Their Own Version of a Big Bang

WAYNE, N.J. — Evangelist Ken Ham smiled at the 2,300 elementary students packed into pews, their faces rapt. With dinosaur puppets and silly cartoons, he was training them to reject much of geology, paleontology and evolutionary biology as a sinister tangle of lies.

“Boys and girls,” Ham said. If a teacher so much as mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, “you put your hand up and you say, ‘Excuse me, were you there?’ Can you remember that?”

The children roared their assent.

“Sometimes people will answer, ‘No, but you weren’t there either,’ ” Ham told them. “Then you say, ‘No, I wasn’t, but I know someone who was, and I have his book about the history of the world.’ ” He waved his Bible in the air.

“Who’s the only one who’s always been there?” Ham asked.

“God!” the boys and girls shouted.

“Who’s the only one who knows everything?”

“God!”

“So who should you always trust, God or the scientists?”

The children answered with a thundering: “God!”

Los Angeles Times

Key quote: “He shows his audiences a graphic that places the theory of evolution at the root of all social ills: abortion, divorce, racism, gay marriage, store clerks who say ‘Happy Holidays’ instead of ‘Merry Christmas.’”

A little provocative thinking for Sunday

The New York Times Magazine has some Questions for Daniel C. Dennett, a longtime professor of philosophy at Tufts University, who has written a book promoting the idea that religious devotion is a function of biology. Two of the interview exchanges:

So what can you tell us about God?

Certainly the idea of a God that can answer prayers and whom you can talk to, and who intervenes in the world – that’s a hopeless idea. There is no such thing.

Yet faith, by definition, means believing in something whose existence cannot be proved scientifically. If we knew for sure that God existed, it would not require a leap of faith to believe in him.

Isn’t it interesting that you want to take that leap? Why do you want to take that leap? Why does our craving for God persist? It may be that we need it for something. It may be that we don’t need it, and it is left over from something that we used to be. There are lots of biological possibilities.

Five books in five days (4)

The End of Faith by Sam Harris was NewMexiKen’s third book in my project to read five books in five days. I began book four, M. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn last night, so am almost back on target.

In The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, Sam Harris argues that religious faith is the problem in the world — a problem that endangers us all. The more fundamental the belief — Judaism, Christianity and Islam most of all — the more threatening it is.

Our situation is this: most of the people in this world believe that the Creator of the universe has written a book. We have the misfortune of having many such books on hand, each making an exclusive claim as to its infallibility. People tend to organize themselves into factions according to which of these incompatible claims they accept—rather than on the basis of language, skin color, location of birth, or any other criterion of tribalism. Each of these texts urges its readers to adopt a variety of beliefs and practices, some of which are benign, many of which are not. All are in perverse agreement on one point of fundamental importance, however: “respect” for other faiths, or for the views of unbelievers, is not an attitude that God endorses. While all faiths have been touched, here and there, by the spirit of ecumenicalism, the central tenet of every religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error or, at best, dangerously incomplete. Intolerance is thus intrinsic to every creed. Once a person believes—really believes—that certain ideas can lead to eternal happiness, or to its antithesis, he cannot tolerate the possibility that the people he loves might be led astray by the blandishments of unbelievers. Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one.

Observations of this sort pose an immediate problem for us, however, because criticizing a person’s faith is currently taboo in every corner of our culture. On this subject, liberals and conservatives have reached a rare consensus: religious beliefs are simply beyond the scope of rational discourse. Criticizing a person’s ideas about God and the afterlife is thought to be impolitic in a way that criticizing his ideas about physics or history is not. And so it is that when a Muslim suicide bomber obliterates himself along with a score of innocents on a Jerusalem street, the role that faith played in his actions is invariably discounted. His motives must have been political, economic, or entirely personal. Without faith, desperate people would still do terrible things. Faith itself is always, and everywhere, exonerated.

Harris is unlikely to make many converts, nonetheless he is convincing in his analysis of the danger. He is less convincing in his later chapters when he discusses alternative forms of belief and spirtuality, once we are weaned from the religious beliefs of our ancestors. Still, it’s a remarkable and worthwhile book.

“The belief that certain books were written by God (who, for reasons difficult to fathom, made Shakespeare a far better writer than himself….”

“Any culture that raises men and boys to kill unlucky girls [i.e., rape victims], rather than comfort them, is a culture that has managed to retard the growth of love. Such societies, of course, regularly fail to teach their inhabitants many other things—like how to read. Not learning how to read is not another style of literacy, and not learning to see others as ends in themselves is not another style of ethics. Its is a failure of ethics.”

Twelfth night

Tonight, Thursday evening, is Twelfth Night (the eve of the Epiphany).

Jesus Without The Miracles

“[T]he relevance of Christianity to most Americans…has far more to do with the promise of eternal salvation from this world than with any desire to practice the teachings of Jesus while we are here.”

