Brother Tayler’s Sunday Secular Sermon: Colton Burpo, Sean Hannity, and the scam of “Heaven is For Real”

June 30, 2015 • 12:00 pm

I’ve written several times about the trio of “I-almost-died-but-went-to-Heaven-and-it’s-real” books, including the discredited Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander, the discredited The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven by Kevin and Alex Malarkey (good names) and the not-yet-discredited Heaven is for Real, by Todd Burpo and Lynn Vincent, detailing Colton Burpo’s (Todd son’s) visit to Heaven (including an encounter with a Very Large Jesus) when he survived an emergency appendectomy at the age of four.

No way a four-year-old could make stuff up like that, could he?—especially since Colton gave post-visit details to his parents (like encountering his younger sibling, who died in a hushed-up miscarriage) that he could not have known unless they were imparted by God. No matter that Colton’s dad was an impecunious preacher.  The book went to #1 on the New York Times best-seller list (in NONFICTION), as did, I think, Proof of Heaven. The success of “heaven tourism” books goes to show that if you want to rake in the dosh, write something that convinces the public that heaven is a real place, and they have a chance to live forever with God. So much for the Sophisticated Theologians™ who claim that such childish beliefs aren’t that common!

Heaven is for Real was also made into a movie last year with Greg Kinnear in the role of Todd. As expected, it got a notably low critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes, though the public liked it a lot more (of course!): the movie earned more than 100 million dollars. Such is the American appetite for real evidence of God and Christ.

Here’s the trailer:

The movie, and Fox News flack Sean Hannity’s credulous acceptance of it, is the subject of yesterday’s Sunday Secular Sermon by Jeffrey Tayler, “Sean Hannity, very bad critic: Fox News, Sarah Palin pal help hit movie prey on the gullible.” The title tells it all, as does the STRIDENT opening paragraph:

The religious and their cynical Hollywood panderers have offended reason and outraged aesthetics by generating a treacly tale of celestial sojourning so transparently trumped-up that only a fool could fail to see through it. Yet, in so doing, they have exposed the acute faith-derangement syndrome (FDS) afflicting large swaths of the American public and thus, potentially, cleared the way for sanity-inducing treatment.

While neurosurgeon Eben Alexander’s book was thoroughly discredited in Esquire by Luke Dittrich (thankfully the demolition job, once behind a paywall, is once again available gratis), the “proof” of such stuff wouldn’t convince the merest skeptic; it’s meant to serve satisfy the confirmation bias of those who already believe. As Tayler notes:

A slash or two of Occam’s razor judiciously applied to the Burpo “enigma” and all becomes wondrously clear. The most obvious (and charitable) assumption: Colton had a dream and recounts the dream, confusing it with reality, as any four-year-old might.  Penniless Padre Burpo, sensing lucre, then takes what Colton tells him, contacts publishers and … you can supply the rest of the story. In any case, the Burpo clan and their associates hit the FDS jackpot. No surprise there: seven out of ten Americans still call themselves Christians, and they are known to donate oodles of their hard-earned income to God-peddlers of all stripes. Spending a mere fifteen dollars on a book seems like a low-cost way to “reconnect with their faith.”

As Tayler adds, such skepticism was shown by Sean Hannity in his interview with the movie’s director and Todd and Colton Burpo. Here’s that interview (trigger warning: severe delusions):

Note that Colton tells us that no matter how old or infirm we are, in Heaven we’ll have the bodies we had in our prime (or would have had in our prime, given Colton’s vision of his miscarried sister as a young woman.) Tayler doesn’t try to hide his disgust at the interview and at Hannity’s sickening credibility:

For affirmation, Hannity turns to Burpo père, who offers the jarringly untrue, self-serving observation that “when you have a four year-old, there’s no way that they have the capacity to take you on long journeys, and make up things, and you not to be able to know that they’re making it up.” He then blurbs the flick: “I think this movie will do great because you’re gonna see in this little boy on the screen pretty much what I saw eleven years ago.”

“Does everybody go to heaven?” Hannity asks Colton.

