In God We (Do Not) Trust

A Letter to Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow

“In God We Trust” appears on every denomination of US currency, from the one cent coin to the one hundred dollar bill, and presumably on those larger notes that I have never seen. Putting issues of church-state separation aside, it is a fairly innocuous, inoffensive statement. Clearly the designers of the currency saw it as admirable that Americans should trust in god.

To trust in something or someone is to rely on them in circumstances where, if they let you down, you will suffer an adverse consequence. Every time I get on an elevator, plane, or ski lift, I am trusting the engineers who designed and built the machine, literally with my life. Likewise, whenever I let a plumber into my house to work unsupervised, I am trusting him with my household goods. If my trust is misplaced, my television may disappear.

If, on the other hand, I let the plumber in, but watch him, or pay a security guard to watch over him the whole time he is in my house, I am not trusting him. Far from it, I am taking independent steps to assure that, regardless of the plumber’s honesty or dishonesty, nothing will be stolen from me. It is likely that I do so because I do not trust him.

In this sense, very few people today ever trust in god. Very few people ever voluntarily put themselves in a position where, if their prayers are unanswered, or if god fails to otherwise act, they will suffer a physical or financial harm. Sure, they will pray, but it will always be in addition to doing whatever science tells them to do. This renders the outcome of the prayers completely irrelevant, as surely as the security guard renders irrelevant the integrity of the plumber.

For example, whenever anybody is sick, they might pray, but they also take the pill or undergo the surgery that their doctor advises. Very rarely will they put their money on god in lieu of medical science. Sure, they may pray on the side, as a harmless, cost-free way of doubling down, but no way in hell would a rational person ignore their surgeon in favor of just prayer. Such rational people do not trust in god. His existence or nonexistence is rendered irrelevant by the medical advice they follow. Similarly, a baseball player may want to wear his lucky socks, but he would never dream of doing so in lieu of hours in the batting cage.

However, Carl and Raylene Worthington did trust in god. They are among the few people in America who can honestly say “In God We Trust.” The Worthingtons are members of the fundamentalist church “The Followers of Christ,” based in rural Oregon. Their newborn daughter had a lump on her throat. In a rare case of actually trusting in god in lieu of science, they refused the help of medical science, even as her condition worsened. To quote directly from a Newsweek article by Winston Ross on the incident (http://www.newsweek.com/id/205705):

Carl and Raylene Worthington told investigators they first noticed the bump on their daughter's neck when Ava was 3 months old. A doctor later said it was a benign cyst battling an infection in the child's blood; it continued to grow as she grew older. By the time little Ava reached 15 months, the bump measured three by four inches—the size of Clackamas County Deputy District Attorney Greg Horner's wallet, he told a jury in the Portland, Ore., suburb of Oregon City last week. By Feb. 29, 2008, Horner said, this "cystic hygroma," a congenital lymphatic lesion, was pressing up against the girl's windpipe, according to a ruling from the county's medical examiner. She was slowly choking to death.

Carl and Raylene called in the devoted parishioners of their Oregon City place of worship, the Followers of Christ, to seek God's help. They anointed Ava with oil. They fed her diluted wine. They extracted phlegm from her throat with the kind of suction bulb used to baste a Thanksgiving turkey. They laid their hands upon the toddler and prayed she would get better. What the Worthingtons did not do is call an ambulance.

The first physician ever to examine Ava was the Clackamas County coroner, who performed her autopsy. "Almost up until the end, if they had gotten her adequate medical treatment, they would have been able to help her," Horner said during his opening statement. Ava died last March of bronchopneumonia and sepsis, associated with the cyst that compressed her airway and deprived her organs of the oxygen they needed to function properly, according to the county medical examiner.

As you no doubt gleaned from the article, the Worthingtons were charged with manslaughter in their daughter’s death. They were eventually convicted of the lesser charge of criminal mistreatment. In other words, they trusted in god and ended up with a dead baby and a criminal record.

As popular as the motto “In God We Trust” might be, and as admirable as it might sound to some in theory, nobody actually believes we should. Not only that, but when somebody does trust in god, in the sense of relying on it, they are tried as criminals, should their trust be misplaced. It is tantamount to the state saying, “Sure, it looks great on a coin, but come on you idiot, it’s not as though this god stuff actually works.”

