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For Catholics, Interest in Exorcism Is Revived

Jill

Oh, good.

There are only a handful of priests in the country trained as exorcists, but they say they are overwhelmed with requests from people who fear they are possessed by the Devil.

Now, American bishops are holding a conference on Friday and Saturday to prepare more priests and bishops to respond to the demand. The purpose is not necessarily to revive the practice, the organizers say, but to help Catholic clergy members learn how to distinguish who really needs an exorcism from who really needs a psychiatrist, or perhaps some pastoral care.

So glad that’s covered.

“People are talking about, are we taking two steps back?” Father Vega said. “My first reaction when I heard about the exorcism conference was, this is another of those trappings we’ve pulled out of the past.”

But he said that there could eventually be a rising demand for exorcism because of the influx of Hispanic and African Catholics to the United States. People from those cultures, he said, are more attuned to the experience of the supernatural.

Bishop Paprocki noted that according to Catholic belief, the Devil is a real and constant force who can intervene in people’s lives — though few of them will require an exorcism to handle it.

“The ordinary work of the Devil is temptation,” he said, “and the ordinary response is a good spiritual life, observing the sacraments and praying. The Devil doesn’t normally possess someone who is leading a good spiritual life.”

With the idea that Latino and African Catholics are more attuned to the experiences of the supernatural, and that people who are possessed are leading bad lives, what could possibly go wrong here?

247 thoughts on For Catholics, Interest in Exorcism Is Revived

  2. @Marlene, hahahahaha.

    Also, I feel like people who believe in possession need to start asking why religious-folk are disproportionately likely to need an exorcism compared to say atheists. I feel like atheists would be easy targets for demons, right?

  4. PrettyAmiable: Well, the theory goes, we heathens are already damned. You wouldn’t go out of your way to claim something that was already yours, would you? No, the devil only has to put forth that much effort to take in the most gullible pious of worshipers. Those souls are worth more.

    Its a subtle reminder that those who fall are worthless and those who strive but never quite get the pay off they’ve been promised are the most good. How else is the church going to convince people to keep paying for those big settlements over something so small as systematically supporting child rape their heads above water while constantly attacked by the twin forces of Satan and secularism?

    …I’m gonna go take a shower now.

  5. well… hmm.

    I do think it’s a little unfair to dismiss this conference out of hand. For one, Catholicism (and the mix of Catholicism and local religions) in African and Hispanic cultures *does* tend to focus more on the supernatural and the possibility of being possessed, so it’s not a huge jump to say that Catholics from those cultures would be more attuned to something their churches emphasize more.

    Second, I don’t think it’s a bad thing that clergy members are being taught more about when to suggest psychiatric or pastoral care – and that seems to be the main thrust of the conference.

    Third, the bishop was saying people who are (or are perceived to be) possessed are usually living bad *spiritual* lives, which in many cases is not at all the same as a general understanding of “leading a bad life.”

    I know most Feministe-ers have no great love of religion, but I would see this development as step in the right direction.

  6. Rita: I know most Feministe-ers are have no great love of religion, but I would see this development as step in the right direction.  

    In the right direction of what?

  7. William: Its a subtle reminder that those who fall are worthless and those who strive but never quite get the pay off they’ve been promised are the most good.

    Ok, I know this is a bit off-topic, but I’ve got to say this: William, guess what, I’m not in this (religion, that is) for a “pay-off”, pats on the head, or cookies. I’m in this for faith, and I suspect a lot of other people of faith would agree.

  8. Pastoral care, at least among Quakers, is often performed by everyone. We don’t have called ministers because worship is led by anyone who might feel led by the Holy Spirit. I, at times, have performed pastoral care for people who needed it, though most gatherings often have pastoral care team comprised of people who have undergone special training.

    And as for people with genuine psychiatric needs, religious groups will always appeal to such people. I would like to believe that people know enough to discern that in a roundabout way.

    But as for demonic possession, that I do not believe in, but neither do I believe in the concept of Satan. Nor do most Friends, aside from Evangelical Friends. However, I will say that the fastest growing group of Quakers currently live in Kenya, and that their version of Christianity would not seem out of place in what has been described here. The same thing is true with Friends from Central and South America. So that seems to be true regardless of what faith group you consult.

  9. Towards building awareness of and acceptance for mental illness in the Catholic church (for a long time people with mental illness in the church have been written off as demon-possessed… and prescribed “more prayer!” rather than modern psychiatric care.) And towards an awareness that all cultures are not the same… that North American clergy may need to adapt their thinking to account for the cultural backgrounds of their congregations.

  10. Well, on one hand, I feel like it’s a good thing that a powerful group like the Catholic Church is giving its representatives training on how to tell if someone needs emotional support or mental health care.

    But on the other hand, this church also actually perpetuates the belief that some people really _do_ get possessed by demons, and so all it takes is one clergyman abusing his power to identify lay Catholics he dislikes as demon-possessed….

  11. Seeing as how Catholics priests aren’t going out and trying to diagnosis possessions, I’m not sure how discrimination would play out. Like, I’m sure most priests would want to get the people the care they need.

    I supposed it would all demand on the people who are asking for exorcisms–are they just having bad feelings or do they need medical care.

  14. And to qualify my original remarks, people seek out religion for many reasons, but often people with psychiatric needs find a comfort in religious belief. This doesn’t mean that all people who believe have a psychiatric illness.

  15. Ok, on a serious note:

    I think that religion is completely bonkers, but I don’t begrudge anyone their religion. Honestly, some could say that exorcism as a practice can be abused, but so can any religious or political authority. If two consenting adults want to act out demonic possession or talking in tongues in the comfort of their own local religious institution more power to them.

    Also, because of the history of exorcism and mental illness it’s a good thing that they’re bothering to exclude mentally ill persons from the process.

    I would try to argue why I think exorcism is bad or harmful, but I realize that a.) I’d only be doing so as a projection of my values onto the issue and b.) I really don’t know enough about what is involved in exorcisms.

    So happy exorcising. exorcisms.

    On a less serious note:

    Satan needs some more love. It’d probably drive a guy insane if he had to put up with all the murderers, rapists, and dictators that he has to on a day to day basis.

  16. Athenia, it sounds like Catholic priests are being trained to separate the mentally ill from the spiritually ill, or however they choose to conceptualize the difference. So, in effect they are being asked to tentatively label, if not to diagnose, people who might be mentally ill. In practice, that’s probably a good thing. I’m all for teaching everyone, priests included, the warning signs of psychiatric illness.

    As an agnostic, I also think it’s ironic that the Catholic Church (or any religion) is holding itself up as a credible independent arbiter of what’s a sign of insanity and what’s a legitimate spiritual belief.

    What’s even more ironic is that the church doesn’t want to disallow the possibility of demonic possession, but the higher ups are so clearly uncomfortable with the implications of their own nominal beliefs that they’re back pedaling like crazy. They’re not phasing out an official belief in demonic possession yet, like they did with Limbo. They’re just acknowledging that it’s, at most, very, very, very rare; and that a significant percentage of people who think they are possessed may need psychiatric help, not just spiritual guidance. Progress, I guess.

  17. PrettyAmiable:
    In the right direction of what?  

    In the right direction of rationally addressing the issue by seeking medical attention.

    Hilarious William. And for anyone else being a complete asshole, believing that there is a God and forces we don’t sense (like bacteria, back in the day) has stayed with me and has come to be an even stronger believe throughout the years as I studied sciences. THIS is all here. It’s the perfect conditions. So many things could have gone wrong. Our entire universe exists on a delicate balance. Something did this.

  18. I have to say, I don’t think this is a bad idea. My guess is that unauthorized exorcisms are already happening (ask Governor Bobby Jindal, Christian and so-called Catholic) and the purpose of this conference is to reign these in and deal with them in the Catholic Church-sanctioned way (which actually recognizes that it’s probably not demonic possession for most people).

  19. God, I’ve tried to write this one comment three different times…

    Truth is, this topic is taboo and incredibly difficult to discuss when you’ve witnessed something very unsettling that you can’t explain and know medicine can’t even explain it.

    I have a hard time saying anything else about this topic, it’s too close to home.

  20. …People aren’t possessed by demons. This is not a thing. If there were/are demons, they assuredly have better things to do than to possess people.

    Consequently, by teaching people to “differentiate” between what is a possession and what is mental illness, we’re justifying the belief that some people might be possessed instead of recognizing that they might be a certain type of ill and not getting the help they need.

    …So, right direction in that we’ve stopped just stoning the shit out of ALL people who are ill? Sure. I guess.

  21. I am so glad that the Catholic church is trying to transform reality into an episode of Supernatural. Can it get on the “world is populated only by prettyboys with guns” and the “all music is seventies-eighties metal” issues next?

  23. Hey, I get that people are religious, I get that they have faith. I have faith. What I do not get, and what I will never even pretend to respect, is anyone who continues to associate themselves with a Church that supported (and in many cases orchestrated) the violent conquest of anything outside of it’s sphere of influence, the destruction of indigenous cultures throughout the world, the enslavement of indigenous peoples, the annihilation of their belief systems, and the murder of anyone who did not share it’s peculiar brand of masochism.

    In the 20th century they’ve rounded out their nauseating history by playing nice with dictators, doing their damnedest to hold back the rights of women and gays, putting doctrine before preventing the spread of AIDS, and engaging in an institutional conspiracy to rape and silence children because the alternative might be embarrassing.

    Yeah, I’m not feeling much shame for mocking the Church. As far as I’m concerned asking me, someone who has both lost their culture to the Church’s depredations and been directly and personally abused by it’s policies, to give two shits about the feelings or the Church or it’s adherents it like asking someone to be a little less hard on some piece of shit waving a confederate flag because thats their cultural expression. The culture is repugnant and so are those who continue to support it because of some rose-colored view of history or some misplaced faith in the inherent goodness of an evil institution.

  24. Hmm, a while back I talked to a Catholic priest about this very issue and he said his personal belief was that an exorcism was not going to do anything but provide a placebo effect…but it was sometimes useful as a path. As in, people would come to him claiming voices but very, very against psychiatric treatment in a sort of ‘just cast the demons out and I’ll be fine’ way. Some of them weren’t letting anyone else know that they experienced various panic attacks, and so forth, so he would attempt to guide them towards more professional assistance (or at least into confiding in others they trusted).

    His view was, essentially: ‘Chances of meeting someone actually possessed, minute to none. Chances of meeting someone who needs professional help, very likely’.

    From what he said, it wasn’t a matter of going out and finding anyone – disturbed people would come to him and demand exorcisms, and he said it was one of those matters you had to learn to deal with but it leads to a lot of uncomfortable and worrying situations – and he wasn’t the only priest to be trying to work out how to provide appropriate care in this situation.

  25. The Catholics are discussing the phenomena of alleged demon possession within the framework of their institution, beliefs, rites, cultures, and today’s medical knowledge. Kudos to them for trying to strike a balance between the secular and the religious, and trying to meet the real needs of their followers.

    On the other hand, the sniggering that people might believe in demon possession? Doesn’t seem like an important feminist stance. In fact, it strikes me as obnoxious and condescending.

    And also, let us not forget that the mentally ill are forbidden from filtering their understanding of their illness through their religious and cultural beliefs. Only by exporting Western secular comprehension of mental illness can they be saved.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html?pagewanted=all

  26. I’m disappointed my earlier comment wasn’t published. I said nothing incriminating or disrespectful about anyone, I only implied my own experience with the unknown. If feministe considers this topic far too taboo to truthfully discuss, why even blog about it?

  28. There are a million things to criticize and ridicule the Catholic Church over. Belief in demons seems like it should be pretty low on the list.

    Personally, I don’t believe in demons. But I certainly have enough funny beliefs and practices that I won’t deny Catholics theirs. In fact, if they spend more time on exorcisms and less time combatting safe sex and abortion, I’m so for it.

  29. Eh…IMO the universe is filled with things I don’t know. Maybe there are demons that make people do the most evil things on Earth. It doesn’t strike me as remotely likely…but I’m not going to categorically deny the possibility.

    But more importantly if someone is consenting* and it helps them…then w00t. I don’t particularly care what it is that makes them feel better (even if only psychologically). I just hope they manage to keep minors out of it. The same goes for snake handlers, faith healers, etc.

    *Yes we could get into a really awful discussion about religion and consent…but oh boy would that be a quagmire…particularly for me…so I’m going to assume that if someone says they consent…they consent. If you want to have that consent conversation…I’m not going to respond.

  30. I’m not going to debate whether or not demons have better things to do than possess people.

    They never said they would be looking at only certain illnesses being possibilities.

    William–I’m perfectly aware of what the Church is doing. I don’t see need to clump everyone who attends together and stereotype them. An anti-religious bias is exactly that–a BIAS.

    I am so glad I met perfectly nice atheists in real life before I met the over righteous ones online.

  32. “Virgin birth? Sure. Transubstantiation? Of course. Demonic possession in 2010? That’s just crazy talk”

    Yes, this. Why pick on exorcism specifically?

  33. William:
    Hey, I get that people are religious, I get that they have faith. I have faith. What I do not get, and what I will never even pretend to respect, is anyone who continues to associate themselves with a Church that supported (and in many cases orchestrated) the violent conquest of anything outside of it’s sphere of influence, the destruction of indigenous cultures throughout the world, the enslavement of indigenous peoples, the annihilation of their belief systems, and the murder of anyone who did not share it’s peculiar brand of masochism.
    In the 20th century they’ve rounded out their nauseating history by playing nice with dictators, doing their damnedest to hold back the rights of women and gays, putting doctrine before preventing the spread of AIDS, and engaging in an institutional conspiracy to rape and silence children because the alternative might be embarrassing.
    Yeah, I’m not feeling much shame for mocking the Church. As far as I’m concerned asking me, someone who has both lost their culture to the Church’s depredations and been directly and personally abused by it’s policies, to give two shits about the feelings or the Church or it’s adherents it like asking someone to be a little less hard on some piece of shit waving a confederate flag because thats their cultural expression. The culture is repugnant and so are those who continue to support it because of some rose-colored view of history or some misplaced faith in the inherent goodness of an evil institution.  

    I’m an atheist, and I’d be the first to agree that the catholic church has a lot of problems, but I can’t hold that against catholic worshippers or followers of the church. I might be able to hold that against the leadership of the catholic church, but your average worshipper on Sunday isn’t going to have an iota of influence on macro scale policy decisions done by the church. Let’s take an average good catholic worshipper. Was probably born with catholic parents, probably became catholic because that was the implicit religious position in their community. When I say good, I mean they are a moral person who understands problems and how catholic policy contributes to these problems. This person might even feel very conflicted about some of the policies that the church takes toward contraception, the way it has handled child abuse, etc. Hell, maybe they were even a victim of child abuse. Does this person leave the church or stay in it? Honestly, I don’t know, and it would depend on how strongly they believed in their religion and culture. It would depend on a whole slew of personal decisions that I could not deride a person for making or not making.

    In general, I think its very poor form to massively oversimplify the motives of a very large group of people. I mean, there might be some cases, if you were talking about a group like the SS, or the hutu militia in Rwanda, but we’re talking about a group whose only barrier to entry is self-identification. Catholics don’t as a prerequisite to membership have to do anything other than believe in jesus, the authority of the pope, and occasionally go to church.

    I mean, I could play the same guilt-by-assocation game and take it to the next level. Do you believe in the inherent worth of humanity? How about after we consider the thousands of years of genocide, murder, rape, pillaging, and environmental destruction carried out by humans? In other words, do the actions of some in a group damn all its supporters? I would say no, but if you want to argue something differently you can be my guest.

    tl;dr

    I think catholicism is a crock but I recognize the inherent value of treating catholics nicely and trying to use objective language in my arguments with them, rather than pulling out the genocide card. We’re here to start conversations, not piss people off or to try and degrade their sense of self worth.

  35. karak: And also, let us not forget that the mentally ill are forbidden from filtering their understanding of their illness through their religious and cultural beliefs. Only by exporting Western secular comprehension of mental illness can they be saved.

    Yes, exactly. I’m a mentally ill person who has recently turned to Christianity (Episcopalian / Anglicanism), and it has had positive effects on several aspects of my illness. It does get a bit tiresome to hear people say that, essentially, people like me are only in it because we’re too “crazy” to make that conscious and freely taken choice.

    Believe me, I did my research, considering Catholicism, Islam, and returning to Judaism. Catholicism I rejected because I feel the church hierarchy is corrupt. The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion is far from perfect, but I think it’s unfair to tar every single parishioner as complicit with evil when it’s so freakin’ difficult to remove bishops who are corrupt.

    I don’t have to like the church bureaucracy (and I don’t – frex, I think the covenant that the Archbishop of Canterbury is trying to ram through will be destructive to the communion), but that doesn’t mean that they church community is somehow to the last person utterly complicit in every wrong decision that the hierarchy makes, not when the lay leaders are doing everything in their power to fight it. I come to church for faith, for healing, and for community, not because I buy into everything the hierarchy is doing.

    1. The Catholics are discussing the phenomena of alleged demon possession within the framework of their institution, beliefs, rites, cultures, and today’s medical knowledge. Kudos to them for trying to strike a balance between the secular and the religious, and trying to meet the real needs of their followers.

      I’m distrustful of a fall-back on exorcism when not so long ago it was used to basically torture mentally ill people, or people with epilepsy. If people filter their mental illnesses through religion or demon possession or whatever, that is their prerogative. But when the church as an institution does it, it troubles me. And yes, I know the article says that individuals have to be evaluated by a mental health professional before an exorcism will be performed, but I think we all know that mental health professionals are not gods, and often overlook serious issues.

      And is no one else troubled by the idea that demons possess people who aren’t living “good spiritual lives”? Half of my family is Catholic and I’m actually not an atheist, so this isn’t a slight against religious people, but we’re talking about a church hierarchy that has throughout history been extremely sexist, anti-Semitic, racist and corrupt. And we believe that this return to exorcism is good because, I dunno, they could be trying to outlaw abortion instead? Given the full set of principles that the Catholic church leaders seem to abide by, I don’t think that this will be used for good. I think it’ll be used to impute demonic possession onto people with mental illnesses, to women who step out of religious bounds, etc etc.

  36. Jill: And is no one else troubled by the idea that demons possess people who aren’t living “good spiritual lives”?

    I am. If my parents (very involved in the Catholic church I grew up in and also used to be very involved in) gave any credence to exorcism then I can see them thinking me as a prime candidate for this.

  37. Jill,

    I think it odd only in that its getting media attention. The Church and other churches have been talking about things like addiction in terms of demonic activity for some time. Hell, I know the church *I* grew up in was extremist, but I’ve heard methodists talking in all seriousness about ADHD in terms of demonic possession. When you truly believe that there is a spiritual battle occuring on Earth between the Kingdoms of Heavan and Hell, and most USians do, it isn’t that far a leap to believe in possession.

    The good spiritual lives trope isn’t anything new or even controversial. Accusations of possession, or even demonic influence are tools of in-group coercion. Which is unfortunate, but as long as people are freely able to leave a church and we can keep the church out of politics (fat chance) it isn’t problematic. In any event its not a new development…indeed the new development is that they are empasizing non-spiritual causes at all.

  38. We can pick on American Catholics because they are perceived as being powerful, white, and male. But we don’t point out flaws in Islam because that religion is oppressed and brown. Check your privilege!

    1. We can pick on American Catholics because they are perceived as being powerful, white, and male. But we don’t point out flaws in Islam because that religion is oppressed and brown. Check your privilege!

      Um what?

  39. @Jill–

    It’s true that exorcisms have been used the past to abuse or mistreat those with physical and mental illnesses. But so has psychology and medicine. The church has a longer past in being abusive, but medical science has worked very hard to catch up in terms of cruelty and inhumanity. If we want to argue that exorcism is bad because of abusive history, then psychology gets caught under the same umbrella.

  40. Frustrated Catholic must have missed the part where several of the commenters here are former or current catholics. Obviously I’m not allowed to talk about the religion I grew up in and that both helped and hurt me in immeasurable ways.
    Privilege checked, FC!

  41. I think it depends on what it means to lead a “good spiritual life” in the first place. Different members of the clergy have different opinions on the matter – not one religious entity acts like the Borg (even if they like to pretend that they do). Is it OK to doubt, for example? Many people of all religions and confessions (and agnostics too) will say that hell yes, it’s OK to doubt – we’re human beings, it’s what we do. What about fear? Hatred? Unresolved internal conflict?

    I think the general school of though is that some people are more vulnerable to possession than others (assuming you believe in possession to begin with) – but the reasons for that vulnerability can be interpreted as wildly different.

    I’m not sure what my own stance on possession is. I’ve accompanied my mother and relatives and loved ones on journeys to various holy sites, and I’ve seen a lot of fucked-up shit. I’ve seen behaviour that still keeps me up at night. And I’ve also seen priests (I’m Russian Orthodox) counseling relatives of people who are ill – and talk specifically about mental illness and the kind of help the person might need. And I’ve seen the same priests turn around and tell someone else that they’re dealing with a case of possession in their family – or saying that possession and mental illness can go hand-in-hand. A strange woman at a monastery – I don’t know what her condition was exactly, and will probably never know – once said some things to me that gave me goosebumps, not in a good sense, and the things she said and the voice she said them in made me think long and hard about what was troubling her (at a glance, she appeared to know certain details of my biography, and tried to use them as a means of insulting and humiliating me – and we were complete strangers). So hell, I don’t know – there are more things in heaven and earth, etc….

    I have my own issues with post-traumatic stress, and I find certain religious rites and rituals to be extremely helpful when it comes to dealing with it. This path is not for everyone, but if it’s part of who you are, then it’s part of who you are.

  42. This is actually very surprising, and I say that as someone who left the Catholic Church. It’s been my understanding that exorcism was something that the Church always officially did, but kind of discouraged, and it’s not as if they just sent out priests who knew the ritual upon request–I believe they were more likely to tell you that your loved one was most likely needed professional help, medical treatment, etc. IOW, in these more enlightened times, they were savvy enough to know that there are a multitude of other factors that could cause this kind of behavior.

    It’s not like you can walk into a church and say, “Hey, my brother is acting funny/gay/shouting inappropriate things. I think he’s possessed by the devil. Can you perform an exorcism?” Years ago, yes, you could, but not anymore–this is because of the death of Anneliese Michel, a mentally ill woman whose family called in priests when she was hallucinating and exhibiting symptoms.

    Now, I don’t believe in demonic possession because I know very well that there is no such thing as the devil or demons or God. (Please, believers, don’t debate me on this–I’m not trying to convert you, show me the same courtesy). I think what the Church says is bunk and I’m quite livid with the Church over its behavior and attitudes towards women, gays, other creeds, etc. And I think the idea that living a less-than-satisfactory life means you’re asking for demonic possession is utter bullshit (and thought so even when I believed in God). But I think it’s going off the fucking deep end to dismiss people as complicit in murder and genocide for being Catholic–especially since many of them are part of oppressed communities themselves. Get the fuck off of your high horse. I’m no fan of the Catholic church (or any bit of spirituality, actually) but it’s grossly ignorant and arrogant to make these kinds of sanctimonious pronouncements about people. I’ve dealt with shit like that from religious folks (or “spiritual” people) who’ve decided that people like me are living in denial, or are really unhappy because we’re not into the god thing, or we’re lacking a moral compass, or whatever. I’m not thrilled to see that pompous bloviating coming from “my” side. Cut that shit out.

