Religious freedom is the most meaningful freedom of all, “since it is through faith that men and women express their deepest decision about the ultimate meaning of their lives.” Indeed, the right to religious freedom is “the litmus test for the respect of all the other human rights.” Where it is protected, peaceful coexistence, prosperity and participation in cultural, social and political life flourish. But when it is threatened, all other rights are weakened and society suffers.

Of course, what they miss is that freedom from religion is as equally important as freedom of religion. This is an important distinction as it has been in the most theologically driven states that freedom to practice your own religion, or no religion, has been the most strictly curtailed.

Conscience bears witness to the fact that people are “impelled by their nature and bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth.

I would argue that conscience leads us to seek our moral obligation without giving precedence to any religious truth. Especially since the concept of ‘religious truth’ varies from religion to religion.

For this reason, each individual’s conscientious search for truth must always be respected. This freedom to respond to the truth of one’s nature as a being created by God and destined for fulfillment in him is essential to a democratic society.

Again, theocracies are never democratic.

Every individual has the “the right to be able to worship God in accordance with the right dictates of his conscience.” Other people, as well as civil society, have the corresponding duty to respect the free spiritual development of each person.

I can agree with this particular sentiment. It is important that followers of any particular religion do not attempt to enforce their beliefs on any other.

Like religion itself, religious freedom has a personal, individual dimension, but it also has a communitarian, public dimension. Since human beings think, act and communicate through their relationships with others, this freedom is expressed through concrete actions, whether individual or collective, both in religious communities and in society at large. Believers must therefore be allowed to play their part in formulating public policy and in contributing to society as a way of living their faith in daily practice. When this right is truly acknowledged, religious communities and institutions can operate freely for the betterment of society through initiatives in the social, charitable, health care, and educational sectors, which benefit all citizens, especially the poorest and most marginalized. Furthermore, religious freedom entails the right of religious communities to set the qualifications judged necessary for those running their own institutions.

This one needs some breaking down. We all develop our conscience through reason or our religious convictions or some combination thereof. Any statement or position we take in private as well as public life is shaped by these convictions. However, we must be able to accommodate differing beliefs and protect minorities. In the vast majority of regions throughout the history of the world, believers have shaped governmental policy. This was as true in ancient China and the Ottoman Empire as it is in today’s Kuwait, and to a lesser extent the USA. However, in most of these societies, people have not been free to practice any beliefs not sanctioned by those in power. This was never more true than in the days of the hegemony of the Catholic Church over Europe when non-believers were tortured and killed for daring to challenge that supremacy.

Again, the history of religion has not been marked with a broad charity and concern for the marginalized. Take a quick look at the scale and wealth of Catholic churches in comparison to the homes of the believers whose livelihood was tithed and blackmailed away from them. I use the term blackmail as the Church used the carrot and stick of future eternal joy or damnation as an excuse to extract these monies. The concern for the daily welfare of these people was limited. In health care, religion continues to waste resources and lives in prayer and exorcisms, resources that could better be used for medical treatments that actually work.

In education, we see the result of religious interference very strongly in the US where battles are fought over the ‘right’ to teach creation mythology over the science of evolution. We most certainly do not want our medical schools to teach prayer and exorcism over radiation treatment for cancer or psychiatric interventions for mental illness. Religion has no place in publicly funded institutions.

The Catholic Church claims the right to religious freedom in order to fulfill her specific mission. In obedience to Christ’s command (cf. Mt 28.19-20), she proposes the Gospel to all people, which she is duty bound to do, because Jesus Christ is “the way and the truth and the life” (Jn 14.6). All evangelization is but an effort to awaken the listener’s religious freedom to desire and embrace the saving truth of the Gospel (cf. Mk 16.15-16).

Do I  have a right to freedom from proselytization? In my school or workplace I most certainly do. In fact in any organization that is not specifically religious in origin I expect and demand that freedom. I do not want children in publicly funded schools to be subject to any religious interference. I do not want sermons at my workplace, especially one that is supported by public funds. Students at religious schools or employees of specifically religious organizations implicitly surrender that right as a condition of their enrolment or employment.

According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, more than 70 percent of the world’s countries impose legal or administrative restrictions which in practice annul the rights of individual believers and religious groups. Among these restraints are the forced registration of religious groups, prohibition of conversions, restrictions on foreign missionaries, favouring one religious group over another, fines, and harassment.

They are being disingenuous here, as the Pew Report  itself cautions that it does not consider religious freedoms that preserve some religious freedom, focusing only on the curtailment of freedoms, even if justified. They use the examples of overt support of political candidates by religious organizations that have tax-free status in the US and Canada, and restrictions on cults in France, to demonstrate restrictions that are justified. For the purposes of the report, these are given equal weight as instances of total theocratic control such as exists in many Islamic countries.

