A new movie soaked in faith

November 7, 2012 • 11:08 am

Just a quick note to say that The Atlantic has a review by Jason Bailey of the new Robert Zemeckis film, “Flight”. Called “The big lie of ‘flight’: Miracles land planes”, it’s a critique—remarkably frank for a widely-circulated magazine—of the idea that endangered planes that land safely are the result of “miracles.”

In case you don’t know who Zemeckis is: here’s part of his Wikipedia entry:

Zemeckis first came to public attention in the 1980s as the director of the comedic time-travel Back to the Future(1985), film series, as well as the Academy Award-winning live-action/animation epic Who Framed Roger Rabbit(1988), though in the 1990s he diversified into more dramatic fare, including 1994’s Forrest Gump,[3] for which he won an Academy Award for Best Director.)

It’s the pilots, not God, who lands the plane, and Bailey debunks all the faith-based stuff surrounding Captain Chesley Sullenberger’s skillful landing of the US Air flight on the Hudson river in 2009.  Sullenberger himself implicitly attributed his landing to experience, not to God. As Bailey notes:

By casting the remarkable events of that day [Sullenberger’s landing] into a framework of miracles and “somebody up there looking out for them,” we cheapened and minimized the split-second thinking and considerable talents of Captain Sullenberger. “I think, in many ways, as it turned out, my entire life had been a preparation to handle that particular moment,” he told Katie Couric on 60 Minutes a month later. Indeed, Sullenberger had 30 years on the job, had been an Air Force fighter pilot, and had trained flight crews in how to respond to emergencies in the air. The passengers and crew of Flight 1548 survived that flight because Sullenberger was their pilot, not because God was his co-pilot.

But in Flight, Zemeckis apparently pulls out all the goddy stops, and heavily infuses a “miraculous” landing with the aura of divine intervention. I haven’t seen the movie, and won’t, but it sounds dire:

It comes to a head in possibly the film’s silliest single scene, which finds Whip visiting his Bible-thumping co-pilot and the man’s wife at his hospital bedside. (When Whip says he’s happy to be alive, Mrs. Co-Pilot quickly corrects him: “Blessed to be alive.”) “Nothing happens by accident in the kingdom of the Lord,” the co-pilot thunders, as the wife actually kisses the cross around her neck behind him, a moment of both painful literalism and amateurish upstaging. She then starts proclaiming “Praise Jesus” during her husband’s little sermon, a moment that is played for oddly incongruent laughs, since the movie is barely subtler than she is.

Bailey also notes the religious note in Zemeckis early film Contact (which I also haven’t seen, but should):

In his 1996 film Contact, Matthew McConaughey appeared as a hunky theologian, pitching vague spirituality to decidedly secular Jodie Foster and her God-pshawing scientist brethren. Some things just can’t be explained, the film assured us.

Well, we all know that it isn’t a miracle when someone is saved, for that implies that those who die also did so by God’s will. Still, it’s refreshing to read stuff like Bailey’s closer in a magazine as popular as The Atlantic:

In that 60 Minutes interview, [Katie] Couric asked Sullenberger if he took time, in the three and a half minutes between the bird strike and the landing on the Hudson, to pray. Sullenberger’s answer is diplomatic, but pointed: “I would imagine somebody in back was taking care of that for me while I was flying the airplane… My focus at that point was so intensely on the landing, I thought of nothing else.” In other words: yeah, I let the other people do the praying—I was busy doing my job.

“I knew I had to solve this problem,” Sullenberger explained. “I knew I had to find a way out of this box I found myself in.” In a brief, high-pressure situation, this pilot had to call upon all of his skill, all of his training, and all of his experience to save 155 lives. And afterwards, everybody called it a miracle. It wasn’t a miracle—it was what the man was equipped to do. But that’s the narrative that’s stuck from that incident, and that’s why it’s disappointing that Flight couldn’t find a way to correct it. They went to the trouble of making a loose dramatization of one of the most compelling stories of our era, and they went off and dramatized the wrong damn part of it.