    Maybe that’s the UU influence (yes, I attend services, yes, my parish is populated by a lot of atheists like me–we like the community and the seven principles). Many people join/stay in these communities not for a “pay off” but for the community and for the fellowship.

  43. Oh, STFU.

    Seriously. There are plenty of people here defending the church, and bloggers on Feministe have pointed out the misogyny many adherents of Islam propagate. There hasn’t been much in the way of bias in that–no religion has been held as super special and above reproach among the bloggers here. Oddly enough, to many White Christians (*ahem* Frustrated Catholic) misogyny is only bad when it’s done by brown Muslims.

    That privilege? Check it yourself, cupcake.

    Frustrated Catholic: We can pick on American Catholics because they are perceived as being powerful, white, and male. But we don’t point out flaws in Islam because that religion is oppressed and brown.

  44. The dismissiveness here, and the idea that anyone who believes in possession must be lacking in all rationality, marginalizes a whole lot of people’s worldviews. Particularly, religions practiced by people of color (Santeria, Vodou, Yoruba, etc.). Particularly, some of the few surviving religions that are not invested in patriarchy and which could actually be useful to feminism.

    The belief that science has attained omniscience and objectivity is dangerous, not because the scientific method isn’t useful, but because it’s people practicing science as much as it’s people practicing religion. Science has been used to oppress people as much as any worldview.

    As someone who worked as a chaplain with a very kind and responsible priest who performed an exorcism during our work together, I can say that the ritual sometimes provides people with real comfort, and is warranted from a secular standpoint, regardless of whether one believes the religious claims. This conference could be a very good thing for priests, who really are struggling with issues of when it is responsible to perform exorcisms.

    It’s also important to remember that “The Catholic Church” is really friggin’ huge, and it’s hard to make generalizations about something that big. The lower you get in the hierarchy, the more likely you are to find really amazing people.

  45. Nahida: They never said they would be looking at only certain illnesses being possibilities.

    If they are claiming ANY ill people are possessed, they are doing a disservice to those people by not treating them. I don’t want a placebo effect for people who stigmatize mental illness. I want the people that they trust to completely de-stigmatize mental illness so that they can get help. That’s it. Anything else is horribly disrespectful to them.

    Further, don’t call anyone a “righteous atheist.” If they (we) have to put up with your proselytizing over the internet, you can put up with them saying the Catholic Church has done a bunch of really shitty things.

    PM: Yes, this. Why pick on exorcism specifically? 

    Because it denies the very real likelihood that the Church is glossing over the fact that the people they are exorcising are ill. Putting forth transubstantiation probably doesn’t mean there are people who need treatment who aren’t getting it. I believed in Santa Claus for a while, for instance, and it didn’t hurt anyone. That’s why exorcism is a big deal.

    GallingGalla:
    Yes, exactly.I’m a mentally ill person who has recently turned to Christianity (Episcopalian / Anglicanism), and it has had positive effects on several aspects of my illness.It does get a bit tiresome to hear people say that, essentially, people like me are only in it because we’re too “crazy” to make that conscious and freely taken choice.Believe me, I did my research, considering Catholicism, Islam, and returning to Judaism.Catholicism I rejected because I feel the church hierarchy is corrupt.The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion is far from perfect, but I think it’s unfair to tar every single parishioner as complicit with evil when it’s so freakin’ difficult to remove bishops who are corrupt.I don’t have to like the church bureaucracy (and I don’t – frex, I think the covenant that the Archbishop of Canterbury is trying to ram through will be destructive to the communion), but that doesn’t mean that they church community is somehow to the last person utterly complicit in every wrong decision that the hierarchy makes, not when the lay leaders are doing everything in their power to fight it.I come to church for faith, for healing, and for community, not because I buy into everything the hierarchy is doing.  

    Absolutely not what was said. If you are mentally ill and aren’t getting told that you have a demon possessing you because your church leadership needs to perpetuate a myth, GREAT. Then this isn’t about you.

  46. PrettyAmiable – Nahida hasn’t been proselytizing in this thread as far as I can see; are you accusing her of doing so elsewhere or on other threads? Or when you say “you” do you mean religious people?

  49. PrettyAmiable: you can put up with them saying the Catholic Church has done a bunch of really shitty things.

    Who said I was even denying that the Catholic Church has done really shitty things? I was CLEARLY against those who stereotyped religious people. Every time there’s a post like this there’s some insane derail about how much religion sucks. Not institutionalized religion, not even fundamentalist religion, THE WHOLE THING. From Tom Foolery’s nonsensical comment in a previous thread about how “atheism is on its way to the top” to William clumping people who perform exorcisms with those who participate in the enslavement of indigenous people.

  52. Nahida: THIS is all here. It’s the perfect conditions. So many things could have gone wrong. Our entire universe exists on a delicate balance. Something did this.  

    Proselytizing. Seriously, STFU.

  53. PrettyAmiable:
    Proselytizing. Seriously, STFU.  

    No, it’s really not. Not in isolation. It’s one person describing their belief. I left the Christian faith when I was fourteen (I was raised in it – I never actively chose it) and have never looked back. I am not interested in believing in any Christian (or Muslim or Jewish or any other organizing religion that I’ve had reasonable exposure to) faith and couldn’t bring myself to if I tried.

    But I do know that people can have beliefs that are different than mine, talk positively about those beliefs, disagree with my own beliefs, and that that in and of itself does not constitute proselytizing or an attempt to convert any more than any time any of us talks about any of our beliefs (faith-based or otherwise) there is a marginal element of advocacy in it, because, you know, we tend to believe in what we believe, strangely enough.

    If we’re going to talk about religion and faith, it’s not going to work to talk about them as evil monoliths. This thread is seriously disappointing (although thank you to everyone on both sides of faith who has stepped up to talk down the mockery).

    1. Also, notes on the rest of this thread:

      -No more telling each other to STFU. Not productive.
      -No more mocking religion broadly
      -Skepticism about religion is fine, though, and is not an attack on any individual’s personal belief system.

      Ok? Now let’s all talk like grown-ups, please.

  55. Apparently I’m not allowed to defend my own beliefs from rampant stereotyping about religious people being idiots without being accused of proselytizing. This may come as a shock to you, but I don’t give a damn about your soul–get the hell over yourself.

  56. Incidentally, this thread isn’t about your beliefs either. No one cares. What I care about is the fact that the policy of exorcism is damaging to society as a whole. Incidentally, what this post is about.

  57. And absolutely no one said, “This is what Nahida thinks.” There was no impetus for you to “defend your beliefs” because no one gives a damn, nor was anyone talking about YOUR BELIEFS.

  58. And I don’t have a fucking soul. Stop pushing your beliefs on me. I’m not telling you you don’t have a soul – that when you die, you’re just fucking dead. So STOP.

  59. When people are making mass judgments about entire belief systems, it most certainly includes me. I’m not the one who went on entire off-topic tangents of other things the Church has done. You’re just spazzing out.

  60. “What I care about is the fact that the policy of exorcism is damaging to society as a whole.”

    Based on your belief that the supernatural is not real. If this is the premise of your argument, it’s not really an argument much, is it? Just well-thought out and self-validated belief. And if someone goes, “hey, I totally disagree with your premise” they’re not trying to convert you. They’re pointing out your argument has no relevance for them.

  61. William: No, the devil only has to put forth that much effort to take in the most gullible pious of worshipers.

    That’s what I was addressing. So yeah, I find it perfectly appropriate that I should “defend my beliefs.”

  62. PrettyAmiable,

    If I got this right, your saying that American priests use the oppressed/possessed card to avoid the stigma which is associated with mental illness. You fail to realize that the stigma surrounding demonic oppression/possession is ten times worse than that of mental illness.

    Nahida I respect you for being willing to frankly talk about your experience. I too share an experience I find so difficult discussing. This topic is so taboo and stigmatized I hardly have the wherewithal to discuss an experience which shook me to my core.
    I grew up from a sensible catholic family. Today I describe myself as a recovering catholic in conversation. I hate the church for numerous reasons already listed above. I wouldn’t even say I believe in God or the devil, but what I witnessed four years ago shook me too my core. There are nights when those memories still keep me awake. I will say this, the person who experiences these bouts/episodes, whatever you wana call them would have given anything to be diagnosis with a mental illness, but every doctor she went to said they could not diagnosis or help her.

    I have more I want to discuss and share about the topic but I have a infant daughter who needs me.

  63. This started when I made a comment about over righteous atheists.

    See what over generalizations do? You had the EXACT SAME reaction I did toward William. (The generalizations began AGAINST religion, for the record.) And yet, even to this point, you can’t understand why I’m doing any of it. So of course, you just call it attempted conversion.

  64. I have to side with Nahida on this one. When you feel attacked just for who you are (also considering the level of hyperbole and insult in this thread), then of course you’re going to have an angry and impassioned response. It behooves everyone to not use language like “stfu”, to not make broad overgeneralizations about peoples and groups, and to treat people like you would in a civil face to face conversation with one of your friends. Not too hard people.

  65. The same way the mentally ill may be called possessed bodies.

    It’s SO EASY to be on the offensive isn’t it? It’s only wrong WHEN THEY DO IT!

  66. “Because it denies the very real likelihood that the Church is glossing over the fact that the people they are exorcising are ill. Putting forth transubstantiation probably doesn’t mean there are people who need treatment who aren’t getting it. I believed in Santa Claus for a while, for instance, and it didn’t hurt anyone. That’s why exorcism is a big deal.”

    Oh, that’s true. Honestly the exorcism thing doesn’t bother me that much, although it could be a problem eventually. I’m more concerned about the overwhelming childhood guilt-trip that is Catholic schooling.

    “You’re just spazzing out.”

    Maybe it’s a demon?

  67. *snorts water out of nose*

    Thank you PM, for the much needed humor break.

    In all seriousness, arguing two consenting people shouldn’t be participating in something because it might eventually be a problem is a bit of a slippery slope fallacy.

    Being skeptical about exorcisms is fine. Jumping to conclusions is completely different. We don’t know how how many people are actually decidedly put through an exorcism (are there stats on that?) in comparison to how many are misdiagnosed in medical malpractice.

    “or perhaps some pastoral care”

    If the subjects are first given medical attention, before anyone decides they’re possessed by demons, and fully qualified doctors are deciding there isn’t anything wrong in terms of psychiatry, the attention and care provided by their religious community can be emotionally healing.

    1. In all seriousness, arguing two consenting people shouldn’t be participating in something because it might eventually be a problem is a bit of a slippery slope fallacy.

      There are all kinds of things that we don’t let two people consensually engage in. Especially where there are power differentials involved. Also where one person has “God said so” on his side + a position of power, the situation is even trickier.

  68. I’m going to skip right over the statements that infer that demons and demonic possession is real, as I simply don’t agree.

    Natalia, I’m pretty sure that one thing that is considered to be part of a bad or unsatisfactory spiritual life or behavior would be pagan practices. So, for example, using Tarot cards or using a Ouija board (which I believe was originally a parlor game for courting couples in the Victorian era, but I digress) would, in this view, make one vulnerable to demonic possession. Which, when you think about it, is a really gross (and Medieval) statement about people who practice pagan faiths–that they are basically cavorting with the devil.

  69. Good point about the slippery slope fallacy. My parents are Catholic and I know a bunch of Evangelical Christian families with some strange beliefs that have noticeably stunted their kids’ development. The fucked-up-ness up those churches make me very wary when I see the Catholic Church start to look like the Evangelical churches here, even if it’s just a little bit.

  70. Nahida: Apparently I’m not allowed to defend my own beliefs from rampant stereotyping about religious people being idiots without being accused of proselytizing. This may come as a shock to you, but I don’t give a damn about your soul–get the hell over yourself.  

    No but you sure do care a lot about what their souls think of you.

  71. Nahida: “or perhaps some pastoral care”If the subjects are first given medical attention, before anyone decides they’re possessed by demons, and fully qualified doctors are deciding there isn’t anything wrong in terms of psychiatry, the attention and care provided by their religious community can be emotionally healing.  

    Outside of a placebo effect there is nothing tangible that a religious community can provide that psychiatrists, and doctors can not. Saying that their MIGHT be spiritual effects, or their MIGHT be demons, or whatever MIGHTs there may be is a fruitless exercise. There MIGHT be an invisible unicorn peeing love beams on you right now. Everything that is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

  72. Well, with power differentials I suppose “consenting” in a lot of cases wouldn’t really be consenting. So I will correct myself on that. But that’s just it isn’t it? It’s tricky. The only thing I really have a problem with is it all being oversimplified–whether in assuming that all clergy will abuse their power or that all exorcisms are necessary. I don’t like extremes, and unless we have loads more information on this, I can’t see it coming to any conclusion I would find solid.

    1. Nahida, I agree — it is a really tricky situation. And I’m not suggesting that exorcism should be illegal or that it serves no purpose ever. Just that, it has been historically badly abused, and my antennae go up when the church is targeting people who the church believes are living “bad spiritual lives,” and when the church sees inroads to be made into communities of color by promoting exorcism, because African and Latino Catholics are so much more in touch with the spirits. Surely not every clergyman will abuse his power, and surely not ever exorcism is necessary, but there are historical precedents and modern problems with the church as an institution that give me serious pause.

  73. Andy, I wasn’t referring to exorcisms, as I did not believe “pastoral care” was referring to them. Communities can provide lots of things. There’s an awful lot of helpful support that comes from being around family and friends.

    And we were past that. Considering the reaction, I would say that so do they. Hypocrites.

  74. Jill, I completely understand and agree. If it weren’t for the blatant biases and insulting broad generalizations I had occupied myself with addressing, I would have expressed my concerns for the outcomes based on the history of how damaging forcing exorcisms has been. Being wary is perfectly called for, but I do believe there’s a chance that power will not be abused.

  75. Andy: Outside of a placebo effect there is nothing tangible that a religious community can provide that psychiatrists, and doctors can not. Saying that their MIGHT be spiritual effects, or their MIGHT be demons, or whatever MIGHTs there may be is a fruitless exercise

    mm, no. There was recently an article in the NYT’s (i think) about how mentally ill people in arab communities that consider what is actually schizophrenia to be a type of possession to fair better than most people with schizophrenia in the western world. by a lot. Because people in the arab world consider possession to be something that is not the person’s fault. And so they keep the person in their family instead of institutionalizing them and use family networks to help care for that person when he or she is sick.

    western medicine imposing itself on these communities have had devastating effects on the mentally ill. including (ironically) a stigma of individuals and destroying the networks that mentally ill people so desperately need to function at the highest capacity.

  76. I can’t find the article I was referring to in comment 80–but here is a different one on the integration of traditional Hmong shamanistic practices with western medicine. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/us/20shaman.html?_r=1

    A turning point in the skepticism of staff members occurred a decade ago, when a major Hmong clan leader was hospitalized here with a gangrenous bowel. Dr. Jim McDiarmid, a clinical psychologist and director of the residency program, said that in deference hundreds of well-wishers, a shaman was allowed to perform rituals, including placing a long sword at the door to ward off evil spirits. The man miraculously recovered. “That made a big impression, especially on the residents,” Dr. McDiarmid said.

  77. bfp:
    mm, no. There was recently an article in the NYT’s (i think) about how mentally ill people in arab communities that consider what is actually schizophrenia to be a type of possession to fair better than most people with schizophrenia in the western world. by a lot. Because people in the arab world consider possession to be something that is not the person’s fault. And so they keep the person in their family instead of institutionalizing them and use family networks to help care for that person when he or she is sick.
      

    I never said western medicine was perfect or couldn’t learn a thing or two, but the issue you are talking about here has nothing to do with religion, but the type of care given. Again allowing sick people to be treated at home in loving care is not something that needs to be done under a religious framework. So let’s ditch the spiritual woo that religion will unnecessarily inject into it.

    Also I would love to see a controlled study on treating gangrene with western medicine vs shamans. Until then I will gladly say the swords and shamans had absolutely ZERO to do with the healing of his wound.

  78. Just dropping in quickly to recommend the wonderful, controversial M. Scott Peck’s famous “People of the Lie”. He came to scoff at exorcism and a spiritual dimension of evil — and changed his mind. It’s dated, but still I think his most influential and powerful book. I heard him speak at Fuller Seminary once, extraordinary.

  79. so sorry to keep posting links, but I am still trying to find that article–again, I didn’t find it. But here is a different article which is based on the sam WHO study and deals with the same themes–mental health can have positive outcomes based on “unicorn peeing” shit like spiritual beliefs and religious community.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/26/AR2005062601091.html

    i’m not saying every single case of religious intervention in mental health issues is positive. and I am incredibly suspect of the catholic church on these matters because i’ve known cases of abused children being killed by exorcism type interventions.

    but I don’t believe that writing western medicine as “sane” and “rational” and everything else as unicorn peeing is justifiable either–and many many conventional doctors and health organizations agree.

  81. bfp:
    but I don’t believe that writing western medicine as “sane” and “rational” and everything else as unicorn peeing is justifiable either–and many many conventional doctors and health organizations agree.  

    Look, I don’t think that western medicine is perfect, it’s not. There’s always something we can better understand, and something we could be doing better.

    HOWEVER, it is based on a system that allows us to verify its claims, and demands evidence and explanation. Until magical swords make any more logical sense then peeing unicorns they don’t deserve anymore respect.

    You know what they call alternative medicine that works? Medicine.

  82. Hugo, Peck was basically describing (at least in some instances) psychopaths and narcissists. He seemed to infer that the only way to live a good, mentally healthy life was to be spiritual. That’s pretty offensive.

    /derail

  83. Andy: Also I would love to see a controlled study on treating gangrene with western medicine vs shamans. Until then I will gladly say the swords and shamans had absolutely ZERO to do with the healing of his wound.  

    How about they can work together? as somebody who has done extensive work around community acupuncture clinics as a patient and as a worker, and who has been successfully treated for “excess wind” by acupuncturists after years of misery in the western medical system–i just don’t agree that there is only one true solution and it is the sane world of doctors and western medicine.

    I don’t think that ONLY swords healed that man–but there have been *numerous* controlled studies about the power of prayer on chronically sick people. If somebody wants to be prayed over while getting chemo treatments–why on earth should that be a problem? (and btw, you did see that he received many ritual*S* *including* the sword AND he was in the hospital which assumes he was receiving western medical treatment as well?)

    also, why is it always westerners that get to decide what is “woo” and what isn’t? “possession” doesn’t mean rotating head throwing up green puke in most traditional cultures. in my culture, it can mean a stickiness of energy that makes you not yourself. it can even mean something good.

    the blocking of energy in the body is something even western medicine agrees happens. So–why does my culture, that calls it locurias, get to be unicorn peeing woo–and your culture, that calls it schizophrenia, get to be “treatment”?

  84. Look, BFP, you are completely overlooking my points. I don’t think that only westerners should decide these things, in fact there are many researchers of many races (modern medicine is a better word), but I think our medicine should follow a scientific process. There is no room in this for spiritual woo.

    I would love to see you link me to these studies. The only ones I know of are of tiny subject groups in non blind situations performed by people profiting from selling “alternative” methods.

    I’d also like to see where modern medicine agrees on this blocking of energy that you refer to.

    If your cultures treatment of mental disorders can not explain in a scientific manner why it is an effective treatment, then yes it should be treated as unicorn-peeing woo.

  85. Ashley: The dismissiveness here, and the idea that anyone who believes in possession must be lacking in all rationality, marginalizes a whole lot of people’s worldviews.Particularly, religions practiced by people of color (Santeria, Vodou, Yoruba, etc.).Particularly, some of the few surviving religions that are not invested in patriarchy and which could actually be useful to feminism.

    I’ll have to admit that as a Catholic I am somewhat biased on the issue of whether or not a reasonable person can believe in supernatural entities. I would like to reinforce what Ashley said about marginalizing world views, especially of peoples who either are currently marginalized or who were historically marginalized. When you consider that the Catholic Church is considerably more diverse than the United States as a whole, I find it a little hard to believe that as someone else here said, that the Catholic Church is cynically taking the opportunity to make inroads on communities of color. At this time, for example, roughly 1/3 of the Church is Hispanic or Latino. 68% of Hispanics are Catholic; how many more people could the most cynical person really expect would be converted because of an increased promotion of exorcisms? As opposed to, you know, the more normal routes to conversion–having been raised by lapsed Catholic parents who took them to mass occasionally and deciding that they want to formalize it, falling in love with someone who’s Catholic and deciding that that’s what faith they want to raise their kids in, a religious experience … Let’s just be realistic here. I feel like this is a straw tactic.

    Before anyone asks, the majority of converts I know did come from one of the three categories. I think that those are all pretty standard reasons for people to formally convert.

  86. “HOWEVER, it is based on a system that allows us to verify its claims, and demands evidence and explanation.”

    Like ice baths and Freudian psychology and the thorazine shuffle and lobotomies and rebirth therapy and hysterical wombs?

    Science is just as subject to fads and prejudices as any other system. It’s surprisingly resistent to change, and statistical results are easily twisted to come to conclusions that are questionable or even false. Not to mention the lack of representation on behalf of those who are subject to science–the poor, the mentally ill, people of color, people from cultures that are different from the majority.

    I mean, for how many years did they “prove” women were intellectually inferior to men? And that black people were intellectual inferior to white people? And that fat is the number one killer of apparently everything good in this world?

    I’m not bagging on your for trusting science–that’s a perfectly logical proposition. But science has some serious issues.

  87. and at least lets be honest here. Medicine? You mean like the medicine of electro shock therapy? or the medicine of jamming an ice pick into the brain cavity of somebody deemed “sick”? Or how about the use of the prison system as a primary site of mental health treatment? Or how about the way “will power” and “go for a walk” were presented as legitimate options to a woman so sick she killed her five children?

    These are not “things we still have to learn.” This is a sane and rational system deciding some profoundly frightening things in a perfectly sane way about “crazy” people.

    And we can dismiss the religosity behind third world treatment of schizophrenia and other mental health issues (i.e oh, it’s *community* NOT religion!!!)–but the fact of the matter is that a diagnosis of *possession* brought about that positive treatment that brings better results than western medicine can not replicate.

    How is western medicine supposed to “learn things” that it hasn’t learned when it so casual dismisses other systems of health with blanket (many times false) understandings of those systems of health (i.e. demonic possession is turning head throw up puke and unicorn pee)?

  88. Completely agree with BFP here. And Sheelzebub, that’s not quite a clear representation of Peck’s work. He was arguing that for many (not all) spirituality was an essential path for recovery, that faith could go where Western psychology simply couldn’t. Whether that meant demonic possession was real or not was almost besides the point — faith (and its attendant practices) was often the only thing that worked. It was about efficacy, not theology.

  89. <And is no one else troubled by the idea that demons possess people who aren’t living “good spiritual lives”? Half of my family is Catholic and I’m actually not an atheist, so this isn’t a slight against religious people, but we’re talking about a church hierarchy that has throughout history been extremely sexist, anti-Semitic, racist and corrupt. And we believe that this return to exorcism is good because, I dunno, they could be trying to outlaw abortion instead? Given the full set of principles that the Catholic church leaders seem to abide by, I don’t think that this will be used for good. I think it’ll be used to impute demonic possession onto people with mental illnesses, to women who step out of religious bounds, etc etc.

