"Noah's Ark"

http://scienceblogs.com/tfk/2010/04/fake_noahs_ark_found_on_mt_ara.php

Josh Rosenau writes on the "fake" discovery of Noah's Ark:

"So Fox News breathlessly reported that Chinese researchers had found Noah's ark. "Has Noah's Ark been found on Turkish mountaintop?," they asked, dumbly. "No," answered slacktivist.

Gawker replied at greater length:

A group of evangelicals found some 4,800-year-old wood on top of Mount Ararat. They are "99.9 pecent" sure that it's Noah's ark. This is totally real, which is why it's on the front page of Fox News' "SciTech" section.

Slacktivist didn't actually just say "no," he expanded on the point by noting:
The expedition seems to have found a wooden structure. They hear hoofbeats, so they're "99.9 percent" certain it must be a zebra. Or a unicorn with zebra stripes.
Considering the style of argumentation offered by Noah's Ark Ministries, he continues:

If you had these people read Aesop's story of the Ant and the Grasshopper and then asked them what the story means, they would reply that it means they should start raising money for an entomological expedition to Greece, because holy cow -- talking insects!

Atrios was just bemused, wondering:

Weren't there like 15 In Search Of documentaries and even a movie around that time about how they so totally found Noah's Ark? Also, Sasquatch.
Various sciencebloggers responded to the incident with predictable ire, with PZ Myers jumping on the Chinese creationists' claim that the wood had been carbon dated to 4,800 years old:

Oh, yeah. Now the creationists are willing to say carbon-dating is valid.
You wish. Todd C. Wood, a baraminologist (creationist who knows better than to reject evolution outright) at William Jennings Bryan College in Dayton, TN, rejected the finding, observing:

1. They claim that radiocarbon dates the wood to 4800 years before present, but the Ark was constructed of pre-Flood wood, which would mean that the carbon dating should be much, much older.

2. The modern "Mt. Ararat" (Agri Dagh) is a post-Flood volcano. The Ark could not have landed on Agri Dagh because it did not exist at the end of the Flood, and even if it did land on modern Agri Dagh, it would have been destroyed by the many, many eruptions of Ararat since the Flood. You can observe all the fresh lava flows on Agri Dagh at Google Maps.

3. Given that the Flood survivors left the Ark to find a devastated world, the Ark would have been the best source of timber for the first decade or so. I think it highly likely that the Ark was dismantled to supply the growing population with building material for shelter.

Say what you will about creationists, some of them have genuine critical thinking skills. But as the saying goes, garbage in, garbage out. Wood assumes that magic things happened to radioisotopes during the Flood, so wood from before the Flood should, like dinosaur bones and preCambrian fossils, have an apparent age of millions of years old.

And then the whole thing collapsed. Wood later reported on comments by someone who tagged along on some of the Ark expeditions and absolutely debunked the story. He concluded:

So there you have it. You know, creationists give evolutionists a hard time over hoaxes like Piltdown, but frankly, we've got just as many skeletons in our closet. Paluxy, Durupinar, the Burdick print, and so it goes.

In creationist math, three hoaxes are "just as many" as one, I suppose. And Wood gives some tolerably good advice (if you edit it right):

Here's some friendly advice to my readers: Please stop pouring money into fruitless searches for Noah's Ark. Do you know what real good you could accomplish with your money? Instead of gambling it away on the hope that you'll find Noah's Ark on a mountain where it can't possibly be? If you're really into creationism, invest in creationist education or research. There are plenty of creation scientists out there struggling with little or no research funding, and it physically sickens me to see people getting swindled out of thousands of dollars on ridiculous Ark expeditions. Don't like research? Then just donate to the Creation Museum. Or give your money to a legitimate missions organization, like the Bible League. Support your local soup kitchen or shelter for battered women or addiction rehab facility. There's so much good you could do with that kind of financial blessing.

There is no Ark. There never was, and if there had been, it wouldn't still be sitting on Mt Ararat. Do something useful with that energy. And remember a point slacktivist made about this in 2007:

it's still startling how many people have gotten drowned in the details of this story. They travel to Mt. Ararat in search of the ark, or they obsess over details of hydrology and storage space. Just as lost at sea are these poor folks' mirror opposites -- those who obsess over the details to prove that the story is "literally" false. (I'm forced to place the word literally in quotation marks here because it is the word they insist on using, although what they mean by it is far from clear.)
Both sorts of literalists approach these stories with the same incomprehension as that of people who don't understand jokes. "What kind of bar?" they ask. You try to ignore them, to get on to the punch line, to the point, but they keep interrupting. "A duck? I don't think you'd be allowed in the bar if you were carrying a duck."

