NPR acts as if the myths of Christianity are real

April 15, 2017 • 2:00 pm

Reader Thomas called my attention to a 5-minute piece on today’s National Public Radio (NPR): “When Easter and Passover overlap,” which I guess is the situation this year. It’s a discussion between host Linda Wertheimer and Andrew McGowan, Dean and President of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, using the temporal overlap of the holidays to discuss their theological connection. (You can hear the program or read the transcript at the link above.)

The discussion sounds like a complete waste of time, designed to fill the “Easter/Passover news cycle” but Thomas had another objection, one based on the fact that—in the absence of evidence for the Resurrection and the evidence of absence of any Jewish Exodus from Egypt—NPR is treating these holidays as if they’re based on real events. (Linda Werthheimer is by her own admission a Jew, and says in this piece that she went to a seder, while Andrew McGowan is an Anglican priest.)

Here’s some of Thomas’s email, with Wertheimer’s words italicized:

I know you are as annoyed about NPR’s osculation, as you say, of religion as I am, so I thought you might have a comment on this aspect: NPR (and of course other outlets) frequently uses the language of fact around religious myths. This is from this morning’s Weekend Edition Saturday:

At midnight tonight, many Christian congregations around the country will hold an Easter vigil to commemorate the resurrection of Christ – this as Jewish congregations celebrate Passover, an eight-day commemoration of the Jewish people’s liberation from slavery in Egypt. I’m joined now by Andrew McGowan. He is dean and president of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. Thank you for being here.

The story of the resurrection is clearly a myth, and the story of the Jews’ enslavement in Egypt is also highly questionable historically. Yet above they are both treated as fact in a format notorious for over-use of words like “alleged” or “rumored” to remove responsibility for stating controversial truths.

The worst aspect of this is that NPR is the same network that, by official policy, won’t use the word “lie” to describe anything Trump says.

Now Thomas is right about these issues, but at first I thought “this isn’t a big deal,” as Wertheimer isn’t really claiming that the events were real. A charitable take is that she’s merely describing what is being celebrated. But then the interview went on:

WERTHEIMER: You know, one of the things that is said every year at the Seder that I go to is that the last supper was a seder.

MCGOWAN: That’s absolutely right. We can’t be sure that it was a seder quite like those that are more familiar from recent times because, in fact, strange as it may seem, the stories of the Last Supper are among the oldest evidence we have for anybody celebrating a seder. And yet they don’t include some of those lovely details that are familiar to so many – the series of cups of wine or all the special foods or the questions that are asked. But it’s absolutely true that the bulk of the earliest Christian material identifies the Last Supper as a meal celebrated at Passover by Jesus with His disciples, even though they’re a bit short on the ritual detail.

Note how “the stories of the Last Supper” are described as “evidence.” The piece goes on:

WERTHEIMER: What about the journey from slavery to freedom which is part of the Passover celebration? The way that Christians celebrate the journey from death to life which is part of the resurrection of Christ – I mean, are those all parallels that we should pay attention to?

MCGOWAN: Well, the Easter Vigil itself is really a kind of mini Passover for Christians, I think. Much of its symbolism is specifically about mapping Jesus’ narrative – the story of Jesus’ connection and his movement from death to life – as a kind of image that parallels that of the Exodus experience so that Jesus becomes Israel itself and his passage from death to life is like the passage through the Red Sea.

And so Christians themselves, especially in the first thousand years of Christian history, saw the whole of the Jesus experience very much as a new kind of Passover, a new kind of deliverance from slavery to freedom and the creation of a people who had a special relationship with God. But, of course, they allegorized the Exodus story and made it part of their own story. And the Easter Vigil still retains that basic language and symbolism of a journey from slavery to freedom, a journey from oppression to liberation.

Again, one could be charitable and just say they’re discussing religious tradition, not the truth of religion (after all, as a Jew Wertheimer surely doesn’t believer in the Resurrection), but neither do they mention that in all likelihood—and in near certainty in the case of the Exodus—what they’re talking about is equivalent to celebrating Santa’s delivery of presents on Christmas or the flight of witches on brooms at Halloween. There is no mention that these are myths without an evidential support.

But of course Werthheimer and McGowan don’t think they’re myths, and NPR is certainly not going to say, “By the way, these holidays are probably not based on historical events.”

I’d normally let this pass, but Thomas’s email got me thinking that in America we are so saturated by this assume-it’s-true religious palaver that we never think to challenge it, or to tell a radio station wedded to “giving the facts” that they cut awfully close to the bone when those “facts” involve religious claims.

Woodpecker hitches a ride through rain-soaked Chicago

April 15, 2017 • 10:00 am

This video came to me via Heather Hastie and Ann German (creator of the Impeach Pussy Grabber website and bumper stickers). That’s all I know about it, save that it’s in Chicago. I don’t even know the species of woodpecker, but I’m sure a reader will! (It must be a hairy or a dowmy.)

 

Bob the Kitten is going to live!

April 15, 2017 • 9:00 am

Yesterday Gayle told me that Bob the Kitten (whose name will not be Bob) was losing weight, as he was not eating enough, “He’s going to live, though, right?” I asked. Gayle said she didn’t know.  And that honest response had me worried sick all day. How could such an adorable and lively little thing not live?

But tonight, when Gayle returned to join my hosts and me for dinner, a miracle (okay, well, something unexpected) had occurred: Bob, who heretofore ate milk and milk/meat soup only reluctantly, and in very small amounts, was given kitten tuna from the store, and wolfed it down with gusto!:

He ate another large portion after dinner, and seemed to be in good spirits, running all around on his wobbly legs.

We are all happy he’s eating now, and things look very good for Bob. I have been promised reports, and perhaps later we’ll get some photos as Bob grows up. It looks as if Gayle has saved her twenty-sixth kitten!

Caturday felid trifecta: Three-legged ginger tom relieves student stress at Cambridge; kin selection in cats; cat flummoxed by optical illusion

April 15, 2017 • 8:00 am

by Grania & Jerry

Somewhere in Cambridge, UK; in the Marshall Library of Economics there is a three-legged cat named Jasper. He sometimes goes to work with his owner Mr Frost, where he is reportedly very well-behaved and spends his time browsing and snoozing. More recently he hosted an event Tea With Jasper during examtime which was a great success. Students reported his calming effect and now more such events are planned.

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Next we have this adorable duo on important cat business. (Click on the white arrow)

https://twitter.com/VeganYogaDude/status/851123342316851202

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And finally the “rotating snakes” illusion which is a peripheral drift illusion where the motion is perceived in a dark-to-light direction. It even works on confused cats.

h/t: Michael, Barry

Saturday: Hili dialogue

April 15, 2017 • 6:30 am

by Grania

Good morning!

Today in 1755 Samuel Johnson’s “A Dictionary of the English Language” was published in London. It was a mammoth undertaking, requiring almost a decade of work and it remained the definitive authority until the Oxford Dictionary was completed nearly two centuries later. It had been deliberately commissioned as pre-existing dictionaries were relatively poor and incomplete. Johnson’s dictionary is a little different from the relatively dry descriptions and meticulously researched etymologies that we are used  to today, for example:

Cough: A convulsion of the lungs, vellicated by some sharp serosity. It is pronounced coff

Excise: a hateful tax levied upon commodities and adjudged not by the common judges of property but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid

As it was, Johnson’s dictionary was so large and expensive that it cost more to print than Johnson’s entire remuneration on the project and sold at around 200 copies per year for the next three decades. Although it was hardly without flaw or error, it was hugely influential for more than a century.

This clip is from the BBC show Blackadder, which if you haven’t seen you ought to try to get a hold of. (Rowan Atkinson, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Miranda Richardson, Tony Robinson etc.) I thought it might be a good fit, as this scene features Johnson on his completion of his great work.

Today in 1912, RMS Titanic sank after hitting an iceberg and the tragedy has been exhaustively documented both by researchers and dramatists ever since.

It’s also the birthday of British conductor Neville Marriner (1924-2016) who founded an orchestra named the Academy of St Martin in the Fields – the unusually long name of conductor and orchestra always cracked me up as a kid when it was intoned by serious-sounding radio announcers. Anyway, it’s as good excuse as any to listen to this sinfonia “Arrival of the Queen of Sheba” by Handel, something that to me is the sound of unbridled joy. One of the commenters on this video quipped “Sheba sure was in a rush to meet Solomon”.

Finally, we catch up with the doings of Hili, a cat beyond reproach in thought and deed.

A: The environs of my chair are always crowded.
Hili: That’s quite natural, he is always following you around.

In Polish:

Ja: Okolice mojego fotela są zawsze zatłoczone.
Hili: To chyba naturalne, on ciągle za tobą chodzi.

Bob the Kitten

April 14, 2017 • 4:36 pm

Gayle Ferguson, a biologist at Massey University who’s hosted me for a day and a half, has fostered twenty-five stray or abandoned kittens, and hasn’t lost a single one: none have died and all have found loving homes. (You may remember her as the rescuer of Jerry Coyne the Cat.)

Her latest acquisition, number 26, is a four-week old male, a tabby, but one nearly lacking stripes. He’s a “pink tabby,” much like Grania’s beloved ex-cat Trinket. Gayle hasn’t named him yet, but I call him “Bob”.

Here are a few photos as we play with him and Gayle feeds him every few hours.

Bob wasn’t expected to live at first, as he was severely underweight, but now he’s doing pretty well and I have high hopes for his survival and adoption. Gayle has lots of experience tending sick and malnourished kittens.

At first he had a special cat formula and was fed from a bottle, but yesterday he graduated to special “kitten meat food” and ate from a syringe.

His first meat!

Bob on my knee:

Self portrait with Bob in a moving car:

Bob and I; I’m unkempt as I just woke up and haven’t had ablutions. This was taken about 15 minutes ago:

Isn’t he adorable? He’s just started playing.

Scientific American uncritically blurbs flawed study making students think science and religion are compatible

April 14, 2017 • 3:30 pm

My big objection to science aggregation sites like Science Daily is that they don’t really do honest, critical reporting, but mostly parrot the bulletins issued by university public relations departments. The result is that readers get one-sided puffery of new results and no critical analysis. Science journalists often depend on such sources and, often lacking science training themselves, simply regurgitate the PR to the public. That leads to debacles like those “cephalopods can change their RNA to make themselves smarter” articles, every one of which was grossly distorted (I haven’t had time while traveling to discuss this at all, but I’ll tell you not to believe the press’s account).

But it’s worse when venues like Scientific American do the same thing. This happened when the magazine just wrote a short piece about a study by M. Elizabeth Barnes, James Elser, and Sara E. Brownell published in a recent issue of The American Biology Teacher.  The Barnes et al. paper describes a two-week module inflicted on college students at Arizona State University with the explicit aim of convincing students that evolution and religion are compatible. At the end, they surveyed the students about how they felt about the issue. As SA notes, the module seems to have “worked”:

On topics ranging from astrophysics to public health, rejections of scientific consensus can prove quite inflexible when bolstered by religious doctrine. But
 a new approach to teaching evolutionary biology appears to ease such tensions. It involves airing perceived conflicts between religion and evolution in the classroom rather than simply presenting a mountain of evidence for evolution. Such a curriculum could help biologists (most of whom claim to hold no religious beliefs) more effectively prepare students (most of whom profess belief in God) to meet the nation’s growing need for scientists and technologists.

Surveys filled out by 60 students before and after the module revealed that the number of students who perceived a sense of a conflict between religion and evolution at the start was cut in half by the end. . .
“If we encourage national policy documents that promote these teaching practices,” says study co-author Elizabeth Barnes of Arizona State, “perhaps we can increase acceptance of evolution among our students, future teachers and future political leaders.”

Perhaps, but I doubt it, as there’s no indication that the study actually promoted acceptance of evolution, and it also involved teaching a particular theological point of view in a public university, which violates the First Amendment. As I wrote in my own analysis of this study posted here in February, the work of Barnes et al. has conceptual and scientific problems:

My objection to this study is that it was tendentious, didn’t look at the effect of the mirror-image study, used small samples, and, most important, took a particular theological point of view, pushing it on students in a public (state) university. This module requires a special interpretation of religion—one saying that it is not at all in conflict with evolution. Yet many religionists feel otherwise.

In other words, the instructors, in a well-meaning attempt to get people to accept evolution, are propagandizing the students with theological views. That’s clear since they trotted in a religious scientist and let the students read accommodationist literature while denying them arguments about the incompatibility of faith and evolution, which I see as powerful. (Why else are most scientists nonreligious—far more so than the general public?) By pushing a particular view of theology on the students, I see the experiment as a First Amendment violation. Would it be any better if the professor propagandized the students with a view that science and religion are incompatible? For that, at least, is a philosophical rather than a theological view. But if they did that, they’d be excoriated. Such is the eagerness of Americans to “respect” faith—the tendency to believe without evidence.

But in my own view, they should leave the accommodationism or anti-accommodationism out of public school classes. Just teach the damn science, and let the students work out the issues themselves. To do otherwise is to push a certain view of religion on them, one that should be left to parents, private discussion, or preachers. The authors of this paper are going the route of Elaine Ecklund at Rice, who has devoted her career to accommodationism. It’s not a pretty endeavor. And it’s injurious because it lets the students retain their view that faith, belief without evidence, is a valid way to accept religious claims.

But my main issue with the Scientific American piece is this: why didn’t they do any critical analysis of the study rather than just parroting the results promulgated by the authors and by the Arizona State PR office? Why did they quote just the author and not critics like me? Here, at least, Scientific American is acting like Science Daily.

h/t: Roberto