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Thursday, February 18, 2016

The Long Goodbye for an Atheist-Positive President


The Secular Spectrum: The Long Goodbye for an Atheist-Positive President

President Barack Obama is the first black president. But he also represents a less well known first.

Though President Obama is almost certainly a Christian, as I have fantasized (and absolutely not a Muslim), he is without a doubt the first president raised by a secular humanist.

Like I was.

It's no coincidence that he regularly mentions nonbelievers in the same breath as the faithful. He's called his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham "the last of the great secular humanists." And he's seen first-hand the deeply held values humanism can instill.

The Republican party doesn't have a corner on the values market.

I'm afraid that none of the candidates of either party will continue his practice of giving equal time to the godless.

And it may be a long time in this "exceptional" religious country before we see the same.
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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.