In a small, perverted way, you have to admire the poor simpletons. At least they put their money where their mouth is. They “anted up” and actually trusted in god. They sent the security guard home. While I might admire them a little more if it were their own lives that they bet on the existence of this most improbable of beings, I do not for a moment doubt their sincerity. The emotional pain they would feel on the death of their child is a good enough ante for me.

To be candid, this is one case where, as an atheist, I would NOT want to see them lose their faith. Imagine the guilt they would feel if they woke up one morning free from the obfuscating fog of their religious superstition and realized, with the clarity of a freethinker, that they had just sentenced their beloved child to a slow, agonizing death based on a primitive sky superstition. The humanist in me would never sentence anybody to such a hell. I believe it is better to allow them to wallow in their myopic beliefs. They have been punished enough.

The lawyer in me also tells me that the Worthingtons should have been dealt with by the courts in a manner more akin to the way drug addicts are (in progressive jurisdictions at least) than as true criminals. The emphasis should be on detox and education. I liken the situation more to the scene in the movie Trainspotting, where the young parents are too stoned on heroine to realize that their baby is slowing being poisoned to death. Committed religious views can be a toxic hallucinogenic.

The larger point here is that when people do trust in god or any other superstition, they are let down. They always have been and always will be. They will be let down with the same mechanical regularity as Charlie Brown’s place kick. Or, more precisely, their fate will be exactly what it would be have been had they not prayed/chanted/meditated. In the famous Benson Study conducted by Harvard Medical School and published in The American Heart Journal (see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16569567) researchers at Harvard Medical School set out to see if praying to god for help really made any difference to a patient’s recovery.

The study was conducted with scientific rigor and discipline. It employed effective double-blind testing methodologies, underwent peer review, and was repeatable, transparent and based on a statistically significant number of patients. In other words, it actually objectively took a good hard look at the issue.

The result was that paying to god makes absolutely no difference whatsoever. None. Zero. You might as well consult a voodoo faith healer. Of course ardent Christians attacked the report or dismissed it with throw away excuses like “god moves in mysterious ways” or “god shalt not be tested” or a myriad of other exculpatory sound bites (by the way, if that were the case, why bother praying in the first place?)

There is nothing specific to Christians here. The same failure and subsequent pretending would have occurred if the study were performed in the Hindu parts of India, Muslim Saudi Arabia, Shinto Japan or anywhere else. We instinctively return to our perpetually absent sky-fairies, despite each broken promise, with the nauseating pathos of a battered spouse.

By the way, can you imagine how believers would have embraced the Benson report and applauded its strict scientific methodology, had it shown that prayer was actually worth a damn? Actual tangible evidence of god would have been headlines around the World and ensured a Nobel Prize to the researches.

But, let’s face it, we all, theists and atheists alike, would have been amazed if the research actually showed evidence of a god. We have become so used to broken promises and false hopes that anything other than a complete “no show” from the sky-fairy would have been the biggest event in human history (it would also have startled the above Hindus, Shintos and Muslims, who would be wondering what happened to their respective deities).

Look, prayers for the sick work no more than a sacrificed animal or jiggled amulet. If one really trusts in god, one should ignore science. Stop taking your medicine and sacrifice a goat, or get on your knees and wait for your sky-god to read your mind as you silently run through a Hail Mary or two. See how far you get.

If you do not have the courage/foolishness to do so, then knock off the Orwellian double-speak and accept that you do not trust in your god, ghost or goat. You trust in science and pay lip service to your superstition when doing so risks nothing.

Going back to the Worthington’s for a moment, after young Ava died, the family was devastated. Devastated, but not shaken in their faith. The parents of Raylene Worthington, Jeff and Marci Beagley, who had just see their infant grandaughter killed through the medical neglect of their daughter, again put their trust in god. They refused medical help to their 16 year-old son, Neil (Raylene’s brother) for a routine urinary tract infection. Instead they and prayed, chanted, used magic oils (or “holy oils” if you prefer) and laid hands upon him. The usual stuff.

Surely god would not let them down again. Surely he would see this as an even bigger display of their faith and reward them with a cure.

Neil is now dead and the Beagleys have been sentenced to prison for criminally negligent homicide. His death was horrific. Slow, painful and drawn out. A simple course of antibiotics, discovered by medical science in the 1930s, would have saved him. Alas, it seems god was busy moving in mysterious ways again.

Little wonder the number of people who actually trust in god has been in steady decline for years. These guys are a text book example of self-effectuating eugenics. I guess they fall squarely into the first part of the famous quip attributed (perhaps apocryphally) to Lincoln: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time....”