Rosa Rubicondior

Two Emails

2013-05-22T22:58:00.000+01:00

Compare and contrast there two emails: one from Conservative MP, Nicola Blackwood; the other from Labour MP, Tom Watson.

Nicola Blackwood, MP; Conservative.

The first is from my MP, Nicola Blackwood, Conservative MP for Oxford West West and Abingdon, in reply to an email from me urging her to vote for the third reading of Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill.

Dear ***************,

Thank you for writing to me about the third reading of Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill. In the event, I reluctantly voted against the Bill.

I have taken a great deal of time to engage closely with the detail of this Bill and met with constituents on all sides of the argument, including equal rights campaigners, religious leaders and Ministers to discuss concerns about the Bill's drafting and implications before coming to a conclusion about how to vote.

From the beginning my concerns have not centred on the issues surrounding the definition of marriage. As a strong supporter of civil partnerships and opponent of discrimination in all its forms, I have no principled objection to equal marriage in secular institutions. I abstained from voting in the Second Reading because although I support the principle of the Bill, my concerns about details of the legislation meant I felt I could not vote for it before there was a chance to address these concerns through debate and amendments.

Initially I was disappointed that this Bill did not extend civil partnerships to heterosexual couples and that is why I voted for amendments NC16 and NC16(a) which will provide a prompt review of civil partnerships legislation. I am pleased that this compromise has been reached as it gives hope to many couples who are currently excluded from civil partnerships and unprotected by the legal rights it offers. My only remaining concern on this issue is that the timeframe and scope of this review remain unclear at this point.

Unfortunately, however, my other concerns about the detail of the Bill, and its potential unintended consequences, have remained unresolved.

In particular, although I voted for two amendments that sought to ensure protection of religious freedom, these did not pass and were not accepted by the Government. In the light of this, and given the vastly contradictory legal opinions offered by Aidan O'Neil QC and Karon Monaghan QC of Matrix Chambers, two of the most pre-eminent human rights barristers in this country, about the strength of the protections provided to religious institutions by the Bill, I am not convinced that these protections will work if challenged in the ECtHR, as is very likely. If you would like me to send you a copy of these legal opinions I would be delighted to do so.

I voted against the Bill quite simply because I could not be sure that the measures in the Bill for the protection of religious freedom would work in the way the Government intends and because the amendments designed to strengthen these protections were not accepted.

I felt as though this Bill, through poor drafting and rushed consultation, had become a choice between religious freedom and equality. In the end, as a supporter of both, I could not find a way to support a Bill that did not guarantee the protection of both.
I do hope that this helps to explain my position. Please do get back in touch with me if I can be of further assistance on this or any other topic.

Kindest regards
Nicola

Needless to say, I have expressed my disappointment to Nicola Blackwood.

Tom Watson, MP; Labour.

The second is from Tom Watson, MP, sent to me as a Labour Party member.

***********,

It was wonderful to finally see the gay marriage bill pass through the House of Commons last night. I am delighted that we are so close to having equal marriage in our country, and so very proud of our party.

In the spirit of celebration, I wanted to share with you the story of one couple -- Emma and Hannah -- who are now looking forward to their wedding and to married life together. Their story, in their own words, is below.

Today is absolutely a day to celebrate, but we have a long road ahead of us.

Help us continue our fight for a fair, equal, one nation Britain: make a donation to the Labour Party now.

Thank you for all your support and hard work.

Best wishes,

Tom
@tom_watson

--

**********,
It's been eight years since I met my partner Hannah.

Since then, we've had the joy of watching some of our closest friends and family members get married. The one sadness for us was not knowing when -- or even if -- we would ever be able to make that commitment ourselves.

All we have ever wanted is for our relationship to be seen as equal and today we can see a future where we too will be able to get married.

To see the equal marriage legislation pass through the House of Commons yesterday was a huge moment for us, and we are incredibly grateful to all the politicians who supported it.

We know this moment would never have come without the Labour Party's unwavering support for and leadership on gay equality -- from repealing Section 28 to introducing civil partnerships.

We have never been more proud to be members of this party, and we just wanted to say thank you to everyone who's campaigned for and supported this bill.

With thanks,

Emma Norris and Hannah Stoddart

(Emma on the left in the photo, Hannah on the right)

These emails probably illustrate the fundamental differences between the Conservative and Labour Parties on the issue of Human rights and equality before the law.

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Evolution Of A Plague of Locusts

2013-05-21T23:17:00.000+01:00

Magicicada adults and final stage nymphs.
Photograph by Arthur D. Guilani

If it hasn't happened already, and you live in the Eastern USA, you are in for a rare treat very soon. Rare, that is if you regard once every 17 years as rare, and a treat if you like fair-sized insects that can make a sound approaching the decibel level of a pneumatic drill.

I'm talking about the emergence of the so-called 17-year locust. Actually, it isn't a locust at all, which is a member of the grass-hopper and cricket family, but a cicada, which is closer to the aphids. The first Europeans in America to witness an emergence had heard of biblical plagues of locusts but had no real idea what a locust was, and assumed they were witnessing a similar biblical plague and called the cicadas locusts.

The 17-year cicada is a member of the Magicicada genus, or periodical cicadas of which there are seven species, three of which have a 17-year life-cycle and four a 13-year cycle.

Magicicada is the genus of the 13-year and 17-year periodical cicadas of eastern North America. Although they are sometimes called "locusts", this is a misnomer as cicadas belong to the taxonomic order Hemiptera, while locusts belong to Orthoptera.
Magicicada spp. spend most of their 13- and 17-year lives underground feeding on xylem fluids from the roots of deciduous forest trees in the eastern United States. After 13 or 17 years, mature cicada nymphs emerge at any given locality, synchronously and in tremendous numbers. After such a prolonged developmental phase, the adults are active for about 4 to 6 weeks. The males aggregate into chorus centers and attract females for mating. Within two months of the original emergence, the life cycle is complete, the eggs have been laid and the adult cicadas are gone for another 13 or 17 years.

Source: Wikipedia - Periodical cicadas

17-year Magicicada sp. Brood XIII, 207.
Photograph by Bruce Marlin

Apart from their synchronised life-cycle, where just about the entire population emerges in the space of a few days after a prolonged development stage as nymphs living in the ground and sucking on roots for a number of years that more than coincidentally is a prime number, periodical cicadas are interesting for their strategy for coping with predation.

Male Magicicadas, the ones which emit the sound by using a pair of tybals on their abdominal wall, have some success detering birds and other predators with a barage of noise but the silent females merely drop to the ground and hide in the undergrowth. Neither of these is very effective however and a whole range of predatory birds, mammals, fish, snakes, even turtles, gorge themselves on cicadas when they emerge, often in millions or billions over a relatively small area. And this is the periodical cicadas' survival strategy, or rather the survival strategy of periodical cicada genes.

The strategy adopted is one of predator satiation. During the few weeks that adult cicadas are active, predators eat their fill and can literally eat no more. In effect, the cicada genes pay a tax in the form of a percentage of their carriers (cicadas) so that enough will survive to produce the next generation of cicada genes.

17-year Magicicada septendicima

This long life-cycle and predator satiation strategy has a beneficial effect for the cicadas. As an entomologist observed in 1898, "The use of the newly emerged and succulent cicadas as an article of human diet has merely a theoretical interest, because, if for no other reason, they occur too rarely to have any real value". The same holds true for non-human predators or course. Predators do not become reliant on cicadas and even if they have a boom in their population following a cicada emergence, by the time of the next emergence, this will be long gone. This is unlike many other predator/prey relationships where a population explosion in, for example, voles, will produce a population explosion in a prey species such as, in the vole example, owls or stoats, which in turn causes a population crash in the prey species followed by a crash in predator numbers.

In fact there seems to be just one predator species which has managed to synchronise with the periodical cicada, in the form of a fungus which lives in the nymphs for the duration of their subterranean existence, producing spoor which remain in the soil as the final nymph matures and leaves the soil to climb a tree to become the winged adult. The spoors then infect the next generation as they burrow down into the soil to start the next subterranean population.

Quite frequently there will be a few straggler emergings of periodical cicadas a year either side of the main emerging but these are usually quickly mopped up by predators because their numbers are never large enough to satiate them, so these rarely breed. In effect, genes favouring early of late emergence, and nascent new species with these periods rapidly go extinct due to predation.

However, due probably to an acceleration in one of the nymph stages facilitated by favourable conditions, an early emergence at 13 years instead of the normal 17 is quite common and often in substantial numbers. Normally, these too produce few breeding successes due to low numbers but very occasionally, and on at least one occasion for each of the 17-year species in the last few million years, this has produced a viable, sustainable population of 13-year cicadas. Hence, for every 17-year species there is a closely similar 13-year species (two in the case of the 'decima' form). These species have names reflecting their periodicity and their relationship.

17-Year Period	13-Year Period
Magicicada septendecim	Magicicada tredecim Magicicada neotredecim
Magicicada septencassini	Magicicada tredecassini
Magicicada septendecula	Magicicada tredecula
Source: Wikipedia - Periodical cicadas

This pattern is also complicated because each species exists as several 'broods', each of which has been given a Roman numeral. Some of these broods populations appear to have gone extinct since this convention as adopted. Broods hatch in different years but the geographical range of broods of the same species rarely, if ever, overlap.

This then is an example of the selfish gene in action. It has suited the survival 'needs' of cicada genes to adopt the predator satiation strategy with no regard for the individual carrier of those genes. All that matters is that the genes survive in the next generation and any strategy which produces more descendants will, well, produce more descendants, so genes producing that strategy will prosper in the species gene-pool.

So, that explains the syncronised emergence of very large numbers and the long life-cycle. What is harder to understand is that the number of years is a prime number.

A clue to this is in the nature of prime numbers. A prime number is a number that is only divisible by itself and 1. This means that any competitor or predator with a long life-cycle can't syncronise with a 13-year or 17-year cicada other than with a 13 or 17-year life-cycle. For example, a two-year life-cycle would only be in sycronisation with the 17-year cicada every 34 years; a three year life-cycle every 51 years.

Sophisticated mathematical models have shown how, given a long life-cycle, a predator satiation survival strategy and populations competing for the same resources, stable populations with a syncronised prime number periodicity will tend to form.

It also means that, once a 13-year form has become established, it will only hatch in the same year as a 17-year form every (13*17) years, or 221 years, so they exist, for the most part as isolated gene-pools. Biologists have long debated whether this makes the 13 and 17-year forms separate species according to a biological definition of non-interbreeding populations. Charles Darwin was of the opinion that this possible interbreeding every 221 years was enough to make these merely forms of the same species. Current thinking, based on genetic evidence, and on the fact that the two forms do not in fact normally interbreed due to different mating rituals, including different sounds made by the males, is that 13 and 17-year forms are in fact distinct biological species.

This is, of course, an example of how the man-made definition of 'species' is not always appropriate. Certainly, nature doesn't read the rule book, making Creationist pontification about micro- and macro-evolution utterly absurd. We can readily see in the 13 and 17-year periodical cicadas how one ancestral species can give rise to two daughter species by the operation of environmental factors acting on genetic variation.

Can any Creationist who has survived this far suggest how this story fits with an intelligent design notion? What is the purpose of producing a super-abundance of food once every 13 or 17 years which, if it makes any difference to bird, mammal, fish, snake or turtle populations in a geographical location, only creates a surplus to starve next year when the cicadas have gone? What is the purpose of cicadas which do little other than feed moles for almost all of their lives, slightly reduce the growth rate of trees and act as hosts for a fungus which does nothing other than produce fungi?

If you live in the Eastern USA, go outside any day soon to be reminded of how evolution works and enjoy the results of a perfectly natural process producing one of the great spectacles of the natural world.

Further reading:

The University of Michigan Museum - Periodical Cicada Page.

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No Theists in Foxholes

2013-05-18T19:41:00.001+01:00

Amazingly, theists seem to imagine that trotting out the aphorism, "There are no Atheists in Foxholes" somehow vindicates their irrational belief in an imaginary friend in the sky. The argument seems to be that, if other people are irrational under stress, it makes my irrational superstition, which I have even when not under stress, somehow more rational.

But what more can we expect from those who base their beliefs not on the rational but on irrational, evidence-free superstition, usually for no reason other than that their mummy and daddy did.

As Richard Pryor (I think) said, if you ever find yourself falling off a high building there are two things you should do:

First, scream! Scream loud and scream all the way down. It won't help you survive but you might as well improve the chance of the paramedics finding your body!
Second, flap your arms. No human has ever flown but you just might be the first! What have you got to lose?

When the rational won't work, be irrational. At least you'll have something to think about on the way down.

There are no atheists in foxholes' is not an argument against atheism, it's an argument against foxholes.

James Morrow

Surprisingly, it doesn't seem to have been until the mid 20th century that anyone thought to come up with this defensive slogan for theists even though foxholes were more a feature of World War I. This is possibly because the conditions of warfare, and the evidence of the random nature of mass slaughter made very many people question their faith. They may not have been Atheists when they went into the foxholes, but many of then came out Atheist. Similarly, of those who survived, many Jews came out of the death camps having asked where God is, and found he wasn't there.

The slogan's origins is slightly obscure:

The origin of the quotation is uncertain. U. S. Military Chaplain William T. Cummings may have said it in a field sermon during the Battle of Bataan in 1942. Other sources credit Lieutenant Colonel Warren J. Clear, who was also at Bataan, or Lieutenant Colonel William Casey. But the phrase is most often attributed to war correspondent Ernie Pyle. It was also quoted by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in remarks broadcast from the White House as part of a February 7, 1954 American Legion Program.

Source: Wikipedia - There are no Atheists in foxholes

The lie to the claim, since it is stated as an absolute, can be given by a single example:

Joe Simpson, author of Touching the Void, addresses the issue in the film adaptation of his nearly fatal climb up the Siula Grande mountain. Referring to the moment when he lay at the bottom of a deep crevasse, dehydrated, alone, and with a broken leg, he states: '"I was totally convinced I was on my own, that no one was coming to get me. I was brought up as a devout Catholic. I'd long since stopped believing in God. I always wondered if things really hit the fan, whether I would, under pressure, turn round and say a few Hail Marys and say 'Get me out of here'. It never once occurred to me. It meant that I really don't believe and I really do think that when you die, you die, that's it, there's no afterlife."

Several atheist organizations object to the phrase. The Military Association of Atheists & Freethinkers has adopted the catch-phrase "Atheists in Foxholes" to emphasize that the original statement is just an aphorism and not a fact. The over 200 members of this organization publicly display their military service in order to show that there are atheists in foxholes, and on ships, and in planes [here]. The religious convictions of current U.S. military personnel are similar to those of the general American population, though studies suggest [page 25] that members of the military are slightly less religious.

Source: Wikipedia - There are no Atheists in foxholes

So much for the truth of the claim - which is rarely a consideration for theists. How about the logic of it?

Maybe there are only atheists in foxholes. If the faithful truly and fully believe in a protective deity, why would they dive into a foxhole to protect themseleves from the bullets whizzing by? A part of their brain knows damn well that if they do not protect themselves, the bullets will hardly discriminate between those who claim faith and those who reject it.

