Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
This is from Fox News; click on the screenshot to go to the article. It’s true, funny, and the “Jesusnapping” was probably conducted by an atheist.
And the story in its entirety:
BETHLEHEM, Pa. – Police say a woman stole baby Jesus from a Nativity scene in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and dropped the figurine off at a hospital with a note explaining that the baby had been “neglected” by his parents, “Joseph and Mary Christ.”
Police say 49-year-old Jacqueline Ross told them it was a joke, but they aren’t laughing. She was identified from surveillance video and is jailed on charges of theft and institutional vandalism.
Police say she went to the hospital early on Dec. 4 just minutes after stealing the $2,700 figurine from Payrow Plaza.
Police say she left a note with the porcelain baby that read, in part, “Child has broken right foot which is been (sic) neglected. Parents Joseph and Mary Christ got a warning.”
Ross doesn’t yet have an attorney.
Here’s a photo of the creche; Baby Jesus has been returned, but note that his right foot is missing. Why couldn’t God heal amputee Jesus?
It’s well known that the actor Leah Remini, most famous for her work on the television comedy “The King of Queens,” is a lapsed Scientologist, and is now speaking out vocally against the “Church.” She’s instigated police investigations into the disappearance of Shelly Miscavage, the wife of the lunatic director of the Church, David Miscavage, a tyrant who seems to have ordered his wife to disappear—perhaps under Scientology guard somewhere.(The LA cops, who said they met with Shelly, dropped the investigation.
Remini was recently interviewed by Larry King about her 30 years as a Scientologist and her recent apostasy, which you can see by clicking on the screenshot below. (The video is 28 minutes long.) If you’ve studied this ludicrous and harmful cult, as I have, you might not learn anything new, but one thing worth noting is this: Scientology is dying, and it’s largely because of the Internet.
It used to be that you attacked Scientology at your own peril, for they were armed with lawyers and harassers who made life hell for any “SP”s (“suppressive persons”: those who attack the cult). Now anybody with access to a computer can read all about the cult, how it scams its members, and about its absolutely ridiculous “theology”, which you have to pay thousands of dollars to learn. (For a taste of this, look up “Xenu” on Wikipedia. It’s unbelievable that people believe this stuff.) Disinfected by the Web, Scientology no longer has the power to harass its detractors, and, as Remini says, it’s bleeding members.
That hemorrhage was helped along by Pulitzer winner Lawrence Wright’s book on the cult, Going Clear:Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, which I’ve read and recommend highly. If you want a good take on how truly bizarre Scientology is, and how it victimizes its adherents, squeezing money out of them like milk from a cow, read that book. It’s a crime that Scientology has been classified by the U.S. government as a “religion,” and thus gets all the tax advantages of any religion. (Of course, no religion deserves tax breaks.)
The Internet has had many salubrious effects by disseminating information freely (including websites run by ex-Scientologists), and one of them is exposing the follies of religion. Because it impoverishes its members, the Church of Scientology is one of the worst Western religions. Those who say that all religions are equally harmful should compare the Quakers to the Scientologists.
Remini is calm and eloquent on the malfeasance of her former Church. When Larry King asks her (he’s giving her listener questions), “What’s the number one thing you want people to know about Scientology?” Remini answers, “Really, do their own research. . . It’s a harmful, dangerous proposition that will cost you a quarter of a million dollars, minimum—and your life.”
St. Januarius, or San Gennaro, as he’s known in Italian, is the patron saint of Naples, reputed to have died in 325 A.D. He’s celebrated with big festivals in Italy and New York, and you may remember that it was during this festival that Don Corleone (in the younger incarnation played by Robert de Niro in The Godfather: Part 2) assassinated the boss Don Fanucci, with the gunshots masked by the firecrackers in the streets.
But there’s a miracle involving San Gennaro, for a vial of what is reputed to be his blood (about 60 ml) is kept in a glass vessel inside a reliquary at the Naples Cathedral, where three times a year it’s exhibited by the priests. The “miracle” occurring when the solid “blood” liquifies and then becomes solid again. Although the Church won’t officially sanction this as a genuine miracle, they don’t impugn it, either, and won’t permit any tests on the blood except crude spectroscopy through the glass, which has shown some dubious indications of hemoglobin.
Here’s the “blood” liquifying in 2011; at about 3:04 the blood is certified to have liquified, somebody waves a handkerchief, and the crowd goes wild. It’s taken as a good omen (in years in which the stuff hasn’t liqufied, bad things have happened), and assures believers that God is in his Heaven.
Wikipedia describes the ritual:
For most of the time, the ampoules are kept in a bank vault, whose keys are held by a commission of local notables, including the Mayor of Naples; while the bones are kept in a crypt under the main altar of Naples Cathedral. On feast days, all these relics are taken in procession from the cathedral to the Monastery of Santa Chiara, where the archbishop holds the reliquary up and tilts it to show that the contents are solid, and places it on the high altar next to the saint’s other relics. After intense prayers by the faithful, including the so-called “relatives of Saint Januarius” (parenti di San Gennaro), the content of the larger vial typically liquefies. The archbishop then holds up the vial and tilts it again to demonstrate that liquefaction has taken place. The announcement of the liquefaction is greeted with a 21-gun salute at the 13th-century Castel Nuovo. The ampoules remain exposed on the altar for eight days, while the priests move or turn them periodically to show that the contents remain liquid.
The liquefaction sometimes takes place almost immediately, but can take hours or even days. Records kept at the Duomo tell that on rare occasions the contents fail to liquefy, are found already liquefied when the ampoules are taken from the safe, or liquefy outside the usual dates.
There are several naturalistic explanations for this miracle (first described in 1389) that you can read about here and here—explanations hindered by the Church’s refusal to permit invasive sampling (and really, what do they have to gain from that?) The most viable seems to be that the “blood” is a thixotropic gel, that liquifies when agitated. At CICAP, authors F. di L.Garlaschelli et al. have replicated this phenomenon using materials that would have been available to fakers in the 14th century:
Thixotropy might prove a good hypothesis to explain this “miracle”. Thixotropy the property of certain gels to became more fluid, even from solid to liquid, when stirred, vibrated, or otherwise mechanically disturbed, and to resolidify when left to stand. Common examples of such substances are catsup, mayonnaise and some types of paints and toothpastes.
Thus, the very act of handling the reliquary, repeatedly turning it upside down to check its state, might provide the necessary mechanical stress to induce the liquefaction. A successful performance of the rite, therefore, does not need conscious cheating, while not excluding its occurrence, as gentle or sharp movements can certainly control the timing of the liquefaction.
Indeed, over the centuries, unexpected liquefactions have often been observed whilst handling the relic case for repairs.
In support of the thixotropic hypothesis, we made up samples whose properties resembled those of the relic. We used substances that would have also been available in the fourteenth century. After some testing with bentonite clays (producing a thixotropic but unpleasantly mud-like gel), we settled for a reddish-brown FeO(OH) colloidal solution.
This gel is the right shade of brown without the addition of any dye; it becomes perfectly liquid when shaken (See Fig. 1 ) and, just like the relic, can even produce the globo and bubbles on its shiny surface (The real boiling even of a volatile liquid in a closed vessel under such conditions is quite untenable).
All the compounds for this concoction could have been readily available to a Neapolitan artist or alchemist of the 1300s. CaCO3 (from chalk, i.e. limestone, or crushed eggshells) also formed the basis of many white pictorial pigments. K2CO3, available from wood ashes was also well-known, and can be used instead of CaCO3. FeCl3 is available in the mountains around Naples
THIXOTROPIC IRON HYDROXIDE GEL IN THE SOLID (LEFT) AND LIQUID STATE (RIGHT).
Indeed, there were several reports in the 14th century of other “liquifying blood miracles.”
However, the blood failed to liquify on the third occasion this year, over a few days in mid-December. An article in Christian Today (CT)describes how Italian Catholics have reacted with fear, for when the blood fails to liquify, as it did in 1939, 1940, 1943, 1973, and 1980 (war and Nazi occupation, cholera epidemic, and earthquake, respectively), bad stuff happens. My view is that the latest failure is connected with Donald Trump. From CT:
Fears of more earthquakes in Italy, cholera and other prophecies of doom circulated on social media after the blood of San Gennaro failed to liquefy.
Gennaro, whose name is often rendered as St Januarius, lived in the third century and is the patron saint of Naples. He is believed to have been a victim of the Roman emperor Diocletian’s Christian persecution.
At his death, it is said, some of his blood was collected by an onlooker and is to this day stored in Naples cathedral in a glass ampoule.
. . . When Pope Francis visited the cathedral in March last year, clergy said they observed the dry blood begin to turn liquid. The blood was said to have “half liquefied”. The three official liquefaction dates are in May, September and December but it does also liquefy for some Popes, although not all, when they visit the cathedral.
This month on the third annual date for the miracle, there were no signs of liquefaction. December 16 is the day Neapolitans remember the eruption of Vesuvius in 1631 and the intervention of San Gennaro to stop the lava before it entered the city.
. . . Fears of more earthquakes in Italy, cholera and other prophecies of doom circulated on social media after the blood of San Gennaro failed to liquefy.
OH NOES! ONLY HALF LIQUIFIED! (Reuters)
It would be great if scientists could get their hands on this blood, but that’s unlikely. However, the Catholic Church’s ambiguous stand on the issue is canny, for it allows the believers to remain believers without the Vatican having to endorse a sketchy “miracle.”
It’s the Christmas Eve Caturday trifecta, and today we have three short clips. This adorable video shows a busker in Malaysia entertaining a bunch of kittens. They’re mesmerized! (Or maybe they’re just expecting noms.)
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From Hi Homer! we have a short but sweet video of a kitten dancing in the sunlight. I wonder if he’s going after the sunlight itself, or just motes of dust.
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Finally, from Sputnik, we learn of a Korean cat who goes to class. The skinny:
A cute four-legged student is reportedly attending classes at Gangdong College in S Korea. The ginger cat called Teuk Gang-i made its home right in the college building.
At the end of October an entertainment broadcast on South Korea’s SBS TV channel broke the news of a cat who acts exactly like a student. It comes to the classroom, seems at first to listen intently to the lecture, but then falls asleep. When the class is over, it lazily goes on to the next one.
The students of Gangdong College say that originally the cat belonged to a girl who studied there and brought her pet to classes with her. But then she took a year out, leaving the cat at school for some reason.
Nobody thought to take the cat home because it already had an owner, the students said. They fed the cat and took care of it at the college. The students also gave the cat a new mane — Teuk Gang-i, which means “Special-course-thing” in Korean. Now Teuk Gang-I is a favorite amongst the students. They said they plan to pool some money and buy a cat house for their school pet to feel even more comfortable.’
Well, he doesn’t seem to be a good student, but he’s loved anyway: the students even made Teuk Gang-i a cat tower! Any translations of the Korean are welcome.
Remember to send in your good wildlife photos; the tank is getting a bit low.
Reader Mark Sturtevant sent a batch of insect photos, which I’ve divided into two parts. Here are the first five with his notes (indented):
The first picture is of a Pale Green Assassin Bug (Zelus luridus), which is feeding on an unidentifiable hemipteran.
Next is one of the bee-like robber flies in the genus Laphria, possibly L. janus. This is a cousin to the larger and more spectacular robber flies that mimic bumble bees. This species was pretty common this past summer, and I wonder why I hadn’t noticed it before.
The next two pictures are of a nice find I had on my ‘lucky tree stump’. One day I found a pair of giant ichneumon wasps (Megarhyssa macrurus) that were competing to parasitize another stingless wasp known as a horntail (often Tremex columba). When the female horntail lays eggs in dead wood, she inoculates the wood with a fungus that softens the dead wood and helps the larvae to bore into it, and it is the fungus that the ichneumons have detected. They will drill in the vicinity of the horntail larva with their extraordinarily long ovipositor, and each will lay a single, very elongate egg into it. It will be curtains for the young horntail because it will be eaten alive in its wood home.
Here is a video showing an ichneumon drilling into wood. During this sequence, you can see that the membrane between some of the abdominal segments stretches to accommodates a loop in the ovipositor that forms during the early stages of the drilling process. But as the oviposter is drilled deeper into the wood, the loop of ovipositor shortens in the abdomen, and the membrane shrinks away. In this examplek the horntail larva was apparently buried deep because the ichneumon wasp drilled her entire ovipositer into the wood, right up to the hilt! I suppose we are seeing the current status of the evolutionary arms race between the deep-burrowing host, and deep-drilling parasite.
Next is an especially beautiful insect, the ebony jewelwing damselfly (Calopteryx maculata). I am very sentimental over these common woodland divas because I came across them in one of my first insect collecting hunts in a forest as a youngster. Living in plain old Iowa, I was astonished to see an insect that would look at home in an exotic rain forest. This individual is a male.
I generally don’t take more pictures of insects after they are well documented in my portfolio, but the jewel wing damselflies are among the exceptions to that informal policy. Besides being very beautiful, I enjoy the challenges that they present. They are shade-loving, which presses me to use the flash, but their metallic colors tend to not come out well with the flash, so I have been trying a variety of experiments to get the right effect. This summer I learned that I can sometimes get a true representation of their colors by bouncing the flash up from the ground or down from the canopy. I suppose I am still looking for the perfect picture, although I do like this one well enough that it is now my computer desktop picture. But I have other pictures of this species that I like a little bit better.
And, to celebrate the Wise Men who followed the stars to Baby Jesus, I’m presenting a star photo by Tim Anderson from Cowra, New South Wales. His notes (he did not mention the Christmas tale!):
‘Tis the season for the Orion Nebula. This image is composed from 420 30-second exposures taken with a Canon 80D camera and 200mm telphoto lens on a Skywatcher Star Adventurer mount.
It’s Christmas Eve: December 24, 2016. That means there’s only one frenetic shopping day left till Xmas and the First Day of Koynezaa. And, yes, it’s National Egg Nog Day. Now I know people claim that they’ve had good eggnog, and I’m sure that somewhere on this planet lurks a drinkable specimen—but I’ve not had it. (I anticipate serious objections from the readers.) But all things told, I’d rather have a mulled wine or a Moscow Mule. It’s also the pagan festival of Mōdraniht .
On this day in history, the Ku Klux Klan was formed in 1865; and 103 years later, the crew of Apollo 8 began orbiting around around the Moon. They were the first humans to do this, and performed ten such orbits. Not much else happened this day in history, as one would expect given its proximity to the holidays, at least in the West. What is remarkable, however, is the number of people who were born or died on this day, perhaps the latter trying to hold on till Xmas.
Notables born on this day include Kit Carson (1809), Matthew Arnold (1822), Baby Dodds (1898), Joseph Cornell (1903), I. F. Stone (1907), Ava Gardner (1922; ♥), Scott Fischer (1955; died on Everest 1996), Carol Vorderman (1960), and Ricky Martin (1971). Those who died on this day include Vasco da Gama (1524), Johns Hopkins (1873), John Muir (1914), Peter Lawford (1984), Norman Vincent Peale (1993), John Boswell (1994; a gay man who became a great scholar of religion and homosexuality and a professor at Yale, he lived across the hall from me during my junior year at William and Mary, and died of AIDS at only 47), Harold Pinter (2008), Jack Klugman (2012), and Buddy DeFranco (2014). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a holiday message for her fans and readers:
To all our readers, both those who believe in different strange gods and those who do not believe in any god except Bastet, I want to express my heartfelt meow.
In Polish:
Wszystkim naszym czytelnikom, zarówno tym, którzy wierzą w różnych dziwnych bogów, jak i tym, którzy nie wierzą w żadnego poza Bastet, składam serdeczne miau.
And out in icebound Winnipeg, Gus is chilling indoors. Here he’s having some tea with his staff:
And here he’s indulging in one of his favorite indoor pastimes: watching bird videos:
Every year Santa brings Christmas gifts—noms, of course—to the animals at the Cincinnati Zoo. The big cats get gift-wrapped meat at 0:43, but as for the sea lion at the end, I have no idea what they’re giving him—and I think the beast is a bit wary!
Giles Fraser is described by the Guardian as “priest-in-charge at St Mary’s Newington in south London and the former canon chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral.” He writes regularly for the Guardian, but it’s nothing that is edifying. It’s apologetics, Jake! Fraser has appeared on this website several times before (e.g., here, here, and here), and never in a favorable light.
But his piece in yesterday’s Guardian (he has a column), may be the worst yet. You can tell that from its title, “How to defeat terrorists? True extremism.” Now what on Earth can he mean by that? He starts by talking about the truck that killed people in Berlin’s Christmas market. (The suspect, Anis Amri, has now been killed in Italy, and there’s a video of him pledging allegiance to ISIS.) As a true apologist, Fraser argues that Amri, and other religious terrorists like him (at least Fraser admits religion was involved!) wasn’t a true believer, for a true believer would have trusted Allah to do his own work, rather than enlist a truck driver to do it for him.
The problem with the person who drove a lorry into a crowded market of Christmas shoppers wasn’t that he was too religious, but that he wasn’t religious enough. It was the action of a half-believer, the sort of thing done by someone who doesn’t so much believe in God – but rather believes in the efficacy of human power exercised on God’s behalf, as if God needed his help. As Rowan Williams once put it: “For the person who resorts to random killing in order to promote the honour of God, it is clear that God is not to be trusted. God is too weak to look after his own honour and we are the strong ones who must step in to help him. Such is the underlying blasphemy at work.”
This is about as bogus an argument I can imagine. First of all, it ignores the fact that God, if He exists, allows horrible things to happen to innocent people—children killed by leukemia, tsunamis, and so on. If God was doing his own work, he would be holding back the tides and curing the kids, with no doctors required. The fact is that the whole basis of Christianity, which is clearly laid out in the Bible, is for people to do God’s work: to act in a Godly fashion. Jesus, after all, was setting about his Father’s work.
Christians and their missionaries regularly say they are “doing God’s work.” Nobody calls them “half-believers” despite their conviction that they’re doing what God wants. It’s only when God requires bad acts, as he did regularly in the Old Testament, that one who performs them is called a “half-believer.” Let God commit his own genocide. But in the Qur’an there are repeated calls by Allah (through Muhammad) to smite the unbelievers. Allah tells them to do that. And that is what Amri did.
“The great aim of all true religion,” wrote William Temple, “is to transfer the centre of interest from self to God.” Religious terrorists don’t get this because they still think it’s all about them, and what they can achieve. That’s the heresy. The man who shot the Russian ambassador to Turkey shouted “Allahu Akbar” – that God is great. The thing is, if he really thought that, he wouldn’t have shot the ambassador. His mistake was to think that God was somehow dependent on, and grateful for, his violent assistance.
Oh really? How does Fraser know that the guy who shot the ambassador didn’t think God was great? I suspect that Turkish policeman thought that he was acting as an extension of God. And that’s not a mistake if you interpret the Qur’an in certain ways.
I don’t want to go on with this, as there is nothing a theologian can’t argue from scripture. But in this case Fraser ignores both the Old and New Testament’s call for believers to do God’s will.
Indeed, what Allahu Akbar surely means (and Arabic speaking Christians use the phrase too) is that God needs nothing from me in order to be God. And when this is recognised, I can (sometimes with quite considerable relief) drop all my desperate schemes and arguments that try and keep him going in the face of opposition and disbelief. Indeed, in order to seek to transfer the centre of interest from self to God, to achieve other-centredness, you can’t make it all about you, your spiritual struggle, your religious heroism.
Moses and Jesus and Muhammad were all extremists. They trusted in God over their instincts. And the shorthand for this is Allahu Akbar – a phrase the terrorists will never understand.
Umm. . . . I think they understand it better than Fraser. And his call for Muslims to be more extremist is one not likely to have good results.
Here’s an exchange Matthew (who does Twi**er) sent me, along with the note, “Tom Holland – historian, Christian, and honest man – points out some problems to sophisticated theologian Giles Fraser.” That’s Tom Holland the author and historian, not Tom Holland the actor, and you might read his Wikipedia bio.
