It had to happen: David Barton, pretend-historian, now pretend medical scientist, claims that science won’t be able to cure AIDS because AIDS is a punishment for sin. David Barton didn’t invent the idea that AIDS represents divine wrath but he is certainly willing to run with stupidity when he hears it.
Even ancient Pagans knew that there were things that could make people sick that weren’t of divine origin, or to be explained by demonic possession. Superstition has not always held sway over every mind. How is it otherwise to be explained that Marcus Terentius Varro, writing in 36 BCE (On Agriculture) and without benefit of a microscope, could know that “there are bred certain minute creatures that cannot be seen by the eyes, which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and there cause serious diseases” but David Barton, with access to all the annals of modern medicine, cannot?
Another way to frame the question might be, why appeal to the complexities of medical science when you have an angry God on hand? After all, succumbing to mundane disease doesn’t make for much of a morality lesson, does it?
This is the future of American theocracy: abandonment of science and embrace of superstition, of malign divine influences, demonic possession, and prayer. Millions will die because the Inquisition won’t like it if you say “germ”. Don’t wash your hands for 20 seconds after going to the bathroom: it will only prevent the spread of infection; it won’t keep God from hating you. Get on your knees and pray: beg for forgiveness.
Seriously, there is a reason the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) publishes a page on hand-washing but not on prayer. And I am certain David Barton would condemn them for that.
As Right Wing Watch reports,
We have also pointed out before that Barton believes that everything in our society ought to be governed by what is in the Bible, even our medical practices … and today Barton returned to this topic, claiming that science cannot create a cure or vaccine for AIDS and that abortion causes breast cancer and mental health problems, proclaiming that to be “good news” because it proves that the Bible is correct.
So forget Marcus Terentius Varro, forget Madame Curie, forget Louis Pasteur, and forget the father of microbiology, Anton van Leeuwenhoek. Forget Philippe Gaucher, the first to identify the disease named after him in 1882. It is easy to see a Republican theocracy prescribing prayer for my son rather than enzyme replacement treatment.
But prayer won’t break down the waste material in his blood or keep it from accumulating in his spleen and liver. Prayer won’t keep him alive if the source of Cerezyme dries up. Prayer wno’t keep an AIDS patient alive and it doesn’t promise a cure anymore than it will drive away a drought, return gasoline to a dollar a gallon or kill the women of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.
Prayer, as Karl Marx correctly identified religion, is the opium of the people (“Die Religion … ist das Opium des Volkes”).
Yet that is what pseudo-historian/pseudo-scientist David Barton wants you to believe. Forget everything after the first century that isn’t Christian:
There’s a passage that I love in Romans 1 – I don’t love what the topic is – but it talks about homosexuality and it says that they will receive in their bodies the penalties of their behavior. And the Bible again, it’s right every time, and studies keep proving that and that’s why AIDS has been something they haven’t discovered a cure for or a vaccine for, because it’s the fastest self-mutating virus known to mankind. Every time they just about get a vaccine discovered for it, it transmutes into something new and they have to start over again. And that goes to what God says, hey you’re going to bear in your body the consequences of this homosexual behavior.
The same thing goes with abortion and now we’re getting studies, and these are somewhat negative studies, but they’re positive studies in that they prove that the Bible is right. So I want to read you the results of a couple of new studies that are out. Here’s a new study that out, now this is the second study that shows that women who have abortions double the risk of mental health problems … Now that’s not good news; the good news in this is God says “don’t kill unborn babies.”
Now, along the same thing, here’s another study, a new study now shows those who have abortions nearly triple the risk of breast cancer. It’s bad news, but it’s good news in the sense that it does show that the Bible is right. When God says don’t kill those unborn babies, there’s a reason. And He tells us in Deuteronomy 6:24 and Joshua 1:8, everything I tell you to do is for your good, for your benefit, so that you can prosper and you can have success. So when he tells us not to do this stuff, whether it’s homosexual behavior or whether its abortion, hey it’s for our benefit he tells us not to do it and now studies prove that to be true.