    I am. When I got angry, my mother would insist I was possessed. She wouldn’t allow that I had any right to be angry about anything, so of course something was wrong with me.

  90. bfp: How about they can work together? as somebody who has done extensive work around community acupuncture clinics as a patient and as a worker, and who has been successfully treated for “excess wind” by acupuncturists after years of misery in the western medical system–i just don’t agree that there is only one true solution and it is the sane world of doctors and western medicine.
    I don’t think that ONLY swords healed that man–but there have been *numerous* controlled studies about the power of prayer on chronically sick people. If somebody wants to be prayed over while getting chemo treatments–why on earth should that be a problem? (and btw, you did see that he received many ritual*S* *including* the sword AND he was in the hospital which assumes he was receiving western medical treatment as well?)
    also, why is it always westerners that get to decide what is “woo” and what isn’t? “possession” doesn’t mean rotating head throwing up green puke in most traditional cultures. in my culture, it can mean a stickiness of energy that makes you not yourself. it can even mean something good.
    the blocking of energy in the body is something even western medicine agrees happens. So–why does my culture, that calls it locurias, get to be unicorn peeing woo–and your culture, that calls it schizophrenia, get to be “treatment”?  

    Woah woah woah. Ok. I accept that in some cultures, there are some “traditional” forms of medicinal practices that are common. However, the idea of energy blocking as you have so described it is nothing more than pseudoscience. For one, what are we even calling “energy” in this case? The traditional scientific definition, referring to kinetic or electromagnetic energy? Are you talking about heat buildups in the body (like heatstroke and overheating?). I’d like to point out that while I accept that some cultures have differing rituals and symbolism associated with treating the sick, many of them are unscientific or pseudo scientific and date from a period of time when people knew nothing about human anatomy or biology. I’d like to say that I still respect people who believe in that type of thing, but I can in no way justify what you’re saying or what they’re saying.

    There have been no widely accepted double-blind studies to date that have shown the curative power of prayer. Moreover, there is no known mechanism by which prayer would even work to heal the myriad of diseases and problems that it would supposedly cure. Acupuncture is more complicated because I honestly don’t know how the body would respond to being stimulated with needles like that, but needless to say that any ills you cure that way will not be by removing harmful energy buildups, whatever that is supposed to mean.

    Locurias? In the context of your cultural belief, what does that label mean? I obviously wouldn’t call it unicorn peeing unless it had an unscientific basis to it. I also trust the current definition of schizophrenia to the extent that I do because it is grounded in certain principles about neuroscience and biology and observable facts about patients who have a similar set of symptoms.

  91. BFP, do you ignore everything I type? I never said modern medicine does or has gotten everything right. What I have said is that it provides a framework for which we can verify in a tangible, observable manner of the claims being made.

    If your alternative treatments are valid they will stand up when tested under these standards.

    You get so outraged when asked that your “alternative” means be verified. Sorry, until they are they still do not deserve respect. Don’t like it? Too bad. Humanity does not deserve mystical woo just because it MIGHT work.

  92. bfp:
    and at least lets be honest here. Medicine? You mean like the medicine of electro shock therapy? or the medicine of jamming an ice pick into the brain cavity of somebody deemed “sick”? Or how about the use of the prison system as a primary site of mental health treatment? Or how about the way “will power” and “go for a walk” were presented as legitimate options to a woman so sick she killed her five children?
    These are not “things we still have to learn.” This is a sane and rational system deciding some profoundly frightening things in a perfectly sane way about “crazy” people.
    And we can dismiss the religosity behind third world treatment of schizophrenia and other mental health issues (i.e oh, it’s *community* NOT religion!!!)–but the fact of the matter is that a diagnosis of *possession* brought about that positive treatment that brings better results than western medicine can not replicate.
    How is western medicine supposed to “learn things” that it hasn’t learned when it so casual dismisses other systems of health with blanket (many times false) understandings of those systems of health (i.e. demonic possession is turning head throw up puke and unicorn pee)?  

    So you take unethical science and portray it as the work of the entire scientific community. I could do the same thing with religion, but it would probably look a lot like what some other people have already done in posts on this thread. Again, it would do people a lot of good to leave issues of murder and atrocity out of a discussion when they’re casually talking about anything.

    My entire point is that people’s ideas should be evaluated on the basis of the strength and importance of the idea alone. I don’t care about distinctions of western medicine or eastern medicine or anything else, but I do think that it is somewhat incredible to argue that systematic and scientific methods of treating people are exactly equal to other traditional unscientific methods. Granted, there are some things in traditional medicine that DO work, but these should be studied closely and the reason why they work should be discovered so that we aren’t left with bad explanations and bad science for them.

  93. karak: I mean, for how many years did they “prove” women were intellectually inferior to men? And that black people were intellectual inferior to white people? And that fat is the number one killer of apparently everything good in this world?
    I’m not bagging on your for trusting science–that’s a perfectly logical proposition. But science has some serious issues.

    IMO there’s a fairly important distinction that needs to be made between science (as a system) and the scientific community. The problems you bring up are with the scientific community (which is made up of humans, who bring their own biases and blindnesses and privileges), not science itself as a framework. Things like “proof” that women were intellectually inferior to men are generally examples of science being done _badly_. These scientists were able to get away with bad science because the rest of the scientific community let them. We now recognize that sort of thing as being, well, bad science.

    As for fat being the #1 killer of everything, I think that’s a pretty classic example of bad science _reporting_.

  94. Odin: We now recognize that sort of thing as being, well, bad science.

    Yeah, but a lot of bad science still happens, some due to bias and prejudice, and some due to sheer frackin’ ignorance (some statistical “manipulations”* happen when people screw up their statistical procedures, find something significant as a result, and everyone is so excited by the significant finding they don’t look too closely at the procedure and methods – IT HAPPENS). I don’t think it should be underestimated how much pressure there is on scientists, especially young and up-and-coming scientists, to produce results, get published, stay current, etc. Yeah, they train us in ethics, they instill in us a sense of scientific honourability, but at the end of the day, the actual practice of the scientific method is still highly fallible for all the very human reasons that impact everything we homo sapiens do.

    *Manipulation means something very specific and non-perjorative in terms of actual stats and experimentation, but I’m using it here in its colloquial, negative sense because I think that’s what will resonant with most participants in this thread.

  95. Just to back up my previous comment with a bit of context (in this case in terms of medical research, which I know is taken a lot more seriously in most cases than my area of social science research): an article on incredibly high rates of error in terms of published scientific findings, complete with excellent follow-up links.

    Shorter: please stop saying science is automatically better than religion when you are conflating theory and practice. In theory, both can be totally amazing. In practice, both have serious flaws.

  96. Andy: If your cultures treatment of mental disorders can not explain in a scientific manner why it is an effective treatment, then yes it should be treated as unicorn-peeing woo. Andy

    Dude, do you *not* see how racist this attitude is?

  97. Jadey- Word. I’m a chemist, and the theme of our last group meeting was “Don’t believe everything you read in JACS*”. Science is a process. People engage in the scientific process. However, people are fallible, even without the pressure to get positive results and publications.

    *the Journal of the American Chemical Society, one of the more prestigious chemistry journals.

  98. Re: Science…

    Please see the dozens of other threads where the scientific method has been debunked as a source of absolute truth. We just had that convo a few weeks ago and its boring already.

    Science can identify things that are useful…but it has severe biases in method that cause it to lag. If someone *believes* that X makes them feel better. If their experience is that with X, they are more functional, more happy, more themselves, then you tell me what difference does it make whether X is vicodin or faith?

    What many people of science fail to grasp is that so far psychology is not a coherent, reductable science. It cannot (yet?) fully explain *why*. Too much is unknown and while we are busy putting together pieces from our western centric view people suffer. If something eases that suffering, then awesome…if science has something else to offer that also eases suffering…awesome. Present all options and let a person choose their comfort without recrimination.

  99. David: I’d like to point out that while I accept that some cultures have differing rituals and symbolism associated with treating the sick, many of them are unscientific or pseudo scientific and date from a period of time when people knew nothing about human anatomy or biology. I’d like to say that I still respect people who believe in that type of thing, but I can in no way justify what you’re saying or what they’re saying.

    you’re kidding, right? *who* exactly, are these people who knew nothing about human anatomy or biology? the europeans who were carving holes into people’s skulls to relieve headaches? yeah, I’ll give you that. If you’re talking about chinese people (who have had a functioning health methodology which included nuanced understandings of human anatomy for thousands of years) or indian people (same thing) or native peoples (same thing)….well, I’m sorry but I have to disagree.

    Native women had healthy, safe, reliable methods of birth control since before europeans showed up. Okinawans have been studied by numerous westerners who all agree that their spiritual practices are an intricate part of their longevity and health. Acupuncture as a reliable treatment method for everything from back pain to nausea is consistently found to be effective. And irony of irony, one of the biggest battles for native peoples is the theft through medical patents of everything from their traditional plants to their diabetes immune genes. It’s “woo” until it’s patented by scientists, I guess.

    What I wonder is what “data” and “studies” and “proof” does science have that justifies the continued medicalization of transness? what study proved that gayness was disease? what study proved it wasn’t? What study was so stable and reliable and grounded in biology and nueroscience that black men are diagnosed with schizophrenia four to five times more than any other ethnic group?

    I don’t think a magic sword is going to cure anything. And I don’t think that “removing harmful energy build ups” (which demonstrates, again, a basic misunderstanding of the methodology each group is working with) will cure everything. I asked very clearly up top–why can’t there be an *integrated* approach to medicine in the west that demonstrates at least some awareness of the west’s own history of tragic lack of understanding of the bodies and minds of all human beings regardless of their race?–or, put in a more positive way–sometimes treating people as a part of a whole within a community framework way may actually be more cost effective, humane, healthy, and even medically effective than reducing them to measurable data.

    Why does there always seem to be a big scary woowoo fear of the harm that beliefs driven by native spirituality could do to innocent people (i.e. how many times do we hear stories and tsk tsk and shake our heads at the scary general “african” ripping the face off of some poor innocent soul who only had depression all in the name of witchcraft?) while the terror that medical professions have inflicted on my community in the past (hmmm…let’s see what happens if we inject all the dirty spics with gonorrhea!) and present (let’s talk about how many of my friends and family members have been institutionalized (where for the record, they were held in solitary confinement, held down and beat up by nurses, and overmedicated as treatment, among other things) for “being crazy”) is poo poo’ed as “bad science” and now we know better!

    I think the catholic church is very capable of violating people through exorcism practices. It has already violated people–and those people have usually been children in abusive situations where parents are attempting to exert control and power over the child. But that doesn’t mean that there is no relevance whatsoever between spirituality and health. And I think it’s extraordinarily dangerous to suggest that western science is the right way until proven otherwise when in many cases that’s just not so. demonstrably scientifically not so.

  100. karak: “HOWEVER, it is based on a system that allows us to verify its claims, and demands evidence and explanation.”

    Like ice baths and Freudian psychology and the thorazine shuffle and lobotomies and rebirth therapy and hysterical wombs?

    Not to mention that one can electrically shock away Teh Gay or Teh Trans. I mean, the cis medical establishment’s gatekeeping of trans people (for example, the WPATH guidelines, which until very recently DEMANDED that the trans person be heterosexual after transition, and STILL DEMANDS that trans folk identify as a binary gender to receive medical treatment) is based very very little on evidential science and very very much on the fears and bigotries of cis medical gatekeepers.

    Oh, and also: I did the Haldol shuffle, which is awfully freakin’ close to the Thorazine shuffle. Believe me, I was given Haldol strictly as a convenience to the hospital staff, because it didn’t do a damned thing to help me. Haldol very frequently causes a side-effect known as akathesia, which I got in spades. I hardly consider this evidence-based medicine. Their actions objectively *harmed* me.

    Now, should I go ahead and paint medicine with as broad a brush as folks here are painting religious belief, and say that medicine is utterly useless and is nothing more than unicorn pee?

  101. Virgin birth? Sure. Transubstantiation? Of course. Demonic possession in 2010? That’s just crazy talk. Lindsay Beyerstein

    Ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaa

  102. Andy: You get so outraged when asked that your “alternative” means be verified. Sorry, until they are they still do not deserve respect. Don’t like it? Too bad. Humanity does not deserve mystical woo just because it MIGHT work.  

    I’m not actually outraged. Thanks.

    re: Humanity–actually–I’d rather be declared in official possession of the fucking devil from Dante’s hell in a community that is going to respect me, take care of me, and work with me on a treatment plan than be shown the “humanity” official science has reigned down on my friends and family who have gone through the horror of being institutionalized.

  103. @ Shoshie,

    Yeah, on re-reading I wish I had been more clear that the pressure can contribute to more errors being made (and a certain amount of human error will happen regardless) and not that the pressure leads to deliberate falsification of results or anything like that. I don’t know how many researchers could psychologically withstand the pain of living with utterly fabricated results unless they were completely apathetic about science! Or just that more interested in fame and glory, but seriously there are much better ways to make a living in that case. 😉

  104. Exorcism? Haha.
    It makes me wanna round up a bunch of secular people with hemorrhoids so I can scream at them. In turn. Each for an allotted five minutes, taking time out to maybe play air guitar and twiddle their nipples with my feet. Perhaps I’ll wear kitten face paint…
    Then I’ll ask about how their hemorrhoids feel after “treatment” and they’ll say something along the lines of “They’re still bloody here you fraudulent mad woman! Piss off before I call the cops!”
    And then I can say “Nahaaaa…but for those five minutes you were so bemused/irritated/angry that you slightly forgot about those hemorrhoids. Now pay me a fiver and I’ll donate it to a charity of my choice.”
    That is all batshit crazy but there will be rational people forced to admit that yes, distraction from the actual real problem worked for a bit there. If it had somehow become a religious practice, the rational ones would still be saying it’s batshit crazy but kinda works only this time there’d be hordes of folks threatening to metaphorically kick their heads in for disrespecting said batshit crazy belief.
    It annoys me that if you want to get away with doing something stupid, cruel or downright mad in ,ahem, “this western society” then the best way of going about is by sheltering behind a religion. (Second best way is possibly as performance art but I digress…).
    (Also, electricity had been around for what, 5 minutes before people started using it in medicine. They were still learning and frankly, if there’s a terrified, screaming woman who, under so-basic-it’s-torture electric shock treatment continues to scream in pain until she can utter no more, it’s gonna look a lot like a cause and effect type of positive result. She stopped screaming after all…Result stayed until they do actually learn better.As it continues..)
    Anyway, teaching priests to recognize a person who’s symptoms can be actually treated can’t be a bad thing. I was almost shocked at how forward thinking they (the men that took 300+ years to formally accept the earth’s not being the centre of the universe) were being until the bit on the end about “good spiritual” people. Oh well.

  105. Andy, you’re falling into mansplaining territory, with a generous helping of “because I think it’s so, that’s why.”

    And David? Remember that “unethical” science used to be considered mainstream.

  106. Jadey:
    Just to back up my previous comment with a bit of context (in this case in terms of medical research, which I know is taken a lot more seriously in most cases than my area of social science research): an article on incredibly high rates of error in terms of published scientific findings, complete with excellent follow-up links.
    Shorter: please stop saying science is automatically better than religion when you are conflating theory and practice. In theory, both can be totally amazing. In practice, both have serious flaws.  

    Better than religion in what way? Religion is designed for one thing, science for another. If we were to say that science is better at making factual claims about observable medical or physical phenomena then that would be correct. If we were to say that religion is designed to meet the spiritual and life needs of people- of answering questions that our outside the scope of science (i.e., what is the meaning of life) then religion is objectively better at that. If you’re saying that not taking a rational approach to medicine is a good idea in some cases, I would have to disagree with you.

  107. @ David

    Except that medical and well-being concerns are not exclusively the provenance of classical “science”, despite efforts on the part of some researchers to colonize them as such. There is in fact ample scientific evidence* supporting the value of a holistic approach to well-being which includes consideration of all relevant factors which include such “irrational” factors as emotion, social support, faith, etc., in which case rejecting the role of a patient’s faith is perilously short-sighted and, dare I say, irrational. (No, seriously, the rationality-emotionality false dichotomy is tiresome.)

    When one’s interest is exclusively in doing science, then the scientific method is obviously the most appropriate. However, most real world applications are not exclusively interested in the singular perspective of scientific knowing. Hell, at a governance and policy level, science often makes very little headway at all, sometimes because of political indifference or antipathy, but also because frequently the type and manner of information that science produces is simply useless at a practical level.

    I am not arguing that the scientific approach is valueless in the medical field (it surely isn’t), merely that it doesn’t have (or need) hierarchical preference because of perceived superiority in its theoretical structure as opposed to its practical utility and results (which are many).

    In terms of comparing science and religion as different epistemologies, or different theories of knowing, which is what some commenters have been talking about, it’s important to acknowledge the shortcomings of both as well as recognize that they are not inherently incompatible. Many people comfortably hold both faith-oriented perspectives and science-oriented perspectives.

    *I am referencing scientific evidence because I assume that is what you, and many others, are most interested in, not because I am hypocritically assume that it is the most prioritized and most important kind of evidence for everyone.

  108. bfp: you’re kidding, right? *who* exactly, are these people who knew nothing about human anatomy or biology? the europeans who were carving holes into people’s skulls to relieve headaches? yeah, I’ll give you that. If you’re talking about chinese people (who have had a functioning health methodology which included nuanced understandings of human anatomy for thousands of years) or indian people (same thing) or native peoples (same thing)….well, I’m sorry but I have to disagree.
    Native women had healthy, safe, reliable methods of birth control since before europeans showed up. Okinawans have been studied by numerous westerners who all agree that their spiritual practices are an intricate part of their longevity and health. Acupuncture as a reliable treatment method for everything from back pain to nausea is consistently found to be effective. And irony of irony, one of the biggest battles for native peoples is the theft through medical patents of everything from their traditional plants to their diabetes immune genes. It’s “woo” until it’s patented by scientists, I guess.
    What I wonder is what “data” and “studies” and “proof” does science have that justifies the continued medicalization of transness? what study proved that gayness was disease? what study proved it wasn’t? What study was so stable and reliable and grounded in biology and nueroscience that black men are diagnosed with schizophrenia four to five times more than any other ethnic group?
    I don’t think a magic sword is going to cure anything. And I don’t think that “removing harmful energy build ups” (which demonstrates, again, a basic misunderstanding of the methodology each group is working with) will cure everything. I asked very clearly up top–why can’t there be an *integrated* approach to medicine in the west that demonstrates at least some awareness of the west’s own history of tragic lack of understanding of the bodies and minds of all human beings regardless of their race?–or, put in a more positive way–sometimes treating people as a part of a whole within a community framework way may actually be more cost effective, humane, healthy, and even medically effective than reducing them to measurable data.
    Why does there always seem to be a big scary woowoo fear of the harm that beliefs driven by native spirituality could do to innocent people (i.e. how many times do we hear stories and tsk tsk and shake our heads at the scary general “african” ripping the face off of some poor innocent soul who only had depression all in the name of witchcraft?) while the terror that medical professions have inflicted on my community in the past (hmmm…let’s see what happens if we inject all the dirty spics with gonorrhea!) and present (let’s talk about how many of my friends and family members have been institutionalized (where for the record, they were held in solitary confinement, held down and beat up by nurses, and overmedicated as treatment, among other things) for “being crazy”) is poo poo’ed as “bad science” and now we know better!
    I think the catholic church is very capable of violating people through exorcism practices. It has already violated people–and those people have usually been children in abusive situations where parents are attempting to exert control and power over the child. But that doesn’t mean that there is no relevance whatsoever between spirituality and health. And I think it’s extraordinarily dangerous to suggest that western science is the right way until proven otherwise when in many cases that’s just not so. demonstrably scientifically not so.  

    It seems to me that we’re arguing with different terms. When you say western science you mean all western scientific and pseudoscientific practices . When you refer to indigenous medical tradition, you’re referring to any non-western scientific or nonscientific practice. What I thought you were referring to with western science was the modern, science based approach that the current mainstream medical community takes toward the treatment of diseases and disorders. What I thought you were referring to with indigenous and traditional medicine practices was ANY practice that has a traditional following and is not strictly grounded in the scientific method.

    You thought that I was saying that the western approach was better than other approaches when it comes to medicine. My argument was that the scientific approach, is superior to nonscientific approaches when it comes to medicine (not that the west is superior). Does that clarify things a bit? There are plenty of treatment methods in nonwestern communities that have been beneficial to the health and wellfare of the patient. Moreover, plenty of nonwestern scholars have taken educated and scientific approaches to studying anatomy, medicine and biology. I was saying that you were better off visiting a licensed M.D. in any country for a medical condition than the shaman of the type who would simply give a placebo cure to a condition.

  109. Again, in short: in applied fields, of which the medical field is one, a multiplicity of approaches is better than a paucity of them.

  110. tinfoil hattie:
    Andy, you’re falling into mansplaining territory, with a generous helping of “because I think it’s so, that’s why.”
    And David?Remember that “unethical” science used to be considered mainstream.  

    Tinfoil hattie it might be a good idea to point to why someone is mansplaining rather than stating that someone is lest other people accuse you of also mansplaining.

  111. Jadey:
    Again, in short: in applied fields, of which the medical field is one, a multiplicity of approaches is better than a paucity of them.  

    Jadey, I have no disagreement with the idea that faith and a support group aren’t as important as the medical treatment itself.(In terms of giving the patient hope and mental wellbeing) We are in absolute agreement there. My entire point was countering what I perceived as the notion that a faith based perspective can be as effective when it replaces a science based form of medical treatment.

  112. David, I don’t believe anyone feels that faith based perspective can be as effective as a replacement.

    I actually managed to agree with bfp, Jadey, and David without any real conflict. They were all really good points, and I felt that they all reinforced Kristen’s point that options should be open to the specific needs of the individual.

    I don’t think either one is as effective when it replaces the other, even if religion wasn’t in the picture. Non-religious people still find comfort from support groups.

    work in progress I must say that hemorrhoids is an improvement from the original standard image of puke and unicorn pee. And I had no idea what you were talking about with the performance arts but it was still hilarious.

    I felt like this should have been asked a long time ago: What actually happens in a Catholic exorcism? I’m not Catholic but the kind I’m familiar with doesn’t really involve screaming or flashy things. The way some of the comments read it sounds harmful.

    We just lie the person down on a bed and recite stuff. They can still take medicine. I always saw exorcisms as complimentary.

  113. @ Jadey,
    I didn’t mean to say that different bad science isn’t happening today. I was addressing the historical examples of bad science that had been brought up.

    I have little sympathy for people in lab sciences who cook their results because of the publish or perish pressure, because my discipline has the same pressures to produce results and publish, but we can’t hide things in a methodology section and hope no one reads it. /derail

    bfp:
    while the terror that medical professions have inflicted on my community in the past (hmmm…let’s see what happens if we inject all the dirty spics with gonorrhea!) and present (let’s talk about how many of my friends and family members have been institutionalized (where for the record, they were held in solitary confinement, held down and beat up by nurses, and overmedicated as treatment, among other things) for “being crazy”) is poo poo’ed as “bad science” and now we know better!