“No, not everybody does go to heaven.” Why? “Everybody there loved Jesus … once we love Jesus, it’s easier to let [material things] go, and we can enter heaven.”

Having expressed not an iota of skepticism, Hannity ends the interview.

The evangelicals who raised such a fuss about l’affaire Burpo were obviously right to do so. Now they would do well take a close look at their own beliefs. Faith-derangement syndrome is, after all, a folie à deux, and they suffer from it as well. But a little clear-headed adult thinking would cure it in no time.

As for “Heaven Is for Real,” nothing will redeem it.

Well, not to the skeptic, but ten million copies of the book and millions of dollars in profits for the Burpos have redeemed their own credibility.

The things rats dream about

June 30, 2015 • 10:15 am

by Grania Spingies

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

The Tempest (4.1.168-170)

I should preface this with my regular caveat: I-am-not-a-scientist, nor do I play one on TV. My level expertise only allows me to say the rough equivalent of “Oh hey, this looks interesting.”

As a child I often used to watch my dogs dreaming. Clearly they were running, sometimes barking and huffing, sometimes panting. It used to fascinate me, and I wondered where in their heads they were running. Was it a field they knew? Were they alone or with companions? Were they chasing prey? Running for the fun of it? What does prey even look like to Canis lupus familiaris who may never met anything particularly prey-like in their modern suburban existence?

Once one of them barked so loud in her dream that she startled herself and woke up with a jump. I’d never seen a Labrador look more sheep-like when her eyes met mine. Unfortunately there was no way to ask her what she had been seeing in her dreams.

But it seems that remarkably a team of scientists has had a glimpse at what rats dream about.

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Not an actual lab rat

Kiona Smith-Strickland over at Discover Magazine writes about a new study where a team looked at rats and determined remarkably that they dreamed about going places they were aware of but had not yet explored. She explains the process:

First, researchers let rats explore a T-shaped track. The rats could run along the center of the T, but the arms were blocked by clear barriers. While the rats watched, researchers put food at the end of one arm. The rats could see the food and the route to it, but they couldn’t get there.

Then, when the rats were curled up in their cages afterwards, scientists measured their neuron firing. Their brain activity seemed to show them imagining a route through a place they hadn’t explored before. To confirm this, researchers then put the rats back into the maze, but this time without the barriers. As they explored the arm where they had previously seen the food, the rats’ place cells fired in the same pattern as they had during sleep.

Neuroscientist Hugo Spiers, who co-authored the study, notes:

People have talked in the past about these kind of replay and pre-play events as possibly being the substrates of dreams, but you can’t ask rats what they’re thinking or dreaming. There is that really interesting sense that we’re getting at the stuff of dreams, the stuff that goes on when you’re sleeping.

You can read the paper here:

Hippocampal place cells construct reward related sequences through unexplored space by H Freyja Ólafsdóttir, Caswell Barry, Aman B Saleem, Demis Hassabis, Hugo J Spiers

Readers’ wildlife photographs

June 30, 2015 • 9:00 am

It’s Stephen Barnard Day again, as he’s sending me photos on the road, and I have some in old emails. These are in fact from May 3.

Bald Eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus): Desi keeping a close lookout and  Lucy on the nest. [JAC: the eaglets have now hatched and fledged]:

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American Avocet (Recurvirostra americana):

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Deets 🙂 (Canis lupus familiaris):

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Turkey Vulture (Cathartes aura):

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Canada Goose (Branta canadensis) attacking another goose:

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Swainson’s Hawk (Buteo swainsoni):

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Tuesday: Hili Dialogue

June 30, 2015 • 4:06 am

Good morning! Grania here again.

It’s the last day of June, so use it wisely. It will never come again. Jerry’s already got a couple of posts scheduled for today because he is a writing machine; but he is back on the road again as his journey continues.

In the mean time we have more deep philosophical ruminations from our feline friend in Poland.

Hili: Time will tell.
A: What will time tell?
Hili: That’s what I’m trying to figure out.

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Hili: Czas pokaże.
Ja: Co czas pokaże?
Hili: Właśnie, też się nad tym zastanawiam.

