Welcome back to Not Everyone Believes Ross Douthat. We're going to wrap up chapter 3 of Ross Douthat’s book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.
There's a whole lot of stuff and nonsense in here, including some stuff that's just, sort of odd, very vague, difficult to understand, a lot of stuff where Ross Douthat never, ever appeals to evidence or facts. He just makes assertions over and over again.
It's not a great chapter. It's not a rational chapter.
We're going to cover two issues in this episode. I'm going to try to be brief about them, because it's just really upsetting, especially this first issue: Faith healing.
Ross Douthat comes into faith healing on page 86 approximately, and he sort of smudges his way into it. He comes into faith healing by talking about the process for making Catholic priests or other people into saints because people have to say that they performed miracles, and usually these are medical miracles.
Oh, I was healed of my sickness, right?
Ross Douthat says that this is done in a very scientific rational way, the way that the Catholic Church identifies people as being saints, who have magical powers to heal people. I'm going to give you some of Ross Douthat's language here.
“The Catholic Church, whose process of saint making depends on scientific investigation and a process of exclusion, to qualify for consideration, the illness that's been allegedly cured by a saint's intercession must be incurable, it must be documented by medical authorities. It must be organic to the body and not psychiatric. There must be no treatment that might account for the shift. The healing must be sudden and immediate, and there must be a full recovery.”
Wow, that's scientific, huh? Is that scientific? You know what it doesn't include? It doesn't include any evidence that is concrete other than people say so, other than what people say happened, right? Any link between the actual proposed saint and the healing is not required in the process. Also not required is any description of the process by which this healing would have taken place.
What is exactly the theory of how a saint heals a person? What is the mechanism for that healing? There's nothing there. Nothing at all about that, except, oh, the power of God did it.
What is the power of God? What is the power of God?!?
Is it electricity? Is it gravity? Is it uh, I don't know, does it have to do with quarks?
I mean, what is the power of God? Catholics can't even define what God is in a scientific way, much less what a saint is and how their magical healing power works.
If you don't do that, you don't even have a hypothesis that can be tested, certainly not one that can be tested across all of these claims of saintly healings. This is not a scientific process. It's a religious process, and it's a very politically influenced one, with people who are appointed by the Catholic Church, not medical scientists who are independent of Catholicism. This is not a scientific process.
Let's talk about something else that Ross Douthat does not talk about when it comes to faith healing. He doesn't talk about how many kids it kills. How many adults it kills is also important, but let's focus on the kids because Catholics love to talk about pro-life stuff.
How about pro life faith healing? Is faith healing pro life?
Let’s talk about Idaho. In just one congregation of true believing Christians in Idaho, they call themselves Followers Of Christ. In just 10 years, 25 children in this one congregation died.
They died, and they were never seen by a doctor. They died, and they didn't get basic medical treatment like antibiotics.
Babies died. That happens a lot with faith healing.
It happens a lot with families who decide that, given everything they've heard in church about the power of faith, they're just going to pray their children's sickness away.
Over and over again, those kids die, or they get severely crippled by their diseases. They lead lives of suffering because their parents couldn't be bothered to take care of them.
This Followers Of Christ congregation is in Idaho, where there is a law that covers everybody except for Christians. Under this law, it's a crime for families to neglect the reasonable medical treatment of their children. When their children come to harm because their parents are refusing to give them medicine, that is child abuse.
It's a crime, unless you are religious, unless you say you did it because of God.
The belief in God is responsible for the deaths of those children's, and it happens all across America every year. Death, death, death, due to faith healing. If Ross Douthat wanted to make a genuinely rational argument about faith healing and how it's real he would bring that up.
If Ross Douthat wanted to talk about faith healing, he would talk about all of the hucksters who take money from people. They talk about Jesus, and they talk about God, and they talk about faith and prayer, and they have music playing, and they have people come down who have serious medical conditions, and they take their money, and they shake them around, and then they proclaim them healed, and then they get them off stage before anyone can see that they're actually not healed.
It's a scam. It's a fraud.
But guess what? It's protected by the 1st amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. You get freedom of religion. Freedom of religion sometimes is freedom to scam people, to exploit them, to shake down sick people of their money.
Of course, Ross Douthat doesn't talk about that in his book when he writes about faith healing, saying it's part of the mystical numinous, woo woo everything.
You want your kid to be without medicine? Let me tell you, almost all of the medicines that we've got, they were created by scientists, not by prayer.
It's not prayer that saves your kid when they're in the hospital with a dangerous infection. It's not prayer. It's medical science.
Faith healing isn’t all, though. Ross Douthat goes on to talk about something else in chapter 3. He goes on to talk about near death experiences.
With near death experiences, you’ve got to ask: How common are those? This is not something that Ross Douthat talks about specifically. He doesn't cite any studies.
There are studies, studies of people in Intensive care units, the units in a hospital where people really do get close to death. It’s always medical science that brings them back from the brink of death by the way. It's not prayer. It's not rosary beads. It's not holy water, shaken on you by a priest. It's medical frickin' science.
For your near death experience, if you have a study where you prompt people and introduce bias into your questioning, you can get rates as high as a 25, 26, 27, 28 percent of people in the ICU, if they are asked, “Hey, did you have a near death experience?” they will go along with the bias of the interview and they will say, yes.