Such people are particularly infuriating when you're trying to tell a really good joke. They're even more infuriating when you're trying to tell a really important story.

Enjoy the story. Study the story. If you find meaning in the story, retell the story and help other people understand it. But the truth of the story about Noah's ark has nothing to do with exactly how long a cubit was, what sort of wood is meant by "gopher wood," or what happened to all the poop. Noah's ark is a story about the dangers of selfishness, about the importance of being good to one another, and ultimately of honoring our ancestors. It's also about the patriarchal society of the era in which it was written down, a culture in which the sins of the father pass to the children, and in which Noah's religious devotion could save not only himself, but his family, just as Lot's goodness (including a willingness to offer his virgin daughters to be raped by a mob to save a guest) was sufficient to save his family.
In other words, a good story, but also a problematic one. And sometimes, problematic stories are the best ones, since you need to think about them more, and reward careful consideration. But not an excuse for chasing around Turkey sneaking rotten wood up a mountain to build a fake boat."

Belief in the flood story has to be the most irrational of them all.

David Quammen on Charles Darwin

http://tnjn.com/2010/apr/27/david-quammen-speaks-on-charle/

Tameka Tift reports on a lecture given by David Quammen on Charles Darwin:

“Throughout David Quammen's discussion of Charles Darwin and On the Origin of the Species, he focused on the theme that Darwin was a cautious and honest man.

Quammen notes that On the Origin of Species is not just a scientific book but rather a foundational work of Western culture and thought.

“"Evolution, not extinction, not conservation but evolution as a history is the idea," explained Quammen, multi-award winning naturalist and science writer.
Quammen points out that Darwin devoted a chapter to answering any potential questions that critics might have about the theory of evolution.

In chapter six of On the Origin of Species, entitled Difficulties on Theory, Darwin argues with himself as he answers every criticism that arose from his own departure from Christianity.

"He wasn't just talking about the grandeur of an idea but rather the grandeur of life itself. Its biological diversity gives joy and meaning to Darwin's own life," Quammen said.

The latter discussion of the lecture focused on Darwin's basics for natural selection. The concept of natural selection centers around the idea of the survival of the fittest. Species will adapt and develop to ensure existence by any means necessary.

Quammen descried three key points to illustrate Darwin's concept of natural selection. First, offspring tend to resemble their parents (principle of inheritance). Second, offspring do vary somewhat from their parents as they are not exact replicas (principle of variation). Lastly, life on our little planet is crowded.

Quammen sums it up by saying that crowding leads to competition, which then results in individual species dying out.”

Jack “Dr. Death” Kevorkian

http://newsjunkiepost.com/2010/04/27/17791/
Amy Beth Arkawy writes about Jack “Dr. Death” Kevorkian:

“With the premiere of HBO’s new film “You Don’t Know Jack,” the spotlight is once again on controversial Dr. Jack Kevorkian. While Al Pacino offers what Kevorkian himself labels a “superb” performance, the real Kevorkian made the media rounds last week, making appearances with Anderson Cooper, Bill Maher and Neil Cavuto.

HBO has pulled the plug on the “Real Time” clip, which featured a lively interchange between kindred spirit Maher. Kevorkian playfully talked about prison, religion, even his quirky, macabre art work. But he continued to display his spunky, outspoken nature as he lambasted the medical profession. “Doctors are cowards, ” he exclaimed, “they know what is right but won’t do it.”

In a candid conversation with Fox News’ Neil Cavuto, Kevorkian took on his notorious nickname, “Dr. Death,” religion and health reform. Cavuto even tried to cajole Kevorkian into admitting his own miserable life ( even bringing up a failed engagement fifty years ago!) propelled the doctor’s controversial calling. Kevorkian acknowledged he ” wasn’t very likable, because of my abrasive personality,” but maintained what is obvious to so many: his was a mission of mercy.

Throughout Kevorkian contended that his patients–most of whom he said were Catholic–never “asked me to kill them. They say, ‘Doctor end my suffering.’”

I grew to like Kevorkian thanks to Pacino’s complex and honest portrayal. I like him ever me after seeing the real man make yet another stand.

Cavuto tried to pierce through Kevorkian’s agnosticism, asking: “Wouldn’t it be a kick if at the end of your life you saw God? What would you say to him?”
Kevorkian: “I’d look at the big man on the throne and say, ‘why didn’t you make me smarter?’”

If more people were half as smart–and compassionate– as Jack Kevorkian the world would surely be a better place.”

There is no reason as to why people should suffer. A person who wishes to have someone end his/her suffering should be granted that wish. Kevorkian understands that perfectly.

Ask the Founders

http://host.madison.com/ct/news/opinion/column/john_nichols/article_a7b2592b-d735-5886-a997-703770877dc4.html

Contrary to what the religious fundamentalists of America will tell you, the Founding Fathers would approve of the decision that ruled the National Day of Prayer as unconstitutional:

“Federal Judge Barbara Crabb recalled an inconvenient truth with her ruling that the National Day of Prayer, which was established by Congress in 1952, is unconstitutional.

Specifically, the judge for the Western District of Wisconsin determined that the prayer law “violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.”

But the broader message is really about the spirit of the Constitution.
Though it is too seldom acknowledged by contemporary politicians and jurists, the initiators of the American experiment were keenly aware of the dangers associated with the imposition by civil government of religious tests, requirements and calendars.

Men of the Enlightenment who had rejected the cruel construct of a “divine right of kings” and waged a revolution against a colonial empire that claimed its imperial reach was sanctioned by God, they knew the folly of mixing religion and politics.
And they were explicit in their determination that the United States must not go the way of the old monarchies of Europe, where state religions, state prayers and attendant rules and regulations served as the apparatus for constraining popular discourse, dissent and diverse expressions of faith.

So they established a Constitution that left no doubt of their determination that the United States would not dictate which religion was superior or inferior, or require an expression of faith as a qualification for citizenship.

They were explicit in this regard, weaving into the initial outline of the American experiment a blunt rejection of any “religious test.”

“The senators and representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States,” reads Article VI, section 3, of the U.S. Constitution.

In case anyone missed the point, when the Constitution was amended to include a Bill of Rights, written into the first of the amendments were two specific declarations:
The first enshrined the principle that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” This meant that the federal government could not identify a preferred faith or set of prayers or practices. In effect, it barred the establishment of the sort of state religions that kings, czars, kaisers and potentates had employed to provide a fantasy of “moral cover” for their abuses of power.

The First Amendment also recognized that the government had no authority to prohibit the “free exercise” of religion, meaning that the state could not tell Americans how to pray or not pray, how to worship or not worship, how to express their faith or not express their faith.

If there was any lack of clarity, the matter should have been resolved one year into the tenure of the nation’s first president, George Washington, when he used a letter to the Hebrew congregation in Newport, R.I., to hail the “enlarged and liberal policy” that said: “All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.”

America did not “tolerate” religious diversity. It embraced that diversity, welcoming Christians and Jews, believers and nonbelievers into a polity where, Washington explained, “The government … gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

To maintain that happy circumstance, Thomas Jefferson explained in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists: “Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and state.”

While the founders survived, there was no mystery about their “original intent” with regard to that wall of separation between church and state. Indeed, when the greatest of our public services, the post office, was developed, it was determined without serious debate that mail would be delivered seven days a week.

Only in the late 1820s did some Christian groups object. And their complaints were quickly rejected by Congress, which adopted the position — stated by Kentucky Sen. Richard M. Johnson — that: “our government is a civil and not a religious institution.”

A century later, long after the last of the founders and those inspired and instructed by them had died, Sunday mail service was stopped. It was not until the mid-1950s, in response to Joe McCarthy’s “red scare,” that the motto “In God We Trust” was approved by Congress, along with the initial National Day of Prayer legislation.

Crabb’s ruling, in a case initiated by the Madison-based Freedom From Religion Foundation, seeks to restore Jefferson’s “wall of separation between church and state.” It is not her point or purpose to undermine the practice of religion. “It is important to clarify what this decision does not prohibit,” the judge wrote. “Of course, ‘no law prevents a (citizen) who is so inclined from praying’ at any time. And religious groups remain free to ‘organize a privately sponsored (prayer event) if they desire the company of like-minded’ citizens. The president too remains free to discuss his own views on prayer. The only issue decided in this case is that the federal government may not endorse prayer in a statute.”

