Court saves Jehovah’s Witness girl’s life
A 12-year-old Jehovah’s Witness girl has received a life-saving blood transfusion that she did not want after a Johannesburg High Court order gave doctors the go-ahead.
The girl, who suffers from leukaemia, was admitted to Chris Hani-Baragwanath Hospital on Tuesday. Despite being told that a blood transfusion was needed to save her life, the girl and her parents refused to consent to the procedure.
Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that it’s against God’s will to take other people’s blood, or one’s own blood that has been stored, into one’s body.
The official website of Watchtower, a Jehovah’s Witness organisation to which The Star was referred by the Jehovah’s Witnesses of South Africa, says: “True Christians will not accept a blood transfusion. They want to live, but they will not try to save their life by breaking God’s laws.”
The Gauteng Department of Health said doctors consulted the girl’s parents and church elders to explain the need for the transfusion. When their explanations were rejected, they brought an urgent application before the High Court on Wednesday.
The court order was issued on the same day, and the girl was given a transfusion immediately.
If Prayer Worked…
The question can be phrased a variety of ways:
- If you believe in prayer, why do you have insurance?
- If you believe in prayer, why do you invest?
- If you believe in prayer, why do you have a burglar alarm?
- If you believe in prayer, why do you see a doctor?
The crux of the question is simple: If you truly believe that prayer works – works in the sense that your god intervenes in your life – why do you not behave as if you believed it?
If “prayer works” means nothing other than the act of praying makes me feel better, I do not disagree. But if it means anything more than that, then those advocating the wonders of prayer should have no need for the reality-based alternatives to which they cling. And if it does not always work, work completely, or only works on the small matters, then what does this say about your god?
New Comments feature at WordPress
WordPress has just released a new comment feature which is available for use here at Skepfeeds, threading. You can easily reply to a specific comment simply by clicking Reply at the bottom of that comment. You can go here for more details.
Skepquote of the day
Freedom of speech has limits, it has to in order for it to work. The point is though, that any limits need to be kept to a minimum, and it can usually be kept to just one, namely, any speech that incites people to commit crimes. You can say you dislike someone, or that you hate them for whatever reason, but as soon as you encourage people to harm them, or kill them, or commit crimes against them, you are stepping out of the boundaries of freedom of speech. It is for these reasons that I do not support banning the Bible or the Qur’an for their content, but rather make sure that the content can be critised in every medium available, and why I support the right of the WBC to say what they do about homosexuals, atheists, muslims, etc. As long as I have my right to say what I think in return, then we have no problems. It is when you suppress freedom of speech, as the UK government has done in the cases of Geert Wilders and the WBC, that the entire system becomes worthless. We might as well not have freedom of speech in this country if our government can decide what is and what is not acceptable on the fly as it appears they currently think they can do.
Tyranny of the Majority
[Originally posted at: Rodibidably]
I have wanted to write this since the moment the numbers came back on Proposition 8 in California, but I wanted to keep my happy mood over the Presidential election alive for a few extra days (which turned into weeks, and then a couple of months) before I ranted on some of the negatives of Tuesday’s voting.
While walking my dog one morning not too long ago, I was listening to the most recent episode of one of many podcasts I am a fan of, The Good Atheist. During this episode one of the two hosts, Jacob Fortin, where he talked about one of his most recent blog posts, When Democracy isn’t Democratic, which just so happened to be about the very subject I had been going over in my mind. I had been thinking about how I wanted to cover this specific topic, and hearing this take on the subject gave me a few ideas of what I agreed with, and what I disagreed with (or at least felt I could covey different). I should say here, that overall I agree with Jacob’s take on the subject, even though I’m not a huge fan of his “pie” analogy, and I am quite thankful for the phrase he used in his blog post (and on the podcast) which has become the title of this entry as well as thankful for the motivation to get this post done now instead of continuing to put it off even longer.
So with that intro out of the way, I’d like to continue on with the purpose of this entry. This is how Wikipedia describes the phrase, “Tyranny of the Majority”:
The phrase tyranny of the majority, used in discussing systems of democracy and majority rule, is a criticism of the scenario in which decisions made by a majority under that system would place that majority’s interests so far above a minority’s interest as to be comparable to “tyrannical” despots.
[Read the rest of this post at: Rodibidably]
The Biology of Belief
[Originally posted at: Time.com]
Most folks probably couldn’t locate their parietal lobe with a map and a compass. For the record, it’s at the top of your head — aft of the frontal lobe, fore of the occipital lobe, north of the temporal lobe. What makes the parietal lobe special is not where it lives but what it does — particularly concerning matters of faith.
If you’ve ever prayed so hard that you’ve lost all sense of a larger world outside yourself, that’s your parietal lobe at work. If you’ve ever meditated so deeply that you’d swear the very boundaries of your body had dissolved, that’s your parietal too. There are other regions responsible for making your brain the spiritual amusement park it can be: your thalamus plays a role, as do your frontal lobes. But it’s your parietal lobe — a central mass of tissue that processes sensory input — that may have the most transporting effect. (Read “Top 10 Medical Breakthroughs”.)
Needy creatures that we are, we put the brain’s spiritual centers to use all the time. We pray for peace; we meditate for serenity; we chant for wealth. We travel to Lourdes in search of a miracle; we go to Mecca to show our devotion; we eat hallucinogenic mushrooms to attain transcendent vision and gather in church basements to achieve its sober opposite. But there is nothing we pray — or chant or meditate — for more than health.
[Originally posted at: Time.com]
Giant Fake snake monster photos
Via Benjamin Bradford over at LiveScinece.com we get these alleged photos of a giant snake monster in the Baleh river in Borneo. Judge for yourself.
Looks ameteruishly fake to me and way bigger than the 100ft estimate, looks morelike 100 meters.
This one looks even faker than the first one, I mean look at the “ripples” around its body, close to it’s head. Does that look anything like real water ripples? The color, the shape everything looks wrong. And Ben Radford makes a great point, if these people got close enough to take one snapshot, how is it that in both cases they only took one snapshot? Wouldn’t you expect the photographer to snap at least a few times? Suspicious indeed.
Final verdict- They’re obvious fakes. It’s interesting that people are still interested in lake/river monsters now a day though no?
Skepquote of the day
This one’s a little old, but it’s a gem, in fact the whole entry is just deliciously funny. By the way I do not endorse breaking people’s knees with baseball bats, and neither does the author of the entry I assume, so don’t start complaining about it.
So, you may think you’re going to blow me away with your amazing show of rhetoric, but believe me, I have seen it before, and you’re wrong. The thing that you’re about to write is not only wrong, but transparently, stupidly, embarrassingly wrong, so wrong that it makes me wince inwardly with shame at the fact that you’re a member of the same human race that I am. What you’re about to write is evidence that you haven’t bothered to read the FAQs, or comprehended a single book on evolutionary biology that’s not written by one of your crackpot creationist pseudo-intellectuals. So don’t bother writing what you’re going to write. Just go away.
Woman blinded by acid wants same fate for attacker
TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) — Ameneh Bahrami is certain that one day she’ll meet someone, fall in love and get married. But when her wedding day comes, her husband won’t see her eyes, and she won’t see her husband. Bahrami is blind, the victim of an acid attack by a spurned suitor.
If she gets her way, her attacker will suffer the same fate. The 31-year-old Iranian is demanding the ancient punishment of “an eye for an eye,” and, in accordance with Islamic law, she wants to blind Majid Movahedi, the man who blinded her.
“I don’t want to blind him for revenge,” Bahrami said in her parents’ Tehran apartment. “I’m doing this to prevent it from happening to someone else.”
Bahrami says she first crossed paths with Movahedi in 2002, when they attended the same university.
She was a 24-year-old electronics student. He was 19. She never noticed him until they shared a class. He sat next to her one day and brushed up against her. Bahrami says she knew it wasn’t an accident.
“I moved away from him,” she said, “but he brushed up against me again.”
When Bahrami stood up in class and screamed for him to stop, Movahedi just looked at her in stunned silence. He wouldn’t stay silent for long.
Bahrami said that over the next two years, Movahedi kept harassing her and making threats, even as he asked her to marry him. “He told me he would kill me. He said, ‘You have to say yes.’ “
On a November afternoon in 2004, Movahedi’s threats turned to violence.
Open Enrollment – Part 2 [Repost]
A while ago, I posted an Open Enrollment for 2 collaborators to join the ranks as authors at Skepfeeds. As the regular readers already know I was very lucky to catch the attention of Rodibidably who joined in and has been doing a marvelous job since then. All of which means there is one position still open for anyone who may be interested. For more details please check my original entry. Thank you.
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