Still, that's a minority. It's like, wow, 3 quarters of people don't have a near death experience. What's going on with that?
Ross Douthat says it's because, because people are just too afraid to tell the truth about what's been going on with near death experiences because they're afraid that someone might sneer at them as scientists. A mean scientist might sneer.
This is Ross Douthat’s excuse for whenever facts don't match his religion's reality. It's the fault of those mean scientists who are so nasty, asking questions.
You know what? If you are a doctor in a hospital and you ask people about some really embarrassing stuff, like if you ask them about the color and the consistency of their poop, they will tell you about it. I mean, they might be a little hesitant at first, but they will tell the doctor about all kinds of embarrassing things. They will talk about their menstrual blood. They will tell doctors about the very embarrassing thing that they did to get themselves in an accident. These kinds of things are routinely reported in hospitals.
But even when you have bias in your research with the direction of a closed-ended question, introducing the idea of near death experiences, it's only one quarter of people who even say under those extremely methodologically compromised circumstances that, yes, that maybe they had something.
And by the way, what is a near death experience? It’s not necessarily seeing God. Most of the time, it’s more like, “Huh, I kind of did see a light when I was unconscious. Um, yeah, you know, I thought I heard music when I was under, or I heard somebody's voice.” Really vague stuff can be included in that category, right?
There was another study that was a little bit more reasonable. It just asked people to tell the researchers about, “Hey, what happened?” It didn't ask, “Did you have a near death experience? Did you have, you know, one of these following things: Did you see lights? Did you hear music? Did you hear voices?”
Did you have a dream essentially? That’s what a near death experience is. It’s a kind of dream people have while they were unconscious near death.
You know how many people spontaneously reported having a near death experience? Four frickin' percent. Four percent, and that could include just something really not religious, like seeing lights or hearing sounds, right? Or it could be just the vague feeling a sense of peace and calm. An emotional experience could be part of that.
So if you have only four percent 4% with any kind of near death experience at all, then actual religiously-themed near death experiences are going to be a small percent of that 4% of people.
So if there is a god, and if this god appears to people who are near death or angels or whatever, if that's real, well, how come it's almost never ever happening?
Ross Douthat writes throughout this chapter, as if religious near death experience is common. You would think it's happening all over the place, the way he writes about it, but it's not. Ross Douthat never cites the studies of how often it happens because he knows that if he did, it wouldn't look good.
What is a near death experience, anyway? These people didn't die. The thing about death is that once it happens to you, you don't come back.
I know Ross Douthat thinks that there are things like zombies and ghosts and stuff like that. He believes that spirits rise from the dead, that the dead people get kind of these, they become transporty floaty soul things, and they go floating into the air, and then they come around sometimes to say, “boo” or to turn on your radio to their favorite radio station as a secret signal or weird stuff like that.
Actually, we don't have any evidence that that actually ever happens. There's never been a photograph of a ghost. You know what there was in the early 20th century? There were a bunch of double exposure photographs that hucksters, fraudsters, liars who wanted to take money from gullible people whose family members just died. Exploiting their pain, they would produce these double exposures and say, “Here's a photograph of your husband. Here's a photograph of your daughter.”
“Oh, they're still alive! Thank you! Here's some money.”
Ross Douthat doesn't talk about that. He doesn't talk about the exploitation, about how we know what those double exposure photographs really are, now that we know about photography and how it works, and that's common knowledge.
You don't see those double exposure photographs of supposed ghosts anymore, do you? No, you don’t, because now we know it's a fraud. So, the fraudsters moved on to something new: Near death experience.
There is no evidence that there are any ghosts or spirits or any such thing as a soul. There's not any concrete evidence of that, but let's say, wow, you know, that when you die, you go to heaven.
Well, that's when you die. When you die, you don't wake up and then go talk to a researcher about it. That's not death. That's near death.
You know what near death is like? Near death is like nearly being pregnant. If you have sex with someone and condom breaks, and then you don't get pregnant, that's near pregnancy. Is that woman a mother? Do we call her a mother? Do we ask her what it's like to be a mother? No.
Do we ask the guy what fatherhood is like? No, of course we don't. We don't because these people don't know a damned thing about parenthood. They were just fucking around, and they got lucky that they didn't accidentally make a pregnancy that they were not ready for.
Being near death is like nearly taking a swim in the ocean because you are on an airplane and your airplane is going to China from San Francisco and you stop in Hawaii in the airport. Do you know what the Hawaiian beaches are like if you do that? You really didn't go swimming in the Pacific Ocean on that vacation, on that trip. You just were in an airport in Hawaii.
I think it's pretty interesting that number one, almost nobody reports near death experiences, and of the near that experiences that are reported, only a minority are religious. That’s just a small, tiny minority reporting what Ross Douthat says is a common experience.
That’s fishy.
We're wrapping up chapter 3 now, and we see that Ross Douthat is avoiding the most serious issues in these matters. He's been sloppy. He's been dishonest. He's talking about things for which there is no evidence. He's describing Catholic church insider procedures that fail to examine all of the evidence and consider all of the possibilities. He calls that “scientific.” He uses the word “rigor” to describe that.
Chapter 3 provides no serious examination of the reality of the supernatural. It's not rational. It's not substantive. It's not persuasive, and that, Ross Douthat, is why not everyone believes.