That’s what the title story of the Reader’s Digest blared in huge letters. It was sitting in the basket next to the toilet at my mother-in-law’s house. I was also sitting, and I was looking for some reading material. I reached for a nearby shampoo bottle and started reading the ingredients instead. “Gingko biloba”, I thought. “I was right – this IS more interesting than Reader’s Digest”.

I haven’t always hated Reader’s Digest. When I was a kid they were all over my parents’ house. I was too young back then to notice the omnipresent conservative bias, and the “Humour in Uniform” sections made me laugh, back when I could see the funny side of life as a footsoldier in the Imperial Army.

Things have changed since back then, thankfully I thought – that is, until I came across an article from the BBC today called Heart patients ‘benefit from prayer’. Turns out that “intercessory prayer” provided by “seven prayer groups of varying denominations around the world” really did make a difference, according to the study released in 2001 by a group of researchers from Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina.

Fast-forward to 2005, and the BBC is out with another article. This one is called Prayer ‘no aid to heart patients’. What group of medical rebels decided to challenge the group from Duke University? As it turns out, the same group. The researchers conducting the study that first found “evidence” of a benefit from prayer continued to do their research, including expanding their subjects from 150 to 700. Four years later they have concluded there is “no evidence of any benefits”.

Does a study like this actually accomplish anything? Non-believers in prayer have no reason to change their minds as a result of it, and believers will simply ignore it. After all, it is easy for a believer to argue that the prayer didn’t work because the prayer groups chosen were not religious enough or because God doesn’t like scientific studies about prayer. Any number of scientific studies that “prove” prayer doesn’t work will always lack the persuasive power of a prayer that someone believes has been answered.

What this study does illustrate has little to do with the subject of the study itself – prayer – and more to do with the relationship between science and religion. Religion doesn’t need science, because it is based on faith. Faith and the scientific method don’t mix, something we have seen over and over again in the clashing histories of religion and science. But that’s a lesson some just don’t learn.

The reason for this is the high regard that people have for science and the credibility that the word “scientific” brings with it. That prayer works to help people recover from illnesses and injuries is a common claim. Whether or not someone does in fact recover from an illness or injury is something we can easily test, and we can also arrange to have lots of people pray for them. The tempting result of a study like this, from a religious perspective? “Prayer is scientifically proven.”

The problem is that belief systems cherry-pick scientific studies as it suits them. Alevo left a comment a few days ago that included the adage “we are born and given a set of beliefs, we spend the rest of our lives trying to prove they are true.” Nowhere is this more true than in the treatment given to science. Imagine this scenario: a major evangelist preacher comes across the study above in 2001, where the initial results are indicating that prayer works. He asks for permission from the study authors to break the news in a major televised sermon called “Proof Prayer Works”. The study authors agree, with one condition: when the study is over, he must televise the results in the same manner. If the study proves prayer works, he must preach that “More Proof Prayer Works”, but if not, he must preach “Proof Prayer Doesn’t Work”.

This scenario is unlikely, but when someone bases a belief on science, they are by default entering into a deal just like the one I described – not between themselves and scientists, but between themselves and their audience. If they believe that their audience should be informed that prayer is scientific, then they should tell their audience when more rigorous science disproves that claim. Intellectual dishonesty is a danger something every proponent of a belief system makes themselves vulnerable to when they try to use science.

If you pray, you believe it works. If you don’t, it’s probably because you think it doesn’t. Prayer is a personal thing, between a person and the deity they believe in, and that’s how it should be. People who believe in prayer don’t need a scientific study to prop it up, because they never prayed because of science in the first place. Those who try and use science to bolster their faith only end up damaging it when the science changes.

The next time I’m at the in-laws and I need to make a hasty disappearance, I’ll take a look in the basket of reading materials for the Reader’s Digest that clears up their previous claims. I just won’t hold my breath looking for it, because I don’t want them to find me like they found Elvis Presley.

Alevo recently sent me an article about the Pope’s opposition to the Harry Potter novels. In March 2003, Cardinal Ratzinger expressed reservations about the books in a letter written to Gabriele Kuby, a woman who wrote a German book whose title translates to Harry Potter- good or evil? According to the article, her criticism centers on the idea that “the Potter books corrupt the hearts of the young, preventing them from developing a properly ordered sense of good and evil, thus harming their relationship with God while that relationship is still in its infancy”.

Criticism of children’s literature with fantastical themes by religious authorities – because of content ranging from witchcraft to magic to perceived Satanism – is nothing new. What I found interesting about this article is how it relates to something I read a few weeks ago in a book called 100 Banned Books*. 100 Banned Books is about censorship, and in a section entitled “Literature Suppressed on Religious Grounds”, Cardinal Ratzinger – now the Pope – makes an appearance.

