{"id":2728,"date":"2009-09-20T06:22:59","date_gmt":"2009-09-20T14:22:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=2728"},"modified":"2009-09-20T14:10:02","modified_gmt":"2009-09-20T22:10:02","slug":"magical-thinking-watch-housing-crisis-chapter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/magical-thinking-watch-housing-crisis-chapter\/","title":{"rendered":"Magical thinking watch: Housing crisis chapter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Religious goods stores have been doing a record business <\/a>in St. Joseph statues.\u00a0 Buried in the garden of a home for sale, the doll allegedly\u00a0helps the house to find a buyer.\u00a0 (We are not told where you put the icon if you live on the 30th floor of an apartment building–perhaps hidden in the dirty laundry hamper.)<\/p>\n

Satisfied buyers testify to the statue\u2019s efficacy:<\/p>\n

Joe Becwar, an observant Catholic, said he sold his house in Southampton, N.Y., soon after his mother suggested the statue and his real estate agent told him to plant it head down, facing the house, by the \u201cfor sale\u201d sign. His brother in Chicago had the same experience, he added.<\/p>\n

And Cheryl Katz, who is Jewish . . . , said the statue helped her sell two houses as a real estate agent. Now that her own house is on the market, she\u2019s using it for herself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The only miracle here is that humanity somehow managed to claw its way up towards the scientific method, given the ubiquity of such arrested thinking.\u00a0 The religious and superstitious are hardly the only ones oblivious to any elementary concept of a control group, of course.\u00a0 How many times have you heard such confident assertions of causality as: \u201cI fed my dog organic carob Power Bars, as his acupuncturist recommended, and the tumor on his leg shrunk.\u00a0 The bars really work!\u201d\u00a0 I sometimes wonder whether any of us deserve the benefits of science, given how little we appreciate or seek to emulate its basic thought processes.\u00a0 I recently heard of the following remedy for muscle pain recommended by a relative\u2019s personal trainer: Put a bar of soap under your mattress at night.\u00a0 Are we living in 15th century Russia?<\/p>\n

The suckers who fall for mountebank health scams, such as fill the shelves of every health food store, presumably have some inchoate sense that their favored cure should in theory be explainable biologically.\u00a0 But I\u2019m not sure that this makes their knowledge or reasoning skills superior to someone who is satisfied with the black box of supernaturalism.\u00a0 Better almost to believe in a miracle that leapfrogs over all biological pathways than to accept that Kinoki Detox Foot Pads, say, can cure insomnia.\u00a0 Such gullibility stems as an initial matter from an unconscionable ignorance of human physiology.\u00a0 But our epistemological problems, it seems to me, stem as well from\u00a0the \u00a0fact that we are incessant conjurors of causality, seeing it everywhere, and from our child-like faith in the association between language and truth.\u00a0 A wrinkle cr\u00e8me needs merely to assert on its label that it can reduce sagging jowls, without offering any plausible theory for how it can do so, and thousands of women will shell out $50 for 2 ounces.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the Catholic Church is deciding whether to create another miracle-producing saint<\/a> to join Joseph.\u00a0 Vatican officials are investigating whether Father Junipero Serra (d. 1784) is preserving the life of a woman who has had 14 brain surgeries for tumors and who has lost much of her skull because of the operations.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s one of the many things that I don\u2019t follow in this miracle-certification process: Let\u2019s say that the Vatican can definitively rule out \u201cnatural\u201d (i.e., medical) causes for the survival of Sheila Lichacz, the brain surgery patient.\u00a0 And let\u2019s say that it has also established that dead people can keep living people alive.\u00a0 How does the Church go on to determine that it is Serra, not Mary, Christopher, Joseph, or some other Christian divinity, who is responsible for Sheila Lichacz\u2019 survival?\u00a0 Even if Lichacz has never asked any other celestial presence besides Serra for assistance, which seems unlikely, how does the Vatican know that saints or even God himself never intervene unbidden on someone\u2019s behalf?\u00a0 And if such holy agents do intervene sua sponte, how does the Church rule out their involvement as actual causes here?<\/p>\n

I ask because I am as usual puzzled by how my conservative contemporaries, beneficiaries of the best education in the world and enjoying the lavish technological fruits of a rigorous approach to causality, instantaneously suspend the skepticism with which they would greet the claim, say, that we should spend $100 million on federal job training because \u201cit works,\u201d or $34 billion on welfare payments to single mothers because welfare \u201cfights poverty,\u201d or $300 million on gang intervention workers because such social service programs \u201creduce violence,\u201d when confronted with a similarly ungrounded religious claim.<\/p>\n

Not that I don\u2019t understand the desire for a supernatural trump card.\u00a0 This summer, my mother was facing the loss of her driver\u2019s license for a routine license renewal if she couldn\u2019t pass the written driver\u2019s exam.\u00a0\u00a0 The prospects looked grim.\u00a0 In my despair at whether she could absorb enough of the irrelevant, arbitrary DMV book to pass, I would have loved to have had some patron saint of memory-challenged but otherwise safe drivers to appeal to.\u00a0 It would be great if there were in fact some supernatural agent who can get us out of a fix and provide us some extra advantage in overcoming our troubles\u2014sacrificing a goat would be a small price to pay.\u00a0 As it turned out, on her second effort at the exam, a sympathetic DMV clerk allowed her to answer an additional question to improve her score and she passed.\u00a0 If God was involved in this happy outcome, I am certainly grateful, but I suspect that my mother\u2019s heroic studying efforts and a considerable amount of luck were more responsible for her success.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Religious goods stores have been doing a record business in St. Joseph statues.\u00a0 Buried in the garden of a home for sale, the doll allegedly\u00a0helps the house to find a buyer.\u00a0 (We are not told where you put the icon … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[338,259,339,340],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2728"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2728"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2728\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2745,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2728\/revisions\/2745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}