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Using computer modeling of a process called wind setdown, researchers have come up with a plausible scientific explanation of the Biblical parting of the Red Sea.
This animation shows how a strong east wind over the Nile Delta could have pushed water back into ancient waterways after blowing for about nine hours, exposing mud flats and possibly providing an overland escape route similar to the biblical account of the Red Sea parting.
Jeffrey Goldberg visited with Fidel Castro recently and has two posts on his Atlantic blog about his meetings with the former Cuban head of state: part one and part two.
After this first meeting, I asked Julia to explain the meaning of Castro’s invitation to me, and of his message to Ahmadinejad. “Fidel is at an early stage of reinventing himself as a senior statesman, not as head of state, on the domestic stage, but primarily on the international stage, which has always been a priority for him,” she said. “Matters of war, peace and international security are a central focus: Nuclear proliferation climate change, these are the major issues for him, and he’s really just getting started, using any potential media platform to communicate his views. He has time on his hands now that he didn’t expect to have. And he’s revisiting history, and revisiting his own history.”
This is substantial reporting but I’ll admit my favorite line was:
I’ve never seen someone enjoy a dolphin show as much as Fidel Castro enjoyed the dolphin show.
Because of Goldberg’s reportage on Castro’s remarks regarding anti-Semitism, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (and strong critic of Israel) announced yesterday that he would meet with Venezuela’s Jewish leaders. Someone get Errol Morris down to Cuba to make a sequel to his film about Robert McNamara. The Fog of Cold War perhaps? (via @kbanderson)
The New Yorker has a long profile of Francis Collins, the ardent Christian whom Obama picked to head up the NIH, and the NIH’s role in embryonic stem cell research.
A year later, Obama’s appointment of Collins seemed an inspired choice. The President had found not only a man who reflected his own view of the harmony between science and faith but an evangelical Christian who hoped that the government’s expansion of embryonic-stem-cell research might bring the culture war over science to a quiet end. On August 23rd, however, Judge Royce C. Lamberth, of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, halted federal spending for embryonic-stem-cell research, putting hundreds of research projects in limbo and plunging the N.I.H. back into a newly contentious national debate.
A show like Futurama just can’t stay in the past. It keeps coming back, just like our friend Jesus. So do references to Jesus in the show.
You would think that dropping the J-word would initially be pretty mild and nonspecific, then ramp up. But the first season’s “When Aliens Attack” comes out swinging:
Earth is invaded by Omicronians demanding to see the season finale of Single Female Lawyer, a television show which was accidentally knocked off the air 1,000 years earlier by Fry. Professor Farnsworth explains that the show no longer exists because most video tapes from that era were destroyed during the Second Coming of Jesus in the year 2443. Ken Keeler, the writer of the episode, considered this joke one of the most blasphemous lines in the show, because it suggested that the Second Coming had been and gone and life on Earth had carried on much as before.
The beginning of “Future Stock” has a toss-off reference:
At the Bot Mitzvah, Fry asks a Jewish robot if they don’t believe in Robot Jesus, to which the robot replies, “We believe he was built, and that he was a very well-programmed robot, but he wasn’t our Messiah”.
In “A Tale of Two Santas”, Bender, posing as the murderous robot Santa Claus, is arrested and put on death row. “All of the crew dress up as Santa and Zoidberg dresses up as ‘his friend Jesus’ to attempt to stay Bender’s execution.”
Fry: I’m Santa Claus!
Hermes: No, I’m Santa Claus!
Amy: We’re also Santa Claus!
Dr. Zoidberg: And I’m his friend Jesus.
Mayor: You guys aren’t Santa! You’re not even robots. How dare you lie in front of Jesus?
All of the summaries above and below are from Wikipedia’s “Religion in Futurama” entry:
When the real Robot Santa appears and attacks the crew and the people attempting to execute Bender, the executioner exclaims “Get him, Jesus!” before diving behind an object, and in reference to Benjamin Franklin’s famous remark, Zoidberg replies, “I help those who help themselves.”
On several occasions, Professor Farnsworth uses the phrase “Sweet Zombie Jesus!” as an expression of shock or dismay. These exclamations are usually cut for syndication in the United States. In the DVD of Futurama episode “The Deep South,” a cut scene shows Farnsworth muttering in his sleep about the Zombie Jesus returning at tea-time, when Farnsworth has no food to supply it.
