When religion gets in the way of saving lives

Strange beliefs, dogma and irrationality, all getting in the way of saving lives. Robert Lanza, a leading researcher on stem cell and cloning shares with us the problems he face in bringing his works from the realms of research to hospitals, in an interview with DISCOVER. The following are excerpts from his interview with Discover.

"So you went to ACT and asked for a job?

Before they would hire me, they gave me a task that was like bringing back the witch’s broom. There was a question about whether the National Institutes of Health would allow the work. Even though this was for therapy and not reproduction, it still involved cloning embryos, and the public was totally against it. Many considered it murder. So I was asked to get all the Nobel laureates in the country to sign a letter to support embryonic stem cell research, addressed to Harold Varmus, the head of the NIH. This was in the old days, when everything was by fax. Actually, I had this whole drawer of all the letters signed by 70 Nobel laureates. The effort was published in Science, and a few months later, many college presidents also signed on.

At the time, ACT was a subsidiary of a poultry genetics company, doing work in agriculture. When I joined they made the move from animal cloning to human therapy, and we knew we would get hit, big-time. I may be the only person who’s had the [Catholic] Church, the pope, and a couple of presidents condemn my work. At one point we had bodyguards here. There was a bombing up the street; then a doctor at a local in vitro fertilization clinic was targeted. I didn’t think I would be alive for more than a few years."

"You’re launching the future of medicine, but it is still on hold.
Rather than curing disease, we’re trying to get around theological problems. It’s not what I signed up for in medical school. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thrown my hands up and said, “Enough, I can’t take it anymore,” but then I’m back the next day. We’re crippled, but they can’t stop us forever. We’ve now got enough irons in the fire and hopefully ways to bypass many of these objections. But it’s just a shame that the research has been held up so long. We’re living through a paradigm shift. People are going to look back at us and say, “They used to cut people’s legs off.” Then they’ll just give an injection and the blood flow will be restored and the limb saved. If I were a patient and I knew I was going to have my leg cut off and something could be done, I would be demanding it. But most people, even most scientists, don’t realize what we’re capable of. I realize it because I’m doing the work and I can see what’s possible before my eyes."

Feelings of ill-will

ARTICLE FROM THE STRAITS TIMES

May 29, 2009

Couple guilty of sedition

Their claim that they did not know nature of contents rejected

By Elena Chong
		Ong and his wife Dorothy Chan leaving the Subordinate Courts yesterday. The couple is in hot water for distributing seditious tracts. -- ST PHOTO: CAROLINE CHIA

A CHRISTIAN couple who mass-mailed evangelical tracts to the public for many years were on Thursday found guilty of distributing seditious or objectionable publications to three Muslims.

About this case ONG Kian Cheong, 50, and Dorothy Chan Hien Leng, 46, claimed trial to two charges each of distributing seditious publications and one each of distributing an objectionable publication and possessing seditious tracts. Two of the recipients, Madam Farharti Ahmad, 36, and Mr Irwan Ariffin, 32, received an evangelistic comic tract titled The Little Bride through the mail in March and October 2007 respectively. Another recipient, Mr Isa Raffee, 35, was sent Who Is Allah? in December that year. All three told the court that they felt angry, insulted and offended, and believed a Christian group had sent them. ... more

Ong Kian Cheong, 50, a SingTel technical officer, and his wife, Dorothy Chan Hien Leng, 46, a UBS associate director, were also convicted of having 439 copies of 11 seditious publications at their Maplewoods Condominium on Jan 30 last year.

This is the first time a full trial under the Sedition Act has been heard.

In 2005, a man was jailed a month for posting inflammatory and vicious remarks about Muslims and Malays on the Internet.

The following year, a 21-year-old accounts assistant received a stern warning for posting an offensive cartoon of Jesus Christ on his blog.

Ong was arrested on Jan 30 last year after he was seen by police dropping off a stack of brown envelopes into a post box outside his office at ComCentre at Exeter Road.

He subsequently led the officers to his car and his home, where more of the Chick Publications materials were seized. Chan was arrested the same day.

The case centred on whether the couple, who were then attending Berean Christian Church at Havelock Road, knew or had reason to believe that the publications they had mailed to the three were seditious.

The prosecution argued that the couple had carried out their evangelical mission 'with eyes wide open', and that they were fully aware of the offensive nature of the contents.

They distributed those offensive publications to members of different faiths in Singapore with no regard for their feelings or sensitivities, said Deputy Public Prosecutor Anandan Bala in his closing submissions.

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This article from the Straits Times brings back memories from the past.

More than a decade ago when I was still in secondary school, students from my school were made to attend church service every week. The service was 2 hours long, if memory still serves me well, and we had to sing praises of the lord. Singing christian songs with woeful melodies was bad enough for a teenager who wanted to do only "cool" things. Singing christian songs was definately not cool. What made it worse was, some of the songs were actually mandrain songs! WTf? Christian songs in maindrain? Totally not cool.

So one day, I decided I'd enough. I gathered some of my friends and proposed this to them: Let's skip this totally "uncool" 2 hours every week and head out for some food at the nearby hawker's centre. And so we did that every week for a couple of months before disaster struck: Our absence from the church service was finally noticed by the teachers.

As a result, each of us got 5 demerit points, which was 33% of the path to getting yourself expelled from school. Add detention classes to that.

Of course I wasn't all too happy about that. I told my parents about it and whined about those long boring 2 hours of hell we were made to go through every week. Then I mention this "Why do they keep saying that we will have to go to hell for not believing in jesus?" to my old man. My old man sort of LOLed and said something that I shall decline to reveal here.

Ok. Back to the main topic.

Question 1)

Why is it that telling a muslim that hell awaits him if he doesn't turn to Jesus a crime while telling the same thing to an atheist not? I'm sure it did "promote feelings of ill-will and hostility" between me and the pastor. Heck, I'd be pissed if anyone else were to tell me that I'd be "going to hell".

Question 2)

Why was it that I was never given the option of not attending the church service?

Oh well. Just food for thought.

Why religion plays no useful role in the making of public policies

It seemed that NMP Thio Li Ann had expressed an opinion, in a special article in ST, that religion has a role to play in public policy making. If she thinks that this is for the general benefit of Singaporeans, then once again, I'm of the opinion that she isn't very bright. Not impressed at all. The reason is simple: A religion is essentially an unfalsifiable belief. Not a great idea to make decisions based on such beliefs, especially if it concerns the general public.


So what is an falsifiability? According to wikipedia,


"Falsifiability (or refutability or testability) is the logical possibility that an assertion can be shown false by an observation or a physical experiment. That something is "falsifiable" does not mean it is false; rather, it means that it is capable of being disproved under hypothetical circumstances."


Yeah, so why is falsifiability important? To illustrate this, let's take a look at Pascal's Wager. Pascal's Wager is actually a simple game theory in decision making, put forward by Blaise Pascal, a 17th century mathematician, physicist and religious philosopher. In essence, Blaise Pascal posits that it is a better "bet" to believe that God exists than not to believe, because the expected value of believing (which Pascal assessed as infinite) is always greater than the expected value of not believing.



In the form of a decision matrix, the possibilities and consequences are listed out.

Basically, it means that if you lived as if god exists and god does indeed exists, then you go to heaven, a reward of infinite value. And if god does not exist, you lose nothing (or at least not too much). However if you lived as if god did did not exists, you find yourself going to hell, a punishment of infinite value. And if god does not exist, you lose nothing (or at least not too much).

For argument's sake, let's take it that the values of rewards and punishments assigned in the matrix are accurate. Then it seems like it's the smart decision to believe in god doesn't it? Well, it seems that way until you realise that the existence of god is unfalsifiable and that you can similarly come up with an unfalsifiable belief that god will send you to hell for believing in him and send those who did not believe in him to heaven. Why would he do that, you ask. Well, maybe he's trying to weed out those dummies <----------unfalsifiable as well.

All this leads to is just an intellectual dead-end. You can get no useful conclusions out of it.

Issac Newton seemed to have gotten the hang of this idea around 300 years ago.

"All forces occur in pairs, and these two forces are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction." - Issac Newton's third law of motion

Well, I have my version of it too

"All unfalsifiable beliefs occur in pairs, and the conclusions drawn from these beliefs are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction." - IMBS

Well, decisions must obviously based on reality and not unfalsifiable beliefs, if you ask me.

Religion: The limits of tolerance

ST Nov 1, 2007

Sexy women are a distraction, says PAS leader

KUALA LUMPUR - MALAYSIA'S Muslim men are suffering sleepless nights and cannot pray properly because their thoughts are distracted by a growing number of women who wear sexy clothes in public, a prominent opposition cleric said.

Datuk Nik Aziz Nik Mat, the spiritual leader of Parti Islam SeMalaysia (PAS), said he wanted to speak about the 'emotional abuse' that men face because it is seldom discussed, the fundamentalist Islamic party reported on its website yesterday.

'We always (hear about) the abuse of children and wives in households, which is easily perceived by the eye, but the emotional abuse of men cannot be seen,' Datuk Nik Aziz said. 'Our prayers become unfocused and our sleep is often disturbed.'

