NPR piece gets a bit elitist even for me

I usually love NPR, but they screwed the pooch on this story:

Religion, Doctors At Odds Over Mental Health In India

The gist of the piece is that Western psychiatric treatment isn't widely available in India, and many Indians seek treatment through faith healers. You might think that my main objection was to the reliance on faith healing over conventional mental health treatment, and I do object to those practices.

However, the tone of the article is what made me cringe more than anything. It’s symptomatic of a sort of meme that has bugged me for a long time: the idea that Indians are inherently more superstitious than Westerners. This is utter bullshit. Uneducated Indians are superstitious, as are uneducated Westerners. The educated Indians I've met are no more or less superstitious than their Western counterparts.

For instance, I've talked a bit about my involvement in the Vedanta Society, which, at least at our local branch, is mostly comprised of Indians. But the education levels are generally higher than those of the people depicted in the NPR story (we even have some doctors in our group). I have not seen any anti-science sentiment among the leadership, and very little among the laity (almost any group has a few New Age types). In fact, when someone asked one of our most senior monks about focusing mental energies on an illness, the monk advised the person to see a doctor! So I think superstition is much more a function of education level than of nationality.

If you don't believe me, go to some of the less-educated parts of any country and see what kind of crazy beliefs you find. Hell, go to the halls of your nearest high school and just listen for all the supposed things that if you do after sex, you won’t get pregnant (my personal favorite is doing a handstand and having your partner pour cold water down your vagina). While you're at it, search YouTube for "cast out demons" and then tell me how that’s so much more sophisticated than going to a Shiva temple.

Also, the cost of psychiatric treatment is hardly a trivial matter. While the faith healers do charge ridiculous sums, those sums are still much cheaper than counseling and medication, which could go on for the rest of a person's life. That’s a problem in this country, too, and probably every country that doesn’t have socialized medicine (I’m referring strictly to end user cost; I’m not commenting one way or the other on whether socialized medicine is a good idea). And if you think there’s no stigma in this country associated with seeking mental health treatment, you need to pay attention or get out more.

I'm not in favor of faith healing by any means, at least not to the exclusion of medical treatment. But condescending crap like this doesn't help. It perpetuates stereotypes and gives the audience a false sense of superiority, which can take the focus away from the problems we have in this country regarding superstition and mental health treatment. And that would be a damn shame.

The Miracle That Isn't

In November of last year, there was a big stir in the news about how a Belgian man who had been in a vegetative state for 23 years was able to communicate with the help of a speech therapist and a touchpad. The story was hailed as a breakthrough, a miracle, etc.

Only one problem: the man can't actually communicate using the methods people claimed he was using. At least the doctor who originally brought forth those claims in November had the decency to admit his own further study has shown the method doesn't work as claimed. His study results were presented yesterday in London. He still believes his patient is more conscious than such patients are generally thought to be. But of course, we don't have any way of proving that.

Back in November, many people expressed skepticism toward the original claims, but on most of the news sites, that skepticism was buried in the comments. Kudos to the BBC for putting the debunking front and center (Note: many sources incorrectly say that the patient was in a coma instead of a vegetative state). There's also an article in the New York Times, but I had to search to find it.

I completely sympathize with this man's family. It's often in the aftermath of something really terrible that people are most prone to being duped like this. Shame on those who promote their quackery by preying on grieving families.

(via BBC News)

Status report: Yet another atheist blog is officially born

Note the new decoration in the right column.

On a friend's recommendation, I read Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, which is a graphic novel about the life and work of British mathematician/philosopher/logician (yes, he was that damn good) Bertrand Russell. Logicomix also shows the influence Russell had on other prominent figures such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Kurt Gödel. If you're remotely interested in this sort of thing, I highly recommend checking out Logicomix. If you're really interested, you'll naturally want to read the writings of the main characters themselves.

Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem states that no logical system can be both consistent and complete. This implies that any complete system will require axioms that cannot be proven within the system itself. The Incompleteness Theorem was a huge blow to Russell and many of his colleagues, who had spent the last few decades trying to formulate a mathematical system based on absolute certainty. Gödel had now shown that such a system was impossible.

For a long time, I had suspected as much on some level, and of course, many of history's great thinkers have hinted at it. Sources as diverse as Socrates and the Kena Upanishad (like most of the Upanishads, the author or authors are unknown) advise skepticism of anyone who claims certain knowledge of absolute truth.

I think one of the things that leads people to say, "Atheism is just another religion," is the certainty that some atheists seem to insist on in their tone--for instance, when someone says directly or indirectly that religion has never produced anything of value and has nothing to offer people today. That's a pretty dogmatic-sounding statement, dripping with certainty and more than a little smugness. I don't think that atheism is just another religion, but I would say that there are those who treat it the same way some devout believers treat their beliefs.

Another implication of all this is that I probably won't be able to find a single group that has what I'm looking for. Previously, I've been known to agonize that there's something wrong with either me or the group when I'm not getting along with them like I'd hoped. For instance, if I didn't like the tone of one of our atheist meetups, I'd ponder the "trouble with atheism," or worse, fear that I was some poseur intellectual lightweight. Now I'm starting to think this distrust of certainty might be all right.

In fact, for the time being, I'm going to continue visiting the Vedanta Society, too. I think they have a lot of interesting stuff to say, philosophically, and I get a sense of humility and community that I haven't gotten too many other places (I wish I could say I got this from freethought-related groups, but this is not the case). Also, what I've seen of their writings so far tends to display a keen understanding of how people work. Many belief systems, religious and otherwise, have bred disaster out of their failure to account for this.

Actually, if I had to describe my belief system, naturalistic pantheism (I'll probably elaborate on this in the near future) would come closest, but since there's no community for that in my area, I have to make do with what I have. It might happen that I can practice Vedanta in a pantheistic way.

But there are things I have in common with the most militant atheist, too, like the lack of belief in anything supernatural and the desire to keep religion out of government (and science classes!). And by the definition espoused by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, I'm at least a de facto atheist. So, up goes the scarlet A.

Disaster narrowly averted

I think I've mentioned before how religious my extended family is. Over the weekend, my grandmother was in the hospital awaiting surgery (it went well, and she's doing much better!). A bunch of us went to visit her, so it was almost like a family gathering. Normally at family gatherings, I just tune out the conversation and pretend to be fascinated by something on my phone, so despite the gulf between our opinions on things, we don't get into a lot of entanglements. But a hospital room provides much closer quarters, so I had to engage in more active lip-biting than I typically do.

During the afternoon, one of my aunts started singing the praises of Joel Osteen. Fine. Normally, this is where I start to tune out and find another conversation, but no such luck this time. Apparently, he had recently preached this sermon about how you should shout praises to God when you're feeling worried. Again, fine. I could see how that might have some psychological benefit. But what bothered me is how she kept talking about "the Christians" in Old Testament events like the battle of Jericho (Hint: there were no Christians in the Old Testament). It took all my self-restraint not to say, "Don't you mean the Jews?"

Later on, my stepmom wondered aloud why we have certain organs, even though we can live without them. This was relevant to the issue at hand, as Granny was having her gallbladder removed. Without even thinking about the implications of my statements, I rattled off the standard Biology 101 answer: "Well, these things were probably more useful at a previous stage in our development. I mean, look at the tailbone..."

We've never discussed the issue, but the look on my stepmom's face indicated I'd hit a nerve. Granny chimed in, "Well, nobody really knows about that stuff." I took that as my cue to bow out. It's things like this that make me think that even if it were a worthwhile goal to rid the world of religion (I'm not saying it is, or that it isn't), it would be impossible to achieve. We've still got flat-earthers, for dog's sake.

I did at least get in one positive point. We were discussing contentment and how important it was, and I said, "Every major religion teaches that in some form." That seemed to please everyone. Those who know me personally know how conflicted my relationship is with my extended family. Like all people, I'd prefer to get along with them. But it seems that to get along, I have to pretend to be someone I'm not.