But that Wikipedia entry missed this line from “Less Than Hero”:
Leela: Man, I’m sore all over. I feel like I just went ten rounds with mighty Thor.
Fry: I feel like I was mauled by Jesus.
(All direct quotes from Wikiquote’s Futurama page.)
At The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal has an interesting post about Apple as a religion and uses that lens to look at the so-called Antennagate** brouhaha. For example, Apple was built on four key myths:
1. a creation myth highlighting the counter-cultural origin and emergence of the Apple Mac as a transformative moment;
2. a hero myth presenting the Mac and its founder Jobs as saving its users from the corporate domination of the PC world;
3. a satanic myth that presents Bill Gates as the enemy of Mac loyalists;
4. and, finally, a resurrection myth of Jobs returning to save the failing company…
On Twitter, Tim Carmody adds that Apple’s problems are increasingly theological in nature — “Free will, problem of evil, Satanic rebellion” — which is a really interesting way to look at the whole thing. (John Gruber the Baptist?)
** The Antennagate being, of course, the hotel where Apple Inc. is headquartered.
From a recent issue of the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik surveys a recent selection of books about who Jesus was.
The American scholar Bart Ehrman has been explaining the scholars’ truths for more than a decade now, in a series of sincere, quiet, and successful books. Ehrman is one of those best-selling authors like Richard Dawkins and Robert Ludlum and Peter Mayle, who write the same book over and over — but the basic template is so good that the new version is always worth reading. In his latest installment, “Jesus, Interrupted”, Ehrman once again shares with his readers the not entirely good news he found a quarter century ago when, after a fundamentalist youth, he went to graduate school: that all the Gospels were written decades after Jesus’ death; that all were written in Greek, which Jesus and the apostles didn’t speak and couldn’t write (if they could read and write at all); and that they were written as testaments of faith, not chronicles of biography, shaped to fit a prophecy rather than report a profile.
In the late 1950s, psychologist Milton Rokeach took three patients who believed they were Jesus Christ and made them live with each other for two years.
The early meetings were stormy. “You oughta worship me, I’ll tell you that!” one of the Christs yelled. “I will not worship you! You’re a creature! You better live your own life and wake up to the facts!” another snapped back. “No two men are Jesus Christs. … I am the Good Lord!” the third interjected, barely concealing his anger.
Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens want to arrest the Pope when he visits Britain in September.
Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church. The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998.
Update: The Times article quoted above is a little misleading says Dawkins.
Needless to say, I did NOT say “I will arrest Pope Benedict XVI” or anything so personally grandiloquent. You have to remember that The Sunday Times is a Murdoch newspaper, and that all newspapers follow the odd custom of entrusting headlines to a sub-editor, not the author of the article itself. What I DID say to Marc Horne when he telephoned me out of the blue, and I repeat it here, is that I am whole-heartedly behind the initiative by Geoffrey Robertson and Mark Stephens to mount a legal challenge to the Pope’s proposed visit to Britain.
Nonetheless, there is a legal challenge involving the Pope’s visit underway, initiated in part by Dawkins and Hitchens. (thx, lots of people)
From the inbox over at the Freakonomics blog, a family in Texas pretends to be Christian so that their children won’t be excluded from play dates.
We found by experience that if we were truthful about not being regular church attenders, the play dates suddenly ended. Thus started the faking of the religious funk.
Thankfully this doesn’t seem to be an issue in Manhattan. (via clusterflock)
Omar Hammami was a fairly normal kid from a small town in Alabama — “as a teenager, his passions veered between Shakespeare and Kurt Cobain, soccer and Nintendo” — who is now in Somalia, leading terrorist attacks for a group called Shabab, which is loosely affiliated with Al Qaeda.
In the three years since Hammami made his way to Somalia, his ascent into the Shabab’s leadership has put him in a class of his own, according to United States law-enforcement and intelligence officials. While other American terror suspects have drawn greater publicity, Hammami exercises a more powerful role, commanding guerrilla forces in the field, organizing attacks and plotting strategy with Qaeda operatives, the officials said. He has also emerged as something of a jihadist icon, starring in a recruitment campaign that has helped draw hundreds of foreign fighters to Somalia. “To have an American citizen that has risen to this kind of a rank in a terrorist organization - we have not seen that before,” a senior American law-enforcement official said earlier this month.