    Hey, now. There’s a huge difference between saying “that was bad science” and “that was bad science but there was totally nothing else ethically wrong with it.”

    (As for the questions you raise about mental health diagnostic criterion, well, too often psychology fails to be sufficiently rigorous to actually be science. I know this looks like a dodge, but it’s the truth, and it’s a serious problem. It’s also why we get so much bullshit out of the Freud and evo psych crowds.)

    It’s clear that you disagree with me about whether or not we should separate scientists (who are human and, gasp, can be bigoted or dishonest or worse), and science as a way of approaching the world. Okay, fine, we disagree. Although, I’m not sure how you can reconcile that with your championing of acupuncture as effective and reliable — those words don’t _mean_ anything unless we collect data.

  114. The physical effects of hope and support should not be underestimated – emotional and physical conditions are not distinct. Perhaps this can be better understood when considering the flipside of stress, which is an emotional, physiological state (all emotional states are also physiological states and vice versa), and which is among the most physically detrimental. It has a strong direct link with all kinds of medical outcomes, including resilience and susceptibility to infection. There are all kinds of reasons supported mutually by scientific and faith-based reasoning for why reducing stress can have dramatic positive consequences for well-being, and both science and faith have suggested valid treatments for addressing issues of stress.

    Again, I am not arguing that faith is infallible or all-important or anymore superior than science is. I am trying to get at the problem of overly dichotomizing these two perspectives or attributing inherent superiority to one over the other in an applied context. Particularly where a person or group rejects a science-based approached (and especially in the case where the scientific perspective has previously been used in a harmful and damaging way), then it has no or very little utility at all compared to an accepted faith-based approach. And vice versa – I derive no satisfaction, support, or personal improvement from being prayed over when I am ill. I imagine it would especially be the case if my previous experience with prayer had been harmful or traumatic – then the consequences might very reasonably be even more negative than no treatment at all.

  115. Odin: Although, I’m not sure how you can reconcile that with your championing of acupuncture as effective and reliable — those words don’t _mean_ anything unless we collect data. 

    why not? because 2500 years of practice and a chinese based methodology of understanding the practice aren’t good enough? why aren’t they good enough?

  116. LOL about how Jill wrote 39 words and there’s a 120-comment-and-counting fight happening about it.

    No, I did not have anything useful or relevant to add to the discussion.

  117. As an aside, I wanted to note that I keep using the word “science” very generally (as I am also using the word “religion” very generally) and while in this case the “science” I am referencing is an Enlightenment-derived and developed Western notion of science, I must recognize that there are other scientific perspectives developed and derived in other contexts, including those that predate, exist independently of, and also have contributed to the Western conceptualization, and of whose existence I am aware of but still largely ignorant about – my erasure is problematic and undermines the strength of my points, and I will be more explicit in the future that I am only talking about “Westernized” science (still not sure “Westernized” is the best choice of word there). I am using “faith” and “religion” much more broadly, but I’ll acknowledge that my personal experience is very Christianity-centric.

  118. Odin: Although, I’m not sure how you can reconcile that with your championing of acupuncture as effective and reliable — those words don’t _mean_ anything unless we collect data.

    The thing is? There’s more than just collecting data. There’s listening to other people’s actual real-life experiences, and people recounting their stories and accounts just as valid an activity as collecting data is.

    You can argue as much as you want that “the plural of anecdote != data”. But when you do, you ignore that individual accounts of people’s lives, including their faith if they practice it, is on a different plane entirely, and that said plane – of individual experiences, of the subconscious, of faith, of the so-called “irrational” – is just as valid as (and I daresay more humanistic than) collecting data.

  119. April: LOL about how Jill wrote 39 words and there’s a 120-comment-and-counting fight happening about it.No, I did not have anything useful or relevant to add to the discussion.  

    I don’t see a fight. Where’s a fight? People are having a heated discussion. That’s not a fight.

  120. bfp: why not? because 2500 years of practice and a chinese based methodology of understanding the practice aren’t good enough? why aren’t they good enough?

    See I think I would say that that was data (but then I’m a historian).

    I would put it this way – if people have been doing something as a response to physical and mental conditions that cause them distress for an extended period of time, then it probably either provides some kind relief, or it helps uphold power structures (and realistically usually I would suspect a little bit of both – certainly that would be true of mainstream medical practices today).

    I’m a materialist and an athiest – I will always disagree with the world view and analysis of people who attribute non-material causation. However, I can see why people are hostile to materialism and atheism when people talk like Andy did:

    If your cultures treatment of mental disorders can not explain in a scientific manner why it is an effective treatment, then yes it should be treated as unicorn-peeing woo.

    My first reaction is a lot of my culture’s treatment of mental disorders would not be able to explain in a scientific manner why it is an effective treatment – and I’m a pakeha (white) New Zealander.

    But the point I want to make is that spiritual practices have often been a way of storing knowledge about the world. Whether that knowledge is ‘people need to rest sometimes’ or ‘this is a good time to plant kumara’ (and much more complex and subtle ideas about the world). I think athieism and materialism should acknowledge that. (I really like this piece by Douglas Adams – which sorts of looks at that).

    I’m not advocating that everything that comes under the name of spiritual is knowledge and true. I had a similar reaction to Jill – exorcism has been a tool that powerful people in a community use against less powerful people. Also I am wholly opposed (in a way that cannot be understated) to any world view that says that people’s physical and mental distress come about because of their virtue or lack of it. However, that’s about the specifics the actual subject under discussion – exorcism.

  121. I feel like at this point there’s so much to say that I can’t add much beyond another derail.

    I’m passed caring about whether my preferred method of healthcare is woo or scientific. Sometimes I even put “effectiveness” low on my list of priorities. What is highest on my list of priorities is a healthcare provider who doesn’t actively discriminate against me or dehumanize me because of my size. When I can find a medical doctor who is actively, openly fat-positive, I might move on from my woo woo acupuncturist.

    I’m not going to say I can speak for the experience of a Caribbean or Latin American Catholic who believes in the rite of exorcism or that I can truly understand the experience of being someone from that background trying to receive mental health treatment. But I can say that I relate to the experience of discrimination in healthcare and I, personally, chose a person within my community who values me as a human being over what has the most conventional medical backing. That choice seems utterly rational to me.

    I also realized that the reason I am so unsurprised by people’s belief in exorcism is that my own family is full to the brim of white, well-educated, upper-middle class people who believe that God has restored them to sanity.

  122. bfp,

    Alternative medicine has some things which, going on memory from some studies, apparently seem to “work.” Acupuncture (for certain issues) is, I think, in that category. Nasal irrigation certainly is. Those are by no means the only two, just the ones I thought of first.

    But alternative medicine ALSO has a whole host of things–a much larger group–which DON’T seem to work. Cupping and ear candling, anyone? High dilution c30 homeopathy–excuse me, I mean “high strength”–where there’s not more than a molecule of substance around?

    You don’t get to play all True Scotsman here, picking out the perfect things and pretending they’re representative. Sure, alternative medicine has some things that work, and sure, some of those things are 2000 years old. But there are a shitload of 2000 year old things which are also a load of BS, and it’s pretty damn clear that “being old” or “being the practice of millions of people” or “being nonwestern” are completely irrelevant considerations in whether or not things WORK.

    so:
    why not? because 2500 years of practice and a chinese based methodology of understanding the practice aren’t good enough? why aren’t they good enough?
    Why? Because they’re irrelevant as a way to determine whether acupuncture should get any respect. It doesn’t deserve respect merely because it’s been around for centuries; plenty of stuff which has been around for centuries doesn’t work so we know that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t deserve respect because it’s Chinese; plenty of Chinese traditional medicine is bunk so we know that doesn’t matter either.

    Eating animal parts as a way to gain the animal’s characteristics has been in probably 100 different cultures for the last 10,000 years or so, including but by no means limited to China. Would you like to propose we start respecting that as well, serving owl parts to the visually impaired?

    No. Things deserve respect because (and only to the degree that) they WORK, which is really the only thing that’s relevant. The other stuff doesn’t matter.

  123. bfp:
    why not? because 2500 years of practice and a chinese based methodology of understanding the practice aren’t good enough? why aren’t they good enough?

    I meant that words like “effective” and “reliable” only make sense in the context of performing the treatment and then seeing if the patient gets better. Sure, _rigorous_ science requires we be careful about how we collect that information, but repeated observations of something physically observable (like patients’ conditions) is the heart of science.

    So when you say that acupuncture is an effective and reliable treatment for certain conditions, I assume you mean that it actually has an observable, positive effect on patients. I suppose you could just be meaning “acupuncture works because acupuncturists say it does”, but I’d be surprised. (Contrast the original discussion topic of exorcism by Catholic priests, where if I understand correctly. the exorcist generally is the one deciding if someone is possessed and if they’ve been successfully exorcised.)

  124. April: LOL about how Jill wrote 39 words and there’s a 120-comment-and-counting fight happening about it.  

    Yes, well when someone has the idea that they can mock religion and make broad generalizations about religious people but then goes off the deep end when someone else does it to atheism, I am NOT going to let that slide by.

  126. “If your cultures treatment of mental disorders can not explain in a scientific manner why it is an effective treatment, then yes it should be treated as unicorn-peeing woo.”

    “too often psychology fails to be sufficiently rigorous to actually be science.”

    I know these are two quotes from different people, but I’d like to juxtaposition them together, to bring some dry humor to the conversation. Seems a bit silly to advise people to seek refuge in science, then to confess the science they should be seeking help from isn’t, well, science.

    I’d like to say, as a mental health worker, we often have no fucking idea why certain medications work, what causes mental disorders, what’s correlation, causation, and simple coincidence, or even what all those squishy bits in the brain actually *do*.

  127. Oh, I missed that the first time through!

    Ah, yes, the policing of what is and is not science – always fun (and with a distinct Scottish flair – a true Scottish flair, that is). Also, full of crap! The scientific method is not the hallowed bastion of a privileged few. Does its application require practical and ethical adaptation to particular areas of research and subject matter? Why, yes! Fancy that – external validity and ethics and all. Do evo psych and Freud represent the full body of psychological research? Why, not even a little bit! Remarkable. It’s almost as if you have no idea what most psychological and social research actually looks like.

    (I also want to say that that anecdotes and related qualitative data are also perfectly legitimate forms of data even within science, especially among us scientists who have pulled our heads out of our rears long enough to realize that listening to our participants and members of our populations of interest can yield fairly essential contextual information and generally improve our understanding of quantitative results.)

  128. The purpose is not necessarily to revive the practice, the organizers say, but to help Catholic clergy members learn how to distinguish who really needs an exorcism from who really needs a psychiatrist, or perhaps some pastoral care.

    Good fucking flying spaghetti monster, I can’t get past this sentence. That has better be a short damn conference because the answers are “none of ’em” and “all of ’em” respectively.

    Father Vega said. “My first reaction when I heard about the exorcism conference was, this is another of those trappings we’ve pulled out of the past.”

    But he said that there could eventually be a rising demand for exorcism because of the influx of Hispanic and African Catholics to the United States. People from those cultures, he said, are more attuned to the experience of the supernatural.

    And I love all the ass-covering from the interviewed priests — they’re all “oh, sure it’s antiquated and we kinda think it’s shit, but there are so many stupid brown people who eat this shit up lol.” It’s like how if a bunch of recent immigrants had a belief that cutting off half your fingers cured insomnia, I’m sure the medical profession would set up a conference to “learn how to distinguish who really needs” their fingers cut off and who doesn’t. Oh wait, that would not happen, because that is the easiest question in the world and the answer is no one needs that.

    Fer FSM’s sake, even Vega up there knows this is bullshit. It’s a pretense to cater to desperate people rather than offer them actual help, to literally demonize the most helpless members of their communities to make a few bucks and keep a few more sheep in the fold, to appeal to the lowest denominator of irrationality rather than take any substantive or constructive action. It’s patronizing. It’s ignorant. It’s damaging and dangerous. It’s the most classic setup up for abuse that a Catholic Church could gleefully pray for. It freaks me right the fuck out.

  129. It is late and I am obviously overly enamored of the word “science” (it has such a cheesy 40s sci fi b-movie flair to it) and probably need to start sleeping soon and also snark-overload, but my last comment was kind of two different points, one of which was tangential to someone else’s conversation. Not clear, sorry.

  130. Something did this.

    Fucking biology/geology/astrophysics/chemistry/beneficial convergence of low probability events added up across billions of star systems and billions of years, how do they work? :p

  131. I was a textbook case of manic depression as a teenager, but, not having a psychiatry degree, I did not know this.

    I was told by several people at the mainstream Protestant church that I attended at the time that I was demon-possessed. I had “let the demon in,” apparently, when I started questioning my Christian faith.

    The following five years I spent in a suicidal fog of despair – which I could not tell anyone about, including my parents, because I felt that it was my fault for “letting the demon in” – until finally in university I decided to get some psychiatric help. The five years I spent believing I was demon-possessed left both physical and psychological scars and I can’t go to a Christian service or indeed hear too much about Christianity without feeling myself getting sucked in that same loop of self-hatred and delusion again.

    The problem with the idea of demon possession is that whatever trait a person possesses that is considered undesirable will often be chalked up to the demon. Mentally ill? Queer? Questioning your faith? MUST BE THE DEMON. And there are very few things that can alienate a person from her own mind and body as effectively as telling her that they aren’t really hers – that they belong to some other, evil entity. I spent part of my adolescence thinking that my body was possessed, that my thoughts were dictated by some outside force. It took me years to identify as queer because I felt my desires and affections were not really *mine* and years also to get treatment for a physical illness because of the hatred and alienation which I felt towards my body.

    I’m currently non-religious, even though I sympathize with the positive aspects of religion – God, heaven, rebirth, prayer, spells, etc. But the mythologizing about evil, whether it deals with the devil or demons or hell, triggers the fuck out of me.

  132. Bagelsan:
    Something did this.
    Fucking biology/geology/astrophysics/chemistry/beneficial convergence of low probability events added up across billions of star systems and billions of years, how do they work? :p  

    Remember a watch implies a watchmaker. Which means that for there to be a god, there must be a god maker. Which in all probability means that god answers to Chuck Norris.

  133. Bagelsan: to make a few bucks and keep a few more sheep in the fold, to appeal to the lowest denominator of irrationality rather than take any substantive or constructive action.

    If there must be exorcisms, I don’t believe people should have to pay for them. What exactly are you paying for? There’s no equipment or prescriptions involved. It’s just a visit. If it’s seen as absolutely necessary to save the person (which I would imagine would be the attitude if one believes in demonic possession) then there’s a different standard than a wedding or a funeral for which one would pay. I would think you’d want to give a little for people who attend your Church.

    I’m pretty sure “pastoral care” is free, and since it’s a much more likely possibility than performing exorcisms according to this article, then it doesn’t logically make sense to pay for exorcisms anyway.

    Money corrupts the process (not in itself) and I would go as far as to say it’s an agent in priests abusing their power. This may even sound obvious, but if people are still paying for them, it clearly isn’t. With the Church being such a community where everyone is “brothers and sisters” I wouldn’t think “healthcare” would be charged for.

  134. I’m pretty sure “pastoral care” is free, and since it’s a much more likely possibility than performing exorcisms according to this article, then it doesn’t logically make sense to pay for exorcisms anyway.

    I reread that and realized that I wrote it poorly. If pastoral care is a possibility, and an exorcism is a possibility, and they can each take each other’s place, it doesn’t make sense that one should be free and the other shouldn’t.

  135. Natalia, I’m pretty sure that one thing that is considered to be part of a bad or unsatisfactory spiritual life or behavior would be pagan practices. So, for example, using Tarot cards or using a Ouija board (which I believe was originally a parlor game for courting couples in the Victorian era, but I digress) would, in this view, make one vulnerable to demonic possession. Which, when you think about it, is a really gross (and Medieval) statement about people who practice pagan faiths–that they are basically cavorting with the devil.

    I think that’s a very good point – and an interesting one at that, because it’s not as if religions did not borrow heavily from pagan practices as they developed. There’s a reason why Christmas, for example, is celebrated when it’s celebrated – and it doesn’t have a whole lot to do with Christ’s birthday.

    But possession, as it is understood by people who believe in it, has an interesting way of striking those who are fairly devout. And that’s interesting to me. Because it can be argued that when you open yourself up to the possibilities of faith – you can also accidentally open yourself up to some unexpected phenomena.

    I enjoy being a member of a religious community – even if I’m on the fringes and rather like it there – but religion isn’t very cuddly, when you think about it, is it? And I don’t just mean in terms of the kind of social injustice that regularly gets perpetrated in its name.

    Fucking biology/geology/astrophysics/chemistry…

    This is just a sidenote, but plenty of scientists believe in some form of a creator, or designer. This doesn’t prove anything either way (people believe – and don’t believe – whatever it is they want) but I think what it does mean is that science and religion aren’t ALWAYS involved in a giant conflict in which the lines are clearly drawn and the opposing sides despise each other. That’s how it plays out sometimes – but not always.

  136. I agree with pretty much everything BFP said, and she said it better than I can.

    The only thing I’d add to the discussion is a bit of curiosity about why every culture independently developed some form of belief in demons and possession. Why every mystical tradition has masters who will teach you how to handle these forces, assuming you have learned to quiet your mind enough that they think you can handle the teaching.

    Maybe it’s some sort of neurological quirk. Maybe it’s people making up silly explanations for something material that science hasn’t recorded yet. Maybe it’s unicorns. But it’s also reasonable enough to posit that maybe the people who are patient enough to sit their asses down and focus have noticed something that the rest of us distracted chuckleheads haven’t.

    What is going on with our culture when the urge to colonize is so strong that we can’t even let our own uncertainty exist?

  137. Jadey: Do evo psych and Freud represent the full body of psychological research? Why, not even a little bit! Remarkable. It’s almost as if you have no idea what most psychological and social research actually looks like.

    I was responding to someone who was specifically talking about Freud and aspects of clinical psychology that were NOT subject to rigorous scientific investigation. I didn’t think bfp would be interested in reading a long, detailed discussion of psychology and the varied problems that some of it has, and I kind of didn’t have time to write it, or do the research to make sure I was being complete and scrupulously correct. And I knew that if I didn’t mention evo psych as being seriously flawed someone would (justifiably) bring that up as a modern example of Evil Western Science being used to justify racism and sexism.

    But you’re right! I must not know anything about science and research, because I’m using sloppy language on an _internet debate_ where I’m more interested in trying to get people to understand that science is a way of looking at the world and not just the domain of Evil White Men. That I think we should differentiate between acupuncture (which Evil Modern Western Science and Evil Modern Western Data tentatively show does no harm and may do some good, although it’s bloody hard to rule out the placebo effect) and the Catholic church’s take on demon possession (where, again, as I understand it, the same person decides that someone is demon-possessed as performs the exorcism).

  138. Nahida: You’re just spazzing out.  

    This is my entire problem with everything you have said. You are as horrifically ableist as this policy is. Thank you for giving me solid proof. I have absolutely nothing to say to you.

    And no, William never said, “Here is what Nahida thinks.” It was NOT a personal attack. It’s like when women talk generally about sexism in society and a guy comes into a thread and says, “But I’M not like that.” You, as a Christian, are part of an oppressive majority. Check your privilege.

    And apparently being self-righteous is only a problem if you’re an atheist, because you seem to be giving yourself a pass.

  139. Usually Lurking: You don’t get to play all True Scotsman here, picking out the perfect things and pretending they’re representative.

    um, what? I’m Chicana.

    as far as “picking the perfect things and pretending their representative…” Jesus. What? I’m not talking about “alternative medicine”–I’m talking about spiritual based care that comes from mostly indigenous peoples and communities of
    color. Homeopathy is not based on spirituality–it’s actually been studied and justified as legitimate by the very method that everybody is telling me is the One True Method.

    and as far as “pretending their representative” goes–you did see my link to the “perfect” method of putting a sword at the door of a room to ward of evil spirits, right?

    re: people have eaten animals for thousands of years expecting to take on attributes of the animal RAWR!!! comment–again, this shows a basic lack of understanding of the spirituality behind many cultures that eat specific meats–just as an example, eating chicken soup to “heal sickness” certainly anecdotally works, and has been studied by the One True Method and deemed effective on some level…are people expecting to take on the power of the chicken when they have the sniffles? Or is chicken soup just something that over the years/decades/centuries, people have observed always seems to work in a way that beef stew never does?

    And finally, my questions (because it’s been around for 2500 years? etc)–were not asked in a way to be a perfect scotsman, but to ask why scientific methodologies that are based on observation, patient feedback, detailed study, etc, and 2500 years of theory making and critical work are not considered “legitimate” enough to even work in *conjunction* with The One True Method. Why is it assumed that something that has been around for 2500 years (and I’m speaking of all indigenous medicine here, not just acupuncture) could not *possibly* have any logic or theory behind it, could not have any method behind it, could not be based on any education that is just as legitimate albeit *different* than The One True Method?

    I’m not proposing that native healing spiritualities and the healing spiritualities of communities of color are *exactly the same* as western science, I’m arguing that they have a logic and a theory and a worldview behind them that can many times work better than western medicine, and many times work very well in conjunction with western medicine. And many times they spring out of a need that western medicine simply refuses to admit even exists, like the violence of colonialism or racism.

    I am questioning why the theories of non-white people are dismissed as unicorn pee and woo and conflated with head turning and green puke and owl eating–when it’s clear that western medicine hasn’t done an exactly exceptional job of being the One True Theory–in fact, it’s clear that Western Medicine has forgotten much of it’s own history of woo woo unicorn pee that still lingers into today’s practice.

  140. I think there’s a huge difference between someone feeling like they need spiritual help and seeking it out and a community deciding that someone is possessed by a demon because they’re gay/skeptical/female and sexual/outspoken/mentally ill/not neurally typical whatever.

    That’s where the disconnect comes in, and that’s where I think a lot of people are talking past each other.

    Now, if someone really and truly believes in the Devil and possession and all that, and they go to a priest for an excorsism, I’m not squicked. I start getting squicked when deeply troubled or vulnerable people are exploited by fundamentalists, true believers, charlatans (like those douchebags on Paranormal State) or demagogues. Then you get situations like Gentleman Cambrioleur’s upthread, and that is. not. okay.

    (And again, if the Church sticks to the policy they’ve had for the past 30 or 40 years, people will be sorely disappointed, as they aren’t going to be performing the ritual willy-nilly or upon request; they’re going to urge the person to get medical and mental health care, and reassure the person they aren’t actually possessed.)

    @Ashley: What is going on with our culture when the urge to colonize is so strong that we can’t even let our own uncertainty exist?

    First–My being a skeptical atheist has fuck-all to do with the urge to colonize, thankyouverymuch. Especially in light of the Catholic Church’s historic moves to colonize, (and insert itself in shaping the laws of this country) this is especially insulting. You do know that missionaries appropriated the gods and festivals of the people they sought to colonize/convert, right? And many of the demons and symbols (such as the pentagram) are also appropriated pagan gods the Middle East, as a way to get pagans there to reject their belief system and buy into monotheism.

