Over two-thirds of adults in the United States are overweight or obese, and over one-third are obese, according to data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2003–2006 and 2007–2008.

And according to the Social Worker, not a single one of them can help it.

Moving of the earth brings fears and harms
Men reckon what it did and meant

They did in Donne’s time and in Voltaire’s and in Kleist’s (The Earthquake in Chile). Candide is a response to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Such events used to challenge people to make sense of them.

Am I right to think that apart from moral brutes  (“God’s judgment!”)  we don’t?   We do what we can, of course: Chile had better building codes than Haiti, and more money to build, and these things saved lives.

We have an answer to Why? (platelets) but no control and scant capacity to predict. Perhaps we now accept something like the ancient belief in blind fortune.

But why not donate direct to one of those two organisations? In the words of the website

When donating via Non-Believers Giving Aid, you are helping to counter the scandalous myth that only the religious care about their fellow-humans.

You are also helping to promote aggressive bigotry. Assisting hypocritical opportunists. Oh and because neither Doctors without Borders or International Red Cross is a development agency you are making a default choice about effective help – Haiti’s needs will not go away any time soon.

But it’s your money.

Sceptics can take this comfort: they now make up the biggest denomination, followed by Catholics and then Anglicans. But this puts Australia only about midway in a list of the top 50 non-believing nations.

All the same, we’re getting there. Agnostics and atheists together = 30%, a figure that in my youth would have astonished my parents’ generation – and delighted my father.

63%, however, believe in miracles, a large increase over earlier surveys. I would guess that global threats like planetary warming, the energy crisis and terrorism would partly account for that. But the Vatican as ever is busy fanning the flames. This week Australia acquired its first bona fide saint and miracle-worker, Mary McKillop.

Her second and clinching ‘miracle’ was to cure a woman’s ‘incurable’ cancer from beyond the grave. The woman prayed to Mary McKillop; the cancer went into remission; ergo, according to the Vatican, a miracle. But spontaneous remission from cancer is well-documented (Anthony Campbell discusses the literature.) How is it possible to demonstrate that only supernatural intervention is the cause? Theology, that’s how.

There are (secular) saints. Raymond Gaita has an excellent account of how, when we meet some people, there is no other or better word for the qualities we perceive in them. And as my late friend Lizzie liked to aver, martyrs are made every day.  Young people confront tanks in Tianamen Square or the Revolutionary Guard in Teheran ; if their deaths advance the cause of justice by inspiring others to work for it, then ‘martyr’ fits. If not, they remain victims. It’s not a question of their inner purity, nor need it be adjudged by a panel of geriatric celibates. It’s whether or not others with similar convictions put in the work.

Rather than throw out the whole apparatus of Christianity, I always want to reclaim what is useable – which makes me one of those ‘cultural Christians’ David Marr talks about in the article linked earlier.  I guess the Theses on Feuerbach are still working away somewhere.

On a similar theme, have a look at Ben Goldacre’s (much better) piece on diarrhea and AIDS.

“The central government should understand the need for green turtles as part of traditional ceremonies because it relates to our faith,” Sudiana said. “Prohibiting it will hurt Balinese people.”

Up to five turtles are needed for sacrifice at each of the 100 to 150 large ceremonies a year in Hindu temples around Bali, he said.

Turtles were traditionally decapitated. But since they became protected in 1999, ceremonies in many temples have changed with turtles being symbolically sacrificed through their release to the sea alive.

Go turtles.