BBC poll: 40% of Brits don’t believe that “Jesus was a real person,” but BBC assumes he was!

October 31, 2015 • 10:15 am

The link to this BBC article came from reader Ant, and when I first read it I think I completely misinterpreted it. Here it is in its entirety, along with the headline (emphasis is the BBC’s, not mine).

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Forty percent of people in England do not believe Jesus was a real person, a survey suggests.

However, 43% of the people asked said they did believe in the resurrection – although many did not think it happened as described in the Bible.

The figures also found while 57% classified themselves as Christian, fewer than 10% actually go to church.

The survey of over 4,000 people for the Church of England will be discussed at its next General Synod in November.

Many scholars agree that Jesus was a real man, who lived in Galilee over two thousand years ago, although many details surrounding his life are still debated.

But, the Church of England survey found that four in 10 people did not realise Jesus was a real person, with a quarter of 18 to 34 year olds believing he was a mythical or fictional character.

The poll was part of a wider research project looking at both practising Christians and the wider population.

After Christians, the second biggest group identified in the poll – 12% – were atheists, while 9% were agnostics, Muslims represented 3%, with Hindus and Jews both making up 2%.

English Christians are more likely than the average English adult to work in education, or professional jobs, but less likely to work in finance or insurance, the survey concluded.

When I first read this quickly, I took this to be the message: 40% of British are mythicists, unconvinced that the Jesus either did the things he’s said to have done in the New Testament, or even that there was a real person on whom the Jesus legend was based. I found that heartening.

But then I realized that I was probably wrong about what the article was saying. Those 40% weren’t mythicists who had considered the evidence, I think, but simply people who don’t REALIZE that Jesus was a real person, and haven’t thought much about the issue. That is, they didn’t consider the writings of Josephus or of mythicists like Richard Carrier, and then made a decision that there was no historical Jesus-person. Rather, they are just oblivious.

Now I may be wrong, but the more I read this, the more I think that reader Ant was right in his interpretation.  What’s more galling is that the BBC is taking what “many scholars believe” as the gospel truth—pardon the pun—despite the fact that close scrutiny gives virtually no extra-Biblical evidence for a historical Jesus. I’m still convinced that the judgement of scholars that “Jesus was a real man” comes not from evidence, but from their conviction that the Bible simply couldn’t be untruthful about that issue. But of course we know of cases where myths grew up that weren’t at bottom derived from a historical individual.

And the “details about Jesus’s life” that “are still being debated” will of course never be settled unless some new archaeological or historical evidence turns up, because that debate center sentirely and solely on what the Bible says. One might as well debate the details of Paul Bunyan’s life from the legend that grew around him.

But never mind: the article is still heartening. After all, 21% of respondents were nonbelievers, and only 10% of the sample of British people go to church. Religion is dying in Britain, and dying faster than in the U.S.

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Halloween Black Cat Parade: Readers’ black cats posted, cat dressed as a pirate, cat dressed as a skeleton, and inappropriate use of cat costumes

October 31, 2015 • 6:57 am

First, and most important, the Halloween Black Cat parade, featuring 72—count them 72—black cats, almost all belonging to readers, has now been posted. You can see it on the left sidebar, or go here to to access it. I urge cat-loving readers to have a look, as there are some great pictures and stories, and if you contributed you’ll want to see your moggie.

Here’s a cat dressed as a pirate, and you can see how much he likes it:

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I don’t think this fearsome adornment is a PhotoShop job, but perhaps I’m wrong. Anyway, if it isn’t, someone went to a lot of trouble to do this:

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Finally, I found this on Facebook (source unknown), but it’s good advice. Do not appropriate the Lived Experience of Cats for your Halloween amusement. It’s an offensive theft of Cat Culture!

