Apparently I don’t understand Jesus

January 1, 2013 • 9:35 am

I knew this would happen: amateur theologians come along after I give my reactions to the Bible and instruct me that I am interpreting it rong.  Here’s a comment I got from one “Steve” which I decided to put above the fold; it refers to my post about the beginning of the New Testament.

He’s somewhat of a troll, so I am not allowing him to comment further, but feel free to say what you want to him, assuming he’ll read this.

People who have so little understanding of the teachings of Jesus should never endeavor to comment on it, much less to propagate it. I don’t have the time in my day to point out these errors and educate you. I will give you a little ‘clue’ here though.

Jesus taught a way to love that is beyond our human ability… nobody can naturally love their enemy. That takes a supernatural enactment of God in us. If we live in releationship [sic] with Him this is possible. And He wasn’t referring to letting someone beat you up. If you’ll read the text more carefully, He said, “If a man strikes you on the right cheek…” This was a common expression for someone giving someone a back-handed slap (picture it… he’s facing you… the common way one would strike you on the right side of the face is by taking their right hand and back-handing you. This was a form of INSULT. That’s what He was referring to!

And as far as no secular references to Jesus in history, you need to do your homework. You’ll find all kinds of historical references to dispell [sic] your ignorant assertion that he didn’t exist. I don’t have the time to ‘spoon-feed’ you any more. We live in the ‘information age’…there is therefored no excuse for this level of ignorance.

I guess Steve doesn’t have time, either, to check out those solid “historical references” to Jesus.  But I’m immensely grateful to lean that the word “strike” (or “smite” in the King James version) was purely metaphorical, referring to the reciprocation of insults rather than blows.

 

Mother lode of flame shells discovered off Scotland

January 1, 2013 • 5:22 am

Here’s a bivalve mollusc I didn’t know existed. The day before Christmas, the BBC News reported a stupendously large assemblage of living flame shells (Limaria hians, also known as the “gaping file shell”) living off the coast of Scotland.

A huge colony of an elusive and brightly coloured shellfish species has been discovered in coastal waters in the west of Scotland.

The extensive bed of at least 100 million flame shells was found during a survey of Loch Alsh, a sea inlet between Skye and the Scottish mainland.

That’s about 20 flame shells for every person in Scotland! (I haven’t been able to find a photograph of a huge grouping.) They’re bizarre looking creatures, seemingly more suited to tropical than temperate waters:

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The article continues:

The Scottish environment secretary said it could be the largest grouping of flame shells anywhere in the world.

The colony was uncovered during a survey commissioned by Marine Scotland.

It was conducted as part of work to identify new Marine Protected Areas (MPAs).

The small, scallop-like species has numerous neon orange tentacles that emerge between the creatures’ two shells.

Flame shells group together on the sea bed and their nests create a living reef that supports hundreds of other species.

It was conducted as part of work to identify new Marine Protected Areas (MPAs).

The small, scallop-like species has numerous neon orange tentacles that emerge between the creatures’ two shells.

Flame shells group together on the sea bed and their nests create a living reef that supports hundreds of other species.

The story also gives a few “flame shell facts”:
  • Flame shells build “nests” by binding gravel and shells together with thin wiry threads.
  • About 4cm long, they group together in such numbers that the sea bed is covered by a felt-like organic reef of material several centimetres thick.
  • Flame shell beds are found at only eight sites in Scottish waters.

They have a restricted distribution, all around England and Northern Ireland:

uklimhia

The Marine Life Information Network gives some information about lifestyle and habitat

Distribution: Patchy records from off Plymouth Sound, Skokholm, southern Isle of Man, western coasts and lochs of Scotland, and Mulroy Bay, Northern Ireland.

Habitat: Found from low water to ca 100 m on coarse sand, gravel, broken shells and stones. It may occupy ‘nests’ of byssus threads among rubble, under stones or in the holdfasts of laminarians. When abundant, the ‘nests’ may coalesce to form a carpet or reef over shell-sand, which may provide a substratum for kelps.

Description: The edge of the fleshy mantle bears numerous conspicuous, red and orange filamentous tentacles. The shell is thin, solid, equivalve and oval in outline, tapering towards the beaks, and usually about 2.5 cm in length but occasionally reaching 4 cm. The beaks bear an ‘ear’ like projection on each side, the anterior ‘ear’ being more prominent. The shell gaps on both sides. The shell is white in young specimens becoming whitish-brown with age. The shell bears clear growth steps and ca 50 radiating ribs that extend to a crenulate margin. When disturbed this species can swim actively using jets of water expelled by ‘clapping’ its shells together and a rowing motion of its tentacles.