In 1981, the book Church: Charism and Power: Liberation Theology and the Institutional Church by Leonardo Boff was published. Boff is a Brazilian Catholic theologian who “is among the leading proponents of liberation theology, an interpretation of Christian faith drawn from the experience of the poor”. His book, based on his experiences in poor Brazilian communities, contains “some of the sharpest criticisms of the Roman Catholic church to come from Latin America”.

He criticizes the church as having a feudal structure based on its adoption as the official religion of the Roman Empire, and recommends that the church “move away from its reliance on power and coercion and toward a democratic model of openness and tolerance”.

By 1982, Cardinal Ratzinger was on the case, writing Boff a letter of criticism and asking for a response, Boff complied and published it. In May 1984, he received a six-page letter from Ratzinger that said his views “did not merit acceptance”, accused him of “ecclesiastical relativism”, slammed his language as “polemic, defamatory and pamphleteering, absolutely inappropriate for a theologian” inspired by “ideological principles of a certain neo-Marxist inspiration”. Boff was proposing a “revolutionary utopia” which was “foreign to the church”, according to the man who is now Pope.

Boff defended himself with a 50-page rebuttal, to no avail, and in 1985 received an official notice to observe an “obedient silence” so he could have “time for serious reflection”. This notice required him to cease writing, publishing, teaching, lecturing and fulfilling his editorial duties at the Revista Ecclesiastica Brasileira, a major religious publication in Brazil, for an unspecified amount of time. Boff submitted to the censorship “as a Christian” ought to, but according to Wikipedia, he left the Franciscan Order in 1992 after being “silenced again”.

The Catholic Church has been showing an increased willingness to influence governments and electorates. Witness its unsuccessful but vigorous attempts to stop same-sex marriage legislation in Spain and here in Canada, even after the fact: Quebec Cardinal Marc Ouellet has supported Bishop Ronald Fabbro after he barred NDP MP Joe Comartin from taking part in his church duties, including church marital classes, because he supported equal marriage rights for gays.

Is the growing muscularity of the Catholic Church rooted in concerns that it is losing its relevance and influence, or is something a little more medieval happening here? The Pope has a censorship history that includes the silencing of a Catholic advocate of social justice in the church. That’s worth keeping in mind as the Catholic Church seeks to expand its political and social influence.

* Karolides, Nicholas J., Margaret Bald, and Dawn B. Soya. 100 Banned Books. New York: Checkmark Books, 1999. 194-197.

The first tragic victims of a terrorist attack are the people. The second tragic victim is the truth. Before we have even begun to come to terms with the dead and the torn apart, the burned and the blackened, the stumbling, screaming and moaning victims of the explosive blasts, the assault on the truth by those who have something to lose or something to gain has already begun.

It starts with the politicians. Tony Blair, the prime minister of Britain, said the people behind the London bombings seek “to change our country or our way of life”. It’s not British policies that are the cause, he’s saying, it’s British values – it’s not Britain’s occupation of Iraq, it’s the way the British go “about our business as normal”. For Bush and Blair, this attack fits neatly into a political framework that strains under the weight of implausibility: Islamist extremists hate freedom.

That’s when the military steps in to back up the politicians. Taking a page straight from W’s phrase book, General Rick Hillier, Chief of the Defense Staff, (the Canadian military’s top job), said, “Members of al-Qaida hate us and detest our freedoms. All the characteristics that make Canada great, also make us a target.” (Speaking of which, I wonder if terrorists hate our geography too.)

It’s interesting how al-Qaeda, an organization whose roots lie in the fight against the occupation of Afghanistan by the totalitarian Soviet state – among the least free of all nations in modern history – went from hating communist dictatorships to hating free democracies. This remarkable ideological shift is something General Hillier has apparently not examined closely, or perhaps he’s just reluctant to admit that the parallel between the USSR and the USA/Britain is not their level of freedom but their occupation of Muslim countries. Soundbites (“They hate everything we stand for … and the fact that we let men and women choose their own lives”) work better on tv, anyway.

Speaking of soundbites, after the politicians and the military officials, it’s up to the media to back it all up with a raucous chorus that ranges from the attack’s silver lining as described by Fox News anchors Brian Kilmeade and Paul Varney:

KILMEADE: And that was the first time since 9-11 when they should know, and they do know now, that terrorism should be Number 1. But it’s important for them all to be together. I think that works to our advantage, in the Western world’s advantage, for people to experience something like this together, just 500 miles from where the attacks have happened.

VARNEY: It puts the Number 1 issue right back on the front burner right at the point where all these world leaders are meeting. It takes global warming off the front burner. It takes African aid off the front burner. It sticks terrorism and the fight on the war on terror, right up front all over again.

to the Toronto Star’s Rosie DiManno, who had this to say among other things:

The agenda of these mass murderers has little to do with religion and ideology, even less to do with justifiable grievances. Their demands are blurry, their ambitions fantastical.

Do not seek moral cover under what are purported to be the fundamental and underlying reasons for their hostility. That is theoretical relativism run amok. Poverty and social alienation of Muslims in Europe, autocratic and corrupt regimes in Arab nations, historical grievances — these are not the factors that lure zealots to what is a far more crude and ambiguous campaign. Dreadfully impoverished peasants in South America, the starving masses in exploited sub-Saharan Africa, enslaved societies in Asian regimes — none of these people are exporting their choler to the West, shredding us in subway cars and steering airplanes into office towers.

In response to her article I wrote a letter to the editor of the Star:

Rosie DiManno’s emotional analysis of Islamist extremists as “nihilists” in a “death-culture thrall” is as rooted in fantasy as the mythical terrorists she describes. Addressing America in 2002 Bin Laden explained his reasons for 9/11: “Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.” Indeed, contrary to DiManno’s claim, there were American and British forces in Iraq before 9/11, bombing Iraqis to enforce the no-fly zones.

DiManno glibly dismisses the bloody occupation of Iraq, continued Western support of regimes that oppress Muslims and “historical grievances” as motives for terror, but these facts are what drive recruitment into terrorist organizations. In the battle against terrorism, some choose to fight against its causes. DiManno chooses to ghostbust the “amorphous” Islamist boogeyman with fanciful fiction. Pick your side.

It’s a medical miracle that the truth still somehow survives. I think it’s thanks to people like you who are at least willing to consider an alternate version of events, a different retelling of history. You give truth a little breathing room, a cranial space to stretch out a little bit, relax and quietly tell the story. It needs you, but more than that, you need it. We all do…

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Today in Iraq, suicide bombers killed some 50 people. That news held the headlines for about as long as most news of people dying in Iraq whether at the hands of insurgents, British troops or US airplanes: not long. I wonder if people’s impression of the war on Iraq would be different if video coming back from that country was of the victims of aerial assaults stumbling out of the blasts, their faces charred and lacerated, instead of distant explosions that inspire “whoas!” instead of “oh no’s”. I wonder if perhaps Iraqis spoke fluent English, embedded American reporters could have found it in themselves to feature more of their tales of loss and survival instead of American tales of courage and heroism from inside an M1 Abrams tank.

Karla Homolka has been getting an enormous amount of media attention lately. I’m not convinced that all this attention is in the best interest of society and I don’t think it’s fair to the families of her victims, either.

Homolka served a paltry 12 years for her crimes because of an often-criticized deal where she agreed to testify against Bernardo. Her light punishment has led to two things, I think: first, many feel as though justice was not served, and second, it’s easy for many others to get the impression that her crimes weren’t really all that severe.

The idea that justice wasn’t served has led many in the media to seek revenge by ensuring that she cannot escape the wrathful public eye. Large groups of reporters milled around the prison yesterday in the hopes of getting that precious first shot of Homolka’s first taste of freedom, and she’s been the subject of plenty of vociferous attacks in the press.

As an attempt to make things difficult for Homolka, however, I think this strategy is backfiring. Her lawyers are making the case that this treatment is unfair, that she has served her sentence and deserves freedom from relentless media intrusion, not least because it jeopardizes her safety. Homolka has furthered this strategy by granting an exclusive interview with SRC (the French version of CBC), where she appeared demure and reasonable, playing to the sympathies of the public as a misunderstood, remorseful woman who deserves a second chance.

The impression that her crimes must not have been all that severe, given her light sentence, helps her make this case to the public, especially since the memory of what her and Bernardo did has faded over the years. And it’s easy to argue that she has paid her debt to society because she served her sentence in full. What’s easy to forget (as Senator Michel Biron must have done, when he appeared in court to support her), as the glare of the media spotlight glints off her carefully coifed hairstyle, is that her debt is paid so soon because she was never held fully accountable.

This spotlight is all about Karla. Karla sells papers and grabs viewers, so when those in the media consider the bottom-line – money – Karla is a good thing. She was interviewed by the French media partly because, according to her interviewer, Joyce Napier, she feels the English media gave her a “bad rap” (how unfair). With the power to boost the fortunes of broadcasters and journalists by granting exclusive interviews, perhaps it’s unsurprising the media is willing to have her appear in their studios – well-dressed and well-rehearsed, looking better (and speaking French better) than many of our politicians.

Her appearance in this manner scrapes open the wounds of the families she hurt so terribly and disrespects the memory of her victims. Why allow her to garner sympathy? What effect does this have on those unbalanced individuals in society who may look up to her, fantasize about her, perhaps even try to emulate her?

Better, I think, to ignore her. Let her scuffle off into the shadows of anonymity to live with her demons. Turning her into a celebrity just isn’t right, no matter how much it might sell papers and airtime. Our media should know better.

Alevo, Astute Political Commentator, has returned with a scathing patriotic rebuttal of my Misplaced Pride post (see the bottom for his comments).

Where have you been?