—– Baghdad Is Shaken By A Series Of Bombs (Sam Dagher and Suadad al-Salhy/The New York Times; April 29)
BAGHDAD: A series of bombs went off in Baghdad on Wednesday, extending a period of violence that has rattled Iraq’s government and security forces.
The pattern of Wednesday’s attacks – including three car bombs in predominantly Shiite areas and two at a Sunni mosque – raised fresh concern that sectarian passions could be inflamed anew.
Accounts of the death toll varied, from at least 17 people to as many as 48, with dozens wounded. So far in April, at least 300 Iraqis have been killed in bombing attacks, making it the bloodiest month since the start of the year and reversing the sharp drops in civilian deaths in January and February.
Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has blamed Sunni insurgents and members of Saddam Hussein’s ousted Baath Party for the recent violence, including four suicide bombings last week that killed almost 160 people, mostly Shiites. Mr. Maliki is torn between demands from the United States and some Sunni leaders to reconcile with some former members of the Hussein government and his Shiite partners, who reject an accommodation.
In the deadliest attacks on Wednesday, two car bombs went off in the Muraidi market in the impoverished Shiite district of Sadr City. The first went off around 4:30 p.m., a peak shopping hour, in a section of the market where live birds are sold. About 10 minutes later, a second exploded in front of a popular ice cream and juice shop in the market….
Gen. Aboud Gambar, head of the Iraqi military’s Baghdad operations command, told state-owned television Al Iraqiya that three other car bombs were intercepted before they detonated.
Almost 30 minutes after the Sadr City attacks, a roadside bomb exploded in the path of a minibus on the southern outskirts of Baghdad, killing five of its occupants and wounding eight, the Interior Ministry official said.
Around 6 p.m., a car bomb went off in another market in the mainly Shiite neighborhood of Shurta Rabia in southwestern Baghdad, wounding five, the official said.
Later in the evening, two car bombs exploded in front of the Nida Allah Sunni mosque in the predominantly Shiite district of Huriya in northwestern Baghdad, killing at least two and wounding eight, he said….
(NOTE: According the CIA World Factbook, the Iraqi population is 97% Muslim and 3% Christian/Other.)
—– Gang On Trial For Torturing French Jew To Death (Thierry Leveque/Reuters; April 29)
PARIS: A self-proclaimed “gang of barbarians” accused of kidnapping a young Jewish man in a Paris suburb, torturing him for 24 days and killing him went on trial Wednesday.
The death of Ilan Halimi, 23, in 2006 horrified France and came to symbolize a rise in anti-Semitic violence in its poor, multi-ethnic suburbs.
The leader of the “barbarians,” Youssouf Fofana, smirked at Halimi’s relatives and shouted “Allahu akbar!” (“God is Greatest!” in Arabic) at them as he entered the courtroom.
Bearded and wearing a white tracksuit, Fofana gave his identity during formal questioning by the judge as “Arabs African revolt barbarian salafist army.” [NOTE: Wikipedia defines Salafi as "a Sunni Islamic movement that takes the pious ancestors (Salaf) of the patristic period of early Islam as exemplary models.... Salafis idealize an uncorrupted, pure Islamic religious community."]
The 28-year-old said he was born on February 13, 2006, in Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois, the date and place of Halimi’s death.
During his time in detention, Fofana, a young French man of Ivorian origin, has bombarded the magistrates investigating the case with letters full of anti-Semitic insults.
He stands accused of kidnapping, sequestration, torture and murder. The charge sheet also includes anti-Semitism, which French law considers an “aggravating circumstance” requiring the stiffest sentences. Fofana faces life in jail.
Fofana has admitted all the charges against him except the accusation that he stabbed Halimi to death.
Among the 26 other defendants are the girl who is alleged to have been used as bait to capture Halimi and young men accused of taking part in the abduction and guarding the captive.
The trial is scheduled to last 2-1/2 months during which 162 witnesses and 50 experts will testify. Evidence will be given behind closed doors at the request of two of the defendants who were minors at the time of the crime.
Halimi was kidnapped on January 20, 2006, in the Paris suburb of Sceaux where he had been lured by a girl.
His kidnappers tried unsuccessfully to extort a ransom of 450,000 euros ($594,000) from his family.
They held Halimi in a cellar in another suburb, tortured him until he was close to death, and then dumped him near a train station. He died in hospital shortly after he was found.
Many in France’s Jewish community say there has been a rise in anti-Semitism among disaffected youths of Arab and African origin since a Palestinian uprising started in late 2000, because of feelings of solidarity with the Palestinians.
Those feelings have mingled in the minds of some of these youths with older anti-Semitic stereotypes.
Several members of the “gang of barbarians” testified that Halimi was targeted because he was Jewish, which in their minds meant he had money and his community would pay to get him back.
After the murder, Fofana fled to Ivory Coast. From there he made death threats by telephone to Halimi’s father and girlfriend. He was extradited to France on March 4, 2006.
—– Former Church Leaders Plead In Sex Crimes; In Unrelated Cases, Two Former Leaders At Heritage Baptist Church Pleaded Guilty And No Contest (Amanda Codispoti/ The Roanoke Times; April 29)
Two men who held leadership positions in the same Vinton [Virginia] church entered pleas Tuesday in unrelated sex crime cases involving children.
Dean Harold Stone, a former deacon at Heritage Baptist Church, pleaded guilty in Franklin County Circuit Court to 12 sex crimes. He faces up to three life sentences in jail.
In a separate case, Daniel Silverman, the church’s former assistant pastor, pleaded no contest in Roanoke County Circuit Court to one count of aggravated sexual battery of a child. He faces up to 20 years in prison….
Stone, 45, of Boones Mill admitted to molesting three girls between 2006 and 2008. Two of the girls were 13 or younger, and the third was between the ages of 14 and 16.
Stone initially had been indicted on 24 felony charges, but some of them were dropped as part of a plea agreement, Franklin County Commonwealth’s Attorney Cliff Hapgood said.
On Tuesday, Stone pleaded guilty to three counts of animate object penetration and nine counts of aggravated sexual battery.
Stone turned himself in to police in November after he stood before the congregation at Heritage Baptist and said that he was a molester, Hapgood said.
Stone is scheduled to be sentenced June 29. Neither he nor his attorney could be reached Tuesday afternoon.
Silverman, 43, pleaded no contest to touching a 12-year-old girl sometime between July and August.
Silverman maintained his innocence after court Tuesday, saying that he decided to plead no contest because he wanted to spare the girl from testifying in court.
Silverman’s sentencing is scheduled for July 7.
The church’s pastor, the Rev. Bob Barton, said in November that the incidents had devastated the congregation and may have caused some members to leave. The church had about 100 members at that time….
—– Former Tennessee Pastor Pleads Guilty To Sex Crimes Involving Boys (Lawrence Buser/Memphis Commercial Appeal; April 29)
A former Cordova [Tennessee] church pastor pleaded guilty Wednesday to charges he sexually abused two teenage boys, including one with whom he fostered a five-year affair.
Steven C. Haney, 48, who headed Walnut Grove Baptist Church for some 20 years, was placed on probation for eight years and will be added to the Tennessee Sex Offender Registry.
State prosecutor David Zak said the plea arrangement was approved by the victims and their families, who were spared the stress of testifying in trial.
“The defendant pleaded guilty only because he is, in fact, guilty,” Zak said.
Haney still faces federal child pornography charges involving pictures of one of the boys on his computer.
In court Wednesday, he pleaded guilty to rape and sexual battery by an authority figure. He was given suspended, concurrent sentences of eight and three years by Criminal Court Judge John Colton Jr., who approved the settlement.
One case involved a male church member who testified at an earlier hearing that Haney enticed him into a sexual relationship in 2001, when he was 15, by telling him it was “God’s plan” and that having sex with the pastor would enable him to do great things for God.
The teen said Haney told him having sex with him would be “a test of faith” for the teen, who added he was rewarded with paying jobs and other favors for his cooperation.
“Steve had convinced me this was for God,” he said in a 2007 hearing.
Sexual encounters took place at the pastor’s church office, at his home and at the home of Haney’s mother, the boy said.
Although the indicted offense occurred between July and November 2003, the victim said the sexual abuse lasted for five years. Evidence in the case included conversations about the affair that the youth recorded at the direction of police.
The other offense involved Haney’s inappropriate touching of another male teenager in October 2003 in a restroom at the church. That victim was also about 15 at the time, the prosecutor said.
Zak said in court that the victims have received anonymous mail criticizing them and proclaiming Haney’s innocence. He called the action “unconscionable.”
He said a Web site also had been established in support of Haney and declaring anonymous supporters would be watching the trial very carefully.
Defense attorney Leslie Ballin said his client had nothing to do with either the mail or the Web site.
—– Australian Anglican Archbishops’ Chaplain Behind Bars At Last (Amanda Gearing/VirtueOnline.com; April 29)
The sentencing of a self-confessed child sex offender and senior Brisbane Anglican priest Canon Barry Greaves in Brisbane District Court last Friday (April 24, 2009) is a significant event for many reasons and for many people.
It is a significant event because Greaves was a priest at Boonah in the early 1980s when he committed the offences and because knowledge of his own sex offending against children failed to deter him from seeking and gaining high office in the Anglican Church.
He accepted the position of being an Archbishop’s chaplain to Brisbane Archbishop Dr Peter Hollingworth in 1999. He stayed on as an Archbishop’s chaplain to the incoming Archbishop Dr Phillip Aspinall in 2002 and not even the disgrace of the sex scandal in the Brisbane Diocese resulted in a glimmer of guilt that maybe he was not an appropriate person to be providing pastoral care to other victims of sexual assault.
Families of victims who were referred to Greaves for pastoral care are now flabbergasted by the double betrayal. “I went looking for comfort and now I discover I was confiding in a f***ing pedophile,” one woman said.
The depth of betrayal she and others feel now that Greaves has pleaded guilty to nine sex offences against children is obviously profound. If victims wanted to regain trust in the clergy when they sought help from Greaves, the chances of them having any confidence to try again after a second betrayal are pretty slim….
Greaves’ behaviour through the criminal justice system has added enormously to the struggle of his victims in pursuing justice.
Greaves forced his victims to endure a police investigation, giving evidence in a committal hearing, a process which caused at least one of them to have nightmares for a year following his harrowing re-living of the depravity forced on him by Greaves. The ongoing impact on this victim, now a man aged in his 40s, is indeed dire.
In addition, Greaves fought in preliminary hearings to have separate trials for each of the victims, in the hope of avoiding conviction. He was willing to string out the legal proceedings, adding vastly to his legal costs, in order to try to maintain the sham of respectability to which he had clung for almost 30 years….
The public is justifiably sceptical of the church’s claims over several years now that it has overcome its failures to protect children.
Hopefully the Diocese will promptly depose Greaves from Holy Orders on the basis of his criminal conviction. Greaves’ late stage guilty plea is evidence that the systemic rot in the Diocese has reached to the highest echelons of the Anglican Church….
Bishop John Parkes declared to the media in 2008 that alleged pedophile priests, specifically including Greaves, could not be stopped from interacting with children as part of the congregation nor from participating in church duties open to any lay person – such as singing in a choir, Bible readings or being part of the cleaning roster. “Until they were convicted, they were entitled to be considered innocent until proven guilty,” Bishop Parkes was quoted to have said at the time.
Given Greaves’ guilty plea on Friday, to nine counts of sex offences against children, this policy needs a swift rethink and action to protect children as a first priority under the precautionary principle. Greaves was sentenced to three years’ jail, of which he will serve nine months before stepping out of jail on a suspended sentence with no parole supervision….
If these three victims take civil action against the Brisbane Diocese for failing in its duty of care, it will be interesting to see whether the Diocese will continue to use the Statute of Limitations to prevent them seeking compensation for their suffering.
To date the Diocese has chosen to use legal defences barring victims from even bringing a compensation action if they are older than 21….
—– Rwandan Pastor In Court Over Fraud (Robert Mugabe/The New Times/allAfrica.com; April 29)
NYARUGENGE, Rwanda: Pastor Josephine Mutesi of Jehovanis Church in Kimisagara was last week arraigned before Nyarugenge Court of Higher Instance to answer charges of embezzlement and abuse of office.
The Pastor was dragged to court by some church members.
According to our sources, Mutesi who is Pastor at the Nyakabanda-based church in Nyarugenge District is accused of withdrawing money from the church’s coffers without authorisation from the signatories.
She is also accused of forging the signatures of the signatories to have access to the funds totalling to Rfw1.8 million [about $3200 US] on January 22, and 28, this year.
Complaints by church members started after the congregation mobilized the funds to buy a house which could later be a church building. The building was to house about 900 members.
The nine founding members then started investigating her and later reported the matter Criminal to the Investigation Department….
“Pastor Mutesi is still running the church. However, she is heading it illegally since we asked her to resign long ago,” Martin Kanamugire one of the church elders complained….
—– Kenyan Religious Sect Slams Brakes On Anti-Polio Drive (George Sayagie/Daily Nation; April 29)
The polio vaccination campaign ran into trouble in Keringet Division of Molo District when some parents refused to let their children get the dose, saying it was against their religious beliefs.
On Wednesday, the medical officer in charge of Molo District hospital, Dr Magdalene Itumbi, sought the help of the Administration Police as members of a religious sect had locked their children in their houses and barred health personnel from carrying out the door-to-door immunisation.
Some 45,000 children have been immunised against polio in the last three days in other parts of the district.
The campaign, being conducted by the government and the World Health Organisation, has 86 teams comprising health workers, volunteers and community members and aims to immunise 17,200 children a day.
Speaking at Keringet trading centre, Dr Itumbi said the anti-polio drive had been stepped up after seven cases were reported in Turkana District in February.
Kenya has been polio-free since 1984 but the disease resurfaced two years ago from Somalia.
—– Nicaraguans Fall To “Crazy Sickness”; Residents Blame Supernatural Forces, Evil Dwarf; Evangelist Stokes End Times Fears; Priest Offers “Preventive Exorcisms” (Tim Rogers/The Miami Herald; April 29)
BILWI, Nicaragua: A mysterious illness that’s driving some indigenous Nicaraguans to hysteria has authorities scrambling to find answers.
No one is entirely sure why the so-called grisi siknis — the Miskito term for ”crazy sickness” — has returned to this port town on Nicaragua’s northern Caribbean coast, but it has residents on edge.
More than 80 cases have been reported here in the past two months, including eight more girls who were afflicted at school April 21. The outbreaks are becoming a daily occurrence in schools, according to regional government authorities.
”We were scared,” said 11-year-old Ana Stefani, whose Morava J.A.C. school in Bilwi was closed for three days last month after 35 of her classmates were afflicted in the schoolyard. “The girls were yelling like they were possessed and they were calling out names of other students. Their eyes were closed and their fists were clenched.”
Grisi siknis is a powerful and puzzling cultural-bound syndrome that afflicts Nicaragua’s indigenous and ethnic communities, mostly young adolescent Miskito women. Outbreaks have been reported as far back as the early 1800s. Some health experts say the illness is more mental than physical. However, it behaves similar to other viral outbreaks in that it’s contagious and can last for months or years.
Residents say it’s related to the supernatural: An evangelical reverend says the phenomenon is a sign of ”the end of times” while a Catholic priest conducts ”preventive exorcisms” and urges his faithful to pray for protection against demonic forces. And witch doctors are giving children charms to protect them from witchcraft and dwarfs.
Authorities have had to close four schools in recent weeks to prevent widespread panic among students.
”There is more devil than God in the city right now,” said Rev. Kenneth Bushey, of the Moravian Renovation Evangelical Church, where seven women took ill with grisi siknis during a youth group event last month. “God is testing our faith.”
While most outbreaks have occurred in remote villages, in the past month there have been some 50 new cases reported in the relatively populous regional capital of Bilwi, and dozens more cases have been reported in neighboring municipalities. Residents here fear the area is on the brink of an epidemic….
Grisi siknis sufferers often experience alternate states of a coma-like trance and indomitable mania, according to witnesses. In the manic stage, victims usually keep their eyes closed and fists clenched with their thumbs tucked underneath their other four fingers, which many interpret as a sign of the dwarf — evil spirits thought to inhabit the earth, an important part in the indigenous view of the cosmos.
”The dwarf only has four fingers, so he can’t stand to see a fifth,” explained Serafina Espinoza, head of the department of traditional medicine for URRACAN, the university of Nicaragua’s autonomous regions.
Those who are afflicted sometimes yell out the names of people nearby, who reportedly fall into a similar trance. Others yell at invisible assailants and swing machetes, sticks, or other weapons in attempts at self defense as they flee into the bush.
It is up to the other villagers to catch and restrain the grisi victims to prevent them from hurting themselves, drowning in a river, or disappearing into the mountains for days, weeks or — in some reported cases — even years.
Though little is known about the causes of grisi siknis, some scientists — in and outside of Nicaragua — have tried to explain the phenomenon in recent years by hypothesizing that it is caused by a poisoning of water or food sources. Others have speculated that it’s caused by ergot, the fungi that grows on wheat and has been linked to other historical cases of collective madness, such as the outbreak of ”Saint Anthony’s Fire” in the Middle Ages.
Testing of food and water supplies in areas suffering outbreaks of grisi siknis have all proven inconclusive.
U.S. anthropologist Philip Dennis, professor emeritus at Texas Tech University, lived among the Miskito population in the community of Awastara in 1978-79 and studied the tail end of another major outbreak in the early 1970s.
Dennis concluded that grisi siknis is related to stress, fear and anxiety, but that it also appeared to be a “flood of repressed libidinal feelings pouring out at once — a wild, orgiastic rite of sex and violence.”
In recent years, however, the collective hallucination has taken on a different form. One theory of grisi siknis is that it might represent a sort of cultural reenactment of traumatic experiences in the Miskito culture — first the arrival of the white man and then violent relocation by the Sandinista military, which forced entire indigenous communities to move inland in the 1980s to prevent them from becoming recruitment camps for Contra rebels.
”The phantoms or demons that show up during the attacks definitely represent lived reality — the British, the Creole people, the Sandinistas,” Dennis told The Miami Herald.
Grisi siknis attacks are also becoming more violent.
During a 2003 outbreak in the rural indigenous Mayangna village of Santo Tomás de Umra, 26 grisi siknis victims terrorized the population and destroyed the entire village. José Manzanares, a traditional healer sent to Santo Tomás to cure the grisi siknis victims, said the afflicted chased other villagers around with machetes.
”They had their eyes closed and their faces turned up toward the sky, but they still chased people around,” Manzanares said. “The only way people could escape from them was to hide under a porch or a house.”
—– Parents Prosecuted For Forcing Girl To Join Religious Group (CTK/WorldWide Religious News; April 29)
ZLIN, Czechoslovakia: A Czech couple is prosecuted for oppressing their 18-year-old daughter for her refusal to join the religious society of which they are members, the Zlin police told CTK Wednesday.
The parents reportedly urged the girl, a secondary school student, to join the Jehova’s Witnesses grouping. After she refused to do so, they expelled her from home.
If found guilty they face up to six months in prison.
The parents left the girl without financial means. They told her she may return home only on condition she joins Jehova’s Witnesses.
“The daughter has already come of age, but she does not yet work to earn her living, therefore the parents are still obliged to support her,” police spokeswoman Jana Bartikova said….
Jehova’s Witnesses present themselves as genuine Christians.
The Christian churches generally consider Jehova’s Witnesses a sect, oppose their interpretation of the Bible and criticise their totalitarian organisation and ways to spread their views.
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As indicated in point 13 of the entry I posted back on June 26, 2002, creationists are fond of claiming that there’s no good evidence that one species has ever evolved into another.
Here’s yet another reason for believing that they’re dead wrong:
—– “Missing Link” Fossil Seal Walked (Richard Black/The BBC; April 22)
It may look like a cross between a seal and an otter; but an Arctic fossil could, scientists say, hold the secret of seal evolution in its feet.
A skeleton unearthed in northern Canada shows a creature with feet that were probably webbed, but were not flippers.
Writing in the journal Nature, scientists suggest the 23 million-year-old proto-seal would have walked on land and swum in fresh water.
It is the oldest seal ancestor found so far and has been named Puijila darwini.
Puijila is the term for “young sea mammal” in the Inuktitut language, spoken by Inuit groups in Devon Island where the fossil was found.
And the reference to Charles Darwin honours the famous biologist’s contention that land mammals would naturally move into the marine environment via a fresh water stage, just as pinnipeds – seals, sealions and walruses – have apparently done.
“The find suggests that pinnipeds went through a fresh water phase in their evolution,” said Natalia Rybczynski from the Canadian Museum of Nature (CMN) in Ottawa, who led the fieldwork. “It also provides us with a glimpse of what pinnipeds looked like before they had flippers.”
The skeleton was about 65% complete, which enabled the researchers to reconstruct what the animal would have looked like in remarkable detail.
The legs suggest it would have walked upright on land; but the foot bones hint strongly at webbed feet. The fact that the remains were found in a former crater lake that has also yielded fossil fish from the same period was additional evidence for a semi-aquatic past.
“The remarkably preserved skeleton of Puijila had heavy limbs, indicative of well developed muscles, and flattened phalanges (finger or toe bones) which suggest that the feet were webbed – but not flippers,” said Mary Dawson from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, US, another of the scientists involved.
“This animal was likely adept at both swimming and walking on land. Puijila is the evolutionary evidence we have been lacking for so long.”
The scientists suggest this proto-seal lived on land and in fresh water
Until now, the most primitive fossil pinniped was a creature called Enaliarctos that dates from about the same period and appears to have lived in the sea along the northwestern coasts of North America.
Enaliarctos had flippers, but may have had to bring its prey to the shore for eating, whereas modern pinnipeds manage it at sea.
Intriguingly, different species of present-day seal swim in different ways – either rotating their flippers, or waving their hind-quarters from side to side, using the hind limbs for propulsion.
Enaliarctos appears to have been capable of both modes of swimming – and as a four-legged animal with four webbed feet, Puijila is a logical fore-runner of this creature which could swim with all four limbs.
The new discovery also shows, the scientists say, that seals, sealions and walruses very likely had their origins in the Arctic.
Darwin forecast the transition from land to sea via fresh water in his seminal work On the Origin of Species, published 150 years ago this year.
“A strictly terrestrial animal, by occasionally hunting for food in shallow water, then in streams or lakes, might at last be converted in an animal so thoroughly aquatic as to brave the open ocean,” he wrote.
To learn about other transitional fossils, go here and here.
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…that have nothing to do with religion.
Four-day journey to Cairns saves girl’s life
A PAPUA New Guinea man made a four-day trip to Cairns carrying a six-year-old girl so badly injured her intestines were exposed.
Forty-year-old farmer Iambai Pisau was called to his niece’s PNG village school on the border of Indonesia last Thursday afternoon after she fell out of a classroom window and landed on a sharp hibiscus tree.
Mr Pisau took his niece to their remote PNG village’s first aid post by canoe only to find the medical officer away for the night distributing donated mosquito nets.
He treated his niece as best he could using a bandage and Panadol before the pair endured a five-hour ambulance ride to another PNG town, Morehead, last Friday.
From Morehead, the two travelled eight hours in a motorised dinghy, which constantly broke down, before spending the night in a bush hut at the mouth of a crocodile-infested river.
On Sunday, it was another four hours in the dinghy to get to Boigu Island, in the Torres Strait.
A medical team on the island organised a helicopter transfer to Thursday Island where the pair was met by the Royal Flying Doctor Service and flown to Cairns, arriving early Monday morning.
Surgeons at Cairns Base Hospital successfully conducted life-saving surgery on Dulcie and she is now resting comfortably.
Mr Pisau said the extent of his niece’s injuries demanded she receive quality care, so he made a bid to get her to Australia.
“I did it because that’s what I had to do.”
Mr Pisau said he was embarrassed at the suggestion of being called a hero, instead saying Queensland Health staff deserved all the praise for saving his niece’s life.
Florissant teen inspired to give away thousands for cancer victims
When Danielle Crow was 16, she went to SSM Cardinal Glennon Medical Center with severe stomach pains. Fortunately she did not have a serious medical condition, but the children Crow met while she was there changed her life.
“This little girl in the room next to me, her name was Melinda, and she was three-years-old, and she had leukemia,” Danielle said.
Even through her pain, Danielle had an immediate reaction — she wanted to help.
“They had four other kids and they were financially strained because of medical bills and everything, so I just thought maybe I could do something for them,” she said.
That was August 2007. Fast forward to May 2008: Danielle single-handedly planned and hosted a charity fishing tournament at Lake of the Ozarks. More than $1,800 was raised with the ‘Casting for Cancer’ event.
Around that time, Danielle found out Melinda, the young toddler who inspired her, had passed away.
She gave the $1,800 to the family of an Illinois boy with cancer.
This high school junior’s second Casting for Cancer fishing tournament will be held May 16. Last Saturday, 100 people helped raise $5,000 at a trivia night which she organized. Between the two events, she expects to collect $10,000.
Because of her experience, Danielle plans to pursue a degree in the medical field when she graduates from high school. She’d like to be a nurse or doctor and work with children who suffer with cancer.
I hope these stories inspire random acts of kindness in my readers, for any reason.
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No, I don’t think the following story is as bizarre as marrying two frogs in an attempt to get it to rain… but is it really that much better?
—– Church To Bless Asparagus Crop (Jo Ann Kirby/The Record; April 25)
STOCKTON, California: On the weekend Stockton shows its love for asparagus, a downtown church is offering a blessing for the festival, the vegetable, and the many workers, growers and shippers busy harvesting the celebrated crop.
Blessing the season’s first crop is a tradition rooted in English parishes, said the Rev. Lee Nelson, rector at the Church of St. John the Evangelist.
“There’s an old tradition in the church of blessing the first fruits,” Nelson said. “On Sunday at 10 a.m. we will have a Blessing of the First Fruits of the asparagus crop. Asparagus is one of the first crops of the season. We want to bless the crops, bless the workers, bless the farmers and be a part of the Asparagus Festival, which takes place right outside our doors.”
Nelson, who began his current post in Stockton in December, said the blessing is a way for the church to connect with the community.
The Anglican congregation hopes it will become a regular tradition of Stockton’s Asparagus Festival. The church has certainly had a long tradition in the community. It opened its doors in 1850, the year Stockton was founded.
“We have a good number of our parishioners from the Filipino community who work in the asparagus fields,” said the Rev. Woodrow Gubuan, associate rector at St. John’s. “We wanted them here for the blessing, but it’s the tail end of the season, and they are actually working Sunday. So we might not have the workers, but we hope their children attend.”
Festival organizers said the idea is something no one had ever offered. They were thrilled when Nelson called them with plans for the blessing.
“After 24 years of doing this, people are still coming up with new things to add,” said Kate Post, executive director of the festival. “The festival is for charity and for our community, and anytime someone wants to do something – especially like this – we are so appreciative.”
Ok, I can kinda understand why a church’s pastors might want to seize on a chance to further insinuate themselves into the fabric of a community much like other local business people might try to do so by buying Little League uniforms, but is standing around in your church “blessing” farm workers in absentia while they’re out working the fields really the best way to do that? How exactly is that benefiting those workers any more than my thinking good thoughts about my trash haulers as I watch them hauling away my trash a benefit to them?
More importantly, I don’t understand the theological underpinnings of these blessings. Are we expected to believe that members of the clergy really have the ear of gOd and that he/she/it will rescue a bad crop or make a good crop better if a minister or pastor simply waves his hands or asks? Are we expected to believe that if members of the clergy *don’t* ask gOd to give farm workers an injury-free season, the all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing big guy in the sky might simply decide to look the other way while some poor migrant laborer with a wife and three kids to support loses an arm to a Satanic (or perhaps Chinese-made) conveyor belt?
I’m not sure which is worse: The absurd, unsubstantiated claim that members of the clergy have such power or that they think it appropriate to use that power to protect things as minor as asparagus. I mean, come on – look around the world today. If *you* had the power to get gOd to improve or protect anything – anything at all – would asparagus even make your list of the top 1000 most important things?
And if you had that power, why waste time listing individual things at all? Why not just say, “Yo! Yahweh, sir! I, your loyal servant with the master’s degree from Ye Olde Bible Seminary hereby bless EVERYTHING! Please see what you can do to protect and improve the whole shebang. Many thanks!”? Is that too easy? Are the results of a blessing directly proportional to the amount of time and effort put into them? If so, “Citation Needed” (as Wikipedia so elegantly has been known to put it). Something tells me that the world would be a much better place if blessings of *any* kind or length actually had any sort of impact at all.
I’m sorry, maybe I’m just being all negative and stupid again, but the practice of and premises behind blessings seem to raise at least as many problems and questions in my mind as The Word Magic Known As Prayer.
Still they continue, get positive coverage in newspapers, and draw crowds.
If that’s a blessing in disguise rather than the worse than useless nonsense it seems to me, I hope someone will explain how and why.
(And as always, bonus points will be given if you can use the power of prayer to convince your gOd, lOrd, patron saint, or guardian angel to convey your ideas to my brain directly without your having to use anything as worldly and science-based as a computer, electricity, or the Internet.)
And with great weather on tap, the festival may be feeling the blessings already.
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“A frog marriage in Maghlipara village, Argatala, India, is part of an effort by villagers
to appeal to the rain gods they believe in to usher in rain.” - The BBC (April 28, 2009)
Apparently this is not an uncommon event….
—– Frog Marriage Performed (KGOT.com/Reuters; June 21, 2008)
Indian villagers married two frogs to bring them rain. They believe that if they please the Gods of rain with this ceremony that they will get good monsoon rains.
The frogs were dressed in wedding capes and prayers were given after the ceremony.
The town believes that God blesses them with rain on time when pleased with them.
—– Green Wedding (Metro.co.uk; April 23)
Earlier this year two frogs got married in front of over 2,000 wedding guests in India.
The frogs were joined in matrimony in a traditional ceremony in Hengrabari, in the northwestern Indian state of Assam.
It wasn’t the result of an amphibian romance, however, and neither of the frogs turned into a prince after being kissed.
Instead, it was an attempt to end the dry spell that has hit most parts of Assam over the past months, which has led to severe water shortages.
‘It’s a traditional belief that when a frog marriage is performed, the Barun Devata (the rain-god) is pleased and the rain comes,’ former councillor Bijoy Das told The Hindu newspaper.
The wedding of the frogs – male Barun (meaning wind) and female Bijuli (meaning thunder) – was accompanied by all the traditions of Assamese weddings, including songs and gifts presented to the bride.
The amphibians were then fed a special celebratory lunch of flies and mosquitoes. After the ceremony, the happy couple were sent on their honeymoon – by being released into a local stream.
“The marriage in progress….”
(Photo by Ritu Raj Konwar)
POP QUIZ: Should the Frog Marriage Theory of Precipitation be given equal time when students are taught meteorology? Should we teach the controversy that exists between those who believe Barun Devata is the rain gOd who must be appeased and those who believe some other deity is? Or should we just excuse easily offended Indian students from the classroom whenever the subject of precipitation comes up?
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I’ve frequently challenged Christians and other theists to give me the name of one atheist who has committed a crime on a par with those of the theists whose terrible crimes I regularly learn about and share here.
I believe OpenDiary.com diarist ~LoveMeForever~ has met my challenge by providing me with a news story about Kevin McKeither, a man convicted of rape last year who allegedly told his savagely abused, elderly victim that “There is no God.”
Congratulations and *cookies* to ~LoveMeForever~ for providing us with verifiable, objective evidence! This is such a rare and notable event that I am truly happy and grateful to have experienced it.
And I mean that without a bit of irony and sarcasm. Evidence, after all, can be examined and evaluated, and it can advance our quest to discover the truth even if it turns out to be less than perfect. Opinions that boil down to unsupported assertions, on the other hand, increasingly seem to me to be little more than patience-testing smoke that makes our attempts to discover the truth all the harder.
That said, here is the evidence we’ve been pointed to:
—– Man Gets 30-60 Years In Rape Of Elderly Woman (Julie Shaw/The Philadelphia Daily News; Dec 6, 2008)
A judge yesterday sentenced a man to 30 to 60 years in state prison for raping a 77-year-old woman in her Olney home last year, stomping on her naked chest, and tying her up.
DNA evidence linked Kevin McKeither, 49, to the egregious crime that shattered the elderly victim’s sense of order, decency and humanity.
Assistant District Attorney Bill Davis told Common Pleas Judge Lisa Rau yesterday that the victim never wanted to see her attacker again and was not in court because she was hospitalized for depression.
“This crime really broke her,” Davis said.
The judge called the crime “chilling,” and said, “it’s frankly impossible for me to fathom why any person would do this to another person.”
As the judge imposed the sentence that Davis asked for, a young nephew of the defendant responded by loudly banging his fist on a wooden gallery bench.
Family members tried to calm the relative, who then screamed, “I don’t care!” as he got up from his seat and flung a crumpled paper bag at a sheriff’s deputy.
The nephew then stomped out of the courtroom.
McKeither – convicted by a Common Pleas jury in May of rape, burglary, robbery and related offenses – also ranted in court.
“I didn’t rape nobody!” a burly, bald-headed McKeither, hands cuffed in front of him, protested. “I didn’t rob nobody. I didn’t burglarize. . . . Thirty to 60 years? When am I going to register (with state police as a sex offender? When I’m) 90 years old?”
As McKeither was escorted out of the room, heavily guarded by 11 sheriff’s deputies, he blurted: “I do want to file an appeal.”
During the trial, the victim described how her attacker entered her home on Gale Street near Front about 1:30 p.m. June 5, 2007, and jumped her from behind. He “took a knife, cut my dress and forced me on the floor,” she testified.
He then raped her, she said. Afterward, he stomped on her bare chest.
At McKeither’s preliminary hearing, the woman said she asked the man during the attack: “Don’t you have any decency?”
He answered, she testified: “Stupid woman, there is no decency. There is no God.”
After raping her, the man tied the victim’s hands and gagged her mouth with scarves she had hanging on her basement door. He used her bra to bind her ankles. Kneeling face forward toward the open basement door, she feared he would push her down the steps.
He didn’t. But he did steal her cash and leave her tied up before he fled.
The woman could not identify her attacker, but DNA evidence found on the clothing used to bind her was a match to McKeither.
McKeither, of Napa Street near York, Strawberry Mansion, had been staying at the time with his sister Shawna McKeither and brother-in-law William Burnett Jr., who lived across the street from the victim.
Yesterday, Shawna McKeither told the judge her brother was “not the predator (authorities are) making him out to be.”
Public defender Elizabeth McHugh told the judge her client’s most recent conviction before this resulted from a 1990 offense. He was convicted of indecent exposure and corrupting a minor. She said McKeither has maintained his innocence in the rape and contended he has something to contribute to society.
Also yesterday, public defender Jerome Mallon successfully argued that McKeither does not meet the legal definition of a sexually violent predator.
Judge Rau said there was no question the rape was predatory and sexually violent. But under the law, the commonwealth would have needed to prove that McKeither has a mental abnormality or personality disorder, which it did not, the judge said.
McKeither, nonetheless, will need to register with state police once he is released.
Here’s a follow-up story that I found online that provides a few more details:
—– Man Who Raped 77-Year-Old Loses Bid For Lower Sentence (Julie Shaw/The Philadelphia Daily News; Feb 21)
An angry Kevin McKeither, sitting in state prison and appearing in court via a video connection, ranted on and on yesterday, proclaiming his innocence in a rape of a 77-year-old Olney woman two years ago.
“I didn’t do this crime that was bestowed upon me!” he shouted, adding that he had “exhibit A to exhibit K proving (his) innocence.”
McKeither, 49, who was convicted on DNA evidence by a Common Pleas jury in May of rape, burglary, robbery and related offenses, received a hearing yesterday because the Defender Association of Philadelphia had filed a petition contending the judge’s sentence was illegal.
Judge Lisa Rau sentenced McKeither in December to 30 to 60 years in state prison, giving him the maximum terms of 10 to 20 years each on the rape, robbery and burglary convictions.
Public defender Elizabeth McHugh yesterday clarified that she did not consider the sentence illegal, but rather that it was “excessive” and “would amount to a life sentence for Mr. McKeither.”
The judge denied McKeither’s motion to reconsider his sentence, and again stated her reasons for the lengthy term, including the need to protect the public, McKeither’s “dangerous propensity,” her concern that his “ability to rehabilitate (himself) is low,” and the nature of the offense.
During the hearing, McKeither, who is at the State Correctional Institution at Camp Hill, Cumberland County, repeatedly interrupted, alleging he is innocent.
“I didn’t rape nobody! They didn’t even find one fingerprint. Please print that, please print that, at least in my defense,” he yelled, directing that comment to reporters in the room. He contended that a police officer had set him up.
The judge told McKeither that this hearing was not the appropriate forum and that he could appeal his conviction in Superior Court.
The victim testified at trial that her attacker entered her home about 1:30 p.m. June 5, 2007, and jumped her from behind with a knife. He raped her, ordered her to turn over, and raped her again.
At McKeither’s preliminary hearing, she also said the man had stomped on her bare chest.
She said she asked him, “Don’t you have any decency?” He replied, she testified: “Stupid woman, there is no decency. There is no God.”
After raping her, the man tied her hands and gagged her mouth with scarves she had hanging on her basement door and bound her ankles with her bra. As he fled, he stole about $85 from her purse, she said.
The woman could not identify her attacker, but DNA evidence found on a scarf used to bind her and on the bra she had on her at the hospital matched McKeither’s. He was living at the time at his sister’s house on Gale Street, across from the victim’s.
McHugh argued at trial that McKeither’s DNA had been “transferred” onto the scarf by a police investigator who shook McKeither’s hand, then went to the crime scene. She contended that police had planted McKeither’s DNA on the woman’s bra, which she alleged was not the same bra used to bind the victim.
Assistant District Attorney Bill Davis, however, explained outside court yesterday that a considerable amount of force had been used to bind the victim, during which time the attacker’s skin cells shed on the scarf and bra. He noted that only one person’s DNA – McKeither’s – had been found on the scarf.
He also said that before going to the hospital, the woman put back on the bra that had been used to bind her.
How do you process all this?
Here’s how I do:
1) This was an awful crime and I strongly condemn it. Whatever your beliefs about theism and religion might be, please don’t rape, rob, or abuse others. It’s bad for them; it’s bad for society; and it’s probably going to be bad for you.
2) Did Kevin McKeither really commit this crime? He was convicted of it in a court of law and that’s enough as far as I’m concerned to shift the burden of proof to those who say he didn’t. That burden isn’t as heavy as I wish it was, however. Unlike many of the convicted theists I’ve posted about, he denies committing the crime. His victim was unable to identify him as the person who assaulted her. The DNA evidence – while apparently strong and perhaps enough for me to have voted for a conviction had I been on the jury judging him – *might* have been planted. Without any evidence to support that claim, I would have dismissed it had I been on the jury. But the fact remains that this sort of evidence is more problematic than what we have for theists like Marie Moore. Bottom Line: Yes, I believe McKeither committed this awful crime – but not as strongly as I believe that Moore committed hers. (NOTE: The fact that his family apparently thinks he is innocent seems very similar to all those cases in which I’ve read about parishioners rallying around their convicted minister and carries very little weight with me.)
3) Is this crime – awful as it is – as bad as all the crimes by theists that I’ve posted? No. It may well be worse than most – but Moore’s murder of her 20-year-old son seems to top it. So does the murder of a blind and disabled man by someone who was apparently hired by Pastor Pushia to do the job so Pushia could cash in on the poor guy’s insurance policy. And of course the crimes of Islamic suicide bombers who often slaughter dozens of men, women, and children at a time are much, much worse…. This in no way excuses what McKeither did – but it is evidence that the known crimes of theists are often much worse than the crimes committed by the one atheist we know enough about to examine.
4) Is McKeither really an atheist? The preponderance of the evidence indicates that he is – but that evidence is awfully slim, being nothing more than a few words he allegedly said to the elderly victim who couldn’t identify him after the fact. I’ll accept that he’s an atheist on the basis of that evidence for the purposes of this discussion, but… I wouldn’t vote to convict him of being an atheist if atheism were a crime and I was on a jury trying him even if I were myself a theist. In the cases involving Moore and Pushia that I cited above, the preponderance of the evidence linking them to theism seems much more substantial.
5) What kind of atheist is McKeither? Apparently a unique lone wolf. At the same time that he allegedly told his victim that there isn’t a gOd he allegedly also said that “There is no decency.” As near as I can recall, I’ve not encountered another atheist who has said that. And at this point I have no reason to believe that McKeither belonged to any atheist group, let alone had a leadership role in such a group. That stands in sharp contrast to the long association Pastor Pushia has had with religion and churches and Pushia’s prominence as a leader. (Which is not to say that Pushia’s religion or church motivated the crime he’s accused of – but it *does* show that his long association with religion and his church apparently did very little to prevent that crime from taking place. It also seems to show what a poor judge of character some church congregations can be.) Needless to say, McKeither’s lone wolf atheism stands in even sharper contrast with the crimes of religiously-indoctrinated suicide bombers.
6) How prevalent are criminal atheists like McKeither? As far as I can determine at this point, he’s the only atheist like him. If atheists are in fact committing terrible crimes at the same rate as theists (let alone at a greater rate, as many Christians apparently believe), why does it continue to be so terribly hard to find evidence pointing to that fact? Even if we assume the absolute worst about McKeither, his solitary case does little to balance the crimes of the hundreds of criminal theists I’ve documented over the years even after we take into consideration the fact that atheists comprise a much smaller share of the US population.
7) Is there anything in commonly available atheist literature like Richard Dawkin’s “The God Delusion” that might logically or naturally encourage people to rape and kill? Not that I can see. That stands in sharp contrast to holy books like the Bible and its many gOd-inspired atrocities. To see the immoral example set by some of its most revered figures, go here. Perhaps the single most revered figure in the so-called Old Testament is Moses – and he allegedly committed a murder himself, then went on to order the murder and rape of thousands of others! And although Christians often point to Jesus as the greatest moral teacher ever, I find that characterization extremely hard to accept. Much of what he allegedly taught strikes me as being outright immoral. (You can find a list of those teachings in an entry I posted on Oct 7, 2002.) Mark Twain went so far as to say that the Jesus/gOd figure of the NT was “a thousand billion times crueler than ever he was in the Old Testament… Nothing in all history… remotely approaches in atrocity the invention of Hell.” Suffice it to say that I think Dawkins and his book set a far better example to follow than the Christian gOd and his book. An atheist who reads Dawkin’s book and then goes out and does Very Bad Things would shock me; a theist who reads the Bible and then goes out and does Very Bad Things would be merely one more monster in a nearly 2000-year-long string of them.
That’s how I process the story about Kevin McKeither.
If you process it differently, please tell me how and why.
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Margaret Evans, an assistant research scientist for the Center for Human Growth and Development at the University of Michigan, published a piece in 2000 titled “Beyond Scopes: Why Creationism Is here to Stay” that discussed creationist and evolutionist beliefs in children. I’ll summarize her paper as briefly as possible.
Evolution Versus Creation Science
Evans credits the emergence of creation science with the 1961 publication of the book The Genesis Flood, in which the “Biblical dictum of a young earth was preserved and the Noachim Flood was invoked to explain the fossil record.” A world awakened to “flood geology” set out to teach its new science in the classroom.
Science in the Service of Religion
In the seventeenth-century, science was considered an attempt to understand God’s handiwork, and in this sense was completely compatible with and endorsed by religion. However, as more and more natural explanations emerged and began to “depersonalize” nature, science found itself challenging religious authority, as it often continues to do.
Creation Science: An Oxymoron?
Evans attributes the recent opposition to evolutionary theory to the 1987 US Supreme Court ruling, which declared creationism to be religious and therefore an unfit subject in science classrooms. However, this decision “only prompted creationists to bolster their credentials as scientists” in an “ultimately futile effort to use science to defend a particular ontological position.”
The Depersonalized Human Versus the Privileged Human
This section begins to uncover some of the human psychology surrounding the adherence to creationist beliefs and the rejection of evolutionary facts. Evans argues that fundamentalists can and do hold scientific ideas, even ones that contradict Biblical teachings such as heliocentrism. The problem, then, is that evolutionary theories “more deeply threaten to undermine the privileged status of God and the human soul in the universe. […] Fundamentalists clearly fear that if they abandon their literal reading of the Bible, they must also abandon moral certitude.”
Cognitive and Cultural Factors in the Emergence of Beliefs about Origins
Now that we understand a bit about the history of creationism, Evans shares the results of her experiment with elementary school children in a midwestern university town.
Children responded to questions like “How did the very first X get here?” Answers were encoded as spontaneous generation, evolution, or creationism.
The youngest group of children, age 5-7, expressed a mix of spontaneous generationist and creationist responses. The middle age group, 8-10, expressed consistent creationist beliefs. The oldest children, age 10-12, expressed predominately evolutionist beliefs.
Furthermore, the youngest children were not inclined to consider why species are the way they are. “Seemingly, they were explaining how an organism becomes manifest, but not how it got there in the first place.”
Evans theorizes that, in certain contexts, “creationist thinking is a precursor and impetus to the later development of evolutionary theory.”
She then explains that the theory of evolution is “not something that arises intuitively, but rather requires a specific knowledge structure, with attention to special kinds of data.” To explain the dominance of creationist belief, Evans says “a teleological explanation appears to be readily applied in the absence of knowledge of other causal mechanisms.”
Consistency of Belief
Evans conducted other studies in different cultural settings. She consistently found “the more children in the middle age group (eight to ten years) knew about natural history […] they more likely they were to be evolutionist” but only in early adolescence “did access to information about evolution begin to exert a differential effect.”
Artificialism Revisited
Evans has established that creationist beliefs are more intuitive than evolutionary theory, but why? “A possible explanation for the derivation of an artificialist explanation is that it arises from an intuitive ontology, specifically a naïve theory of mind.”
“Piaget theorized that once the limitations of human capacities become obvious to a child, around the early- to mid-elementary school years, a superhuman might take on the role previously ascribed to the all-knowing, all-powerful parent. The recognition of human frailty might motivate children to transfer their expectations regarding human creative capacities from the realm of an intuitive theory of mind to an alternative model, that of theistic creationism.”
Evans’ studies confirmed Piaget’s theory. Her evidence points to the fact that “when children have constructed a coherent explanation for artifact origins, they no longer take the existence and design of an entity, artifact or animate, to be a given.”
I think Evans’ studies are interesting by themselves, but consider a recent article from Scientific American discussing studies related to the phenomenon of “infantile amnesia,” the curious inability to recall events from the first three years of life.
Studies by Daniel Povinelli were conducted to discover at what age an “autobiographical sense of self” emerged. Or in William James’ words, “I am the same self I was yesterday.”
Povinelli and his colleagues developed a rather clever series of experiments where children are videotaped playing a game in the laboratory and then shown the video footage a short time later. But, and here’s the clever part, during the course of the videotaping, one of the experimenters pats the child’s head in praise and in so doing surreptitiously places a large, brightly colored sticker on their head. (This was preceded by a sticker-less “sham pat” where children were simply accustomed to being patted on the head.) Although there were a number of hypotheses tested, the critical research question was whether upon seeing the previously recorded footage, children of different ages would be more or less inclined to reach up and touch their head. If they did so, this would indicate their general understanding that their past is causally bound to their present.
In the first study to use this general paradigm, published in the journal Child Development in 1996, Povinelli and his colleagues Keli Landau and Helen Perilloux reported that none of the two-year-olds and only 25 percent of three-year-olds reached up to touch their heads when the videotape was played back to them after a three-minute delay. In contrast, 75 percent of the study’s four-year-olds did so.
Yet although they largely failed to connect the past with the present by reaching up to touch the sticker, nearly all of the three-year-olds in the study accurately identified themselves when asked who was shown in the image. Interestingly, however, the authors found that the three-year-olds were significantly more likely to refer to themselves in the third person (using their first names rather and saying that the sticker is on “his” or “her” head) than were the four-year-olds, who used first-person pronouns (“me” and “my head”) almost exclusively.
In a follow-up study published in a 1998 issue of Developmental Psychology, Povinelli and his research colleague Bridget Simon used nearly the identical procedure, but this time the study included five-year-olds and also included a seven-day comparison condition. That meant that, for half of the children, the time duration between the covert sticker-marking event and the video playback was a full week. In this study, 88 three- to five-year-old children were randomly assigned to either the brief delay (3 min) or the extended delay (7 days) condition. Similar to the results from the earlier study, less than half of the three-year-olds responded by reaching up to their heads regardless of the length of time that separated the two events. In contrast, nearly all of the four- and five-year-olds in the brief condition did so, and furthermore their same-age peers in the extreme delay condition did not. “That is,” the authors write regarding the delayed condition findings, “as age increased, the number of children who reached up tended to decrease…. Four- and especially five-year-olds displayed a clear understanding that although briefly delayed visual feedback is causally relevant to transient aspects of the present self, extremely delayed feedback is not.”
My question, then, is could those children in Evans’ youngest age group who expressed spontaneous generation and creationist origins have simply lacked a fully-developed “autobiographical self”? This seems a likely explanation, at least in part. Children who cannot connect their present selves upon seeing images of their past selves might very well assume existence is a product of “something from nothing”.
Creationism, the essential idea that humankind has always been the way it is now, could similarly be described as a sort of “infantile amnesia”, a failure to identify an autobiographical connection to an ancestor species.
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On April 6th I received the following e-mail from an individual who shall not be named through a university mailing list to which I am subscribed:
I was wondering if you would pray about my job. After more than six years as a temporary lecturer at [University], I am under review for a permanent position. Over the last few months I have jumped through a lot of hoops, and my review has gone through many committees. Now it is in the hands of the university-wide administrative committee (CAP) which will make the final decision. The answer could come anytime between now and July. Please pray that the university will provide the position.
Of course I found the idea that God might be willing to nudge university administrators towards keeping this person’s position quite amusing. I found it even more amusing when I noticed that the person sending the request teaches science courses. Well, not amused. More like distraught. Anyway, I made a mental note of this and filed the e-mail away.
Today I got this follow up from that same individual (the subject of which was ‘praise’):
I am so grateful for your prayers as I have been awaiting word about my job. I received a letter Friday that the continuing lecturer appointment at [University] has been approved, so I’m now permanent! I spoke with personnel this morning to confirm that I understood the letter correctly. Thank you for praying. This decision could have been drawn out a couple more months. Yay!
Of course I am happy for this individual but still distraught at this person’s failure, despite having a Ph.D. in a science field, of seeing the obvious error in this logic. The fallacy in Latin is post hoc ergo propter hoc – It happened after, therefore it was caused by.
There is no significant evidence that prayer can actually alter the course of human affairs and events. And it is highly unlikely that this individual would have blamed a lack of prayers or not praying enough if this person had not received the job offer. It is a tremendous fallacy in thinking that, just because one event follows another in time, the first event must have caused the second to happen.
That a person trained in the scientific method can still so easily fall for it when it comes to religion probably says more about religion than it does the scientific training.
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“Many religious communities cloud the line between rational and irrational behavior. Babbling nonsense syllables inside a Pentacostal church elicits AMENs and cries of ‘Praise Jeebus!’ Doing it inside a mental hospital is likely to extend your stay….
“If churches didn’t celebrate irrational behavior and treat it as ‘normal’, then it might be clearer to delusional people that they or their loved ones are having mental problems and should seek help.” - Deve (4/26/2009 10:05:59 PM )
Dear Deve -
As usual, you’ve made some excellent points.
And they seem the perfect introduction to the two-minute video that I recently found under the heading Baby Preacher Gives New Meaning To Speaking In Tongues.
Is this really the sort of behavior that genuinely sane people would encourage in their children?
The video may be unusually extreme but it fits a pattern I’ve repeatedly encountered. I’ve read about and seen clips of young preachers before and they always leave me feeling more than a little queasy. Intense, one-sided rants that are full of emotional theatrics and devoid of logic and evidence are always troubling, of course, but they seem especially troubling when the star of the show has yet to make it out of junior high. That some adults who should know better actually encourage such behavior with their praise and applause makes matters much, much worse.
Alas, it’s hardly a new phenomenon, as an 1881 New York Times article about boy preachers proves.
Theists who convince their kids to march in public while holding enlarged photos of aborted fetuses or God Hates Fags! signs might be the worst contemporary examples that I can think of.
Has there ever been a very young atheist or humanist “preacher” whose family or atheist community has encouraged to go out into the world and tell theists just how wrong they are? Not that I can recall. I’d like to believe that that’s because activist atheists and humanists tend to have more respect for their children, other adults, and appropriate methods of debate and persuasion, but perhaps something else is going on (such as fear of being burned at the stake by theists if we ever get too uppity).
What do you think? Is it a coincidence that theists seem to use children to promote their teachings in a way that Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and I don’t? Or is this a very real and/or a very significance difference that perhaps supports Deve’s comments about the churches celebrating rather than discouraging irrational behavior?
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- Image by PinkMoose via Flickr
This is part of an ongoing series that will be posted each Monday. You can read the introduction to this series by clicking here.
Look! Up in the sky – and all around us! It’s MONDAY. Time once again for Monday School! STILL “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday!” Remember? If not, keep reading – maybe it’ll all suddenly come back to you like a revelation from on high.
Today’s Lesson: Does Reading Silly Bible Passages In Context Remove Any Of Their Silliness?
If you’ve attended Monday School before, you probably know that I often cite the Bible chapter and verse in an attempt to point out exactly why it’s an absurd collection of writings we really ought to condemn and reject instead of worship, praise, or live our lives by.
If you’ve attended more than a few Monday School sessions, you probably also know that Christians often respond to these chapter and verse criticisms of mine with rather harsh hoots of “Ha! You’re just taking things out of context! You need to read these passages in light of what the Bible says as a whole! Once you do, all these passages you criticize perfect sense!”
There are several problems with this claim of theirs.
First, Christians themselves disagree about what many passages mean despite their best attempts to read them in light of what the Bible as a whole says, so it’s pretty odd for them to recommend that procedure as the means to enlightenment.
Second, they fail to make clear why we should read specific passages within the context of the Bible as a whole but not then go on and read the Bible itself within the context of the ancient times and mindsets which created it. Even if a given silly passage might somehow make sense within the context of the Bible as a whole, the fact remains that the Bible itself loses much of its credibility when seen within the broader context of human history, human psychology, and all the other cultures which have created and assembled similar “We have a hotline to God!” collections of myths.
Third – and perhaps most importantly as far as the average Monday School student is concerned – I have thought at length about how individual passages of the Bible fit into its overall message. Far from explaining away the silliness and immorality of individual passages, this procedure serves to underscore the fact that the Bible as a whole is fundamentally flawed and not merely in error here and there.
Consider Biblical morality in the context of the Bible as a whole rather than as reflected in isolated passages….
Throughout the Hebrew scriptures (commonly called the Old Testament by Christians), a dry, unbending, intellectually dead legalism is repeatedly emphasized at the expense of a genuine morality which takes into account specific circumstances and the greater good.
We perhaps get our first whiff of this legalism when the Bible’s God expels Adam and Eve from the Garden before they can eat of the Tree of Life and obtain for themselves an immortality which God Himself seems unable to reverse after it’s acquired no matter how undeserved or immoral that acquisition may be (Gen. 3:22-24
).
Later, God honors Jacob’s acquisition of the birthright and blessing which properly belong to his brother, Esau, despite the underhanded way Jacob acquired them (Gen. 25, 27). Possession may be nine-tenths of the law, but is it really the essence of Absolute Goodness? The Bible here (as elsewhere) would have us believe that it is.
When God threatens to kill all the Hebrews and start over, Moses talks Him out of it not by proving that the Hebrews deserve to live or have an absolute Right to Life but by citing God’s promise to Abraham (Ex. 32:11-14). Apparently God (and, by extension, everybody else) is bound by promises even when the greater good or a deeper morality requires a promise to be broken. Both here and later (Num. 14:11-20), Moses also points out to God that killing the Hebrews will make Him look bad in the eyes of the Egyptians – a winning argument that reveals the Bible’s God to be even more morally shallow than an appeal to the absolute sanctity of promises does.
Joshua 9:3-26 tells us that the Hivites escaped Joshua’s wrath by making a deal with him while misrepresenting themselves as other people. Even though God ordered their destruction (Deut. 7:1-2), Joshua nonetheless honors the promise he made to them in his ignorance – and God does nothing to indicate Joshua was wrong to do so. (In shining contrast, our legal system – imperfect as it is – does not require that contracts be honored when they are arrived at through fraud or misrepresentation.)
Judges 11:30-40 tells the incredible story of Jephthah’s rash vow to God to sacrifice the first person who comes out of his door when he returns home if he is granted victory in battle. When his victory is granted and the first person out that door is Jephthah’s beloved daughter, Jephthah does indeed sacrifice her – and God does nothing to dissuade or punish him. Clearly the Bible would have us believe that breaking a promise to murder an innocent person is more immoral than murder itself.
When the sons of Aaron attempted to worship God, the Bible tells us they were utterly consumed by divine fire for failing to worship Him in precisely the way God had ordered (Lev. 10:1-2). Clearly the God of the Bible is more concerned about the arbitrary form worship takes than about its substance (otherwise God would kill those who don’t worship at all before He would kill those who merely worship wrongly).
Legalism (which I define as blind adherence to the letter of the law even when doing so violates higher principles of justice and morality) is very unfortunate and much bemoaned when it occurs in our own justice system. It is absurd (and many non-Biblical theists would say blasphemous) to attribute such an unthinking, legalistic mindset to a truly perfect deity – yet that’s exactly what the Bible does, again and again and again.
Indeed, the Bible’s primitive, legalistic morality often degenerates into a childish sort of magic, as when it tells us that the Hebrews escaped God’s killing of the first-born in Egypt by smearing lamb’s blood on their doors (Ex. 12), that the Hebrews prevailed in battle only so long as Moses held up his hand (Ex. 17:11-13), that Aaron was able to stop a God-sent plague simply by waving a censer (Num. 16:44-48), and that Samson’s power was derived from his long hair (Judges 16:19-20).
This absurd legalistic/magical approach extends to the Gospels. Mark 4:11-12 quotes Jesus himself as saying that he speaks in parables so as to confuse his enemies lest they learn the secret of salvation, convert, and gain forgiveness for their sins. Apparently conversion is a kind of irreversible hocus-pocus which can circumvent justice, morality, and/or the will of God Himself and thus must be kept from certain people the way guns must be kept from children by their non-omnipotent parents.
These and other passages (as well as the bizarre Christian concept of substitution atonement) prove that the God of the Bible is often motivated less by any rational system of justice or ethics than by primitive rituals and arbitrary acts which make no sense given His allegedly perfect, omniscient, and omnipotent nature. Indeed, the God of the Bible often seems more like a pre-programmed robot or thoughtless simpleton than the wisest being imaginable. He has more in common with the cruel and capricious gods of oft-deplored non-Hebrew/non-Christian theists than with the best human judges of today, and as such is hardly a better guide for our behavior than the alleged dictates of the volcano deities of primitive island tribes.
That’s the conclusion I come to when I read the silly passages of the Bible in the context of the Bible as a whole, anyway.
If you come to a different conclusion, please tell the class exactly how and why.
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