Forever and ever, amen

It's always amusing to hear people intone that God is the same today as he was yesterday, and will be the same tomorrow. It clearly contradicts all historical experience -- just pick any period in history, examine the teachings and behaviors of any Church, and ask yourself if there have been no changes from then until now. It also contradicts Scripture itself, at least as God was portrayed in some of the early books of the Bible.*

So it's hard to resist poking fun as someone who says, "God wants me to do X," and when he changes his mind, breezily announces that "God wants me to do Y." Matt Hinton pokes a little fun at Oregon football player Lache Seastrunk, a highly-recruited player who has just transferred to Baylor in search of playing time. When he first went to Oregon, Seastrunk told reporters, ""I just really leaned on God and asked Him where I really need to be."

Now that he's going elsewhere, it's "When I first intentionally went there, I felt like God wanted to be there. But God also does things — God also pulls you out of the storm before it happens. So I felt like something was about to go down and God just wanted me to get up out of there." So nice of God to pull you out of a storm you wouldn't be in if you hadn't listened to Him in the first place. He can be just swell that way.

In the Mr. Deity world, I imagine the following conversation:

Larry: "We totally punked him! Oh, I know! Now tell him you want him to go to Alaska-Fairbanks!"
Mr. Deity: "That'd be awesome! He's from Texas; Alaska would just kill him!"
Larry: "Plus, they don't even have a football team!"





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* My favorite example: when the Israelites worshiped the golden calf at Sinai, God told Moses that he was going to destroy them all and offered to make Moses's own descendents become the great nation of sycophants that He longed for. Apparently six or seven centuries is plenty of time for even God to forget that He had made the same solemn promise to Abraham. Fortunately, Moses was a far more forgiving and compassionate person than Yahweh and talked Him into changing His mind back again.

The Projection Project

A little searching leads me to suspect that next Sunday evening will feature an updated version of 30-year-old failed prophecies. Given the conservative propensity for psychological projection, however, I had imagined an outline rather like this:

I. Truth-seeking

A. Evolutionists ignore evidence
B. Global warming scientists scam for big money
C. Why atheists are angry evangelists
D. David Barton on historical revisionists
E. Fox News the antidote to propaganda


II. Protecting freedom

A. Tolerating other beliefs violates the First Amendment
B. Gays are indoctrinating children
C. Scott Lively on the imminent ban on Christianity
D. Combating sharia by enforcing the Ten Commandments

The other Art of the Possible

xkcd offers another way to spot BS:

Barack X?

Here is why Poe's Law is true. A blogger calls for testing Obama's DNA and one of the commenters is insisting that the President is the secret love child of Malcolm X. Because someone that evil couldn't be the spawn of just anyone, could he?

Expert statistician

From an Amazon review of The Unlikely Disciple, an account of a student who spent an undercover semester at Liberty University*:

He finds "research" that backs up his incredible claims against Christianity (saying that 51% of the people in America have never met an evangelical Christian, which ignores the dozens of other polls that show the opposite)

Y'know, I could almost believe them both ....


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* I plan to post a review of the book this weekend

On critical thinking

Oh, for Goodness Sake showed me Anderson Cooper's wonderful interview of Arizona State Representative Cecil Ash. Ash is one of the proponents of the birther bill, which states that the Federal Elections Commission has no authority over a federal election in Arizona and presidential candidates need to present their birth certificates to the Arizona Secretary of State for approval.

Ash insists this is necessary, because there are all these rumors, don'cha know, and they have to be taken seriously. And every time Cooper* prods him with evidence that the rumors are unfounded, he responds with, "I don't know about that; you can't believe everything on the internet." A tour-de-force of the Will to Ignorance.




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* Kudos to Cooper, btw, for responding to a moron as he deserves. Very rare in the media today.

Perpetual Fool's Day

Yesterday you may have participated in April Fool's Day, that once-a-year appreciation of deceptive bullshit. But in the world of religious apology, every day is Fool's Day. So let's have some cheap fun with this bit of wishful thinking from one David R. Reagan:

Stoner begins with a very interesting observation. He points out that his copy of Young's General Astronomy, published in 1898, is full of errors. Yet, the Bible, written over 2,000 years ago is devoid of scientific error. For example, the shape of the earth is mentioned in Isaiah 40:22. Gravity can be found in Job 26:7. Ecclesiastes 1:6 mentions atmospheric circulation. A reference to ocean currents can be found in Psalm 8:8, and the hydraulic cycle is described in Ecclesiastes 1:7 and Isaiah 55:10. The second law of thermodynamics is outlined in Psalm 102:25-27 and Romans 8:21. And these are only a few examples of scientific truths written in the Scriptures long before they were "discovered" by scientists.

Gosh, the Bible is a basic science textbook? Let's see what we can learn!

Isaiah 40:22: "It is He who sits above the circle of the earth, And its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain And spreads them out like a tent to dwell in."

Yep, the earth is round - but round in a flat, 2-dimensional way, not spherical in 3 dimensions. Thus the expression "pennies from heaven," perhaps. So not only do we live in Flatland, we now know that when God plays games with us, he's playing disc golf, not basketball.

Job 26:7: "He stretches out the north over empty space And hangs the earth on nothing."

Deriving F = Gm₁m₂/r² from this verse is left as an exercise for the reader. Speaking of stretching, it's quite a reach to get even a mention of gravity from this verse. No mention that the gravitational attraction between the sun and earth is what keeps our planet from flying off into cold empty space. We don't even get informed that things fall to the ground, but maybe that's because the reference in Job 5:7 to sparks flying upward would hopelessly confuse us.

Ecclesiastes 1:6: "Blowing toward the south, Then turning toward the north, The wind continues swirling along; And on its circular courses the wind returns."

Because before people started quoting the Bible, no one had ever encountered a windbag arguing in circles before ....

Psalm 8:8: "The birds of the heavens and the fish of the sea, Whatever passes through the paths of the seas."

That's all you need to know about the circulation of ocean currents. Seizing upon the word "paths," I suppose we could even work this out as an anticipation of plate tectonics, too, since if paths implies currents, and there are paths on the ground, then that would imply earth currents, too. See? You can find it all there, once someone else has gone and discovered it for real.

Ecclesiastes 1:7: "All the rivers flow into the sea, Yet the sea is not full. To the place where the rivers flow, There they flow again."

Isaiah 55:10: "For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, And do not return there without watering the earth And making it bear and sprout, And furnishing seed to the sower and bread to the eater;"

A lazy student might not connect the verse in Ecclesiastes to rain and snow, or the verse in Isaiah to rivers and oceans, but please! Pay attention! Does God have to spell out every detail? There's only one book between Ecclesiastes and Isaiah in the Protestant Bible, although it does happen to be the Song of Songs and all that sexy imagery can distract.

Psalm 102:25-27: "Of old You founded the earth, And the heavens are the work of Your hands. Even they will perish, but You endure; And all of them will wear out like a garment; Like clothing You will change them and they will be changed. But You are the same, And Your years will not come to an end."

Romans 8:21: "the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God."

Yep, things wear out. That's not quite what the Second Law of Thermodynamics says, but it's a true statement nonetheless and we all know that atheists denied the Theory of Wear & Tear for ages before scientists rediscovered it (although the atheists still deny the evidence - even the octogenarians). They also discovered the Third Law, which states that entropy is arrested only when the temperature reaches absolute zero and all processes cease. You always suspected that Hell would be a more happening place than Heaven, didn't you?


So that's it. If anyone ever insists that there's science in the Bible, you have a pretty good idea what they're talking about - parenthetical banalities that wouldn't surprise a six-year-old. While the Greeks and the Chinese were proving the Pythagorean Theorem, the Hebrews weren't even trying. Jews do a lot better these days, but some Christians prefer intellectual stagnation as much as they long for an unchanging Heaven.

Nothing to be afraid of

On State Street today, I encountered a couple folks holding up one of those Obama-with-the-Hitler-moustache posters.* Our 7-second conversation went something like this:

Me: "Aren't you afraid of being arrested?"
Him: [utterly confused look] "Arrested? No, I'm not afraid of being arrested."
Me: "Guess he's not much of a Hitler, then, is he?"
Him: [utterly confused look persists - he still hasn't taken my point]

Coincidentally, I encountered this Mark Twain-attributed quotation not five minutes later:

“You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”

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* I was going to insert a Google image, but they all seemed to link back to crazy wingnut sites; never mind, you know what they look like.

On belief

Via The Friendly Atheist

God agrees with me. He's pretty smart that way.

From Not Exactly Rocket Science, via Pharyngula:

For many religious people, the popular question "What would Jesus do?" is essentially the same as "What would I do?" That's the message from an intriguing and controversial new study by Nicholas Epley from the University of Chicago. Through a combination of surveys, psychological manipulation and brain-scanning, he has found that when religious Americans try to infer the will of God, they mainly draw on their own personal beliefs.

* snip *

The brain scans found the same thing, particularly in a region called the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) that's been linked to self-referential thinking. The mPFC is more active when we think about our own mindsets than those of others. Epley found that it was similarly abuzz when the recruits thought about their own attitude or God's, but lower when they considered the average American.

I was going to make a quip about the research appearing in the Journal of Unsurprising Results, but I honestly find that last bit rather startling. According to Epley, people use a different part of the brain to infer what other people are thinking, but use the very same part of the brain to reflect on either their own thoughts or their inference about God. That would seem to suggest that creating God in one's own image isn't just an act of bad faith; it could be exceedingly difficult to avoid.

Inspired by this Glenn Beck lecture ....

The Left of right-wing imagination:




The Left of reality:

Let us not come together

These two videos were posted in the comments at Dispatches from the Culture Wars:



And the followup interview with the crazy lady, where she's much calmer and would almost seem to make sense, if you didn't try to understand what she was saying:



What I found fascinating was how the woman almost boasts of how bad her own health care situation is. She claims she's had $15,000 in out of pocket expenses and that her husband works two jobs and has no health insurance. Assuming this is all true, a rational person would be knocking down the conductor to jump on the reform train, but not her. She has higher principles.

Or wait. No she doesn't! Her reasons for opposing health care reform are entirely self-interested: she doesn't want her money going to any illegal immigrants, or to pay for any abortions. She opposes health care reform primarily because some of the benefits may go to the wrong sort.

It's become a peculiar article of faith among conservatives that you can't improve everybody's situation; it's always a zero sum game. I call it peculiar because it directly contradicts one of the fundamental arguments for capitalism: that the rising tide lifts all boats. But I think it's difficult to overestimate the degree to which conservative Americans have been trained to hate and fear everyone else. You know those movies where two enemies find themselves in a situation where they have to learn to trust each other in order for either of them to survive? I'll bet conservatives don't understand those movies.

As Harry said, "I think I can tell who the wrong sort are for myself, thanks."

Starve a cold, feed a fever, and prattle away the flu

God is in his heaven, telling Gabriel, "Look what I can get them to do now!" I hope someone is tracking infection rates before and after the treatment and comparing them to seasonal norms.

Got answers? Got questions!

Appearing down the street:




Okay, here are my questions:

* How do we craft highly-efficient solar power cells that can produce cheap, abundant, inexhaustible electricity?

* How can we cure cancer as reliably as we cure tonsillitis?

* How were the pyramids built?

* What is the location and orbit of the next large asteroid or comet due to strike Earth?


That'll do for starters.

Apologetics 101

“If the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” Richard Nixon, 1977.

"And so, by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Conventions Against Torture." Condaleezza Rice, 2009.

[Via Foreign Policy]



Oh, that part about "Did you know that the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe said Guantanamo was a model medium security prison?" Here's what the OCSE had to say about that back in 2006:

The OSCE Spokesperson said that, in the light of these reports, he wished to make it clear the Organization itself had not sent an expert to Guantanamo: "The person quoted in several of the stories as "an OSCE expert", Professor Alain Grignard, accompanied the delegation despatched by the Parliamentary Assembly, based in Copenhagen, but he was not employed or commissioned by the OSCE."

Damn, these people know how to stretch a fig leaf! A few "make-it-up-as-you-go" memos, one friendly opinion from a carefully-scheduled foreigner, and that's all the proof we should need that Guantanamo was a model prison and no one (by definition) could have been tortured.

And that part about Nazi Germany being less of a threat to America than the al-Quaeda ... imagine that we could somehow manipulate history and offer Condaleezza Rice this choice:

(a) Germany loses, 9/11 happens
(b) Germany wins, 9/11 never happens

... she would choose (b)?

Well, she did say that foreign policy is tricky and you don't always get to choose who you work with. I'm sure she would have been pragmatic.

Left Hand, meet Right Hand. Right, Left.

At Worldview Times, Brannon Howse is railing against Obama's secret plan to advance socialism in the United States.

Meanwhile, over at Worldview Times, Stephen Kovaka gives us examples of economic "sin":

At the same time, ownership of the major sources of real wealth (land, buildings, farms, mines, factories) is being progressively concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority, a one-in-a-million Superclass.

I think I heard about this, maybe from some guy named Marx ....

It is God's opinion that economic health requires two things above all: debt must be liquidated regularly, and the snowballing accumulation of wealth by the few must be limited. When these two tendencies are unchecked, they eventually destroy the society in which they grow.

At which point, Kovaka* recommends the system advanced in Deuteronomy, where all debts are simply canceled - by law - every seven years. Apparently, nothing he's read recently would suggest that uncollectable debts pose problems for an economy.

So "No" to socialism, but we'll have the government cancel contracts at regular intervals and intervene to prevent the accumulation of wealth. Got it.


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* In fairness to Kovaka, he's not advocating communism -- communal ownership of all resources. He just wants to ensure that ownership is widely distributed. He probably wouldn't say the government ought to cause this, but I don't know how else you would do it.

Free association

The Vermont Senate has passed a bill to legalize gay marriage, which has prompted some doodleheads called the Vermont Marriage Advisory Council to

[express] deep concerns about the risk of losing " the natural, inherent bonding right of a child to his/her own biological mother and father." It has said that "same-sex marriage directly increases the number of children who will be motherless or fatherless."

Which, for some reason, puts me in mind of this TV commercial:

The superior intellect

Mike Dunford, at The Questionable Authority, points us to the Conservapedia article about the moon, which has this to say about theories of lunar origins:

Origin theories

Atheistic theories of the origin of the Moon, widely taught for decades despite lacking the falsifiability requirement of science (see Philosophy of science), have been proven false.[9]

The footnote, by the way, points to a page at the Planetary Science Institute's web page, describing the strengths of the theory that the moon is a piece of the Earth which got whacked off in a big collision with other pieces of planet-wannabees while the solar system was still coalescing. There's nary a word about this theory, or any other, having been proven false. Is it any surprise that the writers at Conservapedia don't understand what a citation is, or that it's supposed to provide supporting evidence for your claims? Who else would be telling you they've falsified the unfalsifiable?

It still pleases me that, while there are some silly and ignorant liberals around, there is no market for an endless parade of demagogues like Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and even God can't keep track of how many others, and there is no Liberalpedia.

Now it gets complicated

I forgot where I saw this comment, so I can't link to it ... blogger crime, I know. Anyway, it was just a parenthetical comment that said the writer was going to miss President Bush's regular supply of outrages, or something to that effect. I'm ashamed to admit, but at a certain level, I feel the same way.

Bush was the most consistent cuss I've ever seen. Except for spending money to fight AIDS in Africa, he seemed to be wrong on everything. Everything! I mean, I used to say that no one could be wrong all the time, if only because of the law of averages, but dang if that fellow didn't come near proving me wrong. I hated almost everything he did. Which was, in a way, comforting. I always knew where things stood with Bush.

You see, now I have to bitch about Obama, who I mostly admire, and who I definitely want to do well. But then he turns around and doesn't turn things around - I mean, this damned email investigation he wants to quash, or the trial in England that can't go forward because the nature of CIA torture is a state secret, or secrecy about domestic wiretapping, and the same damn crap that Bush/Cheney threw at us for eight years. Now I have that ambiguity again of decent folks (I do think he is decent) doing bad things. It's so much more comfortable when the people doing the bad things are the bad guys and you know they're bad because they do bad things every day and then boast about it. It's another form of that "moral clarity" that Bush prattled about in order to praise his own simple-mindedness. I've lost that, and it's a good thing to lose, but I'm going to miss it nonetheless.

Oh well, I still have the fundamentalists.

Love thy neighbor as thyself

The circus continues on campus this week. This baptism under fire is, I'm suspect, intended to ensure that young Jeremiah-in-training here receives enough abuse to thoroughly alienate him from mainstream culture; the hecklers just provide what his master wants for him. "That campus is strong with the dark side. In you must go." Putting this fellow* into this situation is just warping him like a soggy book at the bottom of a locker. Intentionally.

I'm hearing that this group has been here in past years, but this time they're more offensive than ever.


* Is he the older preacher's son, I wonder? If so, the poor kid never had a chance.



Postscript:

I found that these folks call themselves Soulwinners Ministries International and consist of a crazy preacher, his wife, and their son, plus one other dude traveling around in an RV, and they are the sort of folk who crave hostility as proof of their own righteousness. It'd be kind of nice to place them in a locked room with the Fred Phelps gang and then forget you'd left them there.

The university is planning a sort of healing/cleansing ceremony next week; after a week of displaying more tolerance than most people felt up to, it might be a necessary catharsis. But at least by the end of the week, folks were learning to just walk past the preachers and deny them their drug. Good move.