Poisoned Fighter Pilot Faces New Nightmare: Air Force Bureaucracy

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Poisoned Fighter Pilot Faces New Nightmare: Air Force Bureaucracy

• By David Axe
• Email Author
• May 11, 2012 | 
• 6:30 am | 
• Categories: Air Force

An F-22 Raptor. Photo: USAF

The Air Force is continuing disciplinary action against one of the Air Force pilots who refused to fly the F-22 Raptor stealth fighter because the pricey jet’s faulty oxygen system was steadily poisoning him. Capt. Josh Wilson, from the Virginia Air National Guard, has been granted whistleblower protection under federal law — a status the Air Force has publicly acknowledged. But that hasn’t stopped the flying branch from beginning a process that may very well threaten to end the pilot’s career.

Wilson and Maj. Jeremy Gordon, also a Raptor pilot with the Virginia Guard, stopped flying the $400-million-per-copy F-22 after they and dozens of other pilots reported in-flight symptoms consistent with oxygen deprivation, including confusion and blackouts. The Air Force temporarily grounded some or all of its roughly 180 Lockheed Martin-made Raptors twice last year so it could study the jet’s onboard oxygen generator.

When the flying branch failed to pinpoint the problem, as a stopgap measure it installed an extra carbon filter in the F-22′s oxygen system then ordered the pilots back in the air for an intensifying program of training exercises and deployments. But the carbon filter was faulty, too, and shed black dust into the pilots’ masks. F-22 fliers began coughing up black phlegm. Ground crews who spent time in the Raptor’s cockpit also reported symptoms. Air Force doctors advised the aviators to stand down.

Wilson and Gordon were the only pilots who refused to get back into the cockpit — that we know of. But in an interview broadcast Sunday the pilots told 60 Minutes that a “vast, silent majority” of the Air Force’s 200 or so Raptor fliers feared for their health or their lives. Gordon’s flight qualification soon expired. Wilson, the younger and less experienced of the two, faced a harsher punishment. The Air Force sent him a letter of reprimand that Frederick Morgan, the two pilots’ Ohio-based lawyer, says is just the first step in a potentially career-ending disciplinary process.


In addition to seeking legal counsel, Wilson and Gordon appealed to Rep. Adam Kinzinger, himself an Air Force pilot, for protection under the federal whistleblower law. Kinzinger and Sen. Mark Warner issued a letter Thursday urging the military not to mess with these pilots — or any others that bring up problems with the Raptor.

“We need to make sure there is a culture in which others feel safe coming forward,” Warner wrote.

The Air Force acknowledges the protected status. “Air Force leadership has made clear that the we are treating the pilots as whistleblowers,” service spokesman John Dorrian tells Danger Room.

But Wilson’s disciplinary action continues all the same, Morgan tells Danger Room. “They didn’t rescind the letter.” Fearing for his career, Wilson has offered to resume flying. “He’s eager not to be disciplined,” Morgan says.

Regarding the letter of reprimand, Dorrian says he cannot comment on private personnel matters. He refers Danger Room to the Air National Guard, but warns that the Guard, too, probably will not comment on any pilot’s individual case.

The Air Force did remove the carbon filters that Morgan says only “made the problem worse.” That was some comfort to Wilson and Gordon, according to Morgan. Now Gordon says he’ll get back in the cockpit, too — but only to help the Air Force work on fixing the oxygen problem. “All these guys want is for the airplane to work,” Morgan says.

This battle is far from over. While the Air Force mulls over Wilson’s and Gordon’s offers, the pilots along with their lawyer are meeting with Air Force doctors and Sen. Mark Warner, a new ally alongside Rep. Kinzinger. Maybe Warner can get the Air Force to explain how whistleblower protection should not stop Wilson’s ongoing disciplinary action.

Civil unions and straight marriage

Out of the
CROOKED TIMBER
of humanity, no straight thing was made

Civil unions and straight marriage

by Henry on January 24, 2010

Arthur Goldhammer’s excellent blog on French politics and society points to this article on the French pact civil de solidarité – a kind of civil union introduced in 1999/2000, largely as an alternative to gay marriage. But the pacs has had very interesting consequences for straight couples (95% of couples with pacs are straight), as this chart shows.



The growth of the pacs’ popularity over its first decade is striking. There are now two pacs for every three marriages. Interestingly, this is because of both a significant decline in marriage, and a significant increase in the overall number of people willing to engage in some kind of state-sanctioned relationship. While you would obviously need more finely grained data to establish this properly, the obviously intuitive interpretation of this (at least to me) is that the pacs have grown both by providing an option for people who would probably not have gotten married in the first place, and attracted a number of people who otherwise would have gotten married, but who prefer the pacs’ lower level of formality (it is much easier to cancel a pacs relationship than to get divorced).

Perhaps this provides grist for the mills of social conservatives (who could claim, stretching the data a bit, that gay-appeasing civil unions are undermining the sacred institution of marriage) – but it would oblige them to face up to the question of whether they should prefer gay marriage to potentially corrosive civil unions that straight couples can take advantage of too. Liberals and leftwingers don’t face nearly the same dilemma, since they can reasonably assume that those who choose civil unions over marriage have good reason for doing so (and perhaps will get married later if they want to; obviously, you can’t tell from data like this how many partners in pacs decide to get married later on).

What We’ve Gained—and What We’ve Lost

ADVOCATUS DIABOLI

What We’ve Gained—and What We’ve Lost

May 10, 2012

If anyone didn't already know that the legalization of same-sex marriage is inevitable, President Obama's dramatic announcement that he supports it should settle the matter. That makes this a good time to appreciate what those of us who favor the expansion of rights as a general principle have gained -- and what we've lost.