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h/t: Barry

Black Caturday: Hili dialogue

October 31, 2015 • 5:05 am

It’s Halloween, or, on this site, Black Caturday! In just a few short hours we’ll have the Parade of Black Cats, including 69 dark moggies sent by readers (I had no idea there would be so many). It’s a bit chilly today, and sporadic rain may dampen the spirits (and candy bags) of the trick or treaters who will flock to American houses this evening in search of sweetmeats. When I was a child, we were allowed to trick or treat without our parents coming along (something that would never happen now), and I would head to the area where the Rich People lived, for their candy was better than anyone else’s. Sometimes they’d give you a whole candy bar! Now, however, parents are always along, and some towns have places where you can X-ray your candy for inclusions like razor blades. Such is the tenor of the times. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is having Deep Thoughts, but I suspect that her “theory of relativity of everything” means how all the objects in the Universe relate to her.

Hili: I’m thinking.
A: What are you thinking about?
Hili: About the general theory of relativity of everything.

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In Polish
Hili: Zastanawiam się.
Ja: Nad czym?
Hili: Nad ogólną teorią względności wszystkiego.

 

Motorcyclist saves orange kitten from traffic

October 30, 2015 • 3:10 pm

End-of-the week feel-good felid from Cycle World: a motorcyclist saves a kitten about to get flattened in a busy street. Kitten, eventually adopted and named Skidmark, is ineffably cute. And the whole thing was captured on a GoPro video affixed to the female rider’s helmet.  Cycle World’s text is indented.

In a video self-effacingly titled “I sound stupid, but I saved a kitten”—a video that’s now gone viral enough that even GoPro took notice, calling the rider in question a “hero” and offering her a care package in appreciation of the deed—Reddit user Your_Brain_On_Pizza (seriously, I like everything about this woman) suddenly stops swearing at traffic and starts steering her bike toward a tiny, fuzzy lump in the middle of an intersection. After hopping off to wave cars away and scoop the petrified kitten up, she runs the little bundle over to a bystander before going back for her bike.

It’s an efficiently executed (if somewhat scary to watch) rescue of tawny cuteness, and in the two days since the incident, rider and kitten have fallen in love. Your_Brain_On_Pizza adopted the cat, had him cleared of ringworms, named him Skidmark (“Skids” for short), and posted the update below. In the sage words of Editor-in-Chief Mark Hoyer, “motorcyclists are kind of awesome.”

An eleven-second update on Skidmark in his Forever Home. There’s hope for humanity after all!

A coalition of groups that should know better writes letter to government advocating more university censorship

October 30, 2015 • 12:30 pm

As reported by Eugene Volokh at The Washington Post, a large coalition of groups that I list at the bottom has written a letter to Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, and Catherine Lhamon, Assistant Secretary at the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education, to request more censorship on U.S. campuses (you can download the letter here).  The letter addresses “harassment” on social media, and how it creates of a supposedly hostile environment for students when that media includes sex- and race-based comments.

As Volokh points out, some of what the groups are asking for is already prohibited by existing laws: making direct threats of rape and other forms of violence, or creating an unwelcome climate in the workplace via pervasive gender- or racial comments. But the letter goes beyond that, trying to ban criticism or speech that isn’t illegal, and is in fact protected by the Constitution. Here are some examples given by Volokh and taken from the letter:

  1. “[S]uccessive invidious comments targeting African-Americans, such as ‘Their entire culture just isn’t conducive to a life of success. It just isn’t. The outfits. The attitudes. The behavior.’”
  2. “Another comment” that said “Slavery was the worst thing to happen to this country, bringing them over here . . . ugh.”
  3. A statement that “I would be completely ok with Clemson being an all white school. Except for football.”
  4. A statement that “The only thing niggers are good for is making Clemson better at football.”
  5. A statement that “Jesus I hate black people.”
  6. A comment saying, “Guys stop with all this hate. Let’s just be thankful we arn’t black.”
  7. Statements “target[ing] Indian students and East Asians, referred to as ‘chinks,’ in addition to LGBT students, Mormons, and women.”
  8. ”[S]tudents post[ing] dozens of demeaning, crude, and sexually explicit comments and imagery about three female professors.”

Now of course these are invidious and deeply offensive statements, but they’re perfectly legal, and they’d likely blur into forms of “hate speech” that simply comprises views that other students wouldn’t like. One person’s criticism is, as we all know, another person’s harassment. And here’s what the coalition below is asking for:

And the coalition is calling for the OCR to pressure universities (over which it has power, given its ability to cut off funding to universities) to, among other things,

    • “initiat[e] campus disciplinary proceedings against individuals engaging in online harassment” — including, apparently, for saying things such as “[African-Americans’] entire culture just isn’t conducive to a life of success”
    • “geo-fenc[e] anonymous social media applications that are used to threaten, intimidate, or harass students”
    • “bar[] the use of campus wi-fi to view or post to these applications.”

This is an attempt to intimidate students into following a “correct” ideology. Granted, there’s a lot of genuine “hate speech” out there, but it’s perfectly legal, and, as Volokh notes, the courts have ruled repeatedly that the same First Amendment Rights that apply off campus must also apply in public universities. Witness Healey v. James, a 1972 case in which a unanimous Supreme Court (mostly liberal but with Rehnquist), adjudicated the banning of a chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) from Central Connecticut State College on the grounds that the SDS had “a philosophy of violence and disruption.” The Court’s ruling, allowing the chapter’s presence on campus, said this:

Yet the precedents of this Court leave no room for the view that, because of the acknowledged need for order, First Amendment protections should apply with less force on college campuses than in the community at large. Quite to the contrary, “[t]he vigilant protection of constitutional freedoms is nowhere more vital than in the community of American schools.” Shelton v. Tucker, 364 U. S. 479, 364 U. S. 487 (1960). The college classroom, with its surrounding environs, is peculiarly the “marketplace of ideas,'” and we break no new constitutional ground in reaffirming this Nation’s dedication to safeguarding academic freedom.

That paragraph should be read by everyone who wants to restrict protected speech on campuses, arguing somehow that the First Amendment is weaker in colleges than in the nation as a whole. And colleges should follow the admirable free-speech policy adopted by my own university.

Here are the groups that signed this letter. Again, I note that it also calls for enforcement of some provisions that are legal, and that should be in place to protect the rights of individuals. I have no truck with threatening individuals or making their workplaces unwelcome venues for sexual or ethnic harassment. But we can’t allow the Constitution to be enforced in different ways in different locations. After we’ve ensured that students are protected from threats, violence, and workplace harassment, who is to decide what constitutes hate speech, and who is to decide what speech is legal off campus but not on it?

This list does not include many local chapters of national organizations that also signed the letter.

American Association of University Women
Association of Reproductive Health Professionals
Black Women’s Blueprint
Black Women’s Health Imperative
Center for Partnership Studies
Center for Women Policy Studies
Champion Women
Clearinghouse on Women’s Issues
Digital Sisters/Sistas
End Rape on Campus
GLSEN
Hollaback!
Human Rights Campaign
Institute for Science and Human Values
Jewish Women International
Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
Legal Momentum
Media Equity Collaborative
Muslim Advocates
National Alliance for Partnerships in Equity
National Black Justice Coalition
National Center for Lesbian Rights
National Coalition Against Domestic Violence
National Council of Jewish Women
National Council of Women’s Organizations
National Disability Rights Network
National Domestic Violence Hotline
National LGBTQ Taskforce
National Organization for Women
National Women’s Law Center
SPARK Movement
SurvJustice
The Andrew Goodman Foundation
Turning Anger into Change
UltraViolet
WMC Speech Project
Women’s Media Center
YWCA USA

h/t: Gregory

Sophisticated theologians squabble like two-year-olds over whether divorced Catholics can get communion

October 30, 2015 • 10:00 am

I won’t belabor this matter except that the article describing it, written by Thomas Reese at the National Catholic Reporter, explicitly mentions “Sophisticated Theologians™”—that rarefied group of thinkers who always provide the Best Arguments for God.

It turns out that there’s just been a Roman Catholic Synod, one of whose aims was to decide what God wanted to do with those divorced and remarried Catholics who wanted to take Communion but haven’t gotten the proper church annulment. Catholics in that situation have sinned and are not in a “state of grace,” so they’re not allowed to nom the body of Christ or drink his blood. You can see the labyrinthine rules for Catholic Communion here, and to me they show craziness rather than Sophistication.

What did the Sophisticated Catholic Theologians™ decide about this difficult issue? What did they settle on as God’s will? Well. . . nothing. They equivocated. As Reese reports (my emphasis):

To the amazement of all, Germans reached unanimous agreement on their report that included a discussion of the internal forum.

“There must be perhaps a way of going with the people in these situations, with the priest to look if and when they can come to a full reconciliation with the church,” explained Cardinal Reinhard Marx, speaking of divorced and remarried persons. “That is the proposal.”

This unanimity was significant because in the German group were theologically sophisticated cardinals representing different points of view, including Cardinals Walter Kasper, who originally proposed the idea of the “penitential path,” and Gerhard Muller, the head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, known to oppose that path.

. . . What is remarkable about the three paragraphs dealing with divorced and remarried Catholics is that the words Communion and Eucharist never appear. Yes, that’s right, they never mention Communion as a conclusion of this internal forum process.

So what does it mean? A conservative might interpret it as closed to Communion because it was not mentioned in the text. A liberal might interpret it as including Communion since it is not explicitly excluded in the text.

I think that the truth is that Communion was not mentioned because that was the only way the paragraphs could get a two-thirds majority. Like the Second Vatican Council, the synod achieved consensus through ambiguity. This means that they are leaving Pope Francis free to do whatever he thinks best.

So here we see God’s will—after all, if you do the wrong thing, you’re not in a state of grace and will go to hell— is decided by vote, or, in this case, not decided by vote. What many people (Catholics and atheists alike) don’t realize is how much of Catholic doctrine, which supposedly represents God’s will and decides your postmortem fate, was decided by similar votes. Here’s a passage from Faith versus Fact:

It’s not widely appreciated that much religious dogma, especially in Christianity, wasn’t even derived from scripture or revelation, but from a consensus of opinion designed to quell dissent within the church. The Council of Nicaea, for instance, was convened by Emperor Constantine in 325 to settle issues about the divinity of Jesus and the reality of the Trinity. Despite some dissent, both issues were affirmed. In other words, issues of religious truth were settled by vote. The requirement for absolving sin through individual confession wasn’t adopted by Catholics until the ninth century; the doctrine of papal infallibility was adopted by the First Vatican Council as late as 1870; and the bodily assumption of Mary into heaven, something debated for centuries, didn’t become Catholic dogma until Pope Pius XII declared it so in 1950. And it was only in 2007 that Pope Benedict XVI, acting on the advice of a commission convened by his predecessor, declared that the souls of unbaptized babies could now go to heaven instead of lingering in limbo. Given the absence of new information that produced these changes, how can anybody seriously see this as a rational way to decide religious “truth”?

In short, the Church just makes stuff up—stuff that’s supposed to affect you for all eternity. How can rational people buy it?

Netherlands revokes Scientology’s tax-exempt status because it’s a profit-making institution; more blows to come

October 30, 2015 • 8:30 am

According to the Netherland Times, a Dutch court has revoked the status of Scientology as a “public welfare institution” (i.e., a nonprofit) because the “church” has been deemed a profit-making institution. And with that the Church’s tax-exempt status disappears”

The court decided that the sales of the Church’s expensive courses and therapy sessions are clearly aimed at making a profit, and thus it does not belong on the tax authorities’ charity list.

. . . The court ruled that these courses [the expensive series of courses that one must take to advance to “getting clear”] cost significantly more than commercial educational institutions’ average school fees. “If providers on the secular education market had similar prices, prospective students would experience it as prices for top education by top teachers in prime locations.” The court finds the prices to be very commercial. According to the court, Scientology consciously seeks profits to fill its purse and was able to build “substantial wealth” like this.

The Church can still appeal against this ruling, but it is not yet clear if they will. A spokesperson called the judge’s ruling “discrimination based on religious beliefs”.

This ruling puts a provisional end to a long ongoing process that started in the Amsterdam Court two years ago, according to newspaper Trouw.  Back then the court ruled that the Church of Scientology does not have a commercial character because it gave courses and therapy sessions to poor Scientologists as gifts. The Supreme Court questioned this ruling late last year, also being concerned about the prices Scientology charges.

Of course the Church of Scientology retains its status as an official religion in the U.S., having gained it after a long battle with the Internal Revenue Service (it originally got that status in 1957, lost it a decade later, and then regained in in 1993 after a series of dubious maneuvers, including illegal actions that resulted in some Scientologists being jailed). Scientology isn’t religious in the sense of worshiping a divine being, but I suppose one could make the case that it has a theology (Xenu et al.) and is “churchlike.”

While its tax-exempt status should also be revoked in the U.S., so should the similar status of all churches. There is no legal justification for exempting churches from taxation, which includes ministers getting a tax-exempt housing allowance. But it will be a cold day in July when the U.S. finally bites the bullet and decides to end the tax-exemptions of churches. At present, religious organizations, like other “nonprofits”, are exempted as a way to further charitable giving, but this amounts to unconstitutional promotion of religion—and to taxpayers subsidizing religion—in a secular country (read the IRS regulations for defining a “church” here). And even if you think that “genuine” religions should be tax-exempt, there is no way that Scientology is a “nonprofit,” given the luxurious lifestyle its leaders enjoy and the way it exploits its members.

Scientology is falling on hard times. The book Going Clear by Lawrence Wright (which I read and highly recommend) shows the rotten status of the organization and its bizarre and cultlike activities, while the subsequent movie (which I haven’t seen) has garnered great reviews despite Scientology’s efforts to block it. And now Leah Remini, once a famous Scientologist who belonged to the organization for 37 years (since age 9!) and an actor known for her role in the television series “King of Queens,” is about to release a memoir, Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology. Her book will undoubtedly cast further aspersions on the church.

While this is a bit Hollywoodish, Remini’s expose will do further damage to Scientology, and, as far as I’m concerned, the more damage the better. I feel sorry for the many people who have been impoverished, victimized, and even done to death by the Church’s malfeasance and greed. It’s also a sign of the times that had I written this post about twenty years ago, I would have been hounded, persecuted, and even sued by the “church.” They no longer have that power.

Here’s a report explaining why Remini left Scientology, which as far as I know is accurate:

When people start telling you that religions do good stuff, ask them what good stuff has ever been done by Scientology, which, after all, is an Official Religion.

And, for LOLs, here’s the odious head of the Church, David Miscavige, with his Sea Org acolytes. (As noted above, Miscavige’s wife Shelly has not been seen in public for eight years.) And, for grins, I’ll throw in a leaked video in which Tom Cruise, the Church’s most famous member, accepts Scientology’s Freedom Medal of Valor from Miscavige in 2004. If this video doesn’t curl the soles of your shoes, you’re immune to woo. Be sure to watch the mutual salutes and embraces at the beginning, and the salute to L. Ron Hubbard’s portrait at 4:28.

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Photo: The Village Voice

h/t: Gravelinspector

Readers’ wildlife photographs

October 30, 2015 • 7:30 am

Reader Benjamin Taylor sent me many photos from Africa, which I intend to post in dollops. Today we have landscapes, and the next installment will be animals. Taylor’s notes are indented:

Last month I went on a camping trip around southern Africa (Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia) and took quite a few photographs.

The Milky Way:

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Sunrise from Dune 45 (Namib-Naukluft National Park, Namibia):

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Looking down from the top of Dune 45:

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Deadvlei, Namib-Naukluft National Park, Namibia.

A clay pan surrounded by sand dunes. This used to be a desert oasis, but the shifting dunes cut off the water supply leaving the white clay and dead acacia trees behind.  The dead trees have stood, largely unchanged,  for around 600-700 years due to the extremely arid climate. The name ‘Deadvlei’ translates to ‘the dead marsh’.

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