    And not for nothing, but if you have faith you are certain of the Truth (cap intended). You don’t need to see God or the Devil to believe they exist. You don’t need proof. Skeptics aren’t certain of jack shit–that’s why we tend to require evidence, proof, all of that stuff before we believe anything.

  141. The only thing I’d add to the discussion is a bit of curiosity about why every culture independently developed some form of belief in demons and possession.

    Well, pretty much every culture has also decided that misogyny is the way to go… that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s maybe really something to that whole female inferiority thing. Just because a lot of people do it/believe it doesn’t mean jack about the validity of the thing. As for why: if a complex system (such as your brain) goes haywire it’s easy to tack a bullshit imaginary explanation on. It’s certainly easier than developing a scientific system, apparently. :p Haywire brains (and other bits of your anatomy) and the love of bullshit imaginary stories seem to be a pretty common trait among all humans, and those commonalities combine to provide a pretty simple possible explanation for why everyone decided to call a variety of symptoms “possession!” If all you have is a hammer (religious bullshit) everything starts to look like a nail (diverse medical/mental/etc. conditions, women giving you backtalk, etc.)

    Also, I’m not sure that all that many cultures would have had to develop the idea of “demons” and the supernatural independently — isn’t there evidence that early humans had a concept of the “afterlife” and developed burial rituals quite early on? That would make the existence of some shared religious aspects much less unlikely because you’d just have a few groups of wildly clueless and imaginative people (descended from one group, natch) running around making crap up, rather than a million groups.

    Why every mystical tradition has masters who will teach you how to handle these forces, assuming you have learned to quiet your mind enough that they think you can handle the teaching.

    Because “mystical masters” love power-tripping just as much as everyone else, and you can get paid for glaring sternly (and mystically!) at people the rest of your life and doing unverifiable intangible things? Nice work if you can get it, having the power to control the people around you purely with superstition and the “secret” art of blah blah five-finger-heart-death-Kill-Bill-whatever. But it’s not an indicator that demons exist. (Nor that powerful breath-exercise-unlockable mystic forces exist either. :p) It’s just an indicator that, like complex brains and a love of bullshit explanations, human cultures all generally have their share of power-grabbing, egotistical and/or easily-deluded individuals who fit neatly into that kind of “mystical” religious hierarchy.

  142. Homeopathy is not based on spirituality–it’s actually been studied and justified as legitimate by the very method that everybody is telling me is the One True Method.

    Fuck the what? NO. It hasn’t. That is probably the most debunked ridiculous example of alternate “medicine” you could have picked. Homeopathy is a literal laughing stock among anyone who knows anything about medicine or science. (Homeopathy really is “unicorn pee” … it’s just very dilute unicorn pee! :p)

  143. @bagelsan–sorry I read a study that said it had placebo effect–I didn’t mean to state so blatantly IT WORKS IT WORKS–I meant to say “that it’s been studied by the One True Method and shown that it has some sort of science behind it, which means that rich people now buy the 6$ bottles of it at Whole Foods because it’s not based on the belief in vomit puking devils taking over the body but on some sort of science that sure other scientists are all “quackery” but what do they know?? because science isn’t fallible.” In other words, I meant to point out the fallacy of One True Method, but took the short route, which came out more like IT WORKS IT WORKS LEGITIMACY!

    SOrry about that.

  144. Re: Placebo effect

    What the hell is everyone’s problem with the placebo effect? I means seriously, in the area of pain reduction its been proven exceptionally effective. I know we hear placebo and thing – not real, but results are all that are necessary in this universe and if 2 molecules of unicorn pee reduce allergies or chronic pain or improve function for parkinsons patients then who the fuck *cares* whether its placebo or water memory?

  145. Kristen J, we should care about the difference between a placebo and a treatment that works beyond the placebo effect, because it tells us what should be researched further (an actual treatment could be possibly improved or applied to other conditions if we understand the mechanism), what’s a fair price that can be charged for the treatment, and how much it should be covered by the government in western countries that are civilized enough to have single-payer health care.

    We need to understand how things work so that we aren’t using placebo methods that have negative side effects; so that peddlers of placebos aren’t allowed to overstate the effectiveness of their products or claim false expertise in other areas (a big problem in the market of pseudoscientific “cures” for autism — the anti-vax movement seems to have been started by snakeoil peddlers, and kids have died as a result of that); so that people don’t turn to things like homeopathy _in place of_ chemo, etc, to treat things like cancer; so that people don’t get punished as sinners when faith healing doesn’t work.

  146. Holy Ableism, Batman!

    Can we please dispense with phrases such as “crazy talk”, “insane derails”, “batshit crazy”, “mad” as synonymous with reckless or unethical, and “the mentally ill”, we’re people, dammit!

    This thread makes me wanna puke and go cry in a corner.

  147. For the last 10,000 years or so, it seems like pretty much every culture has considered women to be weaker/inferior/genetically damaged/ really different/ less intelligent. If you want a universal belief, then “female = bad” is probably a good bet, along with racism.

    So can we please drop the “if something is part of society for 2500 years it must be valid” bullshit?

    bfp,

    True scotsman is a logical fallacy which involves excluding all opposing data and thus generating a self fulfilling and circular answer.

    i.e. “all scotsmen are honest,” followed by “well, John’s not honest!” followed by “then john’s not a true scotsman, because all true scotsmen are honest.”

    or
    “cultural medicine is great” followed by “but so many of those things have been demonstrated to be invalid or even harmful,” followed by “well, the ones that don’t work aren’t true cultural medicine.”

    or
    “we should follow ancient Chinese practices; ancient chinese things are valid” followed by “but many of those same practices denigrate women or people of different races” followed by “well, those aren’t the ones I meant.”

    Or, the short version: Where you need to be saying “X is great because ____,” you end up saying “X is great because it’s great.”

  148. Seconding and thirding everything bfp’s been writing. Also Jemima Aslana about the ableism.

    I want to remind folks that the vast, vast majority of Christians globally are on the “oppressed” end of the privilege spectrum – I am not in denial about or apologizing for the huge amount of privilege and power that wealthy white Usian Christians have, and the amount of damage that those Christians do is huge and horrifying and they make me want to puke and it is absolutely fair game to attack them. However, to lump in the women in base communities in Morelos, Sudanese Christians trying to provide each other with medical care, and MLK, Jr. (to name the tiniest fraction of a few), in with them as being equally privileged (simply because they are all Christians) is absurd.

    Also, I understand the squickiness of hypothetically letting the Roman Catholic clergy decide who’s demon-possessed and who isn’t, and Jill, I understand the worry around the “good” and “bad” spiritual lives thing, particularly in relationship to race.

    I’m a priest (white, queer, femme, Episcopalian, living with a mental illness), and in my primary circle of friends and colleagues (predominantly women of color), we talk about demon possession in relationship to people’s inability to critically examine their own privilege. We talk about those douchey boys at seminary who take over every conversation either with their neverending emotions or their unchecked racism/sexism/cissexism/ableism/homophobia/fatphobia as having demons. (I only wish they would repent and seek an exorcism.) Demon possession in Scripture (with the story of the Gerasene demoniac) as well as in lived experience has been understood sometimes as being colonized, as having a colonized mind. An exorcism is sometimes one method through which people work to decolonize their minds.

    And, more generally, the feeling of being in the grip of a larger Thing/system that you feel pretty out of control of is not uncommon, the feeling that something else is sharing psychic and sometimes physical space with you is not uncommon. At a certain point, isn’t the important thing healing? It is colonizing to insist on one particular language to both describe this experience and to insist on one particular method (Western science) as the be-all end-all of “correct” ways to work toward the wholeness of someone. It’s colonizing to tell communities of color that their language for this experience is not only “unscientific” (as though hundreds of years of experience is not adequate data – and, like it or not, religious traditions are formed and kept because they work for people) but that their language for this is in itself oppressive, thus making them responsible for their own oppression.

  149. PrettyAmiable: You, as a Christian, are part of an oppressive majority. Check your privilege.And apparently being self-righteous is only a problem if you’re an atheist, because you seem to be giving yourself a pass.  

    First, I fail to see how I’m an abelist–and if I’ve somehow made that mistake, YOU were certainly waiting for it since the “proof” came long after your assumption. And second, I’m actually not even a Christian, thank you for that second assumption. (As a matter of fact, I’m Muslim, which I wouldn’t call in this country an oppressive majority. Privilege checked, thanks!) And third, if WILLIAM can make those generalizations about religious people who identify with the Church and I CAN’T about atheists on the internet because you’re going to get offended at the generalization after accusing me of focusing too hard on a generalization, and THEN pull out something as random as proselyting, then I take none of it back. Heaven (if you believe in that is) forbid it ever happens the other way around!

  150. Odin,

    Except while you are trying to sort through *why* it works people are suffering and the placebo effect *works.* So please continue to find effective treatments but stop pretending as if the placebo effect provides no benefits. And if people find comfort in faith healing or unicorn pee who are you to say… No, no comfort for you because I don’t thoroughly understand what is going on here.

    Yeah, I seriously doubt the oxygen drops my MIL uses do anything, BUT they make her feel good. She thinks they give her the energy to be more active and so she IS more active. No doubt the effect is psychological and could be produced some other way…but until you find a way to produce that same effect and get people to take it (overcome the stigma associated with age and health status)…then oxygen drops will have to do.

  151. Homeopathy doesn’t work. It only has placebo effect that is the same effect that you feel if you take a pill of sugar and your doctor tells you that it is a painkiller.
    If a medicament has no effect beyond the placebo effect the Goverment doesn’t aprove it, the homeopathic remedies don’t have to prove that they have effect beyond the placebo. Is the same like the cosmetic products, I can sell a cosmetic from the dove shit, If I say that the dove shit is good for the skin an erase the wrinkles, and I only have to prove that the shit is not bad for the skin, The cosmetic, multivitaminic, dietetic, magnotherapic, homeopathic, holistic industries doesn’t have to prove their efficiency.
    The sad thing is that they predate another cultures too. If I say that I discovered the power of doveshit when I was travelling through the ancient lands of Thailand and that doveshit is the secret of the perfect skin of thai women, I will sell more. It is happening with a lot of spiritual/holistic/dietetic/magic products, people that don’t know a single thing about ancient Egypt, will try to sell you the amazing power of the piramides, or the secret of the incas, the magic stones of the celts etc, etc

  152. “First, I fail to see how I’m an abelist–and if I’ve somehow made that mistake, YOU were certainly waiting for it since the “proof” came long after your assumption. And second, I’m actually not even a Christian, thank you for that second assumption. (As a matter of fact, I’m Muslim, which I wouldn’t call in this country an oppressive majority. Privilege checked, thanks!) And third, if WILLIAM can make those generalizations about religious people who identify with the Church and I CAN’T about atheists on the internet because you’re going to get offended at the generalization after accusing me of focusing too hard on a generalization, and THEN pull out something as random as proselyting, then I take none of it back. Heaven (if you believe in that is) forbid it ever happens the other way around!”

    Also, for someone who has nothing to say to me, you certainly had to tell me to STFU a few times. Which I didn’t even start with when the comments when off in a derail. If you couldn’t take it, you were free not to read them. I didn’t tell William to STFU because while I disagreed with his attitude I fully acknowledged his right to express them as well as mine to address them.

  153. karak: “If your cultures treatment of mental disorders can not explain in a scientific manner why it is an effective treatment, then yes it should be treated as unicorn-peeing woo.”“too often psychology fails to be sufficiently rigorous to actually be science.”I know these are two quotes from different people, but I’d like to juxtaposition them together, to bring some dry humor to the conversation.Seems a bit silly to advise people to seek refuge in science, then to confess the science they should be seeking help from isn’t, well, science.I’d like to say, as a mental health worker, we often have no fucking idea why certain medications work, what causes mental disorders, what’s correlation, causation, and simple coincidence, or even what all those squishy bits in the brain actually *do*.  

    Not to mention that being gay / lesbian / bisexual was considered a mental illness until the 1970’s, and that being trans* / gender variant / of non-binary gender still is (it’s in the DSM, folks!), and that many psychiatrists, psychologists, and gender clinics still attempt to force gender-variant and trans* children to become “gender-congruent” with their coercively-assigned sex at birth. These classifications and “therapies” aren’t based on any identifiable scientific method, but wholly on the prejudice of mental-“health” practitioners.

  154. Sheelzebub–

    My point about the colonizing mind is that we all have it. We’ve been raised in imperialism. It is the way we think: even skeptical atheists. At this point, even most of the colonized people. It’s internalized, much like patriarchy.

    Imperialism doesn’t come from any particular epistemology–science can support it just as handily as religion. But it does tend to go hand in hand with an unwillingness to question your epistemology.

    You also might look into the definition of “faith” according to different traditions. Within Buddhism, for example, it tends to refer to the confidence you have in the usefulness of the teachings because of your own experience, rather than your acceptance of something someone told you. You believe the sky is blue because you see it. Skepticism is encouraged as a useful quality. In Buddhism, they encourage skepticism about, for example, who or what we are, and what reality is. If you think you know the answers to those questions, you’ve got more in common with crusading Catholics than you’d care to admit.

    Bagelsan:

    superstition and the “secret” art of blah blah five-finger-heart-death-Kill-Bill-whatever”

    is a racist thing to say.

    And, there’s nothing particularly magical and secret about paying attention. It’s quite simple. The teachings are not secret. It’s just that we don’t want to do it, because it’s hard and boring and (we think) not as much fun as being absolutely certain all the time.

  155. Ashley, I’m not a Buddhist, nor am I a philosopher pontificating about the nature of reality. But thanks for comparing me to those who hung and burned people at the stake, invaded the Middle East and killed thousands, and threw indigenous people off of cliffs when they refused to convert.

    Oh, and BTW? I never said that science was perfect (you seem to be mixing me up with the posters who were arguing with BFP).

    I mean really–you and William seem like the opposite sides of the same rancid coin.

  156. Argh just realized that in my comment at 153, I used quotes instead of the asterisks I meant to use around the word oppressed. Just to be clear, those are *not* scare quotes around oppressed. I was trying to emphasize, not downplay or mock, the fact that many Christians globally are the victims and survivors of Western imperialism, and to blame imperialism on them simply because of their religion shies very close to victim-blaming.

    We’re not going to be able to talk about the destructiveness of Christianity with any clarity until we acknowledge the vast and complex kinds of Christianity being practiced in resistance to colonization. And acknowledging those resistant strains should make us even MORE critical of Christianities that are about power and money and hatred and murder.

  157. David: Remember a watch implies a watchmaker. Which means that for there to be a god, there must be a god maker. Which in all probability means that god answers to Chuck Norris. David

    Thank Chuck Norris’ maker (Sigourney Weaver? She was kick-ass in Alien(s)!) that I didn’t have coffee in my mouth at the moment, cuz I would have snorted it all over my keyboard in laughter. And I’m a believer.

    On another note, I want to make clear that I don’t support the Catholic Church, or any church, forcing exorcism or notions of demon possession on anyone. As other commenters have related, exorcism and accusations of demon possession are used as tools of oppression, against people with disabilities, against queer and trans folk, against anybody who dares question their faith or disagree with their church’s dogma.

    My annoyance has been people using exorcism as a means with which to condemn any and all expression of faith as ipso facto bad, irrational, sparkly unicorn pee, or what have you, while utterly ignoring the harm that has been done to oppressed people in the name of “science”.

    There’s as much blood on the hands of science (Tuskegee, enforced Norplant implants into women of color, how queer and trans folk have been treated – let’s not forget that David Reimer committed suicide as a result of John Money’s years-long pseudo-science exorcism) as there is on the hands of religion.

  158. “The teachings are not secret. It’s just that we don’t want to do it, because it’s hard and boring and (we think) not as much fun as being absolutely certain all the time.”

    Skepticism is not about being certain all the time, is about not believing things that have not empiric evidence. It is harder and boring to be skeptic than to believe, believing is the easy way. Religion is always something that someone told you, or do you learned the concept of Karma without reading, or learning, or listening to someone.
    Are you skeptical of karma? You can’t see it, you can’t feel it, you can’t reproduce it in a lab.

  159. Jemima Aslana: Holy Ableism, Batman!Can we please dispense with phrases such as “crazy talk”, “insane derails”, “batshit crazy”, “mad” as synonymous with reckless or unethical, and “the mentally ill”, we’re people, dammit!This thread makes me wanna puke and go cry in a corner.  

    Reckless derails*

    I don’t believe the others are mine.

    But supposedly I’m an ableist (I am, myself, not just my comments) because if someone tells me they’re possessed by a demon, I’m likely to consider the possibility that they may be telling the truth. Because I believe in other spirits and that they can do things, and that makes me an ableist, even though I wouldn’t force into someone’s head that they’ve been possessed just because they feel they’re in trouble.

    Excuse me for taking seriously some the people others have described as “batshit crazy.”

  160. On another note, I want to make clear that I don’t support the Catholic Church, or any church, forcing exorcism or notions of demon possession on anyone. As other commenters have related, exorcism and accusations of demon possession are used as tools of oppression, against people with disabilities, against queer and trans folk, against anybody who dares question their faith or disagree with their church’s dogma.

    My annoyance has been people using exorcism as a means with which to condemn any and all expression of faith as ipso facto bad, irrational, sparkly unicorn pee, or what have you, while utterly ignoring the harm that has been done to oppressed people in the name of “science”.

    THIS. Eleventy.

  161. To further clarify what I meant by referencing homeopathy–it has gained legitimacy *because* it is “based in science.” in effect the science proving it’s faulty science legitimates it. because everybody knows that science is not fallible and so it becomes a question of “which scientist do we believe?”–whereas in western society, everybody knows that spirituality (*especially* and almost exclusively in the mainstream imagination, poc based spiritualities) is simply unicorn pee and owl eating.

    Even tho spiritual based health systems like what you see with acupuncture and the ayuvedic and native peoples with their use of traditional herbs and plants–is based in a *theory* and requires education to pass on and isn’t just passed on randomly–but requires commitment to a rigorous *training*. In effect–homeopathy, which has been unproven beyond placebo effect and only been around since the 40s or 50s (i think), has *more legitimacy* than acupuncture or a native shaman recommending certain herbs *because it is based in science* (however faulty it may be) rather than spirituality or “woo woo.”

    And the irony in that is especially significant when you consider things like white people who are so “must have science, proof, method, theory!” are the *first* ones that attempt to steal the knowledge of other people through patents (I’m not kidding this is a HUGe problem–universities and other researchers patenting plants and herbs and knowledge and genes in search of “knowledge”) or claiming to have “had a vision” which of course now makes them official holy people and Indian In A Past Life.

    I think it would be really excellent if we closely examine why it seems so easy to bring up unicorn pee and owl meat as cures for eyes problems–as if *faith* is what is required of health practices grounded in spirituality (if you just believe in the needles, they’ll work!!!)–*rather than* actual evidence–like for 2500 years, if you insert set of needles in these specific locations, people have felt immensely better.

    The spiritual based health systems and the traditional (or, indigenous) spiritual systems themselves that I am a part of and that most people of color are a part of are NOT based on christian fundamentalism–where if you just believe hard enough, the 20th pregnancy you’re carrying in 18 years will be just fine and you aren’t *really* hemorrhaging.

    They are based in observation and even science approved theory (like Buddhism, see: the work the dalai lama has done with scientists). And they hate the (invariably) white “shamans” that come in with their unicorn pee and swear it can cure you (or, as the white “shamans” just did recently, put everybody under a plastic bag and promise them that it’s a real and true healing ceremony)–because it’s taken 2500 years to work through the correct methods and to educate new generations on correct methods and it’s NOT something you can just walk into and be an expert in.

    Why is it so easy to imagine non-white health based systems as “if you just believe in the owl poop, you will see again!”–even as universities are attempting to steal the knowledge of those peoples for their own?

    (and btw, am I the only one who knows that things like horse urine make it into “scientific” medicine like pills for hormone therapy?)

  162. Hel: Religion is always something that someone told you, or do you learned the concept of Karma without reading, or learning, or listening to someone.
    Are you skeptical of karma? You can’t see it, you can’t feel it, you can’t reproduce it in a lab.  

    actually–karma is a complicated *theory* that stands up to the interrogation of *logic* (again, buddhism (as many other poc based spiritualities, is not a faith based religion). It is not a method used to *treat health*–that would be something more along the lines of the act of meditation, which *has* been studied by science and has been shown to help with many things like anxiety and depression and has been *useful* when working in conjuction with western medicine on everything from cancer treatment to alcoholism.

  163. Bfp, If you had cataracts for example, or cancer, or HIV will you use spiritual healing or will you look for western medicine?

  165. There’s nothing wrong with a placebo effect. Making people feel better is good.

    But based on our cultural history, then unless you are careful, next thing that you know people actually start confusing “it has a placebo effect” with “it actually works.” That’s a problem:

    Kristen J. 11.18.2010 at 11:49 am
    …Yeah, I seriously doubt the oxygen drops my MIL uses do anything, BUT they make her feel good. She thinks they give her the energy to be more active and so she IS more active. No doubt the effect is psychological and could be produced some other way…but until you find a way to produce that same effect and get people to take it (overcome the stigma associated with age and health status)…then oxygen drops will have to do.

    Sure, oxygenated water is awesome! It’s even better when it’s made in a pyramid! It cures everything! It’s perfect!

    UNTIL, that is, you realize that the problem has hit the limits of the placebo effect. And until you’ve realized that you can’t convince someone to get the help they actually need, or even to see a doctor, because you’ve supported a full-blown acceptance of bullshit medicine for the past years.

    You’ll know it when you’ve seen someone’s cancer advance while they diligently pursue a placebo that doesn’t work. Because oxygen water will cure them, why take chemo?

    Or when you’ve seen some poor kid get sicker and sicker while her parents keep on praying. Because when prayer works, why involve a doctor?

    Or when someone you know ends up with mumps or measles or whatnot and gets really sick. Because vaccines cause autism (they don’t,) and diseases aren’t that bad (they are.)

    Or when a relative has a DIY home birth with an underqualified doula, because she’s convinced by the doula that “women have been doing this without medicine for millennia and your body will know what to do.” But the kid ends up with a brain damaged kid, and it seems that the “…and those women and their infants sure as hell had a high death & injury rate” part got left out.

    And yes, I’ve seen that sort of stuff.

    It’s not all goddamn roses, where woo is either good or neutral. Belief in unreality and untruth, and a refusal to acknowledge truth and reality, cause some bad shit.

  166. Thank you. I realized that after reading up on it. I was using it from how I’ve heard it used and wasn’t aware of the medical background.

    My argument, however, still stands. On the other stuff about being offended, and on the ableism because–

    “THIS. Eleventy.”

    no. This time it was personal, not of precedent. PrettyAmiable specifically called ME an ableist. As a person, not through history or even casual comments. And so whatever hypocritical rant can about not taking things personally while taking them personally anyone can come up with here doesn’t apply.

  167. superstition and the “secret” art of blah blah five-finger-heart-death-Kill-Bill-whatever”

    is a racist thing to say.

    Nope. Try again. (Hell, try actually explaining your point of view if you want to really go out on a limb.)

    And placebos, while often “effective” in that people feel improved by them, can be harmful due to side effects, wasted time and money, avoidance of real treatments, etc. You know the inevitable stories of parents who try to pray away their kid’s deadly diseases? Yah. And seeeriously what scientist are you referring to who has done anything besides sputter, in dismay “holy fuck y’all it’s just water!” when asked about homeopathy? Does outright dismissal count as putting it through the scientific method, somehow?

  170. Was someone trying to argue that homeopathy is considered more legitimate because the scientific community supports it? Because I’m pretty sure that the medical community in the U.S. doesn’t support it at all.

    Bfp, people’s opposition to traditional medicines comes not from an idea that traditional medicine is “foreign”. It exists because many “traditional” medicines don’t have a satisfying investigative answer for why they work, or even if they work beyond a placebo effect. I can sum up to you why chemotherapy or radiation therapy work, I can’t tell you why many traditional methods would work beyond admitting that some ingredients in traditional medicine might be acting inside the body in a way that some pharmaceuticals might, or that methods like acupuncture are working, but in a way that has not been satisfiably scientifically pinpointed yet.

    Finally, I would like to say that I’m debating the merits of scientific vs unscientific medicine, not western vs. eastern. If you want to make the point that some native or traditional treatments have used methodologies that closely approximate a rational and reasoned approach toward determing the effectiveness of medicines and that those medicines do work, I do not disagree with you. The ancient egyptians, for example, developed a cure for gout far before modern medicine ever came about in the form that it exists today.

  171. People, can we point out racist language without calling each other racists? I think that even if a person is a racist it is more effective to say why the thing that they’re saying is wrong rather than saying that they, as a person, are bad bad bad for using that racist, or ableist, or Xist language.

    Thanks, keep it civil.

  172. Sheelzebub,

    The quote from you conveniently referred to a comment that was brought closer when you quoted it, so it I wouldn’t have to scroll up so far. That’s basically it. I’m sorry if you felt I was dragging you into something, because I know you decided long ago to skip right over it.

    It was just proximity.

  173. Bagelsan: Nope. Try again. (Hell, try actually explaining your point of view if you want to really go out on a limb.)

    Nope. Try again, yourself. This is a specifically racialized example of a white dominated media source and a white director telling us that racialized people are mystical woo woos and people *choosing to believe it as representative*. Why don’t we talk about mystical jam an ice pick in your brain cavity woo woo?

    Or how about we recognize that there is heavy racism and implicit colonialism in the idea that spiritual based health systems from communities of color are not only lacking, but pull your heart out of your body cavity intensely frightening/damaging woo woo. That the only thing going for a system that’s been around for 2500 years is that it’s been around for 2500 years.

    actually–no–it was colonialism (and ironically) the western medical system that imposed patriarchal sexism on the whole freaking world. *most* cultures, even european ones, have had places of privilege for women or at least equality–based on their midwife capabilities and their positions of knowledge on spirituality.

  174. oh, for heavens sake. I totally messed up that above quote. I quoted myself. hey thanks bfp. 😛 I meant to quote this section from Usually Lurking:

    For the last 10,000 years or so, it seems like pretty much every culture has considered women to be weaker/inferior/genetically damaged/ really different/ less intelligent. If you want a universal belief, then “female = bad” is probably a good bet, along with racism.

    So can we please drop the “if something is part of society for 2500 years it must be valid” bullshit?

  175. @Nahida: No prob, and thanks. I think everyone’s hackles are up (well, okay, by everyone I mean mine DON’T ONLY MY HACKLES COUNT GODSDAMMIT??? WAAAAHHH) and I should probably put down the flamethrower.

    @David: I haven’t seen anyone here call anyone a racist or a bad person–they did say that certain statements or attitudes were racist.

  176. @Sheelzebub
    That’s just the subtext I got from reading some people’s posts. Maybe everyone disagrees with me, in which case that’s fine.

  177. David, Ashley said that the attitude was racist, specifically that it was a “racist thing to say” and Jadey pointed out a word I used that was ableist. Both of which are true. It *mostly* is just statements and attitudes.

  178. “For the last 10,000 years or so, it seems like pretty much every culture has considered women to be weaker/inferior/genetically damaged/ really different/ less intelligent. If you want a universal belief, then “female = bad” is probably a good bet, along with racism.”

    This is a lie. The way various cultures have created the identity of male and female and the expectations they had for those genders have varied widely over place and time. Some cultures were women-positive, some negative, and some have such systems so different from mine that I can’t even begin to label it positive or negative.

    And, I’d like to point out, in general, science has done a real shitty job of disproving this prejudice.

  179. Usually Lurking,

    The problem is you separate the mind from the body. Ask yourself *why* someone would forgo cancer treatments. My great aunt refused cancer treatment and went for a homeopathic remedy. Personally, I think it was woo. But *she* didn’t want chemo and radiation and a mastectomy. So medical science had nothing for her. The homeopathic remedy was a source of comfort and she lived 4 years beyond her diagnosis (likely the placebo effect). That were her choice based on her desires and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

    Minors of course do not consent so that is fundamentally different.

    So yeah, I’ve watched people die with homeopathic remedies. I’ve also seen people die from faith healing. A dear old friend of mine who never left the church died from complications due to diabetes about 3 months ago because the stupid shit wouldn’t take insulin. He believed that if his faith was strong enough he wouldn’t die. Sure, with western medicine he’d still be walking around today…but that wasn’t who he was or wanted to be.

    You want to separate the who we are from the what we do, but it isn’t realistic.

    It seems to make you angry that other people don’t choose what you would choose, but that isn’t fair. They aren’t you and other people are allowed to have different value systems.

  180. Nahida: And for anyone else being a complete asshole, believing that there is a God and forces we don’t sense (like bacteria, back in the day) has stayed with me and has come to be an even stronger believe throughout the years as I studied sciences. THIS is all here. It’s the perfect conditions. So many things could have gone wrong. Our entire universe exists on a delicate balance. Something did this.  (Quote this comment?)

    Very well said! I share exactly the same beliefs.

    I believe the only satan that exists is the human ego (ie, our conditioning and learned/adapted behaviours), and it pains me to think that these people, whether suffering mental illness or not, are being taught to believe that their thoughts are the work of satan. The human brain is such a fascinating thing, and the more Catholics/Christians seek to understand how the brain works and how we behave as human beings, the more they would realise that things like temptation and sin are not the result of the devil, but rather the result of the insidious society we’ve built for ourselves. Hence I agree with the majority of comments on this post in that, although not a complete solution, this is definitely a step in the right direction for the church.

  181. Kristen J.: It seems to make you angry that other people don’t choose what you would choose, but that isn’t fair. They aren’t you and other people are allowed to have different value systems.

    Nothing to add, just repeating for emphasis.

  182. Why is it so easy to imagine non-white health based systems as “if you just believe in the owl poop, you will see again!”–even as universities are attempting to steal the knowledge of those peoples for their own?

    Good question. I think part of it is that in order to maintain the whole colonizing setup you have to pretend that no one was here before. We can’t allow ourselves as colonizing people to have any awareness of any practices or traditions that exist outside of the colonizing culture, because that would mean admitting that we’re stealing their shit. We pretend that any culture that exists outside of ours is completely valueless and/or absent, and then steal anything we judge to be of value. It’s a neat trick of cognitive dissonance (by neat, I mean, “craptastic”).

  183. “It seems to make you angry that other people don’t choose what you would choose, but that isn’t fair. They aren’t you and other people are allowed to have different value systems. Kristen J.”

    Children whose parents pray while they waste away, are forced to undergo exorcism to remove their “demons,” or who go without vaccines because their parents are crackpots hardly have a choice in the matter.

  184. You know what makes me really angry? All of this setting up of a false dichotomy, science vs. faith. It’s bullshit. THAT is what causes people to choose faith healing over medical intervention. If people stop pretending that it’s one or the other, then maybe people can get the help– medical AND spiritual– that they need/want.

    I’m a scientist and an religious Jew. When my husband was sick, I was the first to tell him to drag himself to the doctor, get checked out, read some studies recommended by the doctor, and figure out with his doctor what the best medical treatment would be. I also prayed for him. They both helped us get through that really difficult time.

    Fortunately, he’s doing better now. But geez, people! Not all folks who believe in spiritual healing are anti-vaccine or healing-by-faith-alone types. When you set up this dichotomy, you legitimize those people. In reality, those extremists are a very small percentage of people who believe in and rely on spiritual healing to make their lives better.

  185. 1. A lot of people on this thread really need to go back and read the article karak linked to at 25. Very, very informative and relevant. And provides a lot of data that helps complicate the picture of “everybody should just agree that these are mental illnesses to be described in the terms used by professional Western psychologists.”

    2. Bear in mind that the difference between “a malfunction in your own mind” (disease) and “an attack by a force outside of yourself” (possession) depends partly on where we draw the line around “yourself,” rather than on some straightforward piece of evidence.

    3. That shamans and magic can help sick people recover has, of course, been proven many times. It’s called the placebo effect. We now think it has to do with the patient’s belief rather than the particulars of any magical system, but that doesn’t mean the effect isn’t real, or that shamans and witch doctors haven’t provided extremely valuable help to many, many sick people.

    4. On Jill’s comments about the Church and African and Latin American believers: it’s certainly worth being skeptical about this sort of thing. But it doesn’t have to be seen as “the church see[ing] inroads to be made into communities of color by promoting exorcism, because African and Latino Catholics are so much more in touch with the spirits.” The church already includes a lot of African and Latin American members, who really are more likely to see these phenomena in terms of exorcism and possession. Although you don’t want to see a patronizing attitude (“humor these semi-savages in their silly beliefs”) you also don’t want to see a church that dismisses the beliefs of a large population of catholics on the ground that they’re not white (“Of course, many Catholics believe in possession, but we’re just going to stick with the set of beliefs held by most educated Americans and Europeans.”)

  186. PrettyAmiable: This is my entire problem with everything you have said. You are as horrifically ableist as this policy is. Thank you for giving me solid proof. I have absolutely nothing to say to you.And no, William never said, “Here is what Nahida thinks.” It was NOT a personal attack. It’s like when women talk generally about sexism in society and a guy comes into a thread and says, “But I’M not like that.” You, as a Christian, are part of an oppressive majority. Check your privilege.And apparently being self-righteous is only a problem if you’re an atheist, because you seem to be giving yourself a pass.  (Quote this comment?)

    Are you serious? I didn’t want to get involved when I saw the derail but I have to say this. You suspected she was being ableist all this time, and furthermore assumed she was a Christian, stereotyped who she was and called the self-fulfilling prophecy “solid proof,” and all after telling her not to take mocking of religion personally.

    Check YOUR privelage. Atheism was not under attack here until it attacked first. Now I can see why Nahida was so defensive from the beginning. With the assumption that she must be an ableist because she was pointing out an anti-religious bias–when not even advocating exorcism–it was always personal.

  187. bfp: “Why don’t we talk about mystical jam an ice pick in your brain cavity woo woo?”

    Um, has anyone here DEFENDED trepanning? And is it still in widespread use, or widely promoted? I’m in complete agreement with you about the racist nature of Bagelsan’s comment, don’t get me wrong.

    Actually, regarding trepanning, I’m very confused as to your position. I think we agree when I say it’s bullshit, no? But why should I think any more highly of acupuncture, etc. than I do of trepanning? It was used for an incredibly long span of time, after all (people have found quite ancient skeletons in may parts of the word showing signs of trepanation), based on various views of evil forces released through holes in the skull. Should we consider leeches and bloodletting valid medical techniques just because they were used for centuries based on a self-consistent theory of how bodies worked?

    David: nice tone trolling. When someone calls out racism/mansplaining/etc., your first priority should not be to tell people they should just calm down.

    Bfp, people’s opposition to traditional medicines comes not from an idea that traditional medicine is “foreign”. It exists because many “traditional” medicines don’t have a satisfying investigative answer for why they work, or even if they work beyond a placebo effect.

    Nonsense. People shouldn’t oppose things for racist / imperialist / xenophobic / Eurocentric reasons, but we do, OF COURSE we do. The teabagger ‘Obamacare’ signs showing Obama dressed as some racist witch doctor caricature are a clear enough example of how people use exactly those messages. Or should I not be calling those messages racist? Is that too inflammatory?

    Furthermore, the idea that we support only medicine with “a satisfying investigative answer for why they work” – total bunk. We have little to no ‘satisfying investigative answers’ of the type you’re talking about for most ‘modern’, Western therapy. Many common ‘modern’ pharmaceuticals are used despite our ignorance of how exactly they work; we don’t know the mechanisms involved, we don’t know the specifics, but we have seen that they work (oftentimes from traditional medicine), and so we use them. On the other hand, a surprising number of currently approved ‘modern’ pharmaceuticals (mainly a subset of psychiatric drugs) HAVEN’T been shown to work better than placebo. They’re just as much woo as is snake oil or trepanning, just gussied up and given the imprimatur of scientific establishment.

    Beyond this, it’s NOT just about what treatments are effective. The importance of loved ones and support sytems; respect for patients; emotional and mental, as well as physical, care – all these things are absolutely vital.

    Science is, in theory, just a neutral process of making hypotheses, testing them, and throwing out ones that don’t work. Ideally, it should work fine, sure. In practice, we’ve seen a long history of people further elevated up a power dynamic from whence they can proclaim their own ingrained cultural ideas as Absolute Truth and inflict their prejudices and hatred on others. We cannot, can never, ignore this. It is not just a relic of the past that we can forget about; it happens today. We cannot just write this off as ‘bad science’ or ‘mistakes’ or ‘pseudoscience;’ scientific institutions have been responsible for these abuses and need to be closely monitored.

    Now. For that very same reason, we need to cast an eye on any medical or allegedly medical providers. This article was about the Catholic Church hierarchy, for crying out loud – when it comes to hierarchies that have allowed privileged people to cast down judgments from on high and, well, demonize people, this is in no way a problem restricted to scientific fields!

    (Micheal – did you notice what PrettyAmiable quoted?)

  188. PM: Children whose parents pray while they waste away, are forced to undergo exorcism to remove their “demons,” or who go without vaccines because their parents are crackpots hardly have a choice in the matter. PM

    Yeah, which is why I said minors are fundamentally different. I lived this shit. I mean seriously. At 6 months I underwent an “exorcism” because I had colic. My asthma went untreated until I was 12 because of faith healing. I am here on this planet because my school nurse ignored my parent’s directives and gave me asthma medication. (Something I told my parents was a miracle to keep it a secret.) So I get that minors are different and I know parental consent cannot substitute for their consent.

  189. Shoshie:
    You know what makes me really angry?All of this setting up of a false dichotomy, science vs. faith.It’s bullshit.THAT is what causes people to choose faith healing over medical intervention.If people stop pretending that it’s one or the other, then maybe people can get the help– medical AND spiritual– that they need/want.
    I’m a scientist and an religious Jew.When my husband was sick, I was the first to tell him to drag himself to the doctor, get checked out, read some studies recommended by the doctor, and figure out with his doctor what the best medical treatment would be.I also prayed for him.They both helped us get through that really difficult time.
    Fortunately, he’s doing better now.But geez, people!Not all folks who believe in spiritual healing are anti-vaccine or healing-by-faith-alone types.When you set up this dichotomy, you legitimize those people.In reality, those extremists are a very small percentage of people who believe in and rely on spiritual healing to make their lives better.  

    I’m not sure if its so much a false dichotomy as people arguing past each other. I think what most people get out of this discussion is that there are two camps – one which advocates for only scientific medical intervention and another for faith-based or spiritual methods. What I think instead is that there’s a bunch of people talking about western medicine and cultural imperialism, there’s some people arguing about how faith has a role in healing, and some people talking about how science has a role. So in this case, a lot of people (probably myself included) have been arguing with an imaginary opponent. I blame it on thread derails, but hey, at least we’ve gotten to hear a lot of interesting arguments.

    Incidentally, I don’t think we give the anti-vaccine or faith-healing-alone crowd enough credit. I think that they’d be still taking the same approach regardless of what I or anyone else says.

  190. Shoshie:
    You know what makes me really angry?All of this setting up of a false dichotomy, science vs. faith.It’s bullshit.THAT is what causes people to choose faith healing over medical intervention.If people stop pretending that it’s one or the other, then maybe people can get the help– medical AND spiritual– that they need/want.
    I’m a scientist and an religious Jew.When my husband was sick, I was the first to tell him to drag himself to the doctor, get checked out, read some studies recommended by the doctor, and figure out with his doctor what the best medical treatment would be.I also prayed for him.They both helped us get through that really difficult time.
    Fortunately, he’s doing better now.But geez, people!Not all folks who believe in spiritual healing are anti-vaccine or healing-by-faith-alone types.When you set up this dichotomy, you legitimize those people.In reality, those extremists are a very small percentage of people who believe in and rely on spiritual healing to make their lives better.  

    I’m not sure if its so much a false dichotomy as people arguing past each other. I think what most people get out of this discussion is that there are two camps – one which advocates for only scientific medical intervention and another for faith-based or spiritual methods. What I think instead is that there’s a bunch of people talking about western medicine and cultural imperialism, there’s some people arguing about how faith has a role in healing, and some people talking about how science has a role. So in this case, a lot of people (probably myself included) have been arguing with an imaginary opponent. I blame it on thread derails, but hey, at least we’ve gotten to hear a lot of interesting arguments.

    Incidentally, I don’t think we give the anti-vaccine or faith-healing-alone crowd enough credit. I think that they’d be still taking the same approach regardless of what I or anyone else says.

  191. Like ice baths and Freudian psychology and the thorazine shuffle and lobotomies and rebirth therapy and hysterical wombs?

    Ahem…

    The difference is that science moves forward and is subject to alteration in the face of data. Psychoanalysis was studied, criticized, and eventually modified as a result of those criticisms. Being raked over the coals by feminist critics made analysis better. Queer theorists did the same. Walk into a conference or pick up a journal today and you’ll see how voices like Foucault and Butler have transformed analysis from an aggressive tool of oppression into one of the most feminist, queer, and effective schools of modern clinical psychology.

  193. I am questioning why the theories of non-white people are dismissed as unicorn pee and woo and conflated with head turning and green puke and owl eating–when it’s clear that western medicine hasn’t done an exactly exceptional job of being the One True Theory–in fact, it’s clear that Western Medicine has forgotten much of it’s own history of woo woo unicorn pee that still lingers into today’s practice.

    Because white people didn’t come up with it?

    I’m glad Ms Rev pointed out that many people who practice Christianity or Catholicism aren’t privileged. Many Hispanic and African American communities in my area are Christian and aren’t privileged by any means. Everyone who is arguing that Christians need to check their privilege is confusing “Christian” with “wealthy WASP.”

  194. latinist: That shamans and magic can help sick people recover has, of course, been proven many times. It’s called the placebo effect. We now think it has to do with the patient’s belief rather than the particulars of any magical system, but that doesn’t mean the effect isn’t real, or that shamans and witch doctors haven’t provided extremely valuable help to many, many sick people.

    what is this magic you are referring to? try as I might, I can’t get my wand to work–is there a way to make it so?

    which is to say–again–equating shamans with “witch doctors” and “magic” is belittling, unfair, and fairly complicit with a racist system that refuses to believe the knowledge indigenous communities and communities of color have collected could possibly be based on anything substantial or real. which is, again, ironic given how much of that “magic” universities and researchers are trying to steal.

  195. which is, again, ironic given how much of that “magic” universities and researchers are trying to steal. bfp

    I would love an actual concrete example of this magic-stealing…

  197. GallingGalla: The thing is? There’s more than just collecting data. There’s listening to other people’s actual real-life experiences, and people recounting their stories and accounts just as valid an activity as collecting data is.

    …I am very confused about how that is not collecting data. I was talking about investigating the effectiveness of pain-relief treatment. The only way I know of to measure pain is to ask the patient.

  198. “Yeah, which is why I said minors are fundamentally different. I lived this shit. I mean seriously. At 6 months I underwent an “exorcism” because I had colic. My asthma went untreated until I was 12 because of faith healing. I am here on this planet because my school nurse ignored my parent’s directives and gave me asthma medication. (Something I told my parents was a miracle to keep it a secret.) So I get that minors are different and I know parental consent cannot substitute for their consent. ”

    Oh sorry, not sure how I missed that! I’m glad that you dodged a bullet.

  199. David: Bfp, people’s opposition to traditional medicines comes not from an idea that traditional medicine is “foreign”. It exists because many “traditional” medicines don’t have a satisfying investigative answer for why they work, or even if they work beyond a placebo effect

    First, to be clear, I am NOT talking about “foreign” versus “home.” I am talking about white supremacist heteropatriarcal imperialism versus indigenous community based knowledge that then many times extends itself into the diaspora through forced relocation (i.e. slavery), immigration and migration, etc.

    Secondly, while I think it is possible to believe that the US’s cultural distaste for “magic” and “witch doctors” and “five finger heart withdrawal’ is not based in a distaste for the foreign (i.e. the racialized peoples of the world)–when we understand that indigenous spiritualities almost universally are grounded in a holistic approach to health–that takes into account the interconnectedness between healthy human beings, healthy animals, healthy grass, healthy water, healthy air–that individuals do not exist by themselves, but that the entire community is all dependent upon each other–and we see that one of the first things most colonizers/settlers did was to immediately *discredit* that fundamental theory as a way to justify rampant theft of land –it becomes harder to believe that racism is not a core tenet of “Science and Medicine until proven otherwise.”

    in short–certain structures of power are consistently reinforced and justified by perpetuating the myth that western medicine must *teach* the ignorant owl eating masses and that the ignorant owl eating masses have nothing useful at all to contribute to science or medicine or health *on their own terms* (i.e. as equals or partners) rather than on the terms of the rational scientists (i.e. as colonizer and colonized).

  200. by way of example–indigenous women were among the first to point to the connection between corporate pollution and health because they were the first ones to feel the effects of that pollution–indigenous lands are consistently used as toxic dump sites.

    and yet, consistently, those indigenous women are not taken seriously or are easily written off because the colonial popular imagination sees them as “shamans” (or, as stated earlier–witch doctors “making magic” that is really nothing more than a placebo effect) that is coupled with a consistent refusal to “believe in” (i.e. learn anything or be educated by) anything that can not be understood through the scientific method.

    Indigenous women are saying that “cures” come not just from immediate medical backed treatment–but from accepting their *theory of spirituality* which suggests that the land that you dump dioxins all over is intimately connected to the bodies living on that land–and thus to “cure” you must clean up that land.

    somebody asked earlier if I was sick with HIV or cancer or something horrible, would I be treated by spiritual based healing or western medicine–the answer to that is that first, I’ve never said it’s one or the either, from the very first comment I made I said that I don’t understand why there can’t be an integrated or complimentary response to illness. and second–I believe that respecting the earth and land and air and animals as a part of my community and as spiritual beings is as integral to my health as chemotherapy is if I get cancer.

    and I’d most certainly smoke pot (which is an indigenous method of healing) to deal with nausea post chemo treatment. and I do get regular acupuncture treatments to deal with high levels of stress now, instead of in twenty years when those high levels of chronic stress play out in the form of a heart attack or chronic illness.

    Very very unicorn pee drinking of me, but what can one do?

