h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

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This may well be because the tolerant attitudes make it possible to provide a thorough and pragmtic sex education programme without the "moral majority" protesting about the corruption of their children.

Noggin

I recently read a report that teenage pregnancies in the UK are once again on the rise.

az

Just to get right down to the roots:

http://www.users.drew.edu/~jlenz/whynot.html

When I read Bonobo's comment that atheists/agnostics are statistically less likely to divorce, I filed that in "great if it's true" and looked it up. Turns out he's right. And the further one slides towards the fundy end of the belief scale, the greater the odds of divorce become. I can't say I'm surprised, either. Marriage is tough enough without adding all the unnecessary pressures of religion... from self-flagellation to imperialistic misogyny, Christianity has it all.

Anyway, here's one of the many places on the web where the study is cited:

Atheists/agnostics are also statistically less likely to commit crime. And again, I'm not surprised.
http://www.skepticfiles.org/american/prison.htm

It might just be that atheists, feeling no compulsion to marry, tend to do it when they really mean it, whereas marriage is a default assumption for christians.

And to think I used to get harangues because my RE teacher and assorted relatives all thought that my atheism meant that I'd be divorced and having kids by eighteen different fathers and being jailed for shoplifting and being immoral and not giving money to charity and so on by the age of 21...

Oops... I promised a link for the divorce rate thing and accidentally left it off. Here it is: http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_dira.htm

religioustolerance.org is where I got it from.

Personally, I don't write 'atheist' in the religion box on forms. I write 'none'.

Gleaned from the book 'Bitten' by Pamela Nagami, Clinical Associate professor of Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at ULLA. (The book is published by St Martin's Press, New York, in 2004.)

The incubation period for rabies is in humans, 1-3 months. Therefore the girl being argued about earlier wasn't some dumb fundamentalist - she would not have developed symptoms meriting a hospital visit for 30-90 days, hence the delay in going to a doctor. (p 194)

Bat bites can be painless and almost invisible, and not noticed at the time they occur. (p 205.)

When the symptoms of rabies show, the progression of the disease towards fatality is inevitable. (p 204).

Given these facts, the 'fundamentalist' girl and her family did not show stupidity any more than anyone else would, by not going to seek medical treatment as soon as she was bitten. There is no evidence either in the story in the NZ Herald, or the American version linked, that she or her parents used prayer as a substitute for medical care.
Given the third fact above, the girl's survival *is* a miracle, whether of science (as the New Zealand article stated) or of science and prayer combined, as the American story is said to have stated, doesn't matter.
Thank you all for your attention, and your *careful* reading of the above.

I confess I must not have read very carefully because I completely missed any discussion of bats, rabies and miracles.

But, since miracles have come up:

'Events with million-to-one odds happen 295 times a day in America.'

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00094511-E068-10FA-89FB83414B7F0000



(have I mentioned Bertrand Russell lately?)

anhaga, I think the discussion about the 15 year old with rabies was a few dots back...
The point I was making was that there was a 'miracle', which may have been one of science (the article in NZ was pointing out that doctors had tried new drugs in a new combination) but that according to what I was reading last night in Pamela Nagami's book about the inevitable mortality of rabies once symptoms show, it actually *was* a miracle, and thar therefore people who had dissed her family for calling it one, were being unfair. (In the NZ Herald story, it was the doctor who called it a miracle, her family weren't quoted at all.)

BTW, the link you posted won't work! "111 Connection refused"...

Hmm. it's not working for me now either. Strange.

try this: http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:NV1KgDRTsfgJ:www.sciam.com/article.cfm%3FarticleID%3D00094511-E068-10FA-89FB83414B7F0000+shermer+miracle&hl=en

Thanks, will do!

Nope, sorry, that one won't either! URL not found or summat.

Okay. Type "shermer" and "miracle" into google and click on the top of the list.

No. Click on the cached copy of the top of the list.

Shall do!

Both the links worked for me, anhaga. Maybe there's something wrong with your server connection today, Della.


az

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All very well, anhaga!
IMHO, it's a pretty daft argument though... If "psychic" events happen, they happen without a doubt, to the person who has them. No amount of maths changes that I remember with amusement and surprise the time I dreamed (in about 1999) about a local librarian, lying here on my couch, begging me for painkillers, and learnt a day or two later that the morning after the night I had the dream, he had, according to his colleagues, been away from work with a killer migraine!
The most amusing thing about it all was that I hardly knew him, and still don't, other than knowing his name (he wears a name badge) and having chatted once or twice about the books we like.
There are other things as well, all pretty trivial, and all more real than any banging on about statistics and populations of 275 million people make them seem.
That all being said, doesn't invalidate my points about the rabies case. All of them.