ASA rules against faith-healing claims

First it was the BBC:

Bath Christian group's 'God can heal' adverts banned

A Christian group has been banned from claiming that God can heal illnesses on its website and in leaflets.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said it had concluded that the adverts by Healing on the Streets (HOTS) - Bath, were misleading. It said a leaflet available to download from the group's website said: "Need Healing? God can heal today!" The group, based in Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire, said it was disappointed with the decision and would appeal. HOTS Bath said its vision was to promote Christian healing "as a daily lifestyle for every believer".

But the BBC was cagey about the origin of the complaint:

The ASA said it had been alerted to the adverts by a complainant, and concluded that they could encourage false hope and were irresponsible. HOTS Bath said: "It seems very odd to us that the ASA wants to prevent us from stating on our website the basic Christian belief that God can heal illness.

It's not odd, it's the law. HOTS Bath may consider it a "basic Christian belief that God can heal illness" but unless they can substantiate that claim they have no business putting it in an ad on a website, and therefore the ASA ruling is correct.

The ASA didn't reveal the identity of the complainant. Said complainant, however, was understandably aggrieved at the statement subsequently placed on the HOTS website:

It appears that the complaint to the ASA was made by a group generally opposed to Christianity, and it seems strange to us that on the basis of a purely ideological objection to what we say on our website, the ASA has decided it is appropriate to insist that we cannot talk about a common and widely held belief that is an important aspect of conventional Christian faith.

Hayley Stevens, well-known skeptic and paranormal investigator — and the complainant in this case — decided to put the record straight on her blog, Hayley is a Ghost, despite the adverse publicity likely to result. This was then taken up by the Bath Chronicle, which quotes Hayley on her reasons for making the complaint to the ASA. Still HOTS Bath fail to understand the issue at hand, illustrating the de facto privileged position religious faith continues to enjoy — and expect — in the UK. They maintain the ASA (and by extension Hayley Stevens herself, as complainant) are objecting to their ideology, when in fact it's a simple matter of evidence for claims made.

The story then appeared on the Daily Mail website, together with an invitation for reader comments. The article itself is reasonably (and unusually) dispassionate — but the comments, as might be expected, are something else.

Hayley Stevens is to be applauded for not only making the complaint in the first place, but also for standing up to be counted despite the unwelcome attention she must have known it would bring.

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A short interview with Hayley Stevens, conducted after the recent Beyond the Veil one-day conference at Conway Hall at which she spoke (and before the ASA ruling discussed above), will be featured in the next episode of the Skepticule Extra podcast.

Equality is against Melanie Phillips' religion (and vice versa)

After a disorientating but mercifully brief instant of agreement with Melanie Phillips when she interrogated Anthony Seldon on last week's Moral Maze, I now find things are back to normal, as evidenced in her latest column at Mail Online today, in which she attempts to perpetuate the myth that religious views are being marginalised in Britain.

...schoolchildren are to be bombarded with homosexual references in maths, geography and ­science lessons as part of a Government-backed drive to promote the gay agenda.

Bombarded? In maths?

In maths, they will be taught ­statistics through census ­findings about the number of ­homosexuals in the population.

And about other things, I suspect. Even if this is true, it's hardly bombardment. Certainly not to the extent that in history lessons they may be bombarded with — horror of horrors — historical dates.

The bed and breakfast hoteliers Peter and Hazelmary Bull — who were recently sued for turning away two homosexuals who wished to share a bedroom — were but the latest religious believers to fall foul of the gay inquisition merely for upholding ­Christian values.

They were guilty of illegal discrimination against a couple who were in a legal civil partnership, on the basis that the couple weren't married. The judge ruled that for this purpose marriage and civil partnership are equivalent.

Catholic adoption agencies were forced to shut down after they refused to place ­children with same-sex couples.

Quite right too. If agencies refuse to treat people equally, they have no business providing a public service.

Marriage registrars were forced to step down for refusing to officiate at civil unions.

If they refuse to do the job they're paid for, they should do the decent thing and seek other employment.

It seems that just about everything in Britain is now run according to the gay agenda.

