» Continued from Part 3

=== Alternative Healing / Medicine
26. Colorado Children's Deaths Rekindle Debate on Religion
27. Death and Denial at Herbalife

=== Death Penalty & Other Human Rights Violations
28. Human rights head pushes to end death penalty

=== Noted
29. Poof! You're a Skeptic: The Amazing Randi's Vanishing Humbug
30. Public Favorable to Creationism

=== The Mufti Around The Corner
31. Mufti again denies Wall's Jewish link


=== Alternative Healing / Medicine

26. Colorado Children's Deaths Rekindle Debate on Religion
New York Times, Feb. 20, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/

DENVER, Feb. 20 - The deaths over the last two years of three Colorado children whose parents denied them medical treatment on religious grounds has fueled support for state legislation that would prevent parents from using their religion as a defense against prosecution.

The parents of all three children belong to the General Assembly and Church of the First Born, a small denomination that believes in prayer, rather than medical treatment, to cure illnesses and disabilities.

Largely as a result of intense lobbying by the Church of Christ, Scientist, which also favors prayer over medicine, Colorado and 45 other states have statutes that allow parents to use their religious beliefs as a defense against prosecution for withholding medical treatment from their children. The exceptions are Hawaii, Massachusetts, Nebraska and North Carolina.

But with evidence that dozens of other children of parents with similar beliefs may have died in the last 25 years in Colorado, this state has become one of the first to consider eliminating the religious exemption, which its opponents say sanctifies a form of child abuse. The effort has rekindled a debate here, pitting religious freedom against the rights of children.

''I don't think freedom of religion should allow a child to die for not getting proper medical care,'' said State Senator Bob Hagedorn, a Democrat who is leading support in the Senate for a bill now under review in the House.

The United States Supreme Court has ruled that parents do not have an absolute right to deny their children medical treatment on religious grounds, saying in a 1944 decision that while parents ''may be free to become martyrs themselves,'' ''it does not follow they are free, in identical circumstances, to make martyrs of their children.'' The court reprised the same thought in a 1990 case.

But legal experts say that state and local officials have not seen the Supreme Court language as a clear directive for prosecution of child abuse and homicide cases. Congress did little to clarify the issue with a 1974 directive that required states receiving federal money for child abuse and prevention programs to have an exemption for parents who substitute spiritual healing for medical care. The requirement was rescinded nine years later, but by then, most states had enacted their religious exceptions, which effectively allow parents to treat ailing children through prayer without fear of prosecution if something goes wrong.

Then in 1996, Congress seemed to reverse itself in the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, saying there was no federal requirement that a child must be provided ''any medical service or treatment against the religious beliefs of the parent or legal guardian.''
(...)

Leaders from many of the dozens of churches that favor prayer over treatment say they have ample proof their spiritual healing works as effectively as a visit to a doctor.

Marvin Peterson, an elder of the church to which the families of the three dead children belong, said a member recently fell off a ladder and cracked open her skull. After elders prayed and anointed her with oil, he said, she recovered.
''I've seen people healed of cancer, seen it with my own eyes,'' Mr. Peterson said, taking strong exception to critics who characterize the church as a cult. ''We believe that if it's the Lord's will, you will rise up.''

While few critics of Mr. Peterson's church and other like-minded denominations argue with the right of parents to choose the manner of treatment for themselves, they assert that children have constitutional guarantees to medical care.
[...more...]

While faith healings do take place today just as they did in the early church, the teachings of some churches, movements and individuals on this subject amount to spiritual abuse.

Legitimate churches and movements do not equal using drugs or receiving proper medical attention with unbelief, insufficient faith, or otherwise sinning against God.

27. Death and Denial at Herbalife
Los Angeles Times, Feb. 18, 2001
http://www.latimes.com/

(...) But this appearance, on Feb. 19, 2000, is something special for Mark Reynolds Hughes. It's part of a five-day celebration of the 20th anniversary of Herbalife International, the company he started in a former Beverly Hills wig factory. There is a lot to celebrate. At 44, Hughes is the ruler of a $956-million business empire that sells weight-management and personal-care products through a network of more than 1 million distributors in 50 countries.

So-called multilevel or network marketers are lucky to stay in business for several years. Hughes has racked up 20--and become extremely rich in the process.
(...)

From the Forum stage, Hughes looks out on an audience of acolytes, about 4,000 Herbalife distributors who have followed his prescription for health and wealth with almost messianic fervor.
(...)

Three months later, on May 21, Mark Hughes is lying on the four-poster bed in the master bedroom suite of his beach retreat, a Mediterranean-style mansion on 71/2 acres with 300 feet of Pacific Ocean shoreline that he recently bought for a Malibu-record $25 million.
(...)