Indeed.  I’d just love it if television, radio, and film people would stop referring to this kind of thing as a “miracle”, and for insurance companies to deep-six the offensive phrase “Act of God.” (Has anybody noticed that the Acts of God for which one isn’t reimbursed are always bad things?)

h/t: Michael

How the Aztecs killed their victims

November 7, 2012 • 6:55 am

WARNING: A bit gory, though no reconstructions are shown.

Earlier I mentioned that it was possible for the victims of Aztec heart-sacrifice to maintain consciousness during the process, and that the heart, even after it was ripped from the chest, could still be beating. I checked up on this and found a relevant video from the History Channel. It confirms both statements.

These sacrifices, of course, were made in the name of religion. And they were numerous: some estimates are as high as 5,000 victims killed in a single day when a temple was consecrated, and many more thousands as quotidian sacrifices during the year. (For two other, longer videos on this topic, with reconstructions of the practice by surgeons, go here and here.)

One thing that struck me visiting the pre-Columbian temples around Mexico City is the number of gods they worshiped and which had to be propitiated with blood. Yet, as H. L. Mencken pointed out in a famous essay, those gods are dead: almost nobody believes in them any more. They are ex-gods, bereft of life.

It would be interesting to ask a theologian why he or she absolutely denies the divinity of Huitzilopochtli or Quetzalcoatl. If said theologian were a Christian, Jew, or Muslim, I suppose they’d cite the Qur’an or Bible. But that’s only because there was no formal written Aztec scripture—only engravings, murals, and word of mouth.

Thank goodness!

November 7, 2012 • 4:46 am

I just awoke to hear the good news.  A victory for the poor, the dispossessed, women, gays (same-sex marriage now legal in Maine and Maryland), and anybody who cares about stuff beyond their bank account.

Oh, and Nate Silver, the NY TImes‘s pundit, has been vindicated, as noted by xkcd:

Silver’s pre-election forecast on Nov. 6:

The outcome:

Electoral College vote:

Silver’s prediction: 313 Obama, 225 Mittens

Actual:  303 Obama, 206 Mittens, with some results not in

Popular vote:

Silver’s prediction: Obama 50.8%, Mittens 48.3%

Actual: Obama 50%, Mittens 48%, some results not in.

We can haz four more years!

Two photos

November 6, 2012 • 5:54 pm

A big final day for me in Mexico: I managed to tick off everything on my itinerary, including a visit to Trotsky’s house, Frida Kahlo’s house (very moving), a wander around the lovely area of Coyoacán, a lot of walking, and a visit to two buildings containing murals by Diego Rivera and Jose Orozco. I’ll post a few pictures of these tomorrow a.m. before I fly back to Chicago. In the meantime, here are two photos for this evening (click to enlarge):

Self-portrait in Frida Kahlo’s studio (excuse the solipsism; there will be a lot more on Kahlo later). To the right are her paints and brushes, to the left one of the plaster corsets she wore because of her back troubles, and which she decorated after it was removed.

Frames, Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso:

World’s rarest whale seen for the first time

November 6, 2012 • 5:00 pm

I’ve gotten this from several readers, so thanks to all. According to The Province and several other sources, a defunct spade-toothed beaked whale and her calf (Mesoplodon traversii) washed up on the shores of New Zealand in 2010 and have just been identified as the world’s rarest whale in a new paper in Current Biology (full disclosure: I’m in Mexico and haven’t read the paper. The link is below but you’ll get only the abstract for free.)

Apparently the species was originally described from just a few skull and jaw fragments, but a fleshed-out specimen had never been seen until the pair washed ashore in 2010. Those individuals, however, were misidentified as Gray’s beaked whale (Mesoplodon grayi), and buried. But DNA testing on saved tissue specimens now confirms that the carcasses were indeed those of the spade-toothed beaked whale, since the unearthed skeletal remains are similar to the species described previously and the DNA is quite different from that of Gray’s beaked whale.

The beached whales, an adult and her three-metre male calf, were discovered on Opape Beach on the North Island on New Year’s Eve in 2010. Conservation workers thought they were Gray’s beaked whales and took tissue samples before burying them about nine feet under the sand.