Yeah, just about everything. Gay trains, gay supermarkets, gay refuse collection. Does Melanie Phillips find herself using gay hyperbole, by any chance?

Of course, for people such as the Bulls, George Orwell’s famous observation that some are more equal than others is all too painfully true. Indeed, the obsession with equality has now reached ludicrous, as well as oppressive, proportions.

Well, we wouldn't want things to be too equal, now, would we?

David Allen Green at Winchester Skeptics in the Pub

David Allen Green, also known as legal blogger Jack of Kent, was the latest speaker at Winchester Skeptics in the Pub on 24^th November at the Roebuck Inn. Fresh from the #TwitterJokeTrial appeal dismissal David gave us his account of proceedings in an engaging talk without notes or PowerPoint. The issues raised by the Paul Chambers Twitter affair and others have implications beyond the internet social media within which they would initially appear to be confined. Issues of privacy, publication, and the status of conversations conducted online via Twitter or Facebook, or any online forum where the distinction between public and private conversation space becomes blurred, are all considerations that can lead to unexpected (and undesirable) consequences.

One of the problems is that the phenomenon of online social media is still relatively new, and people will inevitably be testing its limits, whether intentionally or unintentionally. And because it's new, the resolution of such tests seems often to be the job of the courts. For the hapless participants this is likely to be unnerving, extremely expensive and potentially life-changing.

David Allen Green, aka Jack of Kent, has made a name for himself as the foremost explicator of these matters. He's a media lawyer with a reputation for clear legal analysis set out in a way understandable to non-lawyers (that is, the rest of us). I met him briefly at the Penderel's Oak in Holborn, the evening before TAM London 2009, and one thing I particularly remember from our brief conversation was his statement that as a lawyer he was in a position to say things about current legal cases that non-lawyers could not, because he knew precisely how far he could go while staying within the law. He confirmed in his SitP talk that his writing is deliberately "legal-proof".

He explained how he got into blogging and how he became a Skeptic (with a K), saying that his skepticism was founded on no more than an insistence that there should be a critical or evidence-based approach to issues when appropriate. He stressed that skepticism shouldn't be used as a means to specific ends.

He has given talks on witchcraft trials from a strictly legal standpoint, maintaining that the existence or not of witchcraft — in the sense of supernatural powers — was never an issue. He detailed his involvement with the Simon Singh libel case, and the importance of libel reform. He also touched on a couple of other cases he's been involved with, Dave Osler and Sally Bercow, but went into more detail about Paul Chambers, whose case is ongoing, though looking pretty grim at present.

In addition to his Jack of Kent blog — so significant in letting the world know the salient details of Simon Singh's battle with the British Chiropractic Association — David Allen Green has also been blogging regularly at New Statesman. They must be pleased with his efforts, as he is now the New Statesman legal correspondent. He also writes the Bad Law? column at The Lawyer.

The Q&A was understandably centred around the Paul Chambers #TwitterJokeTrial case, and its implications for establishing a dividing line between public and private conversation space. In response to a question David gave the example of a Daily Mail article that appeared to intentionally humiliate a civil servant making extensive use of Twitter. The question is, was it reasonable for Sarah Baskerville to treat Twitter as a private medium for off-the-cuff comments about her work and colleagues? Personally I think one has to be mindful of the reach of internet social media, but given Twitter's informality this is easy to forget.

This was an excellent talk about serious issues, delivered by an insider with a gift for explication of complex matters.

I had a couple of questions for David, which I would have asked if I hadn't felt that they'd likely derail the Q&A conversation, centred as it was on the public/private demarcation issue. The first is about the Simon Singh libel case: at a point fairly late in proceedings it appeared that the BCA themselves had posted a libellous statement on their website, to the effect that Simon Singh had been malicious in his article. On his Jack of Kent blog David wrote that if Simon decided to countersue, the case would be over. The BCA amended their website, but the offending statement was still accessible if one knew the correct URL. At the time I thought this was a sign that the BCA knew they were going to lose, and that this hastily amended (but not immediately deleted) libel was a ploy to end the case without losing face over their original suit. I'm curious as to whether this incident had any eventual bearing on the case.