There was something tragicomic about Obama's May 9 announcement, coming as it did as a reactive response to Vice President Biden's impulsive endorsement of same-sex marriage on a Sunday morning talk show. The White House spent two days waffling before Obama finally went on TV. His views had "evolved" into favoring same-sex marriage some months back, the official story goes; he'd been planning to disclose that sometime before the Democratic Convention, but hadn't yet chosen a date. "I've been meaning to mention this," the subtext seems to run, "and now that Veep's shot his mouth off I suppose I might as well do it today." Whatever else one might say about this, it falls short of the image of proactive leadership most Obama supporters might have preferred.

What else might one say about Obama's statement? From a secular humanist standpoint, it's surely welcome. As several pundits have noted, no expansion of rights championed by a sitting president has ever failed to become the law of the land. Still, as LGBT-rights activists -- and other supporters of expanding individual rights -- celebrate, we shouldn't lose sight of what has been lost. (What follows draws from my August/September 2009 FI op-ed "Two Cheers for Same-Sex Marriage.")

Fifteen years ago, before the idea that same-sex marriage might be attainable re-directed LGBT activism, the target toward which most LGBT activists strove was civil unions. Civil unions had a lot to recommend them. In time, they would probably confer most or all of the same rights granted by traditional matrimony in such areas as parental rights, sickroom visitation, healthcare decision-making, community property, the right to inherit, and so on. What secular humanists especially liked about civil unions was that they would be a wholly new instiution, conceived entirely within the domain of secular law. They'd be free of matrimony's tangled roots as both a legal and a religious construct, and they'd be free of matrimony's historical baggage as an institution for transferring what amounted to ownership of the bride from her father to her husband. In twenty or twenty-five years, the thinking went, a robust form of civil union would be legal for same-sex couples across the land.

What was wrong with that vision? Today, many activists view civil unions as insufficient, a second-class "gay ghetto" institution that still separates same-sex couples from more favored opposite-sex couples. But don't judge so quickly. Let's jump back to fifteen years ago, and consider what many civil-union supporters (myself included) expected to happen next. Once robust civil unions were the law of the land for same-sex couples, this thinking went, the next step would be legal activism by opposite-sex couples seeking a way to give their unions the protection of law without having to resort to traditional matrimony with all its negatives. Once that was achieved, civil union would no longer be a gay-ghetto phenomenon. Most importantly, the centuries-long monopoly held by traditional matrimony as the only way to legally authenticate a couple's commitment would have been broken. At long last there would be a new, wholly secular, historically unencumbered way for any couple, gay or straight, to seal their shared commitment.

That's what we've lost.

As I see things, there are two ways to view the now (almost certainly) inevitable triumph of same-sex marriage. One: It's a welcome expansion of human rights, following in the footsteps of woman suffrage, the legalization of interracial marriage, and the civil rights movement. And it is, in spades. But here comes Two: It's a regrettable triumph for traditional matrimony, whose oppressive monopoly stands unscathed. Ironically, cultural conservatives should probably applaud same-sex marriage. The LGBT movement was the only social reform movement powerful enough to have shattered matrimony's monopoly, and its abrupt shift from seeking civil unions to seeking same-sex marriage turned LGBT activists from matrimony's most threatening enemies into its newest supporters.

What really happened over the last decade and a half? We've moved to the threshold of legal same-sex marriage across the country, another triumph for rights-seeking activism. But traditional matrimony, that hoary old church-entwined man-buys-woman institution, has ducked a bullet. And those of us, gay and straight, who wanted most of all to undermine matrimony's monopoly have been left behind. That's what we've gained, and what we've lost.

Are We Born to Be Religious?

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Are We Born to Be Religious?

Genes and personality influence our attitudes toward religion

By Vassilis Saroglou  | May 5, 2012 | 40

 

Image: Bara K. Kristinsdottir/Aurora Photos

In Brief

1. Many people change their religious affiliation during the course of a lifetime. Overall attitudes toward belief, however, are generally stable in adulthood.
2. Specific clusters of personality traits correlate highly with particular kinds of religious belief.
3. Although environmental influences play a large role in determining a person’s religious beliefs during adolescence, genetic factors emerge as more important in adulthood.

A deep question pervades the debates surrounding religion—whether God exists, sure, but that one is mighty difficult to answer. Instead we can ask a related, more approachable query: Why does God exist for some of us but not for others? Theologians and ministers preach that faith is preeminently a matter of personal choice. Is it, really?

Not everyone is a believer, of course, nor do we all maintain allegiance to a single belief system throughout the course of our life. Almost half of American adults, for example, have changed religious affiliation at least once during their lifetime, and most do so before age 24, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Although religious affiliation may be fluid, once people enter adulthood they tend to stick with one category, retaining either faith in God or the absence thereof.

For the most part, people are either religious or atheists because they were raised that way. Parents, classmates and other trusted figures impress their views on children and introduce them to a set of rituals and practices. Later in life those influences hold less power. Several forces can diminish a person’s religiosity—frequently cited reasons include the absence of social pressures to be religious or a desire to distance oneself from one’s family. Personal crises can also spur a change, prompting some people to convert and others to abandon religion.

