Caturday felid trifecta: “Crazy cat lady” banned from feeder ferals, gets big support; the cats of Istanbul; why cats make biscuits; and lagniappe

April 4, 2026 • 11:00 am

We have our usual three items plus lagniappe today.  Read on:

First, click below to see a recent Guardian story about how a mean local council tried to ban this British woman from feeding feral cats, and how the neighbors (and a charity) stepped up to help her.

An excerpt:

“Two ladies from York have just been in,” said Collette Boler at the till of her small cafe in Thurnscoe, near Barnsley. Her voice began to choke up.

“They came in with a box of chocolates and a card, a box of cat food, a bag of cat biscuits and just said ‘carry on doing what you’re doing, you’re absolutely fabulous’. And a man’s just given me a tenner for cat food. It’s been incredible.”

The grandmother of seven has become an unlikely icon for cat lovers everywhere after finding herself banned from feeding a colony of feral felines she has looked after for 20 years.

She had been visiting them twice a day, including Christmas Day, even spending her own money on vet bills and having some neutered, which she admitted cost “a fortune”.

But two weeks ago Boler – affectionately known as the “crazy cat lady” – was subject to what some of her supporters see as a heavy-handed and overzealous ban, after a neighbouring business complained to the council over cat faeces on its premises.

Now if Boler continues to feed the cats, she will be issued with a community protection notice – a type of antisocial behaviour order – which could result in a fine of up to £2,500.

But she has been overwhelmed with support after others stepped in to help, including neighbours, strangers and a national cat charity.

. . .The Cat Action Trust 1977 has stepped in by writing to Barnsley council to urge it to repeal Boler’s b

“Feeders like Collette actually play a really important role,” said Alice Ostapjuk-Wise, a volunteer for the national charity which advocates for the “invisible issue” of cats that have never had contact with humans. “[Feeders] can alert us when a new cat arrives that might not be neutered.” The charity carries out neutering to control their numbers.

The Cat Action Trust 1977 has collected food for the Barnsley cats, which are frightened of humans and mostly stay out of sight, though the council has not made clear whether it too will face consequences for feeding them.

Ostapjuk-Wise said: “We just want to do what we can because some councils actually choose to exterminate feral cat colonies, and that’s the last thing we want.

“The path they seem to be taking so far appears to be very inhumane, basically starving the cats. That’s not going to solve the problem.”

. . .Barnsley council did not respond to a request for comment but previously told local media it recognised Boler’s “good intentions” but the community protection warning was “an early step to prevent the situation from getting worse”.

“We always aim to protect public health and safety, and we encourage anyone concerned about stray animals to work with recognised animal welfare organisations, so support can be provided safely.”

Boler said she had “never expected” so much attention. “I just wish they’d let me feed my cats,” she said. “That’s all I want. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

The Barnsley council sucks. Just because they don’t like feral cat feces, they’re starving the cats to death. There is a change.org petition with nearly 4,000 signatures that you can sign, and I just signed it. Please join me; it costs you nothing and may help save the Barnsley cats from the meanies.

And here’s a FB video with an interview of Boler, who seems very nice.

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This is a wonderful 14-minute video of the cats of Istanbul and how the locals care for them. I love that city–not just for the fact that it harbors “strays” who are effectively pets, but also because it’s beautiful and has lots of attractions.

This is really what it’s like to be in Istanbul. If you want a good commercial movie about Istanbul’s cats, do watch the movie “Kedi” (the Turkis words for cats), made in 2016.  It has a 98% critics’ rating rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a rating that only the very best movies get.

I*********************

The World’s Best Cat Litter site answers a recurring question among cat owners:

There are a variety of answers. Some condensed answers:

It’s in their nature

Kneading is an instinctual trait that begins in kittenhood. When kittens are feeding from their mother, they push on her mammary glands with their paws to help stimulate milk flow. For the mother, this releases oxytocin, also known as the bonding hormone.

You might notice your cat dribbling a little when they are kneading. This is natural too! Some cats go into “milking mode” even though they are older and fully weaned. They just get in the zone and subconsciously expect the milk that would have come from their mother.

They’re claiming their territory

Did you know that cats have scent glands in their paw pads? Scent glands are a way for cats (and other animals) to mark their territory, a trait that is especially important in the wild.

Cats tend to make biscuits on their favorite human, other pets in the home, and their favorite blankets. As a cat kneads, they release their scent to mark something as theirs. So if your cat has a habit of kneading on your stomach, congratulations! You are officially their property.

They’re making their bed

In the wild, felines knead tall grass to create a comfortable space for sleeping.

At home, your cat might like to make biscuits on your blankets, clothes, or even your body. This just means they are trying to get cozy and snuggly for a long cat nap.

They love you!

Kneading is typically a behavior that happens when a cat feels happy and secure, but they aren’t necessarily expecting milk from the process.

They’re going into heat

Female, unspayed cats are known to knead their paws before “estrus,” or going into heat. The act of kneading is a sign to male cats that the feline wants and is able to mate.