He has made controversial comments about women in the past, including that women should stop wearing lipstick and perfume to lower the risk of being raped.

Women's groups have slammed his statements. They say comments like his encourage rapes because they put the blame on women.

Datuk Nik Aziz is also the Chief Minister of Kelantan, the sole Malaysian state that is not ruled by the Barisan Nasional governing coalition.

In the northern state, the Islamic party has fined Muslim women for not wearing headscarves in workplaces and implemented separate check-out lines for men and women in supermarkets.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

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When Datuk Nik Aziz said 'We always (hear about) the abuse of children and wives in households, which is easily perceived by the eye, but the emotional abuse of men cannot be seen, our prayers become unfocused and our sleep is often disturbed.' , i totally flipped.

So that's what he calls emotional abuse. I suppose when jewellery stores display what seems to be an endless variety of ear-rings, neckless and pendants, that's emotional abuse. Or how about someone munching on his burger, walking past you down the street. That's emotional abuse too. What about the emotional abuse you suffer when someone zips past you in a flashy ferrari down the expressway? I'm damn sure that gives you good justification to steal that insensitive bastard's ferrari. Or bar him from driving his million dollar speed machine at least.

Still on the topic on the inane and not-so-harmless things religious leaders sprout out every now and then, the Vatican surely qualifies as the number 1 clown when they say stuff like "condoms don't stop HIV" despite studies establishing

"It is not established whether the condom is as effective at preventing heterosexual transmission of HIV as it is for preventing conception. An overall estimate of condom effectiveness for HIV prevention is needed. Methods: Information on condom usage and HIV serology was obtained from 25 published studies of serodiscordant heterosexual couples. Condom usage was classified as always (in 100% of acts of intercourse), sometimes (1-99%, 0-99% or 1-100%) or never (0%). Studies were stratified by design, direction of transmission and condom usage group. Condom efficacy was calculated from the HIV transmission rates for always-users and never-users. Results: For always-users, 12 cohort samples yielded a consistent HIV incidence of 0.9 per 100 person-years (95% confidence interval, 0.4-1.8). For 11 cohort samples of never-users, incidence was estimated at 6.8 per 100 person-years (95% confidence interval, 4.4-10.1) for male-to-female transmission, 5.9 per 100 (95% confidence interval, 1.5-15.1) for female-to-male transmission and 6.7 per 100 (95% confidence interval, 4.5-9.6) in samples that specified the direction of transmission. Generally, the condom's effectiveness at preventing HIV transmission is estimated to be 87%, but it may be as low as 60% or as high as 96%. Conclusions: Consistent use of condoms provides protection from HIV. The level of protection approximates 87%, with a range depending upon the incidence among condom nonusers. Thus, the condom's efficacy at reducing heterosexual transmission may be comparable to or slightly lower than its effectiveness at preventing pregnancy."

Suddenly it isn't so funny anymore.

How about the creationism/intelligent design movement in USA? You can read more about it by clicking on that wikipedia link and find out how much time was wasted by the scientific community in order to debunk those clowns.

This begs the question: What mechanisms can we put in place to protect our society from the damaging effects of those lies?

I have no answer to that. It's a really tough question.

How do we balance the need to respect the beliefs of others with the realities of our world?

According to this wise man H. L. Mencken, "We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."

In other words, when you say that your wife, who looks like this

is prettier than Sonija Kwok,

we wouldn't bother shutting you up. We may politely agree with you in your presence and then laugh at your bad taste in your absence. Or we may act in the more politically correct manner and say "You are entitled to your opinion".

But if you were to attempt to take away Sonija Kwok's Miss HK crown and give it to your wife, then we have a problem. Because the fact is that Sonija Kwok is the beautiful one.

Religiosity, homophobia and intelligence

Recently, a survey conducted by NTU found that "'intrinsic religiosity' - viewing religion as the primary driving force in life - was the strongest predictor of anti-gay sentiment here. "

Ah.... a correlation between religiosity and homophobia is established. Nothing suprising at all judging by the amount of bible verses quoted by proponents of S377A in the ST forum discussion board.

I've also frequently heard that scientists are usually non-religious. Could there be a link between IQ, religiousity and homophobia?

Guess what? In a study titled "Religiousness, Spirituality, and IQ: Are They Linked?", it was found that

".....religious participants did have significantly lower QSAT scores than members of the other three relationship-to-God categories (spiritual, agnostic, and atheist). This result suggests that religious individuals are somewhat lower in quantitative ability, perhaps suggesting less rigor in certain kinds of reasoning. This pattern did not extend to the other relationship-to-God categories, suggesting that there is something special about the people who identified themselves as religious. "

Haha! I knew it. Intuition does work sometimes!