OT: changing youtube video

[Christopher Browne]

On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 4:51 PM, James Knott <james.knott-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Christopher Browne wrote:
>>
>> Their group is a tiny microcosm; I think it would be an error to tie the
>> (fairly rare, though commonly well-publicized) cases where their folk
>> reject medical treatment with broader religious communities that have
>> extremely different behaviours.
>
> Such as all those who go to Lourdes, expecting a cure?  Carl Sagan looked at
> the number of "miracles" recognized by the Catholic church and found they
> were lower than the natural remission rate for the various diseases.  He
> also pointed out that you were more likely to die traveling to or from
> Lourdes, than to be cured.  There are many other examples, where religious
> belief causes people to forgo proper medical care.

Yes, I think it would be an error to consider those the same thing.

There are approximately a billion Catholics, and "going to Lourdes, a
place in France with population 15K to get healed" which can only conceivably
be done by some miniscule portion of their supplicants seems not remotely
the same thing as a declared doctrine being to reject sickness as an illusion,
and doctoring as an illusory solution to the illusory sickness.

I'm not trying to defend the Catholics; rather, the CS folk seem quite a few
standard deviations crazier.
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists