Full disclosure: My review copy was provided at no charge by BTL publishing. Nevertheless, take my review as my honest opinion on this book.

Losing Control provides a good supplemental reading to the narratives provided by McDonald. While McDonald provides the detailed look into some of the cast of characters involved in the religious right, Warner adds an academic history in the events that date back to the formation of the modern rights movements in the 1960s.

Warner documents a shift in Canadian thinking from it’s Christian roots to a secular society that prizes individual and minority rights. This shift has obviously come hard for the social conservatives in the country, who have since rallied around various conservative parties, from the Progressive Conservatives to the Reform, Canadian Alliance and modern Conservative Party.

Warner breaks his treatment thematically, treating the abortion debate, repressive sexuality laws, gay rights and gay marriage in successive chapters. He finishes with some discussion about the social conservative inroads in politics.

Unfortunately, he only has passing references to the debates over evolution vs. creationism and school prayer, both of which have been hot topics for social conservatives.

In The Armageddon Factor, McDonald used mostly original research to compose her book, however the vast majority of Losing Control is based on 29 pages of third-party sources. This extensive bibliography provides a valuable resource for anyone wanting to get the dirt straight from the source.

I partially criticized McDonald for minor editorializing at points in The Armageddon Factor, and while Warner uses the mostly neutral term social conservative to refer to Canada’s vast network of religious right figures (which includes evangelical protestants, Catholics, conservative Jews, Sikhs and Muslims), he does end many of his chapters in a more of a warning style.

As an example, at the end of the chapter on regulating sexuality he states:

Sadly, there is no realistic reason to believe that members of Parliament will take the next logical step and actually decriminalize prostitution and repeal the repressive bawdy house sections of the Criminal Code. As has so often been the case in the past, the best hope for progress on those issues rests with the justices of the Supreme Court and their interpretations of the rights guaranteed by the Charter.

This is of course not to say that I disagree with anything Warner has to say, I’m with him almost the entire way through this book. He does come down firmly with the BC Civil Liberties Union and criticizes other gay activists who have used the Human Rights Tribunals to censor hate speech, to which I’m still undecided upon, but otherwise I’m in total agreement.

I think the greatest value in Losing Control is in its framing the battles with the religious right in terms of conflicting societal values. It’s secular rights (which include religious freedoms) versus theocratic ambitions to regulate morality.

One final chapter I was hoping for was for Warner to connect the dots (something McDonald attempted to do) and discuss the main organizations that have been active in the fights against progressive minority rights. Such organizations as REAL Women Canada, the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, the Catholic Civil Rights League and Focus on the Family Canada. At the very least, a brief perusal through the comprehensive index will identify the organizations that routinely come up in church-state separation debates.

Overall, Losing Control is a well-researched book that covers the history of social conservatives in Canada and the battles that have been fought and progress that has been made since the introduction of various Bills of Rights and the Charter. While not an outright replacement for The Armageddon Factor, it does make a good supplement for anyone who wants to dig a bit deeper into these issues.

The Christians are coming!

In The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada, Marci McDonald attempts to raise the awareness of our own growing Christian Right. She purports to show how they have quickly and subtly gained an alarming amount of influence in the government.

In the first chapter, McDonald outlines Stephen Harper’s personally religious history, a topic that is not spoken of very much by Harper of the media. Harper became a born-again after moving to Calgary and joining Preston Manning’s Reform Party movement. However, Harper, unlike Manning and much of the Reform Party, was more comfortable keeping his faith and politics mostly separate. McDonald notes that it was only later when, as leader of the new Conservative Party, Harper attempted to reach out to the evangelical communities.

But it was still hard for McDonald to measure the level of influence the Christian Right has had under Harper’s consecutive minority governments. There have been few socially conservative policy changes, and of those most have disappointed the very factions McDonald seeks to expose. Harper has repeatedly turned away from the abortion debate and upon winning his first minority government in 2006 he quickly allowed for his promised free vote on same-sex marriage – a vote that was actually earlier than many evangelicals had wanted, since it provided them less time to mount a defence. Similarly, by breaking his fixed-election date law in 2008, Harper killed several of his caucus’ private members bills, including an unborn victims bill that was called the “first winnable abortion bill” in years.