See also a New Yorker article about Adam Gadahn, an American who is now a member of Al Qaeda.
Paul Ford is asked if there is an afterlife and he replies with a thoughtful non-answer answer.
Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking couldn’t throw away her dead husband’s shoes, for fear that he’d need them when he returned. After my grandfather died I used to fantasize that I could call him and he would answer. “Hey buddy,” he’d say. “I was just thinking of you.” But they changed the area code for that part of Pennsylvania, from 215 to 610, sold the house, and got rid of his clothes.
Kevin Kelly on defining ourselves by technology we don’t use:
I’m interested in how people personally decide to refuse a technology. I’m interested in that process, because I think that will happen more and more as the number of technologies keep increasing. The only way we can sort our identity is by not using technology. We’re used to be that you define yourself by what you use now. You define yourself by what you don’t use.
“Tis not polite to say, English, but we told thee so.” See also. (via lined and unlined)
Christopher Hitchens has travelled the world debating religious people. Here’s what he has learned.
I haven’t yet run into an argument that has made me want to change my mind. After all, a believing religious person, however brilliant or however good in debate, is compelled to stick fairly closely to a “script” that is known in advance, and known to me, too. However, I have discovered that the so-called Christian right is much less monolithic, and very much more polite and hospitable, than I would once have thought, or than most liberals believe.
In 1907, Dr. Duncan MacDougall found a bunch of people who were about to die and weighed them as they expired. MacDougall claimed that at the point of death, the bodies became lighter. That lost weight, the doctor assumed, was the escaping soul. He even postulated that the souls of the sluggish in life are slow in death:
The subject was that of a man of larger physical build, with a pronounced sluggish temperament. When life ceased, as the body lay in bed upon the scales, for a full minute there appeared to be no change in weight. The physicians waiting in the room looked into each other’s faces silently, shaking their heads in the conviction that out test had failed.
Then suddenly the same thing happened that had occurred in the other cases. There was a sudden diminution in weight, which was soon found to be the same as that of the preceding experiments.
I believe that in this case, that of a phlegmatic man slow of thought and action, that the soul remained suspended in the body after death, during the minute that elapsed before it came to the consciousness of its freedom. There is no other way of accounting for it, and it is what might be expected to happen in a man of the subject’s temperament.
The weight lost of MacDougall’s first subject at death was 3/4 of an ounce…or about 21 grams. (via radiolab)
Writing in the New York Times this weekend, Robert Wright attempts to reconcile religion and science. The middle ground is the “built-in” moral sense of our universe, in that the universe builds and rewards organisms that cooperate with one another.
I bring good news! These two warring groups have more in common than they realize. And, no, it isn’t just that they’re both wrong. It’s that they’re wrong for the same reason. Oddly, an underestimation of natural selection’s creative power clouds the vision not just of the intensely religious but also of the militantly atheistic.
If both groups were to truly accept that power, the landscape might look different. Believers could scale back their conception of God’s role in creation, and atheists could accept that some notions of “higher purpose” are compatible with scientific materialism. And the two might learn to get along.
This is essentially the subject of the last chapter or two of Wright’s The Evolution of God, the only part of this excellent book that I didn’t quite buy into, even though I’ve been thinking about his conclusion quite a bit since finishing the book.
The Kindle version of the Koran lists Gabriel as a co-author…you know, the angel who revealed the Koran to Muhammad. (via the browser)
The mother of an 11-year-old girl who died of undiagnosed diabetes as the family prayed for her to get better testified Tuesday that she believes sickness is caused by sin and can be cured by God.
Leilani Neumann told the jury in her husband’s trial that she thought her daughter’s March 2008 illness was a test of her religious faith and she didn’t take the girl to a doctor because that would have been “complete disobedience to what we believe.”
There isn’t enough hard drive space on my server to record all the Fuck Yous I’d love to direct at Mrs. Naumann and her husband in this post. I hope the judge’s god is telling him to sentence these two monsters to forever in prison. (via cyn-c)
From Joseph Clarke in Triple Canopy, a comparison of the histories of the American megachurch and corporation.
Lakewood and America’s twelve hundred other megachurches — congregations that draw between two thousand and fifty thousand people per weekend — are not simply vast machines for passive spectatorship. Sunday services are convergences of worshipers who spend their weeknights at prayer groups, Bible studies, ministries, and missionary training sessions. Successful megachurches are like well-run companies, with intricate corporate structures devised to keep each member personally engaged; their pastors are like chief executives, maximizing the productivity of laborers in the evangelism enterprise. Jumbotron notwithstanding, the architectural and organizational tropes of the megachurch are best compared to those of the modern white-collar workplace.
Last night I found out about the most amazing load of crap I have ever heard of: breatharianism, a extreme diet whose most dedicated followers claim to subsist on air only. There are a number of variations on this basic theme but perhaps the most colorful breatharian is Wily Brooks. From Wikipedia:
Wiley Brooks is a purported breatharian, and founder of the “Breatharian Institute of America”. He was first introduced to the public in 1980, when he appeared on the TV show That’s Incredible!. Wiley has stopped teaching in recent years, so he can “devote 100% of his time on solving the problem as to why he needed to eat some type of food to keep his physical body alive and allow his light body to manifest completely.” Wiley Brooks believes that he has found “four major deterrents” which prevented him from living without food: “people pollution”, “food pollution”, “air pollution” and “electro pollution”. In 1983 he was allegedly observed leaving a Santa Cruz 7-Eleven with a Slurpee, hot dog and Twinkies.
He told Colors magazine in 2003 that he periodically breaks his fasting with a cheeseburger and a cola, explaining that when he’s surrounded by junk culture and junk food, consuming them adds balance. On his website, Brooks explains that his future followers must first prepare by combining the junk food diet with the meditative incantation of five magic “fifth-dimensional” words which appear on his website. In the “Question and Answer” section of his website, Brooks explains that the “Double Quarter-Pounder with Cheese” meal from McDonald’s possesses a special “base frequency” and that he thus recommends it as occasional food for beginning breatharians. He then goes on to reveal that the secret of Diet Coke is “liquid light”. Prospective disciples are asked after some time on this junk food/magic word preparation to revisit his website in order to test if they can feel the magic.
He further mentions that those interested can call him on his fifth-dimensional phone number in order to get the correct pronunciation of the five magic words. In case the line is busy, prospective recruits are asked to meditate on the five magic words for a few minutes, and then try calling again; he does not explain how anyone can meditate with words they cannot yet pronounce. Brooks’s “institute”, in the past, charged varying fees to prospective clients who wished to learn how to live without food, which ranged from US$15 million to $25 million. These charges have historically been presented as limited time offers exclusively for billionaires, New lower fees have been set to $10,000 with an initial deposit of $2,000.
He wants to consume only air but can’t stop eating McDonald’s hamburgers! Diet Coke is liquid light! My impulse is to say “you just can’t make this stuff up, folks” but that’s obviously not true. Kinda makes you want to start your own completely implausible religion, doesn’t it? (thx, andy)
Geeking Out sounds interesting, but I can’t go. Perhaps you’d like to?
This month, we’ll be discussing the interaction between science and religion with speakers including: astrophysicist and Is God a Mathematician? author Mario Livio; psychologist Paul Bloom, the author of Descartes’ Baby; and The GOD Part of the Brain author Matthew Alper, one of the founders of the field of neurotheology. The work of local artists will be on display as well.
Geeking Out will be held Thursday, June 18th, at 7:30 pm (doors open at 7:00 pm) at the JLA Studios art gallery on 63 Pearl St in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn. Admission is FREE. Drinks will be available. Please spread the word and bring your friends.
A quote attributed to Ricky Gervais about his atheism.
It annoys me that the burden of proof is on us. It should be: you came up with the idea. Why do you believe it?
(via cyn-c)
Robert Wright has a new book out soon called The Evolution of God. Andrew Sullivan has a review.
From primitive animists to the legends of the first gods, battling like irrational cloud-inhabiting humans over the cosmos, Wright tells the story of how war and trade, technology and human interaction slowly exposed humans to the gods of others. How this awareness led to the Jewish innovation of a hidden and universal God, how the cosmopolitan early Christians, in order to market their doctrines more successfully, universalised and sanitised this Jewish God in turn, and how Islam equally included a civilising universalism despite its doctrinal rigidity and founding violence.
Last month’s issue of The Atlantic contained an excerpt.
For all the advances and wonders of our global era, Christians, Jews, and Muslims seem ever more locked in mortal combat. But history suggests a happier outcome for the Peoples of the Book. As technological evolution has brought communities, nations, and faiths into closer contact, it is the prophets of tolerance and love that have prospered, along with the religions they represent. Is globalization, in fact, God’s will?
I loved two of Wright’s previous books, The Moral Animal and especially Nonzero. (via marginal revolution)
This video explains how to counteract the “you’re not being open-minded” argument that atheists and scientists sometimes get when confronted by those who believe in the supernatural.
Trying to suggest that a lack of explanation is evidence that supernatural powers are at work is actually a contradiction. In effect what it’s saying is, “I can’t explain something, therefore I can explain it.”
(via buzzfeed)
Some appliances are sold with a Sabbath Mode for those who observe the Jewish day of rest. Here are the notes for a Sub-Zero refrigerator:
- The door can be opened/closed at any time without concern of directly turning on or off any lights, digital readouts, solenoids, fans, valves, compressor, icons, tones or alarms.
- Any defrost cycle that becomes active will not be a function of the number of times or the length of time that the door is opened.
- The ice maker is disabled automatically. Ice cubes can then be made manually (using a standard ice cube tray) as needed for that Sabbath/Holiday.
- All dispenser functions are deactivated.
There are also special Shabbot elevators that stop on each floor so that no buttons need to be pushed. One could imagine a Sabbath Web Browser that would require no button pushing…it would just browse through a list of your favorite web sites automatically and you could dip in and read when you wanted.
Every year, a professor from Liberty University takes his Advanced Creation Studies biology class to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History to check out the opposition.
“There’s nothing balanced here. It’s completely, 100 percent evolution-based,” said DeWitt, a professor of biology. “We come every year, because I don’t hold anything back from the students.”
Creationists, who take their view of natural history straight from the book of Genesis, believe that scientific data can be interpreted to support their idea that God made the first human, Adam, in an essentially modern form 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.
A 2006 poll by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that 42 percent of Americans believe humans have always existed in their present form. At universities such as Liberty, founded by the late Jerry Falwell, those views inform the entire science curriculum.
(via clusterflock)
One of the many things on Ronald Reagan’s mind during the height of the Cold War in the 1980s was the nature of Mikhail Gorbachev’s religious beliefs. Some recently declassified notes taken during a summit meeting in Moscow in 1988 indicate that Reagan went so far as to attempt to convert Gorbachev to Christianity.
Gorbachev tried to switch the subject. Perhaps the United States and the Soviet Union might open the way for greater cooperation in space, he told the president. But the president wasn’t to be diverted. According to the transcript, Reagan told Gorbachev that space was in the direction of heaven, but not as close to heaven as some other things that they had been discussing.
As the meeting ended, Reagan became even more direct and personal. He noted that his own son Ron did not believe in God either. “The President concluded that there was one thing he had long yearned to do for his atheist son. He wanted to serve his son the perfect gourmet dinner, to have him enjoy the meal, and then to ask him if he believed there was a cook.”
Kevin Kelly has written a great post called Amish Hackers, which addresses the myth that the Amish don’t use technology. As Kelly illustrates, the Amish use electricity, cell phones, cars and even the internet but their adoption of technology is not quick, they rent rather than buy (e.g. taking taxis rather than owning cars), and their default stance with any new gadget is to test first to see if it fits with their views.
One Amish-man told me that the problem with phones, pagers, and PDAs (yes he knew about them) was that “you got messages rather than conversations.” That’s about as an accurate summation of our times as any. Henry, his long white beard contrasting with his young bright eyes told me, “If I had a TV, I’d watch it.” What could be simpler?
(via waxy)
David Attenborough, the voice of several thousand hours of nature films, gets hate mail from viewers who believe he should be crediting God for nature’s beauty.
Telling the magazine that he was asked why he did not give “credit” to God, Attenborough added: “They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator.”
(via cyn-c)
Some customers say the Cavanaghs have such a big market share because their product is about as close to perfect as earthly possible. “It doesn’t crumb, and I don’t like fragments of our Lord scattering all over the floor,” said the Rev. Bob Dietel, an Episcopal priest.
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