The power of ritual

I was raised in a devoutly Roman Catholic home, but after spending my teenage years with question after question bubbling up inside me, I left Catholicism, never to return.  In my twenties I tried more than once to find a faith community that seemed right -- that made sense of the universe for me -- attending first a Quaker meeting, then a Unitarian church, and finally a Methodist church, and each time I ended up faced with the same questions I'd had, questions that no one seemed to be able to answer.

The prime question was "How do you know all this is true?"  

In other realms, that one was usually easier to answer.  Science, of course, is cut-and-dried; factual truth in science is measurable, quantifiable, observable.  But even with situations that aren't exactly rational, there's usually a way to approach the question.  How do I know that my family and friends love me?  Because they demonstrate it in a tangible way, every day.

But the claims of religion seemed to me to be outside even that, and I never was able to get answers that satisfied.  Most of the responses I did get boiled down to "I've had a personal experience of God" or "the existence of God gives meaning to my day-to-day experience," neither of which was particularly convincing for me.  I have never had anything like a transcendent spiritual experience of an omnipresent deity.  And something imbuing meaning into your life doesn't make it true.  I'd read plenty of meaningful fiction, after all.  And as far as my wanting it to be true, if there was one thing I'd learned by that point, it was that the universe is under no compulsion to behave in a way that makes me comfortable.

So ultimately, I left religion behind entirely.  I have no quarrels with anyone who has found a spiritual home that works for them, as long as they're not forcing it on anyone else; in fact, I've sometimes envied people who can find reason to believe, wholeheartedly, in a greater power.  I just never seemed to be able to manage it myself.

That's not to say I'm unhappy as an atheist.  Perhaps I can't access the reassurance and comfort that someone has who is deeply religious, but there are a lot of the petty rules and pointless, often harmful, restrictions that I wish I'd abandoned many years earlier.  (The chief of which is my years of shame over my bisexuality.  The damage done to the queer community by the largely religiously-motivated bigotry of our society is staggering and heartbreaking -- and given who just got elected to run the United States, it's far from over.)

But there's something about being part of a religion that I do miss, and it isn't only the sense of community.  You can find community in a book group or weekly sewing night or runners' club, after all.  What I find I miss most, strangely enough, is the ritual.

There's something compelling about the ritual of religion.  The Roman Catholicism of my youth is one of the most thoroughly ritualistic religions I know of; the idea is that any believer should be able to walk into any Catholic church in the world on Sunday morning and know what to do and what to say.  (Giving rise to the old joke, "How do you recognize a Catholic Star Wars fan?"  "If you say to them, 'May the Force be with you,' they respond, 'And also with you.'")  The vestments of the priests, the statuary and stained glass windows, the incense and candles and hymns and organ music -- it all comes together into something that, to the believer, is balm to the soul, leaving them connected to other believers around the world and back, literally millennia, in time.

Window in the Church of St. Oswald, Durham, England  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Tom Parnell, Church of St Oswald - stained glass window, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The reason this comes up is twofold.  First, we're approaching the Christmas season, and I always associate this time of year with rituals that, for the most part, I no longer participate in -- Advent, Christmas music, decorating trees, Midnight Mass.  The result is that for me, the holiday season is largely a time of wistful sadness.  I look on all this as a very mixed bag, of course; it's hard to imagine my having a sufficient change of heart to stay up until the wee hours on Christmas Eve so I can get in my car and go take in a church service.

But seeing others participate in these things makes me realize what I've lost -- or, more accurately, what I've voluntarily given up.  And I can't help but feel some sense of grief about that.

The other reason is more upbeat -- a paper this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about an archaeological site deep in a cave in Israel that shows signs of having been used for the purposes of rituals...

... thirty-five thousand years ago.

The cave was occupied before that; the upper levels has evidence of inhabitants fifty thousand years ago, including a partial skull that shows evidence of interbreeding between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.  But there are deeper parts of the cave, places of perpetual darkness, where nevertheless people congregated.  There's art on the walls, and evidence of the soot from torch fires.

The authors write:

Identifying communal rituals in the Paleolithic is of scientific importance, as it reflects the expression of collective identity and the maintenance of group cohesion.  This study provides evidence indicating the practice of deep cave collective rituals in the Levant during the Early Upper Paleolithic (EUP) period.  It is demonstrated that these gatherings occurred within a distinct ritual compound and were centered around an engraved object in the deepest part of Manot Cave, a pivotal EUP site in southwest Asia.  The ritual compound, segregated from the living areas, encompasses a large gallery partitioned by a cluster of remarkable speleothems [water-deposited minerals].  Within this gallery, an engraved boulder stands out, displaying geometric signs suggesting a unique representation of a tortoise.  Isotopic analysis of calcite crusts on the boulder’s grooves revealed alignment with values found in speleothems from the cave dated to ~37 to 35 ka BP.  Additionally, meticulous shape analysis of the grooves’ cross-section and the discernible presence of microlinear scratches on the grooves’ walls confirmed their anthropogenic origin.  Examination of stalagmite laminae (36 ka BP) near the engraved boulder revealed a significant presence of wood ash particles within.  This finding provides evidence for using fire to illuminate the dark, deep part of the cave during rituals.  Acoustic tests conducted in various cave areas indicate that the ritual compound was well suited for communal gatherings, facilitating conversations, speeches, and hearing.  Our results underscore the critical role of collective practices centered around a symbolic object in fostering a functional social network within the regional EUP communities.

I find this absolutely fascinating.  The drive to create and participate in rituals is deep-seated, powerful, and has a very long history.  Its role in cultural cohesion is obvious.  Of course, the same force generates negative consequences; the us-versus-them attitudes that have driven the lion's share of the world's conflicts, both on the small scale and the global.  Rituals bind communities together, but also identify outsiders and keep them excluded.  (And the rituals often were guarded fiercely down to the level of minute details.  Consider that people were burned at the stake in England for such transgressions as translating the Bible into English.)

So it's complex.  But so is everything.  My yearning for participation in rituals celebrating a belief system I no longer belong to is, honestly, self-contradictory.  But all I can say is that we've been creatures of ceremony for over thirty thousand years, so I shouldn't expect myself to be exempt, somehow.

As Walt Whitman put it, "Do I contradict myself?  Very well, then, I contradict myself.  (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

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Jerusalem, in England's green and pleasant land

A loyal reader of Skeptophilia asked me, rather offhand, if I'd heard of "British Israelism."  I hadn't, and he went on to explain that it's the idea that the British (and therefore Americans of British ancestry) are the descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.

As soon as I heard that last bit, I said, "Uh-oh."  I did a piece a while back about the fact that there are so many groups claiming to be the descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes that calling them "lost" is something of a misnomer.  In fact, if you do any reading on the topic, you'll come away with the impression that you can't throw a rock without hitting a Ten Lost Tribesman.

Delegation of the Northern Kingdom of Israel bringing gifts to Assyrian King Shalmaneser III [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), Black Obelisk side 4 Jewish delegation, CC BY-SA 4.0]

But even so, the British Israelists are in a class by themselves, given how thoroughly fleshed-out their ideas are.  I mean, the ideas are horseshit, but it's amazingly detailed horseshit.  Here are a few of their chief tenets:

• The Ten Lost Tribes were not Jews.  More on that in a moment.
• The Scythians were the ancestors of the Scottish people.  Because, y'know, both start with "Sc" and all.
• The Saxons were connected to Isaac, son of Abraham.  "Saxon" comes from "[I]saac's sons."
• All of the place names that have a syllable of the form "/d/-vowel-/n/" come from the Tribe of Dan.  So London, Dunkirk, Dundee, and... I shit you not... Danube, Denmark, and Macedonia.  Also, this has something to do with the Tuatha Dé Danann, "the children of Danu," who were a supernatural race revered in pre-Christian Ireland.
• The royal family of Britain descends from King David of Israel.  Because reasons, apparently.
• The English are from the Tribe of Ephraim, and Americans are from the Tribe of Manasseh.  Don't ask me how this works, because even after reading about it fairly extensively, I have no idea.