Anticipating the outcry her decision would stir, Crabb continued: “I understand that many may disagree with that conclusion and some may even view it as a criticism of prayer or those who pray. That is unfortunate. A determination that the government may not endorse a religious message is not a determination that the message itself is harmful, unimportant or undeserving of dissemination. Rather, it is part of the effort to ‘carry out the founders’ plan of preserving religious liberty to the fullest extent possible in a pluralistic society.’ The same law that prohibits the government from declaring a National Day of Prayer also prohibits it from declaring a National Day of Blasphemy.”

That is a reasoned judgment, a judgment grounded in a core value of the American experiment. Indeed, if it took courage for Judge Crabb to issue this historic ruling, it was the courage of the founders.”

Spiritual or Physical?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/apr/28/noah-ark-relic-discovery-turkey

Adam Rutherford comments on some of Christianity’s more absurd (“tangible”) tenets:

“If faith concerns the spiritual, the eternal your soul and ill-defined things like that, why are churches so preoccupied with the physical?

Of course, the media love the tangible tenets of religion. The absurdity of the Turin Shroud, a sheet that is claimed to have covered the dead Jesus, was in the news last week as it's back on display after yet another round of pointless analysis. Next week, the pope is due to check it out, and do a bit of praying in front of it.
And yesterday, the Daily Mail felt it necessary to cover in depth a group of fundamentalist Christians who are convinced they have found bits of Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat. I say convinced, but I must give them credit for showing some doubt: Yeung Wing-cheung, from Hong Kong's Noah's Ark Ministries International, said "it's not 100% that it is Noah's Ark but we think it is 99.9% that this is it.'

This is the bit of religion that demands ridicule. Christian fundamentalists are of course silly people. This primarily 20th-century phenomenon uses James Ussher's silly biblical generation calculation to assert duff theology and literal truth to Genesis, which while quite elegant in its prose, is also quite silly. The story of Noah is not just silly but hateful, and impossible. Leave aside the story that a pair of lions would wage terror over all the other animals, or the hideous genetic bottleneck that would result from repopulating an ecosystem with such small samples. Ark proof comes around every few years. In the latest discovery these fanatics claim carbon dating on a bit of Turkish wood to determine that it was from the time of Noah's flood. It might be worth mentioning how creationists often assert flaws in carbon dating as a means to refute evolution. But nailing inconsistencies in fundamentalist arguments pointlessly uses up irretrievable time. I just don't understand why anyone would want to hunt for physical proof of a story that revealed your God to be a bit of a genocidal arsehole.

During the second millennium after Jesus' murder religious authorities became a tad fixated on demonstrating the physical aspects of their culture. Relics became big business in the middle ages, with every bit of nail or wood from the cross, or drops of blood from mediocre saints being targets for pilgrimage. That continues to this day, with millions of people expected to visit the Turin Shroud. The Holy See displays a noncommittal ambivalence towards relics that doesn't approve, but doesn't really condemn. I guess we're all rather used to that from the Vatican nowadays. And so again it demands ridicule.

So what is it about physical evidence that is so interesting to certain religious types? Relics are said to bring you closer to the original owner, and veneration is not idolatry. In Jesus, some of the other grisly bringers of proximity include the sponge he sucked vinegar from, the spear that he was finished off with, his umbilical cord and the best of all, the Holy Prepuce: Jesus' foreskin. I like to think that when Charlemagne felt jolly close to Christ when he handed over an 800-year-old foreskin to Pope Leo III, and then they all had a bit of snigger.

It seems to me that the physical aspects of Christianity are so much less interesting than the intellectual. Did Jesus exist? No one knows. And while I understand the import of his actual existence and more significantly his gory death, what's far more fascinating is that billions of people believe in him. Did Noah's ark exist? No. But there are diluvian myths in many cultures and religion, and that's interesting. The problem with relics is that they are fundamentally silly, and that limits discourse to the absurd.”

Defeat for Separation of Church and State

http://www.todaystmj4.com/news/local/92179769.html

A case to have a nativity scene removed from public property has been dismissed:

“A judge has dismissed a lawsuit that tried to prevent Manitowoc County from displaying a Nativity scene on the courthouse lawn during the Christmas season.

U.S. District Judge William Griesbach says the lawsuit filed by the Freedom From Religion Foundation has been rendered moot.

He says the county's new policy will allow all citizens to seek permits to have displays on the courthouse grounds regardless of their religious or political content.

The foundation, a Madison-based group of atheists and agnostics, argued the county violated the separation of church and state by allowing a Catholic group to erect the Nativity scene for decades.”

Obama Hatred: The Religion

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1165443.html

Obama hatred is alive and well in Israel. Bradley Burston calls it a religion:

“When I was young, I was taught that the purpose of religion was to foster compassion through lovingkindness, to seek peace by example, to perform with human hands the work of angels.

Then I moved to the Holy Land.

If ever the history of religion were written in blood, it was here. If ever religion has drowned history in blood, this is the venue. If ever the sword has beaten the plowshare, whether brandished along with the Old Testament, the New, or the Koran - we can show you the spot. And, more recently, if ever religion has succeeded in keeping peace, reconciliation, even the United Nations and the United States, at bay, ours is the place and time.

So it should have come as no surprise, I suppose, that a cluster of people here, people who cloak themselves in the garb of the pious, have decided to marry their furious loathing of Barack Obama to the custom of their faith, and to do what some in America have been doing for more than a year now: Hating Barack Obama as a new form of religious observance.

Once, on the holiday of Lag B'Omer, which falls this Saturday night, children cast into bonfires images of Adolf Hitler and others who have preached and in some cases practiced the mass killing of Jews.

This year, ahead of the Saturday night observance, professed followers of Meir Kahane have openly boasted of preparing effigies of the American president for distribution and incineration in bonfires across the country.

"There is no doubt that now the enemy of the Jewish people is Barack Hussein Obama," said pro-Kahane activist Noam Federman, a leader of the campaign.

"Obama is the most anti-Semitic president the U.S. has ever had," Federman told Maariv daily's website last week. "The time had come for our blind politicians to wake up and understand that you can't make policy according to the obsession of an Israel-hater."

These are not the rational people who oppose, take issue and disagree with Obama over his policies, his views, his performance. Not at all. These are the people who execrate the man, who despise him with every cell of their being, whose rage at his very name roars like napalm.

The irrational, some might say, rapturous hatred of Obama is not new, of course. Nor are the sulphur and the poison which inform Obama's revilers in the pro-Israel hard right.

Until now, though, many in the Obama-hate movement have confined their religious revivals to the relative privacy and safety of the Mother Church of All Satans, the internet.

The Kahanists, the dedicated Luddites of Zionism, have little use for discretion. They take their obscenity public at every opportunity. This one, however, is, even for them, a whole new level of low.

Part of it is the imagery. Fire is to the Jewish imagination what rope is to the African-American.

But that is only part of it. Because, wherever it is - whether the issue is health care, student loans, immigration policy or settling East Jerusalem - when taken to the extreme, the religion of reviling Obama is, at its core, the sacrament of hatred.

For that reason, it matters little that extremists can practice so-exisistence in hating Obama's guts, whether they may see themselves as God-fearing Jews or God-fearing anti-Semites.

What has Barack Obama done to the Kahanists, or, for that matter, to Israel and the Jews as a whole? He has endorsed a two-state solution - something which George Bush also did. Obama has pushed for a settlement freeze [Bush's road map, Phase One, includes the clause: "Israel also freezes all settlement activity"]. And, in a precedent which somehow also managed to draw the ire of Obama-haters, he has held Passover seders at the White House, which neither Bush nor any other president ever had.

What the Kahanists are saying, in effect, is that there is no longer any difference between the Occupation on one hand, and Judaism on the other.

In that sense, one may reasonably view the pro-Kahane camp as among them worst anti-Semites of all.

"That Hussein Obama who wants to freeze construction in Jerusalem every minute, he would even like to just freeze Israel over. He pretends to be a friend but actually he loves Islam. He is an anti-Semite, nothing less," Kahane disciple and effigy maker Bentzy Gobstein told Israel Army Radio last Thursday.

"We want to educate children while they are small," Gobstein continued. "When you burn it, have a Lag B'Omer bonfire with children - education begins with children.

"We want to teach them that we have to trust God, not Obama."

What is it, in the hearts of these people, who call themselves religious, whom the love or the fear of God should have filled with an openness toward humankind, that makes them hate this man with such fury?

Why is this President different from all other presidents?

They call him every manner of names - Communist, Muslim, racist, Jew-hater. They call him all manner of names, and he is none of these.

Cuurious, isn't it, that they never mention what he actually is. Which is, for many of them, enough reason to revile him, all by itself: Black.”

Here is more proof of how the right of Israel and America are so intertwined with each other. Both believe in this irrational nonsense.