ARI can SMD
I realize this study has been talked about ad nauseum of late, from the morning network shows to Jon Stewart to Izzle Pfaff. But, too f-in’ bad.
In an effort to expose as much authorial bias as possible, I feel it is important to start by admitting that I believe all committed disciples of Ayn Rand are douchebags.
I’ll even allow that support for or belief in Ayn’s Objectivist philosophy isn’t a necessary cause of douchebagness (bagotry?), but assert that a sufficiently high enough percentage of Ayn adherents are in fact douchebags to warrant a strong correlation.
And they are up to their usual douchebag antics, with the ARI releasing this letter (which I originally found linked from bOING bOING):
Dear Editor:
The Harvard medical study showing that prayer has no effect on recovery from heart surgery is shocking. It is not shocking that prayer has no medical effects--what's shocking is that scientists at Harvard Medical School are wasting their time studying the medical effects of prayer.
Science is a method of gaining knowledge by systematically studying things that actually exist and have real effects. The notion that someone's health can be affected by the prayers or wishes of strangers is based on nothing but imagination and faith. Such blind belief represents the rejection of reason and science, and is not worthy of serious, rational consideration. What's next? A study of the medical effects of blowing out birthday candles?
Every minute these doctors spend conducting this sort of faith-based study is one minute less spent on reality-based research--research that actually has hope of leading to real medical cures.
Dr. Yaron Brook
Ayn Rand Institute Executive Director
Irvine, CA
My issue with the ARI is largely the same as with all such dispensers of conservative rhetoric – it is filled with condescending accusations about opponents and in ignorance of the gaping holes within its own position.
Maybe the problem that Ayn’s school of though originally developed at a time when Uncertainty and the Relativity that followed had fully taken root within scientific, and by extension all reason-based, thought and practice.
There is a galling inability in this letter, and to my mind within most Objectivist writings, to recognize that the lines drawn between reason and faith are essentially arbitrary, built upon what we know at any given moment, and that to assert that those lines are static and not fluid is itself a statement of faith.
Every, and I mean every, appeal to objective truth I have come across at some point jumps off this cliff, boils down to some idea that is accepted by faith, be it faith in the unadulterated clarity of one’s own observations or faith vested in an external entity or concept.
The ARI believed prayer had no medical benefit not because of the application of reason upon observation that they trumpet, but because of the presupposition that prayer and medicine exist within mutually exclusive realms. In other words, they didn’t known this because they knew it, but because they believed it.
And then to adopt such a condescending tone, to attempt to enforce their doctrine while so clearly failing to practice what they preach, well, that makes the douchebags.
Look, Ayn herself claimed that rational self-interest was man’s highest moral compass, that laissez faire capitalism was the only proper economic model, AND that men will not knowingly harm others for their own benefit. She holds a belief that government can operate in a function that protects men from such violence.
Reasonable observation of exactly what actually warrants the belief that capitalist men of reason won’t, whether in spite of or in complicity with government, fuck each other over for a buck?
In an effort to expose as much authorial bias as possible, I feel it is important to start by admitting that I believe all committed disciples of Ayn Rand are douchebags.
I’ll even allow that support for or belief in Ayn’s Objectivist philosophy isn’t a necessary cause of douchebagness (bagotry?), but assert that a sufficiently high enough percentage of Ayn adherents are in fact douchebags to warrant a strong correlation.
And they are up to their usual douchebag antics, with the ARI releasing this letter (which I originally found linked from bOING bOING):
Dear Editor:
The Harvard medical study showing that prayer has no effect on recovery from heart surgery is shocking. It is not shocking that prayer has no medical effects--what's shocking is that scientists at Harvard Medical School are wasting their time studying the medical effects of prayer.
Science is a method of gaining knowledge by systematically studying things that actually exist and have real effects. The notion that someone's health can be affected by the prayers or wishes of strangers is based on nothing but imagination and faith. Such blind belief represents the rejection of reason and science, and is not worthy of serious, rational consideration. What's next? A study of the medical effects of blowing out birthday candles?
Every minute these doctors spend conducting this sort of faith-based study is one minute less spent on reality-based research--research that actually has hope of leading to real medical cures.
Dr. Yaron Brook
Ayn Rand Institute Executive Director
Irvine, CA
My issue with the ARI is largely the same as with all such dispensers of conservative rhetoric – it is filled with condescending accusations about opponents and in ignorance of the gaping holes within its own position.
Maybe the problem that Ayn’s school of though originally developed at a time when Uncertainty and the Relativity that followed had fully taken root within scientific, and by extension all reason-based, thought and practice.
There is a galling inability in this letter, and to my mind within most Objectivist writings, to recognize that the lines drawn between reason and faith are essentially arbitrary, built upon what we know at any given moment, and that to assert that those lines are static and not fluid is itself a statement of faith.
Every, and I mean every, appeal to objective truth I have come across at some point jumps off this cliff, boils down to some idea that is accepted by faith, be it faith in the unadulterated clarity of one’s own observations or faith vested in an external entity or concept.
The ARI believed prayer had no medical benefit not because of the application of reason upon observation that they trumpet, but because of the presupposition that prayer and medicine exist within mutually exclusive realms. In other words, they didn’t known this because they knew it, but because they believed it.
And then to adopt such a condescending tone, to attempt to enforce their doctrine while so clearly failing to practice what they preach, well, that makes the douchebags.
Look, Ayn herself claimed that rational self-interest was man’s highest moral compass, that laissez faire capitalism was the only proper economic model, AND that men will not knowingly harm others for their own benefit. She holds a belief that government can operate in a function that protects men from such violence.
Reasonable observation of exactly what actually warrants the belief that capitalist men of reason won’t, whether in spite of or in complicity with government, fuck each other over for a buck?
posted by JJisafool at 8:48 PM
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