I like this – Viking names generator, on archeoastronomy

Tags: Viking, names, generator, Viking names generator,

Following from my last, mercifully brief, post here, I obsessively decided to find out about the YouTube comment posters I mentoned a few minutes ago. I guess that already shows I’m too odd.

Because, obviously I was going to be deeply depressed about the state of American society, humanity in general, yada yada.

Well, duh. No surprises then. I have indeed became deeply depressed about humanity in general. Looking at the YouTube page of “pimpsxycute” – doesn’t the name say it all? – s/he is obviously just not very bright. And, yes, I know I shouldn’t insult people’s intelligence. Obviously no one can help how they are born.

“earmuffs420” is another matter. I still don’t know if the YouTube comment is a joke in any sense of the word , as earmuffs420 seems to be a white racist. Then again I don’t know if the YouTube persona is a joke but this time I am really praying to (insert name of any deity or natural phenomenon of choice) that the whole YouTube personal page is some wierd post-modern ironic joke. Although it’s not even remotely funny. The page is filled with obscure racist crap, an offensive but incomprehensible background and links to racially offensive posts by the writer, with only barely less incomprehensible complaints about them.

Now, people can’t help the level of intelligence they were born with, as I said before. Maybe they can’t even help being complete (insert most offensive word you can think of). But other people don’t have to like it. What you can do about it is another matter. I just don’t know.

My point here is not just the weakness of rationality to deal with the people who are off the scale, which I’ve already whined about. It’s that the Internet lets you see a lot further into the murky depths of humanity than anyone would reasonably want to go. How many aliens are walking amongst us who are seem to be getting mistaken for members of the homo sapiens species by accident?

This is just a link to a clip from The Wire on YouTube There are thousands more. I suspect you could watch half of all 4 series if you look at the clips in the right order. Not recommended.

I only picked this particular clip because
A) it like the way the actors get across the characters of Bunny, Naimond and his evil Mom with a few words and expressions.
B) it has the weirdest comments on YouTube. I really really hope that these people are joking:

earmuffs420 (2 months ago)
naymonds a little bitch. i hate that fuckin kid. his mom has more heart than him naymonds a little bitch. i hate that fuckin kid. his mom has more heart than him
pimpsxycute (2 months ago)
put yourself in his postion . he just a bpy whp grew up in money . he doesnt want to live that life . he mayt be soft . but thats all he knows how to be . i still love namond . and the rest of the cast

The Wire series 4 will be shown on British TV from Tuesday. (On Sky FX, which you should also have if you get cable.) There is almost no way to express how good it is, if you haven’t seen it. In which case, get the DVDs or something and watch the previous 3 series first or you’ve already missed 36 hours of tv genius and you won’t understand the back-stories. You should still enjoy it though. Series 4 is the one with the kids.

The Guardian’s TV Guide introduces the new series with a few pages of the obligatory paeans of praise and with pictures of some of the characters from series 1 to 3. I can’t help feeling the writer has missed the point a bit but that’s all part of the Wire’s magic – you’re alwys going to miss whole levels of meaning because it’s so multi-layered. In fact the TV Guide brought home a huge point that I had missed – Series 3 opens with the blowing up of two towers that is followed by “a dumb and protracted war” (quoting David Simon.) “..Is there a metaphor there? Well what the fuck do you think?…American power and American weakness is the subject. Well one of the subjects.”

The review says that the Wire is “so rich in character and nuance, and so powerful in its anger and painful with its humour that is has been compared to the darkest classics of literature.” The Guardian writer quotes from the New York Times “If Charles Dickens was alive today, he would watch the Wire, unless that is, he was already writing for it.”

He says that the difference between the Wire and Dickens is the absence of a kindly old gentleman to set things right. There is indeed a kindly old gentleman, Bunny, the retired police chief, who has never put a foot wrong and becomes even more virtuous throughout series 4. I am unsure whether this is a weakness – having a truly good man in a world of infinite moral complexity. At first, I was a bit irritated that there was a character who was a genuine hero, in a series in which there is no clear right and wrong. In fact series 4 is much better at engaging one’s sympathies for the innocents – firstly by focusing on the kids, you come to feel more empathy with the adults. Bubs, Prez, Bunk, the boxer and Bodie are all playng “nice guy” roles, as well, all doing their best to follow some codes of decency. (And what about di Angelo in the first series?)

In the end, I feel that having “good” people isn’t a weakness but a narrative imperative – Bunny consistently shows how a single person of character can bring about small positive changes. He stops the Wire from being infernally pessimistic and shows how rationality and goodwill can be maintained in a sea of crap. That is, despite its darkness, the Wire always holds out the possibility that things could change. If it didn’t do this, it would lose a lot of its brilliantly expressed anger at the way things are now.

The NHS budget has been battered recently, not least by the scandal of over £6 billions spent on a central computer system, that mercifully doesn’t work and that anyone with any sense will be able to opt out of.

So this particular example of a mad waste of NHS funds is small potatoes in comparison. A/c to the BBC, Peter Hain has set aside £200,000 to be spent on a year’s trial of providing “alternative therapies” at two general practices in Londonderry and Belfast.

Don’t waste the year, I can tell you now how useful they are for half that amount. Please.

If they worked, they wouldn’t be “alternative”.

Weren’t there a load of recent news items about medical treatments (for cancer, Alzheimer’s, blindness) that people believe they need but which can’t be funded because the national body for clinical excellence says the medicines are too expensive and not cost-effective?

The alternative therapies (acupuncture, massage, homeopathy) will apparently be offered for stress and musculoskeletal disorders.

Well, for musculoskeletal disorders, I thought we had physiotherapy? Even, more “alternatively”, subsidised gym memberships for people recovering from MSDs to get strength back through their own efforts?

And stress? Come on, what is stress? If your life is a bit crappy, then you will be stressed. A backrub massage won’t help much for more than half an hour, and so might a good walk in the park. Or a good comedy show. Or a nice cup of tea. Whatever. Is it a doctor’s job to give you little treats from public money when your boss treats you like dirt?

More serious stress, showing up as depression or breakdown, needs more serious treatment. Granted that most current treatments may be pretty poor at dealing with mental health problems, it doesn’t mean that expensive placebos are ever going to be a better alternative.

Give out sugar coated chalk pills if you can’t do anything for patients but want to look as if you have a solution.

In any case, can you imagine how slighted you’d feel if you went to your doctor with a bad back or a case of agaraphobia and s/he said words to the effect of “Go to this charlatan, please.” Doesn’t that say that your doctor thinks you are a hypochondriac?

But then Peter Hain has outed himself as a hypochondriac, by saying he uses alternative medicine himself and thinks people who can’t afford it should be able to. How egalitarian of him.

This is too much like somone who keeps falling for email scams (“Esteemed person of repute. Help me get my money out of “wherever) offering to fund those of us who can’t fall for them because we have no cash to send.

Technorati Tags: alternative, medicine, woo, NHS, Peter Hain, health, waste, acupuncture, homeopathy

Chip and pin cards can be hacked. Well, there’s a surprise, who would have thought that a piece of technology wouldn’t be intruder-proof? And that the prospect of free money would ever tempt a thief?

It’s on BBC tonight but as nothing short of a lobotomy would allow me to watch Watchdog, here’s a link to the Register story on it. Cambridge University researchers got the card details as a payment was made and transmitted them to a card cloner.

According to the Metro (free bus & train paper) the card companies said this was unlikely to ever be a real threat as it would need there to be a dishonest shop employee with an accomplice outside the store.

Clearly, it is an almost physical impossibility for there to be a dishonest shop employee. And for them to know another person – the odds aginst that must be billions to one.

Tags: cards, credit, crime, chip and pin, BBC, fraud, technology, society.

Apologies because this blog has been a bit intemperate recently (not in the drinking and sleazing sense, I’m afraid, just in terms of presenting too vitriolic a stance.) Spending too much time on the Internet can do that to you. You can end up in a sort of ranting bizarro-world version of the religious fanatic’s brain space. It’s easy enough to let enthusiasm tip into fanaticism. That’s part of the problem surely.

We aren’t really obsessive ranters at WhyDontYou blog. Well, maybe you have to replace really with only.

All the same, there seems like something of an encroaching tide of unreason that we have to deal with somehow. There is another Guardian article by Mark Ravenhill (You can see I got my money’s worth out of the paper today, for a change.) The title is Can we really let students skip drama classes on religious grounds? It’s time liberals fought back The drama classes focus is a bit specialist for me, but Mark makes some very strong points about liberal rational values and how they need defending.

I was seeing the consequences of the culture wars that have played themselves out across American society for the past 20 years. The social conservatives, closely aligned to the churches, have fought – and in some places defeated – a perceived liberal bias in the media, arts and the entertainment industry. And liberals, who had come to see their own values as simply common sense and the inevitable result of human progress, have realised that those values have to be fought for.

He concludes with a rallying cry for universities, as liberal institutions, to defend their liberal values, rather than allow students to opt out of activities they claim to contravene their religious beliefs.

Culture wars, so long avoided in the UK, are brewing. Liberals are going to have to fight hard. There should be no opt-outs when it comes to culture. We believe in our values.

I am not sure that I can go along with this argument completely, given that it seems to focus on drama students being unwilling to act in plays that contravene their moral codes, which must be an issue that affects less than one in a few million people. However, I think the point that those of us who assume that our values are intrinsically rational need to examine those values closely. Looking at the truth of things is a strength that can stop us becoming fanatics without us losing the will to defnd our values.

Self critical thought; teasing out the historical development of our values and examining how they our beliefs might just serve particular interests in society. These are strengths integral to rational thought. Our moral codes rest on more than just being told that a superior being decided certain actions are right or wrong. That shouldn’t make us feeble. It surely makes us stronger. If we believe that this world is the only one that exists and that our time is finite, we should actually care about what happens in our lives and societies and act to defend rationality wherever we can.

Religious Intolerance, Liberal values, fanaticism, rationalism, philosophy, society, social,

Charlie Brooker is unfeasibly funny. This is just great on the Mac adverts on tv at the moment. He says it all. You can read the column online.

Technorati tags: Charlie Brooker, PC, Mac, ads, television, funny.

Following the previous post and a helpful comment from Nullfidian, I found the school website, which is depressing enough. It seems it is a “foundation school.” This got me wondering what a “foundation school” was anyway. Teacher net has some sort of explanation of the types of schools. D’oh. Did I say explanation? I meant list. Because the definitions make minimal sense and just got me ranting.

Apparently a foundation school is what used to be a “grant-maintained” school (which used to mean half-private, but subsidised by the state in exchange for taking a few non-paying kids. Now it appears that they run themselves but the DES pays x amount for them. hmmm.) I’ll say no more about this on-the-face-of-it silly school. It doesn’t seem to offer much except to people who don’t want their daughters to mix with boys so it’s pitching itself at the Islamic parent population,

Some of the other categories seem baffling. I suddenly remember I’m paying my taxes for these:-

Couple of categories of religious indoctrination units schools. Oh good. I love the idea that I am paying for kids to be isolated from people who haven’t been brought up to believe the same stuff as them. (Note for the slow-witted, that was Sarcasm)

Other wierd categories of “specialist” schools. These seem totally daft in concept to me. How fair is it to base a secondary education on whether kids are good at music or sport? Or, Rhiannon forbid, “business and enterprise”? Arghh. Maybe someone can explain to me why these exist but, to be honest, I am not interested so don’t bother. I prefer to deny their existence,

But the category that totally freaks me out is the three categories of child jails. From Secure units to the three truly menacing sounding 365 -days -a-year Secure training units. Quote:

Secure Training Unit (STCs)
There are currently three STCs in operation, they were set up under the Private Finance Initiative and are operated by private providers under contracts managed by the Home Office

They take kids from 10 to 17 (ten???) Are there really enough ten year-olds so dangerously disturbed that they have to be sent to child jails? Three of them, even with all the other units that exist. Thor forbid I or any of my blood ever come across one. All the same, surely kids that damaged and dangerous need some really heavy-duty assistance. Like somebody looking at what their parents or “carers” have done to them? Or why the rest of us aren’t concerned to prevent it?

Private Finance Initiative? Group 4? Securicor?

Doesn’t this seem too Dickensian for words to anyone else? Now on this one, I really would welcome some explanation. If anyone who works in one or has been in one reads this, can you explain what happens in them and what purpose they achieve.? I would be extremely grateful.

Tags: Schools, Education, Private+finance+initiative, Crazy Schools, education, Secure training units, STCs, child jails, Faith Schools, Specialist Schools

I admit that the Family supplement in Saturday’s Guardian is one of the supplements that would normally only get read on a five hour train journey, at a point when I’d even tried to read the (quite tedious-enough) Sport and Work supplements twice. But I read its front cover today and it managed to push half a dozen rant buttons.

Precis: A Jewish man married to a non-Jewish woman has a family crisis over circumcising his new-born son. He caves. The baby is circumcised.

It’s not even a crisis of conscience for him. It’s mainly an argument between his wife’s and mother’s consciences. His wife is determinedly against it but his mother and father bring the whole weight of their kin and community down on him.

The whole article made me almost speechless with rage. (Yes, I know you are possibly wishing that “almost” wasn’t there) Mutilating new-born babies on behalf of an imaginery divine being. Argh. Grrr. That enrages me enough.

But what really gets me angry is the way it shows that being reasonable and benevolent and NOT CRUEL can become such a weak position in the face of irrationality that the nutters may always win, because the rest of us are too moral to fight them with the level of ruthlessnessness they show.

The wife and her family put feeble rational arguments against it but, basically, they are too afraid of upsetting the baby’s father’s family and terrified of not respecting his Jewish identity and so on. So the baby’s needs are sacrificed through the weakness of their opposition.

The paternal grandmother makes her son swear that he will allow it, using the full force of Jewish mother emotional blackmail which I had assumed was a racist myth. For example,

“My mother began to weep openly on the Phone. “Oh my God, Neal, I can’t believe you’re doing this to me”

Well, he isn’t doing anything to her, is he? He is just suggesting for one minute that he mightn’t do something barbaric to his firstborn.

The wife expresses a passionate and reasoned defence of her newborn, but she’s an amateur, constrained to fighting fairly. In the end, facied with opening a “wound in his family life that might take years to heal,” she gives in.

Rationally – what if parents decided to drll 4 inch nails into their baby’s hands, without anaesthetic? I think we all know what even the slackest Social Services departments would have to do about that.

But, what if the parents felt that their God required them to mutilate their offspring? Their whole community has done this since time immemorial. They would reject to own this child as one of them if it isn’t mutilated. (The writer’s father told him they would not accept the baby as their grandson if he wasn’t circumcised.) In that case, what would the Social Services department do? Nothing , it appears, as it doesn’t even constitute recognised child abuse. It seen as Jewish and Muslim custom and somehow has come to be treated as a normal procedure by US citizerns of every faith.

I am first in the queue for arresting the perpetrators of the even more horrifying mutilations practised on some teenage Muslim girls – and ideally applyng a little “eye for an eye” justice on them. However, I can’t see why baby boys have to be without protection from sadistic body-hating lunatics either.

We don’t want to offend people so devastatingly damaged by their own cultural values and their ingrained feear and abhorrence of nature that they actively campaign to mutilate infants?

Who excuse it on the grounds of worshipping a God who actually deliberately added bits to baby boys with the express intention of having them painfully sliced off? It’s that evil Satan deity again, obviously.

If it’s so great, why not leave the babies to grow up and make a choice on reaching adulthood. That is the age at which we allow people to choose to get gender reassignment or breast augmentation – however stupid we may find these choices – because it’s their bodies and they can do what they want with them.

Noone remembers the first few days of life so we can kid ourselves that newborns don’t suffer. Anyone with children is aware that newborns suffer infinitely more intensely than anyone older. Hunger drives them to hysteria in afew moments, for instance. They don’t just feel a bit peckish.

I suspect this is like baptising newborns only taken to psychologically disturbed lengths – religious believers rightly suspect that few people would make these insane choices if they were left to their own devices when they have achieved an adult level of rationality. They somehow manage to coopt new “believers” at an age when the recruits’ skulls haven’t even closed over, so they can avoid having to make a convincing case for following their belief system.

And the rest of us, we should be ashamed of our weakness in the face of fanaticism. I don’t mean we should throw out our moral sense – that’s what stops us being like the fanatics, thank *** (insert name of non-denominational, non-montheistic, deity or wise person of your choice) . I mean that, where we have a choice, as this mother and father did, we should never agree to things that we know are deeply wrong, just to avoid offending people. We have to start somewhere.

A healthy dog wouldn’t let you start cutting into its pups without taking a good measure of flesh out of your hand. As humans, we just let our religious leaders do whatever they see fit to our offspring. If we can’t even protect our own newborns from mutilation, we definitely represent an evolutionary cul-de-sac, our culture having evolved to the point at which it overrides our own natural instincts to protect our young.

Technorati tags: atheism,religion,circumcision.child abuse.mutilation, society, Guardian, family, emotional blackmail

It turns out that WTFs are supposed to be definitions. I quote, after changing the spelling of explanations:

On January 31, 2007 Technorati released a new feature to help people to get explanations on things they see popping up in the blogosphere

This post explains that WTFs are supposed to share your knwledge and links. So far, so good, sounds like Wikipedia in blog format. The Technorati twist is that voting is used to push definitions up to the top. Technorati encourages you to add to the collection and get your “friends” to vote

If you think that you’ve got a better explanation than the one that shows up on top of Technorati search results for a term, no worries, just go and write your own, and get your friends to vote for it. WTF uses a special time weighted voting system that means that the most popular recent WTFs will show up on top of the page.

Maybe it’s terrible cynicism but doesn’t get your “friends” to vote for it mean, in practice, “Send in votes from the dozens of fake blogs you’ve set up to spam your blog to a high enough position to become visible”

Technorati claims this is an experiment. A test may be unfair, given it’s only been going for two days. But, who says the blogworld is fair? So, here goes.

On that very page there is a list of Most Recent WTFs. I’m pasting the whole thing here.

• WTF? Branding a Generic Term (1 blurb)
• 2000 Bloggers (1 blurb)
• congoo (1 blurb)
• ESB (1 blurb)
• Howie Carr (1 blurb)
• avid Hosting (1 blurb)
• Drug Companies Own Texas (1 blurb)
• TV and Radio (1 blurb)
• genocide intervention network (1 blurb)
• genocide intervention (1 blurb)

Who needs TV and radio to be defined? And Drug Companies own texas? This is blatantly a link to someone’s blog and I suspect most of the others are. So the sample list has already dispensed with the definition fiction.

What about Hot Topics

• Boston Mooninites
• Windows Vista
• Myspace
• Marions Kochbuch
• Paris Hilton

Windows Vista, OK. Paris Hilton even. I can’t even hazard a guess what the Marions and Boston ones are and life’s too short to look at everything on Technorati, but I clicked on MySpace. This brings up a list of 4 definitions.

Number 1 – i.e. most popular – is not in any sense of the word a definition, or even remotely interesting, but it has attracted 9 “votes”.

Number 2 is a discussion about the My Space business model, with a list of links, although you would probably be none the wiser if you didn’t know what MySpace was. At least it’s reasonably interesting and throws in some opinion.

(Number 4 is just silly, not qualifying as a definition or comment and has no votes so far.)

Number 3 says “Myspace http://myspace.com/ is a popular social networking, blogging, and content hosting/sharing site.”

Now that actually looks to me like a definition. But it’s clearly not “popular” enough. It will disappear to the nether reaches of the list after a few more bloggers see that a “definition” on the WTFs is just a way to get people to see your profile name and link to your blogs……..

Hey, why am I wasting time on this when it could be a ranking WTF?

Technorati tags: technology, technorati, wtfs, technorati rank,

Sorry, this is yet another post on Technorati. To repeat WTF are WTFs?
If you look at a blogger’s profile on Technorati, you see a page with two tabs one of which says WTF

Technorati Tags: technology, technorati, WTF

We always appreciate feedback here at WhyDontYou blog. We get little enough of it recently, it seems, despite blogging to within an inch of our lives. So, it was gratifying to get a response to the blog post What is it about evolution and vaccination from http://www.geocreationism.com/.

I have to admit the argument went over my head but the gist seems to be that only Christian Jews are obliged to follow Leviticus. I can’t quite work out how that explains why vaccination and evolution are counter-religious but it sort of explains why Christian fundamentalists don’t feel they have to follow every word of the Old Testament – it’s only meant for Jews, apparently.

Do I have to say – if that is the case – why draw the line at Leviticus? Why insist that any of the Old Testament applies to Christians? And if the Jews were given these rules as God’s chosen people, as in the geocreationist comment, then how come Christians are expecting to get into Heaven come the Rapture? Hasn’t God already made His mind up who He wants to take – and they’re all Jews?

I tried to read the blog but my mind glazed over. (It seems to be a defence of evolution, but sees it as due to divine selection rather than natural selection, so it’s not totally anti-scientific.) But I am still doing the decent thing and giving them the credit of a link here for the effort of replying. That is meant as a lesson for all you other people who could be getting links here ……. 😉

Technorati tags: Intelligent design, Fundamentalism, religion,philosophy, atheism,

Interesting piece in the always wonderful Register today: The President of Romania apparently said that pirated software had started the computer industry in Romania, This was reported as having been said when the Romanian President shared a platform with Bill Gates, at the opening of a Microsoft Technology Centre in Bucharest.

I can’t resist this quote from the Register article:

72 per cent of software in Romania, one of the EC’s newest member states, is pirated according to the Business Software Alliance (BSA). That costs companies like Microsoft $111m in lost revenue each year.

Technorati tags: (why do we bother?) technology, Romania, Microsoft, warez,piracy.

I can be as illogical and superstitious as the next person – though I like to justify it as thinking metaphorically…. – but I hope this isn’t the case if the next person happens to be a fundamentalist of any stripe. Looking through TW’s posts here (e.g Bad bad Medicine ) and some of the sites we’ve linked to, such as Pharyngula, I detect some bizarre themes that have been challenged by these blogs.

1. evolution (obviously)
2. vaccination
3. AIDS therapies

No matter how hard I try, I can’t really find any coherent connections between the major works of the God-of-Abraham religions and these topics. Not least because the theory of evolution and the medical science behind development of vaccines and anti-virals DID NOT EXIST at the time that the infallible books were dictated straight from the mind of God onto paper.

Evolution is the easiest topic for following the fundamentalist logic. The Bible says the world was created in 6 days, in a specific order. Obviously, if the Bible is always infallible and not metaphorical, this must be what fundamentalists believe. But it’s a Jewish book. I’ve not heard of any major Jewish movements against evolutionary theory. However, I believe that orthodox Jews do actually attempt to keep up with a fair number of the multiple prohibitions in Leviticus. So how is it that fundamentalist Christians can treat the Bible as literally true in every word and avoid doing all these observances? As pointed out repeatedly on the blogsite God is imaginary, many of these rules and the penalties for breaking them are genuinely repulsive to most people’s thinking. You can see why there would be problems putting them in practice today – not to mention pretty severe opposition. So the Christian fundamentalists have already dispensed with huge chunks of the Bible.

Did Jesus say “Follow everything in the Old Testament word for word, except for the million instructions for living in Leviticus”? I’m not too familiar with the New Testament but I’m pretty certain this instruction doesn’t appear anywhere. in fact, I doubt that Jesus is ever actually reported as having said “The Old Testament is true, word for word” but I am happy to be corrected on this.

Even if we were to accept that the world was created in a week and “the exact length of time for all the begats in the Bible to have a generation each” ago, then why does this stop evolutionary processes being true? Ah ha, because, man is supposed to be set apart from the animals. Good job we don’t need to breathe and communicate amd move and grow and eat and excrete and reproduce then, because, otherwise, we would be like animals.

Evolution is one thing. It requires some level of logical thought to grasp its principles. It could be replaced at anytime by some other theory of the natural world. However, it seems to have proved itself by the very fact that advances in biology – based on the theory – are already developed to the point that our knowledge is giving us enough control over nature to threaten our survival of the planet in new and exotic ways. (Just as our mastery of physics and chemistry and engineering prove themselves daily – nuclear weapons and poisons and transport machinery – they all work. :-))

But vaccinations? Treating AIDS with effective medicines on the basis that it’s caused by HIV infection? How can these possibly conflict with any Biblical teachings? I just don’t get this one. Medical science has made its fair share of mistakes, OK. All the same, being a science, medicine is obliged to test the effectiveness of its cures and develop new ones if the old ones aren’t working. Vaccinations are the best way to prevent suffering and death on plague scales. Does the fact that the Bible is full of plagues suggest that vaccinations are irreligious because they stop these Biblical events happening? Does God really want to see the people who live in countries that are too poor to provide effective vaccinations wiped out? Because that seems to be the Intelligent Design going on at the moment.

The AIDs-denying stuff is just demented. It has been associated with unneccesary deaths in South Africa, with spurious “natural” treatments being advanced in a country that has a desperate need for working and affordable anti-virals.

In both these cases, lack of access to vaccines and medicines don’t seem to be leading to better health.

Not being a theist myself, I probably don’t have a right to say this, but the fundamentalist position assumes the existence of a God who is is just pure evil. He sends illnesses on the basis of his moral judgements of people’s ways of life, and these illnesses somehow attack the most blameless. His aim is really poor if he’s trying to strike at wickedness and his arrow of destruction hits a year-old baby living in a shanty-town. Now, worshipping a Supreme Being like that, out of fear of what He might do if he’s not treated to a constant sycophantic chorus, seems to be both sacrilegious and craven.