There’s further information about whether you should prevent them from kneading (no!), and advice to trim their nails so they don’t do damage when they make biscuits.

Or you can watch this explanatory video:

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Lagniappe: An appropriate tweet showing a street sign in Istanbul asking people to be attentive for road cats:

. . . and an educational FB meme from Debra:

h/t: Matthew, Ginger K.

Readers’ wildlife photos

April 4, 2026 • 8:40 am

Send in your photos if you got ’em!

We have a batch of lovely hummingbird photos today sent in by Ephraim Heller, including a hummer in her nest. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

On my February visit to Trinidad and Tobago I managed to photograph 13 of the 18 hummingbirds that are sometimes present on the islands. A previous post was devoted entirely to my new favorite bird, the tufted coquette. Today’s post contains photos of six other species; a subsequent post will cover the remainder. The species that I did not photograph either do not visit feeders or are only present seasonally in the country.

Trinidad and Tobago sits at the junction of South America and the Caribbean, and its unusual diversity of hummingbird species is due to its recent geological separation from the Venezuelan coast and the diversity of habitats it retains. Both Trinidad and Tobago are fragments of the South American continental shelf that were once connected to the mainland and later became isolated as sea levels and tectonics changed. Trinidad was connected to South America via a land bridge during the last glacial maximum, 10,000-12,000 years ago. The white-chested emerald population restricted to Trinidad and the white-tailed sabrewing restricted to Tobago show that measurable biological divergence can occur over relatively short timescales once island populations are isolated.

Hermits (subfamily Phaethornithinae) diverged from all other hummingbirds early enough in the family’s evolutionary history that they are sometimes described as a parallel radiation. They share several features that distinguish them from typical hummingbirds: bills that are long and strongly curved (matching the curved tubular flowers they prefer, particularly Heliconia), plumage that is brown or green rather than iridescent, and a foraging strategy — trap-lining — in which each individual follows a memorized route through the forest, visiting widely spaced flowers in sequence rather than defending a single patch. Because trap-liners visit many individual plants across a large area, they tend to carry pollen between plants that are far apart, making them important cross-pollinators over distances that territorial hummingbirds rarely cover. Male hermits do not defend territories at all; instead, they gather in loose groups (leks), where each male sings from a fixed perch to attract females. Females select mates and then nest and raise young entirely on their own.

Green Hermit (Phaethornis guy):

Little Hermit (Phaethornis longuemareus):

Rufous-breasted Hermit (Glaucis hirsutus):

The rufous-breasted hermit is the primary and perhaps the unique pollinator of the deer meat (Centropogon cornutus) flower:

Here is a rufous-breasted hermit on its nest, built under the leaf of a Heliconius:

Now moving on from the hermits (subfamily Phaethornithinae), the rest of my photos are of species of typical hummingbirds (subfamily Trochilinae).

The white-necked jacobin (Florisuga mellivora) has been studied extensively because a proportion of adult females look like males. In most hummingbirds, the two sexes are clearly different in appearance, with males being more colorful. In the jacobin, all juveniles of both sexes bear the same ornamented, male-like plumage. As they mature, about 80% of females change to the typical muted female pattern, but roughly 20% retain the male-like appearance into adulthood. The leading hypothesis is that this reduces harassment by territorial males: for reasons I do not understand, male jacobins tend to aggressively harass and drive off female jacobins during feeding, while ignoring other males.  What makes this interesting for biologists is that it demonstrates that colorful, male-like ornamentation in females can arise through means other than sexual selection.

[JAC: I bet some chowderhead would say this bird has three sexes because of the dimorphism in females]

Male pattern white-necked jacobin:

Female pattern white-necked jacobin:

Long-billed Starthroat (Heliomaster longirostris):

The white-tailed sabrewing (Campylopterus ensipennis) occurs only on Tobago and in a small area of northeastern Venezuela. When Hurricane Flora hit Tobago in September 1963, it destroyed much of the Main Ridge Forest Reserve; the sabrewing population appeared to have been eliminated entirely and the species was presumed locally extinct for eleven years, until individuals were confirmed to have survived in 1974. Current estimates for the Tobago population range from several hundred to over 1,000 birds.

White-tailed Sabrewing male:

White-tailed Sabrewing female:

Saturday: Hili dialogue

April 4, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to CaturSaturday,  April 4, 2026, Passover (until April 9) and shabbos for Jewish cats.

It’s also Holy Saturday, International Carrot Day, National Cordon Bleu Day, National Vitamin C Day, World Rat Day, and Ramen Noodle Day.

This isn’t really ramen, but it’s close: a bowl of Hong Kong’s famous beef noodle soup that I ate on my first visit there in 2016:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 4 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

First, two lovely views of Earth from Artemis II posted by NASA: Surprise: it’s round! And it’s round from all angles, which means it’s not flat. I’m not quite sure what continents we’re looking at. Can you help?