Actually, there are no studies that prove the Bible is right. With regards to a link between mental health problems and abortion, Barton is speaking of a single 2009 article in The Journal of Psychiatric Research “purporting to show “a link between abortions and long-term mental health problems” but there are two critiques of that study which show that it is seriously flawed.”
The first, by Julia Steinberg of the University of California at San Francisco and Lawrence Finer of the Guttmacher Institute and also published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, “found what they called, in a letter to the journal’s editors, ‘untrue statements about the nature of the dependent variables and associated false claims about the nature of the findings.’” Dr. Steinberg dismisses the first report’s findings in no-nonsense terms:
“This is not a scholarly difference of opinion,” Dr. Steinberg said. “Their facts were flatly wrong. This was an abuse of the scientific process to reach conclusions that are not supported by the data.”
The second critique, an analysis of data in Denmark (reported last year in the British Journal of Medicine), also “found no support for the hypothesis that abortion increased the risk of mental disorders.”
The American Cancer Association says that abortion does not cause an increased risk of breast cancer: “After adjusting for known breast cancer risk factors, the researchers found that induced abortion(s) had no overall effect on the risk of breast cancer. The size of this study and the manner in which it was done provide good evidence that induced abortion does not affect a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer.”
In 2003, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) Committee on Gynecologic Practice concluded that “”Early studies of the relationship between prior induced abortion and breast cancer risk were methodologically flawed. More rigorous recent studies demonstrate no causal relationship between induced abortion and a subsequent increase in breast cancer risk.”
The American Cancer Society does not rest its anti-Barton case there:
In 2004, the Collaborative Group on Hormonal Factors in Breast Cancer, based out of Oxford University in England, put together the results from 53 separate studies done in 16 different countries. These studies included about 83,000 women with breast cancer. After combining and reviewing the results from these studies, the researchers concluded that “the totality of worldwide epidemiological evidence indicates that pregnancies ending as either spontaneous or induced abortions do not have adverse effects on women’s subsequent risk of developing breast cancer.”
But David Barton does not care what scientists say; he doesn’t even care what the Bible says, really, since the Bible doesn’t talk about mental health problems or breast cancer resulting from abortion. And in fact, God does kill unborn babies, according to the Old Testament: God repeatedly commands that the Israelites kill men, women, and children, even pregnant women – hell, they even have to kill the livestock! That doesn’t sound like a pro-life God to me.
But misinterpretations of Scripture and dishonesty aside, theology does not explain disease – wallowing in ancient superstition is not going to save lives. Scientists may not so far have a cure for AIDS but they don’t have a cure for my son’s Gaucher Disease, or a cure for cancer, either. They also once upon a time did not have cures for many diseases that are now curable. Now, in other words, is not forever. Scientists do know what causes AIDS. As the Mayo Clinic explains:
“AIDS is a chronic, potentially life-threatening condition caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). By damaging your immune system, HIV interferes with your body’s ability to fight the organisms that cause disease.”
AIDS, in other words, is not a theological problem. It is a medical problem, just as female contraception is a medical, not a religious issue.
David Barton claims to be a historian but a historian cannot indulge in fantasies of prayer and miracle. As Bart Ehrman explains, “the natural sciences use repeated experimentation to establish predictive probabilities based on past occurrences.” A hundred times out of a hundred a bar of soap will float in water; a bar of iron will sink. This provides “an extremely high level of…presumptive probability” that all future bars of soap and iron will behave in this fashion, whereas a miracle involves “a violation of this known working of nature” – floating bar of iron, for example. A historian cannot disprove a miracle took place but a historian must establish “only what probably happened in the past” and miracles are “at odds with how the natural world typically works.”[1]
The germ theory of disease freed humankind from dark superstition and science is indeed a candle in the dark, as Carl Sagan said, holding back the demon-haunted world.[2] Republicans hate science and conservative Christian Republicans most of all: science is inconvenient: it impedes the spread of ideology and it impedes the spread of religious doctrine. When Stephen Colbert said that reality has a liberal bias he was speaking truth, and the literature is abundant on this score.[3]
The sin of science is that it tries to explain the world as it is, now how it should be, not to buttress this or that ideology or this or that religion. Science is the facts on the ground, an object not of belief but of fact. Medical science is the same.