From an adjoining part of the suite, Darcy LaPier Hughes--his fourth wife and, like her three predecessors, a former beauty queen--enters the master bedroom. Her husband's back is facing her. He is wearing only a black T-shirt and black bikini briefs. Something about him doesn't look right. Darcy calls the guards, who realize something is very wrong. They carry him to the floor and lay him on his back to perform CPR. Unsuccessfully.

The Los Angeles County coroner's office concludes he died of a toxic combination of alcohol and Doxepin, an antidepressant he was taking to help him sleep. His blood-alcohol level was measured at 0.21, more than 2 1/2 times the legal limit for driving.

The death was ruled an accident, an eerie echo of the ruling on the drug-related death of Hughes' mother 25 years earlier. Hundreds of mourners grieved the loss of a man struck down in his prime who had helped so many get so rich.
But the real story is even sadder, the tale of a troubled man who grew up amid discord and drug abuse and, as an adult, turned a mythical video version of his past--the Herbalife story--into his reality. It's also the story of how Mark Hughes, the super-salesman, may have become a prisoner of his public image.
(...)

Mark, then 19, was not with his mother when she died. Instead, having accumulated several drug busts, he was far away in the San Bernardino Mountains, at an institution that paved the way for his success at Herbalife.

CEDU, as the drug institute is called, was the brainchild of Mel Wasserman, a Palm Springs furniture store owner who had sponsored recovering addicts at Synanon, a drug rehab program, at its facility in Santa Monica. In the late '60s, as Synanon developed cult-like trappings, Wasserman founded his own center for troubled teens in bucolic Running Springs, west of Big Bear. Its goals included liberating the ''spirit of the child'' and creating ''a safe and healthy environment for making new choices.'' Wasserman eschewed Synanon's confrontational approach to therapy.
(...)

In 1976, Mark began selling Slender Now diet products for Seyforth Laboratories, a multilevel marketer, becoming one of its top 100 earners. After Seyforth collapsed in 1979, he sold exercise equipment and weight-control products for Golden Youth, another direct-sales outfit. By the time Golden Youth, too, went out of business, Mark was ready to start his own operation that would combine the Eastern philosophy of herbal medicine with the vitamin and mineral technology of the West. With Slender Now manufacturer Richard Marconi, he developed a line of products that promised ''100% Satisfaction Guaranteed or Your Money Back.'' In February 1980, the 24-year-old entrepreneur--now Mark Reynolds Hughes, having taken his mother's maiden name--unveiled Herbalife.
[...more...]


=== Death Penalty & Other Human Rights Violations

28. Human rights head pushes to end death penalty
Asahi News (Japan), Feb. 22, 2001
http://www.asahi.com/

The head of the Council of Europe's committee on human rights said Wednesday that Japan must consider abolishing the death penalty if it hopes to continue to be an observer nation to the intergovernmental organization.

Gunnar Jansson is in Japan on a fact-finding mission to prepare a report on Japan's reasons for maintaining capital punishment and the conditions faced by death row inmates. The results of the report will be discussed in a committee session in late June.

Jansson was to meet Justice Minister Masahiko Komura today to discuss the issue.

In an interview with Asahi Evening News, Jansson said the committee hopes Japan will abolish capital punishment, as have all European member countries of the 43-nation council.

Of the six observer nations to the council-a forum for discussing human rights issues based in Strasbourg, France-only the United States and Japan maintain capital punishment.

Committee members may demand observer countries' memberships be revoked.

``It is possible,'' Jansson said. ``Although dialogue is preferable.''

``Considering that they (the Japanese) have applied for this (observer) status on their own initiative, we expect Japan to act,'' Jansson said, adding that he hoped to kick-start debate on the issue in Japan.
[...more...]



=== Noted

29. Poof! You're a Skeptic: The Amazing Randi's Vanishing Humbug
New York Times, Feb. 17, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/

(...) Homeopathy, faith healing, mind reading, psychics, mediums, dowsers, parapsychologists. James Randi, 72, has been taking aim at them all and more since he was 15 and accused a preacher of fraud for channeling messages from the dead. (The police hauled him out of the church and into jail for disrupting a religious service.)

As pseudoscientific and paranormal claims grew rampant, Mr. Randi's work as a professional skeptic won him a frequent chair on Johnny Carson's ''Tonight'' show, a MacArthur ''genius'' award, dozens of lecture invitations every year, from Capitol Hill to China, and a series of lawsuits from disgruntled mind readers and spoon benders like Uri Geller.

Mr. Randi, often billed as the Amazing Randi, has succeeded where scientists have not in exposing those claiming supernatural powers. A magician by training, he knows the trick of making the hands of a watch move without touching it, of divining information in a sealed envelope, of causing a statue of the Virgin Mary to weep. ''I'm a liar, a cheat and a charlatan,'' declares Mr. Randi, an impish man with a bushy, white beard, but ''at least I know it.''

Apparently it takes one to know one. ''Scientists, people with academic degrees, assume they know how it's done,'' Mr. Randi said, ''but they're trained to look for the facts, not the tricks.''

