This is Why Reason Matters
Today this story popped up on my radar via Skeptico. The basic story is, the classroom aide of an autistic girl in Ontario Canada went to a “psychic” who cold-read the aide and came to the determination that the autistic girl was being sexually abused. Now, in a rational world, when presented with this allegation the local child services agency would dismiss it outright. In this world however they mindlessly sent forth a case worker to investigate. Of course, the charges were bull-shit, and the mother was exonerated immediately. But still, this poor woman has had her life turned upside down, her child traumatized, and an entry made in the child services records (believe me, child welfare services record all allegations, regardless of the final disposition of the case.).
This is why reason matters. I know that what I’m about to write may offend some of my friends, and I sincerely apologize for that, but it must be said. This is the result of a society that devalues reason and extolls the virtues of blind faith. Sure this time around it was some woo-slinging con-woman making the allegation. But what happens when the allegations come from a pastor who received the information from God? Would the result have been any different? I don’t think it would.
The world we live can only truly be known in the bright light of reason. When we deny reason, and instead put our trust in the shadowy realm of faith, we lose the ability to discern the truth.
Posted on June 19th, 2008 under Posts • Tags: Philosophy, Skepticism. • 
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June 19th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
A-fucking-men. Cheers.
July 10th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Respectfully, I disagree with you, man. Cases like this have nothing to do with religion. This is about litigation.
Conventional thought says that when something bad happens, someone has to be responsible. And the civil courts exist as a huge fucking machine to establish that blame. Even if no one is actually to blame, the process of being sued is itself a vast and expensive form of punishment.
The courts operate on a system of antagonistic fact finding, where each side works to keep the other’s version of ‘this is what happened’ from being accepted as the operating truth on which the court will render judgement.
It’s really hard to get a subjective opinion written into the official record against a skilled and determined opponent. Objective, measurable facts are much easier to defend.
So when the people who run a bureaucracy decide there’s no damn way they’re going to take the blame for anything bad that may ever potentially happen, they sit down with their lawyers and write up a set of rules. Those rules are objectively measurable and can be easily substantiated in court. Then they abandon all further subjective judgement in favor of blind adherence to those rules.
That’s how we get zero-tolerance drug policies that kick fourth graders out of school for giving a friend a cough drop. Or screw over the mom in the UK who recently got listed as a violent herion addict because the woman with the criminal record had the same name and birthdate.
The DFS will investigate any claim of potential abuse, regardless of how stupid it may sound, simply because failure to investigate any claim is an objective, measurable fact that can be used against them in court.
That’s all there really is to this story. The only connection to religion here is the stretch between ‘going to a psychic’ and ‘going to a church’.