Well, the first thing that comes to mind about all of this is that the Israelists have broken a cardinal rule, to wit, "don't fuck with a linguist."  None of their supposed etymologies are even within hailing distance of the truth.  Just looking at the "Tribe of Dan" ones -- of which none have anything to do with the Tribe of Dan -- let's start with Dundee and Dunkirk, which both contain the Celtic word dun meaning "fort" (as do Dunblane, Duncannon, Dunearn, Dunfermline, and dozens of others).  London comes from the Latin Londinium (which was probably a latinization of a Celtic place name).  Danube comes from the Celtic Danu (the same gods referenced in the Tuatha Dé Danann, but the fact that they were right about that one thing brings to mind my dad's remark that "even a stopped clock is right twice a day").  Denmark comes from a Germanic tribe called the Dani.  Finally, Macedonia comes from the ancient Greek μακεδνόι, which means "tall people."

Put a different way, linguistics is not some kind of bastard child of free association and the Game of Telephone.

The bottom line is, it's mighty odd if the English are direct descendants of the Israelites, there is not a shred of evidence -- anthropological, genetic, linguistic, or archeological -- of that connection.  What the Israelists have is an amalgam of quasi-evidence (mostly in the form of folk legends and mythology), mixed well with misinterpretations and outright falsehoods.  Despite all that -- to my astonishment -- it still has its fervent adherents, including the leaders of the Church of God International and the members of the Christian Identity movement.

Where it gets uglier, though, is that the Israelists, especially after the idea took hold in the United States, devolved into sickening levels of antisemitism.  This initially puzzled me, because you'd think that any group so gung-ho about the Israelites would be equally chummy with the Jews, but no.  The leading proponents of the idea have taken great pains to distance themselves from modern-day Jews, whom they consider "usurpers" and "imposters."  Some go so far as to believe that modern Jews aren't the descendants of the Israelites at all, but come either from Adam having sex with the demonic Lilith, or the Serpent having sex with Eve, or possibly both.  Anthropologist Michael Phillips, commenting on this bizarre doctrine, said that the belief allowed an adherent to "maintain his anti-Semitism and at the same time revere a Bible cleansed of its Jewish taint."

All of which illustrates something we've seen here before, which is that bigoted assholes will latch on to any gossamer scrap of evidence they can find to support their abhorrent ideas, and failing that, will make some up.

Anyhow, to the reader who sent me the link, thanks for sending me down a several-hours-long rabbit hole that left me thinking if the Daleks ever invade the Earth, I might just tell 'em, "Exterminate away, little buddies, there's no intelligent life down here anyhow."  Every time I think I've plumbed the absolute depth of stupidity, I find that someone has found the bottom and started to dig.

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Clay magnets

One of the most wonderful things about science is the role creativity has in discovery.  Problems that have been considered somewhere between difficult and intractable have often been solved by someone who has a sudden creative insight -- how to bring together two previously disparate bodies of knowledge, or using a technique from one realm to study an entirely different one.

Take, for example, the study that was sent my way by a reader of Skeptophilia a couple of days ago.  It has to do with the technique of paleomagnetism -- the "geological clock" provided by the fact that the Earth's magnetic field flips, for (thus far) reasons unknown.  You're probably familiar with the most famous use of paleomagnetism; it was the technique that finally cinched down the plate tectonic model as accounting for continental drift.  When magma solidifies into solid rock, tiny ferromagnetic particles that were once free to move become locked into place.  When the rock was liquid, those particles could swivel around and line up with the magnetic field of the Earth at the time; once solid, that magnetic signature was frozen in place.  When geologists doing magnetometer readings of the ocean floor on either side of the Mid-Atlantic Rift Zone found parallel stripes of rocks with the same magnetic signature, and the rock as they neared the ridge had progressively younger radioisotope ages, they knew that there was only one explanation.  New rock was welling up at the ridge from deep in the mantle, and that was pushing the plates apart, creating strips of new ocean floor all along the ridge.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the USGS]

Now, a new study has applied paleomagnetic techniques to a completely different problem.  A team at Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has looked at the magnetic signature left in fired clay bricks -- and used it to date archaeological strata in order to pinpoint the dates of famous battles described in the Biblical Books of Kings.

