has the power to lower the threshold on any behavior sanctioned by either a sacred text or a trusted religious leader and is at its most powerful when one is echoed by the other.

As many have pointed out, thousands of Muslim servicemen in the U.S. military shot no-one on November 5, 2009, nor will they unless they find themselves assigned to combat. Similarly, millions of people consume alcohol without insulting, hitting, kicking, stabbing or shooting anyone. Most of us are peaceful drinkers and peaceful believers. Yet, statistically we know that without alcohol assaults would be less common. So too, we all know that when suicide bombings happen, Islam is likely to be involved. And, I would add, when we hear that an obstetrics doctor has been shot or a gay teen beaten and left to die, or a U.S. president has announced a “crusade”, we know that Christianity was likely a part of the mix.

In general, as the gospel writer said, it is far easier to see the mote in our brother’s eye than the log in our own. American culture is bathed in Christianity, and even for most secular Americans, is easy to see Islam’s role in violence while missing the times when Christianity plays the same role. But the rest of the world doesn’t see us through our own rose colored glasses, and under a bare light bulb, American Christianity retains shadows of the inquisitor’s hood and implements of torture.

In recent years, the European and Australian press repeatedly have called attention to horrors being perpetrated in Africa thanks to American missionary dollars, a story that has been slow to get mainstream American press coverage.  As Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity spread across Nigeria and Congo, thousands of children are being beaten or burned or disfigured with acid after being condemned by Christian ministers as “witches.”   After all, the American missionaries teach that the Bible is the literally perfect word of God, and the Bible says, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 22:18).  When children are condemned by pastors and priests, exposed in the name of Jesus by the Holy Spirit himself, parents abandon them and their villages drive them out.  The lucky ones find refuge in shelters.  (For photos click here.)

Meanwhile in Uganda, American Evangelicals have helped to advance prison terms and death penalties for African gays. The Family, an American Christian organization with members in congress helped to convert Uganda’s president to their form of politicized Christianity. American activists attended a conference in Uganda aimed at “wiping out” homosexuality. Within months, a bill had been introduced that would allow the death penalty for gays with AIDS and institute jail time for parents who fail to turn in their homosexual teens. Unrelated? No. But horrors such as these don’t seem to have abated the flow of salvific dollars, Bibles, and earnest missionaries eager for converts any more than suicide bombings have dried up support for madrassas.

Was the Fort Hood murder spree caused by Islam? Are the African murder sprees caused by Christianity?  A yes answer is far too simple. But the fact is that religion around the world continues to disinhibit lethal violence at a horrendous rate. For us to vilify Muslims or Christians or any group of believers collectively is to engage in the familiar act of cowardice we call scapegoating. It means, ever and always, that we end up sacrificing innocents to appease our own fear, anger and thirst for vengeance. But for us to ignore the complicated role of religion in violence is a different kind of cowardice, one that has been indulged by peace-lovers among the faithful for far too long.

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light and Deas and Other Imaginings, and the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org.  Her articles about religion, reproductive health, and the role of women in society have been featured at sites including AlterNet, Salon, the Huffington Post, Grist, and Jezebel.  Subscribe at ValerieTarico.com.

Related:
Who, When, Why –10 Times the Bible Says Torture is OK
Why Bible Believers Have a Hard Time Getting Child Protection Right
Psychological Harms of Bible-Believing Christianity
Bible vs Quran—Test Your Knowledge of Who Deserves Death in Which Religion
15 Bible Texts Reveal Why “God’s Own Party” is at War with Women
If the Bible Were Law, Would You Qualify for the Death Penalty?

An earlier version of this article, written in response to the November 2009 Fort Hood shootings, was published at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/valerie-tarico/like-alcohol-religion-dis_b_353281.html 

Posted in Musings & Rants: Christianity | 2 Comments

When Science Teachers Don’t Believe in Evolution

Posted on January 17, 2010 by Valerie Tarico

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. – Charles Darwin

Human with Dinosaur at Kentucky Creation MuseumLast week, as I was driving a carload of middle-schoolers to a movie, the kids started talking about their teachers.  I couldn’t help overhearing, “ . . . He’s a great science teacher, but he doesn’t believe in evolution.”  Two days later, a friend reported that his 15-year-old daughter had just returned from at a junior government retreat.  “They argued the pros and cons of teaching intelligent design in schools, and she said there were some very compelling arguments on the pro side.”  When I repeated the story at  the dinner table later, my own daughter mentioned a schoolmate who feels conflicted about his biology curriculum because his family doesn’t believe in evolution.