“At present, Christians are the religious group which  suffers most from persecution on account of its faith. Many Christians experience daily affronts and often live in fear because of their pursuit of truth, their faith in Jesus Christ and their heartfelt plea for respect for religious freedom.” Besides Christians, members of other religious bodies often experience violent attacks or discrimination in numerous countries, especially where they are a minority.

I would argue that the countries where Christians are persecuted, are also often countries where all who do not follow the official state religion are persecuted, atheist usually fair no better. There are also examples where Christians are the persecutors. They are not the only group that suffers at the hands of the overly religious. North Korea is an example of a putatively secular state that prohibits the practice of any religion, but it could be argued that the rulers of that country are deified.

Then they bring it home to Canada.

In the past decade in Canada there have been several situations that raise the question whether our right to freedom of conscience and religion is everywhere respected. At times, believers are being legally compelled to exercise their profession without reference to their religious or moral convictions, and even in opposition to them. This occurs wherever laws, which most often deal with issues linked to the dignity of human life and the family, are promulgated and which limit the right to conscientious objection by health-care and legal professionals, educators and politicians.
For example, some colleges of physicians require that members who refuse to perform abortions refer patients to another physician willing to do so; elsewhere pharmacists are being threatened by being forced to have to fill prescriptions for contraceptives or the “morning after” pill; and marriage commissioners in British Columbia, Manitoba, Newfoundland and Saskatchewan must now perform same sex marriages or resign.

They rightly follow this with a statement admitting that some of these are examples of conflicting rights. They maintain, however, that religious rights of conscience should override rights recognized by the state.  The examples above are of jobs or professions where an expectation of duty to state rules is expected. It is part of the profession of pharmacy to fill the prescriptions as written by the physician. Concerns about the appropriateness of prescriptions are to be taken up with the physician and not the patient. For example, is a pharmacist is convinced that a patient is possessed by a demon, should, in their right of conscience and religion prevent them from filling a prescription for a mental health drug? Should a physician who is a Jehovah’s Witness be able to refuse a blood transfusion? There are many more examples of religious beliefs that are at odds with modern medicine. Permitting such actions is the logical extensions of the stand of the Bishops.

Pope Benedict XVI pointed out in his recent address to the German Bundestag, “unlike other great religions, Christianity has never proposed a revealed law to the State and to society, that is to say a juridical order derived from revelation. Instead, it has pointed to nature and reason as the true sources of law.

The Church may attempt to use reason, but all of their ethics are based upon the concept of ‘revealed law’.  Their belief that the sole purpose of sexual intercourse is procreation, that marriage is a necessity for sexual acts, that an amorphous soul is infused at the moment an egg are fertilized are all based upon ‘revealed truths’. Again  it is disingenuous of them to sidestep that concept.

Where the contribution of religious believers is excluded from public life, that life is deprived of a dimension necessary to every flourishing society: an openness to transcendence.

Here is the concept that an openness to transcendence is necessary to society. This is an exclusively religious idea, and most certainly interferes with the right of freedom from religion.

Education plays a critical role in correctly forming the conscience. For this reason, “parents must always be free to transmit to their children, responsibly and without constraints, their heritage of faith.

I know of no-one in this country who would refuse parents the right to educate their children in the tenets of their faith, or lack thereof.

Parents and educators have an especially important task to fulfill in forming the consciences of the next generation in respect for their brothers and sisters of different religions. Their constant challenge is to develop in children a conscience that is truly upright and free: one that can choose what is truly good and right and thus reject what is evil. They have the duty of helping young people conform their conscience to the truth
of the moral law and to live in conformity with that truth.

Again, they are attempting to impose their concept of ‘truth’ on students in publicly funded schools. Being truly free is not the same as being indoctrinated in the ‘truth’ of any one religion.

“The citizen is obliged in conscience not to follow the directives of civil authorities when they are contrary to the demands of the moral order, to the fundamental rights of persons or the teachings of the Gospel. Refusing obedience to civil authorities, when their demands are contrary to those of an upright conscience, finds its justification in the distinction between serving God and serving the political community. ‘Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’ (Mt 22.21). ‘We must obey God rather than men’ (Acts 5.29)

Everyone has the right to civil disobedience, however, everyone has the responsibility to acknowledge the law of the state. The purpose of that disobedience is often an attempt to change a given law, but to expect no consequences for actions based upon religious belief is unreasonable. An example of this is the Islamic demand for death of apostates. In Canada, murder is against the law of the state.  If a person kills another based upon their most sincere beliefs, it is still a murder and punishable as such by the laws of our state. Refusing to act according to the standards of your profession based upon religious beliefs has consequences. Those consequences may be the loss of your livelihood.

We offer to all who are victims of violence, persecution, intolerance, or discrimination because of their moral or religious convictions the support of the Church’s teaching, the solidarity of our public interventions, and the assurance of our fraternal prayers for the protection of the right to freedom of conscience and religion for all people.

In this final statement, they show their true hypocrisy. They do not support the rights of people whose sexuality differs from their own concepts. They do not support the reproductive rights of women for contraception or abortion, even in cases of rape or abuse. In general, they do not support the rights of people who wish to have freedom from the religious proscriptions of the Catholic Church.

The belief of the Bishops that theirs are the only true beliefs, that those beliefs are the only source of morality, blinds them to the concept of true freedom and human rights.

Many have said the war on women doesn’t exist, that it’s a ploy by the left to demonize Republicans. But what have we seen since they took over the house and stormed state legislatures across the country in 2010?

We’ve seen no comprehensive jobs bills, no bills drafted to try to stabilize the economy or rein in the criminal excesses of Wall Street and the banking worlds; we’ve witnessed continued, unrelenting obstructionism…

And we’ve seen the passage of an unprecedented number of bills meant to limit women’s access to health care and abortion services, which, may I remind you, remains legal in the United States of America. By the end of 2011, 135 pieces of legislation had been passed out of 1100 introduced, and in 2012 alone over 30 new provisions or measures have already been enacted out of 944 bills introduced.

I haven’t taken the time to determine the legislative party standings in the individual states, but it does seem that most of the attacks are coming from the Republicans.If anyone has further information on this, please let me know.

The comments sections includes some information missing from the graphic. Montana and Georgia have also legislated some attacks on women. On the other hand, some states such as California have passed some bills favourable to women. Overall though, it’s a tough time to be a woman in large parts of the US.

A number of US states have recently passed legislating explicitly declaring that marriage

Human chromosomes during metaphase

can only be valid between one man and one women. In an article first published in 2008 and updated in March of this year, Rick Moen explains how a policy of one man one women is not as simple as it appears. His essay compares the effects of such purportedly limiting legislation to the invasive plant kudzu that was introduced into the southern states from Japan to control erosion and had the unintended consequences of taking over. I don’t agree with his analogy, but his explanation of the difficulties of gender identification is accurate and pertinent.

Approximately 1% of the population is born outside of our concept of XY chromosomes as the defining characteristics of gender.

1. You’re a girl with female sex organs — but, at puberty, your voice deepens and some testes descend out of your lower abdomen. (I’m steering clear of some of the more graphic details, here.) It turns out you have XY chromosomes (male), but you look like a young woman. You might or might not be fertile, but it would (if so) be as a male. This is a recessive genetic condition called “5-alpha-steroid reductase deficiency”, that causes testosterone to be chemically transformed in peripheral tissues before it can have its usual effect.
2. You’re a man with all of the apparent parts, facial hair and all. One day, during unrelated abdominal surgery, doctors are surprised to find inside a full set of normal female parts (ovaries, Fallopian tubes, womb, etc.). Genetic typing shows you to be XX, but something called “Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia”, starting early in life, caused your adrenal glands (near your kidneys) to induce production of an unusual mix of sex hormones, changing your entire course of post-natal development, leading you to appear, and believe yourself to be, male.
3. You’re a gal: All the gal parts. None of the others. Yet, you’re XY. It turns out that, during development, you ended up short of a hormone called “Mullerian Inhibiting Factor”. That factor would have let your Mullerian ducts develop into testes, which would have given you more androgens. Its absence means you end up looking, seeming, and believing yourself female. (This pattern of early development is called “gonadal dysgenesis”.)
4. You’re a girl — but you don’t seem to be entering puberty. Genetic testing shows you’re XY, although in all other respects apparently completely female. What’s happened is that the sex-determining “SRY” region of the Y chromosome didn’t trigger the development of testes, with resulting female development. This is called “Swyer syndrome”, or “XY gonadal dysgenesis”.
5. You’re a man, albeit somewhat on the tall and thin side. You and your wife are having fertility problems. You’re both checked: It turns out you, the husband, have “XXY” or “XXXY” or “XXYY” chromosomes. (There’s also been one reported case of “XYYY“.) You might be borderline fertile (as a man), or you might be out of luck. This is called “Klinefelter’s syndrome”. There’s also a variant “mosaic” form of Klinefelter’s where some of your body’s cells have XY chromosomes and others are XXY.
6. Speaking of mosaicism: You’re a male with all the fixings, but also female equivalents — and raised as a boy. You then get the worst parts of both types of puberty, with both menstruation and your voice cracking, and so on. This is an incredibly rare but documented “cellular mosaic” condition where you have some XY cells and some XX ones, the only known way of generating true (bi-fertile) hermaphrodism, which is otherwise impossible and a medical myth. (There can be diverse combinations of mosaicism: XY with XXY, XX, XXXY, and so on.)
7. You’re a man with all the normal parts. You and your wife are having fertility problems. Genetic testing shows you to be “XX”, but with the sex-determining “SRY” genetic bloc also present on some non-standard chromosome, and thus producing male development anyway.
8. You’re an apparently normal man, with fertility problems. Genetic testing reveals “XX” genes, and no SRY block can be found anywhere. This “SRY-negative XX male syndrome” is observed but so far not fully understood.
9. You’re a gal. You’re late entering puberty. The doctors find no womb or a partial one. Otherwise, you’re an (infertile, except via surrogacy) XX woman with absolutely nothing wrong with you. The causes are not really understood, but it’s called Mayer Rokitansky Küster Hauser (MRKH) syndrome.
10. You’re a gal, but your secondary sex characteristics at puberty seem underdeveloped, relatively speaking. You turn out not to be XX, but rather have a single, unpaired X chromosome (also called either “XO” or “45,X” as opposed to “46,XX”) — or a second X is present but abnormal, or some single-X cells are mosaiced among XX ones. In any of those cases, you might be fertile, or maybe not, and it’s called Turner (or Ullrich-Turner) syndrome.
11. You may be unsurprised to hear that babies also sometimes end up with mixed sexual characteristics caused by fetal conditions (e.g., Mom was prescribed a progestin-based medicine such as Danazol, a testosterone-related hormone once prescribed to treat endometriosis), or for no identifiable reason. Traditionally, obstetricians tend to pick a sex and use neonatal surgery to converge the baby towards it — something more common than people realize, as nobody wants to talk about it — yet another contentious, opinion-soaked issue I’m carefully avoiding. (But, anyway, the point is: Are you sure you’re not a man, or a woman, primarily because a scalpel made you that way?)