  201. Just a note to say:

    I’ve been [silently] appreciating many of the insights and sub-themes in this thread, including

    **the scientific method as distinct from the practice of Science, and the limits of each;

    **the simultaneous denigration and appropriation of indigenous knowledge of healing and wellness (implicit here, I think: disproportionately bad effects on women);

    **values of ritual and communal meaning-making outside of dogmatically “anti-ritual” and/or positivist worldviews;

    **historically and socially specific views on un-wellness and affliction, and how both Institutional Science and non-hegemonic medicinal practices often present helpful resources and harmful constraints to a given individual or group.

    **complex ways that people navigate contact with the historically specific but non-uniquely hierarchical and oppressive religious institution of the Catholic Church, which is led undemocratically by certain classes of people and filled with/animated by/imposed upon diverse subjects (thus reflecting our larger society).

    And at the same time am feeling overwhelmed by the many large arms of the discussion, coupled with (and maybe exacerbated by) lots of rhetoric that to me feels demanding, condescending, inflammatory, or un-generous.

    So, both appreciating and feeling burnt out on the thread.

    hugs to all who like hugs. and a book recommendation, for anybody interested in reading a historical-materialist take on some of these very topics: Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body, and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici. Really, really, really interesting and good, and has helped me to understand the violent eradication of Western European indigenous healing culture (practiced largely by women), that was decimated through the Witch Hunts and other forms of state terrorism after the Middle Ages, during the birth of the capitalist economic system.

  203. I aI am Catholic. I believe in Christ by choice. I want religion in my life because it gives me peace. I wouldn’t condemn a person that is an atheist because ithat is their choice. And I expect equal respect. On the subject of exorcism. I don’t believe a person always chooses to be possessed. I think sometimes people choose to seek it. Like these shows paranormal activity and ghost hunters and such. I guess the bottom line is make choices that will make YOU happy. I wouldn’t wish that any person here ridiculing the catholic faith or any religion would have a personal experience of any kind that would make you a believer. As our country says God Bless America…peace out!

  204. I’m in complete agreement with you about the racist nature of Bagelsan’s comment, don’t get me wrong.

    Oh please. 9.9 What I’m trying to point out is that a lot of the woo-love is racist in exactly the same pattern as Kill Bill, not that Kill Bill is an accurate representation of anything. (Where did you guys even get that from? Magical thinking is truly a wonder.)

    I was responding to Ashley’s starry-eyed exoticizing of all things foreign: “Why every mystical tradition has masters who will teach you how to handle these forces, assuming you have learned to quiet your mind enough that they think you can handle the teaching.”

    That crap is straight out of all those racist “wise old Asian man” tropes — and is a perfect example of the people who jump on the mystical bandwagon just because someone slaps a few kanji on something and say it’s “ancient.” Oh wow, gee, let’s go on a tourist trip to visit those “masters” and learn their secret magic ways, then we can get a Hanzo sword and really start getting our weeaboo on. Yuck.

    It’s patronizing (refusing to scrutinize a practice ’cause it’s “mean” to apply logic or something), it’s infantilizing (Asia’s so primitive and adorable and instinctive!), and it erases all the realities of modern Asia — white people aren’t the only ones using scientific methods, y’all. Japanese medicine doesn’t all involve sitting under a waterfall on a mountain anymore than American medicine does, yanno? Asia is kicking ass and taking names at modern (not “western”) science, but that doesn’t let Westerners properly fantasize about the mystical Orient, so all that boring old evidence-based research gets ignored in favor of whatever old crap they can dig up and get certified as “a non-white person did this shit once a thousand years ago, so you know it’s legit! You know how in tune with nature those people are.”

    Understand? It’s all about fetishizing “ancient wisdom” — and who cares if there are actual scientific communities of color addressing actual medical problems using well-established methods, that’s not foreign and sexy like something 2000 years old.

  205. David: Re: mansplaining. Was I talking to you?

    Also: I can’t mansplain. I’m not a man.

    Also: Look it up. Not my job to educate you.

  206. which is to say–again–equating shamans with “witch doctors” and “magic” is belittling, unfair, and fairly complicit with a racist system that refuses to believe the knowledge indigenous communities and communities of color have collected could possibly be based on anything substantial or real. which is, again, ironic given how much of that “magic” universities and researchers are trying to steal. bfp

    C’mon, bfp. You know that all knowledge and treatment offered by indigenous communities and communities of color is given great weight. It’s the placebo effect! As explained by white-male dominated science!

    bfp’s comments here consistently resonate with and make sense to me. Guess I’m just a unicorn-pee-drinker. Or I’m just a feminist who refuses to take “science” as the answer to everything, without examining the patriarchal, white, privileged basis of “science” as some are discussing it here.

  207. Understand? It’s all about fetishizing “ancient wisdom”

    I disagree.

    When I give birth, I plan on doing it in a hospital (I keep having nightmares about getting stuck in one of those epic Moscow traffic jams and giving birth in the back seat of a cab – but we’ll just leave all that in the realm of paranoia for now). This doesn’t preclude me from, say, going to get treated for post-traumatic stress symptoms via alternative means – because I respect the particular methodology which is, in fact, ancient, and because I have enough experience to know that it works for me.

    If a bearded priest is able to offer me more help than a medical doctor – I am going to take that help. And I’ll respect the place where it’s coming from – because I’m the one in need. I don’t give a crap if other people call me a “crackpot”, it’s my body and mind that’s suffering, not theirs, and they don’t get to decide how I arrive at a place of greater healing. Is any particular busybody going to be the one helping me out when I suffer from spasms so bad that I can’t walk or eat?

    Do they even care to hold my hand through the pain? No on both counts? Well, they don’t get to tell me what to do then.

  208. Bagelsan,

    I was responding to Ashley’s starry-eyed exoticizing of all things foreign

    I’m not talking about “all things foreign.” I’m talking about my own tradition, which I take seriously.

    I’ve practiced meditation with Christian mystics, and plenty of boring white accountants. Contemplative practice and mysticism exists in every tradition, and that was my original point. The conflation of contemplative practice with a racist representation of Asian culture was your own.

    I think this thread is about played out, but just want to express appreciation to bfp and kloncke for their insights. It’s been an interesting and challenging discussion.

  209. I would love an actual concrete example of this magic-stealing…

    You could look at Freud’s work with dreams for a pretty good example (although Jung had the decency to come around a few decades later and admit that was magic). Or you could look at the research that has been done around the use of Ibogaine to treat certain kinds of addictions. You could trace the aggressive movements in the pharmaceutical industry to work out (and patent) the ways in which many traditional remedies work. You could look at the CBT movement’s attempt to co-opt meditation, yoga, and breath work.

    Still, I think that talking about shamanism and the Catholic church in the same breath is questionable. What it means to be a shaman differs from culture to culture (and even from community to community within cultures), the word itself is somewhat like “pagan” or “heathen,” a means of homogenizing a wildly disparate group of Others. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, is a transnational business and political party.

  210. Odin:
    …I am very confused about how that is not collecting data. I was talking about investigating the effectiveness of pain-relief treatment. The only way I know of to measure pain is to ask the patient.  

    And yet, when it comes to acupuncture, for example, you denigrate it’s effectiveness because oh my, data hasn’t been collected by (enough) Western scientists when there are innumerable people, including people commenting on this thread, that acupuncture has helped them.

    And another way that I think your missing the point, I’ll illustrate with my own story, that of my father. He recently had surgery to remove an unusually large and deeply invasive skin cancer. The wound was truly enormous and was not healing, and he was in severe pain and severely disabled as a result. The surgeon had not ordered home nursing care (my father is 84 and could not care for this wound himself). He and I went to his family doctor, who was appalled at the lack of medical care he was receiving, and contacted the surgeon to twist his arm into ordering home nursing care.

    [‘k, time for atheists to jump on me for “proselytizing” even though I’m describing my own experience…]

    Immediately after that doctor’s visit, I went to a healing service at my church. I laid on hands and had hands laid on me, I was anointed with oil, I listened and cried as the priest spoke the healing from the Holy Spirit flowing into us and then out from us. And I prayed for my father.

    And you know what happened? He got better. His wound started to heal, and continues to do so, and he is becoming more active, is driving again, and his mood has improved considerably.

    Now who’s to say that the medical care that he received was the *only* factor here? Who’s to say that my faith and my prayers and participation in the healing service had nothing to do with it? And before anybody makes arguments about “unfalsifiable statements”, that is to me the point of faith and healing services, that they operate on a different plane that is beyond and outside of scientific inquiry. I never in my life would suggest that my father not received the medical care that he needs, and I intervened on his behalf with his surgeon to insist that he order home health care. Y’all can tell me that my belief in prayer and healing services have no basis in fact, and I’m ok with that. But as soon as y’all start talking shit about people of faith – of whatever religious or spiritual tradition, deist or not, using ableist language like we’re “deluded”; as soon as you start talking about the things that bfp has raised – methods of treatment that have been in use by non-Western communities for thousands of years because they *work* – with such disrespectful terms as “unicorn pee”, then we part company.

    You don’t believe in acupuncture, herbal medicines, or faith healing? Then don’t practice them. But what threat is it to you, unless it be to your / our Western privilege, that people find healing through means other than Western allopathic medicine?

    Aspirin = a substance contained in willow bark. Paclitaxel (a chemotherapy drug) = substance contained in Pacific Yew trees. Digitoxin = substance contained in the foxglove plant. All treatments known by and discovered by indigenous people, and taken from them by the same Westerners who equate their healing methods with “unicorn pee”.

    Oh, and stating without qualification that Christianity is privileged is kind of … illogical … in the face of the recent slaughter and ongoing repression of Iraqi Christians.

    Also what Miss S said:

    I’m glad Ms Rev pointed out that many people who practice Christianity or Catholicism aren’t privileged. Many Hispanic and African American communities in my area are Christian and aren’t privileged by any means. Everyone who is arguing that Christians need to check their privilege is confusing “Christian” with “wealthy WASP.”

  211. Now who’s to say that the medical care that he received was the *only* factor here?

    Not me!

    Who’s to say that my faith and my prayers and participation in the healing service had nothing to do with it?

    Do you mean “I believed it would work and got a placebo?” or “because I thought it would work, I acted differently or made different choices?” I don’t disagree that such a thing is possible or even likely.

    Do you mean “God heard me and, through the healing oil and prayer, acted to change or direct reality to match my wishes?” I’m firmly in the “nothing to do with it” camp.

    And before anybody makes arguments about “unfalsifiable statements”, that is to me the point of faith and healing services, that they operate on a different plane that is beyond and outside of scientific inquiry.

    yup. That said, it’s a plane which contains (though is by no means limited to) a lot of unreality.

    Y’all can tell me that my belief in prayer and healing services have no basis in fact, and I’m ok with that.

    Thank you for your permission, and I’m glad you accept that.

    But as soon as y’all start talking shit about people of faith – of whatever religious or spiritual tradition, deist or not, using ableist language like we’re “deluded”

    If someone believes that I have been abducted by aliens and replaced with an undetectable robotic replica, I reserve the right to call them deluded. That’s not being ableist; it’s what deluded means. Deluded involves a reality check.

    So, believing that the Holy Spirit flowed into you and then magically flowed out of you to act and heal someone else? Delusion. You don’t get automatic protections for delusions just by calling them “religion.”

    But what threat is it to you, unless it be to your / our Western privilege, that people find healing through means other than Western allopathic medicine?

    Generally? No threat at all. Plenty of non allopathic medicine is perfectly great stuff.

    If you’re talking about faith, and/or faith healing? Well, I think it’s generally a threat when people avoid reality or ignore it, and generally a good thing when they understand it. Any additional denial of reality is a threat. i’m willing to make concessions for the placebo effect but it’s a slippery slope.

    Aspirin = a substance contained in willow bark…[appropriated] by the same Westerners who equate their healing methods with “unicorn pee”.

    Herbalism is real. it’s not in the same category as exorcism and healing by intervention of the holy whatever. Herbalism isn’t unicorn pee, because it’s just a different kind of medicine with a bit of woo attached. It has some downsides, sure: herbs which contain good stuff often also contain a lot of other stuff which isn’t necessarily healthy; those things sometimes have side effects; dosing concentration usually isn’t controlled; there are certain chemical forms which sometimes work better; and and so on. But herbs work.

    And FWIW, herbalism isn’t an “indigenous” thing as distinct from evil white colonizing westerners; it’s universal. Christians used herbs; Aztecs used herbs; pretty much everyone used herbs though which ones they used varied depending on what grew where.

  212. GallingGalla: And yet, when it comes to acupuncture, for example, you denigrate it’s effectiveness because oh my, data hasn’t been collected by (enough) Western scientists when there are innumerable people, including people commenting on this thread, that acupuncture has helped them.

    I denigrated acupuncture? How? When? Show me precisely what I said that was a denigration of acupuncture, because I can’t find it, even taking into account that I’ve been somewhat sloppy in my language. I specifically pointed out that Evil Western Science tentatively supports its effectiveness (a statement of fact to the best of my knowledge), something that I think is in its favor. There’s ongoing debate about how strong the support is, which is why I used tentative. That’s not an insult or a denigration. That’s a statement of what is to the best of my knowledge a fact. If I’d not acknowledged the debate, even though I am personally inclined to think that the balance of the evidence shows that acupuncture is a relatively safe, effective placebo, I’d have been rightly yelled at by others for letting my personal biases get in the way.

    My whole point for talking about data was to point out to bfp that when she talked about acupuncture being effective and reliable, she was very likely talking about verifiable empirical observations — asking a patients to report on their pain levels, which is as far as I know the only method we have to measure pain — rather than asking an exorcist if a demon was gone. We have no way to measure if demons are gone. The exorcist is the one who decides. Not the patient, not the patient’s changes in behavior or health, but the exorcist who holds power over the patient.

    Just because I’m not expressing outright support for something doesn’t mean I’m denigrating it. Good grief. You’re as bad as Kristen J, who apparently thinks that my concern over the ethics of placebo practitioners and safety of such treatments means I want to deny people safe placebos they are currently using.

  213. Right, because herbalism has always been accepted within the Western scientific paradigm and there have been no shifts in understanding or acceptance that might presage the potential for future change. Here, eat this root. (Not definitive, but illustrative!)

    Also, who exactly do you think “indigenous” means?

  214. Odin: You’re as bad as Kristen J, who apparently thinks that my concern over the ethics of placebo practitioners and safety of such treatments means I want to deny people safe placebos they are currently using.

    Err…no, but nice try. Your “concern over the ethics of placebo practitioners” contains 2 logic fails (1) that the effect you identify as placebo is in actual fact placebo (rather than just something science cannot currently fully explain) and (2) it denies the agency of the patient.

    And considering that my original argument – the one you objected to – was specifically aimed at questioning why we denigrate the choices individuals make in their person health decisions, your objection seems to indicate that you think we should denigrate people for choosing non-medical alternatives.

  215. Usually lurking–

    “So, believing that the Holy Spirit flowed into you and then magically flowed out of you to act and heal someone else? Delusion. You don’t get automatic protections for delusions just by calling them “religion.”

    Believing in a supernatural power, in and of itself, is not a sign of mental illness. Believing that supernatural power is benevolent and wants to help you is not delusion. It’s a commonly shared held belief, and therefore can’t be a delusion. If a widespread belief is later shown to not be true, they were wrong, not delusional. People thought for years the Earth was flat, and then that it was the center of the universe. They weren’t delusional, just wrong.

    Religious beliefs can hit a point where they sink into delusion–but so can’t scientific beliefs. People who are *sure* someday there will be computer neural implants and AI and plan for Y2K are a bit delusional. But that’s okay! It’s all good!

  216. Not “deluded” as in “diagnosed as possessing a mental illness.” Deluded as in “believing in something which is obviously untrue.”

    If a widespread belief is later shown to not be true, they were wrong, not delusional.

    That depends on the belief, hmmm? I do not believe that you are an alien, but that doesn’t make me deluded even if you are; based on all available evidence it would be exhibiting delusion if I believed that you WERE an alien. I have absolutely no rational reason to conclude you are, and every rational reason to conclude you’re not.

    Tell me, please, how that applies to spirits.

    But in any case, groupthink doesn’t count towards whether something is delusional or not IMO, outside the psychiatric diagnosis field. If I create a “Karak is a purple skinned flying alien” cult, it isn’t any less deluded once I convince 100,000 people it’s true.

    Believing that wine literally changes to the blood of Christ? Believing that a holy whatnot literally comes down from wherever and does something? Deluded. Shit, it’s just social convention that prevents folks from pointing out that “I hear god talking to me” and “I hear voices in my head talking to me” are the same things with different names. Why accept one as more problematic than the other?

    Would you think someone was deluded for believing they could create a unicorn-riding faery in their back yard, who would cast mind-controlling spells on neighbors to stop their leaf-blowing? Would you think them deluded if they built a mind control ray out of tinfoil and broken pencils and spent two days fasting in a pyramid to get the energy to power it and control the neighbor?

    If so, why DON’T you think it’s deluded if someone believes that they can pray to god and that somehow god will stop the leaf blowing?

  217. Odin: You’re as bad as Kristen J, who apparently thinks that my concern over the ethics of placebo practitioners and safety of such treatments means I want to deny people safe placebos they are currently using. Odin

    I’m as bad as Kristen J? *grins* Why, thank you, Odin, I do appreciate the compliment. And yes, I agree with her wrt placebo issues.

  218. Shit, it’s just social convention that prevents folks from pointing out that “I hear god talking to me” and “I hear voices in my head talking to me” are the same things with different names.

    Actually UL, while I can’t say I recall having experienced auditory hallucinations, I can say that seeing spirits is quite different than visual hallucinations.
    Not only do the two situations feel different and look different, but friends who can also see things can and have confirmed the presence of spirits (including details and that I didn’t state and/or speaking out before I could say that I saw something) yet certainly don’t see anything when I’m hallucinating.
    So yeah, this person who is both spiritual and crazy says that there is a big difference. If you want to dismiss me as entirely ‘delusional’ or whatnot then thats -your- ableism showing.

  219. Some people clearly need a reminder that being a feminist and an anti-racist does NOT require you to be either an anti-realist, an anti-positivist, an anti-Marxist, an anti-scientist, anti-Enlightenment, an idealist, a relativist (about truth, or morality, or epistemic norms), a Frankfurt-School-style critical theorist, a post-modernist, a spiritualist, or a strong social constructivist (not that one could even consistently be all of those simultaneously). The association of feminism with any significant subset of these positions is largely restricted to the sphere of influence of a smallish number of thinkers in some US humanities departments over the last 40 years or so (notably not philosophy departments).

    The insinuation or, worse yet, the unreflective assumption that one has to adhere to them (particularly prominent in this thread), lest one be deemed an out-group or worse, is nothing short of offensive (like a sudden, unexpected whiff of over-ripe camembert). Invoking claims suffused with any of these substantive philosophical positions as pure facts is unconducive to informative discussion, because challenging the tacit assumptions will almost always be a derail. It’s really just a cheap rhetorical trick. Even if the positions happen to be right.

  220. Religious beliefs can hit a point where they sink into delusion–but so can’t scientific beliefs. People who are *sure* someday there will be computer neural implants and AI and plan for Y2K are a bit delusional. But that’s okay! It’s all good!

    Ah, I see the problem here. You have no fucking idea what science is.*

    *Based on the fact that you seem to think “science” (not “science-as-practiced-by-humans”) involves belief (by definition not an evidence-based practice) in any way, and that the Y2K panic thing had anything to do with science. Science supports the idea that 1999 –> 2000 is significant to anything? Um, no. And neural implants, etc, are for the most part currently science fiction. Whether or not one fervently predicts their widespread use in the future has really no relation to things like the scientific method. False equivalences are false.

    However, if you want to start calling your religious beliefs “religious fiction” then I’m 100% in support of that.

  221. Also, I agree with william; we’ve all (including me) gotten wildly off-topic. Acupuncture, for example, and exorcism have certain things in common but until the Catholic Church starts debating whether they should stick people with needles vs. with tiny crosses or whatever, then I don’t really care about acupuncture. My main concern is that the Church is stepping into medical practitioner territory, “diagnosing” mental illnesses (and “diagnosing” demons, too, but while I find that equally objectionable it’s at least within their religious purview) and I am very suspicious of their motives (the Catholic Church being absolutely notorious for abusing its power.)

    It’s like a weird twist on those suicide prevention campaigns, where people are being told “If you know someone who is talking about suicide, harming themselves, etc., encourage them to seek professional help” now amended to “– unless it’s probably a demon! In which case fuck trained therapists; get yourself some holy water and go to town!” No matter your religious affiliation, encouraging people with no health training to make health diagnoses (especially in potentially life-threatening situations) is baaad.

  222. People thought for years the Earth was flat, and then that it was the center of the universe. They weren’t delusional, just wrong.

    The point being made, if I understood karak correctly, was that there isn’t delusion involved. In the history of astronomy, there was a point when it was proven that other planets move, but it was not proven that it is true for Earth. There was nothing found to prove that there was any such orbiting–as a matter of fact, there was a perceived lack of a stellar parallax, which until much later was even considered evidence of the opposite. But those who believed Earth didn’t move weren’t delusional, they were just wrong.

  223. Kristen J.:

    And considering that my original argument – the one you objected to – was specifically aimed at questioning why we denigrate the choices individuals make in their person health decisions, your objection seems to indicate that you think we should denigrate people for choosing non-medical alternatives. Kristen J.

    Actually, Kristen J, you started out by asserting that “everyone” had a problem with the placebo effect. And your question was _who_ cares why things actually work, so long as they do. If you didn’t actually want to know who cared, then you shouldn’t have asked.

    I care, so I gave you reasons why we should care, including harms that can occur if we just say “well, we can’t understand it, but it seems to work, so that’s good enough! Everyone stop trying to understand it now” or worse, “it works, don’t you dare question the (person in position of authority)’s knowledge!”

    Mandating ignorance is not the same as respecting patient agency.

    Yes, I do assume that when things like homeopathy have an effect, it’s a placebo, because often the reason “why” it works flies in the face of my understanding of basic reality. For example, in my understanding of reality, thermisol in vaccines can’t give you autism if none of the vaccines you’ve had actually had thermisol in them. In my understanding of reality, you can’t cure cancer with a glass of ionized water, because of what cancer physically _is_. If you can explain how this is logic fail, I will listen.

    I never said placebos were bad, I never said I wanted people to stop using them, I never even said that there was anything inherently bad about using placebos. And I honestly wish my (white, middle-class, USian) coworker who gets acupuncture would talk about it in supernatural terms like chi rather than use pseudo-scientific bullshit to try to impress me, because I don’t really care if he thinks his chakras are being realigned but it drive me nuts to hear perpetuate misconceptions of what the term “electromagnetic energy” means.

    I certainly never said (or even tried to imply) we should mock or denigrate competent adults who make an _informed_ decision to use non-science-based therapies or who turn down evidence-based medical care for themselves. Allowing competent adults to make informed decisions about what happens to their bodies is the heart of bodily autonomy, so actually, I think it’s really important that we let people (especial people with terminal illnesses) make the decisions that they are most comfortable with.

    But I am damned concerned about people making uninformed decisions or being taken advantage of by scammers. I’m worried about what’s going in in cases like those of Daniel Hauser, Penelope Dingle, and Kara Neumann.

  224. Usually Lurking,

    The wine is a symbol of the blood of Christ. The wine does not turn into blood, it, wine, represents the blood. Catholics do not believe wine LITERALLY turns into blood.

