Quote of the day:

Religion is based…mainly upon fear…fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.
—Bertrand Russell

I could have run this as a pet peeve but I decided that religion trumps pet peeves, and I was going to publish it a few days ago but then Tom Lehrer died, and Tom trumps religion.

One of the questions on Saturday’s Q&A involved advances in medicine in the last hundred years or so. The questioner wondered whether he and his wife who were born in 1957 and 1962 would have survived to their current ages had they been born a hundred years earlier. He had suffered a massive urinary tract infection at age 66, and a hundred years previously without antibiotics there would have been no way to treat it. His wife had undergone C-sections at ages 32 and 34, and he was wondering when C-sections became viable options for pregnant women.

Here was the answer:

(V) & (Z) answer: C-sections have been around for many, many centuries, but for most of those centuries, the general idea was to save one life (usually the infant) at the cost of the other (usually the mother).

The key to C-sections that saved both lives was not perfecting surgical technique, it was figuring out how to combat infections. So, C-section mortality rates dropped precipitously starting around 1880, when doctors began washing their damn hands. They had another precipitous drop starting around 1920, as antibiotics became widely available.

That, of course, reminded me of one my big annoyances about Christians and other religious people: when they recover from some illness, instead of giving credit to the healthcare workers who treated them and the advances in medical science that made their recovery possible, they go right away to thanking their imaginary deity.

It never seems to occur to these morons that had they been born a hundred years earlier, and in many cases just a few years earlier, medical science couldn’t have helped them and their non-existent god wouldn’t have been much use.

Yes, I know, some Christians are very smart people. When I call them stupid or morons, I’m merely referring to the way that human beings compartmentalize. People can be very bright in one area and incredibly stupid in another.

But I think Christians are especially stupid when it comes to their religion. It never seems to occur them that if they take the Bible at face value, their god didn’t give a rat’s ass about anyone except the Hebrew people, the chosen people, who eventually became known as the Jews. Even when Jesus appeared on the scene, Jesus was only preaching to his fellow Jews. After Jesus died, a cult formed up around him, and even that was initially just a sect of Judaism, until Paul decided to start spreading it to the gentiles. It’s right there in your Bible.

By the way, I’ve often thought that as far as I personally am concerned, the best argument for the existence of a god is that I have so many Catholic friends. But that is assuming that the god is actively interfering in my life and has a sense of humor, but there is no evidence that the god of the Bible has a sense of humor.