I don’t think people appreciate just want an amazing man Pat Robertson is. Because he is cloistered away at the Christian Broadcasting Network, he has been allowed to simultaneously become a national figure while having the same old crazy beliefs of a regional phenom. There is his Bible approved weight-loss shake. And his claim to be able to leg press 2,000 pounds. And his claim that all good Christians should be in favor of assassinating Hugo Chavez. He’s a colorful guy!

But the big thing with him is faith healing. I find the fiction of faith healing really interesting. It is the most bizarre form of magical thinking. It is useless for broken bones. Just ask the Christian Scientists! And there’s that whole thing about God never re-growing limbs. It seems if the ailment is obvious, God is absent. But when it comes to things like cancer which come and go, God is right on it!

Well, yesterday, Brian Tashman at Right Wing Watch noted, Robertson: Mother Who Can’t Heal Son’s Deafness Must Be Doing Something Wrong. A mother named Debbie wrote to him, “My son is hearing impaired and cannot hear at all. I have prayed for his healing; it seems as if God is hearing-impaired. What am I doing wrong?” The title of the article makes it sound like Robertson shames the mother, but that clearly isn’t his intent. But it is a shaming thing to say.

As cultures advance, they tend to move from belief in magic to belief in prayer. There is a clear reason for this. If you have a shaman who can do miracles, he is either successful or he isn’t. If he dances for rain and it doesn’t rain, everyone see him for the useless pretender that he is. But praying to God provides the ultimate out. If you pray for God to heal your son and he isn’t healed, it isn’t God’s fault. God’s there; he hears you; it is just that you aren’t worthy.

But Pat Robertson had some ideas. First he said that she should “rebuke” the “spirit of deafness.” But if that didn’t work, “Try something else.” He and his co-host then laughed. To me that said, “If you try enough things, eventually something will work and you can credit God with it.” And if nothing works, maybe you aren’t worthy, or your son isn’t, but regardless, God works in mysterious ways.

What’s most interesting about this is that Robertson is going back to a very primitive approach to this kind of stuff. It seems very much like a shamanic thing. It’s very much the kind of thing that would have gotten him killed by the church a thousand years ago. Because this is not prayer. This is spell casting. And I think it is very telling of modern American evangelical Christianity. The movement is very confused theologically. And thus nothing is true and everything is permitted. As long as you claim that the power comes from Jesus.

Afterword

To go along with the article, here is the Jim Carroll Band doing “Nothing Is True”:

H/T: Crooks & Liars

BBC’s Louis Theroux had the stomach, once more, to talk with batshit crazy Shirley Phelps, her unfortunate children, and the seriously fucked up Westboro Baptist Church in his documentary, America’s Most Hated Family in Crisis.

If only Shirley Phelps could keep her crazy to herself rather than poisoning the minds of her children. Kids at risk can be removed from a physically or emotionally abusive environment, but with families like these all you can do is feel sorry for them and hope they never have children of their own.

As a sentient citizen of the U.S., I am well aware of Westboro Baptist Church and the appalling, vicious hatred of its “ministry.” In this country that they scream God hates because of gay people, they are allowed, by law, to publicly propagate their twisted version of Christianity. That’s the price we pay for having the right of free speech. So, even though the very existence of these heinous people is abhorrent, we can’t shut them up. Or kill them. And that really annoys me. If I were inclined to be a card-carrying AAA (Armed Atheist Activist), this human cancer cluster would be my first — possibly only — target.

I came across this documentary today, The Most Hated Family in America, and it is infuriating. The matriarch of this family cult could be Ann Coulter’s missing fraternal twin — they don’t look alike, but in tone, attitude, ignorance, and density of hate, they are very much the same. Coulter’s only saving grace is that she isn’t breeding. Shirley Phelps-Roper has spawned eleven children whom she vigorously indoctrinates in fanatical dogma of irrational hatred.

I became an atheist based on rational thought. The disturbing and incredibly frustrating fact is that these people think they are being rational too. People like Shirley Phelps contradict themselves without any sense of the bizarre dichotomy of their own arguments. If someone is stunned into silence by the sheer absurdity of her hate-fueled “lines of reasoning” she thinks she’s won the debate. It never is a debate though. She and her herd, for all their smiling and smug self-assuredness, have no interest in hearing someone else’s point of view. There is no room in their minds for ideas that, deep down, they must know make real sense.

Matt Yglesias published a really good article yesterday, What Do Conservatives Like About Health Care in Singapore? He’s confused, you see, because he actually knows something about the Singapore healthcare system. And based upon that, conservatives ought to hate it because it is a far more intrusive and “socialistic” system than Obamacare. In fact, like almost all countries outside the third world, Singapore has a healthcare system that liberals would gladly exchange Obamacare for.

This is nothing new. Conservatives are always talking about some other country’s healthcare system. It doesn’t matter what it is. Back in February, Aaron Carroll wrote, I Don’t Think the Swiss Health Care System Is What They Think it Is. That was about how the conservative healthcare wonks (such as they are) were all excited about Switzerland. For example, Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Avik Roy wrote, “While most Americans view their healthcare system as ‘free-market,’ Switzerland actually has the most market-oriented healthcare system in the West.” But alas, no. So I guess the next in line is Singapore.

All this is grasping at straws. As I’ve noted before, the Republicans really screwed up when they decided that their very own healthcare reform idea was too liberal. For some, I’m sure this is a good faith effort to find a way out of the corner they’ve painted themselves into. But mostly, it is just yet more cover. “We hate Obamacare. Let’s repeal it and then we’ll get that Swiss system. Or Singaporean. Or…” The weird thing about it is that they really think if they ignore our country’s healthcare problems long enough they will just go away. Eventually they are are going to have to face the problem, but in the meantime people are dying.

In the case of Singapore, the confusion seems to be that conservatives think that it is based upon Health Savings Accounts (HSA). These are the Holy Grail of conservative healthcare reform. The idea is that an individual buys a catastrophic insurance policy with, say, a $2,000 deductible. Then they put money in a special non-taxed savings account for a total of $2,000 per year. Then they pay for their medical treatment out of the account up to the deductible. If they don’t meet the deductible, they get to keep what is left over in the account. Thus, people won’t just run to the doctor, because they have an incentive. It really is the ultimate libertarian policy: perfect in theory, useless in practice.

Well, it turns out that part of Singapore’s healthcare system is called “Medisave, a compulsory individual medical savings account scheme.” But it isn’t really an HSA. It is more like Social Security, “Singaporeans and their employers contribute a part of the monthly wages into the account to save up for their future medical needs.” Yglesias explains, “As best I can tell, these Medisave accounts are deposited into the Central Provident Fund, a government-run investment pool, rather than constituting private savings as we would understand them.” Aaron Carroll sums it all up nicely:

What this means is conservatives will continue to call for anything but. They are willing to consider any healthcare system, as long as it absolutely positively cannot be done here. So even if Singapore had the perfect libertarian Holy Grail of healthcare, it would be abandoned as soon it became an actual bill in Congress. Conservatives only want perfection and that only exists in their minds. From a practical standpoint, that means they want to do nothing. Everything else is bloviating.