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.
He’s reached Aspen, having traveled from Holdrege, Nebraska to Colorado Springs until finally reaching Aspen today. He’ll update us in more detail later on himself.
In the mean time, here are some photos from the road (click on the photos to enlarge, do the procedure twice to get the photos by themselves):
There are a whole lot of reasons why people deny truths, and most of them don’t do it out of malice or contempt for humanity. In many cases they truly believe that they are doing the right thing. It is fairly self-evident that many of the anti-vaccine brigade do this because they truly believe they are saving their children from the harm of a callous conspiracy between the CDC, Big Pharma and your local GP. Ignorance may not be an excuse, but it is their reason.
It is pretty hard to win over hearts and minds on these issues, but the best that the pro science-based medicine side can do is to keep on refuting the worst myths and distortions.
But it really doesn’t help when someone with a disproportionate ratio of influence to actual facts gets up on their high horse and spouts forth.
In text form:
California Gov says yes to poisoning more children with mercury and aluminum in manditory vaccines. This corporate fascist must be stopped. They say mercury in fish is dangerous but forcing all of our children to be injected with mercury in thimerosol is no risk. Make sense? I am not anti-vaccine. I am anti-thimerosal, anti-mercury. They have taken some of the mercury laden thimerosal out of vaccines. NOT ALL! The CDC can’t solve a problem they helped start. It’s too risky to admit they have been wrong about mercury/thimerasol. They are corrupt.
Oy.
His swipe at the CDC was no doubt in response to people informing him that thimerosal is no longer used in most vaccines any more, and especially not children’s vaccines even though studies have shown to have no evidence of harm at the dosage that was typically used.
The CDC addresses this issue fairly clearly here, and has several papers on the subject available to download and read here. True Believers™ don’t read papers, of course, because they are all a part of the corrupt fascist conspiracy. But people who are genuinely undecided might. This is what the CDC actually says on the subject.
Thimerosal is a mercury-containing preservative used in some vaccines and other products since the 1930’s. There is no convincing evidence of harm caused by the low doses of thimerosal in vaccines, except for minor reactions like redness and swelling at the injection site. However, in July 1999, the Public Health Service agencies, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and vaccine manufacturers agreed that thimerosal should be reduced or eliminated in vaccines as a precautionary measure.
Since 2001, with the exception of some influenza (flu) vaccines, thimerosal is not used as a preservative in routinely recommended childhood vaccines.
Much as one would like to think that the new cartoon up at Jesus & Mo is satire that is all made up, or at least exaggerates reality even just a little bit for comic effect; this kind of conversation is all too evident on social media everywhere, and you’ve probably seen several examples of it yourself.
I’ll be looking at the push-back to legalization of same-sex marriage in the next few days, but in the mean time enjoy. Share everywhere you see any whinging and whining.
We have only one reader’s photos today, and of course that reader is Stephen Barnard, whom I’ll be visiting shortly after July 4. His notes are indented:
This is one of the Northern Harrier “chicks” [Circus cyaneus] from a nest across the creek from my house. It looks pretty much grown up and ready to fly.
I haven’t been doing much photography lately because the fishing has turned on.
It’s a tough life in Idaho!
I also found three pictures of turkey vultures (Cathartes aura) that Stephen sent on May 1:
There are plenty of wheelings and dealing going on in the bipedal humanoid world today, but it’s a little disturbing when your four-footed companions appear to be watching the stock markets. Do they know something we don’t?
Cyrus: Do you know what the current value of gold bullion is?
Hili: No, I don’t, but the price of coal went down.
In Polish:
Cyrus: Wiesz jaki jest dziś kurs złota?
Hili: Nie wiem, ale ceny węgla poszły w dół.
And as a lagniappe, Leon came to visit. Hili is not At Home to visitors of the felid persuasion but the amiable Cyrus is, and it appears that there is some plotting and planning going on.
Leon: Cyrus, I came with a mission of peace. Let’s talk.
No, this cottontail’s name is not “Spot.” A juvenile rabbit was sitting on the trail at the Garden of the Gods (a fantastic series of rock formations in Colorado Springs), and then hopped into the bushes after I photographed it (below). Can you spot it?
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.
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.