Here’s a photo from the Wikipedia site:

800px-Flame_shells

For more on flame shells, including a diver’s experience with them, go here.

h/t: Chris

Year-end statistics: who watched what and said stuff

January 1, 2013 • 5:07 am

WordPress sent me my year-end stats on Sunday, and I thought I’d put them up if anyone’s interested.

First, the total views for the year.  On August 21 of this year, I put up one post got the most views ever: “Kentucky Republicans realize that they screwed up: students will have to learn evolution!” It was about Kentucky lawmakers who, unwittingly, approved school standards that, because they were designed to prepare students for a national test, mandated that they learn evolution. That garnered an astouding 72,280 views, almost certainly because someone put it on reddit.

Total views

Below are the posts garnering the most views. I can never predict the popularity of a given post, not only because I try to avoid writing posts designed to garner traffic, but also because I’m mystified by which posts inspire a lot of discussion (for example, I wouldn’t have thought that free will would get much interest). And posts that get picked up by sites like reddit (something else that is fortuitous) are the ones that get the most views:

Views

The stuff about Liechtenstein above is confusing, and I don’t understand that calculation. But never mind; below the search terms used to find the site:

Narwhal?

Narwhal? What’s up with that?

I took a screenshot from the dashboard, that’s a bit more informative—and amusing:

Picture 3
“Shaved cat” continues to enjoy a puzzling popularity; perhaps it’s based on something I’d rather not know.

The readership-by-country map was confusing, so I’ll put up the yearly total from the dashboard. We had readers from 223 countries:

Picture 3

Sadly, readers from Central Africa—or Turkmenistan.

Finally, the most prolific commenters:

Commenters

Ben Goren wins by several lengths, with about nine posts per day. I wonder how many of those posts contain the word “intestines”?

Thanks to all for another great year!

Kerfuffle! Keith Kloor won’t stop biting the leg of atheism

December 31, 2012 • 1:12 pm

When Keith Kloor first posted on his Discover blog about the perfidy of the New Atheists, lumping me with Dawkins as strident “fundamentalist” atheists, wrongheaded in our dislike of accommodationism, I got a strange feeling about him. He seemed oversensitive, much like Robert Wright or Chris Mooney. In that post, Kloor claimed that atheist stridency was aimed at “making enemies of the whole world,” and that we also hold all religions as equally bad.

Somehow I sensed that Kloor was one of those thin-skinned accommodationists who can’t let well enough alone. Their downfall is always their inability to resist responding to criticism, no matter where it comes from..

Sure enough, after I replied to Kloor, he wrote a second post in response.  I didn’t deal with that one because it was lame, citing “authorities” like Saul Bellow and Clifford Geertz to show that religion has substantial value, and suggesting there were things in heaven and earth not dreamt of by us materialists. (Kloor really has a weakness for the numinous.)

In the meantime, P. Z. Myers took out after Kloor at Pharyngula. Kloor’s statement that most ticked off P.Z. was this:

To wave away the persistent questions and yearnings that still drive the religious impulse as merely the last bastion of ignorant superstition is, as I wrote here, “inconsistent with the spirit of science.”

The assertion that religion and science are incompatible has become an article of faith for some–a kind of dogma that I recently discussed in this post. Aside from this being a form of fundamentalism, I also said that I saw no constructive use “in making an enemy of virtually the whole world” by broadly denigrating all religious believers.

Myers offered a withering response:

I’m not waving away the yearnings, they’re real enough, and we all have them. I’m waving away the goddamned answers as inadequate, contradictory, and false.

You do realize, Mr Kloor, that that’s what religion promises? Not more questions (if that were the case, it would be philosophy), but deep cosmic truths, answers hallowed by nothing more than generations of prophets pulling stories out of their asses? It is “inconsistent with the spirit of science” to simply accept those claims unquestioned, to assume that there is some validity to them because you’re afraid that pointing out the flaws might be regarded as “denigrating all religious believers.”

If telling people that they are wrong is denigrating, then my profession of education is dedicated to denigration.

I guess it also makes me a fundamentalist, if your definition of fundamentalis is lacking in reverence for the unsupported authoritarian dogma of religion, and feeling no respect for faith at all.