  225. Odin,

    I’m fairly certain I understand the context under which I made my comment. For me the context was people denigrating others who make non-medical choices. If you read the conversation differently bully for you…but it wasn’t what I was talking about.

    I never said science should stop trying to figure it out…in fact I said quite the opposite. Instead I said…WHILE you are trying to figure it out people need relief…so we should stop calling people names (which has definitely being occurring in this thread) because they accept their own experience as evidence that something works.

    Odin: Yes, I do assume that when things like homeopathy have an effect, it’s a placebo, because often the reason “why” it works flies in the face of my understanding of basic reality. For example, in my understanding of reality, thermisol in vaccines can’t give you autism if none of the vaccines you’ve had actually had thermisol in them. In my understanding of reality, you can’t cure cancer with a glass of ionized water, because of what cancer physically _is_. If you can explain how this is logic fail, I will listen.

    The logic fail is in your absolute certainty that your understanding of reality is – in fact – reality and your dismissal of other people’s experiences as a valid source of their reality.

    For me physics forms the greatest approximation of reality based on my value system (effectiveness in terms of predictive power). I think everything in the universe is, in some way or another, reducible to physics.

    But physics is just a way to describe our experience and its based on an assumption that predictive power is the key to understanding *R*eality…an assumption we have no way to verify…so our assertion that this is *R*eality is baseless.

    Odin: Allowing competent adults to make informed decisions about what happens to their bodies is the heart of bodily autonomy, so actually, I think it’s really important that we let people (especial people with terminal illnesses) make the decisions that they are most comfortable with.

    So when you say things like this, you are really saying “Allowing competent adults – who agree with me about what constitutes reality – to make decisions is at the heart of bodily autonomy.”

    Because aside from this nonsense people keep spewing about delusional states, lots of people on this planet live with a different basic understanding of the world and that world view is not wrong. It may be different, it may be less effective, it may be damaging, but it is no less true than our world view.

    If that world view incorporates demons and angels (which most people in the US believe in btw) or if it involves ninjas and pirates (which at least has comedic value), we have to accept/respect their reality as authentic to themselves and the choices they make based on that reality.

  226. Kristen J.: lots of people on this planet live with a different basic understanding of the world and that world view is not wrong. It may be different, it may be less effective, it may be damaging, but it is no less true than our world view.

    […]

    we have to accept/respect their reality as authentic to themselves and the choices they make based on that reality.

    Each of these theses requires an independent substantive defence – the sort for which a blog comment is admittedly not the ideal medium. Simply calling their rejection a “logic fail” or “baseless” isn’t it.

    But more importantly, asserting their negation is not incompatible with feminism or anti-racism, or a black mark upon one’s judgement and human decency in general, as you (and some others) have been insinuating.

    [I made a similar point in another, less temperate post, which has been stuck in moderation.]

  227. lots of people on this planet live with a different basic understanding of the world and that world view is not wrong. it may be less effective, it may be damaging

    This may well just be a fundamental irreconcilable difference between us, but when something is ineffective and harmful I think that “wrong” is exactly the descriptor for it.

    Also, what do you think about people who hold internally inconsistent beliefs? Take homeopathy, for example; the people who believe that X treatment will be most effective when diluted down to literally one or zero molecules –that “more dilute” equals “more powerful” — also simultaneously believe that less mercury/lead in drinking water is good and that we aren’t all drinking extremely potent dinosaur (unicorn?) piss all the time.

  228. This entire thread reminds me of the classic joke:

    “Renee Descartes once walked into a bar. The bartender asked him if he would have a drink. Descartes said ‘I think not’ and *poof*, he vanished.”

    Anyway, on a more serious note, you people are going to have to tackle the age old question of what constitutes truth if you even want to talk about if all “truths” are equally valid. Might be a question for a philosophy major. In the meantime I’m going to listen to some more music on this laptop, which is being powered by energy from the spirit realm.

  229. This may well just be a fundamental irreconcilable difference between us, but when something is ineffective and harmful I think that “wrong” is exactly the descriptor for it.

    What’s right for one person may be wrong for another. Someone above posted about a terminally ill grandparent who didn’t want chemotherapy or a mastectomy. If she didn’t want it, it wasn’t right for her.

    That’s true even within the realm of “Western Science.” I have yet to find an SSRI that actually helps my anxiety, but one of my friends did. (And it seems like doctors don’t want to prescribe benzos. Or Ambien. And Maryland doesn’t approve medical marijuana. But that’s another story.)
    .
    Another friend got involved in a church, and a support group and she’s doing very well. Everyone needs to realize that everyone is different and has different needs. If I’m diagnosed terminally ill, I may want chemo, radiation and any other treatment available to me. Or, I may choose to pray and spend the rest of my days with the people I love. There’s nothing wrong with that.

  230. Oy, as I said above…the Reality/Truth/Objectivity discussion is one we’ve had around here a bunch lately. And trying to convince people that they are not the holders of all truth and knowledge is boring. Go read Chally’s Objectivity and Neutrality thread from a few weeks ago if you actually want to see where the idea that you actually know shit gets you. It’s a cognitive error that leads people to be dogmatic and judgmental.

  231. Well, surely there is a line between knowing all shit or simply knowing some shit. Without a baseline of any arguable axioms a conversation degenerates into sets of meaningless unproven claims which are also fairly dull to deal with. I blame the circular discussions that we see on this forum as an inability to set down formal rules or even formally say what we are trying to argue. I am also guilty of this.

  232. My main concern is that the Church is stepping into medical practitioner territory, “diagnosing” mental illnesses (and “diagnosing” demons, too, but while I find that equally objectionable it’s at least within their religious purview) and I am very suspicious of their motives (the Catholic Church being absolutely notorious for abusing its power.)

    And that, really, is at the core of my problem with this entire situation. The Catholic Church doesn’t get to claim religion and then go back to their little sandbox. They’ve abused far too many people, in far too many ways, for far too long to ever be given the benefit of the doubt. Discussions about acupuncture or the power of prayer obfuscate the fundamental issue at hand here. Its not, for me, that faith is suspect but rather that Rome is suspect.

    I’m pretty strongly convinced in the existence of things outside of what can be explained by the shitty brand of logical positivism we tend to call “science” in the West. I don’t even have an issue with people calling some of those experiences possession. What I do have a problem is with certain groups of people who have shown a centuries long track record of being untrustworthy using that kind of language suddenly at a time when their influence is waning. I’m not going to trust the words or motives of a Catholic priest anymore than I’d trust the words or motives of a Scientology SeaOrg member. Hubbard was a violent con man, his organization has consistently used violence to silence critics and coerce members. Just because the RCC has been doing it a bit longer and owns a city in Italy doesn’t make them much different.

    Beyond that, there is a real problem in this country with mad persons being subjected to moral and spiritual judgments. There are patients in my workplace who have been subjected to exorcisms and have the scars (physical and mental) to prove it, patients who have been cut off from their families because they chose meds and therapy to treat their psychotic symptoms rather than faith healing, patients who have seen a minor depression blossom into a major and suicidal one because they have been told that it is their poor spiritual life that has left them this way. Its bad enough to see that happening because people are misguided. The thing is, I don’t think thats whats happening here. I think the Church realizes that African and Latino/a members are quickly becoming the only ones who still show up and drop something in the collection plates outside of major holidays or cultural milestones. I think the Church views these folks as a resource to be exploited. I think the Church is talking about exorcisms not because of a sincere belief that demons are inhabiting Christians but because talking about it makes the faith more immediate and real and that urgency will lead to more asses in pews. I think the Church is betting on the ignorance of it’s members, on their fear, on their trust, in order to get a chance to reach a little deeper into their pocketbooks. I think the Church is using mad folks in order to whip their congregations into a frenzy and didn’t stop to think about what this might do to those mad folks because they don’t tend to have the kinds of numbers or net worth to pay for the next child rape settlement or pair of Prada boots.

    So yeah, Catholics can whinge all they want about being oppressed because people aren’t being respectful to their faith. They can try to distract by talking about the handful of places in the world where they aren’t the dominant power. But the bottom line is that here, in the places where Catholic doctrine holds sway, the actions of the Church hurt people who have very little power. Thats a repugnant thing to defend.

  233. Kristen J.: Go read Chally’s Objectivity and Neutrality thread from a few weeks ago if you actually want to see where the idea that you actually know shit gets you.

    That discussion exemplifies the very same problems as this one does.

    The association of feminism and anti-racism with brands of anti-realism, or relativism, or scepticism is largely restricted to the sphere of influence of a smallish number of thinkers in some US humanities departments over the last 40 years or so (notably not philosophy departments). Thoughtful people can and do disagree about whether this is for good or ill, far more than the local consensus seems to allow. Treating such philosophical views as a marker of political allegiance or alignment is therefore a really bad idea.

  234. William: So yeah, Catholics can whinge all they want about being oppressed because people aren’t being respectful to their faith.

    I’m not Catholic, I’m Episcopalian, and so is at least one other commenter on this thread. As I made clear in my comments above, I fully recognize that the Christian churchs, especially in the US, are responsible for a great deal of oppression. I think that the Catholic Church has blood on its hands, starting with the Crusades, continuing with the Inquisition, and Pope Pius XII’s silence regarding the Holocaust, and with priests raping children and the hierarchy covering it all up. Not to mention that Benedict XVI is happily and gleefully raiding the Anglican church for bishops and priests and actively working to break apart the Anglican communion so he can get his jollies from destroying a large Protestant denomination.

    And right now, the Episcopal diocese of which I am a part, has also been found to be sexually abusing children, and every Episcopal bishop in the country, along with the lay standing committee of my diocese, has demanded he step down, and he has refused. This is a BIG problem, that we cannot remove a cleric who is abusing children.

    But I take exception to condemning every Christian for the harmful and evil acts of the Church hierarchy. It’s no different than painting all Muslims as terrorists because a few extremist clerics advocate terrorism. I also take exception to so many people ignoring that churches are often deeply involved in social justice; the US civil rights movement was born in churches; Catholic priests integrating socialism into their theology, and the Catholic Worker Movement, have been a bulwark against right-wing oppression in Central America, and have died for their activism. This, William, is what I’m “whinging” about – Not about people condemning the Catholic church for forcing exorcisms on people, but about people, including yourself, condemning all people of faith as inherently evil.

  235. Kristen J.: Odin,I’m fairly certain I understand the context under which I made my comment.For me the context was people denigrating others who make non-medical choices.If you read the conversation differently bully for you…but it wasn’t what I was talking about.

    Whaaa, but my understanding of reality is that you were talking about whether or not we should study placebos! How dare you impose your view of Reality on my by informing me that yours is different, and telling me the content of your view of Reality! If you really respected my worldview you wouldn’t tell me you think I’m wrong!

    …I think we can all agree that would be a really bad argument if I were serious, yes?

    I never said science should stop trying to figure it out…in fact I said quite the opposite.Instead I said…WHILE you are trying to figure it out people need relief…so we should stop calling people names (which has definitely being occurring in this thread) because they accept their own experience as evidence that something works.

    Okay, great, we apparently agree that non-evidence-based treatments that seem to work should be studied, and that if they’re actually providing relief (placebo effect or not) we shouldn’t take them away from someone unless there’s a clear indication of risk or abuse (they’re drinking mercury, their practitioner is insisting they give increasingly more money to the Church of Practitioner so that God will be pleased with them, etc).

    Now can you please explain to me where “Odin wants to take everyone’s placebos ” comes out of what I’ve said?

    The logic fail is in your absolute certainty that your understanding of reality is – in fact – reality and your dismissal of other people’s experiences as a valid source of their reality.For me physics forms the greatest approximation of reality based on my value system (effectiveness in terms of predictive power).I think everything in the universe is, in some way or another, reducible to physics.But physics is just a way to describe our experience and its based on an assumption that predictive power is the key to understanding *R*eality…an assumption we have no way to verify…so our assertion that this is *R*eality is baseless.

    But at that point I have no way to rule out that I’m not just a butterfly hallucinating that I’m a human. I have no way to be sure that the world wasn’t created by a trickster god who wants us to think s/he doesn’t exist, or has a completely different nature. I can’t rule out that I’m not a brain in a vat and that this isn’t the Matrix Truman Show. I have to make a decision somewhere, both about what reality is and how much confidence I have in it.

    Making that decision is not logic fail, unless I choose an inconsistent set of axioms to work from.

    So when you say things like this, you are really saying “Allowing competent adults – who agree with me about what constitutes reality – to make decisions is at the heart of bodily autonomy.”

    Not really. If someone tells me that acupuncture helps them because it’s rearranging their chi flow, that’s fine with me. I don’t say “oh, they are not capable of informed consent” just because they believe there is a thing called chi and I don’t. (And as I’ve said, I’d rather people talk about chi flow, which I don’t believe in, then use bullshit pseudoscience to justify it to me.)

    But if someone says “drinking lead-infused water instead of having traditional treatment will cure my cancer”, then IMO morality dictates that we make sure they understand the risks of both lead poisoning and forgoing evidence-based cancer treatment. Yes, that does mean that I’m saying their understanding of the world is wrong. But I don’t want them to die out of ignorance, and I have to make a decision somewhere about the relative moral weight of respecting their worldview and letting them put themselves at risk out of what I see is ignorance. Once they understand those risks, which they can balance against whatever additional risks that their belief in demons or whatever imposes on the situation, _then_ they can go do whatever.

    It seems like you’re drawing the moral line elsewhere, and are more willing to let people risk their lives out of what you and I both apparently agree is ignorance about how the world actually works. I guess you think that it would be a disrespect of their worldview to give them information based on yours, and that this disrespect would be worse than letting themselves risk their health and safety through ignorance of how you think reality works.

    Us making different decisions about the relative moral weights of safety vs some particular notion of respect? Not the same as me committing logic fail.

    Because aside from this nonsense people keep spewing about delusional states, lots of people on this planet live with a different basic understanding of the world and that world view is not wrong.It may be different, it may be less effective, it may be damaging, but it is no less true than our world view.If that world view incorporates demons and angels (which most people in the US believe in btw) or if it involves ninjas and pirates (which at least has comedic value), we have to accept/respect their reality as authentic to themselves and the choices they make based on that reality.  

    Just because I think that reproducible results and natural explanations are the right way to go about things doesn’t mean I personally want to go chastise and correct everyone who has a different worldview from mine, and take away their metaphorical teddy bears and aspirin. But morality demands I be concerned for their safety, so I want their decisions to be made with what I think is correct information. Once they have that information, so long as no one else is being put at risk, that’s their choice.

    The three names I gave were of two minors and an adult woman who, from what I’ve read, seems to have been repeatedly and deliberately _mislead_ by her homeopathy practitioner about the risks and likely success of trying to cure her cancer with homeopathic methods.

  236. Odin,

    See Nagel’s concept of the view from nowhere (which I still think misses the mark…but is at least famous enough to be discussed lots of places on the web) for a good description of why its logic fail. Short version: The belief in the human ability to know *T*ruth is by definition logic fail. All you know is your subjective experience and you can’t create objectivity (i.e. Knowledge of truth) within the limits of human perception and cognition.

    Sure we have to move forward with our understanding of the universe…but at the end of the day when we begin talking about what people should do, should believe we have to remember that our understanding of the universe is not absolute and we cannot assert the *T*ruth of our views over the views of others. We can persuade. We c
    an argue that insulin is waaaayyyy better than faith and provide studies which we believe demonstrate the usefulness of our worldview…but we can’t (logically, reasonably) assert that we know.

    Which is why I find all of this name calling and scientific sanctimony so offensive.

    As for the other if you say you didn’t mean to denigrate people’s choices, I believe you…I was simply explaining why I interpreted your words that way.

  237. Kristen J.: See Nagel’s concept of the view from nowhere […] Short version: The belief in the human ability to know *T*ruth is by definition logic fail. All you know is your subjective experience and you can’t create objectivity (i.e. Knowledge of truth) within the limits of human perception and cognition.

    This is a serious misreading of Nagel. Nagel’s accepts that there is both a truly objective and truly subjective view of the world, and his project in the book is to reconcile the two when they come into tension. His solution is to sometimes de-emphasise the objective, and sometimes to de-emphasise the subjective, depending on the case at hand. So, for instance, he rejects the appropriateness of the subjective view in explaining autonomous action and rejects the appropriateness of the objective view in explaining phenomenal consciousness. In yet other cases, he would insist that an intermediate view was necessary. He emphatically rejects subjectivism about physical reality, and would disagree with your treatment of the insulin case.

    None of this, mind you, is philosophically uncontroversial, and Nagel’s is in fact a minority view among philosophers (his book aimed to buck that trend, but not much has changed in the intervening 20 years – see the results of a recent survey of professional philosophers at philpapers.org). I’m not suggesting that philosophical issues can be settled by majority vote, but you’re presenting a much more radical form of subjectivism than Nagel’s as rationally indisputable, and that’s just not the case.

    Additionally, even if Nagel’s view (or some more radical position) is right, it would not be right as a matter or logic, but as a consequence of substantive metaphysical and epistemological propositions. It’s denial is by no means a “logic fail” – even less so “by definition” – but something thoughtful people can (and do) disagree on.

    Finally, it is not clearly incompatible with feminism or anti-racism to think that people can have, even frequently, beliefs (about the world and about themselves) that are objectively false. This too is something thoughtful people can (and do) disagree on.

  238. So yeah, Catholics can whinge all they want about being oppressed because people aren’t being respectful to their faith.

    I’m not Catholic. Or Christian. As a matter of fact, I’m of a religion that has been historically competitive with Christianity. I’m of a religion whose people, today, are both oppressed and oppressive.

    There is a huge difference between disrespecting people who have faith and disrespecting people who abuse their power in the name of faith to prevent others from practicing their natural human rights and preserving their culture and self-identity. You’ve made it clear that you were against those who associated themselves with the Church, which includes those who share its faith–and in this context, with exorcism and the belief in spirits, other religions who have the similar components of faith–and not just with the Church itself.

  239. Michael: Usually Lurking,The wine is a symbol of the blood of Christ. The wine does not turn into blood, it, wine, represents the blood. Catholics do not believe wine LITERALLY turns into blood.  

    Actually, with regard to Catholics, you have that exactly wrong (Google for transubstantiation). Catholics also believe that the host literally becomes the body of Christ.

  240. This is a BIG problem, that we cannot remove a cleric who is abusing children.

    Sure you could. Nothing prevents you other than respect for the current system of rules which came from men, not from your God. That you have not found a way to remove him means that you have said that you, as a group, value the rules and procedures of your sect more than you value casting out a child rapist. That you still choose to associate with such an organization, grant it legitimacy through your continued public identification, and likely continue to monetarily support it makes you complicit in the actions and messages of the hierarchy.

    Protestantism is a history of schisms and breaks. Sticking around a given organization despite their unwillingness to address child rape is a tacit support of the values they are putting forth. I’m sorry if thats uncomfortable, but the presence of faith doesn’t really change the equation much.

    But I take exception to condemning every Christian for the harmful and evil acts of the Church hierarchy.

    Look, I don’t condemn everyone born south of the Mason/Dixon line for being a racist. But if I hear someone spouting about State’s Rights and flying the rebel flag, well…

    I’m sorry. But Christians simply don’t get to criticize the Church hierarchy while at the same time enjoying the power and privilege that the abuses of that Hierarchy created. If you sit in churches built on blood, celebrate your faith on holy days designed to help stamp out indigenous faiths, and use rituals designed to co-opt the faiths of native peoples, and still contribute monetarily, then you’re not sufficiently different from the hierarchy for me to make a distinction.

    It’s no different than painting all Muslims as terrorists because a few extremist clerics advocate terrorism.

    Except, of course, that Muslims don’t possess nearly the amount of power, influence, and privilege of Christians and that Islam is a far less centralized faith than even the constantly shifting sands of Protestantism. But hey, both involve praying so they must be the same, especially if it allows comparatively wealthy white people in the west to claim that they’re just as oppressed as poor brown people who have to worry about being bombed in the name of security.

    I also take exception to so many people ignoring that churches are often deeply involved in social justice; the US civil rights movement was born in churches;

    You’re right. More than that, American churches continue to be deeply involved in social justice by being the last holdouts in the war against the unborn, the financial bulwarks of our war to defend marriage, and last sane voice keeping the filthy communists from giving contraception to everyone. Sure, churches in the US have stood up for the rights of a handful of Americans. They have also produced Rick Warren.

    Catholic priests integrating socialism into their theology, and the Catholic Worker Movement, have been a bulwark against right-wing oppression in Central America,

    Its worth noting that revolutionary Catholics in central and south America didn’t die because they were Catholics but because they were revolutionaries. Thats like suggesting that somehow Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death for being a Christian rather than for being a civil rights activist. The two things might have been intertwined for him, but all his shooter saw was an uppity black man.

    Liberation theology is an interesting idea, but you can’t really credit the Catholic Church for it when the Church hierarchy has done all it could to knock it down every chance it got. You don’t have to look much further than the decision to pick Pope Palpatine over anyone who actually represented Central or South America, Africa, or Asia. Liberation theology has existed in spite of Catholic doctrine, not because of it.

    This, William, is what I’m “whinging” about – Not about people condemning the Catholic church for forcing exorcisms on people, but about people, including yourself, condemning all people of faith as inherently evil.

    You’re attacking an argument I haven’t made. All people of faith are not inherently evil. I’m a person of faith (though I find it interesting how, despite saying that several times in this thread, that keeps getting missed since I’m not a Christian), I know and respect a lot of people of faith. I don’t really believe in the concept of evil, at least not as Christian conceptualize it. What I do believe, however, is that Christianity has a lot of blood on it’s hands and that, outside of a few groups like the Quakers, Western Christianity is suspect. If a church is suspect so are it’s supporters. Does that mean all Catholics are evil? No, evil is Christianity’s rhetorical laziness. It does make western Catholics (and, more broadly, Christians) supporters of a dangerous, oppressive, powerful ideology. I’m pretty uncomfortable with that. I think its telling that, in order to defend yourself, you have to reach to the experiences of others in order to make your argument for oppression.

  241. JP: This is a serious misreading of Nagel. Nagel’s accepts that there is both a truly objective and truly subjective view of the world, and his project in the book is to reconcile the two when they come into tension. His solution is to sometimes de-emphasise the objective, and sometimes to de-emphasise the subjective, depending on the case at hand.

    Which has nothing to do with what I said…since I was only referencing Nagel’s view from no where as an entry point to the idea of the dichotomy between the subjective and objective and the inability to achieve objectivity from a subjective view.

    If you believe that you can get to objective truth through subjective experience, Nagel as well as other radical skeptics blow that notion up. I could point to the BIV experiment…but I find Nagel more accessible.

    I’d be curious how you can see the BIV paradox and the belief in knowledge as something other than logic fail. It provides formal logic propositions that are not compatible.

    JP: Finally, it is not clearly incompatible with feminism or anti-racism to think that people can have, even frequently, beliefs (about the world and about themselves) that are objectively false. This too is something thoughtful people can (and do) disagree on.

    It is incompatible with anti-oppression to believe that your beliefs about the universe are more valid and should be imposed upon other people either legally or through social pressure like say…name calling and the use of ablism as a tool to inspire fear and create congruent beliefs.

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