Those samples ended up at the University of Auckland, where scientists did routine tests about six months later. Rochelle Constantine, a co-author of the paper, said she and her colleague Kirsten Thompson couldn’t believe it when the results showed the pair to be the rarest of whales.

“Kirsten and I went quiet. We were pretty stunned,” she said.

Further tests confirmed the discovery. Constantine said they then retested about 160 samples taken from other stranded Gray’s whales but didn’t find any more that had been misidentified.

This year, researchers returned to the beach to exhume the skeletons

Until I see the paper, I won’t know how different the DNA is from the congeneric species, and whether that difference supports species status. I assume, however, that we have DNA from several Gray’s beaked whales, and the DNA of the new whale is quite different from those.

Here’s the mother photographed in 2010; note the snout that resembles the “beak” of a porpoise:

Needless to say, nothing is know of its behavior, and, as Wikipedia says dryly, it is “unlikely to be abundant.”

____________

Thompson, K., C. S. Baker, A. van Helden, S. Patel, C. Millar, and R. Constantine. 2012: The world’s rarest whale. Current Biology, 22: R905–R906. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.08.055

Teotihuacan

November 6, 2012 • 7:34 am

I’m off to the U.S. tomorrow for about ten days before I hie to Old Blighty.

Two days ago I went to the ruins of Teotihuacan with a small group; it’s one of the most important set of ruins in Mesoamerica, and is just 50 km north of Mexico City. On the way we stopped at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a surreal experience, but more on that later.

As Wikipedia notes, the city lasted about 350 years, beginning about 100 B.C., and was huge (30 km square), holding over a hundred thousand residents.  It’s a World Heritage site, and the most visited archaeological site in Mexico. It appears to have begun its decline in the 6th century A.D., possibly because of climate change that induced droughts. (Archaeologists are beginning to realize that the mysterious decline of many Mesoamerican cultures may have been based on climate change, i.e., changing ecology.) This should be a lesson for today’s world: we face climate change, too, and it could be disasterous; the difference is that this time it’s our fault.

Excavation of the ruins really begin around 1910, and I’m told they’re about 85% restored. Still, they’re quite impressive and there are some original murals with original paint (a rarity in Mesoamerican ruins). Here are two of them. The first is a sacred bird and a plant; water is apparently coming from the bird’s mouth:

Other murals inside an enclosed room:

This is a partial mural of a jaguar along the “Avenue of the Dead” that runs through the ruins. It’s part of a complex of temples and platforms called “The Puma Complex”. Kitteh!

The walls are attractive, with the mortar inset with small pebbles:

The stunning part of the ruins comprises two temples, those of the Moon and Sun, and a long “Avenue of the Dead” connecting them. The avenue is flanked by structures and platforms whose functions are unknown. I climbed both temples; here’s the smaller Temple of the Moon taken from the Avenue.

Here’s the Temple of the Sun (now thought to be a temple to the water god); it’s the third biggest pyramid in the world, after the Great Pyramid of Choululu in Puebla, Mexico, and the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt:

I climbed to the top of this one, too (awesome view), and here’s the obligatory vanity picture:

Lest we forget what these civilizations were really like, let us remember that the builders of Teotihuacan, and their Aztec replacements, practiced the most barbarous forms of human sacrifice, for human blood was thought to propitiate the gods.  From Wikipedia:

Teotihuacanos practiced human sacrifice: human bodies and animal sacrifices have been found during excavations of the pyramids at Teotihuacan. Scholars believe that the people offered human sacrifices as part of a dedication when buildings were expanded or constructed. The victims were probably enemy warriors captured in battle and brought to the city for ritual sacrifice to ensure the city could prosper.[32] Some men were decapitated, some had their hearts removed, others were killed by being hit several times over the head, and some were buried alive.

And remember what the Aztec sacrifices were like: victims were laid over an altar and their chest ripped open with an obsidian knife, their heart snatched from the chest cavity and raised, still beating to the sky.  Surely some of these victims remained alive briefly without a heart (see this video). According to some accounts, thousands were sacrificed per year by the Aztecs; we’re not so sure about the toll at Teotihuacan.

Human sacrifice as shown in the Codex Magliabechiano: