#9805: — 11/27  at  06:55 PM
I wonder why the parents bothered to take their daughter to the hospital? Could have "saved" a lot of money AND their little girl.

#9812: Chris Clarke — 11/27  at  07:58 PM

No wonder science and reason can make so little headway against religion, when religion keeps pulling amazing miracles like this out of its hat.

I would have ended that sentence with a different word.

#9814: Chris Clarke — 11/27  at  08:02 PM
OK, all kidding aside. From the linked article:

"As society has developed, people have forgotten the folklore about don't play with stray animals, or stay away from bats," Dr. Willoughby explained. The bat drew blood, he said, but the bite was quick and small, so Jeanna thought she had just been scratched. Her fellow churchgoers assumed that only healthy bats could fly, so they picked it up after it flew into a window and threw it out the door.

In other words, it was her co-religionists' biological ignorance that put her in grave danger in the first place. But they get credit for the cure after the MDs make an historic save. Damn that liberal, anti-religious, non-values-driven media!

#9815: — 11/27  at  08:05 PM
You do know that this means that we'll soon have warning stickers about the germ THEORY of disease, right? Someday, this case will occupy the same place in creationist lore as Haeckel's embryo drawings.

#9819: — 11/27  at  08:32 PM
When my brother was in a car wreck one time, and got a bad concussion, my parents were thrilled that he was so lucky not to have died, it must have been Divine Intervention. I tried to point out that he was extremely unlucky, because he got in a huge car wreck, but let's just say creationists aren't the best at statistical reasoning.

#9820: — 11/27  at  08:51 PM
I wonder if any of the four anti-viral drugs they tried were ones that had been developed to fight HIV. So much for thinking that AIDS research only benefits sinners...

#9822: — 11/27  at  09:02 PM
This reminds me of the woman I once knew of Catholic training. She was concerned about my atheism. I pressed her about why this was important to her. It turns out that two of her sisters had died of diabetes at a young age, but one of her sisters had died peacefully and the other one had suffered. Of course it turned out that the suffering one did not believe in god.

My comment that in the end both had still died did no get me any points.

#9825: — 11/27  at  09:22 PM
My mother prayed a lot for my grandfather when he had cancer. I guess God didn't like us that much. :/

On a more enheartening note, I'm reminded of the Onion headline:

"BOY ASKS GOD TO WALK AGAIN; 'NO' IS ANSWER."

*paraphrased, of course*

#9832: John Wilkins — 11/27  at  10:39 PM

No wonder science and reason can make so little headway against religion, when religion keeps pulling amazing miracles like this out of its hat.

"Hat"?

#9833: — 11/27  at  10:43 PM
It may be unfair to the father in this story to assume that he thought that only prayer, and not the medical treatment, was efficacious. The excerpt at any event doesn't QUITE have him saying that.

That gentleman aside: thanks to my second job as a community college teacher, I have met a number of people who fill the complete-medical-religious-wingnut bill quite nicely. I will never forget one class in particular, a Humanities survey, in which one woman stated that members of her family NEVER worry about getting a bad diagnosis from some doctor; they just pray and God makes it come out all right. This prompted another, younger woman in the room to observe that an HIV-positive friend of hers had cured herself by prayer. She concluded this touching anecdote by opining that "it's all just demons." (A loosely related aside: in the same class, the most obstreperously Christian student in the room had this to say after I read the first few lines of the ILIAD for them in Greek: "That sounds like devil talk!" It was very odd then, I told her, that God had written the New Testament in the same language. This didn't score me any points with her. I have to say that my anecdotal experience does nothing to contradict those statistics on American beliefs regarding evolution and religion that suggest perhaps the most ignorant population in the developed world.

#9835: PZ Myers — 11/27  at  10:50 PM
Hey, Wilkins, it's a euphemism, OK?

And yes, I suspect the father was rationalizing it to believe that God saved his kid by providing the medical care. It's still the same thing -- the magic middleman is really unnecessary.

#9844: — 11/27  at  11:29 PM
Time for Twain:

Just so with diseases. If science exterminates a disease which has been working for God, it is God that gets the credit, and all the pulpits break into grateful advertising-raptures and call attention to how good he is! Yes, he has done it. Perhaps he has waited a thousand years before doing it. That is nothing; the pulpit says he was thinking about it all the time. When exasperated men rise up and sweep away an age-long tyranny and set a nation free, the first thing the delighted pulpit does is to advertise it as God's work, and invite the people to get down on their knees and pour out their thanks to him for it. And the pulpit says with admiring emotion, "Let tyrants understand that the Eye that never sleeps is upon them; and let them remember that the Lord our God will not always be patient, but will loose the whirlwinds of his wrath upon them in his appointed day."

They forget to mention that he is the slowest mover in the universe; that his Eye that never sleeps, might as well, since it takes it a century to see what any other eye would see in a week; that in all history there is not an instance where he thought of a noble deed first, but always thought of it just a little after somebody else had thought of it and done it. He arrives then, and annexes the dividend.

#9867: — 11/28  at  09:38 AM
I caught a bit of this on NPR a few weeks ago, but I didn't have time to listen to the whole thing. Thanks for posting it!

Vasha -- Dammit, now I'm curious, and Dr. Willoughby said he won't name names until he's published! BTW, they only gave her two antivirals; the other two drugs were anesthetics.

#9868: — 11/28  at  09:39 AM
* And by "a few weeks ago" I mean "a few days ago." Thanksgiving break always seems to last much longer than it really does.

#9872: — 11/28  at  12:50 PM
Why are you guys so down on prayer? I pray every night that the sun will rise next morning, and it works for me! One night I forgot, and the next day there was an eclipse.

#9873: — 11/28  at  01:32 PM
A different perspective.

I see here a family who put their faith and their trust in science. I see here a family who put their faith and trust in their God. They had no problem with a conflict between science and religion.

On the other hand I see a scientiet who finds that their religion gets in the way of his science so religion must be dismissed with a flipant remark.

If I were keeping score I would say religion won this round.

#9874: PZ Myers — 11/28  at  01:39 PM
I would, too. Science got all of the hard work, and a nonexistent god got all of the credit.

And if religion keeps winning like this, we all lose.

#9875: — 11/28  at  02:13 PM
As to other perspectives:

I think that prayer was probably, at the worst, a harmless waste of energy for the family and friends of the girl with rabies. I believe also that the examples I gave show a much more sinister side to the whole business: if my dizzy former student is to be trusted, there's at least one young woman somewhere thinking she's been cured of HIV, and perhaps behaving accordingly. ANYTHING BUT HARMLESS.

In my main job (legal aid), I represent, among other people, battered women. And like everyone else who does, I have encountered this phenomenon: a woman's church, pastor, and family pressuring her to NOT to seek protection from her husband because, as St. Paul said, he is the head of the woman as Christ is the head of the Church. NOT HARMLESS. That's my perspective.

Religious beliefs strike me as pretty uniformly false: harmlessly so some of the time, but sometimes quite harmful. After 9/11, we don't need to look too strenuously for examples of the harm. A little over 2,000 years ago, that talented reprobate Lucretius wrote eloquently of the harm religion can prompt men to do. More than 2,000 years later, we're still mired in this cesspool of infantile self-deception. It seems there will be no collective emergence from the cesspool, no growing up. How goddamned depressing.

On a nicer subject: stung by a snarky comment from Abiola Lapite, I changed gravatars. You see an approximately ten-year old picture of my daughter and me. Not recent, but one of the best I have of her. Her mother is doing her level best to turn her into a devout Bahai, an outcome I can tolerate with a fair degree of equanimity. What I find a lot less tolerable is the thought of her coming to some harm because of religion.

#9876: Ophelia Benson — 11/28  at  02:25 PM
And then there's the more subtle, hard to detect, long-term harm, which is (arguably) the same kind of harm we get from electing unqualified ignorant incurious anti-intellectual people to high office: to wit, the harm to people's motivation to learn. If prayer is what does the trick, why bother to learn anything about science? Obviously it's more important to learn about praying, and to get lots of practice. If grinning rich boys who don't know anything get to the top, why, so can anyone who grins and doesn't know anything, so why bother to learn anything? (Unless you value learning for its own sake of course, but hey, get real, who does that?!)

#9881: — 11/28  at  04:08 PM
Right you are, Schuyler. My Grandfather's church used to "cure" people of all kinds of diseases. They would throw away the "useless" medicine prescribed by real doctors. Miraculously, these people were often pronounced Gone to Jesus within a few months of being "cured." That's murder, as pure and simple as it can be. Not all religions can be blamed for this, though. It's the fault of people,albeit religious ones, not religion, that we've abandoned reason in many churches today.

#9889: — 11/28  at  04:59 PM
I'll certainly concede that there's religion and there's religion, and I'm sure that most religious people in America adhere to a philosophy of "God helps those who go to the doctor." It's just that, as a skeptic, I fall repeatedly into a kind of despair at the failure of skepticism (which I really do regard as part of being a grownup) to penetrate very far in this benighted country of ours. If you don't share my skepticism, you of course won't share my unhappiness here.

#9902: — 11/28  at  08:05 PM
One thing that strikes me about this story is not the praying that some people believe saved the young girl's life, but rather the "preying" done by unscrupulous fakirs and charlatans who enrich themselves by claiming to offer medical services by virtue of their close connections with the Supreme Deity. In any commercial or professional venue other than religion, these shamans would be held accountable to demonstrate that they are offering a legitimate product. If they were actual medical doctors, they'd have a difficult time getting liability insurance, you can be certain; But hiding behind the mantle of religion seems to grant them immunity from consumer protection laws or any reasonable standards of honesty.

#9906: — 11/28  at  11:26 PM
Wait a minute. We are missing the obvious. Years ago churches founded hospitals because praying was not a profitable enterprise. By diversifying into medicine the churches created a new cash stream through their hospitals. All the work is still done in that little out of the way chapel inside the hospital, and the friends and families of the patients even do most of the work. Sure a giant edifice of doctors and MRIs and special potions needed to be created to maintain the illusion, but some of those make excellent revenue streams too.

It is so obvious, the prayer is the effective part and everything else about the medical enterprise is just a way to take your insurance company's money.

Brilliant. Simply brilliant!

#9908: — 11/29  at  12:16 AM
Desert Donkey said: By diversifying into medicine the churches created a new cash stream through their hospitals.

That seems a bit cynical. Religious orders found their way into medicine because they were the only ones who would tend to the sick. They also operated charities that gathered enough capital to build and staff hospitals. The only time I'd avoid a hospital with a Christian affiliation would be with regard to reproductive issues.

Not all religion is malevolent or misguided.

#9911: — 11/29  at  02:13 AM
Why not encourage religious nuts to put their money(/lives) where their mouths are; reject all medicine and go just for prayer. It would give them a demonstration of natural selection in action (plus, doctors could compare the effects of prayer/antiviral drugs).