Category: News

News Flash: Non habemus papam—Pope Benedict resigns because of infirmity.

February 11, 2013 • 4:26 am

This is not a joke: according to the Guardian and other sources like the BBC, Ratzi—Pope Benedict XVI—is to step down on February 28. That’s 17 days from now. He is 85 years old.

Here’s the full text of the pope’s statement from Vatican Radio.

Dear Brothers,

I have convoked you to this Consistory, not only for the three canonisations, but also to communicate to you a decision of great importance for the life of the Church. After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.

I am well aware that this ministry, due to its essential spiritual nature, must be carried out not only with words and deeds, but no less with prayer and suffering. However, in today’s world, subject to so many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith, in order to govern the bark of Saint Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months, has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognise my incapacity to adequately fulfil the ministry entrusted to me.

For this reason, and well aware of the seriousness of this act, with full freedom I declare that I renounce the ministry of Bishop of Rome, Successor of Saint Peter, entrusted to me by the Cardinals on 19 April 2005, in such a way, that as from 28 February 2013, at 20:00 hours, the See of Rome, the See of Saint Peter, will be vacant and a Conclave to elect the new Supreme Pontiff will have to be convoked by those whose competence it is.

Dear Brothers, I thank you most sincerely for all the love and work with which you have supported me in my ministry and I ask pardon for all my defects. And now, let us entrust the Holy Church to the care of Our Supreme Pastor, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and implore his holy Mother Mary, so that she may assist the Cardinal Fathers with her maternal solicitude, in electing a new Supreme Pontiff. With regard to myself, I wish to also devotedly serve the Holy Church of God in the future through a life dedicated to prayer.

From the Vatican, 10 February 2013

BENEDICTUS PP XVI

This is the first time any pope has resigned since 1415 (Pope Gregory XII).

This happened only half an hour ago and I have no more news, but the Guardian is continually updating coverage on its website.

Now what happens to a retired pope?

h/t: Martin

Murdoch apologizes for anti-Israel cartoon, artist apologizes for timing

January 29, 2013 • 11:58 am

We had some some, er, “lively” discussion the other day about a cartoon by Gerald Scarfe in the Sunday Times showing Benjamin Netanyahu cementing a bunch of screaming, bloody Palestinians into a wall. The cartoon was published on Holocaust Memorial Day, and here it is:

cartoon-sunday-times

According to a report on the BBC News today, editor Rupert Murdoch has apologized and so, in a way, has the artist:

The Jewish Chronicle said that in a message denying it permission to reprint the cartoon, Scarfe said he “very much regrets” the timing of the cartoon.

He had apparently been unaware that Sunday was Holocaust Memorial Day.

Mr Murdoch wrote in a tweet: “Gerald Scarfe has never reflected the opinions of the Sunday Times. Nevertheless, we owe major apology for grotesque, offensive cartoon.”

(BTW, I am no fan of Rupert Murdoch.)

The Board of Deputies of British Jews said the cartoon was “shockingly reminiscent of the blood libel imagery more usually found in parts of the virulently anti-Semitic Arab press”.

The term “blood libel” refers to myths dating back to the Middle Ages that Jews murdered children to use their blood during religious rituals.

. . . In a statement, the Sunday Times said the cartoon was aimed at Mr Netanyahu and his policies, not at Israel or Jewish people.

But Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks said it had “caused immense pain to the Jewish community in the UK and around the world”.

“Whatever the intention, the danger of such images is that they reinforce a great slander of our time: that Jews, victims of the Holocaust, are now perpetrators of a similar crime against the Palestinians,” he said in a statement.

The news report details other Jewish criticism of the cartoon, but also a statement by an Israeli journalist that, while the cartoon was offensive, it wasn’t antisemitic.

Well, I thought the cartoon was in poor taste, and catered to—if it was not inspired by—antisemitic feelings, but I didn’t feel “immense pain”.  I felt the need to combat the cartoon with speech.

I am a bit worried, though, that the Jewish community may become too easily offended at legitimate criticisms of Israeli policy. I have some of those criticisms myself, but don’t think this cartoon expresses any of them.  Criticism of Israel is not automatically criticism of the Jews, though one has to be careful about crossing that line—which this cartoon did. And its publication on Holocaust Memorial Day was insensitive.

But I don’t think people are aware at the extent of antisemitism out there, especially those who aren’t Jewish. Although I’m not at all religious, I have been sensitized to the issue by having myself been called antisemitic names in my youth, including “dirty Jew” and “Yid.”  Jewish cemeteries are still vandalized, and antisemitic slogans spray-painted on synagogues. When I was in Lisbon a few months ago, I saw one Holocaust memorial defiled in this way. I have heard too many academics, discussing the question, refer to me, Jerry, as “you people.” Now what does that mean?

