Go see and decide which.

It puzzles me that Christian Fundamentalists make such a big deal of fighting evolution—which, after all, not only makes sense, but you can actually see it happening in organisms with short lifespans (microbes) and see in the fossil record transitional forms galore and trace structural similarities across many species (all mammals, for instance)—and yet seem to have no fight with quantum physics, which is really weird. For example:

To protect him from the other solders, presumably “Christian.” (In quotation marks because I don’t think an atheist would be in danger from a true Christian—but maybe I’m reading the New Testament wrong.) Randi Kaye reports for CNN:

Army Spc. Jeremy Hall was raised Baptist. Like many Christians, he said grace before dinner and read the Bible before bed. Four years ago when he was deployed to Iraq, he packed his Bible so he would feel closer to God.

He served two tours of duty in Iraq and has a near perfect record. But somewhere between the tours, something changed. Hall, now 23, said he no longer believes in God, fate, luck or anything supernatural.

Hall said he met some atheists who suggested he read the Bible again. After doing so, he said he had so many unanswered questions that he decided to become an atheist.

His sudden lack of faith, he said, cost him his military career and put his life at risk. Hall said his life was threatened by other troops and the military assigned a full-time bodyguard to protect him out of fear for his safety. Watch why Hall says his lack of faith almost got him killed »

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“Ask and it shall be given,” as Jesus said. You have asked (repeatedly) for transitional forms in the fossil record, and more and more are found. These provide strong evidence of Evolution, which I assume you will now accept. The latest (with photo at the link):

Hidden away in museums for more that 100 years, some recently rediscovered flatfish fossils have filled a puzzling gap in the story of evolution and answered a question that initially stumped even Charles Darwin.

Opponents of evolution have insisted that adult flatfishes, which have both eyes on one side of the head, could not have evolved gradually. A slightly asymmetrical skull offers no advantage. No such fish — fossil or living — had ever been discovered, until now.

All adult flatfishes–including the gastronomically familiar flounder, plaice, sole, turbot, and halibut–have asymmetrical skulls, with both eyes located on one side of the head. Because these fish lay on their sides at the ocean bottom, this arrangement enhances their vision, with both eyes constantly in play, peering up into the water.

This remarkable arrangement arises during the youth of every flatfish, where the symmetrical larva undergoes a metamorphosis to produce an asymmetrical juvenile. One eye ‘migrates’ up and over the top of the head before coming to rest in the adult position on the opposite side of the skull.

Opponents of evolution, however, insisted that this curious anatomy could not have evolved gradually through natural selection because there would be no apparent evolutionary advantage to a fish with a slightly asymmetrical skull but which retained eyes on opposite sides of the head. No fish–fossil or living–had ever been discovered with such an intermediate condition.

But in the 10 July 2008 issue of Nature, Matt Friedman, graduate student in the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago and a member of the Department of Geology at the Field Museum, draws attention to several examples of such transitional forms that he uncovered in museum collections of underwater fossilized creatures from the Eocene epoch–about 50 million years ago.

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Very interesting article in the NY Times by Ethan Bronner. It begins:

A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.

If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.

The tablet, probably found near the Dead Sea in Jordan according to some scholars who have studied it, is a rare example of a stone with ink writings from that era — in essence, a Dead Sea Scroll on stone.

It is written, not engraved, across two neat columns, similar to columns in a Torah. But the stone is broken, and some of the text is faded, meaning that much of what it says is open to debate.

Still, its authenticity has so far faced no challenge, so its role in helping to understand the roots of Christianity in the devastating political crisis faced by the Jews of the time seems likely to increase.

Much more at the link.

Interesting (and see also this comment by Mark Kleiman):

In a follow-up to research showing that psilocybin, a substance contained in “sacred mushrooms,” produces substantial spiritual effects, a Johns Hopkins team reports that those beneficial effects appear to last more than a year.

Writing in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, the Johns Hopkins researchers note that most of the 36 volunteer subjects given psilocybin, under controlled conditions in a Hopkins study published in 2006, continued to say 14 months later that the experience increased their sense of well-being or life satisfaction.

“Most of the volunteers looked back on their experience up to 14 months later and rated it as the most, or one of the five most, personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives,” says lead investigator Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., a professor in the Johns Hopkins departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Neuroscience.

In a related paper, also published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, researchers offer recommendations for conducting this type of research.

The guidelines caution against giving hallucinogens to people at risk for psychosis or certain other serious mental disorders. Detailed guidance is also provided for preparing participants and providing psychological support during and after the hallucinogen experience. These “best practices” contribute both to safety and to the standardization called for in human research.

“With appropriately screened and prepared individuals, under supportive conditions and with adequate supervision, hallucinogens can be given with a level of safety that compares favorably with many human research and medical procedures,” says that paper’s lead author, Mathew W. Johnson, Ph.D., a psychopharmacologist and instructor in the Johns Hopkins Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.

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Another interesting post on the Psychology Today blogs, this one by Jesse Prinz.

Atheism is said to pose a major threat to morality. Some theists claim that disbelief leads to moral relativism and undermines a major factor motivating prosocial behavior. Recent research can help us see what is true and false about these anxieties.

These issues have special resonance in the United States. A new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life reveals that 92% of Americans believe in some kind of god. Other research suggests that atheists are among the least trusted minority groups. Consider a recent paper in the American Sociological Review by Minnesota researchers Penny Edgell, Joseph Gerteis, and Douglas Hartmann. They report that 39.6% of people polled say that atheist do “not at all agree with my vision of American Society.” This score is higher than any other group by a considerable margin. A 2007 shows that 53% of Americans would not vote for an atheist president, and another Gallup poll suggests that 84% of Americans think the nation is not ready for an atheist in the White House. The major source of concern inmorality. Many people worry that the faithless lack a moral rudder. Without God, morality loses its foundation.

Is this concern really justified?

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Voting is a great idea in the working out of compromises in human affairs, but sometimes it just doesn’t make sense. As Lawrence Krauss notes in New Scientist:

I believe in democracy as much as the next guy. But then, I wonder about the next guy.

Say that you are in charge of developing a state-wide high-school curriculum in French-language studies, and that you need the advice of a group of experts on how to put together the ideal programme. Is it better for officials to appoint these people, or for the public to vote on who they regard as the most attractive candidates for the job?

To put it another way, should you need minimum qualifications to be eligible to serve? Should you be required to know some French? Should you be disqualified if you openly profess that French is not a useful language, and that the curriculum should focus on Italian instead?

“Yes” is surely the sensible answer to the last three questions. Yet in the US, we are taking exactly the opposite approach in allowing elected officials who are both ignorant and biased to define the science curricula for public-school students.

The most recent and blatant example of the sorry condition of state education boards comes from Texas, whose education board is now debating whether high-school texts should be required to discuss the “strengths and weaknesses of evolution”.

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Religious fundamentalists despise a diverse and secular society—they want everyone, believers or not, to follow the rules promulgated by the fundamentalists. This is true of Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, and doubtless holds for other religions as well. Securely in possession of the only truth, self-righteous psychotics seek ever-greater power to strike at those who hold other views. And it’s coming to your town as well. From a Washington Post article by Rob Stein:

When DMC Pharmacy opens this summer on Route 50 in Chantilly VA, the shelves will be stocked with allergy remedies, pain relievers, antiseptic ointments and almost everything else sold in any drugstore. But anyone who wants condoms, birth control pills or the Plan B emergency contraceptive will be turned away.

That’s because the drugstore, located in a typical shopping plaza featuring a Ruby Tuesday, a Papa John’s and a Kmart, will be a “pro-life pharmacy” — meaning, among other things, that it will eschew all contraceptives.

The pharmacy is one of a small but growing number of drugstores around the country that have become the latest front in a conflict pitting patients’ rights against those of health-care workers who assert a “right of conscience” to refuse to provide care or products that they find objectionable.

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We need a term for ignorance that is impervious to information: armor-plated ignorance. I’m not thinking so much of global warming (though there’s certainly an example) or evolution (another example), but of abstinence-based sex ed: the notion that teaching kids that they really, really must not have sex until they are married will somehow work, when study after study shows that it does not work. For example, this article from ThinkProgress today:

On Sunday, the Washington Post reported that the National Abstinence Education Association (NAEA) is launching a $1 million “Parents for Truth” campaign. Its mission is to enlist 1 million parents to back abstinence-only education by lobbying local schools and working to elect supportive lawmakers. Last week, the NAEA e-mailed “30,000 supporters, practitioners and parents to try to recruit participants and plans to e-mail 100,000 this week.”

There is very little that is truthful about this “Parents for Truth” campaign. Not only is it pushing misleading, discredited claims about abstinence-only education, but the entire effort appears to be run by unethical individuals with strong ties in the anti-gay movement:

– Valerie Huber, the NAEA’s executive director, was found guilty of “neglect of duty” while at the Ohio Department of Health in 2006. She “participated to a substantial degree in the selection of a vendor” for which she also worked. Huber was given a one-day suspension from her position.

– Melissa Cox was one of the vendors with which Huber had ties. Cox had previously worked for the Medical Institute for Sexual Health, which advocated “curing” gays through “conversion therapy. An abstinence-only conference planned by Huber in October 2005 had been criticized for its “overt Christian messages and anti-gay speakers, including ones openly recruiting for the ‘ex-gay’ movement.”

– As noted by the AIDS Taskforce of Greater Cleveland, NAEA has hired the PR firm Creative Response Concepts to “develop and implement a national public relations campaign to improve the public understanding and perception of abstinence education.” Creative Response Concepts was best known for leading the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” campaign in 2004. Its other clients have included the RNC, Christian Coalition, Concerned Women for America, and the Discovery Institute.

Abstinence-only programs don’t work. Last November, 10 leading scientists in the field of adolescent sexual and reproductive health warned that abstinence-only education withholds “information that may be critical to protecting the health of young people.” More recently, health experts testified to Congress that these programs “have not cut teen pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases or delayed the age at which sex begins.”

Hypothetically Speaking, Pandagon, and Scott Swenson have more on Huber.

This is interesting. Go to the link, but here’s the chart summarizing the responses from followers of the Coral Ridge Ministries:

How dangerous are the following to the spiritual health of America?

Very interesting charts. Intro:

A few months ago I posted data which showed, unsurprisingly, that Unitarian-Universalists tend to have high IQs and Pentecostals not so much. What about something like Biblical literalism and IQ? Well, I plotted the IQ values from the General Social Survey for selected denominations and plotted them against the proportion which believed in a literal interpretation of the Bible.

One argument made by Creationist/ID supporters is that there are gaps in the fossil record—where, they ask, are the transitional forms showing how one species evolved into another? And, of course, as more and more transitional forms are discovered, they are somehow not convinced, but keep asking the questions. We now have transitional forms of fish moving onto land, what became whales moving into water, and now this report of a frog/salamander ancestor.

Interesting:

Religious leaders have contended for millennia that burning incense is good for the soul. Now, biologists have learned that it is good for our brains too. In a new study appearing online in The FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org), an international team of scientists, including researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, describe how burning frankincense (resin from the Boswellia plant) activates poorly understood ion channels in the brain to alleviate anxiety or depression. This suggests that an entirely new class of depression and anxiety drugs might be right under our noses.

“In spite of information stemming from ancient texts, constituents of Bosweilla had not been investigated for psychoactivity,” said Raphael Mechoulam, one of the research study’s co-authors. “We found that incensole acetate, a Boswellia resin constituent, when tested in mice lowers anxiety and causes antidepressive-like behavior. Apparently, most present day worshipers assume that incense burning has only a symbolic meaning.”

To determine incense’s psychoactive effects, the researchers administered incensole acetate to mice. They found that the compound significantly affected areas in brain areas known to be involved in emotions as well as in nerve circuits that are affected by current anxiety and depression drugs. Specifically, incensole acetate activated a protein called TRPV3, which is present in mammalian brains and also known to play a role in the perception of warmth of the skin. When mice bred without this protein were exposed to incensole acetate, the compound had no effect on their brains.

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Are religious people happier? Depends on where you are. Kevin Drum explains, with some interesting speculations on the reasons.

Are all cultures equal? I don’t think so. I believe in basic human rights, and if a culture deprives people of their rights—and even their life—because those people displease someone else but otherwise do no harm, then that culture is wrong in that area and should be fixed. An example is reported in The Observer in the UK by Afif Sarhan in Basra and Caroline Davies:

For Abdel-Qader Ali there is only one regret: that he did not kill his daughter at birth. ‘If I had realised then what she would become, I would have killed her the instant her mother delivered her,’ he said with no trace of remorse.

Two weeks after The Observer revealed the shocking story of Rand Abdel-Qader, 17, murdered because of her infatuation with a British solider in Basra, southern Iraq, her father is defiant. Sitting in the front garden of his well-kept home in the city’s Al-Fursi district, he remains a free man, despite having stamped on, suffocated and then stabbed his student daughter to death.

Abdel-Qader, 46, a government employee, was initially arrested but released after two hours. Astonishingly, he said, police congratulated him on what he had done. ‘They are men and know what honour is,’ he said.

Rand, who was studying English at Basra University, was deemed to have brought shame on her family after becoming infatuated with a British soldier, 22, known only as Paul.

She died a virgin, according to her closest friend Zeinab. Indeed, her ‘relationship’ with Paul, which began when she worked as a volunteer helping displaced families and he was distributing water, appears to have consisted of snatched conversations over less than four months. But the young, impressionable Rand fell in love with him, confiding her feelings and daydreams to Zeinab, 19.

It was her first youthful infatuation and it would be her last. She died on 16 March after her father discovered she had been seen in public talking to Paul, considered to be the enemy, the invader and a Christian. Though her horrified mother, Leila Hussein, called Rand’s two brothers, Hassan, 23, and Haydar, 21, to restrain Abdel-Qader as he choked her with his foot on her throat, they joined in. Her shrouded corpse was then tossed into a makeshift grave without ceremony as her uncles spat on it in disgust.

‘Death was the least she deserved,’ said Abdel-Qader. ‘I don’t regret it. I had the support of all my friends who are fathers, like me, and know what she did was unacceptable to any Muslim that honours his religion,’ he said.

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Something for your weekend pondering.

Fascinating article. Read the whole thing. It begins:

In the Gospel of Matthew, it doesn’t take long for the author to show his readers two different sides of Jesus Christ. One minute Jesus is sitting on a mountain, delivering a powerful sermon to a presumably rapt audience: “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth….Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” But just five chapters later, Jesus, again preaching to his apostles, changes his tune. “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword,” he says. “For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” That’s quite a change from the sandal-wearing, peace-loving hippie we’ve come to expect.

If even Jesus could be divisive, what can be expected of the sinners who call themselves his followers? And how about his contemporary American disciples, who sport anonymous Internet handles and spend their days trolling blogs dedicated to the disparagement of other faiths? What about those who insist that Jesus himself have a stronger voice in the U.S. Congress?

As a reporter covering religion at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for the last four years, I’ve been a witness to attitudes and language on my beat that would make veteran political reporters cringe. Even the blog I wrote for the paper, The God Beat, became such a target for corrosive, hateful comments that I was forced to shut it down.

Take a look at Theoi.com.

Welcome to the Theoi Project, a site exploring Greek mythology and the gods in classical literature and art. The aim of the project is to provide a comprehensive, free reference guide to the gods (theoi), spirits (daimones), fabulous creatures (theres) and heroes of ancient Greek mythology and religion.

The problem is only partly the pedophile priests, of course. The Pope so far seems to be ignoring the complicity of the bishops (accessories after the fact) who covered up for the priests, transferred them to new parishes, and kept them free to continue their activities. I wonder why none of the bishops have been arrested as accomplices? (Of course, one such bishop, Cardinal Law, fled the country and now resides at the Vatican.)

Michael O’Hare at the Reality Based Community describes the puzzle:

Sexual abuse by Catholic priests in the US, and the church’s decades of serving the perpetrators parish after parish of unwarned victims, has bankrupted dioceses, driven bishops from office, and devastated thousands of the faithful. Remarkably, there has been almost no such history in Italy. Obviously, the Catholic hierarchy in that country comprises nothing but righteous and upright men, not a pedophile nor a predator among them, ever.

I guess…though if an Italian priest were to be charged with abuse, and a few have, the entire episode (victims, witnesses, accusee, and all) would immediately be covered by the most absolute internal secrecy under pain of excommunication, precluding any possibility of criminal prosecution or public notice, so we would know nothing about it. The same secrecy rules obtained in the US, but broke eventually under the weight of the secular criminal and civil law, and an independent press in a country only about a quarter Catholic and not party to a Lateran Treaty.

The Italian press has been completely supine on this issue (as here, for example), and when the occasional light is shone from outside, especially on the explicit policy of secrecy the church has imposed wherever it can get away with it, the result is an avalanche of namecalling and abuse, but as far as I can tell, no substantive refutation of the basic facts and policy. The Italian church’s view, in summary, is that attention to the possibility of priestly misconduct is hurtful to the accused priests (false accusations of this kind are in fact very rare).

The pope was in charge of this mess in his previous job, and it’s remarkable that in his current US visit, he kept bringing up the pedophilia scandal and wringing his hands about it. But a new high in what I can only read as the oiliest, cynical, chutzpah was surely achieved when he asked the faithful to reach out to the victims, something completely impossible in Italy because there are no victims to be found.

I’m astonished at the free pass he got from the US media, who seem to have never, in this entire visit, raised the linked questions (if not to his flacks, in analysis):

“If the church has completely protected Italian youth from abuse by priests, why were these wonderful methods not provided to the American bishops, and American children left at risk? And if it hasn’t, how big is the problem there? And why should we believe the answer, as long as Cardinal Law, the apostle of coverup, wilful ignorance, and mendacity, has been swept into the comforting embrace of the Vatican with about a dozen important jobs? And since you bring it up, how is anyone supposed to reach out as you ask, if the church’s policy continues to be that they remain unknown, invisible, and silent?”