Tolerating the intolerant? Bigoted views not apparently bigoted if they’re held by persons of faith

George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, has been taking time out from the House of Lords, where he and 26 other 'Lords Spiritual' enjoy governing power on the basis of their faith, to argue that we discriminate against people of faith (saywha?). Not withstanding this paradox (or the somewhat questionable record of Christian tolerance as indexed by such trifling historical episodes as The Crusades or The Inquisition), he was at the Intelligence Squared debate where the motion "Stop bashing Christians! Britain is becoming an anti-Christian country" was defeated by 378 to 216 with 48 undecided.

More worrying for doctors is his association with the Spirituality Special Interest Group of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, which held a session entitled ‘Intolerant Secularisation'.* In the chair was the psychiatrist Chris Cook, who believes that mental disorder can be caused by demonic possession. Though psychiatrists are the least religious of doctors, this group has an agenda is to allow doctors to bring their faith into the workplace (with the inevitable foisting of evangelism upon patients) without fear of reprisal that has rightly greeted nurses who offer to pray with patients, evangelical NHS employees refusing to tuck crosses into their shirts, and relationship therapists who refuse to counsel homosexuals.

(Source: Matt cartoon, Daily Telgraph UK)

Lord Carey's argument appears to be that we should tolerate discrimination by religious organisations because it's not really bigotry if it's faith-based; far from being your common-or-garden homophobia, Lord Carey's desire to see homosexuals denied rights that the rest of us take for granted is far more high-minded, you see. His testimony (roundly criticised by a rather bemused Court of Appeal) in the case of the sacked relatonship therapist speaks for itself:

The comparison of a Christian, in effect, with a 'bigot' (ie a person with an irrational dislike to homosexuals) begs further questions...In my view, the highest development of human spirituality is acceptance of Christ as saviour and adherence to Christian values. This cannot be seen by the Courts of this land as comparable to the base and ignorant behaviour [of homophobes]. My heart is in anguish at the spiritual state of this country.

As is mine, Lord Carey, as is mine. And not least because of illogical and nonsensical arguments like this perpetrated by supposed role models for people of faith. How much more irrational can dislike of homosexuals be, if it's based upon freely chosen subscription to iron age ancestral dogma?

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*To give the Spirituality group their due, they did have a dissenting speaker, Prof. Rob Poole, on their programme who argued that faith in the workplace clearly violates important professional boundaries in direct contravention of General Medical Council guidelines. They declined to let me speak on intolerant secularisation as a 'Just War' - my abstract is below - but I received a very polite note from Chris Cook quite reasonably pointing out that the agenda had already been drawn up. The title and text of my abstract submitted to the meeting was as follows:

Intolerance of Intolerance: A Just War.
Religious communities portray predominantly secular society and its healthcare system as being intolerant of their beliefs and right to express them through practices at work. Recent cases, for example, have addressed whether Christians should be allowed to refuse public and private services as diverse as sex therapy and accommodation to homosexual persons whose sexual orientation conflicts with their faith. I argue here that such practices are themselves intolerant, and that a fortiori they therefore have no right to be tolerated by the wider community which sees intolerance as a social ill. In the same way that 'Just war' principles sanction proportional aggression towards actual or threatened military action from aggressive states, intolerance is a reasonable (and possibly imperative) societal reaction towards intolerance. The reaction (such as increasing

secularisation) of society (and its healthcare system) to intolerant religious beliefs and practices cannot thus be referred to as intolerant, in the same way as a proportional and legally sanctioned military response towards an aggressor cannot itself be described as 'aggression'. Dr. Ed Mitchell has begun his CT1 psychiatry training this year. His medical degree was from Oxford University. He has an undergraduate degree in experimental psychology also from Oxford, and Masters and PhD degree from Cambridge University in criminology. He has been a Fulbright visiting research fellow in with the Program in Psychiatry and Law at Harvard University.

Vatican + doctors = bad medicine

Shady goings on at the Vatican with the canonisation of Mary MacKillop. Two cases of remission from cancer and TADA!!!!! a new saint!!!. This nonsense is lent ostensible gravitas by the commission of doctors. The Medical Committee of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints is responsible for establishing whether a genuine medical miracle has occurred (quick recovery from a laminectomy in the case of Cardinal Newman's beatification). Now, all studies thus done have shown no benefit from intercessory prayer. Thus, any doctor who testifies on any Vatican medical committee ignores evidence and invokes a supernatural explanation. That's not being a doctor, that's bearing witness. They might as well ask anyone with a belief in supernaturalism. If a doctor is giving evidence about something to which his training is irrelevant, then a committee of ice-cream salesmen could do as good a job.

Most of these miraculous justifications state that at least one doctor said "the patient would never walk again", or "had 6 months to live". No doctor I've ever known has never had the confidence in their skills to make a definite prognosis like that (and I've known some pretty confident consultants). That's the way doctors break bad news in Hollywood films and bad daytime TV dramas. Patients might unfortunately hear it that way, and people anxious to prove a miracle might make it up, but doctors don't say it. Doctors say things like "his spinal cord is almost completely severed at T7-T8 level. It's extremely unlikely he'll ever get sufficient motor function back to be independent of a wheelchair". Or "On average, people with small-cell lung cancer survive 6 months". Prognostication is something EVERY doctor has doubts about his ability to perform, as each one knows several patients who defy the odds (whether they pray to Mother McKinnon or not). I've seen diabetic patients whose blood sugars should have killed them years ago. I contact their GP, not the Vatican.

Adele Horin (thanks Pharyngula) has another splendid angle on the whole affair here.

At the time Mary MacKillop answered the prayers of a woman dying of leukaemia, there was a lot of static in the air. In China 43 million people were dying of starvation in one of the world's worst famines. Thirty years later in the 1990s, when MacKillop answered the prayers of a woman dying of lung cancer, 3.8 million were dying in the Congo wars, 800,000 in the Rwanda genocide, a quarter of a million in the Yugoslav wars.

Very good of MacKillop's ghost to hear and answer the prayers of two Australians amongst such carnage.

VP of Center for Intelligent Design in Glasgow is a consultant colorectal surgeon!

David Galloway is a consultant colorectal surgeon working at Gartnavel General Hospital and Western Infirmary, Glasgow. He is also vice-president of the new Centre for Intelligent Design in Glasgow. Yep - a surgeon holding office in an organisation that gets into all sorts of difficulties with evolutionary concepts such as development of bacterial resistance to antibiotics.

A member of the Lennox Evangelical Church, Dumbarton, his medical career has not been visibly hitherto encumbered by the cognitive dissonance involved in reconciling Eve's creation from Adam's rib (or Mary's virginity) with his scientific training. Indeed, he is current vice president of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. I would think that august institution is particularly proud of his new affiliation and its rather unsubtle attempt to get intelligent design teaching into schools north of the border (thankfully, down here the government has clarified its position on that sort of nonsense). However, the centre's leaders have rather given the game away by talking about their fundamentalist Christian beliefs rather than the supposedly scientific basis of ID. Oopsy.

Francis Collins betrays the rational basis of his profession

With a distinguished research career, and having directed the National Center for Human Genome Research and latterly the National Institutes for Health, Francis Collins is one of the most accomplished and important doctors of his generation. But that doesn't make him a good example to other doctors.



Collins is an evangelical Christian, but he's not a bigot else I doubt if Christopher Hitchens would have suffered his friendship for long. Of greater concern is that Collins has written in the Washington Post about how he's praying for Hitchens ('Praying for my friend Christopher Hitchens'). Praying for someone who believes his legacy will be to have "made a stand for those who are trying to hold reason and science against superstition", and who has requested people do not pray for him seems pretty disrespectful (that is, after all, why most Christians are participating in the 'Pray for Christopher Hitchens' day). But doing it without a shred of dignity by putting one's piety on display for the purposes of self-promotion in the pages of a national newspaper is doubly so.

In any case, Collins is the sort of apologist who finds no clash between science and religion, believing that his god is outside the normal universal terms of reference and therefore impervious to scientific investigation. (Jerry Coyne begs to differ here). In other words, so as not to fall foul of the 'God of The Gaps' (the gaps eventually yielding to scientific investigation and thus progressively squeezing the hiding places for the irrationality of faith), by a sleight of hand he's invented in his own mind a chasm rather than a gap. But to ensure that even this chasm can't be bridged by science, he's importantly declared that this chasm has only one side. And to think that Thomas Aquinas went to all that bother with natural theology.

I've alluded to various psychological research that shows how of the cognitive biases that allow intelligent doctors to believe nonsense, but it is astonishing what otherwise reasonable people can do in the service of their beliefs. Collins' acheivements cannot excuse the poor example he sets for the medical and clinical science. Don't worry about an evidence-base if it doesn't suit your purposes. Just make something up. Preferenably something that other people can't call you on.

And whilst you're there, why not take the opportunity to do a bit of proselytising by writing about it in the Washington Post?

Royal College of Psychiatrists spirituality group chairman thinks Demons can cause mental disorder

In 1976, two Bavarian priests were convicted of negligent homicide in the case of 23-year-old Anneliese Michel, an epileptic who died after her treatment was discontinued in favor of exorcism.

It's nice to know that such potential is still alive and well in the UK. I previously blogged about an article appearing on the Christian Medical Fellowship's website advocating that doctors should consider demonic possession as a differential diagnosis in mental disorder. It was picked up on by Iain Brassington at the excellent Journal of Medical Ethics blog.

At the time I didn't realise that the author held office. The article was written by Prof. Chris Cook, who is now the Chairman of The Royal College of Psychiatrists' Spirituality and Psychiatry Special Interest Group. He's a consultant psychiatrist who still works for Tees, Esk & Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust. Is it only mental disorder, or are other disorders caused by demons, such as hypertension or diabetes? It's one thing when society stigmatises mentally disordered persons, but quite another when members of the medical profession do so.

http://www.dur.ac.uk/theology.religion/staff/?username=dth0ccc
http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/rollofhonour/specialinterestgroups/spirituality/aboutus/executivecommittee.aspx

Hospital chaplains facing the axe

The National Secular Society has an article on swingeing cuts facing hospital chaplaincies.

The chaplains have always attempted to justify themselves by saying they provide an important source of spiritual comfort to the religious (of all denominations) and non-religious alike. The notion that those of other religions benefit from the pastoral services of Christian chaplains is of course nonsense, a bit like saying that the provision of free petrol benefits those with diesel cars (or, in the case of atheists, no car at all). Try to imagine Christians utilising pastoral services provided by Scientologists (and proposing that these services are paid for by taxpayers!). Those sharing the beliefs of the chaplain are privileged by this spending.

And what a lot of spending it is. Many people I talk to are amazed that hospital chaplains are funded by the NHS. In 2009, figures obtained under freedom of information requests revealed the total annual cost of chaplaincy services to the NHS in Great Britain to be upward of £35million.

The Unite union for healthcare workers is investigating whether chaplains are being targeted 'disproportionately' as in Nottingham, where four out of five chaplains have been cut. If the alternative is to cut doctors and nurses, whose services are needed by everyone in hospital irrespective of creed, I think this could be a case of most people agreeing where the axe should fall in the NHS.

Now, that defence department spending review: shall we cut Trident or army chaplains? (actually...I...er...best not get started).

70 children dead from religious opposition to vaccination

As if the children of that country have't got enough problems, Pharyngula notes that a measles outbreak in Zimbabwe has killed at least seventy children over the last two weeks. The outbreaks are mainly in apostolic religious sects which combine Christian Fundamentalism with traditional African religious practices, with children being treated with holy water and prayer. They are strictly opposed to vaccination. But I suppose at least they can claim poor education, a country ravaged by poverty and corruption, and colonial religious indoctrination. Unlike other supernaturalists such as the adult model Jenny McCarthy, the actor Jim Carrey, or sundry Christian Science sects who hold similar beliefs with similarly tragic consequences.