He goes on to discuss the difficulties the Olympic Games have had in determining the gender of individuals to ensure that gender specific competitions are kept separate, and how all tests devised by the committee are unworkable.

• A judicial test defining sex by external genitalia will fail on citizens with ambiguous parts, of various descriptions.
• One that defines female as XX and male as XY will fail on any number of genetic anomalies.
• One that defines female as “having a womb” (or ovaries) will fail on men with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, people with cellular mosaicism, women with MRKH, and others.
• One that defines male as “having testes” will fail on CAIS women, 5-alpha-steroid reductase deficiency women, and others.
• One that defines male as “having the SRY gene” will fail on CAIS women, on SRY-negative XX males, and others.
• One that defines male by hormone levels will fail on CAIS women and others.
• One that defines sex by fertility will fail on (obviously) the infertile and on women past menopause. (Do we really want to define the infertile as neuter and forbid them from marrying? I hope not.)
• One that defines a person’s sex as “whichever sex the obstetrician wrote on the birth certificate” will fail on people whose botched sex-assignment surgery is corrected later in life, on people with some of the developmental anomalies cited earlier, and on transsexuals and similar.

There really are no workable tests. This isn’t just a technical problem that hasn’t been worked out: Remember, the best minds in the International Olympic Committee, aided by the world’s top doctors and scientists, tried to solve it for 31 years, and gave up.

He then continues with some examples of how these issues affect the practicability of the concept of one man one women.

Consider a pre-operative transsexual XY male who wishes to marry an XX female, and end up living as two married women. The two first marry — which is lawful per the “marriage protection” law. Then, the male changes sex: Voila, same-sex marriage. (The law does not invalidate marriages automatically because of SRS — nor for more depressing reasons such as adultery or wife-beating. However, if it did, a male wanting to “game the system” could use measures to live as female short of full SRS. A female could do the reverse. If the state, by contrast, doesn’t recognise SRS as changing one’s legal sex, then marriage can lawfully occur either before or after surgery.)

This isn’t mere speculation. Texas’s “marriage protection” law is exactly what let two women, Jessica and Robin Wicks, one a male-to-female transsexual, win their marriage license in San Antonio, Texas: The women had been previously denied that marriage license as a same-sex couple, but successfully argued that the Texas 4th Court of Appeals’s 1999 “Littleton v. Prange” decision (Littleton being a widow barred from suing over her husband’s death from medical malfeasance, because she’d been born male and then had SRS) guaranteed them the right to marry, based upon their inferred chromosomes — because the judge ruled chromosomes rather than outward sex characteristics to govern which sex Jessica Wicks (né Grady Roland Wicks) is.

The Wicks newlyweds’ attorney was quoted as saying he was encouraging other transsexuals to travel to San Antonio to get married. (Same-sex couples giving public thanks to a “marriage protection” statute and a socially conservative judicial district: the first of many “marriage protection” ironies to come.)