David Barton and pseudo-scholars like him (and dark disciples like Glenn Beck and Republican politicians who trumpet their claims) should be seen for what they are: agents of destruction. If you are a fan of Thomas Hobbes’ “nasty, brutish and short”[4] then their gospel of destruction will no doubt find favor with you and in fact Christian Scientists are free to dismiss the germ theory of disease if they wish and if you want to think your cold is caused by demonic possession I suppose you are free to do so.
But this sort of Bronze Age thinking, promoted at the expense of centuries of scientific and medical advances, should not become public policy to inflict all humankind. Penicillin is a cure but prayer is a panacea, and disease as a divine punishment should hold no more allure in the 21st century than the philosopher’s stone.
[1] Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, Third Edition (Oxford University Press, 2004), 227-29.
[2] Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Ballantine Books, 1996).
[3] Just a few examples: Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (Basic Books, 2005); Russell Shorto, Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason (Doubleday, 2008); James Hoggan, Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (Greystone Books, 2009); Timothy Ferris, The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature (HarperCollins, 2010),
[4] Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan (1651).
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Reynardine
Apr. 28th, 2012 at 8:40 am
In fact, Christian Scientists wash their hands like everyone else, and though I was one for only two or three years around junior high, I can say that mental hygiene has a lot to do with physical health. Now, Mr. Barton and his ilk are another matter. What they are doing would be called mental malpractice by Christian Scientists, and malediction by the rest of us. They *want* us to be sick.
It’s not nice to think that a group grasping for power is motivated by a hatred for human beings and a desire to hurt them, but that’s what their words and deeds suggest. We mustn’t cure illness, because “Gahd” uses it to punish us for our sins. We mustn’t allow contraception, because “Gahd” uses babies to punish women for having twats. We mustn’t alleviate poverty, because “Gahd” has already decided those people are going to Hell. Above all, we mustn’t learn too much, because we might doubt what they’re telling us “Gahd” wants.
A recent article- I forget where- stated that religious fanatics’ brains shrink. David Barton and his ilk provide empiric proof.
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SinghX
Apr. 28th, 2012 at 9:17 am
Gaaaaaawd (opps my finger accidentally slipped)gives women mental health problems and cancer for aborting? There is more “evidence” that the mental health disease of delusional thinking is sinking in to the recesses of Barton’s shrinking brain…and it’s probably because he drinks copious amounts of wine/alcohol because, Gawd turns blood into wine…isn’t that in the bible too?
Drink up, Grand Master Gawd Historian Barton…you’ll eventually come up with something!
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Ezi
Apr. 28th, 2012 at 9:31 am
Apparently this guy doesn’t know about Google: Google Search: Man Cured of AIDS
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David Deal
Apr. 28th, 2012 at 10:12 am
What is sad is the fact that about 15% of the population (the religious fundamentalist base of the Rethuglican party) actually embraces this dribble. I know some of them personally despite being an Atheist or perhaps because I am for some of them feel compelled to try to drag my heart and mind back into the dark ages of ignorance and superstition. If one were to take Barton’s assumptions seriously we’d have to go clear back to the source which was the Simian form of HIV from which this one mutated after monkey meat was eaten by humans, (a near act of canibalism considering our close genetic relationship to all the apes). So one would have to ask the question- What sin did the chimpanzies commit to be given the Simian form of HIV before we got it from them?