Clay retains a fossilized magnetic imprint for the same reason that magma does; when the clay is plastic, the particles are free to move, but once it's fired, they're stuck in place.  What's coolest about this study, though, is how sensitive the technique has become.  Back in the 1950s, when Fred Vine and Drummond Matthews used paleomagnetism to study the sea floor, it was pretty crude.  The best they could do was say that a particular sample of rock had a magnetic field like the one we have today (shown in white on the above image) or one that was reversed with comparison to the current orientation (shown in various shades of orange).  This wouldn't be much help in archaeological settings, as the last complete polar reversal was 780,000 years ago.  Now, the technique has improved to the point that the scientists can detect tiny fluctuations not only in direction but in strength -- and that has allowed them to date strata with an accuracy of ten to fifteen years.

This has allowed the team to pinpoint firm dates of offensives against the Kingdom of Judah by Shoshenq I of Egypt (1 Kings 14: 25-26), Hazael of Damascus (2 Kings 12:18), Tiglath-Pileser III (2 Kings 15:29) and Sennacherib (2 Kings 18-19) of Assyria, and Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon (2 Kings 25:1-21).  And while some of the findings confirmed previous dates for sites, the more accurate technique has disproven other conjectures.  For example, the site of Tel Beit She'an, thought to have been razed by Hazael of Damascus, showed a paleomagnetic date between seventy and a hundred years earlier, meaning it had fallen not to Hazael but to the campaign of Shoshenq of Egypt.

It's not only the fineness of the technique I find impressive, but the fact that the team thought of using it at all.  Creativity hinges on divergent thinking -- the ability to see multiple solutions to a problem, and to apply out-of-the-box techniques in order to find those solutions.  This is an excellent example of just that -- using a technique first pioneered in studies of plate tectonics to establish a timeline of biblical archaeology more accurate than anything we've had.

Makes you wonder what crossovers scientists will come up with next.

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Fine-toothed comb

Sometimes I need to tell y'all about a new discovery not because it's weird or controversial, but simply because it's cool.

I owe my awareness of this one from my twin brudda from anudda mudda, Andrew Butters of the brilliant blog Potato Chip Math (which you should all subscribe to immediately).  Andrew is not only smart and a great writer and funnier than hell, he also knows my capacity for geeking out over anything related to languages, so when he found this, he sent it on to me instantaneously.

It's about the discovery of an ancient ivory comb near Tel Lachish, Israel.  It was a cool enough artifact, dating from about 1,700 B.C.E., but its coolness factor increased by a factor of a thousand when it was discovered that it was inscribed with seventeen tiny letters.

[Image courtesy of Dafna Gazit, Israeli Antiquities Authority]

The inscription is in Canaanite, and says: "ytš ḥṭ ḏ lqml śʿ[r w]zqt," which translates roughly to, "may this tusk root out lice of the hair and the beard."  If you're wondering what happened to all the vowels, they're missing because written Canaanite was an abjad -- a writing system wherein vowels are left out unless they occur first in a word.  (Modern abjads include Hebrew and Arabic, both of which are in the same family as Canaanite.  If you're curious about abjads and other writing systems, I did a post about that topic back in January.)

There are a lot of things that are cool about this.  First, it's mildly amusing that one of the earliest inscriptions ever found has to do with getting rid of lice.  Be that as it may, the (much) more awesome piece is that this is the earliest known inscription in the alphabet that would eventually morph into not only Arabic and Hebrew, but Cyrillic (used in several Slavic languages), Greek, and eventually, English.

"This is the first sentence ever found in the Canaanite language in Israel," said archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  "There are Canaanites in Ugarit in Syria, but they write in a different script, not the alphabet that is used still today…  The comb inscription is direct evidence for the use of the alphabet in daily activities some 3,700 years ago.  This is a landmark in the history of the human ability to write."

An amusing postscript is that the next oldest inscriptions ever found in Canaanite were on a 3,500 year old lead tablet found near Mount Ebal in Israel, and said, "Cursed, cursed, cursed—cursed by the God YHW.  You will die cursed.  Cursed you will surely die.  Cursed by YHW—cursed, cursed, cursed."

So that's cheerful.  I probably don't need to mention that "YHW" is a transcription of the Hebrew name for God, usually rendered either "Yahweh" or "Jehovah" in English.  It's a little humbling that the oldest surviving written texts we know of had to do with (1) ill-wishing an enemy, and (2) getting rid of parasites.

Although if you'll look around you at the behavior of people now, you'll probably be struck by the fact that not all that much has changed.

So that's our cool discovery of the day, and thanks to Andrew for bringing it to my attention.  Interesting that the letters I'm typing right at this moment have a history that stretches back over three millennia, back to inscriptions like this one.

I just hope what I'm writing these days is more edifying than "Use this comb to remove lice" and 'You will die cursed."

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End Times celebration

By now, you've probably heard about Donald Trump's controversial decision to grant official recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital city, to be followed by moving the United States Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The issue -- as far as I understand it -- is that both Israelis and Palestinians consider Jerusalem to be their capital, and our previous stance was that the US would remain out of that particular facet of the conflict.  The hope was that any eventual Israeli-Palestinian peace deal would involve some sort of compromise regarding the city (hard to imagine what that would be, of course).  So while we've been pretty unequivocally supportive of the Israelis, we've been cautiously neutral with regards to that piece of it.

Trump, of course, has the "bull in a china shop" approach to world diplomacy, and announced his decision last week, come what may.  This caused a lot of forehead-slapping on the part of people who've devoted their lives to bringing peace to the Middle East -- but one group, at least, was absolutely thrilled.

This, to no one's particular surprise, was the evangelical Christians, who in the last year have showed themselves as a group to be kind of unhinged.  And this time, one of their spokespersons in the political arena -- State Senator Doug Broxson of Florida -- has come right out and said why Trump's announcement was the cause of such jubilation:

It's going to usher in the End Times.

"Now, I don’t know about you," Broxson said to a cheering rally, "but when I heard about Jerusalem — where the King of Kings [applause] where our soon coming King is coming back to Jerusalem, it is because President Trump declared Jerusalem to be capital of Israel."

Of course, at the same rally, Broxson also called Trump's cabinet picks as "the best of the best, the brightest of the brightest," which makes me wonder if Broxson has either lost touch with reality in general, or else his only basis of comparison is the members of the Under-90-IQ Club.

Be that as it may, what gets me most about this statement is how excited the evangelicals seem to be about the Rivers Running Red With The Blood Of Unbelievers.  I mean, you'd think that even if you knew you were going to be on the winning side, you wouldn't be looking forward to it, you know?  As a friend of mine put it, "You're free to think I'm going to be condemned to burn in agony in hell for all eternity, but it'd be nice if you didn't seem so happy about it."

I suppose the reason is that the End Times cadre think that before the really bad stuff starts happening, they're all gonna be Raptured right the hell out of here, leaving us evil folks down on Earth to contend with such special offers as the Beast With Seven Heads and Ten Crowns.  Which brings up an interesting question: why does it have three more crowns than it has heads?  I remember that bothering me when I first read the Book of Revelation as a teenager.  Does it wear two crowns on three of its heads, and one each on the other four?  Or does it wear one crown per head and carry the other three around in its backpack as spares, in case one of its crowns is in the laundry?

Of course, in the same passage (Revelation 13:1) it also says that the Beast has ten horns.  As a biologist, I find that even more peculiar.  Usually the number of horns on an animal is a multiple of the number of heads.

But maybe I'm thinking too hard about all of this.

La Bête de la Mer, from Tapisserie de l'Apocalypse (ca. 1380) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So I'm a little perplexed by the jubilation.  I thought that Jesus was pretty unequivocal about loving thy neighbor, and as far as I can see this does not entail looking forward to thy neighbor being the featured entrée at Satan's barbecue lunch.

As for me, I'm kind of hoping that Trump's decision doesn't usher in the End Times, and also that it doesn't cause the turmoil in the Middle East to intensify, because that's the last thing those people need.  Right now, it would be more to the point to try to defuse tensions, not do shit that makes the warring factions even madder at each other.

But I suppose that's what you get when the "best of the best and brightest of the brightest" are in charge.