My second question is: whatever happened to Jack's Climate Quest?

OK, not cancer. How about rewiring kids' brains?

Hard on the heels of the unfounded "Facebook and Twitter will give you cancer" scare, we have the Daily Mail now warning that in addition they will reprogramme children's brains:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1153583/Social-websites-harm-childrens-brains-Chilling-warning-parents-neuroscientist.html

Here's a summary:

A neuroscientist says social networking websites shorten attention-spans, encourage instant gratification and make young people more self-centred. That's it. No evidence is cited, or even suggested to exist. Here are a few quotes from the neuroscientist, as reported in the article:

"My fear is that these technologies are infantilising the brain..."

"I often wonder whether real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitised and easier screen dialogues..."

"It is hard to see how living this way on a daily basis will not result in brains, or rather minds, different from those of previous generations..."

"Of course, we do not know whether the current increase in autism is due more to increased awareness and diagnosis of autism, or whether it can - if there is a true increase - be in any way linked to an increased prevalence among people of spending time in screen relationships."

Fear, wonderment, difficulty of seeing, and lack of knowledge - not exactly the soundest basis for such conclusions, is it?

Susan Greenfield is a respected scientist, but the Mail's article gives the impression that her warning is nothing more than unsubstantiated opinion.

(via Derren Brown Blog)

UPDATE 2009-02-25:

Ben Goldacre appeared with Aric Sigman on BBC Newsnight the same day, in a segment also featuring recorded sound-bites from Susan Greenfield. Her statements are indeed unfounded - she admits as much. Watch the Newsnight segment on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg8LlUME-IM


...and there was a follow-up on this morning's Today Programme, with Colin Blakemore injecting a modicum of common sense into the whole affair (thereby backing up Ben Goldacre's position):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7909000/7909623.stm

Facebook and Twitter will give you cancer!

A short item on the Today Programme this morning had Dr Aric Sigman explaining the conclusions of a paper he has authored for the peer-reviewed Institute of Biology Journal, Biologist, entitled Well Connected?: The Biological Implications of ‘Social Networking’. The BBC website covers it here: BBC NEWS | UK | Online networking 'harms health' and you can hear Dr Sigman on the BBC here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7899000/7899649.stm

I'm not a biologist, and not a member of the Institute of Biology, so I can't access Dr Sigman's article*. But his press release is available on his website, so I've looked at that. Early on in the press release is this graph, presumably excerpted from the article:

I'm not a biologist, neither am I a statistician, but this graph seems to show only that over a period of 20 years, face-to-face social interaction went down from six hours to two hours per day, while over the same two decades use of electronic media went up from four to eight hours per day. So the conclusion seems to be that the four hours that were spent face-to-face in 1987, were in 2007 spent in using electronic media. He seems to be suggesting that face-to-face interaction has gone down because of the increase in use of electronic media. Maybe. Or it could be coincidence. The graph doesn't show what people were doing with the other hours in the day, so on the whole it doesn't tell you very much.

The rest of the press release seems to claim that face-to-face interaction has positive health effects, and this may well be true, but the preponderance of "links" and "associations" suggests that most of these are correlations and not causation. Take this, for example:

"Women who have suspected coronary artery disease (CAD) with a small social
circle exhibit more than twice the death rate of those with a larger social circle."

It's possible that some women have a small social circle for reasons that are to do with being medically disposed to more serious and life-threatening coronary artery disease - not the other way around. I've not seen Dr Sigman's actual paper (which appears to be a meta-study, and presumably doesn't include any actual clinical research), so I don't know if the causation he ascribes is valid.

Valid or not, it makes a good headline, and you can rely on the Daily Mail to pick it up: How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer.

If the audio expires, download it from RapidShare here:


http://rapidshare.com/files/341833475/MoralMaze_The_BBCR4dtt-20090218.mp3

*UPDATE 2009-02-19:
The paper published in Biologist is now freely available:
http://www.iob.org/userfiles/Sigman_press.pdf

UPDATE 2009-02-20:
Until I get around to reading the paper myself, here's someone who already has:
http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2009/02/facebook_causes_marb.html
(via Ben Goldacre's Twitter feed)