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Reynardine
Apr. 28th, 2012 at 11:32 am
In fact, cannibalism is connected with a variety of retroviral and prionic diseases. Kuru among New Guinea cannibals and mad cow among cattle who have been given feed with ground up beef and mutton parts are two examples. Once established in a new host like that, they can mutate, as is the case when humans are infected by meat from sick ungulates. HIV shows a second pattern, though. There is some evidence it can vector inside spirochaetes, which is why in some areas it has had a pattern suggesting arthropod transmission (in areas where yaws and other arbotransmitted spirochaetal diseases exist) and in others not, and why areas where men are not circumcised show far higher female-to-male rates than where they are (the foreskin harbors otherwise harmless spirochaetes). Note, though, that the unvectored virus spreads most easily when introduced into the alimentary tract, and that supports the hypothesis that it was introduced to the human species by the kind of near-cannibalism you mentioned.
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Eykis
Apr. 28th, 2012 at 11:22 am
Barton is simply a fewl – uneducated, uninformed, ridiculously religious, FEWL.
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Johnee
Apr. 28th, 2012 at 11:45 am
Last year I asked my aunt who worked as a nurse for several years in a hospice facility, if there were a lot of devout Christians coming in and praying for their loved ones to be cured. “All the time” she said. “How many were cured and left hospice”? I asked. She sighed, “none”. This on top of all the numerous studies that prove prayer has absolutely no effect beyond random chance.
No divine intervention, cures or curses.
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Maria
Apr. 28th, 2012 at 12:21 pm
Yay for lesbians, the chosen people! If you take Barton’s argument to its natural conclusion, you MUST conclude that God prefers lesbians to straight folks and gay men. Lesbians are far less likely than those groups to suffer from hiv/aids.
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SinghX
Apr. 28th, 2012 at 6:08 pm
There is no such word as “lesbian” in the bible, therefore, lesbians don’t exist! In fact, this whole “thou shalt not be gay” interpretation is take from Leviticus…if you read it, be sure and look for the passage that says “a woman shall not lie with another woman”…look real hard cause it ain’t there.
There are all kinds of “a man shalt not lie with”…his sister/cousin/mother/sister-in-law/brother-in-law/the babysitter, yada-yada, but there is no passage about a woman lying with another woman is a sin or forbidden. God didn’t forbid it! It ain’t in there, look for yourself.
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Sally
Apr. 28th, 2012 at 2:07 pm
This is bad news, but would be good news: David Barton has advanced prostate cancer, undergoing treatment at Houston Medical Center. Asks for prayer and contributions.
One can dream, eh?
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Shiva (Moderator)
Apr. 28th, 2012 at 5:12 pm
Tomorrows sermon: Man can cure cancer! Aids! Walnuts!
I hope he waits for my 10 cents. Call me David, I got news for you
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Glenn
Apr. 28th, 2012 at 8:43 pm
Some of this is OK, some not so much. You imply for example that there only article supporting the link between abortion and mental health is a “single article” in the Journal of Psychiatric Research. But this is incorrect. Research conducted at the University of Otago and published in the British Journal of Psychiatry corroborates this conclusion. (I comment on this elsewhere). So your information is somewhat selective. But of course – that’s not what makes abortion wrong in general anyway, so no biggie.
But that shortcoming aside, Barton’s use of Scripture is just terrible. Paul, in Romans 1, didn’t even know that AIDS would exist in the future for goodness’ sake. When he talks about people degrading themselves in sin and receiving in their body the penalty thereof, he is talking about the sinful degradation and shamefulness itself, not some extra thing on top of it, and certainly not a disease that didn’t even exist at the time.
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Shiva (Moderator)
Apr. 28th, 2012 at 9:10 pm
There is no corroboration . The study you quote says “findings of the present study suggest that abortion may, in fact, increase mental health risk” May is seldom conclusive. Nor is this study corroborated any where else. While the number of references to study’s may be wrong, the conclusion at this time is not.
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Hrafnkell Haraldsson
Apr. 28th, 2012 at 9:54 pm
For the record, the 2009 article referenced is behind the Republican claim that abortion is linked to mental illness and this article has been debunked repeatedly.