Charles Darwin published his world-changing work, On the Origin of Species, 150 years ago this week.  What he proposed was breathtakingly simple.  It can be reduced to three parts: variability, heritability, and differential survival.  Variability means simply that creatures are different from each other, even within a species.  Heritability means that those differences are in part handed down from parent to child.  Differential survival means that not all of us live to produce the same number of offspring, and that those who have more offspring are better represented in future generations. Once you concede these three points, evolution becomes inevitable.

Even so, for 150 straight years, fearful Abrahamic literalists have been trying to deny the facts about natural selection or at least to keep them away from young minds.  Reality threatens their belief that the earth was created  in six days and then re-created in an ancient flood (young earth creationism), or their belief that it evolved but was tweaked regularly according to some divine blueprint (intelligent design).  More to the point, reality threatens their belief that we–stinky, mean, bipedal-primates-with-bad-backs who love and hate and make cool stuff and then destroy it — are the pinnacle of creation and center of the universe.

Generations of scientists have subjected Darwin’s theory to tests that weren’t possible back in 1859.  These include  computerized reassembly of fossils, radio carbon dating, core samples of geological layers, DNA sequencing, even laboratory experiments that create distinct bacterial species out of a single ancestor.  Mountains of evidence have confirmed that, with some adjustments, Darwin was right.  Today our understanding of natural selection provides the foundation for the life sciences – genetics, biology, biotechnology, medicine, animal husbandry, and more.

And yet unbelievably, some religionists still labor to create the illusion of confusion.  Unfortunately, this forces them to cast aspersions on the whole scientific enterprise.  They love the fruits of science in the form of mammography and cell phones and airplanes.  But they reject the obligations of the scientific method, which say that before making truth claims you must ask the questions that could show you wrong.  And they are deeply suspicious of scientists themselves.  (Why would scientists keep getting the answers so wrong unless they were deliberately trying to undermine faith?)  Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive [ourselves].

If nothing else, creationist efforts to undermine science and science education should teach us something about our species,  about our impressive capacity for delusion.  Given enough motivation and community support, we humans seem to have an almost boundless ability to cling to a story regardless of the evidence.  Without religion, there would be no such thing as a good science teacher who “doesn’t believe in evolution.”  But given the right ideological filter, this paradoxical teacher becomes perfectly possible.

We all are prone to “confirmation bias” which is a tendency to seek information in support of what we already believe, disregarding any contradictions.  Religious orthodoxy over the centuries has refined confirmation bias into an art form called “apologetics.”  Apologists start with a set of handed down conclusions and then reason backwards from there, drawing in logic and evidence only as these support their foregone conclusion.

These people, in my mind, worship an idol with clay feet.  They don’t worship a Power that is actually great enough to create the intricacies of the natural world, but rather a golden calf called the inerrant Bible or the inerrant Koran. (Call it bibliolatry—text worship.  In an age of widespread literacy and printing presses, what better golden calf than a literally perfect book?)  They don’t trust that all truth is God’s truth, and that nature really does have something to say about her creator.  They minimize the fallibility of our ancestors who wrote and assembled our sacred texts and church leaders who interpret them.  Consequently, they don’t see that they have made a god in the image of man.

When it comes to Darwin’s theory, some of the most sophisticated apologists in the country are housed in a Seattle institution called the Discovery Institute.  They use the language of science to undermine the work of science.  That may be why, in one of the most secular parts of the country, we can find teachers who think that disbelief in evolution is somehow compatible with the obligations of the scientific process.

The creationists will be shown to be on the wrong side of history, but in the meantime, they have the power to do serious harm.  In the service of their idol, they undermine the cutting edge education and research that have let us attain our current cultural/technological nexus.  In doing so they also undermine our ability to innovate and solve the great challenges we now face:  climate change, population pressures, weapons of mass destruction, and resource depletion.

When Darwin first noticed evolution, it flew in the face of everything he, as a Christian, had been raised to believe.  It flew in the face of his theological training.  It flew in the face of his beloved wife Emma’s devout faith.  And so, working almost alone, he spent twenty painstaking years assembling logic and evidence before he finally went public with his suspicions.  Through all that time, he had the integrity to follow the evidence where it might lead and ultimately the courage to challenge the apologists.  Those of us who care about the future of our species cannot afford to do any less.

———

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light and Deas and Other Imaginings, and the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org.  Subscribe to her articles at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.

Posted in Musings & Rants: Christianity | 1 Comment