Thin-skinned as he is, Kloor has now put up a third post, and—oy vey!—promises more of them! Here’s his latest (today) from his Discover blog, a piece called “People who live in glass houses.” I post it in its entirety because it’s short:

To make sure the reader understands what he’s saying, Kloor begins with a picture of a glass house, and then proffers a small rant, now lumping me with Myers instead of Dawkins.

This exquisitely designed house would be perfect for PZ Myers and Jerry Coyne. I’ll expand on that (and more) in the New Year (later this week). Meanwhile, here’s something from Margaret Atwood that reminds us why religion is not so easy to stamp out in the 21st-century:

“I think that the religious strand is probably part of human hard-wiring…by religious strand, I don’t mean any particular religion, I mean the part of human beings that feels that the seen world is not the only world, that the world you see is not the only world that there is and that it can become awestruck. If that is the case, religion was selected for in the Pleistocene by many, many millennia of human evolution.”

You’d that think the atheists who are evolutionary biologists would be able to process this with their super-rational minds. And that they (Myers, Coyne et al) would be smart enough to recognize that one-size-fits all denunciation is likely counterproductive to their goal.

Indeed, for Margaret Atwood is surely an expert on both religion and evolution, and therefore stands as the authority on the evolutionary genetics of faith! Here Kloor promotes Atwood’s tenuous statement as something that evolutionists like Myers and I should acknowledge as truth.

But it’s complete garbage.  I’m not going to discuss into the many theories for the origin of religion, but most of them argue not that we have hardwired “genes for god and spirituality,” but that religion is an epiphenomenon of our biology interacting with our culture: something that has piggybacked on humans’ evolved childhood obedience to authority, or on our desire to impute agency to inanimate objects or events.  Only a chowderheaded biologist would argue that “religion was selected for in the Pleistocene by many, many millennia of human evolution.” We simply don’t know that! In fact, we know very little about the original source of the religious impulse, except that it can be eliminated relatively quickly (viz., Scandinavia). So if it’s “hardwired,” it’s extraordinarily malleable!

So why, exactly, are we supposed to accept the “scientific” conclusions of a novelist—granted, a good novelist—in the absence of evidence? It would behoove Kloor, since he’s writing for a science site, to stop touting people like Atwood as experts on the evolution of human behavior.

As for our one-size-fits-all denunciation of religion, Kloor still hasn’t absorbed the fact that almost no New Atheist denounces all religions as equally bad.  Fundamentalist Christians and Catholics are far worse than Quakers.  Scientologists are far more harmful than Unitarian Universalists.  Insofar as religions accept the supernatural, they’re all bad in contributing to the denigration of reason, but they’re not equal in their pernicious effects on society. Some proselytize more than others, or try harder make their religious views into public law. Kloor should just quit purveying lies about what New Atheists believe, get back to writing about science, and stop embarrassing the Discover website.

I’m done with Kloor; he lacks the originality of thought to interest me, and his deliberate misrepresentation of New Atheists is intellectually dishonest. Let him put up as many posts as he wants promoting accommodationism, and let him cite as many famous people as he can to show the virtues of faith. All it will do is make him look foolish—at least in the eyes of scientists.

One last point: I find it curious that atheists like Kloor spend a lot more time going after fellow atheists than after religion.  That could only be justified if atheists were hurting science more than religion does, but that’s surely not the case. And we’re far less harmful than even moderate Christians.  You don’t see atheists throwing acid in the faces of schoolgirls, terrifying children with thoughts of hell, or trying to regulate people’s sex lives.

UPDATE: I was right; Kloor has just put up another post (his second today) accusing P. Z. and me of “atheism fundamentalism.”  He even uses the old Chris Mooney tactic of saying that our reaction to him is proof that he’s “hit a nerve”!

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Amazing photo: Soyuz approaches the International Space Station

December 31, 2012 • 10:53 am

The Russian-built Soyuz spacecraft is on a mission (it began Dec. 19) to visit the International Space Station and do experiments (read about it here).  This stunning picture comes fr0m today’s Twitter feed of Commander Chris Hadfield—a tweet from space! The caption:

Earth, Moon and Soyuz: Kevin Ford took this picture as we approached Station last week. Science fiction into fact.

A_dAOBBCEAAJepN

Quote of the week: Peter Atkins on woo and faith

December 31, 2012 • 9:10 am

This is from an article (reference below) that I offered to send to readers, and many took me up on it. The quote is from pp. 99-100, and remember that for Atkins the “paranormal” includes religion.