Here is some further information on the subject from The Guardian:
Repeated studies, which have been blessed by the American Psychological Association, have shown there is no causal link between abortion and mental illness. Despite the disinterested assessment of the experts, though, anti-choicers have continued to push this claim.
Now, however, the last bit of supposedly scientific evidence establishing the link between abortion and mental illness has been debunked – mostly because the original researchers distorted their data in order to establish a causal link where none existed.
Priscilla Coleman, a professor at Bowling Green State University, published a paper in the Journal of Psychiatric Research in 2009 claiming to demonstrate a causal link between abortion and mental illness. This month, researchers from the University of California, San Francisco and the Guttmacher Institute debunked Coleman’s heavily criticised study, showing decisively that the data collected by Coleman did not support her conclusion that abortion causes mental illness. The Journal ran a letter from the debunking team (pdf), and devastatingly for the anti-choice cause, Ronald Kessler, the principal investigator of the National Comorbidity Survey, and Alan Schatzberg, editor-in-chief of the Journal, agreed with the debunkers (pdf).
Turns out that Coleman juiced up her results by counting mental health disorders that occurred prior to women’s abortions. It’s a little like arguing that the stomach-ache I had a week ago is caused by the meal I ate tonight. While fully acknowledging that errors are a common problem in research attempting to establish causal links between any two events, it does seem that, at a bare minimum, researchers should realize that an event such as an abortion cannot actually cause events that happened before it. Coleman’s response acknowledged that they used lifetime mental health diagnoses (rather than 12-month or 30-day diagnoses, as previously stated) because she and her colleagues had wanted to “capture as many cases of mental health problems as possible”.
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Reynardine
Apr. 28th, 2012 at 9:43 pm
Rather, might not the correlation be that those who are either unstable anyway or traumatized by pregnancy more likely to terminate? And what kind of future does a kid have if mommy is nuts?
If a woman is coerced into abortion by parents, a husband, or a sugardaddy, then of course that is going to be traumatic – but coerced abortions were far more common in the back-alley days, where black market operators had no professional standing to be preserved by refusing them, and often a great deal of extra money to be made by performing them. Also, if a woman must abort a child for financial reasons, that too will be traumatic. The solution is to make sure that both contraception and adequate support for children who are born is available- but Republicans are agin’ it.
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KatzKids
Apr. 29th, 2012 at 2:30 am
What seems to be always ignored in the abortion discussion is the ongoing trauma both mother and child can experience through the “recommended” adoption option.
Children who never get adopted, shuttled from foster family to foster family, sometimes severely abused, feeling abandoned, unloved, unwanted. Even children with loving adoptive parents feel, at their core, rejected. “Why didn’t my mother want me?” So many of them search endlessly for their biological mothers to learn their history, answer the “Why” question. Mother’s who search for the children they never wanted to give up but were forced to by their families or their churches. Bishop Romney, himself, tried to force a loyal Mormon mother to give up her dearly loved baby to the Church’s adoption agency. Her crime? She was a single mother. She refused so he excommunicated her.
My cousin was forced as a teenager, to give up her son. She finally found him, as an adult with a family of his own. (her grandchildren) She found that he had been seeking her too. They had a meeting & found they were “soul mates” – same interests, same personality, same skills. He couldn’t wait to bring his wife & children to meet her. It was as if they had never been apart. She was over the moon. He had been given to an LDS family & they & the LDS Church dropped the hammer. He was forbidden to ever get in touch with her again & has obeyed. He was crying when he gave her the bad news. She was married & they had tried all their lives together to have children – unsuccessfully.
OK – I know I’m rambling here-my apology! This has affected our whole family negatively. There are no perfect solutions. For this A**hole and his minions and their evil, made-up Gahd to continue to dominate the conversation with so many lies & false gospel enrages me.
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Jim Faubel
May. 10th, 2012 at 2:31 pm
The idea that Aids is God’s punishment for “gay behavior” must come as a surprise for all the millions of heterosexuals that have died from it…and all those who were left behind without parents or partners.
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