Around the same time, in New Hampshire, another two women, Judi and Mikayla Howden, were in a similar situation: Mikayla started out as Michael, married Judi, and then arrived at the painful decision that he was rightfully a woman and underwent SRS to become Mikayla. The result? A lawful same-sex marriage, despite — and, in fact, courtesy of — New Hampshire’s ban on such things.

An article on the matter cannily points out:

Recognition lets existing, heterosexual marriages like the Howdens’ become same-sex. Denying recognition permits new same-sex marriages – like one between Judi and Mikayla if they were to marry today – because the spouses’ sexes differ only on paper, not visibly.Oh dear, oh dear. “Marriage protection” statutes not only fail to ban same-sex marriage, but also furnish a legal blueprint for its mass-production.

Opponents of same sex marriage most likely have not considered the biology involved in determining the actual differentiation of the sexes. John Gray popularized the concept that Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus, but in reality a great many people lie between those planets, most likely right here on Planet Earth.

At least invoking God LOUDLY

The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine

…for several hundred years, peaking in the 16th and 17th centuries, many Europeans, including royalty, priests and scientists, routinely ingested remedies containing human bones, blood and fat as medicine for everything from headaches to epilepsy. There were few vocal opponents of the practice, even though cannibalism in the newly explored Americas was reviled as a mark of savagery. Mummies were stolen from Egyptian tombs, and skulls were taken from Irish burial sites. Gravediggers robbed and sold body parts.

“The question was not, ‘Should you eat human flesh?’ but, ‘What sort of flesh should you eat?’ ” says Sugg. The answer, at first, was Egyptian mummy, which was crumbled into tinctures to staunch internal bleeding. But other parts of the body soon followed. Skull was one common ingredient, taken in powdered form to cure head ailments. Thomas Willis, a 17th-century pioneer of brain science, brewed a drink for apoplexy, or bleeding, that mingled powdered human skull and chocolate. And King Charles II of England sipped “The King’s Drops,” his personal tincture, containing human skull in alcohol. Even the toupee of moss that grew over a buried skull, called Usnea, became a prized additive, its powder believed to cure nosebleeds and possibly epilepsy. Human fat was used to treat the outside of the body. German doctors, for instance, prescribed bandages soaked in it for wounds, and rubbing fat into the skin was considered a remedy for gout.

Blood was procured as fresh as possible, while it was still thought to contain the vitality of the body. This requirement made it challenging to acquire. The 16th century German-Swiss physician Paracelsus believed blood was good for drinking, and one of his followers even suggested taking blood from a living body. While that doesn’t seem to have been common practice, the poor, who couldn’t always afford the processed compounds sold in apothecaries, could gain the benefits of cannibal medicine by standing by at executions, paying a small amount for a cup of the still-warm blood of the condemned. “The executioner was considered a big healer in Germanic countries,” says Sugg. “He was a social leper with almost magical powers.” For those who preferred their blood cooked, a 1679 recipe from a Franciscan apothecary describes how to make it into marmalade.

The magical thinking that accompanies the type of medicine has two areas of rationale. first, the concept of ‘like cures like’, although popularized by Samuel Hahnemann of homoeopathy fame, has been a concept in  treatments for centuries. The other  was attached to the belief that some of the ‘spirit’ of the deceased could be passed on through ingestion of body parts or fluids.

Romans drank the blood of slain gladiators to absorb the vitality of strong young men. Fifteenth-century philosopher Marsilio Ficino suggested drinking blood from the arm of a young person for similar reasons.

Dolan gives examples of the practice continued into the 19^th and even 20^th century.

But Sugg found some late examples of corpse medicine: In 1847, an Englishman was advised to mix the skull of a young woman with treacle (molasses) and feed it to his daughter to cure her epilepsy. (He obtained the compound and administered it, as Sugg writes, but “allegedly without effect.”) A belief that a magical candle made from human fat, called a “thieves candle,” could stupefy and paralyze a person lasted into the 1880s. Mummy was sold as medicine in a German medical catalog at the beginning of the 20th century. And in 1908, a last known attempt was made in Germany to swallow blood at the scaffold.

I can only assume that Suggs (or Dolan) was unaware of the current practice in the far east.

Dolan concludes with comparing these practices with the trade in  illicit body parts. Claiming that a transplant where the organ is from a corpse where prior consent was not given is very much the same as corpse medicine from the past.  In some ways an ethical argument can be made to link the two, but most ethicists are in agreement that prior consent is an integral part of the process, and of course, the magical thinking that accompanies corpse medicine rather than the actual science involved in transplants and transfusions.

I can not emphasize enough that the type of thinking behind corpse medicine is not different that the thinking behind much of modern CAM practices.