Recent research suggests, however, that this is not the whole story. By studying the correlations among thousands of individuals’ religious beliefs and measures of their thoughts and behaviors, scientists have discovered that certain personality types are predisposed to land on different spots of the religiosity spectrum. Genetic factors account for more than half of the variability among people on the core dimensions of their character, which implies that a person’s feelings regarding religion also contain a genetic component. By analyzing twins, some of whom share the same DNA, psychologists have begun to collect evidence for the genetic roots of religiosity. These studies are starting to explain what makes some of us believers, whereas others end up rejecting supernatural notions.

Bringing Up Believers

The search for a biological basis for religion has gained wide appeal as the tools to probe our internal makeup have improved. Numerous brain-scanning experiments have sought to pinpoint one or another brain region as being important to the religious experience, prompting occasional claims that humans are equipped with a “God module,” a part of the brain that causes us to have religious beliefs. In 2004 a much hyped book called The God Gene proposed that a particular gene, VMAT2, was linked with religiosity. The data supporting that claim, however, were never published in a peer-reviewed journal, and other scientists never replicated the purported results.

Discerning how genes lead to behavior is one of biology’s toughest tasks. Genes make proteins, and figuring out how those proteins give rise to behaviors, let alone beliefs, pushes at the edges of our scientific knowledge. What is clear is that genes are not a blueprint; instead they interact with environmental influences in many complex ways, twisting fate at every turn. One way to examine the question is to look at personality characteristics: genes predispose a person to particular traits, which can manifest as certain behaviors.

The study of personality began almost a century ago, when pioneering psychologists working in the 1920s and 1930s became inspired by biology’s orderly classification systems and set out to codify personality. They started by scanning the dictionary for all the terms that captured some aspect of a person’s character, producing a list several thousand items long. Factions of psychologists debated over which descriptors, and how many of them, were needed to capture the essential dimensions of personality.

  

More recently, psychologists have rallied around “the big five,” as psychologist Lewis Goldberg of the University of Oregon called them in 1981. These five traits—extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness—have been shown to be independent of one another and to remain stable throughout most of life. In work published in 1987 Robert R. McCrae and Paul T. Costa of the National Institutes of Health verified the five factors by administering questionnaires and collecting self-reports and peer ratings from thousands of people. Subsequent surveys in many languages and countries have contributed to the dominance of the five-factor model in personality psychology today.

According to this model, the ways in which individuals’ personalities differ from one another can be organized along five main dimensions. People differ in extroversion: extroverts are dynamic, gregarious and socially warm, whereas introverts are timid and reserved. Neuroticism refers to a person’s tendency to be anxious, depressed and generally emotionally vulnerable, as opposed to emotionally stable and positive. A third facet is agreeableness, which captures whether a person is empathetic, helpful and trusting of others, as opposed to mean, individualistic and arrogant. Conscientious individuals are methodical, self-controlled, and willing to establish goals and work toward achieving them, whereas those low in conscientiousness tend to be impulsive and disorganized. Finally, we can differ in openness: whether we like novel, challenging and complex ideas, experiences and feelings. Less open individuals prefer to stay within their comfort zone.

Linking Personality and Religion

To find links between a person’s religious beliefs and any other facet of life, scientists must sift through enormous quantities of data. In 2010 I published an in-depth analysis of 70 previous studies seeking to link religion and personality with a total of more than 21,000 participants. These papers covered several decades, ages and religions, although Christianity was most heavily represented. Several of these reports corroborated self-assessments, with ratings provided by family members, friends and colleagues.

What those studies revealed is that religious people consistently differ from low-religious or non­religious individuals on two personality dimensions: agreeableness and conscientiousness. The effects were modest in size: 60 percent of religious versus 40 percent of nonreligious people are agreeable or conscientious. Yet this correlation showed up in study after study. It was present in both men and women, from teenagers to adulthood, and among several cohorts ranging from the 1970s to the present, as well as in a study from the 1940s. We saw this trend in people of all major religions, not only in Protestant and Catholic  but also in Jewish and Muslim faiths. Several behavioral experiments bolster the idea that religious individuals tend to display agreeable and conscientious behaviors. For example, religious people are inclined to show cooperation in laboratory experiments and to volunteer in real life. They also endorse healthy lifestyles that reflect self-control such as low alcohol, drug and tobacco use. Again, these effects are modest, but the fact that they are pretty consistent across studies makes them notable.

One could argue that rather than certain types of people being more likely to become religious, religion might instead instill agreeableness and conscientiousness in believers. To answer this question, researchers examined data from the Terman Longitudinal Study, a project that followed people with high IQs throughout their life. In the early 1920s, when these participants were between the ages of 12 and 18, their parents and teachers evaluated various aspects of their personalities. In 2003 Michael McCullough of the University of Miami and his collaborators found that of the 492 subjects they analyzed, the children and adolescents rated as more agreeable and conscientious turned out to be more religious 19 years later than the individuals who were rated lower on these measures as children. Another analysis published two years later examined changes in religiosity of Terman study participants over the course of 50 years. The people who were high in agreeableness in their early adulthood were more likely to remain believers or even to become more religious later than those who were less agreeable as young adults.

These results are in line with personality theory. Personality traits are already present in early childhood. Later in life they heavily shape social attitudes, values and identities. It thus becomes clear that rather than religion making people agreeable and conscientious, it is personality that determines religiousness.

If further research, especially in Eastern cultures and religions, confirms this pattern, we may have psychological evidence in favor of some of the universal functions of religion. Scholars have long suggested that because religion fosters social cohesion, it may have played an important evolutionary role by enabling larger groups of people to band together. These findings on personality traits support that idea. Agreeableness and conscientiousness together denote a preference for social harmony and personal order—in other words, stability.