A Muslim-basher becomes an atheist-basher

June 29, 2015 • 2:00 pm

I promised never to mention the name of a certain gentleman (henceforth called CG) again, on pain of having to give a free book to the reader who spots his name—and this post doesn’t count in that pledge). But I wanted to point this out because here we have a genuine example of Islamophobia. The Godless Spellchecker, responsible for earlier bringing CG low for plagiarism, now points out that CG had a past history of violent anti-Muslim sentiments. The stuff CG tw**ted is absolutely horrendous, and if you don’t think Islamophobia really exists, here we have an example—from a nonbeliever, no less.

What’s odd about CG is that his bigotry against Muslims has now turned into nasty bigotry against New Atheists, while he’s begun coddling Islam itself à la Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan. As for the gentleman’s previous anti-religious bigotry, he’s now issued a notapology that says this: “You see, New Atheists aren’t upset I was an anti-Muslim bigot, probable racist, in 2009. They’re upset that I’m not that now.”

“Probable” racist indeed! While Islamophobia isn’t technically racism, as Muslims aren’t a race, the “probable” part is a weasel word. And, as The Godless Spellchecker notes, none of the New Atheists whom TG continues to excoriate for “Islamophobia”, including Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins, have ever said anything as vile and anti-Muslim as TG did in his earlier incarnation. Nor can one equate TG’s deliberately antagonistic baiting of anyone who looks “Arabic” with the criticisms of Islam posted by much of our atheist community.

Frankly, I’m sick of those critics, particularly nonbelievers, who accuse New Atheists of both shrillness and Islamophobia. They are either ignorant or intellectually dishonest. (Perhaps I’m extra sensitive to this because I’m lately the receiving end of the shrillness canard.) But such accusations are always meant to deflect readers from the real issue: are the claims of religion true? How would we know? What does it mean to base ones morals, worldview, and actions on propositions lacking any evidentiary support? 

When someone plays the “strident” card, or conflates criticism of Islam with criticism of Muslims as people, you know they got nothing.

Peregrinations: Vermillion, South Dakota

June 29, 2015 • 12:30 pm

After a roughly ten-hour drive from Chicago on Saturday, I arrived in Vermillion, South Dakota, where reader Hugh Britten, his wife Lynn (both biologists at the University of South Dakota) and their daughter Caitlin greeted me with excellent hospitality, including two cats, a d*g, and a lovely get-together with other faculty and great noms. Here’s the family; note the tabby between Lynn and Caitlin:

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A closeup of the tabby, named Dobby:

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And the other cat, a black fluffball named Jedda (they also had a friendly and ancient d*g named Isabelle, but I don’t have a picture of her):

Jedda

Before the soirée, we had time for a quick visit to two nice sights around the town. The first is the National Music Museum (formerly known as the “Shrine to Music,” a much better name), which is a world-class collection of instruments and music-iana: a stunning collection for a small school. Grania has, I believe, posted some of the photos I took with my iPhone (mostly Guitars of the Greats), and here are a few more.

This, I was told, was one of only two surviving guitars made by Stradivarius. I can’t vouch for that independently (the label below says it’s “one of a handful”),  but I had no idea he made any guitars. This one must be worth millions.

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The information about it:

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And here’s his signature on the peg head:

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Another Strad, this time a viola (at least I think that’s what it is):

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I was told this is the oldest harpsichord in the world that’s still playable. (UPDATE: In comment #11 below, reader M. Janello tells us a little about this instrument and then links to a video of the harpsichord being played.)

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The information:

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Moar harpsichords (the Museum has several rooms of these and their descendants, the piano and the pianoforte):

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After the Museum, we visited the famous Spirit Mound, a natural mound that was visited by Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition (1804-1806: the first non-native expedition to the US west). We know this is the place, for it’s described accurately (including the view, which at the time included no trees) in Clark’s journal. The visit was on August 25, 1804, and you can read more about their ascent of the mound here. The local Native Americans considered a kind of sacred place, but one inhabited by malicious demons.

Here’s the mound, which isn’t very tall but affords a long view of the flat prairie:

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And me, standing exactly where Lewis and Clark stood. Note the bench on which the pair rested after mounting the hill 🙂  I think it’s traditional for visitors to point in various directions when they reach the top:

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They’re restoring the prairie in the area to the state it was in before settlers came in and planted other stuff, including trees and non-indigenous plants. Here are some of the native flowers. I know these, but I’ll let the readers identify them. The last one, however, is hemp (wild marijuana), locally called “ditchweed”:

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Ditchweed (Cannabis sativa; apparently too low in the active substance to be worth smoking); it is, of course, hemp, used for making cloth and many other things:

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A fine fat toad we saw along the trail (at least I think it’s a toad; the difference between toads and frogs always eludes me). Perhaps a reader can identify it.

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And finally, I posed on the restored prairie to show how tall the grass was. Imagine this kind of vegetation, interspersed with wildflowers, extending all the way west from the Mississippi to the Rockies! What a sight it must have been for the pioneers who first encountered it, and then, at the end, encountered the huge and daunting wall of the Rockies.

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Times they are a-changing, but there are still miles to go

June 29, 2015 • 10:00 am

by Grania Spingies

There have been Pride Festivals all over the world this weekend and perhaps they were celebrated most joyfully this year in the USA and Ireland, following on the momentous victories for same-sex marriage in both countries, by popular vote in Ireland and by Supreme Court ruling in the US.

Ireland’s own version of Pride had somber beginnings against a backdrop of murder.

Dublin Pride notes:

In March, 1983, prior to the first pride parade, a march was held from the city centre of Dublin to Fairview Park in the suburb of Fairview, Dublin, protesting the levels of violence against gay men and women in Ireland. In particular, the march was a reaction to the controversial judgement in the Flynn case, when suspended sentences on charges of manslaughter were given to members of a gang found guilty of the 1982 killing of Declan Flynn, a 31-year old gay man, in Fairview Park, and the subsequent celebrations by some members of the local community following their release.

The difference three decades on is dramatic.

now

However, while it was being celebrated in spectacular style on both sides of the Atlantic, this is what the scene looked like in Istanbul where police broke up the parade with water guns and rubber bullets, for as yet unstated reasons.

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Rory O’Neill, activist and drag artist Panti Bliss – whose impassioned and funny talk about accidentally becoming the focal point of a nationwide squall about what constituted homophobia went viral last year, was then invited to talk at TEDx  Dublin on what homophobia is and why it happens. There’s some insightful and thought-provoking stuff in there.

 

Dinosaur 1, mammal 0. Bee-eater catches bat.

June 29, 2015 • 9:58 am

by Matthew Cobb

PCC mailed me from holiday (can you spot the problem in that phrase?) and asked me to post these amazing photos by Shuki Cheled, which have just been posted on birdguides.com, where Jonathan Meyrav writes this:

On Friday 26 June photographer Shuki Cheled was birding around the Judean plains with a Dutch birding friend. Near the village of Nahala the two encountered a European Bee-eater with something large in its bill. The bird eventually flew closer and the two were amazed to see that the prey was actually a bat! The bat was alive and flapping at first, and was probably a Kuhl’s Pipistrelle (Pipistrellus kuhlii).

The bee-eater proceeded to hit the bat against branches, as they do with wasps and bees, until the bat died. The bee-eater spent the following minutes trying to swallow the bat, flipping it over and over, without success. Eventually it flew off, with the bat still in its beak, so the eventual outcome remains unknown.

This is a truly remarkable story: European Bee-eaters are known to feed on many flying insects but rarely take terrestrial prey. They sometimes hunt termites, caterpillars and grubs, but never prey of this size. The only logical scenario I can think of is that the pipistrelle made the mistake of choosing to roost in the Bee-eater’s nest cavity and the bird was simply trying to remove the threat, but who knows.

One of the commenters on the birdguides post, Steve Portugal says: ‘

I was in Italy once and saw juvenile Starlings trying to enter Bee-eater burrows – the Bee-eaters dragged them out and tried to drown them.