Erik Reece in Jesus Without The Miracles: Thomas Jefferson’s Bible and the Gospel of Thomas from Harper’s. An excellent article.

Thanks to Albloggerque for the link.

Another best line of the day

… from the opinion of Judge John E. Jones III:

“It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.”

Myths of Modern America

Wash Park Prophet concludes we are a Christian nation only in Gallup polls. The entire entry is worth a read; he ends with this:

Most Americans aren’t really very different, even though we aren’t as trained to recognize it as such. Many Japanese parents teach their children Confucian proverbs. Americans are as likely to offer their children moral guidance form Aesop and the Brothers Grimm and Winnie the Pooh, as they are from the Proverbs or the Book of Job.

This is why there will never be a full fledged theocracy in the United States. While Christianity has made some narrow inroads into the American mythology, for example in the Pledge of Allegiance and the “In God We Trust” motto, which were themselves bad decisions, the Christian majority is illusory. Many nominal Christans in America don’t believe in Noah much more than they do in Batman, and many people who give doctrinaire answers on the phone to pollsters asking about the miracles of Christianity and the Creation story, are about as sincere as a parent asked by a child about Santa Claus. Decorum and good breeding dictate a certain answer, but that answer isn’t always sincere when the truth really counts.

Best line of the day, so far

“Jesus says Christmas shouldn’t be about picking fights and organizing boycotts. All that legalistic nitpicking just reminds him of the Pharisees. Do you really think that if Jesus returns to Earth tomorrow, his priority is going to be organizing a boycott of Target stores? You think he’s going to appear on Fox to say, ‘Worry about genocide and hunger later – first, let’s battle with liberals over what holiday greeting to use’?”

Nicholas Kristof channeling St. Peter in a conversation with President Bush

Another way of looking at it

Believing there is no God means the suffering I’ve seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn’t caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn’t bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.

From an essay by Penn Jillette, explaining that he isn’t an atheist. He is a believer. He believes there is no God.

Alito the red-nosed reindeer

Report from The New York Times:

It is the time of year when bedtime stories and television specials often recall the plucky reindeer and the little girl of Whoville who managed to save Christmas. This year, some conservative groups are hoping to add a new name to that pantheon of heroes: Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., the Supreme Court nominee.

“Liberal groups like People for the American Way and the A.C.L.U. have opposed public Christmas and Hanukkah displays and even fought to keep Christmas carols out of school,” declares a radio commercial paid for by the conservative Committee for Justice beginning Monday in Colorado, Wisconsin and West Virginia, states whose senators are considered pivotal votes on Judge Alito.

“Some courts and judges have supported this radical agenda, but not Judge Sam Alito,” it continues. “Throughout his career, Judge Alito has consistently upheld the Constitution’s protection of free religious expression.”

Christianity and the Christmas story (in some form) have survived nearly 2,000 years. These modern American Christians are sure having a crisis of faith if they believe only Sam Alito can save Christmas.

But of course I may have it backwards. It’s certain political leaders that are having the crisis of faith. They believe only Christmas can save Sam Alito.

Good stuff

NewMexiKen’s best blogging buddy, Functional Ambivalent got the week off to a good start this morning —

• Further Evidence, If Any Were Needed, That Republicans Are Unhinged
• The Suburbs Hate Jesus

Stamp out Christmas

Contrary to what some people on the internets are claiming, it’s not more anti-Christian secularism. The real reason the Postal Service did not release a new Madonna and Child Christmas stamp this year is because they had an overstock of last year’s stamp and wanted to sell them before the price of postage goes up to 39 cents on January 8 and makes the stamp nearly obsolete.

There will be a new Madonna stamp (no, not that Madonna) next Christmas. Madonna and Child stamps had been released each year since 1966.

You may click on the image to see a larger version of the 2006 stamp based on a painting by 18th century Peruvian artist Ignacio Chacón. Feliz Navidad.

‘They’re like a mob of dervishes, hysterical, freakish, ineffectual, deluded.’

Pharyngula tells us some scary stuff:

The program was called “Faith Matters”, and it’s not clear whether Nightline was going for high irony or was sincere. It’s about the Justice House of Prayer, an anti-abortion group whose strategy was to rent an apartment with windows facing roughly in the direction of the Supreme Court, where “interns” jump up and down and rant and pray towards the Court, apparently under the impression that they will have some psychic influence on the justices, or that their all-powerful god requires constant nudging and needs to be aimed in the right physical direction to have an effect. I get the idea they imagine their god as a vast, logy blimp without much consciousness, and if only they tug on his supernatural guidewires enough, they can position him over the court building—at which time he’ll reach down with fat, bloated fingers and diddle about in the brains of the people below him. It’s a strange, primitive theology, cult-like and absurd.

NewMexiKen isn’t quite certain how this kind of “prayer” is any less effective than any other kind, but it’s certainly more open to ridicule.

OneGoodMove has a video of the Nightline report.

Theologians to ask Pope to suspend limbo?

Limbo — the place where the Catholic Church teaches that babies go if they die before being baptized — may have its days numbered.

According to Italian media reports on Tuesday, an international theological commission will advise Pope Benedict to eliminate the teaching about limbo from the Catholic catechism.
…

In his Divine Comedy, Dante passes limbo on his way into hell and writes: “Great grief seized on my own heart when this I heard, because some people of much worthiness I knew, who in limbo were suspended.”

Reuters via Yahoo! News

At first NewMexiKen thought they meant the dance.

Now that’s what I call archival quality preservation

This archivist is impressed with the Church of Scientolgy installation in northern New Mexico reported on by local station KRQE, with a follow-up by Richard Leiby in Sunday’s Washington Post:

Secret Flying Saucer Base Found in New Mexico?

Maybe. From the state that gave us Roswell, the epicenter of UFO lore since 1947, comes a report from an Albuquerque TV station about its discovery of strange landscape markings in the remote desert. They’re etched in New Mexico’s barren northern reaches, resemble crop circles and are recognizable only from a high altitude.

Also, they are directly connected to the Church of Scientology. …

The church tried to persuade station KRQE not to air its report last week about the aerial signposts marking a Scientology compound that includes a huge vault “built into a mountainside,” the station said on its Web site. The tunnel was constructed to protect the works of L. Ron Hubbard, the late science-fiction writer who founded the church in the 1950s.

The archiving project, which the church has acknowledged, includes engraving Hubbard’s writings on stainless steel tablets and encasing them in titanium capsules.

The Post has a KRQE aerial photo.

Update: Even better photo from TerraServer.

Santa Catalina Island

… was named in honor of Saint Catherine of Alexandria by Sebastián Vizcaíno on this date in 1602, her feast day. The indigenous Pimungan called their island Pimu.

In 310, Emperor Maximus ordered Catherine broken on the wheel for being a Christian, but she touched the wheel and it was destroyed. She was beheaded, and her body whisked away by angels.

According to The Catholic Community Forum, Saint Catherine is the patron saint of “apologists, craftsmen who work with a wheel (potters, spinners, etc.), archivists, attornies, barristers, dying people, educators, girls, jurists, knife grinders, knife sharpeners, lawyers, librarians, libraries, maidens, mechanics, millers, nurses, old maids, philosophers, potters, preachers, scholars, schoolchildren, scribes, secretaries spinners, spinsters, stenographers, students, tanners, teachers, theologians, turners, unmarried girls, wheelwrights.”

Twenty-six miles across the sea
Santa Catalina is a-waitin’ for me
Santa Catalina, the island of romance
Romance, romance, romance

Water all around it everywhere
Tropical trees and the salty air
But for me the thing that’s a-waitin’ there, romance

Visit Catalina Island’s Official Website.

Best line of the day, so far

“If I ever become Dictator of the World, my first edict is going to be a ban on allowing press releases to fall into the hands of the press. When the media get ahold of something stupid, there’s no telling what might happen.”

Functional Ambivalent in a great post on Christmas, Wal-Mart, religious protesters and stupidity. Mostly the latter.

Intelligent Evolution

NewMexiKen wonders how many of those who oppose Darwinism have ever read his works — and for that matter how many of those who oppose creationism have ever studied the Bible. In an introduction to a new collection of Darwin’s major works, famed biologist and author Edward O. Wilson takes an intelligent look at Darwin and the debate. The entire piece is well worth your time (not long) if you’re interested in this important, continuing issue in American life. Here’s an excerpt:

Thus it is surpassingly strange that half of Americans recently polled (2004) not only do not believe in evolution by natural selection but do not believe in evolution at all. Americans are certainly capable of belief, and with rocklike conviction if it originates in religious dogma. In evidence is the 60 percent that accept the prophecies of the Book of Revelation as truth, and yet in more evidence is the weight that faith-based positions hold in political life. Most of the religious Right opposes the teaching of evolution in public schools, either by an outright ban on the subject or, at the least, by insisting that it be treated as “only a theory” rather than a “fact.”

Yet biologists, particularly those statured by the peer review and publication of substantial personal research on the subject in leading journals of science, are unanimous in concluding that evolution is a fact. The evidence they and thousands of others have adduced over 150 years falls together in intricate and interlocking detail. The multitudinous examples range from the small changes in DNA sequences observed as they occur in real time to finely graded sequences within larger evolutionary changes in the fossil record. Further, on the basis of comparably firm evidence, natural selection grows ever stronger as the prevailing explanation of evolution.

Spreading guilt

“If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is ‘God is crying.’ And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is ‘Probably because of something you did.’”

— Jack Handy, who has many, many more Deep Thoughts.

This and the item directly below via ack ack ack.

For a little perspective

There are 6.4 billion people living on earth. There are approximately 100 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy — 16 times more stars than people. The latest estimates say there are over 125 billion galaxies in our universe. The universe is estimated to be between 13 and 14 billion years old and having a radius of at least 10 billion light years (because we can see stars that far).

The earth is about 4.55 billion years old. And man has been on earth for the last 350,000 of those years. By my arithmetic (which is open to correction), if the age of earth was proportionately reduced to 100 years, then man has been on earth for not quite 3 days and each person inhabits this earth for about one minute.

With all this in mind, does God really care if someone kicks a field goal?

— The Lazy Way to Success

As NewMexiKen looks around and views some of God’s recent handiwork, it occurs to me that God probably cares more when someone misses a field goal.

Survival of the most religious

Now here’s an interesting twist — religion as a Darwinian survival tactic.

In his book Darwin’s Cathedral, David Sloan Wilson, professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University in New York state, says that religiosity emerged as a “useful” genetic trait because it had the effect of making social groups more unified. The communal nature of religion certainly would have given groups of hunter-gatherers a stronger sense of togetherness. This produced a leaner, meaner survival machine, a group that was more likely to be able to defend a waterhole, or kill more antelope, or capture their opponents’ daughters. The better the religion was at producing an organised and disciplined group, the more effective they would have been at staying alive, and hence at passing their genes on to the next generation. This is what we mean by “natural selection”: adaptations which help survival and reproduction get passed down through the genes. Taking into account the additional suggestion, from various studies of twins, that we may have an inherited disposition towards religious belief, is there any evidence that the Divine Idea might be carried in our genes?

Excerpted from Robert Winston, Why do we believe in God? in The Guardian.

Doomsday

From an article in The New York Times, Doomsday: The Latest Word if Not the Last:

Word spread quickly in some conservative Christian circles when Israeli troops captured the Old City of Jerusalem from Arab forces in June 1967. This was it: Jesus was coming.

But Jesus did not return that day, and the world did not end with the culmination of that Arab-Israeli war.

Neither did it end in 1260, when Joachim of Fiore, an influential 12th-century Italian monk calculated it would, nor in February 1420, as predicted by the Taborites of Bohemia, nor in 1988, 40 years after the formation of Israel, nor after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

But after last week’s devastating earthquake in Pakistan, coming as it did after a succession of recent disasters, the apocalyptic speculation, bubbled up again with impressive fervor on many Christian blogs, in some pews and among some evangelical Christian leaders.

*****

“It’s inherently interesting,” [Craig C. Hill, a professor of New Testament theology] said. “If you have a sign out for the sermon, ‘Our obligation to the poor,’ you won’t get anybody. If you have a sign out for, ‘The Internet and the Antichrist,’ you’ll bring them in.”

666 Not So Evil?

Legions of metalheads who’ve saluted “the number of the beast” may need to subtract 50 from the numeral that adorns their notebook doodlings, T-shirts and tattoos.

A newly discovered fragment of the Book of Revelation challenges the conventional belief that the Antichrist’s mark is 666, indicating instead that it is 616. Expert classicists used multi-spectral imaging to get a better view of the text, which is written in archaic Greek and dates to the late third century.

“It is clearly an important new manuscript, giving us a relatively very early copy of the text of Revelation,” said Christopher Tuckett, a theology professor at Oxford University’s Pembroke College. “It is probably not the earliest manuscript of Revelation that we have … but this is the first time [the 616 reading] has been found in such an early text.”

Fear of 666 is so extensive it actually has a name — hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia — and has inspired everything from televangelist speeches to Hollywood films. …

mtv.com – News

So, as NewMexiKen has asked before, can we change the name of the highway back now?

Thanks to Reecie for the link (in her comment to the entry below).

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion; And vice versa

ABC News Poll:

Most Americans say religious leaders should not try to influence politicians’ positions on the issues, and abortion is no exception: Nearly seven in 10 — including most Catholics — oppose denying Holy Communion to Catholic politicians who support legal abortion.

Sixty-eight percent of Americans oppose denying communion to such politicians; that includes 72 percent of all Catholics and a similar number of churchgoing Catholics. Even among Americans who oppose legal abortion, 57 percent reject the idea of denying communion to Catholic politicians who hold the opposite view.

These sentiments fit with broader public views: Nearly-two thirds of Americans say religious leaders in general should not attempt to influence politicians’ positions on the issues. Again Catholics mirror the overall population — 65 percent share this view — although there are broad differences among other population groups.

God doesn’t take sides

Roger Ailes nicely slices Lileks.