From inside the capsule:

A headline from today’s NYT (click to read):

*Friday’s war summary from It’s Noon in Israel (their bolding):

It’s Friday, April 3, and the thirty-fifth day of Operation Roaring Lion. The global price of oil has reached $111, up eleven percent since yesterday. Here are the latest developments while you were asleep:

  • Donald Trump’s primetime address Wednesday night marked no significant shift in the war’s trajectory—as I predicted. The president reiterated four familiar positions: the war is necessary, it has effectively already been won, it must continue, and it will end soon. As of today, the original four-to-five week timeline has elapsed. Based on an IDF statement from March 15 indicating that up to three additional weeks of strikes were under consideration, the current estimate now points to a total campaign lasting seven to eight weeks.
  • Yesterday, the U.S. struck Iran’s largest bridge, collapsing the center of a newly built B! suspension bridge—a 136-meter-high, $400 million structure connecting Tehran and Karaj. According to a security source speaking to i24NEWS, the destruction was intended to cut off supply routes that bring drone parts and missiles to Iranian firing units that launch them at U.S. and Israeli forces. Trump shared footage of the strike on Truth Social, declaring, “The biggest bridge in Iran comes tumbling down, never to be used again,” and warning of “much more to follow” if a settlement is not reached.
  • Iranian media reported this morning that a second F-35 stealth fighter had been shot down over central Iran—echoing a March 23 claim previously denied by United States Central Command. As with the earlier report, there is no independent verification.

And a bit of analysis:

More than almost any of the generals and military figures, there is one man whose elimination might truly cause the regime to topple. The man could have been a Silicon Valley billionaire; instead, he joined the Revolutionary Guards: Babak Zanjani, the architect of Iran’s crypto-based sanctions-evasion system.

Zanjani’s is a fascinating story: the son of a railway worker with no higher education who became a businessman and built a global empire of dozens of companies across Turkey, the UAE, Malaysia and Tajikistan—designed specifically to bypass sanctions. In 2013, he was arrested for allegedly embezzling $2.7 billion from state oil revenues and sentenced to death—but the sentence was never carried out. It turned out the architect of its shadow economy was more valuable to the regime alive than dead. Before and during his arrest he was a media fascination, and was the most famous prisoner in the history of the Islamic Republic. After his gamble on the explosion of crypto netted major returns for the regime, Zanjani was released under supervision in 2025.

According to Makor Rishon’s Pazit Rabina, Israel has declared the first crypto war, and Zanjani is the enemy. He has been identified as the “beating heart” of Iran’s shadow economy—the man who converted oil revenues and financial assets into digital assets, enabling the Revolutionary Guards to continue funding terror even under the heaviest sanctions.

Earlier this week, Defense Minister Israel Katz, in cooperation with the U.S. treasure department, signed an administrative order designating Zanjani’s crypto wallets and oil tankers as terror assets. The order grants Israel and the U.S. legal authority to freeze and seize billions of dollars across global trading arenas. Yet well-informed sources warned that the effort is “too little, too late.”

*Definite clickbait from the WSJ: “Iran beefs up defenses, recruits children as it prepares for ground war.”

Iran is responding to the threat of a ground operation on its soil by stepping up defenses around its biggest oil port, while threatening to attack a wider array of targets around the Gulf and launching a mass recruitment drive reminiscent of its 1980s war with Iraq.

The steps come as President Trump has ordered thousands of Marines and Airborne troops to the Middle East. While the president hasn’t said he plans to put boots on the ground, the deployments would give the U.S. more options for ground assaults or raids, and they have set off preparations and a wave of new threats from Iran.

Analysts and people familiar with Iranian military tactics say the country is gearing up for a fierce fight that could give it the chance to inflict more casualties than it can against the U.S. and Israel’s dominant air forces.

Tehran is also mobilizing its population in ways that seek to harness the spirit of the 1980s war with Iraq. They include drives to recruit millions of Iranians, including children—a fixture of the tributes to martyrs via street signs and posters that are still a part of Iran’s daily life.

Iran is hardening defenses on Kharg Island, Ebrahim Azizi, the head of the parliament’s National Security Commission, told the legislature’s news agency this week following a visit to the oil export hub and possible focus of any ground operation. Steps include boosting guided-missile systems, laying mines along the coastline and booby-trapping facilities, an Iranian official said.

Military analysts say tunnels have likely been carved into many of the islands, which Iran is preparing to defend with missiles and other munitions. Iranian-backed militias in Iraq have demonstrated the use of wire-guided first-person-view drones, which are possessed in greater numbers by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, posing a potent threat to any U.S. troops.

The Times of Israel reports that Amnesty International has condemned Iran’s use of child soldiers as a war crime:

Amnesty International on Thursday issued a statement warning that Iran’s recruitment of children as young as 12 for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ all-volunteer Basij force amounts to a war crime.

According to Amnesty, the IRGC put out a recruitment call on March 26, dubbed the “Homeland-Defending Combatants for Iran,” which it said was “open to volunteers” aged 12 and up. The call came as the Basij found its checkpoints under attack during the war with the United States and Israel.

Citing eyewitness accounts and its own analysis of video footage, Amnesty said that evidence shows “child soldiers having been deployed” to checkpoints and patrols, some armed with weapons including AK47-style assault rifles.

Iran is not dumb: they know that even a small number of American casualties on the ground will turn America against the war far more than any rise in the price of oil. Iran is surely willing to sacrifice any number of “martyrs” to stop the war.

*Despite Trump’s claim that there is “regime change” in Iran since there’s a new leadership, these new leaders are still hard-liners, and are, according to the WaPo, are pushing a hard bargain on Trump.

The assassinations of Iran’s senior leaders by Israel and the United States have triggered unprecedented churn within Tehran’s political and military establishment, eliminating the supreme leader and some of the most powerful men in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but have left in place a hard-line government and little hope of a diplomatic breakthrough, according to regional and Western officials.

Rather than usher in what President Donald Trump has called “more reasonable” leadership, the surviving Iranian regime is newly emboldened to inflict economic pain, pushing Tehran and Washington further apart in negotiations, according to the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive details.

 . . . officials in the region say they see little hope of a negotiated breakthrough in the next few weeks, even as Israel continues to pursue its assassination campaign against senior Iranian leadership. In public comments, Iran’s leaders have played down talks with the United States and laid out steep demands to end the war, including reparations and formalized control over the Strait of Hormuz, with a right to collect tolls.

. . . The regime has signaled its defense will also involve spreading more pain around the region to substantially raise the price of any attack. Tehran, which has successfully shut off most Gulf oil exports and hit facilities and airports, has told its neighbors it would expand its targets to offshore oil platforms if its islands are invaded, Iranian and Arab officials said. It has also threatened to hit vital infrastructure like power plants and desalination facilities.

“Iran intends to make any U.S. landing as costly and politically unsustainable as possible,” said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, a London-based think tank. “I expect Iran will try to swarm and inflict pain through drones first and then widening its retaliation to its neighbors.”

Does that make you nervous? Yes, me too.

*In January an unidentified astronaut took ill aboard the International Space Station, forcing a medical evacuation of the ailing one and two companions back to Earth. Now the astronaut has been identified as Mike Fincke, and his condition described, though he seems to be okay now and doctors still don’t know what happened.

The astronaut who prompted NASA’s first medical evacuation earlier this year said Friday that doctors still don’t know why he suddenly fell sick at the International Space Station.

Four-time space flier Mike Fincke said he was eating dinner on Jan. 7 after prepping for a spacewalk the next day when it happened. He couldn’t talk and remembers no pain, but his anxious crewmates jumped into action after seeing him in distress and requested help from flight surgeons on the ground.

“It was completely out of the blue. It was just amazingly quick,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press from Houston’s Johnson Space Center.

Fincke, 59, a retired Air Force colonel, said the episode lasted roughly 20 minutes and he felt fine afterward. He said he still does. He never experienced anything like that before or since.

Doctors have ruled out a heart attack and Fincke said he wasn’t choking, but everything else is still on the table and could be related to his 549 days of weightlessness. He was 5 ½ months into his latest space station stay when the problem struck like “a very, very fast lightning bolt.”

. . . Fincke said he can’t provide any more details about his medical episode. The space agency wants to make sure that other astronauts do not feel that their medical privacy will be compromised if something happens to them, he said.

One wonders why he was brought back home if the episode lasted only 20 minutes. But doctors couldn’t be sure that something serious didn’t happen (even a mild heart attack), and it was the right thing to do to bring him back to Earth to have him checked out. Remember, the safety of astronauts takes priority over the goals of a mission.

*Yup, the Free Press is still touting religion, and never touting the advantages of nonbelief. Here’s there new article, whose title speaks for itself, “Guys, try church“, by FP senior editor Will Rahn, He first dispels the idea of going to church to embrace “hypermasculine” Christianity, which I didn’t know was a thing. It’s the crazy idea that Christianity goes along with getting fit and buff. Instead, Rahn says that we males should go to church for the right reasons. Curiously, that means making Pascal’s wager!

I’m not saying men should stay away from faith generally. In fact, I’m writing this to encourage you to go to church—not necessarily because it will get you fit, or be fun. Pretending to be a crusader is probably more exciting than just sitting in a pew. But going to church will probably make you a bit happier, and perhaps a slightly better human. Normie Catholicism is, to my mind, a lot more attractive than the “Deus Vult” version.

Don’t get me wrong—as a kid I found it all exceptionally dull. Sit, stand, kneel, stand. The organ music. The well-coiffed priest in his robes going on about who knows what. It all struck me as a silly waste of time that would be better spent watching cartoons.

. . .I’m not making the case that you should adopt my strain of mainstream Catholicism, or even Catholicism at all. I’m not even here to sell you on Christianity. If you’re looking for that, check out C.S. Lewis or Søren Kierkegaard or Thomas Aquinas. A lot of that stuff, particularly Kierkegaard, has a way of sailing right over my skull. But I will say that the most practical argument for fostering a faith in the deity comes from the 17th-century French polymath Blaise Pascal.

In vulgar terms, it’s essentially a risk-reward hypothesis: You lose very little by deciding to live a faithful life, and if all that dogma is essentially correct, you might get to spend eternity in paradise. If there is no God, you just die like everyone else, having lived at least a little more lovingly, peacefully, and forgivingly than you might have otherwise.

The only people with something to lose here are those who stick with atheism: The hard bet that there is no God has atheists dying like everyone else at best, and at worst costs them never-ending joy. Life, in my humble opinion, is a hard enough slog without the weight of atheistic certainty.

. . . Pascal’s wager has been decried as cynical, but it worked for him. He talked himself into sincere religious faith. Go through the motions, act as if it’s true, and you might just wind up a true believer. What’s funny about the wager is that believing in God, in the promise of heaven, is really its own reward. Bet on a God who loves you, and you’ll find there are rewards for you in this world regardless of what’s next.

And another reason men should go to church: to find women!

I heard recently of a now-married couple who locked eyes for the first time at the moment in Mass when everyone wishes peace on those around them. And this was not in one of those fancy downtown Manhattan churches for hot Zoomers on the make, but rather in the sleepy, family-oriented Upper East Side neighborhood of Yorkville. Going to church indicates to women that you’re a halfway functional human being.

This is absolutely insane; I was stunned to see such stupidity. What kind of God wouldn’t know whether you were believing solely to get to heaven—or faking your belief.  Maybe Pascal talked himself into sincere belief, but how many of us unbelievers could do the same thing?  And aren’t there good reasons for being a good human being: living a decent life rather than a “faithful” life? Does it matter which “faith” you live? Finally, “atheistic certainty” is an oxymoron.  Most atheists simply see no reason to believe in God, and are not certain about Gods. No atheist I know feels that their atheism is any kind of “weight”. Atheism is no more a “weight” than is disbelieve in leprechauns, Santa Claus, and the Tooth Fairy.

I have to say that this is the dumbest article I’ve seen lately touting religion, which seems to be a goal of the Free Press. It’s incoherent, misguided, and out of place on a serious news website.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej compares people unfavorably to cats:

Hili: People like to talk behind each other’s backs.
Andrzej: Yes, cats are better—they kill, but they don’t hold grudges.

In Polish:

Hili: Ludzie lubią się wzajemnie obmawiać.
Ja: Tak, koty są lepsze, zagryzają, ale nie żywią urazy.

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From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From somewhere on Facebook (I forgot); the caption is “This is how we’ll get to Mars.”

From My Cat is an Asshole:

Masih reposted this video of an Iranian civil-rights activist describing her horrifying interrogation in prison. She must be out of Iran now, but think of all the jailed protestors that don’t have a voice—or never leave prison alive. The Farsi is translated into English subtitles.

And I had to add this one I found on my feed:

From Simon: Cats on a plane!

From Luana:

From Emma. Read the description of that poor guy’s life by clicking on Sama Hoole’s tweet:

Two from my feed:

Clever cat!

One I reposted at The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived at Auschwitz. She was four years old.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-04-04T10:13:08.628Z

Three from Dr. Cobb, whose hols ended yesterday. First, a treehopper disguised as a duck! Not really, but there coiuld be multiple functions for these shapes, including the new one given in the article below the photo.

Inspiration for scifi. #Bugs #Bugsky http://www.science.org/content/arti…

— 🟪 Core Traditions | 1.5°C > Normal?! 🌎 (@porcelainteacup04.bsky.social) 2026-04-03T06:33:22.701Z

A pair of osprey vids. This one was from three days ago:

Resident female Telyn (3J) arrived at Dyfi today (30th) at 14:19. Just need resident male Idris to arrive(c)DOP#UKOspreys

— Welsh_Nature_Lady 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 (@welshnaturelady.bsky.social) 2026-03-30T14:04:51.551Z

And this one was yesterday:

Dyfi Ospreys resident male Idris returns at 18:23 2nd April, great to see him back with Telyn (3J)#UKOspreys(c)DOP (c)MWT

— Welsh_Nature_Lady 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 (@welshnaturelady.bsky.social) 2026-04-02T19:23:01.006Z

The woodies are still here

April 3, 2026 • 2:27 pm

The woodies seem to fly in every day about 11 a.m. and are still here when I leave about 2. I still have no names for them, as nothing suggested struck the right chord.  Here’s a preview of the next set of duck photos, which will concentrate on the wood ducks as Vashti is nesting.

Feel free to suggest names, which should reflect the fact that they’re perky and gorgeous. (The last pair was named “Frisky” and “Ruth”, with Ruth having a Jewish name.)

Click to enlarge:

Bart Ehrman schools Ross Douthat on Christianity and how to find Biblical “truth”

April 3, 2026 • 9:40 am

The NYT “opinion” piece below is very long, and is in fact a transcript of a discussion of Christianity pitting Biblical scholar and atheist Bart Ehrman against dyed-in-the-wool Catholic Ross Douthat.  If you’ve read this website lately, you’ll know that Douthat is all over the place touting Jesus: he’s published a new book, he’s debated Steve Pinker on God, he’s written a gazillion columns highlighting his book and its reasons why we should be Christians, and in today’s piece he and Ehrman discusses the “truth” of the New Testament.

I have little respect for Douthat because his case for a divine being in general, and for Christianity in particular, simply involves the same tired old (and not dispositive) assertions, many of them based on science (e.g. the “fine-tuned” universe, the mystery of consciousness, etc.).  Douthat’s drunk the whole chalice of Kool-Aid, and is not self-critical.

Ehrman, on the other hand, is an impressive guy. He started out as a Biblical literalist and practicing fundamentalist Christian, eventually becoming a Baptist preacher. Then he realized, based on the existence of inexplicable evil in the world, that the whole Jesus-and-God story was largely bushwa, and he wrote a bunch of books showing why. He knows his Bible better than does Douthat, and can quote chapter and verse without even looking at the book.

Now Ehrman does think that there’s a factual core of the New Testament, in that he thinks the evidence for the existence of a Jesus person who taught disciples is an absolutely secure historical fact. So, he thinks, is the Crucifixion, though not the Resurrection: Ehrman has no truck with miracles, adhering to Hume’s argument that unless they are more probable than the reliability of their witnesses, they shouldn’t be accepted.  Ehrman also has no truck with mythicists (I flirt with such a position) who aren’t convinced that there was a real Jesus person. Ehrman thinks that historical-Jesus believers, who are indeed in the majority among Biblical scholars, have a solid case. (The evidence for that, though, is based largely on what’s written in the Bible.)

[UPDATE:  See comment 3 below by Roger Lambert, citing Richard Carrier’s critique of Ehrman’s view that a Jesus person absolutely existed. Carrier is a “mythicist” who doubts the existence of a Jesus person. You can see more of Carrier’s arguments here.]

At any rate, you can either hear the discussion (82 minutes) or read it (the latter is a lot faster for me) at the NYT link below. It is an object lesson (from Ehrman) on how to assess the Bible as “truth”, and also how a historian uses evidence when confronting Scripture. Ehrman spends a lot of time schooling Douthat on these issues, and Douthat comes off as a credulous schoolboy.

The main point that Ehrman wants to make in this discussion is that Jesus and then Christianity introduced to the world the idea that we should love people whom we don’t know, a view that has led to good things like hospitals and orphanages. Ehrman has just published a new book on this thesis: Love Thy Stranger: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West. 

I have a few doubts about that, including the fact that Ehrman takes it for granted that this was one of Jesus’s teachings without good evidence for that claim, and that the idea of loving others whom you don’t know was not invented by Christians. Ehrman may be right with respect to the West, so his book (which I haven’t read) at least has the geography of love correct, but he’s on shakier ground saying that loving strangers was indeed a teaching of Jesus. Ehrman even notes that Jesus didn’t say to love everyone, only the members of one’s tribe—Israelites. And of course some of Jesus’s teachings, like “take no thought for the morrow” or “abandoning your family and loved ones to follow me”, aren’t ones we should follow. After all, Jesus did also say that the end of the Earth and his return was nigh:

Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom. (Matthew 16:28).

Ehrman would surely argue that the last verse, while Jesus may have said it, was simply untrue. But if Jesus did say it, Christians have to explain it.  The fact is that, as even Ehrman admits, we have no idea what Jesus said. Ehrman sort of admits that, but then apparently has some secret way to separate what Jesus really said versus what people made up about him later.

Click the screenshot below to read, or see the article archived here. If you have some time, I think it’s worth hearing or reading.

I’ll give a few quotes from the discussion, most of them from Ehrman (indicated with an “E”; Douthat’s quotes are prefaced with a “D”). These quotes are indented, while my comments are flush left.

Ehrman’s argument:

I am absolutely not arguing that Jesus introduced the idea of love or the idea of altruism into the world. What I am arguing is that we, today, almost all of us — whether we’re Christian, agnostic, atheists, whatever we are in the West — when there’s a disaster that happens, we feel like we ought to do something about it. There’s a hurricane, there’s wildfires, there’s an earthquake, and we feel like we ought to do something. We might send a check, for example, or we retire and we decide to volunteer in a soup kitchen. We’re helping people we don’t know and probably never will know, and who we may not like if we did get to know them.

So why do we help them? My argument in the book is that sense, that we should help people in need, even if we don’t know them, ultimately derives from the teachings of Jesus. In Greek and Roman moral philosophy at the time, this was not an issue at all — you were not supposed to be helping people just because they were in need. Jesus based it in large part on his Jewish background, but with some transformations of what he himself knew growing up. He is the one who made this part of our conscience.

. . .The idea is that if you’re going to love your neighbor, it doesn’t just mean somebody who’s within your own religion or your own ethnicity or your own nation. It means, if somebody’s in need, that’s your neighbor. That’s what it means to love your neighbor as yourself.

So Jesus is getting the idea of love your neighbor and even love your stranger as yourself from his Jewish heritage. But within Israel, it’s “Love your fellow Israelite as yourself.” And Jesus is now universalizing it.

Part of the thesis of my book is that that mentality is what led to huge institutional changes in the West, including the invention of public hospitals — orphanages, old people’s homes, private charities dealing with hunger and homelessness, governmental assistance to those who are poor — all of those are Christian innovations you can establish historically.

. . . What I am saying is that if people claim to be followers of Jesus, they ought to follow his teachings. And his teachings are quite clear that you should care for people who are not like you — the other. You’re not supposed to bomb them back to the Stone Age, and you’re not supposed to make them suffer because you don’t like them or you don’t want them among you. You’re supposed to take care of them.

(Ehrman is referring at least in part to recent wars, and he admits that he’s a political liberal, but denies that his argument is in any way political. I believe him.) But yes, if you claim to follow Jesus’s teachings, you should follow Jesus’s teachings. And then you should leave your family and give away everything you have.

But of course the argument that The Love Everyone Idea came from Jesus is an untestable assertion, since we can’t repeat history without a Jesus person.  But if Jesus didn’t teach that, then it came from somewhere else and can be attributed simply to humanism and not credited to Christianity. It could have simply been one of the many things made up by people who wrote the Bible. After all, Ehrman claims that much of the Bible is false.

How about these teachings of Jesus?

From Matthew 6 (King James version, which is the version I’ll use): take no thought for the morrow:

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? 26 Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? 27 Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?  28 And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: 29 And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 30 Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? 31 Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? 32 (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. 33 But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

Follow me, not your family or loved ones (Luke 14:25-27):

25 And there went great multitudes with him: and he turned, and said unto them, 26 If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. 27 And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple.

Why are Christians supposed to follow the love commandment but not the others? I don’t know, nor does Ehrman tell us.

A further problem with Ehrman’s claim is, as he says below, to Jesus “your neighbor” doesn’t just mean anybody, but apparently only fellow Israelites— members of your tribe.  But that’s not what Ehrman thinks we should do today; he think we need a new interpretation of Jesus’s words to fit the 21st century. And that means loving everyone:

E:  You can’t simply take the teachings of the New Testament and transplant them into the 21st century. If any government tried to institute, as their governmental policy, the Sermon on the Mount, they’d last about two days, period.

I’m not saying that it’s this kind of simplistic equivalent. What I am saying is that if people in power claim to be Christian, they ought to take very seriously what that means. I’m not saying that it’s going to necessarily affect immigration policy, for example. But the Bible is quite clear, even in the New Testament, that “Love your neighbor as yourself” meant your fellow Israelite, or it explicitly states that anybody who immigrates into Israel is to be treated like an Israelite.

This baffles me.  He is updating Jesus’s words here, and so we should follow Ehrman’s interpretation, not Jesus’s supposed teachings themselves. How do we know what, according to Ehrman, Jesus really said or taught, and what words were put into his mouth later? We don’t know from this interview, though perhaps it’s in Ehrman’s new book.

Ehrman: Well, I think there are credible historical narratives in the Gospels. I think we can find things that Jesus really did say and really did do. But I don’t think that you can simply read the Gospels and think: Oh, that’s what Jesus really said and did.

There are a lot of reasons for that.

Douthat: Give me three reasons.

Ehrman: They are contradictory to each other, describing the same event, where they both can’t be right because they’re contradictory. They are written by people who were not there at the time, who didn’t live in the Jewish homeland, who did not speak Aramaic. They’re living decades later and are recording accounts that they’ve heard. So that’s two things: The authors living much later, and the contradiction.

The third thing is: These authors got their stories from somewhere. We don’t know where the authors lived and we don’t know who the authors were. The Gospels circulated anonymously before they had names attached to them. So we don’t know. We call them Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But we don’t ——

All true. But note Ehrman’s statement, “I don’t think that you can simply read the Gospels and think: Oh, that’s what Jesus really said and did.” He may think that the consistency of Jesus’s “love” message indicates that a Jesus person really taught that, but there’s also a consistency in Jesus saying that he was the son of God. Yet Ehrman believes the former but not the latter.

Here’s Ehrman explaining why he became an atheist: he couldn’t accept theodicy:

E:  I taught at Rutgers for a few years, and when I was there, I was asked to teach a class called The Problem of Suffering in the Biblical Tradition. And when I got asked to teach the class, I thought it would be a great idea because I had long thought that every author of the Bible in one way or another is trying to wrestle with the problem of, especially, why the people of God suffer.

And I had realized by this time that there’s not an answer in the Bible — there are lots of different answers. And some of these answers are in conflict with each other.

. . .I came to think that the idea that any monotheistic religion has a problem with the existence of God, given the state of suffering in the world.

And I’m not a radical atheist who insists there is no God, but I don’t think there is. I don’t think there’s any kind of supernatural power that’s overseeing the world, that is active in people’s lives, that actually answers prayer. I don’t believe a God like that exists.

Douthat doesn’t have an answer for that.

Finally, is it true that Jesus did introduce the idea of loving your neighbor to the West? Well, my friend the philosopher Maarten Boudry, discussing this with me via email, decided to ask the bot Claude. Here’s the question (in bold) and Claude’s answer:

Is it true that there were a lot of Axial Age religions that promoted counterintuitive and challenging moral codes, like loving your enemy and turning the other cheek, apart from Christianity?

Yes, this is a well-documented observation among historians of religion and philosophy. The Axial Age (roughly 800–200 BCE, a term coined by Karl Jaspers) saw a remarkable convergence across several civilizations, where thinkers independently developed moral and ethical frameworks that challenged conventional human instincts like tribalism, revenge, and self-interest.

Here are some notable parallels:

Buddhism (5th century BCE) is perhaps the most striking example. The Buddha taught mettā (loving-kindness) toward all beings, including those who harm you. The Dhammapada contains passages urging practitioners to overcome hatred with love and to respond to anger with calm — very close in spirit to “love your enemy.”

Confucianism and Mohism in China offered related ideas. While Confucius was more measured (when asked about repaying injury with kindness, he replied “repay injury with justice”), Mozi (5th century BCE) went further with his doctrine of jiān ài (universal or impartial love), arguing that people should care for strangers and even rival states as much as their own — a radically counterintuitive position that was widely debated precisely because it cut against natural partiality.

Jainism developed ahimsa (non-violence) to an extreme degree, extending compassion and non-harm to all living creatures, including insects. This demanded extraordinary self-discipline and restraint even toward those who might threaten you.

Stoicism in Greece taught that all human beings share in a universal rational nature, and that anger and vengeance are failures of reason. Marcus Aurelius (though later than the Axial Age proper) wrote extensively about responding to hostility with understanding rather than retaliation, building on earlier Stoic foundations.

Zoroastrianism emphasized the moral duty to actively choose good over evil, framing ethics as a cosmic struggle that required personal sacrifice and integrity beyond mere self-interest.

The Hebrew prophetic tradition — figures like Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah — challenged their own society with demands for justice toward the poor, the stranger, and the marginalized, often at great personal cost.

What makes the Axial Age so fascinating to scholars is that these developments happened largely independently across cultures that had little or no contact with each other. The common thread seems to be that as societies grew more complex and urbanized, thinkers began reflecting more deeply on the gap between how people naturally behave and how they ought to behave — and many of them arrived at strikingly similar conclusions about the need to extend moral concern beyond one’s in-group.

So Christianity’s ethic of enemy-love, while distinctive in its specific theological framing, was part of a broader human pattern of moral discovery during this period. That doesn’t diminish its significance, but it does place it in a richer historical context.

Even in the West, then, there were antecedents to Jesus’s message of love.

While I have a lot of respect for Ehrman, I don’t understand how he managed to separate the wheat of “love they neighbor” from the chaff of “follow me and neglect your family and friends”.  I do think, though, that the message of treating everyone with respect (I can’t bring myself to love everyone!) would have come from humanism as a guideline equal in force to that of “love thy neighbor.” Would we lack hospitals and orphanages if Christianity didn’t exist? (Go read about what Catholic Ireland did to orphanages!)  Steve Pinker has pointed out the reason for this in recent years: we have no special privilege simply by being us. And remember that although love may have been the Christian message, for two millennia avowed Christians have flouted that dictum. It doesn’t, then have any pride of place over the similar dictum of humanism.

Readers’ wildlife photos

April 3, 2026 • 8:15 am

Edmund Ault has sent us some photos of mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) ducklings, and you can never see too many of these.  (We should have some in Botany Pond by April 19.)  Edmund’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

These ducklings are on the River Witham, in the centre of Grantham, Lincolnshire, and are the first I have seen this year. I regularly feed the ducks on this stretch of river, but I wasn’t aware that there was a nest until I saw the brood this morning; I think they must have hatched first thing this morning (31st March). And what a brood it is: 16 ducklings!

Most of the brood are sheltering under their mother:

More:


The mother duck led her brood for a walk away from the river; when she got back to the river she happily jumped off a small concrete wall (about 3 feet high) and expected her brood to follow suit – which all of them did, although reluctantly:

The brood moved upstream and tried to scale a weir; although the weir is only about a foot high the rush of water was far too great for them and eventually they turned around and went back: