Reply #25: Don't know, actually.

[Igel]

"False equivalence" is sometimes a scare word. Having labelled something as "false equivalence," your audience perceives that word "false" and assumes, therefore, that atheists don't have their own quirks.

The real equivalence isn't between religion and atheism but between different forms of adherence to ineffective "cures." Distilled water a la homeopathy, praying a la fundamentlism, shoving bonebreak or black cohosh into a kid a la naturopathy.

I've seen both fundies and atheists go along torturing their kids before rushing them to the ER. The kids survived, but the prayer or distilled water didn't do a heck of a whole lot to ensure their survival.

One difference is that while most preachers, naturopaths and homeopathists usually tell the parents to rush to the evil allopathy folk, a vanishingly small number of preachers can still say, "It's god's will" and encourage parents to keep their sick ones home.

Still, a lot of the parents that do this kind of thing for religious reasons aren't encouraged to do it by their ministers. With there being more fundies than homeopathists and die-hard naturopathy folk you don't expect numerical equivalency. But I wonder if there aren't cases of negligent homicide which, because they're not sensationist but involve herbs or distilled water qua drug, don't rate national news. (Of course, I have this assumption that there's not a fundamental weirdness about Xian fundies that isn't shared by other "fundamentalist" outlooks.)