However, McDonald does point out that perhaps Harper’s greatest success has been in his “incremental” changes, evidenced by his countless appointments of partisans and born-agains to all levels of courts, the senate and the civil service. Within the Prime Minister’s Office, Harper counts many evangelical leaders, including the former leader of Focus on the Family Canada, Darrell Reid.

Similarly, Harper has been able to make many changes by the mere stroke of a pen. In recent months Harper has cut funds to Status of Women Canada and KAIROS, a social justice charity that apparently represented the wrong-type of Christians for this government (like McDonald has been told she is). He has sent tens of millions of stimulus dollars to Bible Colleges and after he cut funding to abortions for overseas aid, a crowd of 15,000 pro-lifers rallied on the steps of the House of Commons.

McDonald also briefly discusses the so-called “Christian Left,” which included Tommy Douglas, the father of Canadian medicare. She points out how both Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff and NDP leader Jack Layton have reached out to various faith communities through acts like the revival of the NDP Faith and Social Justice committee. Contrary to some interpretations, it does not seem to me that McDonald is against these, or even Harper’s, attempts to dialogue with people of faith in principle, but merely that she hopes that such activity is acknowledged publicly.

The Armageddon Factor is an enlightening read, regardless of your personal views, but unfortunately the book strays from neutrality enough that it reads as a bit more than just a who’s who of the Christian Right. My initial hope was that it could have been more like the documentary film Jesus Camp, which, for the most part, just lets the subjects speak for themselves.

Either way, the book does shed light on much of what has been going on in the dark. No democracy is served by secrecy and backroom lobbying. At the very least, this book will hopefully force Canadians to decide what kind of country we want this to be, because if we do not, there are those who have a scripturally-inspired version of what they think it should be.

From Radom House Publishers:

The Armageddon Factor
The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada
Written by Marci McDonald

About this Book

An urgent wake-up call for all Canadians who think that this country is immune from the righteous brand of Christian nationalism that has bitterly divided and weakened the United States.
In her new book, Marci McDonald documents the startling extent of the influence that the religious right already wields in Canada and shows how, quietly, often stealthily, it has provoked far-reaching changes in Canadian policies and institutions, including our public service, our schools and our courts.
In four short years, galvanized by their failure to stop same-sex marriage, not only have conservative Christians developed a permanent infrastructure in Ottawa, designed to outlast whatever party is in power, but they have done so by borrowing the rowdy style of the American religious right to which most of their leaders boast close ties. Their rise has been tied to the election of Stephen Harper and it is no secret that evangelicals have already re-shaped Harper’s foreign policy in the Middle East, guided by what McDonald terms the Armageddon Factor. But few Canadians are aware that a militant band of conservative Christians with a direct pipeline to Harper’s cabinet is also attempting to reshape the country’s social, cultural and even scientific policies, driven by a belief that Canada has a biblically ordained role to play in the final days before Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ.

About this Author

MARCI McDONALD is one of Canada’s most respected journalists. The winner of eight gold National Magazine Awards, she is also the recipient of the Canadian Association of Journalists’ investigative feature award. A former bureau chief for Maclean’s in Paris and Washington, she has interviewed Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Bill Clinton, and spent five more years in the United States as a senior writer for US News & World Report. A winner of the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy, her study of the backstage machinations behind the free trade deal led to her book, Yankee Doodle Dandy: Brian Mulroney and the America Agenda. Her controversial cover story in the Walrus, "Stephen Harper and the TheoCons,” [link added] inspired this book.

Along with this book, I heard from a friend that Ms. McDonald will be appearing in Calgary on May 18 for the Council of Canadians: Calgary Chapter along with Donald Gutstein, author of Not a Conspiracy Theory. Hopefully we can get them out to Vancouver in the near future.

I just finished the epoch by Marx and Engels, although that word is deceiving because all-in-all it comes in at a mere 42 pages. My opinion: things have changed a lot since they wrote this manifesto.