The word farce derives from old French, meaning ‘stuff’ or ‘stuffing’ and may have originated in the comic interludes of medieval French religious plays serving as light-hearted stuffing in between more serious drama. Historically, the term meant a literary or artistic production of little merit.

Farce is a type of comedy that uses absurd and highly improbable events in the plot. Situations are humorous because of their ludicrous and often ridiculous nature. The choice of setting is a key factor in farce, as the protagonist is sometimes at odds with the environment. Often the central character in a farce does not (or should not) belong in the place of the action. The audience will only accept the situation if they follow the conventions previously established. But characters in a farce can also quite logically belong in the setting they are placed in.

Examples of farce can be found in the ancient Greek comedies of Aristophanes, the plays of Shakespeare and the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. Farce in film includes the works of Charlie Chaplin, Keystone Cops and the Marx Brothers. On television, the best examples of farce surround British actor John Cleese. Ridiculous situations abound in the 1970’s television series Monty Python’s Flying Circus and later in the wonderful, but short-lived series Fawlty Towers. There are also several Monty Python films that are excellent examples of farce. Few actors possess the ability to create pure farce better than Cleese.

It is important to note that farce is both a verbal and physical humour, using deliberate character exaggeration by the actor. The Marx Brothers were renowned for using their bodies in such a way as to exaggerate the situation, thus making it even more farcical. Whether it was using on-screen props or simply their arms and legs, this famous team made farce a very physical form of comedy. Similarly, John Cleese also uses his body to extraordinary effect. By nature a very tall man, Cleese manipulates his body to create silly walks by simply extending his legs outward and exaggerating his movements for extreme comic effect.

Sometime the ridiculous aspects of farce contain only the blackest type of humour. A recent episode at the Fort Lauderdale airport has the ridiculousness of farce without much of the humour. The headline in the West Palm Beach News reads: “18-month-old ordered off plane at Fla. airport”

The story continues:

Eighteen-month-old Riyanna has been called a lot of things:

The face of terrorism

cute, adorable and now … a suspected terrorist.
She was called that on Tuesday night at the Ft Lauderdale Airport. She and her parents had just boarded a JetBlue flight when an airline employee approached them and asked them to get off the plane, saying representatives from the Transportation Security Agency wanted to speak to them.
“And I said, ‘For what?’” Riyanna’s mother told only WPBF 25 News on Wednesday. “And he said, ‘Well, it’s not you or your husband. Your daughter was flagged as no fly.’ I said, ‘Excuse me?’”
Riyanna’s father was flabbergasted.
“It’s absurd,” he said. “It made no sense. Why would an 18-month-old child be on a no-fly list?”
Riyanna’s parents, who asked not to be identified, said they think they know the answer to that question. They believe they were profiled because they are both of Middle Eastern descent. Riyanna’s mother wears a hijab, a traditional head scarf. That’s why they have asked to remain anonymous. They said they’re concerned about repurcussions. That said, they are both Americans, born and raised in New Jersey, just like their daughter.
Riyanna’s parents said once they were taken off the plane, they were met by TSA agents and made to stand in the terminal for about 30 minutes.
“We were put on display like a circus act because my wife wears a hijab,” Riyanna’s father said.
Eventually, the child’s parents said they were told they could reboard the plane though they added that nobody offered an apology or even an explanation for what happened. The family refused to get back on the plane because they were embarrassed. They chose instead to leave the airport, but they still want to know why and how this happened.
WPBF contacted JetBlue and was told this was an issue with the Transportation Safety Administration. JetBlue also said both it and the TSA are investigating the incident.
But the TSA disagreed, telling WPBF this is an airline issue and therefore, it is not investigating. The TSA also said that since Riyanna and her parents were issued boarding passes, that means they had been cleared by the TSA and were definitely not on the no-fly list.
Riyanna’s father said he plans to consult an attorney.
“We were humiliated,” he said. “We were embarrassed. We were picked on.”

As the article points out, Riyanna name is on the no-fly list, at least according to TSA. If that is the case, any examination should have been done at the time of boarding. Even if we give TSA workers the benefit of the doubt and a slip-up occurred at the gate, surely they must have the leeway to very quickly determine whether the name on the list matches the individual in front of them. There is just no way an 18 month old could have developed the terrorist credentials to be a hardened terrorist. A quick glance at IDs and the situation is resolved.

Were the family profiled just because of the hijab and the colour of the father’s skin? I have no idea. However the TSA’s rationale of pulling the family from the flight because their daughter was on list of suspected terrorists is absolutely ridiculous.  The usefulness of profiling has been debunked by security expert Mike Schneider numerous times, most recently on Sam Harris’ blog in response to a Sam’s comments.

We would not accept police arresting an infant who happened to share a name with someone on a “Most Wanted List”. There is no way we should accept preventing a child from flying for the same reason.

Airport security is mostly theatre to convince people that giving up privacy rights is acceptable to prevent terrorism. However, the type of theatre most exemplified by increased security is farce, without even the lowest humour.

Sleep. 2006 Jun;29(6):841-7.
The effects of caffeine, dextroamphetamine, and modafinil on humor appreciation during sleep deprivation.
Killgore WD, McBride SA, Killgore DB, Balkin TJ.
Abstract
STUDY OBJECTIVES:
Sleep loss consistently impairs performance on measures of alertness, vigilance, and response speed, but its effects on higher-order executive functions are not well delineated. Similarly, whereas deficits in arousal and vigilance can be temporarily countered by the use of several different stimulant medications, it is not clear how these compounds affect complex cognitive processes in sleep-deprived individuals.
DESIGN:
We evaluated the effects of double-blind administration of 3 stimulant medications or placebo on the ability to appreciate humor in visual (cartoons) or verbal (headlines) stimuli presented on a computer screen following 49.5 hours of sleep deprivation.
SETTING:
In-residence sleep-laboratory facility at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.
PARTICIPANTS:
Fifty-four healthy adults (29 men, 24 women), ranging in age from 18 to 36 years.
INTERVENTIONS:
Each participant was randomly assigned to 1 of 3 stimulant medication groups, including caffeine, 600 mg, n = 12; modafinil, 400 mg, n = 11; dextroamphetamine, 20 mg, n = 16; or placebo, n = 14.
MEASUREMENTS AND RESULTS:
Humor appreciation for cartoon stimuli was enhanced by modafinil relative to both placebo and caffeine, but there was no effect of any stimulant medication on the appreciation of verbal humor during sleep loss. In contrast, all 3 stimulants improved psychomotor response speed, whereas only caffeine and dextroamphetamine improved ratings of subjective sleepiness.
CONCLUSIONS:
Findings suggest that, despite similar alerting and vigilance-promoting effects, these 3 compounds have significantly different effects on those highly complex cognitive abilities mediated by the pre-frontal cortex.

via Discoblog

In isolation, this study seems to be pretty ridiculous. However if we put this publication into context, it makes a lot more sense.

A quick search on the primary author, WBS Kilgore, we learn that he has quite a number of neuroscience based articles many of which are related to stimulants and sleep deprivation. We also learn that he conducts much of his research at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) “the largest and most diverse biomedical research laboratory in the Department of Defense.” It all comes together.

Here we have a researcher studying various aspects of sleep deprivation and stimulant use from a military perspective. It’s not difficult to see how this has direct applications in both combat and non-combat settings for military personnel and civilians. There are many professions from ER physicians to farmers who are required to spend extremely long hours at work. The consequences of sleep deprivation have implications on their own behaviour and mental acuity, as well as the safety of others and even their personal and professional relationships.

At some point in our lives, nearly all of us have used some sort of stimulant in an attempt to improve our mental and/or physical performance while sleep deprived. Writing papers or studying in school, long distance driving, finishing a work project are all examples of instances of increased consumption of caffeine consumption in one of its common forms: coffee, tea, soft drinks, or pills. We don’t even think about the consequences because for most of us, we can just catch up on our sleep over the next few days. In some professions, the sleep deprivation is chronic and gaining an understanding of stimulant use becomes an important area of research.

This simple example demonstrates the difficulty of political interference in the types of research that are carried out. A cursory look at an abstract or even an isolated paper can give a very distorted view of the value of a particular line of research.

Calling out bigotry based upon religion is the same as religious persecution. The sooner we recognize that truth, the sooner we can become the theocracies the gods intended us to be.

SEOUL, May 6 (Yonhap) — South Korea has strengthened customs inspections to stop smuggling of pills made of dead human fetuses or infants from China as such pills could pose serious health hazards, officials said Sunday.

Smuggling of the so-called “human flesh capsules” has increased since the first case was caught in August last year. Customs authorities have so far uncovered 35 attempts to bring in such pills, totaling 17,451 capsules, in travelers’ luggage or by mail.

Such pills are believed to be sold as stamina enhancement drugs, but customs officials said they are contaminated with “super bacteria” and other disease-causing organisms and could cause serious health problems.

Some of those pills are smuggled in capsules of other legitimate drugs to disguise the contents.

Officials said they will strengthen inspections of drugs arriving from China, especially such cities as Yanji, Jilin, Qingdao and Tianjin, where many of human flesh pills are believed to be produced.

What else could be more important than increasing male potency? The magic extends to protection from other diseases as well. More on the story from Yahoo News

The smugglers told customs officials they believed the capsules were ordinary stamina boosters and did not know the ingredients or manufacturing process.

Ethnic Koreans from northeastern China who now live in South Korea were intending to use the capsules themselves or share them with other Korean-Chinese, a customs official said. They were carried in luggage or sent by international mail.

The capsules were all confiscated but no one has been punished because the amount was deemed small and they weren’t intended for sale, said the customs official, who requested anonymity, citing department rules.

China’s State Food and Drug Administration and its Health Ministry did not immediately respond to questions faxed to them Monday. Chinese media identify northeastern China as the source of such products, especially Jilin province which abuts North Korea.

The Jilin food and drug safety agency is responsible for investigating the trade of such remains there. Calls to the agency and to the information office of Jilin’s Communist Party were not answered Monday.

The South Korean customs agency began investigating after receiving a tip a year ago. No sicknesses have been reported from ingesting the capsules.

Most of us can easily see the ridiculous nature of such claims. We have heard how animals have been injured, tortured, or killed (Rhino horns, bear bile, etc) in the name of treatments or cures for disorders or diseases. What isn’t discussed outside of the skeptical community is that it is this exact magical thinking that results in the popularity of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) of which these are a part.

The acupuncture concept of meridians, qi in and reiki, laws of similarity and infinitesimals in homoeopathy, subluxations in chiropractic, Five Elements, yin and yang, astrology, and many more are examples of the same type of magical thinking. None of these have the slightest proof in scientific examinations; none have been demonstrated to have any plausibility in the worlds of chemistry, physics, or biology, and yet, TCM is practised and followed by millions of people worldwide.

I have heard so many times that pharmaceuticals, especially vaccines, use materials from aborted foetuses; a myth that is propagated by supporters of magical thinking and their religious brethren and not actual practices of these companies. Critics then jump to the conclusion that since this is what the companies do, then all of their products are evil.  Of course, they are unable to turn the same logic on themselves and declare that since some practices of TCM use actual human and animal parts or excretions, then all must be cast out.

I get called cynical and hard headed because I can’t accept that ‘other ways of knowing’ would open my mind allow me to see the ‘truth’. That Science doesn’t know everything. Science can’t test everything. Then someone comes up with using foetal tissue as a Viagra substitute and my mind closes with a snap.

The offending shirt.

On the face of it, the logo is offensive to anyone who does not follow his beliefs about Jesus. However, the principles of free speech guarantee the right of individuals to speak freely, not the right of people to not be offended. On the other hand, schools are supposed to be places where students can feel safe from being bullied and  attacked for their beliefs, their lack of beliefs, or anything else that can serve to ostracize them from the rest of the student body. For example, should I wish to walk down the street wearing a shirt that proclaims “Christians are all fools” I am within my rights to do so. Just as anyone can wear a shirt with a logo that claims that gays will suffer the eternal torments. of hell.  Should either of these shirts be allowed in schools? I don’t think so.

This puts school authorities in the difficult position of balancing the sometimes conflicting concepts of free speech and inclusiveness. In this instance, it appears that the t-shirt is only part of the problem with this particular student. According to the CBC,

Students said William Swinimer has been preaching and making them feel uncomfortable, and the shirt was the last straw so they complained.

“He’s told kids they’ll burn in hell if they don’t confess themselves to Jesus,” student Riley Gibb-Smith said.

Katelyn Hiltz, student council vice-president, agreed the controversy didn’t begin with the T-shirt.

“It started with him preaching his religion to kids and then telling them to go to hell. A lot of kids don’t want to deal with this anymore,” she said.

He also seems to think that after 12 years, he and his family, can use his new found fame pressure a change in the school.

A Nova Scotia student suspended from classes for five days for wearing a T-shirt with the slogan “Life Is Wasted Without Jesus” returned to school today wearing the same garment, but he was quickly taken home by his father.

William Swinimer, who’s in Grade 12, was scheduled to attend a session for all students on how to express their beliefs in a way that is respectful to all.

But John Swinimer said he wants Forest Heights Community School in Chester Basin, Lunenburg County, to only teach the basic courses, leaving religion out of it.

“He will not attend this school unless they are having reading, writing and arithmetic — good old-fashioned academics,” he said, waving a New Testament bible. “When they’re having forums, when they’re having other extra-curricular activity, he will not attend that school.”

Suddenly we have a different picture of this student. He has a history of being an aggressive proselyte who has been accosting students for some time. He stakes the stance that forums on inclusiveness should not exist within the school and that only the three Rs should be on the curriculum.

If we look at the t-shirt in isolation, it appears to be an issue of  an attempt to suppress  free speech. A deeper look suggests that this student has been an individual who has had a disruptive influence on the school for some time. This would suggest the need for some form of administrative interference. Whether that should have been in the form of suspension is up for debate, and most certainly it should not have been over the shirt itself.