True scientific revolutions are utterly distinct from the revolutions proposed by those who hanker for the paranormal. Real scientists have no time for the reports of such phenomena. Indeed, they scorn the reports and regard all practitioners as contemptible charlatans. Although such scornful attitudes are seen by some as politically incorrect, and at worse a conspiracy of the scientific establishment to trample underfoot the green shoots of unorthodoxy, there is good reason to believe that all claims of authentic paranormal observations are hogwash. First, there are no authenticated, reliable observations of phenomena that cannot be explained by the principles of conventional science. Second, whereas true scientific observations are like a canvas stretched over a frame of theory, purported paranormal phenomena are isolated pimples of whimsical speculation that are not grounded in a coherent corpus of knowledge. Third, were purported paranormal phenomena ever to be authenticated, they would devastate the whole structure of science, for most of them strike at two of its great foundations, the conservation of energy and causality. It is simply silly to assert in opposition to this remark that because there is a conspiracy among scientists to preserve these two pillars of rationality, intellectual police are sent to exterminate the first sign of the paranormal. If either foundation were overthrown by careful experiments on elementary particles, then there would be a Nobel prize for the overthrower; but to suppose that these two principles are best tested in the equivalent of the gambling halls of Las Vegas is frankly absurd.

One aspect of the paranormal versus real science should not go unremarked. As in other forms of obscurantist pursuit, such as religion, it is so easy to make time-wasting speculations. The paranormal is effectively unconstrained whimsicality. Original suggestions in real science emerge only after detailed study and the lengthy and often subtle process of testing whether current concepts are adequate. Only if all this hard work fails is a scientist justified in edging forward human understanding with a novel and possibly revolutionary idea. Real science is desperately hard work; the paranormal is almost entirely the fruit of armchair fantasizing. Real science is a regal application of the full power of human intellect; the paranormal is a prostitution of the brain. Worst of all, it wastes time and distorts the public’s vision of the scientific endeavour.

This is a man who is fed up with theology—as we all should be. I was talking to a famous secularist the other day, who will remain unnamed, who told me that theology was intellectually worthless because it had no real object of study: theologians simply analyze the thoughts of other theologians, immersed in a never-ending (and never progressing) stream of intellectual pablum.

I’ve read theology for a year now, and have to agree. Theology is the biggest waste of time in the history of human intellect. (I’m talking about academic thought here; if you count “all thought”, then replace “theology” with “religion.”) It makes no progress (except to discard the tenets that science disproves) and reaches no conclusions about either the existence or nature of gods.

Here is a serious question: has theology ever contributed anything to the progress of humanity?

_____________

Atkins, P. 1995. Science as truth. History of the human sciences 8:97-102.

Republicans are greedy jerks

December 31, 2012 • 6:43 am

If you’re an American, you’ll know that unless the Republicans in Congress and President Obama reach a deal, the U.S. will go over a “fiscal cliff” at midnight, triggering huge tax increases for nearly all Americans (an average of $3400 per family) as well as huge spending cuts. They abhor Obama’s proposal to raise taxes on all Americans making more than $250,000, while leaving tax rates on lower incomes pretty much untouched.

As the New York Times reports, the Republicans are recalcitrant, for they want the rich to keep their largesse while the poor and aged take the hit:

In seesaw negotiations, the two sides got closer on the central issue of how to define the wealthy taxpayers who would be required to pay more once the Bush-era tax cuts expire.

But that progress was overshadowed by gamesmanship. After Republicans demanded that any deal must include a new way of calculating inflation that would mean smaller increases in payments to beneficiaries of programs like Social Security, Democrats halted the negotiations for much of the day.

I’m fed up with Republicans, a bunch of greedy jerks whose overriding concern is to avoid reducing the incomes of the very rich. For crying out loud, our tax rates are among the lowest among first-world nations, and those who make more than a quarter million dollars a year can easily afford to pay a bit more.  Instead, Republicans, like small children who don’t get their way, are threatening to hurt everyone, and to throw the country into a recession.

Republicans are immoral—at least those who favor a plan that hurts the poor while protecting the wealthy.  (It resembles those Catholics who would rather have people get AIDS than use condoms).  The poor and middle classes are stretched already, and $3400 a year is a huge bite. How can these people look themselves in the mirror and feel that they’re doing the best for America?

The television news this morning reported that Obama may raise the “rich” level to $400,000 a year, which is ridiculous.

If this country goes down the tubes, blame the Republicans who are guarding their bank accounts—and all the misguided people who voted for them.

Let’s just admit it: the Republican party doesn’t give a damn about the poor, the aged, the dispossessed—and women.  This is one reason why America remains so religious.