The first major problem I encountered was that they assume this diametrically opposed class war. It’s the “us versus them” mentality that has led to many conflicts throughout time. The communists (I’ll use this word to denote the position taken by the manifesto) argue that the only way for the working class to ever gain anything is to destroy the current system. It’s a hugely false dichotomy now, however, may have rung truer in another time.

Today (in Western culture), there is no proletariat-bourgeoisie class rivalry. There is essentially a spectrum of wealth from the homeless to the worlds richest – and most are above the poverty line today.

To give a clear example of how things have changed consider property ownership. One key argument the communists bring up is that the majority (they claim 90%) do no own property, and because of low wages they never will. However, today in Canada about 70% of people own their own home (many own condos). Yet even if today a minority were still property owners, that would be a good argument for increased wages, not outright class warfare.

This brings me to another issue. The manifesto isn’t entirely clear on the action they are recommending. Some parts read as a call to violent revolution, while others suggest a democratic upheaval first. They talk in one section about coordinating to win elections, but then hint that something more may be necessary to take property away from the rich. However the manifesto ends with a line like:

“[Communists] openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

WORKINGMEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

I should also point out that the use of the all-caps and exclamation marks typically decreases your integrity and ability to claim rational arguments.

One thought that ran through my head as I read the manifesto was that nothing could have pushed me further from the label of communist than the actual manifesto itself.

I do have to credit it with a few things: it advocates briefly for universal education and an end to child labour, also for minimum wages and working conditions, the nationalization of roads and communications, and it gives decent arguments about how communism doesn’t destroy individuality – unless individuality is solely determined by what you can buy and sell. They also point out that the system of the time clearly provided little incentive for the poor, since they could never make enough to own property, yet they kept on working, however he neglects the fact that needing to put food on the table is a damn good reason to work. However, the communists also calls for an even distribution of people across the countryside as opposed to grouping in towns and cities, which makes no sense in today’s society, and likely little at the time in industrializing nations.

All in all I have to say I was somewhat disappointed by the Communist Manifesto. I was hoping that Lenin truly bastardized it and Stalin furthered the destruction of the ideas, however it’s all pretty much in there. And with a modern middle class and social welfare net, I think we can safely declare that communism is dead.

[tags]communism, marx, engels, Communist Manifesto, books, economics[/tags]

The first I came across was the [tag]bikini[/tag] girls [tag]cat fight[/tag] over [tag]atheism[/tag]:

The sequel to the cat fight features the [tag]girls kissing[/tag] and making up:

Finally, there’s the sexy woman in a towel arguing about the [tag]Bible[/tag]:

Check out his website for more on the book.

The arguments for Christianity break down as follows:

(1) There can be no morals without God.

This is actually his big one. It’s what made him go from “atheism” to Christian apologist. Never mind that it doesn’t take too much reading in moral philosophy before you realize how pathetic of an argument this is, he doesn’t even articulate it well!

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?

He assumes that morality requires a reference point, however if morality is derived from reason it requires no more reference than intelligence does.

Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.

(2) He uses the Jesus had to be “liar, lunatic, or lord” argument.

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse You can shut Him up as a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonesense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

(3) He claims we just happen to be built for spirituality:

God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits are designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

(4) The “authority” of the bible:

And it seems plain as a matter of history that He taught His follwers that the new life was communicated in this way. In other words, I believe it on His authority.

There may also be other smaller “arguments” for Christianity, but morality was his big one. The funny thing is, even granting that argument, it doesn’t justify choosing Christianity as the big-T True religion, and other than the Liar-Lord-Lunatic argument (which is a false dichotomy), he presents NO arguments for why he believes this rubbish.

However, there are a few passages I agreed with Lewis on:

1. While discussing (sexual) propriety or decency he urges elders not to assume the young are corrupt because of their emancipation from old rules, and meanwhile the young should not assume the old are prudish.
2. On marriage he suggests a distinction between “Christian Marriage” and (secular) state marriage.
   

   A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans [Muslims] tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognise that the majority of British people are not Christians [in the 40s I think they were] and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distict kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distiction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.

3. I also like a bit of his initial discussion on “Faith,” where he talks about faith being what you use to hold onto your reason when emotions run high and you may think irrationally. This “faith” would be like remembering that you won’t drown while learning to swim because your instructor will save you. However, I think his promotion of this use of faith sometimes goes beyond just when you’re being irrational, and sometimes prevents reasonable discourse in your mind (for example if new evidence is presented you should examine in rationally).

There are, however, many things I found not only disagreeable, but downright objectionable.

First, he just short of vilifies homosexuality. Although this was written in the fifties before the “sexual revolution” of the seventies, it still remains a pillar of Christian apologetics and must be answered for.

When a man makes a moral choice two things are involved. One is the act of choosing. The other is the various feelings, impulses and so on which his psychological outfit presents him with, and which are the raw material of his choice. Now this raw material may be of two kinds. Either it may be what we would call normal: it may consist of the sort of feelings that are common to all men. Or else it may consist of quite unnatural feelings due to things that have gone wrong in his subconscious. … The desire of a man for a woman would be of the first kind: the perverted desire of a man for a man would be of the second. [Emphasis added]

The bad psychological material is not a sin but a disease. It does not need to be repented of, but to be cured. And by the way, that is very important. Human beings judge one another by their external actions.

In terms of “curing” homosexuality he was buying a lot into Freudian psychoanalysis (as likely most people of the day were). However, the idea of “curing” homosexuality remains alive today and further discriminates many productive members of modern society.

Second, he launches into the chastity and marriage sections, noting that he is a lifelong bachelor, which limits his ability to comment, however in some places he takes more liberty than he likely has.

the Christian rule is, ‘Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.’ Now this is so difficult and so contrary to our instincts, that obviously either Christianity is wrong or our sexual instinct, as it now is, has gone wrong. One or the other. Of course, being a Christian, I think it is the instinct which has gone wrong.

The biological purpose of sex is children, just as the biological purpose of eating is to repair the body. … But if a healthy young man indulged his sexual appetite whenever he felt inclined, and if each act produced a baby, then in ten years he might easily populate a small village. This appetite is in ludicrous and preposterous excess of its function.

Condoms and other birth control was readily available to men and women by the 1950s. Therefore no man should need to worry about populating villages. I should also note that Lewis often singles out men alone as the ones out with the “dangerous” sexual appetites, although you may grant this to the prevalent biases of the era, they aren’t eradicated today.

I found these two quotes humorously ironic:

Christianity is almost the only one of the religions which thouroughly approves of the body…

Christianity has glorified marriage more than any other religion: and nearly all the greatest love poetry in the world has been produced by Christians. If anyone says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity contradicts him at once.

He justifies these by claiming it is merely the “desires” for sex which have become perverted and he blames everything from the media to the culture and even “people out to make a buck.”

He continually uses an analogy between sexual and food appetites.

The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kings of union which were inteded to go along with it and make up the total union. The Christian atitude does not mean that there is anything wrong about sexual pleasure, any more than about the pleasure of eating. It means that you must not isolate that pleasure and try to get it by itself, any more than you ought to try to get the pleasures of taste without swallowing and digesting, by chewing things and spitting them out again.

However, following this logic, chewing gum is as immoral as sex outside of marriage. The fact is he presents no arguments for why sex outside marriage is so bad and so worrisome other than misleading apologetics.

Finally, I’ll finish off with straight quotes from Lewis on why every marriage must have a leader, and why it must be the man. If need be I’ll explain in an entire new post why this is absurd, but I hope you can read for yourself.

