Gay-To-Straight: Christian Programs Don't Work

At last, an honest and objective scientific report by the American Psychology Association has demonstrated what common sense and experience already knew: The Christian "Gay to Straight" programs simply don't work, and in fact are counterproductive. Instead of turning gay men and women into heterosexuals, they almost always fail, leaving the victims of this nonscientific hocus-pocus worse off than before they started.

Faith should never tread in science's domain, and this is a perfect illustration why. It is legitimate for Christains to ask, "Can homosexuality be cured?" (although even the word "cured" biases the investigation from the outset). But it is completely wrong, both scientifically and morally, for Christians to say "Yes" without one shred of objective scientific evidence, and further, to develop therapies, and claim those therapies work, with no science to validate their claims.

Good psychology can help people immensely, and bad psychology can damage people. Apparently that's what happened here: Gay-to-Straight programs actually do harm. They take men and women who are already having enormous psychological stress (caused, ironically, by the very Christians who claim to have the cure), and put them through a stressful program that almost always fails, leaving the victim still gay and feeling even more shamed than before. The Christians who run these programs assert with great confidence that people can change if they want to. When the program doesn't work, that puts an enormous load of guilt on the gay victims.

The good news is that the American Psychology Association's leadership endorsed this report overwhelmingly, by a vote of 125-to-4 in favor.

Christians should stick to matters of faith, and leave psychology in the hands of those who actually know the difference between a fact and an opinion.

Scientologists: Psychiatrists caused 9/11 attacks!

I've heard some whacked stuff from Scientology, but this one takes the cake. The Scientologists have a weird hatred of psychiatry that goes beyond the normal anti-science you often find with fringe religions. But now it's over the top: Scientology claims that psychiatrists caused the 9/11 attacks! According to this video (which I don't recommend, it's a half hour of ranting and babble):

It was [doctor] al-Zawahiri, trained in Cairo, who convinced bin Laden to establish al Qaeda. ... [During an interview], al-Zawahiri claimed credit for the attacks [while] bin Laden sits beside the doctor, muttering to himself while caressing his beard. The exact methods utilized by al-Zawahiri to influence bin Laden are as yet unknown. But more than one source has reported that the doctor, is also a psychiatrist. ... bin Laden has been been know to take psychiatric drugs, or anti-anxiety pills. ... Freedom [Magazine] found the influence of psychiatrists, psychologists, and their methods in terrorist groups to be strong and pervasive.

The video goes on and on, digging deeper into their pile of imagined plots and conspiracies and other manure.

Techniques of drug-induced mind control were already being tested by North American Psychiatrists fifty years ago... [in] experiments conducted under the aegis of the U.S. Intelligence Agencies. One aspect of such experiments was to find the exact combination of drugs, hypnosis, and other forms of psychiatric and psychological methods, to produce individuals who could be programmed to commit acts of violence, including assassination.

By the end, they've condemned them all: The entire psychiatric profession seems to be to blame for all terrorism worldwide. If you believed this drivel, you'd be convinced that getting rid of terrorism would require nothing more than rounding up all of the psychiatrists and psychologists. Wars would stop, terrorists would recover from their drug-induced stupor and go back to being normal, productive citizens. They even drag Hitler and the Holocaust into the act, claiming that psychiatrists were behind the Nazi regime and the atrocities of WWII.

It would be funny if it weren't for the collateral damage the Scientologists' cause. Their anti-psychiatry conspiracy theories have prevented more than one person from getting adequate help, including some recent high-profile cases.

Tags: al-qaeda psychiatry scientology terrorism religion atheism