His friend Michael Shermer said: ''Randi is the man. He's the pioneer of the skeptical movement.'' Mr. Shermer, founding editor of Skeptic magazine and the author of ''Why People Believe Weird Things'' (W. H. Freeman, 1997), added, ''Randi is a tough-minded skeptic who doesn't suffer fools gladly.'' (Mr. Randi once invited a nasty critic who he said was spreading rumors about him to a lecture and punched him in the mouth.)

Belief in the extraordinary seems to have infiltrated every aspect of American culture, from psychic hot lines to television series like ''Mysterious Ways'' and ''Roswell'' to bogus claims of miracle cures. A 1996 Gallup poll found nearly half of the Americans surveyed believed in extrasensory perception and the reality of U.F.O.'s.

''You see the proliferation of this stuff and think, `Why is this suddenly happening today?' '' said Louis Masur, a cultural historian at City College of New York. But there is ''not anything necessarily new about this today,'' he said. ''We go through cycles. There is a cycle between reason and faith, enlightenment and religion. Think back, throughout American history in particular, and you have these moments where science, experimentation and reason dominate, and you have these other moments where a faith-oriented set of beliefs challenge that.''

People have always accepted bogus claims, agrees John Allen Paulos, a mathematician and the author of ''Innumeracy'' (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989), which examines the link between mathematical illiteracy and the susceptibility to pseudoscience. ''The starkness of the contrast between beliefs in various pseudoscience and modern science is what makes it so much worse.''

Other scholars think that such beliefs are on the upswing. Elaine Showalter, a professor of English at Princeton University, argued in her book ''Hysteries'' (Columbia University Press, 1997) that an epidemic of hysteria was sweeping America. In her view, people who claim to have been abducted by aliens and those suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome are unable to deal with their internal problems. Instead, they blame external sources - aliens, satanic conspiracies and viruses - that they hear about from talk shows, the Internet or self-help books.

Although ignorance and lack of education are often linked to beliefs in supernatural claims, the information revolution is now often cast as the villain.
(...)

Mr. Randi, who often speaks ominously of entering a new Dark Age, said, ''It's easier to become silly now because of access to nonsense.'' He credits a wide backlash against technology as well as a deep-rooted desire for certainty; people want ''some sort of magic relief,'' he said.
(...)

Human beings look for patterns, he said. That's why psychics are so successful; 98 of 100 of their statements may be wrong, but people discount the mistakes and remember the hits. ''It's like panning for gold,'' he said. ''If you find a gold nugget, that's what you seize upon.'' Never mind that you throw out pan after pan of sand and twigs. ''You don't turn to your companion and say, `Ooh, look here's a worthless stone.' ''
(...)

He has written nine books, and has his own newsletter, a Web site (www.randi.org), where he is described as ''one of America's most original and fearless thinkers''; a radio show; a magazine column in Skeptic; and an ability to talk nonstop about crackpot ideas. Now in the center ring is his offer of $1 million to anyone who can prove supernatural or paranormal powers.
[...more...]


30. Public Favorable to Creationism
The Gallup Organization, Feb. 14, 2001
[...more trends...]
http://www.gallup.com/

(...) The American public favors teaching creationism in schools along with evolution (68% favor and 29% oppose), but is opposed to the idea of teaching creationism instead of evolution, by a 55% to 40% margin. Further, Gallup polls conducted last year suggest that a quarter of Americans believe teaching creationism should be required of the public schools, while another 56% say creationism should at least be offered to students as a subject of study.
[...more...]


=== The Mufti Around The Corner

31. Mufti again denies Wall's Jewish link
The Jerusalem Post (Israel), Feb. 21, 2001
http://www.jpost.com/

[...more offbeat news...]
In the latest Palestinian rejection of Jewish history, the PA appointed mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Ikram Sabri, issued a religious decree yesterday which stated that the Western Wall is Islamic property which has no connection to Jewish history.

''No stone of the Western Wall has any connection to Hebrew history,'' Sabri asserted in his fatwa.

According to his version of history, the Wall is simply the western wall of the Aksa Mosque. As such, he said, it should not be called the Western Wall or the Wailing Wall but the Al-Burak Wall, after the name of Mohammed's horse.

''The religious ruling of the mufti of Jerusalem is an attempt to distort history, which hurts attempts to settle the Jewish-Arab conflict.'' said Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch, rabbi of the Western Wall.
(...)

Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yisrael Lau said that ''the Wall, which is part of the outer wall of the Temple Mount, is a historical fact which can never be called into question... The dreams, yearnings and accomplishments of generations will not fall because of the nonsense of one man.''
(...)

Over the past year, Sabri, who has become known for his extremist views, has twice canceled his participation in interfaith conferences sponsored by the UN because Lau was in attendance.
[...more...]