(1) The need for some head follows from the idea that marriage is permanent. Of course, as long as the husband and wife are agreed, no question of a head need arise; and we may hope that this will be the normal state of affairs in a Christian marriage. But when there is a real disagreement, what is to happen? Talk it over, of course; but I am assuming they have done that and still failed to reach agreement. What do they do next? They cannot decide by a majority vote, for in a council of two there can be no majority. Surely, only one or the other of two things can happen [false dichotomy alert]: either they must separate and go their own ways or else one or other of them must have a casting vote. If marriage is permanent, one or other party must, in the last resort, have the power of deciding the family policy. You cannot have a permanent association without a constitution. [Marriage isn't the military]
(2) If there must be a head, why the man? Well, firstly is there any very serious wish that it should be the woman? As I have said, I am not married myself, but as far as I can see, even a woman who wants to be the head of her own house does not usually admire the same state of things when she finds it going on next door She is much more likely to say ‘Poor Mr X! Why he allows that appalling woman to boss him about the way she does is more than I can imagine.’ I do not think she is even very flattered if anyone mentions the fact of her own ‘headship’. There must be something unnatural about the rule of wives over husbands, because the wives themselves are half ashamed of it and despise the husbands whom they rule. But there is also another reason; and here I speak quite frankly as a bachelor, because it is a reason you can see from outside even better than from inside.. The relations of the family to the outer world – what might be called its foreign policy – must depend, in the last resort, upon the man, because he always ought to be, and usually is, much more just to the outsiders. A woman is primarily fighting for her own children and husband against the rest of the world. Naturally, almost in a sense, rightly, their claims override, for her, all other claism. She is the special trustee of their interests. The function of the husband is to see that this natural preference of hers is not given its head. He has the last word in order to protect other people from the intense family patriotism of the wife. If anyone doubts this, let me ask a simple question. If your dog has bitten the child next door, or if your child has hurt the dog next door, which would you sooner have to deal with, the master of that house or the mistress? Or if you are a married woman, let me ask you this question. Much as you claim to admire your husband, would you not say that his chief failing is his tendency not to stick up for his rights and yours against the neighbours as vigorously as you would like? A bit of an Appeaser? [emphasis added]

So what is my final review of this book?

If you get a chance to read it, don’t.

The basic arguments of the book are:

1. That secular liberals have lost their soul in being unwilling to debate religious/moral issues in the public square. This was done in the mistaken ideas of “privacy” of religion and “liberty” to believe anything and not be offended. Basically this is seen in extreme efforts to accomodate “multiculturalism” and endagers our free speech, but also prevents us from speaking out for abortion rights, stem cell research and other topics.
2. That all ethics and morals come from a collective secular conscience that is accessible to all (or at least most, excluding sociopaths). He discusses much moral philosophy in that latter chapters that just build on his earlier arguments. For Dacey, all morality must be derivable from reason which is available to everyone.

I’m going to write a bit more on a few philosophical ideas that sprung from this book, and I highly recommend it to everyone, especially leftists, secularists and anyone who associates with the “freethought” movement.

And if you get a chance, see him speak, he’s sensational.

I liked his review of materialistic and atheistic philosophers through the ages and the often repressed view that needed to be said, but beyond that I found little to keep reading for (FYI I quit after just entering the section on Christianity which made quite a few major accusations with no referential backings).

There are much better books out there discussing atheistic philosophy, look for them.

It also doesn’t help that I have Austin Dacey’s The Secular Conscience and C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity on my shelf (the former I look forward to reading, but the latter I will read in its entirety).

struggling Christian who has found the Anglican Church the most conductive to his own spiritual grown. But, I’m attached to it by an elastic band, not a chain. [Would You Believe? p. 45]

The book I’m reading is “Would You Believe? Finding God Without Losing Your Mind” subtitled “A book for doubters, sceptics and wistful unbelievers.” With this title and his form of liberal Christianity, I went in honestly expecting a decent argument or case for theism.

Unfortunately, after finishing the introduction, and Chapter 1: “Why I believe” I can say that there’s no new tricks in this bag. The first chapter starts off with a good teaser:

I should stress that when I talk about faith, I am decidedly not talking about blind faith… As rational beings we must have reasons for our beliefs. While any God worthy of the name is by definition far beyond reason’s total grasp, nevertheless a faith that will not stand rational scrutiny, that contradicts reason in any fundamental way, is not a faith for human beings. True spiritual belief is never “blind.” [p. 18-19, emphasis added]

He then talks about “non-rational” aspects of faith and belief that go “beyond reason.” These are his arguments of the “heart” or where he just really “feels” it’s true.