J. Anderson Thomson, Jr., MD;
Why We Believe In God(s) – 2011

As I showed in Why Religious people Behave Like Atheists, for the most part, and for most of their lives, even devoutly religious people act like perfectly normal Atheists. Like Atheists, they will get into the lifeboats if the ship is sinking and won't expect a magic invisible friend to reach down from about the sky to lift them clear. They will check before crossing the road and won't assume an invisible force is protecting them.

Just so on a battle-field. Like perfectly sensible Atheists, religious people, even the most fanatical, will take cover in the foxholes and will effectively abandon any belief that the invisible friend is looking after than or that it has a plan for them and decides when it's time for them to die. If they really believed that they would believe that diving into a foxhole would make not the slightest bit of difference to the outcome.

In actuality, there are no Christians in foxholes. What part of "thou shalt not kill" don't you understand?

RationalWikki - Foxhole Atheists

And why is that Muslims will pray to Allah, Christians will pray God (or to Jesus, Mary or one of their other demi-gods) and Hindus will pray to Krishna, Ganesh or Shiva, or one of their multiplicity of deities. In times gone by warriors in battle would have prayed to Wotan, Zeus, Apollo, Isis, or Osiris, or any one of a myriad other gods. Did that validate the existence of those gods, or justify a superstitious belief in them, or does the logic only hold for the god you are trying to justify believing in with no evidence? As I've said before, every argument for your god can be used for every other god too, and every argument against those other gods can be used against yours. That's no less true for this absurdly condescending aphorism. If you think it is, you don't understand confirmation bias.

In fact, even though they're not honest enough to admit it, there are no true theists in foxholes. There may be people who are pretending to be theists just in case it turns out to be true, but their actions tell a different story. Their actions tell us they don't believe what they preach.

By the way, if you're thinking of using the 'God helps those who helps themselves' excuse, are you really telling people that your god prefers people who behave like Atheists? That goes against everything your faith teaches - whichever one you are defending. It certainly goes against what the Christian Bible says (Luke 11:9).

So, the foxholes aren't so much full of theists as full of frightened hypocrites behaving like Atheists but pretending to be theists, just in case. All in all, not a good role model, excusable though their irrational behaviour might be in the circumstances.

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More Evidence For a Human Ring Species

2013-05-17T20:13:00.000+01:00

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Relationship between modern humans, Neanderthals and Devisovans (to which now needs to be added a fourth species)

Creationist loons and the professional liars of the Discovery Institute must dread a publication from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. After the recent confirmation that modern humans (Homo sapiens) and Neanderthals (H. neaderthalensis (or should that be H. s. neanderthalensis?)), interbred and that H.sapiens also interbred with the recently discovered Neanderthal relatives, the 'Denisovans', to form what amounted to an incompletely speciated 'ring species' only a few thousand years ago, the Institute has now dealt another blow to Creationism.

At the Biology of Genomes meeting last week, reported in Science, Svante Pääbo's team announced that DNA analysis of samples obtained from Neanderthal and Denisovan bones found in the Denisova cave in Siberia, using a new technique, has yielded a nearly complete, high coverage of the genomes of our closest cousins which not only confirms the previously reported interbreeding but strongly suggests a fourth, so far undiscovered species of Homo involved in the complex.

So far as I am aware, this is the first case of a new distinct group of Homo being identified on the basis of the DNA it contributed to another species with which it occasionally interbred.

It is amazing that, in the face of this blizzard of information confirming the scientific view of human origins, in full accord with the Darwinian Theory of Evolution, frauds, loons and politically-motivated liars still maintain their anti-science stance. One can only assume they feel the monetary rewards and the hoped-for political rewards justify this abandonment of pure reason and sacrifice of intellectual integrity. The Discovery Institute's ambition is of course well known. Their 'Wedge Strategy' is to insert Biblical Creationism into public schools disguised as science, and all areas of public policy to soften up the American people and prepare the way for abandoning the secular Constitution (and democratic freedoms which that guarantees), in preparation for installing a fundamentalist, Taliban-style Christian autocracy complete with rigid enforcement of the Old Testament Laws of Leviticus and Deuteronomy through the Christian equivalent of Sharia courts.

The Wedge Strategy includes propagandising against the basic philosophy of science whilst creating the false impression in the minds of the scientifically illiterate that the Theory of Evolution is a theory in crisis and that serious biologists are now rejecting it in favour of Creationist alternatives such as 'Intelligent Design' despite the latter being declared a non-science and merely a cover for Biblical creationism in 2005 in the Kitzmillar vs Dover Area School District Trial and as reluctantly admitted under cross-examination by Discovery Institute champion and Christian fundamentalist, Michael Behe, in the same trial.

Reference:

More Genomes From Denisova Cave Show Mixing of Early Human Groups
Elizabeth Pennisi
Science 17 May 2013: 340 (6134), 799. [DOI:10.1126/science.340.6134.799]

Monkeying With Creationist Fossils

2013-05-17T00:04:00.000+01:00

Rukwapithecus (foreground) and Nsungwepithecus (background).
MAURICIO ANTON

Creationism has taken such a battering recently that one is almost tempted to feel sorry for frauds like Ken Ham, Eric Hovind and Dwayne Gish and the professional liars at the Discovery Institute. It must be a bit like standing in a tornado trying to shelter under an umbrella just to keep the ignorant loons who give them money from finding out the truth.

Hot on the heels of the news that modern non-African peoples interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans to form a possible human ring-species, showing that human speciation was in progress only a few thousand years ago, and the news that a seven million year-old earliest human fossil had been found showing intermediate 'transitional' characteristics between humans and chimpanzees, comes news that the earliest common ancestor of both apes and Old World monkeys has now been found. It's a delicious irony that today's slap in the face for primitive Creationists is news about the evolution of Man from monkeys.

The Scientist today has an article by Ed Yong on a letter published in Nature by N.J. Stevens et al., ("Palaeontological evidence for an Oligocene divergence between Old World monkeys and apes," Nature, http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature12161, 2013.)

Apes and Old World monkeys are prominent components of modern African and Asian ecosystems, yet the earliest phases of their evolutionary history have remained largely undocumented. The absence of crown catarrhine fossils older than ~20 million years (Myr) has stood in stark contrast to molecular divergence estimates of ~25–30 Myr for the split between Cercopithecoidea (Old World monkeys) and Hominoidea (apes), implying long ghost lineages for both clades. Here we describe the oldest known fossil ‘ape’, represented by a partial mandible preserving dental features that place it with ‘nyanzapithecine’ stem hominoids. Additionally, we report the oldest stem member of the Old World monkey clade, represented by a lower third molar. Both specimens were recovered from a precisely dated 25.2-Myr-old stratum in the Rukwa Rift, a segment of the western branch of the East African Rift in Tanzania. These finds extend the fossil record of apes and Old World monkeys well into the Oligocene epoch of Africa, suggesting a possible link between diversification of crown catarrhines and changes in the African landscape brought about by previously unrecognized tectonic activity in the East African rift system.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12161.html

The team found fragments of two different species; one of which is the oldest known Old World monkey (Nsungwepithecus gunnell) and one of which is the oldest known hominoid (Rukwapithecus fleaglei). Both specimens were found in the same 25.2 million year-old stratum showing that diversification of the two families was well under way at that point in Earth's history.

As Ed Yong points out in The Scientist:

Nsungwepithecus sits on the stem of the Old World monkey clade, appearing before the last common ancestor of all living species within this group. Similarly, Rukwapithecus sits on the stem of the hominoid clade, within a group of obscure extinct primates called the nyanzapithecines.

Stevens clarifies that although some previously discovered hominoids may have evolved earlier than Rukwapithecus, its fossils are the oldest yet discovered for this group. But David Begun, a paleoanthropologist from the University of Toronto, is not sure. He thinks that Kamoyapithecus - another Oligocene primate that lived 27 million years ago in Kenya - might also be a hominoid. He even wonders if it was the same animal as Rukwapithecus, since one is known from upper teeth and the other from lower ones.

The significance of this find is that it brings the fossil evidence into line with the molecular evidence, placing diversification of these two primate families at about 26-27 million years ago in Africa, entirely in line with the theory of common descent with modification taking place over time in a very old Earth.

It must be hard being a Creationist fraud when those nasty little facts keep hitting you in the face and making a monkey of you again. No wonder they are so skilled at ignoring facts because, just like ignoring tornadoes, everyone knows it makes them go away.

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Self-Righteous Bigots Are Whining Again

2013-05-16T01:05:00.000+01:00

When Christians become a 'hated minority' – CNN Belief Blog - CNN.com Blogs:

I had to laugh when I read this blog by John Blake of CNN.

When Peter Sprigg speaks publicly about his opposition to homosexuality, something odd often happens.

During his speeches, people raise their hands to challenge his assertions that the Bible condemns homosexuality, but no Christians speak out to defend him.

"But after it is over, they will come over to talk to me and whisper in my ear, 'I agree with everything you said,'" says Sprigg, a spokesman for The Family Research Council, a powerful, conservative Christian lobbying group.

So we have the phenomenon of the shy Christian, or should that be shy homophobe hiding behind Christianity?

The hypocrisy of someone who wants to repress a minority complaining about being a repressed minority is all to obvious but it positively shouts out in the very next paragraph:

We’ve heard of the 'down-low' gay person who keeps his or her sexual identity secret for fear of public scorn. But Sprigg and other evangelicals say changing attitudes toward homosexuality have created a new victim: closeted Christians who believe the Bible condemns homosexuality but will not say so publicly for fear of being labeled a hateful bigot.

So closeted gays are perfectly okay and just as it should be, but imagine the effrontery of expecting a Christian to keep his/her bigotry and hate private? The very idea?

Obviously, Christians should be entitled to bully, harass, offend and deny human rights to anyone they wish provided they can find the necessary excuse in their Big Book of Excuses, aka, the Holy Bible. What's the point of a religion if you can't use it to feel better about yourself by elevating yourself above others and pretending to be their moral superior?

But what's interesting is not the usual Christian hypocrisy, inhumanity, double standards and over-inflated sense of entitlement but what these changing times tell us about two things:

The state of Christianity and how it's losing its former status.
How society's ethics and morality is developing whilst Christianity, like other religions, is trying to act as a break on human cultural progress and moral development.

On that last point, religion is not, and has never been, a source of morality. Religion and morality coexist and to a great extent, morality precedes and, in the early stages, informs religion. No popular religion ever formed around a god or an idea that was repugnant to the majority of people.

If you doubt that, ask yourself if you would think of a god as good or bad if it told you to kill babies? Is killing babies wrong because your god says so, or does your god say it's wrong because it's wrong? How do you think Christianity would have fared if those who made up the Jesus stories wrote about a man who told you to be unkind to old ladies and to kill kittens for fun?

Yes, yes! I know the Old Testament god was a monster - which is why the early Christians had to invent a nicer one when the Bronze-Age Hebrews came into contact with the culturally more advanced Greeks and Romans. Under the influence of newer ideas, 1st century Palestine was on the verge of abandoning Yahweh and becoming Yahwatheist, which is why Christianity was invented.

No matter how much humanism there is in nascent religions, the problem is that religion then becomes a dogma which can only be changed slowly and with great effort, whilst society continues to develop and reassess and re-formulates its morality. In the last few generations we have seen massive changes in our cultures and ethics. We have stopped buying and selling 'lesser races' as slaves; we no longer colonise and deny democratic and human rights to third-world people; we no longer deny working people and women the vote; we no longer fight wars with massive armies slaughtering one another to see who is the last one standing. We now see it as wrong to deny access to goods, services and opportunity to the disable.

Christianity has normally opposed every one of those improvements in human rights for ordinary people. At the very least, religions and theologians have always 'discovered' a perfectly sound theological reason to justify not changing. God created it that way for a reason and ours is not to reason why.

And now we no longer deny people basic human rights because of their gender and sexuality. This is the last bastion of Christian control. Christians like to believe they own marriage, and the ability to exercise what little control they have left is too precious to them to give it up without a fight. No area of human activity is out of bounds for their interference and meddling, even what consenting adults do in private.

Let's look at the excuse they use for this abuse:

Strangely, Jesus was entirely silent on the subject and yet this is the very Jesus whom these same gay-abusing Christians will tell you introduced a new covenant and effectively abolished the laws in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. But only the laws they find inconvenient, it seems.

First, the usual passage:

Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.

Leviticus 18:22

Leaving aside the question of whether gay men actually DO lie with one another 'as with a woman', which would be physically impossible unless anal intercourse with a woman was the norm when Leviticus was written, since neither of them have the right female equipment, why take this law in isolation and ignore so many of the others?

This 'Letter to Dr Laura (Schlessinger) has been around the Internet for many years. I first saw it on a Compuserve forum in about 1997.

Dear Dr. Laura,

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly
states it to be an abomination. End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.

When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Lev 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?

I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev 15:19-24). The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?

I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?

A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an Abomination (Lev 11:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this?

Lev 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?

Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev 19:27. How should they die?

I know from Lev 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?

My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? (Lev 24:10-16) Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)

I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help.

Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.

Your devoted disciple and adoring fan.

I think that makes the point better than I ever could.

What we are witnessing now is the end-game for Christianity. The tension on the elastic band keeping us tethered to the Bronze-Age is at breaking point. Society has progress to the point where hysterical Christian attempts to hold it back simply make it worse for Christianity by making them stand out as reactionary bigots merely using an outmoded superstition to try to cling on to the last vestiges of the power they have abused for so long.

Where once you could cross the road to avoid Christians shouting abuse at strangers and threatening them with their god, or the mad person standing in stained underwear shouting Bible verses and abuse from his or her window, we now only need to log on to Twitter or do a quick Google search to find today's batch of religious nutters and Dunning-Kruger simpletons telling the world what God thinks and how science has got it all wrong - with a computer.

Christianity on the Internet is now represented by lunatics, bullies, hate-filled bigots and frauds from which decent, humanitarian, compassionate human beings are recoiling and which is causing people to question the basis of their faith if it can produce people like the repugnant religious fundamentalists we now encounter daily. Consequently, most developed countries are witnessing a phenomenal rise in the numbers of people admitting to having no religious belief, many of whom are coming out of the closet Christians would dearly love to keep them in along with gays. In many European countries Atheists/Agnostics are now the majority and even in staunchly Catholic countries, church attendance is falling rapidly.

The whining Christians complaining about not being allowed to repress a minority any more, and needing to feel ashamed of their bigotry, is merely a symptom of that terminal decline.

[Update 19 May 2013] Yesterday France became the fourteen nation to abandon yet another inhumane piece if Christian dogma when it legalised same-sex marriages.

'via Blog this'

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Dunning-Kruger Creationists

2013-05-12T22:41:00.000+01:00

Science doesn't invent things, that's the job of technology. Science merely discovers things.

Sometimes though, science doesn't so much discover new things as put what is already known into scientific language together with the evidence and data underpinning it. Take, for example the understandable annoyance by Patrick Matthew that credit for describing evolution by natural selection had gone to Darwin and Wallace when he had mentioned it in an obscure book on forestry, assuming that it was such obvious idea that he couldn't have been the first to think of it, so never made much of it until Darwin and Wallace, who were completely unaware of Matthew or his book, were receiving all the credit - and praise for their genius. Darwin, of course, graciously acknowledged Matthew's prior claim, pointing only to the obscurity of his choice of publication as the excuse for his (and the entire scientific establishment's) ignorance of it.

The Dunning-Kruger effect occurs when incompetent people not only fail to realise their incompetence, but consider themselves much more competent than everyone else. Basically, they're too stupid to know that they're stupid.

RationalWiki - Dunning-Kruger effect

Just so with the Dunning-Kruger effect. One of my old mother's sayings - and she had many - was, "They're too daft to know they're silly!" She used it particularly for religious fundamentalists and fanatics but also for the idiot sons of the aristocracy and nouveaux riches who assumed they had the right to govern us and who populated the Tory benches at Westminster and kindly ran the local councils for us. It wasn't her own saying; she had learned it from her parents who were the product of countless generations of the English agricultural working class.

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

Bertrand Russell, The triumph of Stupidity

But Dunning and Kruger, in Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments showed the underpinning data, put it into the language of science and published it - and so claimed the title for its discovery. Which is fair enough really because the experiments they conducted were designed to sort the wheat of wisdom from the chaff of prejudice and ignorance, which are also to be found in those pearls of ancient wisdom. Science is a methodology for ensuring we are right by more than simple chance.

Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.

Kruger J, Dunning D.;
J Pers Soc Psychol. 1999 Dec;77(6):1121-34.

Which is a slightly convoluted lead in to a short blog on the Dunning-Kruger effect which I was prompted to look into in an attempt to understand the antics of a particularly obnoxious individual who seems to think that the best way to convince the world of his genius is to put on a daily display of ignorance and stupidity and that the best way to promote his religion is to be as obnoxious and abusive as possible in its name. Maybe it's just hate and frustration at his own social ineptitude and consequent social isolation which motivates him - certainly he shows the social skills of the sociopath - but equally possibly he could be a classic Dunning-Kruger simpleton, too daft to know he's silly.

Basically, Dunning and Kruger found that clever people tend to underestimate their own potential, usually assuming that, if they find a task easy, so will others. Asked to rank their expected performance in a test, clever people will tend to underestimate their relative performance. Stupid people, on the other hand, often over-estimate their own abilities assuming themselves to be experts on very little actual knowledge, assuming that this little knowledge is all that is required to be an expert. They tend to rank themselves higher than they actually perform.

Sound familiar? If not, spend a while on Twitter, especially following the hastags such as #Evolution, #TeamJesus, #Atheism or #Science to see a daily parade of people who know little or nothing of the subjects of either theology or science but who are eager to tell the world that science or biology has got it all wrong, or that there is definitely proof of whatever god they believe in because it says so in a holy book that they know for a fact is never wrong about anything. Few if any of them will have studied science or theology.

To be a dedicated Dunning-Kruger performer one has also to have the ability to wave away anything in the way of logic or facts which contradicts one's absolute certainty that one knows everything there is to know about a given subject. Either the information is obviously wrong - otherwise I'd know about it! - or the opponent is clearly mad, stupid, ignorant or evil. It is simply impossible that the information or logical reasoning could be correct, and who could possibly know or understand the subject better than one of the world's leading experts who knows everything about the subject, having once read a blog or watched a TV program, or read a few pages in a book, or simply thought about it once and decided it was all wrong?

Obviously, if you can't say when a monkey last gave birth to a human or a crocodile turned into a duck, like 'Darwin claimed', or you can't produce all the transitional fossils on which the Theory of Evolution (which is no more than a guess anyway) depends, Evolution is a lie and a religion, and science requires more faith that believing Jesus rose from the dead, that snakes can talk, or that Mohammed flew about on a winged horse.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

So the Dunning-Kruger Creationists imagine they've won the argument and proved their god must have done it all by magic, impressing the world with their brilliance and settling the argument once and for all. Can't think what all those scientists are wasting all their time and money on when it's all so obvious! And what's the point of learning any more when you know it's all wrong anyway? Why is everyone else so stupid!?

This phenomenon was investigated by Helmuth Nyborg of the University of Aarhus, Denmark:

Abstract
The present study examined whether IQ relates systematically to denomination and income within the framework of the g nexus, using representative data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY97). Atheists score 1.95 IQ points higher than Agnostics, 3.82 points higher than Liberal persuasions, and 5.89 IQ points higher than Dogmatic persuasions. Denominations differ significantly in IQ and income. Religiosity declines between ages 12 to 17. It is suggested that IQ makes an individual likely to gravitate toward a denomination and level of achievement that best fit his or hers particular level of cognitive complexity. Ontogenetically speaking this means that contemporary denominations are rank ordered by largely hereditary variations in brain efficiency (i.e. IQ). In terms of evolution, modern Atheists are reacting rationally to cognitive and emotional challenges, whereas Liberals and, in particular Dogmatics, still rely on ancient, pre-rational, supernatural and wishful thinking. [My empasis]

Nyborg, H. The intelligence–religiosity nexus: A representative study of white adolescent Americans

As RationalWiki explains, the tendency of clever people to under-estimate their potential is a form of psychological projection: those who found the tasks easy (and thus scored highly) mistakenly thought that they would also be easy for others. This is similar to the "impostor syndrome" whereby high achievers fail to recognise their talents as they think that others must be equally good.

He [Paul Revere] who warned, uh, the British that they weren't gonna be takin' away our arms, uh, by ringing those bells, and um, makin' sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed.

Sarah Palin, on Paul Revere's midnight ride,
June 3, 2011

It's a supreme irony that, whilst intelligent people can underestimate their ability because they have the intelligence to realise they could be wrong, unintelligent people can stupidly over-estimate their own ability because they lack the intellect to realise they could be wrong. People impressed by displays of self-confidence will often vote for stupid people whereas what we should be looking for in our politicians and leading industrialist, bankers, and generals is healthy self-doubt. Perhaps the single most important achievement of ultra-patriotic American Christian right is that people who are both educated and honest (i.e. the scientists and intellectuals) who should be amongst the best able and qualified to govern America, are effectively debarred from holding public office. Instead, America is governed by what often look like Dunning-Kruger syndrome sufferers.

The Internet at times seems to be crawling with religious loons, creationists and science deniers all confidently telling us, from a position of almost complete ignorance and with absolute certainty, that something is indisputably wrong or indisputably right, and who, when questioned, become abusive or simply dismiss you as a fool, and who never ever take the risk of accepting the answer to the questions they keep throwing out or reading anything which would disturb their cosy certainty and cause a little self doubt.

Refference: Kruger, Justin; David Dunning (1999). Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77 (6): 1121–34.
doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1121. PMID 10626367

Wikipedia - Dunning-Kruger effect.

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Sacerdotus - Manny's Many Twitter Accounts.

2013-05-11T22:51:00.001+01:00

We recently outed the serial abuser, loon, attention-seeking spammer and Internet troll, Manuel "Manny" de Dios Agosto, the emotionally immature failed wannabee Catholic priest from the Bronx who several of us have known for several months to be behind the Twitter account @Sacerdotus. The evidence can be seen here.

It is also very apparent, and has been for many months, that Manuel's method of abuse and harassment involves using multiple Twitter accounts. This blog will serve as a register for all Manuel's known Twitter accounts, so people who wish to ignore his incessant attention-seeking, infantile spam, cyber-bullying and harassment, know which accounts to ignore or block altogether. If Manuel's behaviour again descends to the depths he reached in the summer of 2012, when all his accounts had to be taken down by Twitter Support pending his undertaking to behave in future, this list can serve to support any official complaints against him.

Please feel free to register any new Manuel accounts in the comment section below, together with supporting evidence, and I will add them to the main blog. The usual signs that they are Manuel's accounts includes:

Repetitively re-tweeting tweets from his other accounts.
Promoting Manuel's blogs.
Challenging people to a debate about Christianity then ignoring questions or becoming abusive when asked to clarify a point or substantiate a claim.
Constant claims that people won't debate him or are afraid of him.
Abusing the people Manuel normally abuses or agreeing with Manuel's abusive tweets.
Having several of Manuel's accounts in the follower and following lists.
Sharing Manuel's obsessions.
Accounts impersonating people who Manuel is currently abusing, stalking or otherwise showing an obsessive interest in.
Abusive accounts by people purporting to be devout Catholics, showing an obsessive fascination with the trappings of Catholic priesthood and variations on the 'Sacerdotus/Sacerdotvs/curatus/curatvs' theme.
Replies from Manuel with one account to tweets sent to a different one. Running many accounts obviously gets confusing

Account	Notes
@Sacerdotus	Manuel's main account in which he pretends his name is Michael.
@SACERD0TUS	The account Manuel uses to get around being blocked, apparently believing that no one will notice the all caps to disguise the fact that he has replaces the letter 'o' with a zero.
@Sacerdotvs	Used by Manuel to get round blocks. Remains suspended.
@SacerdotusBlogs	Account set up when all Manuel's other accounts were suspended. Immediately commenced abusing those whom Manuel had been harassing prior to suspension. Also suspended a few hours after creation. Appears to have been deleted altogether.
@RosaRublcondior	An impersonation account Manuel was using to post gratuitously offensive obscenities until all his accounts were suspended by Twitter. Then used by him to support a petition to get me banned. Substitution of 'i' for 'l'. Remains suspended.
@RationallyFaith	Thinly disguised account normally used by Manuel to agree with himself and to abuse those who disagree with him.
@Bronxbomber777	Used by Manuel to post threats of violence, often sexually explicit, especially to females. Remains suspended.
@YearOfFaith2012	Plagiarised by Manuel from an official Catholic account, presumably in an attempt to give it credence. Used for the usual abuse and to make it look like people agree with him.
@NYLATINO2012	Used by Manuel to pose as a gay male prostitute to contact gays prior to spamming them with homophobic abuse. Has been known to post pornography visible to minors. Account appears to have been deleted very recently. Was active earlier on day of writing.
@jaxz0hnp	An impersonation account used to abuse and harass user @jaxzohnp. Simple substitution of 'o' with zero again. Remains suspended.
@StJohnSmith	Used for same function as @Rationally Faith. Still active but all tweets and following appear to have been deleted.

No doubt there are other accounts owned by Manuel de Dios Agosto. They will be added as and when they are identified.

This site details how to go about dealing with abusive behaviour on Twitter. Twitter Support should already have records of Manuel's previous form in this regard.

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Grains of Truth

2013-05-10T13:34:00.000+01:00

Chandra X-ray Observatory image of Cassiopeia A,
a 300-year-old supernova remnant.
Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO.

It must be awful being a Creationist these days with so much information available on the Internet and having to be ignored or explained away and with so many new discoveries being made available to a mass audience and having to be avoided. At times it must be a bit like walking about in a rain storm whilst telling yourself there is no such thing as rain.

Take, for example, this article by Maria Cruz which appeared in Science last week. It concerned a paper published in the Journal of Astrophysics by Haenecour et al. (Astrophys. J. 768, L17 (2013)) which reported on the discovery of grains of material that pre-date the formation of the solar system. These grains were part of the molecular cloud out of which the solar system formed and which subsequently became incorporated into solid accretions.

These presolar grains can be identified by their unusual isotopic composition which can only have been formed outside the solar system. The team used sophisticated techniques called 'nano secondary ion mass spectrometry' (NanoSIMS) and 'Auger electron spectroscopy', to identify silica (SiO₂)grains in two meteorites. The isotopic composition of the oxygen atoms in the silica suggests that they were formed in the core collapse of an earlier supernova - an exploding star in which heavier elements are formed out of helium by nuclear fusion under intense pressure and heat.

This reaction creates such a violent release of energy that it overcomes gravity and causes the star to explode, creating the nebulae in which new stars form. Unlike the first generation stars which formed out of collapsing molecular clouds of almost pure hydrogen, second and subsequent generation stars form from collapsing clouds which include these heavier elements, the so-called stardust. As the cloud collapses under gravity, the heat and gravity causes the fusion of hydrogen nuclei to form helium to start up. The release of energy causes the heavier elements to be thrown out to form an accretion disk out of which planets form around stable orbital centres. This is how we know that our sun is at least a second-generation star.

The problem for Creationist loons and the professional liars who promote Creationism as an alternative science, is that their preferred fairytale version of the creation of the Universe says that everything was created together in a single day, so there would never have been a presolar time or first and second generation stars. The existence of presolar grains will either have to be ignored altogether, or some other traditional coping strategy will need to be called into play, such as attacking the scientists or dismissing science as 'scientism', in order to handle the painful cognitive dissonance without incorporating this new information into their fairytale.

Reference: Supernova Grains Identified in the Lab, Maria Cruz,
Science 3 May 2013: 340 (6132), 526. [DOI:10.1126/science.340.6132.526-a]

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Sacerdotus - The Fraud Exposed

2013-05-09T11:55:00.000+01:00

This detailed report on Manuel "Manny" de Dios Agosto, aka @Sacerdotus and many other Twitter aliases, has just been published on Twitter by @Yhwh_TheLord. As regular Twitter Atheists will know, Manuel is a notoriously obsessive stalker, fantacist and abuser who uses Catholicism and an obviously fake piety as the excuse for his abusive posts there as well as on his blog site.

I happen to be his most recent obsession ever since I exposed his ludicrous claims to have scientific proof of the Christian god by simply challenging him to produce it and debate it in a neutral forum, but apparently I'm not the first.

It fully validates everything I had exposed about Manuel and his murky past in blogs here and here.

Enjoy.

A Saccy Report #atheist #atheists #atheism Sacerdotus, aka Sacerdotvs, aka Sacerd0tus, aka The Priest, aka Dodge Priest, aka CuRaTvS, aka Curatus, aka Enigmvs, aka Bronx Bomber, aka BronxBomber777, aka RationallyFaithful, aka....oh hell I give up, too many aliases to list. Who is this notable spiritual blogger and warrior against atheists? Could he be Manuel "Manny" de Dios Agosto, a male, possibly age 32, Spaniard/Basque and Puerto Rican New Yorker who is studying for the Catholic priesthood of the Lord Jesus Christ within the Catholic Franciscan Order? Who knows? Sacerdotus vehemently denies the name Manual (Manny) de Dios Agosto and instead says his name is Michael. Let's get to the facts:

http://www.myspace.com/curatus
This is the MySpace page for "The Priest". Points of interest on the page include the graphic, it's really strikingly familiar with twitter atheists. Also notice the four friends of the account, one of whom is our old buddy Tom. Say "Hi" to Tom, folks, he's been out of the game for a while. There's a curious gent listed among the friends named "CuRaTvS", which looks much like the "/curatus" portion of the URL for the page, we'll come back to him in a minute. Under the "General Interests" it's noteworthy that "The Priest" loves his Bronx Bombers and he's also into Catholic Apologetics. Some of his heroes are John Paul II and Mother Theresa. Glance at the "About Me" section under the Blurbs on the right side of the page where it says "What do you want to know about me...[blah blah blah]...Espiritvs Sanctvs", it's a fairly short commentary, commit that to memory for a moment and we'll come back to it. On the right side at the bottom of the page are the Priest's Details. He's from the "Boogie down Bronx", he's Catholic and Pisces. Finally the Priest attended Grace H. Dodge Vocational High School from 1996 to 2000. Now hover your mouse over the primary account graphic at the top left of the page, the popup indicates The Priest is male, 32 years old. MySpace pages have a "Blogs" section. Within the blogs for this account is the following entry which I linked to directly for convenience:

http://www.myspace.com/curatus/blog/361737014 [Dated 26 Feb 2006]
This is the Priest's personal bio, apparently he's male, Spaniard/Basque and Puerto Rican who is studying for the Catholic priesthood of the Lord Jesus Christ within the Catholic Franciscan Order. The second half this blog post is of notable interest, he says his "highschool time was just a trip. People nickednamed [him] the 'priest' or the 'priest from Dodge'". He was "the guy with black clothes, crucifix and priestly insignia. Moreover, some even mistook [him] for some 'goth' kids". And he attended "World Youth Day" events. The Priest sounds like a nice kid. He's obviously very religious and has been since childhood. What about that CuRaTvS friend of his? I think Curatus and CuRaTvS is a bit of a curious coincidence. Let's follow the link and see what CuRaTvS is all about on his MySpace page:

http://www.myspace.com/curatvs
Take note of the graphic. There are lots of tweets in the status feed about twitter names like "@RosaRubicondior" and "@Sacerdotus". The Priest from the last account that we looked at is in the friend list. Oh, but now look at this! This is interesting. On the right side in the "About Me" blurb is the exact same bio from the Priest's page. Wow. The same "What do you want to know about me...[blah blah blah]...Espiritvs Sanctvs". Hmmm. And at the bottom on the right in the Details CuRaTvS is a Catholic Pisces from the Boogie down Bronx, too, who also attended Grace H. Dodge Vocational School from 1996 to 2000. This is the same guy. The Priest and CuRaTvs are the same person. Yep, sure enough, in the Interests section he loves his Bronx Bombers and Catholic Apologetics. Now hover over the graphic at the top left, CuRaTvS is male, 102 years old. A hundred and two years old, haha, that'll really throw 'em off the scent! Let's see what we can find in CuRaTvS' blogs:

http://www.myspace.com/curatvs/blog/540766735
Here's an interesting CuRaTvS blog which starts out "The peace of the Lord be with you and yours always. This is Manny aka 'Dodge Priest'". Well now we know this is Manny. CuRaTvs and The Priest are Manny. Hi Manny! Say Hi to Manny, folks. There are also some links to Facebook pages, we'll come back these. Let's look at another of CuRaTvS' blog posts first:

http://www.myspace.com/curatvs/blog/544275135
This last blog made on September 11, 2011 is notable. The first few lines read "Today the 10th anniversary of the horrific terrorist attacks took place. September 11 will always be a date engraved in the minds and hearts of all who witnessed it, whether in person or on television". Let's commit that portion of this blog to memory for a moment and move on to another MySpace account:

http://www.myspace.com/sacerdotvs
This is the MySpace account for Sacerdotus, spelled "sacerdotvs" in the URL, similar to curatus/curatvs or enigmvs. Sacerdotus is "Catholic, studying to be a priest" and also a Pisces. There are lots of tweets in the feed about #atheists @RosaRubicondior and @Sacerdotus. Sacerdotus says he'd like to meet Jesus, The Blessed Mother, the saints and angels. Say Hi to Tom again in the Friends list, folks. Hi Tom! Now hover over the graphic at the top left, Sacerdotus is male and also 102 years old. Imagine that, two centenarians! Now let's check those Facebook pages:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Priest/132076986845953
This is the Facebook page for the Priest. There's one of our favorite graphics again. There are loads of tweets on the feed about @RosaRubicondior, #atheists and @Sacerdotus, links to sacerdotvs.blogspot.com, sacerdotus.com. We'll get to these in time. Let's look at the "Basic Info" for the Priest first:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Priest/132076986845953?id=132076986845953&sk=info
On the Basic Info page all of same bios from the MySpace page are listed. Loves those Bronx Bombers. Control + C'd & control + V'd from the MySpace page. Moving on:

https://www.facebook.com/dodge.priest [page now mysteriously taken down]
This is the Facebook page for Dodge Priest. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the feed to the oldest posts. Dodge Priest attended the following schools: IS193 (1995) in the Bronx, Grace H. Dodge Vocational (graduated 2000) in the Bronx, Holy Apostles College and Seminary (2004, Theology) and St. Philip Seminary (2005, Philosophy, Theological Philosophy no doubt). The top of the feed has lots of post to Sacerdotus's blog and some retweets about atheists and RosaRubicondior. Check out the "About" page for Dodge Priest:

https://www.facebook.com/dodge.priest/about
There are links back to the MySpace curatvs pages. Dodge priest is CuRaTvS and the Priest and Manny, all the same person. Dodge priest likes EWTN. Now have a look at another Facebook account:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sacerdotus/196437507086639
This is Sacerdotus' Facebook shrine to...well...his own blog. Scroll down to May 9th, 2012, quoting "please join me in giving @BarackObama a bronx cheer for supporting social engineering #catholic". A Bronx cheer, eh? Now scroll up to October 30th, 2012, quoting "Vote to help Bronx Hospital fight Breast Cancer". November 17th, 2012 "Sacerdotus shared News 12 The Bronx's status". I'm sensing trends here, mostly self promotion and insults to atheists, but sprinkled lightly with Bronx insights. Next let's have a look at Sacerdotus' twitter page, particularly his posted pics page:

https://twitter.com/Sacerdotus/media/grid
Here you'll immediately recognize his signature graphic from the MySpace pages and Facebook pages. It's the one in the background of this page. Now view his main Twitter page:

https://twitter.com/Sacerdotus
On his main feed page he now prominently says his name is Michael. He's been very adamant about this, his name is Michael. When questioned, he doesn't know anyone named Manny, he thinks Manny is some minor child. According to Sacerdotus, Sacerdotus' real name is Michael. On the feed, you'll notice a variety of topics, if three can be called a variety. There are insults to atheists, incessant plugs for his blog and comments about RosaRubicondior and not a whole hell of lot more than that! There are also links to his various blogs, foremost we'll finally examine his very own website powered by Blogger:

http://www.sacerdotus.com
Welcome to Sacerdotus.com, a personal vendetta against all things atheist, anything RosaRubicondior, and spattered with a few papal posts and posts about condoms and abortion. On the right side of the page, scrolling a bit down, is the "Blog Archive" box. Please take a look at it. Let's go all the way back in time to one of the first blogs ever posted on Sacerdotus.com back in 2011. For convenience, I've linked to it directly here:

http://www.sacerdotus.com/2011/09/10-years-later.html
Drumroll....... The blog reads "Today the 10th anniversary of the horrific terrorist attacks took place. September 11 will always be a date engraved in the minds and hearts of all who witnessed it, whether in person or on television" ....and cymbal crash.

WAIT! Oh My Fairy Godmother and Holy Talking Donkey, look at that! That's the exact same blog posted to CuRaTvS's MySpace blog! What a startling coincidence indeed. If you'll remember CuRaTvS posted a blog that said "This is Manny aka 'Dodge Priest'". Well, Hi there, Manny! Nice for you to finally meet all of us atheists.

So who is this Manny fellow, Priest of Dodge who loves his Bronx Bombers and Catholic Apologetics so much? Why he's none other than our very own friend to all atheists, @Sacerdotus! Sacerdotus isn't Michael at all, he's actually a guy named Manny, just as I posed several years ago when his anonymous offensive tweets and blog posts reached a crescendo.

Let's see if we can probe deeper. Let's have a look at the Classmates.com listing for IS193 (Intermediate School) in the Bronx:

http://www.classmates.com/places/school/Bronx-Intermediate-School-193/17014741
On the page if you scroll to the bottom there's an Alumni List. We're looking for a gent named Manny. Utilizing the "Find" or "Search" feature of your browser doesn't reveal any "Manny" in the listing. But, hey, Manny could be short for Manuel, right? Let's search again. There's a "Manuel de Dios Agosto" in the listings, could that be Manny, aka Sacerdotus, aka Dodge Priest, aka....oh never mind....you get the picture. Let's see what's on that profile:

http://www.classmates.com/people/Manuel-de-Dios-Agosto/27846231
Hmmm...well there's no profile picture or profile info (anymore) but none-the-less, Manuel de Dios Agosto did attend IS193 between 1992 and 1996. That certainly encompassed 1995, as listed on Dodge Priest's Facebook page. And Manuel de Dios Agosto did attend Grace H Dodge Vocational High School and graduated in 2000, same as Dodge Priest's Facebook Page. Hold the phone! What's that? Scroll to the bottom of the page. Look there. In your deletion frenzy of your classmates bio when I called you out on it, Manny, you forgot to delete your favorite graphic.

Other links of interest:

https://sacerdotus.wordpress.com/contact/
In case you're interested in giving him a call. New York area code, no surprise there.

http://www.formspring.me/Curatvs/pictures
@Sacerdotus' favorite graphic on Curatvs' blog remnants.

https://twitter.com/RationallyFaith
Saccy

https://twitter.com/SACERD0TUS
Saccy

https://twitter.com/BronxBomber777
Saccy (now suspended)

http://members.sitegadgets.com/mysticrose/guestbook.html
Search for Manuel on this page, in case you'd like to email him directly.

http://www.zoominfo.com/CachedPageMain?archive_id=0&page_id=37894156&page_url=//www.cny.org/archive/ld/ld050400.htm&page_last_updated=2003-02-02T09:44:19&firstName=Dan&lastName=Papineau
Search the page for Manuel.

On a final note, I'm less than amused by this blog:
http://www.sacerdotus.com/2011/09/from-atheist-to-catholic-huh-how-that.html
This a blog about how Manny converted from Atheist to Catholic, however as the links and profiles listed above have demonstrated, Manny has never been atheist. He was the Priest of Dodge even in gradeschool, attending World Youth Days, remember? He prominently states in this particular "Atheist to Catholic" blog that "It was physics that lead me to God, not any religious ideas". But this is a notable lie. Nothing -lead- Manny to God, he was indoctrinated as a child, as is demonstrated with the above links. According to his own posts he studied Theology and Theological Philosophy at both Theology and Seminary schools. This particular "Atheist to Catholic" blog post states "As a student of Science", though you've never been a student of science, Manny, as your trail of personal history clearly shows. You were the kid with the "crucifix and priestly insignia", as your own Bio indicated to everyone. You were never an atheist as you claim to be. You were never a student of science as you claim. That's all pure fabrication and this is a classic example of the twisted, manipulative, head-case way that theists lie for their gods. Your "Athiest to Catholic" blog says "ME - a young atheist physics student", but nothing could be further from the truth, as these links demonstrate.

Manuel "Manny" de Dios Agosto, Spaniard/Basque and Puerto Rican New Yorker who is studying for the Catholic priesthood of the Lord Jesus Christ within the Catholic Franciscan Order, Pisces, who loves his Bronx Bombers and Catholic Apologetics, aka Sacerdotus, aka Sacerd0tus, aka Sacerdotvs, aka Manuel de Dios, aka Curatus, aka CuRaTvS, aka the Enigmvs, aka Dodge Priest, aka the Priest of Dodge, aka the Priest, aka RationallyFaithful, aka Bronx Bomber, aka BronxBomber777, and untold other aliases. They're all yours, so now own them.

Special Note: For historical reference and amusement I've made saved screen captures of all of the aforementioned pages. This will be convenient when Robert T. Johnson (DA, Bronx County) and Bill de Blasio send Me that summons to appear in court, as you warned.

As I've told you many times before, Manny, what you say is irrelevant to what is demonstrable. Tend the garden and avoid indemonstrable knowledge.

@Yhwh_TheLord, http://tl.gd/n_1rk6q96

As @Yhwh_TheLord points out, all this is public information. Being an inveterate narcissist, Manuel has flood the social media with ludicrous claims about himself, although, at the time of writing, it appears that some of them at least are being hurriedly taken down.

On wonders what hysteria this further exposure will lead to. Stand by for another flood of new Twitter accounts all posting abuse and re-tweeting one another.

[Update 10 May 2012] The following link to screen shots of most of the above. See comment below.

**Indicates screen shot with a date. Sometimes you may have to look for it but it's there.

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St Paul - Lying On The Road To Damascus

2013-05-06T22:55:00.000+01:00

The Conversion of Saul, Michelangelo Buonarotti Simoni,
Capella Paolina, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican City.

One of the problems Bible apologists face is the frequency with which the Bible was obviously written by people who were ignorant of so much history and yet needed to set their tales in olden times to give them credibility and so made crass errors. Leaving aside such obviously glaring examples as the Noah's Ark story which was set in an event which simply never took place at all - a global flood a few thousand years ago - and the Tower of Babel story which was set on a flat Earth before there were enough people alive to build such a building if the Flood tale was true, there are plenty of more subtle examples.

I have written about one, identified by Thomas Paine in The Age Of Reason, where Genesis talks of people being "chased unto Dan" - somewhere which wasn't so called until many hundreds of years after the event it purports to describe - See How Dan Destroys The Bible. Then there is the story of the Israelite slaves working on the city of Raamses - which wasn't built until some 127 years after the reputed date of the Exodus. We also have the Israelite escaping from Egypt by crossing the Red Sea into Sinai, the author apparently being completely unaware that Sinai was then also part of Egypt, and would have been patrolled by Egyptian soldiers.

Then there is the muddle over when Jesus was born relative to the dates Herod the Great lived and Cyrenius was Governor of Syria.

But here's a little, almost unnoticed blunder concerning the one person who can be said to have founded Christianity, at least in the West, almost single-handedly; St Paul aka Saul of Tarsus. It concerns his 'conversion on the road to Damascus' and calls into question the veracity of the entire story and especially that of his 'miraculous' conversion.

Here's how the relevant bits are described in the Bible. Acts, was probably written by the author of John [correction: should have read 'Luke'. Thanks to 'Alluctus' for pointing out the error], one of the 'Four Apostles' who wrote the 'Gospels'.

And Saul, yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the high priest, And desired of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem.

And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven:

Acts 9:1-3
Then Ananias answered, Lord, I have heard by many of this man, how much evil he hath done to thy saints at Jerusalem: And here he hath authority from the chief priests to bind all that call on thy name.

Acts 9:13-14
And I persecuted this way unto the death, binding and delivering into prisons both men and women. As also the high priest doth bear me witness, and all the estate of the elders: from whom also I received letters unto the brethren, and went to Damascus, to bring them which were there bound unto Jerusalem, for to be punished.

Acts 22:4-5
Which thing I also did in Jerusalem: and many of the saints did I shut up in prison, having received authority from the chief priests; and when they were put to death, I gave my voice against them. And I punished them oft in every synagogue, and compelled them to blaspheme; and being exceedingly mad against them, I persecuted them even unto strange cities. Whereupon as I went to Damascus with authority and commission from the chief priests,

Acts 26:10-12

Now, that all seems very straightforward. Paul was travelling to Damascus on the authority of the chief priests of Judaism in Jerusalem with a warrant to arrest Christians and deliver them bound to the Temple authorities back in Jerusalem. All this takes place very soon after the alleged crucifixion of Jesus in around 33-36 CE.

A glance at the map will show you that Jerusalem was down south near the Dead Sea in the Roman province of Judea, just to the right of the word Judea on this map. Damascus, on the other hand was way up north, outside Judea and up into Phoenecia in the top right-hand corner of this map.

The slight problem for the story of Paul's conversion, and something of which the author was unaware, or perhaps hoped his readers would be unaware of, is that the Temple Authorities' writ only applied in Judea. The 'Chief Priests' of Judaism had no authority to have people arrested in another Roman Province and the Romans were totally unconcerned about which Judaic sect Jews belonged to. Being Christian was not an offence in 1st century Rome and if it had been, it would have been the Roman authorities who dealt with offenders, not Jewish ones. Paul's so-called warrant would have had no authority in Damascus.

Whatever Paul nee Saul was doing in Damascus, and whatever he was travelling there for when he was 'miraculously converted' and handily changed his name from the Aramaic 'Saul' to the Greek version of the same name, it had nothing whatsoever to do with arresting or persecuting Christians on behalf of the Jerusalem Temple Authorities or Chief Priests of Judaism. The whole story smacks of being written far away, by someone who was only vaguely aware of the geography and politics of the times about which he was writing.

That's not to say Paul didn't experience the symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy like he so vividly describes, but simply that the author of Acts should have thought up a better excuse for him going to Damascus, albeit one that might not have been so impressive as a spectacular conversion of a former zealous persecutor of Christians.

A shame the author didn't pay attention to detail and come up with a more plausible story to justify St Paul's spiritual authority over and political control of the early Christian sects in the Eastern Roman Empire. It is careless little blunders like this obvious little porky pie that destroy the Bible as a reliable source book for history and as a reliable guide to morals.

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Ear Worm Crosses The Species Barrier

2013-05-06T13:39:00.000+01:00

Outside near my garden right now is a male Blackbird in a beech tree announcing to the blackbird world, and particularly to any spare females, that this is his territory and he is available. He has been there every day for about two weeks or more singing variations of his repertoire of musical phrases and cadences and competing with the Gold finch's babbling silver trickle of notes and Great tit's piping in the same tree. (A typical Blackbird song on this RSPB site).

European Blackbirds are noted for incorporating musical phrases into their song and extemporising on them. This particular one seems to have a snatch of a song by Robert Burns called Ye Banks and Braes which is ironic really because the phrase it keeps singing is the tune to the lines "Thou'll break my heart, thou warbling bird, That wantons thro' the flowering thorn!"

Ye Banks and Braes

Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon,

How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair?
How can ye chant, ye little birds,
And I sae weary, fu' o' care!
Thou'll break my heart, thou warbling bird,
That wantons thro' the flowering thorn!
Thou minds me o' departed joys,
Departed, never to return.
Aft hae I rov'd by bonnie Doon

To see the rose and woodbine twine;
And ilka bird sang o' its luve,
And fondly sae did I o' mine;
Wi' lightsome heart I pu'd a rose,
Fu' sweet upon its thorny tree!
And my fause luver stole my rose -
But, ah! he left the thorn wi' me.

Robert Burns

Maybe it's just a coincidence and that it my brain's ability to recognise patterns which is working, but what we have here is an example of a meme or ear worm. It's something every successful pop tune writer tries to achieve - a phrase you keep playing over and over in your mind.

This Blackbird has pulled off the neat trick of passing a meme across the species barrier so my mind now keeps singing "Thou'll break my heart, though warbling bird...". A meme is of course a unit of cultural inheritance; in this case a musical phrase which interprets in the context of my British cultural background and my personal development as a song by Burns, complete with the Galawegian Scottish dialect words with phrases like "And I sae weary, fu' o' care!" and "And ilka bird sang o' its luve, And fondly sae did I o' mine; Wi' lightsome heart I pu'd a rose, Fu' sweet upon its thorny tree!"

In the context of the Blackbird's culture of course, that same meme has a totally different meaning understood only truly by another Blackbird.

This is the exact analogy of how genes only have meaning in the context of the environment in which they are expressed and by which the information in them is translated into meanings. This is a point which Creationist pseudo-scientists either don't understand or deliberately obscure when they claim that no new information can arise from mutation (which is nonsensical anyway) when what is important is not the information but what that information means in the context of the environment in which it expresses. Even with no change in information, an environmental change can produce a change in the meaning if that information and so an evolutionary change in the species carrying it.

The importance of the cultural context of memes is also illustrated in a blog I wrote a few days ago about cultural bias in which I presented some common 'proofs' of the existence of the locally popular god and the truth of different holy books with 'proofs' which only work on people with a pre-exiting belief in those gods and holy books. To people from other cultures, the fallacy of those 'proofs' is laughably obvious because it is quite simply devoid of an rational meaning.

It is because the interaction between the genotype and the environment produces the phenotype and the environment selects in favour of fitness to survive in that environment, that species look as though they were made for that environment. They were. They were made by the environment itself.

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Looking At Life

2013-05-02T18:52:00.000+01:00

In an earlier blog I looked at life and showed how, although people use it to mean something else, biologically speaking, 'life' is simply entropy management. Most people use the word life to express some hazy, often muddled, idea including consciousness, thinking, existing or even an idea of a 'soul' as though being alive means you have some magical entity inside you which gives you 'life'.

Religious people even think 'life' is something you get at some stage in your development as an embryo, although they will argue ceaselessly about when this occurs - the moment of conception, at the first 'quickening', at birth. In this respect, as in so many others, the ideas religious people have are almost unchanged from the opinions held by people in the childhood of our species when the world was so poorly understood it must have seemed a magical place.

It has even been claimed that there is something qualitatively different about the chemistry of carbon and the molecules based on it - the so-called organic molecules - as though they obey a different set of physical laws which separates organic 'life' from inorganic 'non-life', so life is what carbon atoms, together with oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulphur and occasionally other atoms produce.

This muddle and confusion over what exactly life is would be amusing if only Creationists in particular didn't keep challenging people to explain what it is, or to create it, or to say what its purpose is. Challenging one of them to define it first is a sure-fire way to bring the conversation to a shuddering halt, often with an indignant flounce and an insult hurled over the shoulder together with a passive aggressive threat to back it up. But never any coherent definition of 'life' of course.

It is a fundamental law of nature that entropy or the amount of disorder in a system tends to increase with time. This can only be halted or reversed using energy. Energy is obtained from somewhere else so, in order to manage entropy, living things need a source of energy.

Life on Earth gets it's energy ultimately from the sun, which gets its energy from a nuclear fusion reaction which creates helium out of hydrogen, releasing vast amounts of energy in the process. Entropy is increased in the sun, releasing energy which is used by living things on Earth to reduce their local entropy. Most of the sun's energy is radiated out into space of course, so Earth life only uses a tiny fraction of it. Never-the-less, this system shows how energy can be used locally to apparently go against the Second Law of Thermodynamics provided the Law is not violated in the system over all. The Second Law of Thermodynamics only applies in a closed system and the only truly closed system is the Universe itself. Local apparent violations of it are perfectly permissible provided the energy in the system overall remains constant.

What this means for 'life' is that life is a chemical and physical process. When that process ceases, life stops. We call this death. But where does life start?

Life started when the first replicators evolved efficient mechanisms for catalysing reactions in a controlled way. Any improvement in efficiency at replicating would have given them additional advantage and success - expressed as producing more copies of themselves, together with the improvements. There is no sense in which chemical reactions are turned on by some external 'spark'. Chemistry happens because the result is a lower energy state for the atoms and molecules involved. We still carry that early 'life' in that the chemical processes that make us alive are directly descended from those first reactions involving the earliest replicators. Life is a continuation of the chemical and physical processes which started some 13.5 billion years ago and which are continuing inside you right now. If you like the poetic metaphor of a 'spark of life' that's fine just so long as you remember that there was no initial spark to start it going and there is nothing magical or metaphysical keeping it going.

Life does not start afresh at every new generation or with every new individual. New individuals and new generations are produced out of living cells produced by living things.

Very basically, all higher organisms, and especially multi-cellular ones exist in two different phases, one of which isn't even multicellular (although in mosses, ferns and liverworts, and in some other creatures it is, or become multicellular). A sperm and an ovum are the single-celled phases of many animals including us mammals. What we see as the normal animal is simply the multicellular phase. In most animals the single-celled phase has one of each chromosome. Two of these come together to produce a cell with two of each. These phases are called haploid and diploid respectively.

How this works, and how this system evolved in multi-cellular organisms can be seen by looking at how it works in plants.

	In mosses, both phases are there but the haploid phase is what we see as a typical moss plant. At the right time, this phase produces special egg and sperm cells. The sperm cells swim across to the egg cells and fertilise them to produce the diploid phase. (This is why mosses need to live in damp conditions so there is some moisture for the sperms to swim in). The diploid phase then produces a multicellular stem with a little fruiting body on top in which haploid spores are produced. These get distributed and grow into new moss plants.
Ferns have taken this process one step further. What you see when you look at a fern is the diploid phase. At the right time, usually underneath the fronds, dust-like haploid spores are produced. A few of these will find the right conditions in which to grow into a flat little haploid phase or gametophyte in which develops egg cells and sperm cells. After fertilisation, the resulting diploid cell divides and grows into the adult diploid phase. Evolving this system meant ferns were able to live in conditions where the whole plant didn't need to be wet so long as the ground it grew on was damp.
	In flowering plants, the normal plant, as with ferns, is diploid phase. The haploid phase is the single-celled pollen and ovules. When an ovule is fertilised it divides and grows to form an embryonic plant in the form of a seed, which is the distributive diploid phase which grows into a diploid plant. Using wind, insects and other creatures to distribute the pollen means that flowering plants don't need to be wet or even grown in especially damp conditions. For an outline of how this system evolved, especially it's co-evolution with insects, see Does God Hate Bees?

This should illustrate how talking about life starting at conception (union of two haploid phase cells to form the initial cell of the diploid phase) makes no sense biologically, nor does talking about a new life at any stage in the reproductive process. Life is always present and has always been present as long as replicators have been replicating. We are all descended from those original replicators so we all share that 'life' in that we are all still managing entropy locally.

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Oldest Americans Refute The Bible

2013-05-01T23:23:00.000+01:00

The Toca da Tira Peia Rockshelter during the 2008 excavations.

The news just keeps getting worse for the frauds at the Discovery Institute.

Today New Scientist brings news of what could turn out to be evidence that humans were living in Brazil 20,000 years ago, some 14,000 years before the Universe was created according to the Christian mythology that the Discovery Institute is trying to insert into US public schools disguised as science, despite the constitutional bar on US governments doing anything to promote or establish any religion.

For those who haven't yet encountered the Discovery Institute and its professional liars, it is the organisation behind the current attempt to con the American people into believing that 'Intelligent Design' is science, despite it being found not to be in the 'Dover Trial'.

The Discovery Institute is using the Wedge Strategy to try to discredit science and replace it with the primitive Bronze-Age origin myth from Genesis, prior to overthrowing the American Constitution and establishing a fundamentalist Christian theocracy. Its power ambitions are not limited to the USA. It is supporting similar subversive activities in other countries.

These theocracies would be almost indistinguishable from the form of government established in Afghanistan under the Taliban, complete with a Christian version of Sharia courts and a strict, literal enforcement of the biblical Laws of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. For more on this see Why Creationists Lie To Us.

The article by Michael Marshall in New Scientist reports on a paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science in which the authors present evidence of stone tools which were found under a rock shelter in Brazil being 20,000 years old.

Abstract.
When and how did the first human beings settle in the American continent? Numerous data, from archaeological researches as well as from palaeogenetics, anthropological and environmental studies, have led to partially contradictory interpretations in recent years, often because of the lack of a reliable chronological framework. The present study contributes to the establishment of such a framework using luminescence techniques to date a Brazilian archaeological site, the Toca da Tira Peia. It constitutes an exemplary case study: all our observations and measurements tend to prove the good integrity of the site and the anthropological nature of the artifacts and we are confident in the accuracy of the luminescence dating results. All these points underline the importance of the Toca da Tira Peia. The results bring new pieces of evidence of a human presence in the north-east of Brazil as early as 20,000 BC. The Toca da Tira Peia thus contributes to the rewriting of the history of the peopling of the American continent.

Lahaye, C., Hernandez, M., et al; Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 40, Issue 6, June 2013, Pages 2840-2847.

Of course, like all scientific claims, this one is not universally accepted. As Marshall says:

For others, it is the tools that are raising eyebrows. "Rock shelters are difficult to interpret," points out John McNabb of the University of Southampton, UK. Stones falling from above can break, making them look like human-made tools. As a result, McNabb calls the evidence "suggestive but unproven".

Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.

The Wedge Document, Discovery Institute

It has long been accepted that the earliest traces of human habitation in the Americas were of the 'Clovis People' who are known to have entered North America from Siberia about 13,000 years ago. However, evidence have been accumulating for the last 30 years that there was an earlier colonisation by at least 15,000 years ago.

This latest find should probably be regarded as tentatively adding to that evidence, pending corroboration. If true, it would show that modern humans had crossed into North America from Asia and had penetrated down the Panamanian Isthmus and deep into South America much earlier than previously thought. It has long been assumed that they came via the 'Beringia Land Bridge' during a lowering of sea levels during a glaciation period. An earlier migration is certainly not precluded by that theory.

We will also pursue possible legal assistance in response to resistance to the integration of design theory into public school science curricula.

The Wedge Document, Discovery Institute

But of course, even if 'Clovis' turns out to have been the earliest culture to arise in the Americas, it is devastating for biblical creationism and especially for a notion of a 6,000 year-old Earth and life being reset about 4,000 years ago by a devastating global flood.

The surprising thing is that Christian fundamentalists persist in this denial of the evidence when even one of their favourite founding fathers, regarded as one of their greatest thinkers, St. Augustine of Hippo, inadvertently proved that humans could not all have descended from Noah when trying to argue that people could not live on the other side of Earth:

But as to the fable that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours that is on no ground credible. And, indeed, it is not affirmed that this has been learned by historical knowledge, but by scientific conjecture, on the ground that the earth is suspended within the concavity of the sky, and that it has as much room on the one side of it as on the other: hence they say that the part that is beneath must also be inhabited. But they do not remark that, although it be supposed or scientifically demonstrated that the world is of a round and spherical form, yet it does not follow that the other side of the earth is bare of water; nor even, though it be bare, does it immediately follow that it is peopled.

It is too absurd to say, that some men might have taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean, and crossed from this side of the world to the other, and that thus even the inhabitants of that distant region are descended from that one first man. [My emphasis]

Source: De Civitate Dei, Book XVI, Chapter 9 — Whether We are to Believe in the Antipodes; Augustine of Hippo,
translated by Rev. Marcus Dods, D.D.; from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library at Calvin College.

To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.

The Wedge Document, Governing Goals,
Discovery Institute

Well quite. It's not often that I agree with St. Augustine but one can't argue with that logic. We know there are people living on the far side of Earth and, as St. Augustine points out, they wouldn't have been able to get there in such a short time, ergo there never was a flood and Earth is much older than the Bronze-Age goat-herders thought. St. Augustine's blunder was in making a testable prediction of course - something that the more astute apologists and creationist frauds know they must avoid at all costs in case it is tested.

St. Augustine's prediction has been tested and the Bible was promptly falsified, as is so often the case when its claims are compared to reality.

So, all we need now is for the frauds at the Discovery Institute to accept reality and abandon their strategy of trying to fool the American people into giving them unaccountable power to abuse and with which to abuse others. Any bets on that happening any day soon?

Reference:

Christelle Lahaye, Marion Hernandez, Eric Boëda, Gisele D. Felice, Niède Guidon, Sirlei Hoeltz, Antoine Lourdeau, Marina Pagli, Anne-Marie Pessis, Michel Rasse, Sibeli Viana, Human occupation in South America by 20,000 BC: the Toca da Tira Peia site, Piauí, Brazil, Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 40, Issue 6, June 2013, Pages 2840-2847, ISSN 0305-4403, 10.1016/j.jas.2013.02.019.

( http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440313000733)

Keywords: Optically stimulated luminescence dating; Toca da Tira Peia; Brazil; First peopling in America; Luminescence

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Confirmation Bias

2013-04-28T23:07:00.000+01:00

Er... But which god?

Confirmation bias is what causes people to say stupid things like, "Everything proves God/Allah". The Cosmological Argument and Teleological Argument depend on confirmation bias in the target audience - something of which religious apologists are only too well aware since they use it all the time.

Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs.

Wikipedia - Confirmation bias.

So what's this got to do with religion? You're probably thinking it doesn't apply to you. If you're religious you probably believe you have very good, objective reasons for your beliefs and you see evidence of your god all around you. The strange thing is, and what gives the lie to it being objective evidence, is that people of other religions see the same thing and think it's evidence for their god and their religion.

Well, you might say, we have proofs for our religion that can't be proofs for theirs. The problem is, so do they.

The strange thing is that your 'proofs' don't seem to convince people who don't already share your beliefs and their 'proofs' don't seem to convince you. Take a look at these which I came across researching for an article on miracles.

Any Muslims convinced by these and ready to accept Jesus as their personal saviour yet? Why not? Plenty of Christians are convinced.

How about these?
Have they got any Christians or Jews chanting, "There is no god but God and Mohamed is his Prophet", yet? How come? Millions of Muslims will tell you they are proof of Allah.

Isn't it strange how they only convince people who are already convinced?

You seen now why Atheists don't find any of these 'miraculous' appearances convincing at all? Just like Christians do with the Islamic 'evidence' and just like Muslims do with the 'miraculous' images of Jesus or Mary, we see them for what they are - evidence only of the human ability to see patterns and of the human ability to look for and find 'evidence' which 'confirms' pre-existing beliefs.

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Impossible Miracles

2013-04-28T21:18:00.001+01:00

The problem with miracles is that no one can prove they happened - which is a bit of a drawback for a church like the Catholic Church which relies so heavily on miracles to impress the 'flock' and keep them in awe and wonder.

The problem is with the definition of a miracle in the first place. Here's what the Catholic Encyclopedia has to say:

(Latin miraculum, from mirari, "to wonder").

In general, a wonderful thing, the word being so used in classical Latin; in a specific sense, the Latin Vulgate designates by miracula wonders of a peculiar kind, expressed more clearly in the Greek text by the terms terata, dynameis, semeia, i.e., wonders performed by supernatural power as signs of some special mission or gift and explicitly ascribed to God...

The wonder of the miracle is due to the fact that its cause is hidden, and an effect is expected other than what actually takes place. Hence, by comparison with the ordinary course of things, the miracle is called extraordinary. In analyzing the difference between the extraordinary character of the miracle and the ordinary course of nature, the Fathers of the Church and theologians employ the terms above, contrary to, and outside nature. These terms express the manner in which the miracle is extraordinary.

A miracle is said to be above nature when the effect produced is above the native powers and forces in creatures of which the known laws of nature are the expression, as raising a dead man to life, e.g., Lazarus (John 11), the widow's son (1 Kings 17). A miracle is said to be outside, or beside, nature when natural forces may have the power to produce the effect, at least in part, but could not of themselves alone have produced it in the way it was actually brought about. Thus the effect in abundance far exceeds the power of natural forces, or it takes place instantaneously without the means or processes which nature employs. In illustration we have the multiplication of loaves by Jesus (John 6), the changing of water into wine at Cana (John 2) — for the moisture of the air by natural and artificial processes is changed into wine — or the sudden healing of a large extent of diseased tissue by a draught of water. A miracle is said to be contrary to nature when the effect produced is contrary to the natural course of things.

The term miracle here implies the direct opposition of the effect actually produced to the natural causes at work, and its imperfect understanding has given rise to much confusion in modern thought. Thus Spinoza calls a miracle a violation of the order of nature (proeverti, "Tract. Theol. Polit.", vi). Hume says it is a "violation" or an "infraction", and many writers — e.g., Martensen, Hodge, Baden-Powell, Theodore Parker — use the term for miracles as a whole. But every miracle is not of necessity contrary to nature, for there are miracles above or outside nature.

Source: The Catholic Encyclopedia (accesses 28 April 2013).

A cynic might think that the last sentence above is deliberately confused and designed to give the appearance of refuting Spinoza and Hume whilst not redefining a miracle to bring it within the realm of nature, and thus not miraculous. Both Spinoza and Hume had pointed out essentially the same thing - that miracles are, by definition, unnatural or 'super-natural' and are thus a violation of natural laws. To argue that a 'miracle' which is 'above or outside nature' is not contrary to nature is absurd if one accepts the normal definition of 'nature' as everything about the material Universe.

na·ture
n.
1. The material world and its phenomena.
2. The forces and processes that produce and control all the phenomena of the material world: the laws of nature.

Source: The Free Dictionary (accessed 28 April 2013)

Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. It ranges in scale from the subatomic to the cosmic.

Source: Wikipedia - Nature (accesses 28 April 2013)

So there can be little doubt, despite what the Catholic Encyclopedia tries to imply, that miracles, at least as they are defined and understood by those who promote them and those who believe in them, are things which have no natural explanation or, in Spinoza's and Hume's words, violate natural law. In fact, Spinoza goes further and says natural laws cannot be violated, so even if miracles appear to be unnatural, this is simply due to the ignorance of the observer. Miracles are simply natural events for which we don't yet have a natural explanation.

And this is where the problem begins.

We all want to believe in impossible things, I suppose, to persuade ourselves that miracles can happen.

Paul Auster, The Book of Illusions

Because there can be no natural explanation there can be no evidence other than someone else's word for it that a given miracle actually happened. Additionally, because miracles are unnatural the likelihood of them occurring spontaneously is zero - otherwise they could have a natural explanation. Even if we are charitable and allow that they are not actually impossible (how can something that happened be impossible?) but are just so highly unlikely that a natural cause can be excluded, or at least given a lower probability that a supernatural or 'divine' intervention, we are left with a highly unlikely event.

We are, in effect, being required to take someone's word for it that a highly unlikely, even impossible, event actually happened, without them supplying any evidence. Why on Earth would any rational person do that?

How many people would you believe if they told you, without the slightest scrap of evidence, that, for example, they had just seen the Virgin Mary appear out of thin air in Central Park, New York, or a man fly to Heaven and back on a winged horse from Hyde Park, London? How about if they claimed to have just witnessed a man satisfy the hunger of thousands of people with a few loaves of bread in Montreal, Canada?

What other explanations would you consider first? Which other perfectly natural causes could there be for that person telling you such a thing?

Why would you consider those more satisfactory than that they were telling you the truth?

And would you really believe them without wanting to see just a little evidence? I suggest that you wouldn't believe a word of it. And yet when religious people read about, or are told about, miracles, they believe what they are told, yet nowhere in all that was there ever more than one person telling another something that you would never have believed had they told you first hand. The story has been given a spurious gloss of credibility by being repeated by authority figures - authority figures who had no more basis for belief that you did.

This is how the church uses its 'authority' to persuade people to believe the unbelievable. Believing everything by faith simply means the church has not yet found your lower limit of credulity.

As John W Loftus points out, Christians have a double burden of proof when it comes to proving miracles.

On the one hand, they must show that a particular "event" was not very likely...

On the other hand, Christians must show that the purported miraculous event happened. And yet, everything they say to establish the first burden of proof takes away the strength of the second burden of proof. That is, the more they argue that an event was miraculous, the less likely such an event occurred. But the more they argue that an event was likely to have occurred, then the less likely that event can be understood as miraculous.

The only way people judge whether or not a miracle occurred is whether or not it fits within their control beliefs (i.e., which God he believes in and was taught to believe). One cannot start with the evidence for a miracle to show that the Christian God exists, simply because a person must already believe it’s plausible for the Christian God to exist in the first place (unless it’s a case of accepting what someone says because that person is believable). Otherwise, the evidence isn’t evidence for anything, much like how the evidence in a criminal trial isn't evidence of anything since the prosecutor and defense attorney will have two different ways of seeing that evidence based in separate control beliefs. And yet, how is it possible to believe in the Christian God in the first place without the cold hard evidence that will lead him to believe? The explanation of a self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit doesn’t solve anything.

John W. Loftus. Miracles, a Double Burden of Proof, and Control Beliefs

So here is a simple challenge for any Christian. Take any miracle you wish and which you believe, and explain why a non-believer should believe it really happened and that the cause could only have been the Christian god. After all, if you believe in said miracle, that must be what you believe, so all you need do is explain the rational basis for your belief. It is not enough to say that someone else believes it.

What could be easier than that?

If you can't, you might like to consider exactly why you believe it yourself.

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Recent Evolution in Britain

2013-04-27T16:58:00.000+01:00

Senecio cambrensis

A lovely example of the very recent evolution of an entirely new plant species has been discovered in North Wales. I'm grateful to @Kaimitai on Twitter for bringing it to my attention.

The new species, Senecio cambrensis, also known as Welsh groundsel or Welsh ragwort, arose as a fertile allopolyploid hybrid between S. vulgaris or common groundsel, and S. squalidus or Oxford ragwort. Hybrids of these two species are the fairly common but sterile S. x baxteri (in taxonomic nomenclature 'x' indicates a hybrid) which is thought to have been the actual ancestor of S. cambrensis. Sometime in the early 20th century an accidental doubling of the chromosome number led to a fertile plant - the Welsh groundsel.

Left: Senecio vulgaris. Right: Senecio squalidus.

The new species can only reproduce with other members of its own species making it indisputably a new species - contrary to the claim made by Creationist pseudo-scientists that evolution cannot give rise to new species.

It was discovered in 1948 by Horace E. Green growing at Ffrith, Flintshire, Wales and was first systematically described in 1955 by Effie M. Rosser of Manchester Museum. In 1982 S. cambrensis was discovered growing in several sites near Edinburgh, Scotland. This population is believed to have arisen independently of the North walian population in about 1974 but had disappeared by 1993. It has been reported, probably mistakenly, in Shropshire, England and more reliably at Wolverhampton, England. The Wolverhampton population now also seems to have disappeared.

One of the original parent species, S. squalidus or Oxford ragwort is an alien species in Britain having been introduced from Sicily in the 18th century. It's own history in the UK is an interesting example of how environmental change can bring about evolutionary change:

This Senecio [S. squalidus] was introduced into Britain via Francisco Cupani and William Sherard in the years of their visit 1700, 1701 and 1702 from Sicily where it lives as a native on volcanic ash to the Duchess of Beaufort's garden at Badminton. Later a transfer of the genetic material to the Oxford Botanic Garden by the "Horti Praefectus" (the title still given to the head gardener at the Oxford Botanic Garden) Jacob Bobart the Younger before his death in 1719 (which is also the same year that Bobart retired as Horti Praefectus and perhaps a good indication of when this species of ragwort and other invasive species might have "escaped" and started to make their home in the greater British Isles). The Sicilian ragwort escaped into the wild and grew in the stonework of Oxford colleges (with the specific mention of the Bodleian Library) and many of the stone walls around the city of Oxford. This gave the plant its common name, "Oxford Ragwort".

The vortex of air following the express train carries the fruits in its wake. I have seen them enter a railway-carriage window near Oxford and remain suspended in the air in the compartment until they found an exit at Tilehurst [near Reading, Berkshire, some 20 miles south-east of Oxford].

George Druce, 1927
Carolus Linnaeus first described Senecio squalidus in 1753, although there is a dispute as to whether the material came from the Botanic Garden or from walls in the city; the taxonomy for this species is further complicated by the existence of species with a similar morphology in continental Europe.

James Edward Smith officially identified the escaped Oxford ragwort with its formal name Senecio squalidus in 1800.

During the Industrial Revolution, Oxford became connected to the railway system and the plant gained a new habitat in the railway lines clinker beds, gradually spreading via the railway to other parts of the country. The process was accelerated by the movement of the trains and the limestone ballast that provides a well-drained medium which is an adequate replica of the lava-soils of its native home in Sicily.

Source: Wikipedia - Senecio squalidus

So, from an escaped botanical specimen in Oxford, Oxford ragwort has spread throughout the UK assisted by human agency and facilitated by the Industrial Revolution - a process which is continuing today with other species with wind-distributed seeds by being blown along motorways and highways in the direction of traffic. It is now a widespread and common species and is something of a pest in the New Forest where regular eradication campaigns are conducted because it is thought to be harmful to the horses which roam freely in the forest.[However, see Update below]

There we have not only another example of recent speciation by hybridization, so disconcerting to Creationists, but a nice example of how environmental change can facilitate and drive evolution. Who would be a Creationist pseudo-scientist having to hope his credulous target market remains ignorant of this sort of information, especially when they have the Internet to contend with? What a way to earn a living!

No wonder religious superstition is declining so rapidly these days and is becoming more and more the province of the ignorant and scientifically illiterate upon whom Creationist cheats and con artists prey.

[Update 3 may 2013]
I am indebted to fellow blogger mabymynydd who has pointed out that it is the native Common Ragwort (Senecio jacobaea), not the Oxford Ragwort (S. squalidus) which is considered by some to be a pest in the New Forest, though the danger to horses is disputed. See comment below.

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The Danger of Faith

2013-04-24T23:58:00.001+01:00

The recent Twitter spat between two people whom I admire has prompted me to look again at faith and what it can lead to. They are the (normally) left-leaning political journalist with a mercurial mind, rapier wit and impeccable logic, Mehdi Hassan, who is also a Muslim, and the evolutionary biologist, author, Humanist and Atheist, Richard Dawkins.

The spat began when Dawkins, who had previously been told by Hassan in a public debate, that he believed Mohamed had literally flown to Heaven on a flying horse, just as the Qur'an says, and Dawkins, perhaps rather abrasively (which is too easy with only 140 charcters) seemed to question how he could hold such illogical views and still be considered an objective journalist.

I have previously written about the fallacy of faith and how how religious moderates can and do, albeit unwittingly, enable and permit religious extremism simply by giving a gloss of respectability to the idea that faith is a valid way to determine the truth; that the contents of a holy book can logically be held to be true, not on evidence or deductive reasoning, and even despite contrary evidence and common sense, by faith alone. I'm happy therefore to be seen as biased in this matter, if being objective can be considered biased.

I'm certainly biased in favour of factual and logical evidence because I don't regard my intuition or wishful thinking - call it what you will - as over-riding the evidence, and I certainly don't feel any obligation to hold evidence-free beliefs just because my parents pinned the label 'Anglican Christian' on me shortly after birth and got a priest to cast magic spells over me. If there is no evidential reason to believe something I see no reason to believe it. If I see evidential reasons not to believe something then I not only see no reason to believe it, I see reason not to believe it. It's that simple really. I have no difficulty following the evidence, no matter the conclusions to which it leads me. So in this respect I can see exactly where Richard Dawkins is coming from.

I admire Mehdi Hasan because I see him brilliantly arguing some political point or other by skilfully marshalling the facts and showing the logical deductions to be drawn from them - and 'facts' is the operative word here. Would anyone bother to read Mehdi or listen to him on BBC Question Time if he only ever argued that such-and-such must be true because he had faith in it, or because it was written down somewhere and he believed the author unswervingly and uncritically? I think not. I think he would long ago have been dismissed as just another swivel-eyed, sanctimonious fanatic. What makes him the journalist he is is his mastery of the facts and devastating use of logic - together with his ability to communicate these with words, of course.

How then does he come to believe, apparently with complete certainty, and certainly without any hint of embarrassment, in flying horses? The answer of course is that Mehdi accepts without question that the Qur'an is unquestionable truth and that the god described in it is capable of performing miracles. So, not only is a flying horse possible because his god can produce one at will, but Mohamed would not have said he flew to Heaven on one if he didn't. Therefore, the only permissible belief can be that it really happened. To believe otherwise would call the entire Islamic faith into question because it would call Mohamed's reliability into question. It is not permitted to even think that Mohamed could have been hallucinating or worse, and the idea that he mistakenly took a mythical Greek beast he had heard stories about as being real and used it in some sort of poetic metaphor to describe a transcendental 'experience' had whilst fasting has to be dismissed because he was guided by Allah, who wouldn't have made that mistake.

But let's not forget that Islam is not the only religion that requires belief by faith in things for which there is no evidence and which logic tells us are absurd. Christianity also has it's mythical creatures, including talking snakes, donkeys and plants and a belief that a primitive blood sacrifice and the act of humans is required to satiate and empower an already omnipotent god, and that killing an innocent person somehow absolves you of responsibility for your wrong-doings which you didn't do anyway. The only reason to believe these things is because they were written about in a book, other people in your culture believe them and most of all because your parents did. There is no evidence for them outside the book so they can only be believed by faith.

The frightening thing is what this ready, even proud, acceptance of the absurd by faith can lead to, especially when it is presented as a good, moral, even intellectually honest thing and something to be proud of and admired for. Admired for believing something absurd without any evidence? Really?

If one believes in flying horses, talking snakes, and the efficacy of human blood sacrifices, why not also believe that women should be subservient to their husbands, father and brothers, that apostates and Atheists should be killed, that a raped woman has committed a crime, that clerics can mandate you to kill someone without trial for saying something they disagree with, and without the right of appeal?

And if you can believe in human blood sacrifice, talking snakes and a person surviving in the stomach of a fish for three days, why not carry out Jesus' instructions in Luke 19:27 and slay his enemies or that women should not teach, nor usurp authority over the man (1 Timothy 2:12) or that women should submit themselves to their husbands (Ephesians 5:22, Colossians 3:18)?

Moderates Muslims like Mehdi Hasan seem capable of compartmentalising and sanitizing - of cherry-picking - their faith, so that harmless beliefs like that in flying horses and miracles can be held with conviction because they don't do anyone any harm, yet they manage somehow to avoid following the same logic to it's obvious conclusions when it would lead to behaviour not acceptable in a civilised society.

Just so with the many moderate Christians who can believe with conviction that a barbaric human blood sacrifice worked once and a mythical first couple did something wrong for which we all somehow bear individual responsibility of which only that blood sacrifice can absolve us, and yet not repress women, stone rape victims, naughty children, gays and people who eat shellfish, and slay Jesus's enemies like he ordered. Even otherwise perfectly rational Christians who accept the evidence for human evolution and thus that there was never a first couple who could have committed 'original sin' nor any point at which humans ceased to be animals and became the special creation of a god with space reserved for them in a 'Heaven', can believe that they need to say the right magic spells on a Sunday to be forgiven for that 'sin' and ensure they get their allotted space in Heaven, or that they have a close personal relationship with the magic creator of everything.

The problem is, the fundamentalists of all faiths don't seem capable of that degree of discrimination - of being able to discern shades of grey - and can point to the respectable, harmless and 'admirable' faith of the moderates to justify it, even accusing those same moderates of hypocrisy or worse. If you believe in flying horses why not believe unbelievers should be killed? Who are you to decide which of Allah's truths and instructions is right and which you can ignore? In their simplistic, black and white world of certainties, if you believe in original sin and talking snakes, why not slay Jesus' or Allah's enemies?

As the 9/11, 7/7 and Boston Marathon faith-based initiatives and the Sabra and Shatila and Srebrenica massacres show, there is nothing of which humans are incapable in terms of inhumanity to their fellow man once they subscribe to the notion that truth and the will of a god can be determined by faith alone, that their actions are demanded, even mandated by that god and that death is not the end but the beginning.

The problem is the delusion that faith is a good thing. Faith, or rather the delusion that faith is a good thing, is probably the greatest crime against humanity, inflicted on us by the priesthoods. Religious faith has probably been responsible for more death, destruction and human misery, and has filled more psychiatric wards, than any other single human idea.

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Understanding Religion - I'll Pray For You!

2013-04-20T11:09:00.000+01:00

What the pious really mean.

I'll pray for you because:

If I'm honest and say I hate you people won't think I'm a kind, caring person.
I want you to think I have some power over you that you can't do anything about.
I like to think I have some power over you that you can't do anything about.
I like to think I have an invisible friend who hurts those who won't agree with me about everything.
I can't be bothered to learn stuff but I want people to think I'm better than you in some way.
I want you to feel guilty about beating me in an argument with facts I didn't like, because I should be allowed to win every time even though I can't be bothered to learn stuff.
You won't agree with me so I'll try threatening you with my really powerful imaginary friend.
I want people to think I'm religious because I'm hoping to get away with people thinking I'm someone they can trust.
I can't counter your argument so I want to threaten you whilst making other people think I'm your morally superior.
I want my friends to be impressed by me and admire my smugly self-satisfied piety.
I want people to think I'm so special I have a close personal relationship with the Creator of the Universe who makes my wishes come true.
It costs me nothing and is much easier than doing something practical to help.
Pretending to be other peoples' moral superior makes me feel good about myself.
If there really is a god I'm hoping to impress it with my piety, so I show it off at every opportunity.
What use is religion if you can't use it as a weapon when you need to?
What use is religion if you can't use it to try to elevate yourself above other people?
I'd really like to hurt you physically but I can only use words and make-believe in this medium and I'm a coward anyway.
Just like a rapist, I want to have power over you without any responsibility because I'm inadequate.

Isn't it great the way religion can be used against other people in so many different ways? Has mankind ever devised any better source of excuses for the morally bankrupt than religion?

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Gallstones - Another Little Gem From The Intelligent Designer

2013-04-18T23:01:00.000+01:00

Opened gallbladder containing numerous gallstones

You have to hand it to the Intelligent Designer. Just look at the way it came up with the idea of gallstones. Whatever would we do without them?

A gallstone is a crystalline concretion formed within the gallbladder by accretion of bile components. These calculi are formed in the gallbladder but may distally pass into other parts of the biliary tract such as the cystic duct, common bile duct, pancreatic duct, or the ampulla of Vater. Rarely, in cases of severe inflammation, gallstones may erode through the gallbladder into adherent bowel potentially causing an obstruction termed gallstone ileus.

Presence of gallstones in the gallbladder may lead to acute cholecystitis, an inflammatory condition characterized by retention of bile in the gallbladder and often secondary infection by intestinal microorganisms, predominantly Escherichia coli and Bacteroides species. Presence of gallstones in other parts of the biliary tract can cause obstruction of the bile ducts, which can lead to serious conditions such as ascending cholangitis or pancreatitis. Either of these two conditions can be life-threatening and are therefore considered to be medical emergencies.

Source: Wikipedia - Gallstones

The archetypal sufferer from gallstones has the five 'f's:

Female.
Fertile.
Fair.
Fat.
Forty.

Fair referring to skin colour.

However, many exceptions are found and gallstones are not uncommon in men, post-menopausal and thin women and non-Europeans although less so than in Europeans. They are very rare in young people.

The problem starts because body fluids with a high concentration of anything and especially salts, lend themselves to the formation of stones by simple chemical processes. Unfortunately, many of these fluids are collected in temporary stores such as, in the case of gallstones, the gallbladder. Stones may also form in places like the kidneys where they can obstruct the outflow of urine, causing kidney damage or be passed down the ureter to the bladder causing excruciating pain and sometimes accumulating there to obstruct urination, or salivary glands causing the flow of saliva to be obstructed and the face and neck to swell up as saliva accumulates.

The function of the gallbladder is to store bile until food is present in the small intestine. It then contracts squirting bile down the bile duct into the small intestine where it plays a role in digestion of fats. Bile is actually a waste product produced by the liver from dead red blood cells, or rather from the haem part of haemoglobin from which most of the iron has been removed and recycled. When the bile duct is obstructed bile is retained by the liver and passes into the blood where it causes jaundice and shows up in the urine which resembles freshly brewed tea or black coffee. If not treated, this can cause renal failure.

The problem is compounded by the fact that, for no apparent good reason, the bile duct joins with the duct from the pancreas to form the hepato-pancreatic duct before it joins with the small intestine at the 'ampula of Vater', so any obstruction in the hepato-pancreatic duct also obstructs the pancreatic duct. As well as controlling blood sugar levels with insulin, the pancreas also produces enzymes for digesting proteins so any obstruction or damage to the pancreas can also cause it to begin to digest and eventually destroy itself. Infections in the bile duct can also spread to the pancreas causing acute inflammation of the pancreas or pancreatitis which is fatal in about 25% of sufferers (though not all these are caused by gallstones).

It would be a particularly nasty and vicious intelligent designer who came up with this example of bad design which, in the time before anaesthetic surgery and before modern medicine would have been a common cause of death, especially of females in midlife and still is in people without access to health care. There is no purpose to gallstones; there is no purpose to them predisposing to infection by normally benign intestinal bacteria; there is no benefit from the pancreatic duct uniting with the bile duct and so making it easy for the pancreas to become involved with gallstones and any infection they may allow. Unless, of course, the purpose was to cause illness and death.

The entire system is a kludge; an "it'll do" solution which has its origins somewhere in evolution and particularly in embryology, and so we are stuck with it.

To understand why evolution, which we would expect to eliminate these kludges and lead to perfection of 'design', has not eliminated gallstones or 're-designed' the hepato-pancreatic duct we need to look at the common predisposing factors above. The reason is the same reason we have not eliminated cancer and degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, motor-neurone disease and Parkinsonism. There is little or no benefit to the genes from any mutations which would bring about these changes because they only present as problems after we have produced our offspring.

If there is no benefit to the genes there can be no evolution other than random genetic drift. The link to fair skin, which, in evolutionary terms provided some benefit particularly in a cloudy, relatively sunless north west Europe, suggests some linkage between changes in melanin (the dark pigment) production in the skin and gallstone formation, so they may simply be an unfortunate by-product of an otherwise beneficial mutation in the context of an environment with a lot of clouds. And that evolutionary change expresses before we produce offspring by reducing the incidence of rickets in growing children.

What benefit there might be to the genes in having mothers live long enough to be grandmothers, and so helping to raise the next generation carrying her genes is much less obvious than it would be if they affected her reproductive success directly, since her grandchildren are only one quarter her on average, but never-the-less we should expect to see some evolutionary change towards eliminating the formation of gallstones and/or reducing their potential seriousness over time even for that small advantage. But then we only evolved fair skin relatively recently so there will not have been time yet for this effect to be noticeable. Gallstones are probably part of the cost of evolving fair skin in a cloudy environment and we will still need to bear that cost for many years, possibly hundreds of thousands yet.

As an example of intelligent design and especially the design of an omni-benevolent designer, gallstones fail badly. Any designer who came up with this idea is neither intelligent nor benevolent. As an example of the mindless, undirected and amoral process of evolution, gallstones are readily understandable.

Sorry, Discovery Institute and your willing stooges who push fundamental Bible lieralism disguised as science with 'Intelligent Design'. You have very many of these examples to explain. Ignoring them and relying on the ignorance of your credulous victims won't work with rational people.

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Sudden Rapid Evolution

2013-04-18T10:48:00.000+01:00

If you're anywhere in Europe, and very many states in North America if not now then certainly very soon, you'll be able to look out of your window, or in any public garden or park and see an example of very recent evolution in the form of the Eurasian Collared Dove Streptopelia decaocto decaocto.

I still remember seeing my first one in Woodstock, Oxfordshire when on my way home from working in Oxford. This must have been in about 1964. One of the technicians in the animal house in our laboratory was also a keen naturalist and had told me excitedly only a few days earlier that he had seen a pair in Charlton-on-Otmoor. Just a few years earlier any recitation of the names of the common British birds would have included just four British wild pigeons - the Wood Pigeon, the Stock Dove, the Turtle Dove and the Rock Dove - in addition to the ubiquitous Town Pigeon which is a feral form of the domestic dove, which is itself a domesticated Rock Dove, so it didn't count as a different species. The Collared Dove was absent from all the books on Birds I had then (and still have). Ironically, a dove normally described as common was the Turtle Dove, a close relative of the Collared Dove, but which I only ever saw once in Oxfordshire. The last ones I saw were in Crete last Summer.

The phenomenal expansion of the range of the Collared Dove in the twentieth century was nothing short of spectacular. In the nineteenth century it was confined to Turkey, the Middle-East and India. In the 1920s it appeared in the Balkans and began an extraordinary north-westward expansion so that by the 1950s saw it make the British bird list as rare vagrant, then a breeder in 1955 in Norfolk. It is now abundant and a common garden bird throughout the UK and Ireland, has reached the Faeroe Islands and appears occasionally in Iceland, probably as a wind-blown vagrant. It then expanded laterally from this narrow band extending north-west from Turkey to the British Isles so it is now present throughout Europe and Western Asia, extending even into the Arctic Circle.

It was introduced into the Bahamas in the 1970 and quickly spread to Florida. It is now very quickly extending its range across North America. If its European sucees is repeated it will soon be a common garden bird there too and may even extend down into South America.

But what caused this sudden expansion? At the time there was speculation that it must have been a genetic change which enabled the doves to survive in the colder north-west but there was also speculation that it could have been due to post-war changes in agricultural practices or other human activity which made their preferred food more readily available. It is also possible that there had been some form of barrier preventing their expansion. A barrier, especially for a relatively sedentary species (despite the species' expansion individual birds do not often move vary far from the area they were born in) can consist of something as simple as an expanse of water or even land on which its food is absent. If it can't survive there long enough to make it across it can't establish itself on the other side, so the barrier is as effective as a wall. Was there some change in the Balkans in the 1930s or 1940s? It has even been suggested that the Collared Dove was introduced there as escapees from captivity.

To me the agricultural change hypothesis is less convincing than a genetic change because Collared Doves are not especially birds of the fields and woodlands but more birds of towns, parks and gardens, and parks and gardens have been a feature of European towns since well before the early twentieth century. The fact that the expansion was initially resolutely north-westward until it reached the Atlantic coast of Europe also points towards a genetic change rather than a change in agricultural practice or other human activity.

In a sense though, whether it was genetic change or environmental change which was the main cause of this expansion is semantic since an evolutionary change will only occur if the environment is right for the genetic change. If the genetic change is adverse in the given environment it will be quickly eliminated and nothing more will be heard of it. Whether the Collared Doves, much earlier in their evolution, had evolved then genes then neutral but capable of exploiting a new environment, by genetic drift, which then needed to 'wait' for the right environment to arise, or whether they evolved alleles of genes able immediately to make use of an existing environment is merely academic. Evolution is always environmentally driven since that is what selects for differential success. This is how genetic variance is selected by an environment and why the gene pool moves towards fitness for survival and makes a species appear 'fine tuned' for its environment. Essentially, the argument reduces to one of timing, not about the mechanism itself.

The Collared dove is a pretty little example of how this evolution happened very recently and very rapidly. In North America you can look forward to seeing it soon if you don't see it already. In Europe you should be so used to seeing it now that you take it for granted and maybe assume it was always present. Some of us are old enough to have seen it arrive.

The newly-evolved, range-expanding form of the Collared Dove, coming soon to a garden near you. Evolution in our lifetime.

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How The Intelligent Designer Works

2013-04-14T22:39:00.000+01:00

Lancet fluke (Dicrocoelium dendriticum)

If you're a Creationists you'll know already that the Intelligent Designer created the entire Universe and everything in it just for us, and especially for you.

If you're a Christian you'll know it did it exactly as the Christian Bible says the Christian god did. You'll also know that you must never say that the Intelligent Designer is the Christian god because that would make it harder to get fundamentalist Christianity taught in American public schools, and schools in other secular countries, as though it is a real science, and not a religion, which would be illegal. You'll already understand though that the Intelligent Designer is completely indistinguishable from the 'one true' god in the Christian Bible, so it must be all the omnis, including omni-benevolent, and never does anything which isn't done because it loves you... and everyone else, obviously.

If you're a Muslim you'll know the Intelligent Designer is call Allah and created everything exactly the way Muhammad said it did in the Qur'an especially for humans and in particular for you personally, because it wants you to love and worship it.

So this is a heart-warming story of how the one true Intelligent Designer designed a little creature which those mad atheistic scientists call Dicrocoelium dendriticum or the lancet fluke because it is shaped a bit like a medical lancet which used to be used for cutting into veins to let some unwanted blood out.

Dicrocoelium dendriticum is a member of a group of flatworms called trematodes. Scientists call flatworms Platyhelminths, which means - you've guessed it - flat worms. Why do they bother making up all these big words, eh?

The Intelligent Designer designed this particular flatworm, like a lot of other flatworms, which of course it also designed, to live inside the bodies of other animals as parasites. Parasites don't need to bother with looking for food, avoiding predators and things like that because the animals they live in do that for them. Isn't that a brilliant idea, if you're a flatworm?

The Intelligent Designer designed this particular parasite to live in the biliary ducts of animals like sheep and cows and sometimes even humans. The biliary ducts are the tubes which take bile from the liver to the intestines where it is used to help with digestion of fats.

But that idea gave the Intelligent Designer a problem because, when the flatworms want to breed, they lay eggs which end up in the gut of their host and eventually outside the hosts body altogether, along with other waste. But they need to be back inside the host, which is where they were designed to live. How to get them there?

This is where the Intelligent Designer came up with a typically brilliant idea. It got snails to eat the faeces of the animals, together with the parasite's eggs, which hatch out inside the snail. But then it realised that the host animals like sheep and cows don't eat snails, so it had another brilliant idea. It came up with a design to get them back out of the snails again. It made it so the snails don't like the baby flatworms inside their bodies so they surround them with a hard case and get rid of them as cysts containing several baby flatworms in the slime they use to make their slime trails.

But then the Intelligent Designer realised its plan had hit another snag, apart from the baby parasites being still outside their hosts: cows and sheep don't normally eat snail slime, just like they don't normally eat snails and if they waited till the slime had dried up the baby flatworms would dry up to and die.

Here is where brilliant idea number three comes in. The Intelligent Designer noticed that ants eat snail slime because they want the moisture in it, so he made it so they also eat the cysts the snails excrete with the baby flatworms in them.

But there was another problem! Cows and sheep don't eat ants either! So it was still stuck for a way to get the baby flatworms into the sheep and cows. It now had them inside ants instead, having tried with getting them into snails and having to think up a way to get them out again.

Now came the most brilliant trick of all. It had to think of a way to get the ants eaten by cows and sheep and what do cows and sheep eat a lot of? Grass of course. But there was never going to be a way to get grass to eat baby worms.

Here is where the Intelligent Designer pulled out all the stops and really got creative. It noticed that every cyst contained lots of baby flatworms so it made one of them go to the ant's nerve centre and take control of it so it behaves in a very odd way for an ant. Normally, when it gets dark and cold, ants go back into the ant nest for the night and come back out when the sun rises. Ants who have been taken over by baby lancet flukes don't go back to the nest. Instead, they climb up a blade of grass, grip the stem tightly with their jaws so they won't be knocked off, and wait for a passing cow or sheep to eat the blade of grass, and them with it.

Voilá! The baby flatworms are back where they started - inside the cows and sheep, and occasional humans who might accidentally eat a contaminated ant and who can then become very ill. The cows and sheep can also become very ill and the quantity of meat and milk they provide for humans is reduced, and we have to be careful to cook the meat from them in case we get these parasites into our bodies.

So, how did that benefit us, which is what the Intelligent Designer wanted to do? The answer is, no body knows. Lancet flukes don't seem to do anything at all for us and can even be a problem. One theory is that the Intelligent Designer sometimes stops making everything for us and sometimes makes the world look like it was all designed for parasitic worms, or viruses, or bacteria, or grass, or tsetse flies, or any one of a million other creatures. Obviously when it designed the lancet fluke the Intelligent Designer was having a day when it hated things like snails and especially ants and wasn't thinking of cows and sheep or even us at all.

Another thing no body knows is why an Intelligent Designer would design things like these parasitic worms with such a complicated life cycle when it could have just designed them to lay eggs which hatch out where they live and not need three different hosts and several different stages before the adults get back to where their parent came from. It must be hard for people who believe in an Intelligent Designer to explain why it often acts like a really stupid one, which is probably why they normally ignore things like that.

Some mad scientists even think the Universe looks just like it wasn't designed for anything in particular and that all the different creatures have just fitted in. They even say it wasn't designed at all just because it doesn't look like it was!

But Creationists could easily prove the Intelligent Designer designed everything just for us - if only they could think of why it designed parasites like the lancet fluke, and million of other things that either don't do anything for us or even cause us a lot of harm in apparently random ways. And if only they could prove it was designed at all and could explain why it looks just the way it would if it wasn't designed and there was no intelligence or plan.

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Why Believe The Holy Books?

2013-04-13T18:25:00.000+01:00

Is it the act of a rational person to believe the stories in the Bible or the Qur'an, or any other holy book? All you have is someone else's word for it that the events described actually happened yet you are expected to believe without question. Why is that rational just because these events were alleged to have happened a long time ago and a lot of people have believed them without question in the meantime?

Their belief didn't make the accounts come true, and they certainly didn't witness them. In effect, you are believing something highly unlikely simply because someone else did.

Why don't you do that with things you hear about today?

Try this little exercise for yourself:

Take any story you like from your holy book - stories about what the prophets did or said, or about what different tribes of people are said to have done, or stories about what a god allegedly said to someone - preferably stories which form the foundation of your faith but not necessarily so.

Now, imagine someone passing along your street told you that this event was happening right now, or had just happened, a mile down the road. Would it make any difference if this person wrote it down? Would you believe them or would you think they were deluded, mistaken or lying to you for some reason and probably selling you something?

I suggest that only the most gullible and credulous of people or the insane would believe these stories without at least asking to see the evidence, if they were reported as happening today.

Yet the people who wrote those stories down in the Bible or the Qur'an or other holy books either believed people who told them they had happened or expected other people to believe them without any available evidence. And that's exactly what you've done, if you believe those stories are actually true.

How is that different to believing the person walking along your street? More to the point, where does it leave your faith if you have no rational basis for believing the stories in your holy book?

Try the little exercise above and let me know which stories you would believe and what would convince you to take the word of a complete stranger that these extraordinary events were taking place just down the road today, without needing any evidence.

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Farewell To Picasso's Child With A Dove

2013-04-12T23:06:00.002+01:00

BBC News - Picasso's £50m Child With A Dove set to leave UK:

Sad that Picasso's Child With a Dove is to leave the UK, but what is even sadder is that this pivotal painting in Picasso's development and such an iconic painting has been bought by a private collector, which means it could disappear from public view to spend many years languishing in a bank vault.

Child With a Dove was one of the first paintings to fire my imagination and interest in art when, as child of about nine, we had a poster of it at my primary school in about 1955. We had to try to copy it. I believe it was an attempt as art education. My painting was singled out for special praise because the head mistress thought I have done the hands very nicely, which I felt a bit of a fraud about because I found that to be the hardest part to copy.

But what I saw in the painting was something which has stayed with me. I saw a child lovingly holding peace close to his/her breast (the child is actually, and I think deliberately androgynous) and treasuring it above all else, as symbolised by the forgotten toy ball on the ground. I saw it as anti-war and a tribute to the innocence of childhood.

The slaughter of World War II was then still fresh in many people's minds, including my father's who survived Dunkirk. The poor physical and mental wrecks of World War I still hobbled about on crippled feet from the trenches of Normandy, some with crippled lungs from gas and crippled minds from the horrors they endured as young men when those who could endure it no longer had summary execution for cowardice to look forward to. I remember too well when the new names from World War II were added to the war memorials which sprang up only a generation earlier in every town, village and hamlet. Child With a Dove told us we needed to hold onto our childish idealism if our generation was not to repeat the mistakes of earlier ones. Nothing is more precious than peace. Peace needs to be held gently but firmly, kept close and loved above all else. If we care more for peace than we care for toys we can make a better world.

I think Child With a Dove also influenced my political development.

Picasso was just 19 years old when he painted Child With a Dove in Paris in 1901. It represents a transition from his Impressionist style to his 'blue period' when he was probably in a sombre and reflective, even depressed mood following the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas. His blue period is characterised with experimental paintings in a Post-Impressionist but still highly figurative style depicting 'the human condition'. Child With a Dove may represent Picasso's own farewell to the naive innocence of an Andalusia childhood. The child is distinctly Andalusian in appearance. Many Andalucian people can trace a North African Berber ancestry from a time when 'al-Andalus' was the Arabic name for Spain and Andalusia was a collection of Islamic Emirates.

Pablo Picasso never seems to have forgotten that childhood love of peace and was an inveterate peace-monger, depicting as he did the horrors of war with Guernica, and later on returning to the dove motif when he designed the poster for the 1949 Paris Peace Congresss. He named his fourth child, born the day before the 1949 Peace Congress, Paloma (Dove).

Addressing the 1950 Peace Congress in Sheffield, England Picasso said, "I stand for life against death; for peace against war". Almost fifty years earlier he had said that with Child With a Dove. I hope future generation get to see it too.

'via Blog this'

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A Quickie For Bible Literalists.

2013-04-12T18:07:00.000+01:00

I'm in a bit of a quandary! There's something about the Bible I just don't understand. I'm sure a Bible literalist who believes everything in the Bible is the absolute truth because it was written by an inerrent, omniscient god can explain it to me.

You see, according to Genesis, God killed every living thing outside of Noah's Ark after telling Noah to put a male and female of every species in the Ark and then setting it afloat in a flood for a year or so.

And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female. Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive.

Genesis 6:19-20

A little later on, when the flood has subsided, God told Noah to disembark with all the surviving animals onto an Earth from which all living things have been removed.

And God spake unto Noah, saying, Go forth of the ark, thou, and thy wife, and thy sons, and thy sons' wives with thee. Bring forth with thee every living thing that is with thee, of all flesh, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth; that they may breed abundantly in the earth, and be fruitful, and multiply upon the earth.

And Noah went forth, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons' wives with him: Every beast, every creeping thing, and every fowl, and whatsoever creepeth upon the earth, after their kinds, went forth out of the ark.

Genesis 8:15-19

Okay so far? So, if we go along with this, we know the only things alive on Earth at that point were the humans and the animals which had survived the flood by being in the Ark with Noah. That all seems perfectly straightforward, if a little extreme, and notwithstanding all the technical difficulties.

Noah was disappointed that no turned up for his barbecue.

Where I start to get a little bit confused is with what happened next:

And Noah builded an altar unto the Lord; and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar.

And the Lord smelled a sweet savour; and the Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.

Genesis 8:20-21

No, although it is a puzzle why an omniscience inerrant god would regret doing something and promise not to do it again, that's not what baffles me here. Nor is it the time needed for Noah and his family to catch and kill all the animals needed for the sacrifice.

What baffles me is, if Noah burned one of each of every 'clean' beast - and the Bible is quite emphatic and unambiguous on that matter, leaving no room for doubt - how did the remaining one breed and why are there still 'clean' animals when Noah effectively extinguished those species as a burned offering to God, making a great deal of the effort he put in to saving them in the first place, a complete waste of time and effort?

Any thoughts?

[Update 13 April 2013]
As several people have pointed out, Genesis 7:2-3 talks of seven of each clean beast, which would leave some over for sacrificing. However, Genesis 6 is quite specific that it was two of each clean and unclean and that they be paired male and female. Hence, to use the Genesis 7 defence a Bible literalist would need to implicitly accept that the Bible is at best inconsistent and ambiguous and at worst contradictory, unreliable and thus useless as a source - which is of course true.

So, is any is Bible literalist prepared to use that defence and so argue that the Bible is not the literal word of of an inerrant, omniscient god? Please feel free to use the comment section below if so.

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