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Wednesday, February 3, 2016

A Little Birdie Told Me to Do It

A little ruby-crowned kinglet at the LA County Arboretum seemed anxious about something, but not to whisper in our ears.
The Secular Spectrum: A Little Birdie Told Me to Do It.

Have you ever noticed that God always seems to tell people to do exactly what they wanted to do already?

It's almost as if people are confusing their own inner voice for God's.

The hospital chaplain's inner voice certainly didn't tell him to respect my and my loved ones' nonbelief.

I still can't believe that he would pray, "May you take the Lord's light into your heart and be healed," within earshot of my mother, after she told him we were atheists.

When my mother first told me of this, I could still hear the anger in her voice.

What "man of God" would say that in front of an atheist mother grieving over her dying atheist daughter?

Apparently, to him, nondenominational didn't mean he had to respect those with no faith at all.


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Coma Girl

Coma Girl

Not a miracle recovery, but a miracle of modern medicine

In 2013 I fell into a six-week coma and nearly died after I contracted legionella. The Legionnaire's disease was in turn triggered by immunosuppression caused by the prednisone I was taking for my rare autoimmune disease, dermatomyositis.

I suffered a series of strokes on both sides of my brain when the sepsis caused my blood pressure to plummet. I fell into a deep coma. My kidneys and lungs began to fail, as my body was began dying one organ at a time. My doctors told my loved ones to give up hope for my full recovery. They expected me to die, and even if I somehow lived, I would remain a vegetable or at best left so hopelessly brain-damaged that I would never be same. But unbeknownst to them, while they were shining lights in my eyes and shaking their heads, I was telling them in my coma-dream--my secular version of a near-death experience--to leave me alone because I was trying to get back to sleep. I was experiencing what is known as covert cognition, the subject of my Skeptical Inquirer article "Covert Cognition: My So-Called Near-Death Experience," which appeared in their July/August issue.

But it wasn't a miracle--despite what so many continue to believe--that I recovered so fully. I owe my life not to God, but the miracles of modern medicine, as well as the nature of the watershed-area brain damage I suffered, as I detailed in my article and in this blog.