Dear Marion,

Thank you for your letter. The Irritable Bowel Syndrome study
which you related seems to me to display various interesting
and important facets which I neglected to mention.

The significance of the distinction between "syndrome" as
a coincidence of symptoms, and a "disease" as a phenomenon
with an "organic" i.e. defined anatomic, biochemical, micro-
biological "etiology" (causation). Secondly, the investigator's
prejudice that sugar pills were "inert" even though they had
been shown to have documented therapeutic effects. Fundamental
to this prejudice is the irrational belief that the effectiveness
of medication is contingent on a definable biochemical process.
Thirdly, the travesty, the patent shallowness of the "physician-
patient" relationship, where the "physicians" were investigators
and the "patients" were experimental subjects recruited by 
advertisements and rewarded by the attention paid to their
"functional" disorders. Fourth, the naive and unrealistic
assumption implicit in the design of the study, that patients
"understand" the information that is provided them, on the
basis of which they are then to give "informed consent."
Utter misconception of what it means "to know". In my own
practice I've experimented - and observed - that patients'
responses depend not at all on the logical "meaning" of the
communication, but on the affect with which it is presented
to them.  From my perspective it's not just "American medicine",
but "Western" medicine in its entirety which has been overwhelmed
by technology and is trapped in an impenetrable thicket of logical
misconceptions, "scientific" superstition, and spiritual depravity.
As I may have written you before: our culture has an apparent need
for an enemy within, - for diseases to be "conquered", and death
to be "fought" to the bitter end, a need quite analogous to the
need for imaginary foreign enemies whose specter is forever
tempting the nation to destroy itself - and humanity.

You write:
 
_    "Your mention of scepticism as a threat to belief
_    has made me wonder whether this wasn't a big issue
_    in your childhood.  Wasn't Religious Belief very
_    important to your parents?  I would think that
_    persuading you of the importance of Religious Belief
_    would have loomed large for them.  Had you shown
_    scepticism toward religious doctrine, I imagine
_    this would have caused great consternation.
_    But apparently that's not what happened.  How come?"

You misunderstood. I admit, I was too cryptic. The "belief"
which I deemed threatened by "scepticism" is the mental
certainty that the world and the person (myself) who inhabits
that world are reliable and real. In other words, I contemplated
scepticism as an hypothetical threat to sanity. I acknowledge
that for the utterly religious mind, the realities of religious
dogma and secular experience might overlap, if not indeed
coincide. However our families, - and our culture - are so
far removed from religious zeal that the matter barely seems
worth even a passing thought.

The sort of "Religious Belief" to which I think you refer was
scorned by both my father and my mother, in his and her own way.
My mother's adored grandfather August Roessner was an agnostic
who refused to go to church and whose irreligiosity was denounced
in Pastor Eisenberg's sermon on the occasion of Grossvater's funeral.
In Germany, my mother used her church affiliation as protective
camouflage against Nazi antisemitism. In Virginia, my mother found
adherence to church rituals and rites indispensable instruments of
assimilation to a culture from which she remained alienated until
at the end she was overcome with senility.

My father's religious experience was essential to him, but was
at the same time uncompromisingly individual and inward. It was
nothing that he would ever have tried to communicate or to "share".
He subscribed most eloquently to our grandfather's motto, borrowed
from Frederick the Great of Prussia: In meinem Staate soll jeder
nach seiner Facon selig werden. (In my state, each person shall 
achieve salvation in his own fashion.) In this perspective it was
not Onkel Heinz, but Onkel Fritz who proved - with his intolerance -
to be renegade to the family tradition.

Jochen