So whats the harm........

Well hello everybody, I trust you all had a wonderful and uneventful holiday season.
I have undergone several bouts of viral infestation, and in fact am fighting one off right now. Thus is the joy of working in hospitality and having a 5 year old in preschool!
I had a couple of interesting things happen in the past several weeks. The first is that my sister had quite a serious cancer scare. During a routine follow up for her hysterectomy the technician thought that he saw several shadows that could have been tumors.
The second is that I have been involved in more than one rather heated discussion about my skepticism, my lack of faith, and my distrust of religion. The one question that all these had in common was, “what’s the harm if someone believes in that”?
Let’s take a look at that.
Well a very clear example arises this year with the touting of Jenny McCarthy. Yes, that Jenny McCarthy. If you are not aware, she has a son that was born with Autism. This is a terrifying thing for any parent to go through, and I would imagine what a strain it would put on a person. Well, Jenny first found comfort in a group called the Indigo Children. This group believes that children born with Autism are a next step in human evolution, and that they are “removed“and “anti social” because they exist in several planes of reality. After leaving that group she discovered some very poor research and pseudo science that tried to link vaccines with Autism. Before we go on I feel that it is important to point out that there are some very real and documented problems with vaccines, they are by no means perfect, and in fact my brother contracted Gillian Burre syndrome which rendered him totally paralyzed for about 6 months, from a flu vaccine. But percentage of persons with complications is almost nonexistent faced with the potential millions that would die otherwise. It would seem that Miss McCarthy has now publicly joined the anti vaccine campaign and had done a multitude of interviews speaking against vaccines. Well this mis information has now taken its toll, in small communities across the US there has been a unprecedented spike in Measles cases among unvaccinated populations. Her belief in this nonsense is now killing children. Can you imagine the effect small pox would have on today’s population? To put this in perspective let’s look at The Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918-1919. This flu killed more people than the First World War, at somewhere between 20 and 40 million people. It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. More people died of influenza in a single year than in four-years of the Black Death Bubonic Plague from 1347 to 1351. So “What’s the harm”?
I recently heard an interview with the actor/ politician/ economist Ben Stine (Buller, Buller) where he was promoting his new movie on education and creationism called, Expelled. In these interviews he said that “the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed. That is where science in my opinion leads you” and “love of god and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place and science leads you to kill people”. Hmmmmm, love of god, like Israel and Hamas? Perhaps the Catholics and the Protestants? Possibly Islam and the western world? Perhaps this god he is speaking about is a different one than the one that commanded Abraham to kill his only son to prove his love for him? And just perhaps the science he speaks of is not the same one that that has saved countless lives by developing penicillin? I think it would be very safe to say that the amount of human suffering and death that was caused by misguided pseudo science (eugenics) is nothing as compared by the amount brought on by religion. So again “what’s the harm”?
As many of you know my sister is very much a proponent of homeopathy and naturopathy, primarily because she is terrified of the medical community at large that she perceives as killing our mother. I have respected her beliefs for some time. Well, her first reaction to her discovery of the possibility of cancer was to ask the family for money in order to receive a Homeopathic remedy for her cancer. Needless to say we exchanged some very heated words on the subject. I started to feel guilty that I had not been more supportive of her methodology. But then I realized that we were talking about her life. Homeopathy and Naturopathy have long been debunked by multiple scientific studies. It is very well established in the scientific community that Homeopathy and Naturopathy have absolutely no benefit and in some cases can be very harmful. The case of the father in Australia recently force feeding his daughter with heart disease homeopathic vitamins and inflicting permanent brain damage upon her, comes to mind. It took a family intervention instigated from my father to finally get my sister to see reason and see her Oncologist. As it turns out, the shadows were most likely non cancerous. I can’t imagine the anxiety, the damage to her body, receiving a treatment that she didn’t need. “So what’s the harm”?
We are all participants in this society; we are all responsible of the actions of our society. And yes, this includes 9-11, George W. Bush, and our present economic crisis. Our inaction, our ambivalence has brought this world into being. We created it. I think it is time we start to take responsibility for our society; it is time to call out the lunatics, to let people know that racism is unacceptable, that ignorance is unacceptable, and that blind faith and religion are outdated and unacceptable. We live in a world where pseudo science and religious fervor rule. And for the first time in human history, we really do have the power to destroy all human life on earth. I fear that the hour is late, but I want to my son and his generation to at least know that someone stood up and said “what’s the harm? Well let me tell you………”