As one commenter pointed out, it’s a bit offensive to tell Jewish people how they should or should not feel in such a case l if you’re not one of them.

But this brings up the Danish cartoons making fun of Mohamed.  Was I—were we—telling Muslims that they shouldn’t be offended when they were published? I don’t think so.  What speech there was in favor of publishing those cartoons (and many venues didn’t say anything out of cowardice) made the point that it’s ridiculous to adhere to a religious dogma that Mohamed should not be depicted in a picture. That’s not the same thing as saying that Jews shouldn’t be offended by pictures accusing them of blood libel, of taking over the media, and so on. (Such cartoons, as I hope we all know, are daily fare in Islamic countries.) I was in favor of publishing the Danish cartoons, but also strongly opposed to that stupid anti-Islamic film “Innocence of Muslims,” which attacked not religious belief, or the behavior it inspires, but Muslims themselves.

At any rate, do note the different reactions of the two faith communities. Did Jews go on murderous rampages after the cartoon was published, killing British citizens, storming their embassies, and threatening the life of Scarfe? No: they filed formal protests. That’s the civilized way to do it. No fatwas, bounties on Scarfe’s head, and so on. Defamatory speech is met with counter-speech. I doubt that Scarfe has gone into hiding, or has armed guards protecting him.

And Scarfe’s cartoon has been reproduced widely, unlike the behavior of the many cowardly publishers (including Yale University Press) who refused to reprint the cartoons of Mohamed.  That’s because publishers fear violent reprisals from Muslims but not from Jews.  Once again, a real difference in the behavior of the two religious communities is ignored, and Islam given a pass. Why are Israelis held to higher standards than Palestinians?

I don’t think we should rehash the whole issue in the comments, but I can’t prevent that. What I’d prefer is a discussion contrasting the Danish cartoons with Scarfe’s.

The peopling of the Americas

July 12, 2012 • 9:55 am

by Greg Mayer

The Americas were the last continents to be inhabited, and there has long been controversy about how and when it occurred. There is a general consensus that the earliest Americans arrived from northeastern Asia in the late Quaternary, but the exact peoples involved, the routes taken, when they arrived, and the modes of travel are all much debated. A paper by David Reich and colleagues, in press in Nature, presents evidence on one aspect of the question– did the first inhabitants arrive in one, or in more waves of migration? It has always seemed probable that the Eskimos, culturally and linguistically distinct from the American Indians to the south, and occurring on both sides of Bering Strait, represent a distinct migration, but were the more southern peoples the result of one, two, or more migrations?

Note that Na-Dene (green) and Eskimo-Aleut (red) derive in part from an Asian (black; Yoruba are African) ancestry separate from that of Amerind or First American (blue). (The Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut are not a single arrival from Asia; the Han Chinese are too genetically distant from east Siberian peoples to capture the ancestral source in this comparison.). D Reich et al. Nature, in press, doi:10.1038/nature11258

Here’s the money quote from Reich et al.’s abstract:

[W]e assembled data from 52 Native American and 17 Siberian groups genotyped at 364,470 single nucleotide polymorphisms. Here we show that Native Americans descend from at least three streams of Asian gene flow. Most descend entirely from a single ancestral population that we call ‘First American’. However, speakers of Eskimo–Aleut languages from the Arctic inherit almost half their ancestry from a second stream of Asian gene flow, and the Na-Dene-speaking Chipewyan from Canada inherit roughly one-tenth of their ancestry from a third stream.

The three migrations thus were by 1) a group the authors call First American, that gave rise to almost all of the Indians of North and South America; 2) the Na-Dene, a group also linguistically identified, that occurs in the US Southwest and a few other places in the US and Canada; and 3) the Eskimo-Aleut, who arrived most recently. These three groups had also been identified by the late linguist Joseph Greenberg (who called the first group “Amerind’).

This is actually pretty much the story as I understood it from the viewpoint of a biologist paying casual attention to the anthropological results. Media accounts (NY Times, BBC) make it sound a bit more novel and controversial than I would have thought. This could be due to my not fully grasping the state of the debates within anthropology (quite possible!), or the hyping that tends to accompany reporting of even the best scientific work.

____________________________________________________________

Reich, D. et al. 2012. Reconstructing Native American population history. Nature, in press.

Mystery of Amelia Earhart solved?

June 1, 2012 • 1:27 pm

If you’re like me, you’ve been fascinated forever by the disappearance of the aviator Amelia Earhart in 1937 on a round-the-world flight.  There has been increasing evidence that she managed to make it to an isolated South Pacific island, Nikumaroro.  There are reports that a female skeleton was found there in the 1940s, and excavations have suggested strongly that the island harbored castaways. Could one of them have been Earhart? (She was flying with a navigator, Fred Noonan.)

According to ABC news, a jar of what looks to have contained freckle cream of the type used by Earhart (who didn’t like her freckles) was found on the site, along with buttons, a zipper from a flight jacket, and what may have been fragments of human bones.  Here’s the found jar (left) that looks pretty much like freckle cream:

TIGHAR
A freckle cream jar believed to belong to Amelia Earhart was found on the southeast end of Nikumaroro Island in the Pacific Ocean. Archaeologists are finding artifacts that suggest Amelia Earhart may have survived for a time there as a castaway.

The report continues:

TIGHAR [The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery] has long been investigating Earhart’s disappearance and has conducted nine archaeological excavations on the uninhabited island Nikumaroro in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati.

“This is one of several bottles that we’ve identified from the castaway campsite that seem to be and, in some cases, are very definitely personal care products that were marketed exclusively to women in the United States in the 1930s,” Gillespie said.

The jar was found broken into five pieces, four of which were together. The fifth piece was about 65 feet away near the bones of a turtle and appeared to have been used as a cutting tool.

Fish bones and eel remains were also discovered, and the remains indicated that they had not been prepared the way natives would have prepared their food.

“This is not a Pacific Islander,” Gillespie said. “This is a westerner grabbing anything they can find and cooking it and preparing it the way westerners do.”

Gillespie said that according to recovered documentation, the partial skeleton of a female castaway was discovered in 1940 in the area along with part of a woman’s shoe, part of a man’s shoe and a navigational tool, but the artifacts were later lost.

Along with the cosmetic jar, TIGHAR found pieces of a woman’s compact, a zipper that was manufactured in the 1930’s, and a bottle of hand lotion that has been chemically analyzed to match Campana Italian Balm, which was popular during Earhart’s time.

Of course the results aren’t in (can they do DNA analysis?), but it looks increasingly as if Earhart and Noonan made it to the island, lived there a while, and then died a slow death as castaways.

Here’s Nikumaroro ; read more about it here:

The island is a coral atoll that is one of the Phoenix Islands, a remote archipelago here:

Dawkins to edit New Statesman Christmas issue

December 9, 2011 • 3:47 am

The New Statesman has announced that its Christmas issue will be edited by no other than Richard Dawkins, who will apparently fill it with all kinds of secular stuff. (This may be a counter to the issue guest-edited by the Archbishop of Canterbury last June.)

It looks a great issue, and will include a contribution by Hitch.  As I expected from Richard, it won’t be limited to atheist pieces—though all of the “Four Horsemen” will appear—but will also contain a good dollop of science:

Dawkins has contributed an essay, written the New Statesman leader column, and travelled to Texas to conduct an exclusive interview with the author and journalist Christopher Hitchens. They discuss religious fundamentalism, US politics, Tony Blair, abortion and Christmas.

Microsoft’s Bill Gates has written a column on the wonders of innovation, the political theorist Alan Ryan has written on Barack Obama, and there are contributions from some of the world’s most respected scientists, includingPaul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, and the space explorer Carolyn Porco, on Saturn. . .

In 2007, Dawkins, Hitchens, the philosopher Daniel Dennett and the neuroscientist Sam Harris were nicknamed the “Four Horsemen” of new atheism. Both Dennett and Harris have written essays for this issue, on human loyalty and free will, respectively.

Other contributors to the special issue include the human rights activistMaryam Namazie, the comedian Tim Minchin and the rabbi and broadcasterJonathan Romain.

Elsewhere in the magazine, the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, speaks to the NS assistant editor Sophie Elmhirst about choosing morals over politics, reading poems at Occupy St Paul’s and her “Christmassy relationship” with God, Philip Pullman defends fairytales and Kate Atkinson offers an exclusive short story, “darktime”.

The issue will be on sale on December 13 in London and on the next day in the rest of Britain.

h/t: Micha

Republicans insane; want to establish theocracy

November 21, 2011 • 10:52 pm

As I’ve found from reading comments on this site, non-Americans are continually astonished by the extreme degree of both religiosity and idiocy of Republicans in America.  Without living here, it’s hard to apprehend how soaked in God our country really is.  And if you do live here, it’s so common that you barely notice it.  If you want a graphic demonstration, here’s a two-hour-plus video of the “Thanksgiving Family Forum,” a meeting of six Republican presidential candidates in Iowa. They include

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann
Herman Cain
[ex] Speaker Newt Gingrich
Congressman Ron Paul
Texas Governor Rick Perry
Senator Rick Santorum

Start at 36 minutes in if you want to skip the opening prayers, Pledge of Allegiance, and other religious and and patriotic requisites and get right to the insanity of the candidates themselves.

Or, better yet, just skip the video and read Rick Saletan’s piece in Slate, “Rule of the Lord,” which summarizes what these politicians have in mind for America.  Here are a few salient quotes:

Herman Cain:

What we are seeing is a wider gap between people of faith and people of nonfaith. … Those of us that are people of faith and strong faith have allowed the nonfaith element to intimidate us into not fighting back. I believe we’ve been too passive. We have maybe pushed back, but as people of faith, we have not fought back.

Rick Perry:

Somebody’s values are going to decide what the Congress votes on or what the president of the United States is going to deal with. And the question is: Whose values? And let me tell you, it needs to be our values—values and virtues that this country was based upon in Judeo-Christian founding fathers . . . in every person’s heart, in every person’s soul, there is a hole that can only be filled by the Lord Jesus Christ.

Michele Bachmann:

American exceptionalism is grounded on the Judeo-Christian ethic, which is really based upon the 10 Commandments. The 10 Commandments were the foundation for our law. That’s what Blackstone said—the English jurist—and our founders looked to Blackstone for the foundation of our law. That’s our law . . . I have a biblical worldview. And I think, going back to the Declaration of Independence, the fact that it’s God who created us—if He created us, He created government. And the government is on His shoulders, as the book of Isaiah says.

Rick Santorum:

Unlike Islam, where the higher law and the civil law are the same, in our case, we have civil laws. But our civil laws have to comport with the higher law. … As long as abortion is legal—at least according to the Supreme Court—legal in this country, we will never have rest, because that law does not comport with God’s law. . . The idea that the only things that the states are prevented from doing are only things specifically established in the Constitution is wrong. Our country is based on a moral enterprise. Gay marriage is wrong. As Abraham Lincoln said, the states do not have the right to do wrong. … As a president, I will get involved, because the states do not have the right to undermine the basic, fundamental values that hold this country together.

And Newt Gingrich, who argues that we should abolish the courts’ power to review the constitutionality of laws:

I am intrigued with something which Robby George at Princeton has come up with, which is an interpretation of the 14th Amendment, in which it says that Congress shall define personhood. That’s very clearly in the 14th Amendment. And part of what I would like to explore is whether or not you could get the Congress to pass a law which simply says: Personhood begins at conception. And therefore—and you could, in the same law, block the court and just say, ‘This will not be subject to review,’ which we have precedent for. You would therefore not have to have a constitutional amendment, because the Congress would have exercised its authority under the 14th Amendment to define life, and to therefore undo all of Roe vs. Wade, for the entire country, in one legislative action.

Don’t think for a moment that if religious candidates like these get the upper hand, they won’t do everything in their power to convert their religious values into laws that apply to all of us.  And accommodationists wonder why we’re so hard on religious belief!  Because, of course, only rarely is such belief a purely private matter. If you think you have God-given truth and morality, it’s almost imperative that you try to impose your values on everyone else, including those who disagree. It’s the Inquisition in latter-day form.

If one of these Republican clowns get elected, it will require the complicity of the religious “moderates” we’re supposed to coddle.  Remember that not everyone supporting these people is a fundamentalist or Biblical literalist.

h/t: Tom C.

Dallas newspaper excludes secular voices

November 8, 2011 • 5:19 am

Over at SocraticMama, Anne Crumpacker (mother of Mason) is asking readers to sign a petition to include a secular voice in the Dallas Morning News (the interview with Mason Crumpacker was a very rare exception). As Anne says,

In my view, part of the problem is that Mason’s little interview, to the best of my knowledge, was the first time in over a year that the Dallas Morning News editorial staff had written about the secular point of view.

A quick look at the “Texas Faith” blog shows the last entry under “Atheists, agnostics and doubters” was published on September 28th, 2010. The title?

TEXAS FAITH: Why do we pray for Christopher Hitchens?

Have a look at that link: it’s totally pro-religion! It’s also a bit offensive, since Hitchens has explicitly requested that people not pray for him.

Newspapers are starting to recognize that any “faith” or “religion” section should include a voice for secularism as well.  If a newspaper has a section devoted to promulgating religion, it should, by all standards of fairness and free discussion, include humanist and secular pieces.  The Washington Post does it. Even the Chicago Tribune does it.  Texas, of course, is Texas, but it’s not immune to reason.

We can make a difference.  Go over to SocraticMama’s website, read her post, sign the petition at the bottom and, if you’re feeling really ambitious, write a letter to the managing editor (and post it in the comments section as well).  Thanks.