A Profile of Belief

We can add even more nuance to our personality profiles of believers. In my 2010 meta-analysis I also reviewed studies that had focused on either spirituality, which encompasses more modern forms of faith not necessarily connected to religious institutions, or fundamentalist types of religion. About 62 percent of those who are high in openness to experience—and are agreeable and conscientious—are interested in and involved with spirituality. About the same percentage of people who are agreeable and conscientious but low on openness tend to become involved with fundamentalist religious groups.
Openness appears to tune believers to the kind of faith they end up holding.
An important question is how these clustered traits might relate to choices in real life or at least to real life as it is modeled in the lab. In a study I conducted in 2005 at the Université Catholique of Louvain in Belgium with Isabelle Pichon, we asked Belgian participants how they would react in several situations in which they could choose to either offer help or not. Here is one scenario: you are trying to catch a train when you see a person whose suitcase flies open and from which the contents scatter. Do you stop to help? We assigned our subjects randomly to one of two conditions. In one, the person needing help was a friend, family member or colleague. In the other, the person requiring assistance was unknown. Our findings were intriguing: the more religious the participants, the more they expressed willingness to help the familiar individual but not the stranger. Spiritual subjects, however, did not distinguish between known and unknown people. They were equally willing to help in both cases.

We can make further distinctions among types of religiosity. In collaboration with my graduate student Joanna Blogowska, we replicated the suitcase scenario with Polish participants in a study published in 2011. We added a second study, in which we examined the willingness to help either a student in need or a feminist student in the same situation. It turned out that participants who were high on religious fundamentalism were not very willing to help unknown people or a feminist, an individual whom they perceived as threatening to their values. They did, however, frequently offer to help either a close acquaintance or a student in need. The participants who were high in fundamentalism assisted individuals in those latter two categories 66 percent of the time versus exactly half of the time for feminists and strangers. In other words, those viewed as outsiders were least likely to receive a helping hand from more conservative believers.

Genes and Environment

These clustered personality traits—and their corresponding behavior—suggest an underlying genetic component. To investigate this idea, researchers have contacted hundreds of pairs of twins to assess their religious beliefs at different points in time. These twin studies aimed to identify how each of the following variables helped to determine religiosity—the unique experiences of each twin, the shared environmental factors of family and environment, and finally, heritability.

What these studies conclude is that shared environment—namely a family’s approach to religion—plays a great role, especially during childhood and adolescence. After that, the picture shifts, the early environment becomes less potent, and a genetic influence emerges between the ages of 18 and 25 years.

Let us look a little more deeply at one of these twin surveys. In a 2005 study by Laura Koenig, then at the University of Minnesota, and her colleagues, for example, the researchers analyzed reports on the religiosity of twins in adolescence compared with adulthood. The intent was to calculate the relative importance of genetic factors versus environmental influence at those two stages of life. The scientists used a statistical model to determine which factor is most important in adolescence versus adulthood. For adolescents, they learned that genetics—in other words, dispositions for certain personality traits—accounted for only 12 percent of their religious identity, and a shared upbringing contributed 56 percent to the outcome. (If you include a third category, which captures all the unique events that shape a twin’s life, these three numbers add up to 100.) Conversely, 44 percent of adults’ religiosity could be attributed to genetics, and 18 percent had to do with their environment.

All these data suggest that genetic influences help to explain why adults sometimes stray from the beliefs of their childhood. The more distance they get from the influences of their early years, the more idiosyncratic factors can hold sway over a person’s attitudes. In a way, we are born to be inclined toward religion or atheism. Does God call us? For some of us, the answer is yes: through our genes, parents, acquaintances and life events.

This is article was published in print as "Are We Born to Be Religious?"

Latin American History

Cinco de Mayo - the Basics

By Christopher Minster, About.com Guide

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The Flag of the United States of Mexico

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Basic Guide to Cinco de Mayo:

Cinco de Mayo is probably the holiday most often celebrated that no one understands. What’s it all about? How is it celebrated? What does it mean to Mexicans? Here are the answers in a handy guide.

What is Cinco de Mayo?:

Literally "the Fifth of May," Cinco de Mayo is a Mexican Holiday celebrating the Battle of Puebla, which took place on May 5, 1862. In 1861, France sent a massive army to invade Mexico, as they wanted to collect on some war debts. The French army was much larger, better trained and equipped than the Mexicans struggling to defend the road to Mexico City. It rolled through Mexico until it reached Puebla, where the Mexicans made a valiant stand, and, against all logic, won a huge victory. It was short-lived, as the French army regrouped and continued; eventually taking Mexico City, but the euphoria of an unlikely victory against overwhelming odds is remembered every May fifth.

Isn’t it Mexico’s Independence Day?:

That's a common misconception. Mexico celebrates its independence on September 16, because it was on that day in 1810 that Father Miguel Hidalgo took to his pulpit in the village church of the town of Dolores and invited his flock to take up arms and join him in overthrowing Spanish tyranny. Independence Day is a very important holiday in Mexico and not to be confused with Cinco de Mayo.

How Big a Deal is Cinco de Mayo?:

Cinco de Mayo is a big deal in Puebla, where the famous battle took place but it really isn't as important as most people think. September 16, Independence Day, is a much more important holiday in Mexico. For some reason, Cinco de Mayo is celebrated more in the United States of America, by Mexicans and Americans alike, than it is in Mexico. One theory for why it is more popular in the USA is that at one time, it was celebrated in all of Mexico and by Mexicans living in former Mexican territories such as Texas and California. It was ignored in Mexico after a while but still celebrated north of the border, which never got out of the habit of remembering the famous battle.

How is Cinco de Mayo Celebrated?:

In Puebla and in many USA cities with large Mexican populations, there are parades, dancing and festivals. Traditional Mexican food is often served or sold. Mariachi bands fill town squares, and a lot of Dos Equis and Corona beers are served. It’s a fun holiday, really more about celebrating the Mexican way of life than about remembering a battle which happened 150 years ago. It is sometimes referred to as a “Mexican St. Patrick’s Day.” In the USA, schoolchildren do units on the holiday, decorate their classrooms and try their hand at cooking some basic Mexican foods. All over the world, Mexican restaurants bring in Mariachi bands and offer specials for what’s almost certain to be a packed house.

How Can I Host a Cinco de Mayo Party?:

It’s easy to host a Cinco de Mayo party! Making basic Mexican food like salsa and burritos is not too complicated, add some decorations and mix some Margaritas and you’re good to go. Look at the links listed below for recipes, decorations and more valuable Cinco de Mayo information from About.com’s team of writers!

Celebrate Cinco de Mayo with About.com!

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Celebrate Cinco de Mayo with About.com!

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How I Left My Evangelical Christian Faith

AlterNet.org

AlterNet / By Valerie Tarico

How I Left My Evangelical Christian Faith

Lots of people have successfully left their religious faith behind. Here's what the path out looks like.

April 25, 2012  |  

 

Photo Credit: Kurt-Rune Bergset

 

I am what you might call a slow learner. I managed to make it all the way through high school, despite an eating disorder I couldn’t pray away, and all the way through college, despite a suicidal depression triggered by the same eating disorder, and almost all the way through grad school before I finally gave up on my religion and god. 

By contrast, my friend Geoff figured things out in the second grade. One day a nun at his Catholic school tried to pour holy water on the one Black kid in the school to exorcise the devil because he kept getting in fights. But Geoff thought to himself: It’s not Satan, it’s because all the other kids pick on him. Today Geoff is a psychologist working for Seattle Children’s Hospital –which is, ironically, the same place that did in the last shreds of my Evangelical beliefs.

I can’t recall the name of the small person who severed the final strands of my faith. There's just a vague image of soft brown hair and trusting brown eyes. I was 26, in the last stage of my PhD program, which required a year-long internship at the University of Washington. In one of my rotations, the one at Children’s Hospital, interns provided mental health consultation for families of patients on the medical wards. He was two, and in the first phase of treatment for a spinal cord tumor that would leave him paraplegic even if the nightmare course of chemotherapy were successful. I don’t know how long he survived.
Maybe it was his eyes, or his inability to comprehend why he couldn’t walk anymore, or why people who looked kind kept hurting him. Maybe it was the unbearable tenderness of his parents, who simply wanted to take their child home and love him rather than watch him suffer inexplicable months of “treatment” for a long shot at extending his life. But something inside me broke.

For years I had been patching my Christian faith together, as I like to say, with duct tape and bailing wire. My beliefs had become more and more idiosyncratic as I tried to hold together the lot of moral and rational contradictions that make up born-again, Bible-believing Christianity. Now, finally, after two decades of warping my feelings, perceptions and intellect to defend the absolute goodness of the Christian God, I got mad. I said to the god in my head, "I’m not making excuses for you anymore. I quit." And just like that, God was gone. All that was left was the frame of tape and wire: empty excuses, rationalizations and songs of worship that sounded oddly flat.

I tell you these two stories because they illustrate two extremes of leaving faith. On the one hand you have Geoff, whose parents were casual believers and whose skepticism kicked in early. On the other hand you have me, who took things to the brink of suicide because, as I thought, if I couldn’t pray away bulimia and depression then I was a failure in God's eyes. There are many paths into religion and many paths out.

The Damage Done

Most freethinkers were religious at one point in their lives. Whether you need a recovery process to move beyond that -- and how intensive that recovery process will be -- depends on what you believed, how deeply you believed it, and how much of your social support depended on fellow believers. ExChristian.net hosts forums that give people a chance to talk about their exodus from faith with support from fellow travelers. As often as not, loneliness is one of the hardest parts of the process. A believer can go anywhere in the world and find a ready-made community of fellow Christians. But a former believer can find himself or herself alone at the dinner table surrounded by family members but harboring a dark secret that would trigger rejection and judgment -- if they only knew.

Ministers who lose their faith often face the worst isolation, which is why Richard Dawkins and other have launched the Clergy Project to support those who are in transition. My friend Rich Lyons is a member of the project. He had to leave his home in Texas and excavate old radio skills he hadn’t used in over a decade in order to start life over in Seattle. Questioning cost him not only his livelihood, but also his wife, access to his beloved daughter, and his small-town reputation as a decent person. Rich now produces a podcast series called Living After Faith – his way of offering a helping hand to other exiles from Christian fundamentalism.

Getting out of the church can be a complicated process -- but it's easy compared to getting the church out of you. A while back, I wrote an article titled "Getting God’s Self-appointed Messengers Out of Your Head." I talked about a concept psychologists call “introjects.” When you are a toddler, your mobility outpaces your good sense. Left to their own devices, many toddlers would play in traffic -- without even being told to. Caregivers have to provide constant external supervision. One of the ways that a toddler becomes capable of greater autonomy is that the voices of those external supervisors get internalized. The toddler brain develops what we call an introjected parent -- an internal model that can say, "Don’t follow that ball into the street," even if the real-world mother or father isn’t there. We create virtual, introjected parents (and teachers and preachers), so that even if all of those authority figures disappear we will still know how to function. But at some point having your parents along in your head is a disadvantage -- say, for example, when somebody really hot has just undone the top button on your shirt.

I think of recovery from religion like peeling layers off of an onion. Dissenting intellectually from teachings or doctrines you learned as an adult is like peeling off one of the outer layers. But if you keep going, you find scripts that got laid down earlier—attitudes, emotional conditioning, ideas you were taught before you had the capacity to question them. And some of these are tremendously harmful from a psychological standpoint.

I once was speaking to a group of Hindus who wanted to understand evangelical Christianity, because rampant proselytizing was dividing their villages and splitting families down the middle. After the talk, a woman named Mohini came up to me. She asked, “Is what you told us really true -- that Christians believe children are born evil?” I explained again the doctrine of original sin. She was horrified. She said, “When babies are born into Hindu families, we whisper to them: 'You are perfect. You are a spark of the divine.'”

Last week, I was working alongside my friend Al, who is a carpenter and used to belong to a Christian commune. I asked him, “If you were talking to a group of college students about recovery from religion, what would you tell them? What would you most want them to know?” He said: “Tell them they are OK just the way they are." Getting rid of the sense that you were born deeply, unacceptably flawed can be a lifetime endeavor.

Triggers for Leaving

Like my own experience at Children’s Hospital, many former believers experience some kind of acute trigger. Religion has an immune system made up of promises, threats and behavioral scripts that keep belief from crumbling under pressure from outside information. In Bible-believing Christianity, that immune reaction includes disparagement of rationality: “Thinking themselves wise they became fools” (Romans 1:22) or “The fool has said in his heart there is no God” (Psalms 14:1). The Bible is full of threats against the faithless, from the story of Noah’s flood to the tortures promised in Revelation. Rules for believers prohibit emotional attachments to outsiders: “Be ye not unequally yoked with unbelievers, for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness and what communion hath light with darkness” (2 Cor 6:14).

When the religion’s immune system is working, it can seem like nothing gets through. A motivated believer will fend off any amount of linear reasoning or evidence. Backed into a corner he or she will simply insist, “I just know.” I picture some of my own family members surrounded by a polished wall of smooth steel—impervious, with no foot or handhold.

And yet, over time, life creates little windows of opening. Sometimes the trigger is unignorable hypocrisies or cruelty by church members. Sometimes it is a life crisis—a divorce, natural disaster, injury or loss of a loved one. Sometimes new social connections open up new ideas. Sometimes the accumulation of contradictory information reaches a tipping point. Bible-believing Christians, those who see the Bible as the perfect word of God, would be horrified to know how often loss of faith is triggered by someone deciding to read the good book and discovering the long litany of slavery, incest, misogyny, genocide, or scientific absurdities there.

Stages of Recovery 

When the walls of faith start crumbling, people often go through a process that I think of as roughly four phases based on the dominant emotions of each stage:

1. Denial and fear. When religion has provided the structure to your life, doubt can be terrifying—especially if you’ve been taught that doubt is a sign of spiritual weakness or comes straight from the devil. In this phase, many believers redouble their efforts to shore up their faith. They may pray desperately for God to take away the doubts. Increased Bible-reading is common. So is missionary work: if you can convince others God is real, then surely it must be true. Psychologist Marlene Winell specializes in recovery from religion. For this phase of recovery, she offers clients two bits of advice that she sums up as “Get real” and “Get a grip”:

Be honest with yourself about whether your religion is working for you. Let go of trying to force it to make sense....Don’t panic. The fear you feel is part of the indoctrination. All those messages about what will happen to you if you leave the religion are a self-serving part of the religion. If you calm down, you’ll be just fine. Many people have been through this.

2. Uncertainty and guilt. At some point, doubt gains the upper hand. But that doesn’t mean the transition is over. When those final threads of my own faith broke, I kept my thoughts to myself. I didn’t believe in God anymore, so I told myself, but I didn’t want to drag anyone else to hell with me. A friend described this phase as “I don’t believe in Hell. Does that mean I’m going there?” It would take several years and several therapists after my Children’s Hospital rotation before I risked asking my brother Dan how he managed to hold onto our childhood beliefs. (I found out his beliefs were as long gone as mine.)

My book, Trusting Doubt, is particularly valuable in this phase because it digs into core evangelical teachings, showing how they can’t possibly be true. Information is powerful in helping to purge those last lingering shreds of doubt and the guilt that goes with them. Learn about yourself, the world around you and the history of your religion. Former Mormon Garrett Amini says his parents called books and articles that were critical of his religion “spiritual pornography.” Evangelicals don’t use this term, but the concept is probably familiar to anyone who has ever been a part of a sect that has to constantly fend off reality. So, read widely: evolutionary biology, analysis of sacred texts, psychology of religion, physics. Listen with open ears. The truth will set you free.

3. Loss, grief and anger. Once there’s no going back, it’s not unusual to feel bereft, spiritually, socially, intellectually and emotionally. The loss is real, even if Jesus is not. Religion offers clarity, identity, purpose, community, a channel for joy, a structure around which to sculpt the week and the calendar year. That is a lot to lose -- even if your parents or spouse don’t kick you out. Grieving is important. So is anger. Anger is an activating emotion, it gives you the guts to say what is real—to yourself and to others, and to make hard changes.

Christians often are taught that anger is bad, and many people will encourage you to shutter it during the recovery process. It can feel risky, too big or too out of control. But the reality is that each of our emotions has a purpose, and sometimes we need to express anger so we can learn how to take care of ourselves without it. Learning to express anger in a way that is appropriate and modulated takes practice.

When you get stuck in either grief or anger, it's time to get help. Marlene Winell's book, Leaving the Fold, has great self-help exercises for fundamentalists in recovery. But sometimes self-help isn’t enough. Winell offers long-distance phone consultations and RecoveringfromReligion.org is creating a referral list of mental health professionals who are able to work with clients in recovery.

4. Emergence, curiosity, affirmation. The very first ex-Christian Web site I ran across  -- now almost 10 years ago -- was called losingmyreligion.com. Its archive still exists, headed by the same banner it had then -- a picture of a dead fish and an inscription that says: "Stay home Sundays, save 10 percent." Just beneath the banner is this poem:

Awake
 
I woke up to an empty room

No more angels watching over me.
No more demons to be held at bay
by the invocation of
an Anglicized version
of a Hellenized version
of a Hebrew name

I woke up to an empty room:

Just a room. Four walls, ceiling, floor.
Just a room. Nothing more.

I woke up to an empty room
and embraced the solid air.

I woke up to an empty room and knew myself

awake.
 
What Comes Next?

In those wonderful interludes when you find yourself awake, the dominant emotions shift from focusing on who you were to focusing on who and what you want to be. Which values and habits from your religion do you want to keep? What do you want to call yourself? What new discoveries most excite your curiosity? What matters – really matters to you?

As a movement, atheism—freethought—secularism is just becoming strong enough to move beyond a defensive posture and beginning to ask these questions. Are there secular moral absolutes? Dare we talk about secular spiritual community? How do we build ritual, holidays and music back into our communal lives? Absent religion, how can we together express wonder and joy?
Joseph Campbell had this to say:

People say that what we are all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive….”

That is the quest of a lifetime.

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington and the founder of Wisdom Commons. She is the author of "Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light" and "Deas and Other Imaginings." Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.

SALON

Thursday, Apr 26, 2012 07:30 AM EDT

The myth of the “morning-after abortion pill”

There's a reason why people mistake emergency contraception and abortion: The right intentionally confuses the two

By Irin Carmon



  

 (Credit: Shutterstock/Salon/Benjamin Wheelock)
 

It started around February, when Republicans were still eager to talk about contraception. The Obama administration, or so Mitt Romney charged in Colorado, was forcing religious institutions to provide “morning-after pills –in other words abortive pills — and the like, at no cost.”

It was, of course, a lie. Romney was conflating two different pills: emergency contraception, known as the morning-after pill, which prevents a pregnancy; and chemical abortion, or mifepristone, which ends a pregnancy of up to seven weeks’ gestation and isn’t covered under the new guidelines. Since both pills were marketed in the U.S. around the same time, even some pro-choicers have gotten confused. But Colorado happens to be the epicenter of people confusing them on purpose. It’s the birthplace of the Personhood movement and home to Focus on the Family, both of which have strategically called emergency contraception “abortion” on the scientifically unproven basis that they could block a fertilized egg from implanting.
There are a host of ironies here. Obama has earned the renewed support of reproductive-rights advocates by requiring health insurers to cover contraception, but the Center for Reproductive Rights is still taking him to court – with oral hearings being held this week before a New York federal court -– for overruling the FDA’s recommendation to lift the prescription requirement on emergency contraception for women under 17. That litigation has been winding its way through the system for over a decade, throughout the Bush-era politicization of the FDA, eventually resulting in a federal judge concluding that “the FDA repeatedly and unreasonably delayed issuing a decision on [the emergency contraception pill] Plan B for suspect reasons.” The FDA was ordered to explain why Plan B shouldn’t be available over the counter for girls 13 and up. When the Obama administration overruled the FDA’s recommendation to make it over the counter, U.S. District Judge Edward Korman suggested the Center for Reproductive Rights reopen its case.
“It seems to me that what we’re going through is a rerun of what happened before,” Korman remarked, referring to politics trumping the recommendations of medical professionals.

The Obama administration’s unspoken but unmistakable fear was of an election-cycle attack line that Michele Bachmann would use anyway: That teenage girls would be able to get Plan B from “the grocery store aisles next to bubble gum and next to M&Ms.” That was, in fact, an echo of the language President Obama himself used to invoke a highly unsupported bogeyman: that “a 10-year-old or 11-year-old going to a drugstore would be able to, alongside bubble gum or batteries, … buy a medication that potentially if not used properly can have an adverse effect.”

But there is another twist, so far mostly overlooked: Emergency contraception won’t be covered by insurance for everyone, since it’s available over-the-counter for those who can show I.D. proving that they’re 17 or older. They’ll still have to fork over around $50 a pop. But as long as girls 16 and younger need a prescription for the morning-after pill and they have insurance, it will be fully covered — effectively free. The same goes for women older than 17 who decide to jump through the hoops of getting a prescription, either for over-the-counter Plan B or the prescription-only generic and Ella versions.
As much as pro-choice advocates want to lift the barriers that make emergency contraception hard to get — because it’s more effective the faster you use it — one of those barriers, the prescription requirement, also mitigates another, the high cost. Said Adam Sonfield, a senior public policy associate at the Guttmacher Institute, of this catch-22, “It presents a tradeoff between cost and access.”
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Part of the reason people get confused about emergency contraception and abortion is because lots of people are confused about the basic biology of pregnancy: specifically, that it doesn’t necessarily happen instantaneously and that sperm can live in the body for several days, during which time a woman can ovulate and an egg can potentially be fertilized and implant. Regular use of hormonal contraception prevents ovulation and the chance for fertilization; emergency contraception essentially works the same way except that it’s taken after sex, by which point ovulation may have already happened. But according to recent studies, there is no evidence that taking emergency contraception after ovulation and fertilization will stop the egg from implanting.

But the misinformation and misunderstanding have created a contradictory public health picture when it comes to emergency contraception. In some ways, it’s become more accessible. In 2010, the U.S. approved a longer-acting French variant of Plan B, known as Ella, and there are scattered experiments in convenient delivery, from a birth-control vending machine at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania to a new bike messenger service in London, both of which caused minor news sensations. The annual “Back Up Your Birth Control” campaign has been promoting the line “EC=BC,” emphasizing that emergency contraception is birth control, not abortion — just in case that is a barrier for women who are considering taking it. And the Center for Reproductive Rights’ petition did manage to lower the age restriction from 18 to 17.

But there are more disturbing suggestions that misinformation is triumphing. A recent Boston Medical Center study found that many pharmacists were still often misinformed about the age requirement and were even more likely to wrongly refuse emergency contraception to 17-year-olds in low-income neighborhoods, where the rate of unintended pregnancy is higher. In Honduras, the Supreme Court upheld the criminalization of emergency contraception, which means women who use it could be jailed. Personhood initiatives, which oppose the morning-after pill, have so far failed in Colorado, Mississippi and Oklahoma, but they’ve introduced false doubts by providing even more opportunities for pundits and candidates to say “the morning-after abortion pill.”

It’s a problem that dates back decades: When, throughout the ’90s, the U.S. considered approving a French chemical abortion pill known as RU-486, it was widely called the “morning-after abortion pill,” including, often, in the New York Times. The distinction wasn’t pressed by the pro-choice community itself.  “At the time, the prevailing medical wisdom was that there is a continuum rather than a bright line between EC and mifepristone,” said Gloria Feldt, who was president of Planned Parenthood at the time, with the benefit providing more options for women who did not wish to be pregnant. “It was also assumed that a formulation of mifepristone would eventually be made for use as a true ‘morning-after’ pill.” The widespread belief, she recalled, was that a chemical abortion pill would “solve all the abortion debate problems and guarantee privacy.”
Another problem was that although doctors and non-professionals had been giving women high dosages of regular birth control pills for decades as a form of emergency contraception, the science of exactly how emergency contraception worked remained unclear. The medical definition of pregnancy remains “implantation of a fertilized egg,” but let’s say you believe, as the Catholic Church does, that fertilization itself creates a human life. Anti-choice advocates obsess over what would happen if a woman who took emergency contraception did happen to ovulate anyway and an egg potentially was fertilized, which is enough reason for some of them to call postcoital contraception “abortion.” They have claimed that hormonal contraception makes the lining of the endometrium inhospitable to a fertilized egg, constituting “murder.” Even the official packaging for Plan B, the single-step version of emergency contraception, suggests that “in addition” to blocking ovulation and fertilization, “it may inhibit implantation (by altering the endometrium).”

Except that we now know it doesn’t, even if you walk down the path of remote maybes, which requires you to believe that a zygote, which may not implant for unknowable reasons, has the same rights as a living woman who doesn’t want to be pregnant. As Princeton’s Kelly Cleland pointed out recently, “The science has evolved considerably in the last 13 years. Newer evidence, published since the Plan B label was approved, provides compelling evidence that levonorgestrel EC (LNG EC) works before ovulation, but not after.” The International Consortium for Emergency Contraception and the International Federation of Gynecology & Obstetrics also note that two new studies have shown conclusively that if a woman has ovulated and an egg has been fertilized, it’s too late for emergency contraception to work. They recommended that the language on the product labeling be changed.

Of course, scientific evidence has rarely had much place in this debate. In the meantime, even the most non-ideological news sources keep making the mistake alongside the ideologues. Last week, a furor erupted after the Associated Press reported that “Women seeking to take emergency contraception like the so-called ‘morning after’ pill would have to do so in the presence of a doctor under a bill before the Alabama legislature.” That is, until Erin Gloria Ryan from Jezebel read the actual bill and saw that it was, in fact, a law meant to limit chemical abortion, not emergency contraception. (A spokesperson for the AP said a correction was being prepared). “The confusion over this issue is probably one of the reasons emergency contraception hasn’t had as positive an impact as hoped when it comes to lowering the abortion rate,” wrote Amanda Marcotte at RH Reality Check. “If women think it is some kind of abortion-ish thing, they probably think taking it is a big deal, instead of thinking of it more like taking the pill, since it’s basically the same thing.”

But talk about moved goalposts. If ’90s-era advocates had hoped that the ability to end a pregnancy in the safety of your home with RU-486 — the actual abortion pill, not the morning-after one — would defuse the abortion debate, their more recent counterparts hoped to take it to the next technological level by providing “tele-med” abortions. They would involve doctors seeing a woman over webcam with a nurse practitioner physically present, helping women in remote areas with ever-dwindling options for safe abortions to access them. But four states have already passed requirements meant to undercut these options by forcing a doctor’s presence, and the bill the Associated Press misreported was aiming to add Alabama to the list. All in all, there have been fewer gamechangers, and more cases of one step forward, two steps back.

Irin Carmon is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @irincarmon or email her at icarmon@salon.com. More Irin Carmon.