He tips his hat early and admits that his reason for believing is that “nothing else makes as much sense to [him].” [p. 20] With this he launches into a discussion of Gordon Sinclair and Paul Davies and their belief that the universe is too complex and seems like it just had to be “made for us.” This is the “argument from design” and essentially is another “god-of-the-gaps” in that we don’t have a complete understanding of the creation of the universe. Dr. Stenger (who I shall be seeing in Calgary tomorrow) has utterly destroyed these arguments in his books “Has Science Found God?” and “God: The Failed Hypothesis.” In short, there are reasonable naturalistic explanations for how the universe, in its current form, came to be.

Harpur’s second reason for belief is his gut again. He says “there is more than one way of knowing” beyond the rational/logical sense. He also claims the logical positivists and empiricists have been utterly rejected since their prime earlier in the last century. However, forms of empiricism still fills the heart of philosophy of science and epistemology today, and in fact, I doubt outside of theological circles that any academic seeks to gain knowledge (true beliefs about the world external to ourselves) by means other than dirty empiricism.  The main fact here is no “other way of knowing” has produced the concrete knowledge of the world that empirical science has.  When Harpur argues that he believes in God because it feels right, he has not given us a “rational” argument.

Harpur finishes off by citing that although he doesn’t believe in biblical inerrancy, he does find religious texts (as well as great arts) so moving that they had to be (at least partly) divinely-inspired. Again, we don’t have anything more than the last argument.

So out of Harpurs arguments, we see none that pass his own filter since they all “contradict reason.” However, there are still nine exciting chapters to go.

Chapter 2 is on “what he believes” and is a description of his own theology and beliefs, which I shall not repeat. However, I had to set the book down for a minute when I read the following:

Prayer, like gravity, is an unseen force. [p. 46]

Except when I let go of the book I could see an effect of gravity. There have been tests for observable results of prayer – they have all failed (or been methodologically unsound). He argues that he knows it works because of “personal experience as well as years of observing it working in the lives of many others.” [p.46] He then steps a bit towards the loony end and states:

What interests me is that while polls show the majority of ordinary people believe in the reality and power of prayer, the secular scientific and medical establishments carry on for the most part ignoring it completely. For example, pharmaceutical companies in North America are spending as much as $15 billion (US) a year to try to come up with a new antibiotic to combat the “superbacteria” that have evolved in response to previous antibiotics… They will spend absolutely nothing, naturally, on research into the effects of prayer upon health and healing. You can’t put that into a pill and mass-market it. Yet, recent research I did for my book on healing, The Uncommon Touch, showed me that prayer has a measurable effect on healing. The medical establishment could put protocols in place to make a beginning at least of documenting the effects of prayer scientifically. [p. 47-48]

Except, Mr. Harpur, “secular science” HAS looked into prayer (see above linked article, and Google “scientific study of efficacy of prayer”), and the evidence isn’t there. Your personal “research” likely found placebo effects. If prayer worked so damn well, why did the Plagues kill 30 to 60% of Europe during the height of the Dark Ages (a high time for theism)? Prayer doesn’t work, and promoting unscientific practices is dangerous to public health.

Harpur touts Dr. Herbert Benson, who made some work on relaxation techniques to aid in health care, however Dr. Benson pushes a bit too far with his conclusions, and isn’t entirely accepted within the scientific community.

He follows with a discussion of Dr. Randolph Byrd who did experiments on the efficacy of prayer (contradicting Harpur’s earlier claim no such work has been done), and finding it to be successful. A quick look reveals that Byrd was dead wrong:

The “landmark study” of Byrd and the recent confirmation attempt by Harris et al., both claiming therapeutic benefits of intercessory prayer, are shown to be invalid. One was improperly designed, the other fallaciously analyzed–and the two contradict each other.

I believe Dr. Stenger addresses this study as well in Has Science Found God?, however I had to return the book to the library, so I can’t pull a reference here (Dr. Stenger does devote a chapter to debunking intercessory prayer claims).

He finally cites a “successful, but as yet unpublished, doctoral thesis,” by Rev. Dr. Sean O’Laoire who did more research into intercessory prayer (and surprisingly found good results). However, little work has followed up on this thesis. One key thing to note about studies of this sort is that the threshold of crap (data that may be statistically insignificant) that is accepted in medical journals is much higher than in harder sciences. This is mainly to allow potential new treatments to get to the market to help people live, however it has the negative effect of allowing more statistical aberrations through. More studies should be done, at least that much I can agree with Mr. Harpur.

Chapter 2 finishes discussing Harpurs views on fear and doubt. Doubt is crucial to faith he says, and fear is often misused.

I will continue my commentary on this book as I try to finish it.

First, the author Kazanis is a M.S. in Physics from the University of Cincinnati, and a Ph.D. in Biophysics from The Pennsylvania State University. He also has a lot of experience with Taoism, Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies. One would think this would be the ideal candidate to tie the realms of “science” and “mysticism” together. However, it seems Kazanis failed to learn about how science really works.

The main theme of the book is that dark matter, as posited by quantum cosmologists (as what makes up “95% of the universe” – in fact in only comprises 23% of the universe, with the even more mysterious dark energy comprising 73%), which permeates luminous (or ordinary) matter without being detected, is the source of all spiritual and mystical phenomena.

The first mistake made by Kazanis is that he blindly accepts that evidence for paranormal phenomena exists, and then seeks an explanation for it. He then arbitrarily posits dark matter as the “subtle matter” of ancient mysticisms along with unseen forces as an explanation for those phenomena.

He later demonstrates many key misunderstandings while trying to explain how his subtle matter can explain the unexplained. The major section I take exception to is that entitled “Cold Fusion”

Pons and Fleischmann used the term “cold fusion” for their unique energy generating discovery because the energy that was produced was too great for a chemical reaction and so they thought it must be nuclear, but there was no radioactive [sic]. Therefore they referred to it as “cold fusion”. This phenomena was met with enormous skepticism, particularly by nuclear physicists in the USA.

However, recent scientific and commercial developments in cold fusion seem to confirm their discovery. Dozens of laboratories have replicated this work, and the results have been published in scientific journals. These developments seem to vindicate Pons and Fleischmann and may yet lead to a breakthrough in cold fusion as a practical energy source.

Is it nuclear or chemical? Since subtle ‘dark matter’ is ever present, and since dense physical matter must interact with pranic [related to prana or qi energies] ‘dark matter’, Pons and Fleischmann may have come across a mechanism which allows the interaction between these two types of matter, and thus generating energy. In this way we could have a strong energy source, but no radioactivity, by utilizing ‘dark matter.’ [p. 59-60]

One would think that Kazanis, with a masters in Physics would understand the difference between fusion and fission is, but the above section on cold fusion (reprinted in full) would beg to differ. Pons and Fleischmann called their reaction “cold fusion” because they thought they’d achieved nuclear fusion (the binding of two subatomic elements together) at room temperature and energies. Typically fusion occurs at extreme energy levels, which is why the fusion that occurs in the core of the Hydrogen bomb requires a traditional fission or A-Bomb to trigger it. This is all within accepted science.

Cold fusion, however, was likely not acheived by Pons and Fleischmann. No group has successfully reproduced the results of the original experiment (Kazanis gives footnote references for 66 items in his 128 page paperback, but not one for a reproduced cold fusion result). Finally, another group showed that there were issues with the gamma-ray spectra with the original experiment, which would lead to a false interpretation. The best explanantion of why cold fusion appears in this book is given at a Physics World article (a good reference debunking the cold fusion myth):

Yet the defenders of cold fusion have soldiered on, a number of them merging with a network of conspiracy theorists, psychic spoon-benders, UFO enthusiasts and believers in other exotic physical phenomena outside the ken of science.

Yet, most simply put, if cold fusion did exist, and was readily repeatable, we would not be entering an energy crisis.

A few pages later Kazanis stumbles through a section entitled “Cosmogenesis” in which he mixes creationist misconceptions with New-Age woo. Frankly, I couldn’t be bothered to fully read it, since Kazanis has destroyed any credibility within the field of physics.

In the Journal of Near Death Studies, Long gives a fairly decent review of this book [1]. The best parts are reproduced here:

Lacking any personal or professional background suggesting the existence of chakras, I asked myself what was known about any physical correlate of chakras, and whether chakras were accepted among conventional health scientists as real. I performed a literature search
in The National Library of Medicine (NLM), an enormous searchable database of allied health science literature from all around the world, and in a variety of languages. Directly entering the term chakra, and searching NLM revealed only two articles that had the term chakra
in the title (both Dutch journal articles from 1979), suggesting, consistent with my medical perspective, that the physical or physiological correlate of chakras is unknown to conventional health scientists. I then searched my database of 240 NDEs submitted to my web site (www.nderf.org) for the term chakra and did not find the term. I then queried my NDE co-investigator, Jody Long, who is knowledgeable of, and personally believes in, the reality of chakras. Long had recently reviewed the aforementioned 240 NDE accounts, and could not recall any account describing awareness during any NDE of anything suggesting
chakras.

The reader can quickly see the differences between the author’s and my own belief systems. I do not claim either of our belief systems is superior to the other, but simply point out how differing belief systems make a consensus regarding the integration of science and spirituality difficult. This important concept is not discussed in the book.

Kazanis discusses a number of unexplained and controversial observations including astrology, herbalogy, and alchemy, and concludes: “Although science is unable to account for such events at this time, there is no reason for doubting that they can be accounted for, providing we expand our knowledge to include subtle bodies, subtle matter and subtle
energy, which is, in essence, what science today calls ‘dark matter” (p. 118). This conclusion is difficult to accept given our very primitive understanding of dark matter.

Basically, all that is known about dark matter is that it has gravity and does not interact with the known electromagnetic spectrum to allow it to be visualized. A conclusion linking
dark matter to other mysterious phenomena seems very premature.

This brings up another concern. Relating dark matter to the realm of existence of a variety of phenomena (including NDEs) is an intriguing hypothesis, but I believe most readers will accept it is only a hypothesis. We are a long way from proving the validity, or lack thereof, of this hypothesis. One would expect a book about the integration of science and spirituality to be filled with such statement qualifiers as “possible,” “perhaps,” and “hypothesized,” but there is a noticeable paucity of such qualifiers throughout the book.

By my perception, Kazanis represents the mystical teachings he is aware of as more reliable than science for the pursuit of spiritual growth. In the first chapter he states: “By turning inward mysticism has concentrated its exploration of the universe on those concepts which are of value to spiritual growth” (p. 20). Science is never similarly acknowledged as being of value for spiritual growth. At no point in the book did I encounter the recognition that the mystical teachings Kazanis discusses may need to undergo revision in the future as new understandings are developed. Yet Kazanis criticizes science for periodically, throughout history, representing its understandings as absolute and complete truth, only to be humbled by the next generation of scientific discovery significantly changing accepted scientific understandings.

Such criticism is certainly legitimate, yet this one-sided criticism of science does not help the difficult process of integrating science and spirituality. A substantial openmindedness and humility by all will be required by all to allow such integration. No single scientific or spiritual discipline has all the answers.

I have to disagree with the conclusions of the reviewer however, as he ends:

Kazanis correctly points out that mystics are at least trying to answer some very big and important questions that science cannot. For example, science has very little to offer regarding questions about God, consciousness, and the meaning of life, to name a few. When we know so little about such important questions, it certainly seems reasonable to
consider the thousands of years of collective wisdom of other cultures. This book is a good, very brief introduction to such beliefs. The concept of dark matter is intriguing and thus this book is recommended reading for those interested in how science and spirituality might be integrated. It is not the intent of this book to discuss NDEs in any depth,
and readers interested in such a focus are advised to consider other books.

First, I believe many scientists are exploring the questions of God’s existence and consciousness. And the meaning of life has long been a subject of objective, secular philosophy. I would also disagree that “we know so little about such important questions,” and would not necessarily grant answers to historical cultural “wisdom” as many of those beliefs are routed in ancient superstitions with little to no basis in reality. I also completely disagree that this book should be used as a guide to integrate science and spirituality as all it does is attempt to bastardize dark matter cosmology to the point it can be used for pseudoscientific events. The same has been done to quantum mechanics, and countless other scientific phenomena.

A proper integration of science and spirituality is something that would draw on the results of science to build a rational, objective worldview that affirms human diginity and worth. Lucky for us that such a system already exists in secular humanism and the Brights.

UofA staff and students can access the above article online.