Oil prophecies

The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy is the practice of picking out the data points, after the fact, that support whatever your claim is.  The name comes from the story of a guy traveling across Texas.  He sees an old barn with bullseyes painted on the side, and in the exact center of each bullseye is a bullet hole.  The guy sees two old-timers leaning against a fence near the barn, so he stops to talk to them.

"Who shot the holes in that barn?" the guy asks.

One of the old-timers says proudly, "I did."

"That some pretty fancy shooting.  You must be good."

The old-timer is about to reply when his friend chimes in, "Nah.  He's a lousy shot.  He got drunk one night, shot some holes in the side of his barn, and then painted the bullseyes around them."

The whole thing comes up because of a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia yesterday with the comment, "Hoo boy.  Get a load of this."  The link was to the homepage of the Zion Oil and Gas Company, whose raison d'être is... well, let me give it to you in their own words:

When first visiting Israel in 1983, I believe that God gave me a scripture (I Kings 8: 41- 43), a vision (Oil for Israel) and, as a Christian Zionist and New Covenant believer (Isaiah 65:1), the calling to render assistance to the Jewish people and Nation of Israel, and to aid them in the Restoration of the Land by providing the oil and gas necessary to maintain their political and economic independence.

Zion is a testimony and a journey of faith, which began for me when I was saved, or born again, in January 1981.  This testimony is based only on God’s faithfulness to the Jewish people and the Nation of Israel (Genesis 17:1-8). 

Both of which are covenant promises and will come to pass (1 Kings 8:56; Isaiah 25:1) and not because of my faith.  It is God’s purpose and will for my life to discover the oil of Israel (Isaiah 46:9-11; Exodus 9:16). 

I was saved by faith.  It is a gift of God (Ephesians 2:8,9; Romans 10:8-9). 

Jim Spillman came to Zion Temple in Clawson, Michigan in February 1981 and taught on “The Oil of Israel“; by faith I believed it and The Great Treasure Hunt.  God used Jim Spillman first in my life to deposit the vision for the oil in my heart.

Yup, you read that correctly.  The CEO and founder of Zion Oil and Gas, John Brown, started his company because he thought he was anointed by god to find oil for the United States and Israel.  Not only that, he uses the Book of Genesis, and the account of the Great Flood, to tell him where to drill:

God creates this.  He provides the money and the place where to drill. Now why we haven't got the oil yet, I don't know.  I have never drilled one oil well I didn't expect to find oil...  He talks specifically about the land of Joseph and the blessings of the deep that lies beneath.  It doesn't say specifically oil, but there's a huge possibility it could be, let's put it that way.

In fact, the motto of the company is, "Geology confirming theology."  (If you want more in-depth information about Brown and his company, check out the article about Zion on RationalWiki.)

The only problem is that Zion's batting average so far is... zero.  They've drilled four wells in Israel, at great expense to their stockholders, and every one has been a dry well.  The result: $130 million down the drain, and a 90% loss of their stock's value on NASDAQ.

[image courtesy of photographer Eric Kounce and the Wikimedia Commons]

Unsurprisingly, given the mindset of people who would fall for this in the first place, this zero return on investment has not been as discouraging as you'd expect.  One of them, one Andy Barron of Temple, Texas, was quoted in the above-linked article as saying, "Well, I used to have a lot more money in it than I do now.  The stock I bought has tremendously decreased in value over time.  But with my belief that God is in charge of all of it and it's all his anyway, I think the upside of betting on God is pretty good."

Another supporter, Hal Lindsey (whose name may be familiar from his cheery End Times books The Late Great Planet Earth and Satan is Alive and Well on Planet Earth), said that even though things haven't gone well, they're about to, and furthermore, that's an indication that the world is about to end.  "Zion Oil right now is on the verge of discovering oil," Lindsey said.  "[It is a sign that] we are really on the very threshold of Lord Jesus's return."

So that's using a prophecy to support an oil drilling operation that has had zero success, and claiming that supports a different prophecy.  Which should win some sort of award for pretzel logic.

But you can bet if Zion does strike oil at some point, John Brown and his pals will shout from the rooftops about how this proves the prophecies and the Great Flood and his company being blessed by god and whatnot.  Thus the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy that I started with.  Given long enough, you can find incidental support for damn near anything, especially when you choose to ignore all of the failures.

Anyhow, that's today's exercise in wishful thinking.  All of which supports the idea that even though religion -- in at least some circumstances -- can be a decent guide to moral behavior, it's a lousy substitute for science.  Oh, yeah, and caveat emptor.  Not to mention "a fool and his money are soon parted."

Zombie nanobots from hell

For the latest reason that you should avoid being vaccinated, as long as you have zero understanding of science, we have:

The medical establishment puts nanobots into vaccines, which then eat your brain.

This, at least, is the contention of one Jim Stone, who runs a site called Environmental Terrorism.  And it turns out that the nanobot doesn't eat your whole brain, it just destroys the part of it that allows you to go to heaven:

(A) virus they are creating will attack the “God Center” of the brain and destroy it! He tries to sell it by saying that this will stop suicide bombers by people that believe in God but of course this is just the sell job.  He says it will take somebody that believes in God and turn them into a “normal” person!  So if you’re a Christian it will make you no longer believe in God and Jesus Christ which is your key to eternal life!  This is the pure evil that is the new world order government running the US!

Well.  Isn't that special.  But in the parlance of the 1980s infomercial, "Wait!  There's more!"

There have been many reports about nanobots being developed that will destroy people. This report actually identifies that nanobot and what it is based upon. Once this nanobot is received via a tainted vaccine, it inserts DNA into your cells which instructs your own cells to produce more copies of itself and THAT is how it replicates. And it NEVER backs off, it simply orders your own cells to keep producing it until your cells die from being over worked doing exactly that. And it’s completely verified this thing came from a lab in 2007.

You have no idea how relieved I was when I read the last sentence, because I got the majority of my vaccinations before 2007.  Which, presumably, is why I still have a brain.

Who would do this evil stuff, you might ask?  And of course, the answer is:

The Jews.  But you probably already knew that.

I plan on asking my wife, who is Jewish, why she would do such a thing.  I mean, making me eat matzoh balls, which in my opinion taste like chicken-flavored play-doh, is one thing.  Infecting me with a microorganism that eats my brain is quite another.

Then Mr. Stone shows us a picture of the nanobot that does all of this nasty business:

When I saw this, I said to my computer, and I quote:  "What the fuck?  That's a bacteriophage."

But this doesn't stop Mr. Stone.  He claims that this creature didn't exist prior to 2007, which will surprise the hell out of my AP Biology students because I've been teaching them about bacteriophages ("bacteria-eating viruses") since 1994.  It's also quite natural, and completely harmless unless you're an E. coli bacterium.

You'd think that an amount of research that's as microscopic as the virus itself would be sufficient to convince Mr. Stone that his claim is complete and utter horse waste.  Starting with the fact that it's called a "bacteriophage," and not a "brainophage."  But no.  Not only is this thing going to turn you into an irreligious zombie, you can tell it's a Jewish nanobot because of its shape:

(T)heir little hexagonal leg patterns and star of david phage bodies (are wreaking) havoc on the rest of mankind.  And on that note, I may have stated above that the reason for re engineering a phage to do the job rather than a known infectious virus would be to make good and sure it could not spread to other people in the wild, but I can´t help but imagine that such a profoundly Jewish looking micro organism would not be selected simply for its appearances.

A passage which, I suppose, demonstrates why Mr. Stone himself is immune.  If you don't have a functioning brain, that would presumably make the Jewish brain-eating nanobot virus less interested in infecting you.

At the end, we get the coup de grâce:

(E)verybody must make their own decisions about vaccines.  I’m not a doctor and cannot give you medical advice.  All I’m saying is that evil men control the medical system and they already have a virus that can change your brain so you no longer believe in God!

Have a nice day.

So, there you have it.  The least plausible reason yet that the anti-vaxxers are suggesting that you not get vaccinated.  At least it's more fanciful than Jenny McCarthy and her hand-waving "vaccines cause autism" nonsense.  Given a choice between Jenny McCarthy and brain-destroying nanobots, I'll take my chance with the nanobots.

Geopolitical let's-pretend

When secular types think of instances of the religious demanding that we treat counterfactual beliefs as if they were real, the first thing that comes to mind is usually the ongoing non-debate over creationism being taught in public schools.

I call it a "non-debate" because there really is no basis for argument.  Either you accept the scientific method -- in which case the evidence for the evolutionary model is overwhelming -- or you don't.  If you don't, then debate is fruitless, because the two sides aren't even accepting the same basic ground rules for how we know something is true.

But this is hardly the only example.  We just got another striking case of the religious claiming that the world is other than it is, and demanding that everyone else simply play along, in the decision by Collins Bartholomew, a subsidiary of Harper-Collins, to publish maps of the Middle East without including Israel.

I'm not making this up, although I wish I were.  A representative for Collins Bartholomew said that if they included Israel on maps in atlases destined for classrooms in the Middle East, it would be "unacceptable to Muslim customers" and "not in line with local preferences."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

In other words: because the majority of Muslims in the Middle East would like it if Israel didn't exist, they not only get to pretend it doesn't exist, they have a major book publisher playing along in the charade.

Apparently, Collins Bartholomew's defense for the decision was that if they'd included Israel, no one in the Middle East would have bought the atlases.  Or else, they would only have allowed them in the country if each one of them had the name "Israel" crossed out with a black marker, a practice that apparently really happens.

The first group to object to the expectation that everyone pretend that the world is other than it is was the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, which should make it an odds-on contender for the Irony Award 2015.  "The publication of this atlas will confirm Israel’s belief that there exists a hostility towards their country from parts of the Arab world,” said Bishop Declan Lang, chairman of the Bishops' Conference Department of International Affairs.  "It will not help to build up a spirit of trust leading to peaceful co-existence."

Which could be a direct quote from the writings of St. Obvious of Duh.  I think the Israelis already know that, Bishop Lang.

The question, of course, is whether people in other countries are willing to play along.  Yes, we get that a lot of you people in the Middle East don't like Israel.  Yes, you can put your hands over your eyes and play let's-pretend.  But the rest of the world doesn't have to pat you on the back and say, "Of course, dear, of course bad nasty Israel doesn't exist.  I checked under the bed and in the closet, and I didn't see it anywhere.  Don't pay attention to the big black mark on the map.  It doesn't mean anything."

Now, understand me; I'm not making a statement one way or the other about who is right and who is wrong in the perpetual state of conflict in the Middle East.  My general feeling, non-political-type that I am, is that the situation is so complex that assigning blame would be a fruitless task.  The whole area is so rife with issues of poverty, territorial claims, religious frictions, ethnic frictions, militarism, and arguments based on hereditary rights, that any attempt to divide the players into Good Guys and Bad Guys is doomed to failure right from the outset.

But the Catholic Bishops' Conference is right about one thing; the situation isn't going to be helped by publishing companies pandering to people's desperation that a counterfactual worldview be reality.  The proper response -- both to the Muslims who object to Israel being in atlases, and to the creationists who object to evolution being taught in public school science classes -- is "suck it up and deal."

Arguing by agreement

My job would be easier, as a skeptic, if humans were basically rational beings.

The fact is, though, we're not controlled solely by the higher-cognitive parts of our brains.  We are also at the mercy of our emotions and biases, not to mention a set of perceptual apparati that work well enough most of the time, but are hardly without their own faults and (sometimes literal) blind spots.

This is why the backfire effect occurs.  A pair of psychologists, Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, found that most people, after being confronted with evidence against their prior beliefs, will espouse those beliefs more strongly:

Nyhan and Reifler found a backfire effect in a study of conservatives. The Bush administration claimed that tax cuts would increase federal revenue (the cuts didn't have the promised effect). One group was offered a refutation of this claim by prominent economists that included current and former Bush administration officials. About 35 percent of conservatives told about the Bush claim believed it. The percentage of believers jumped to 67 when the conservatives were provided with the refutation of the idea that tax cuts increase revenue.  (from The Skeptic's Dictionary)

As a blogger, this makes it hard to know how to approach controversial topics.  By calmly and dispassionately citing evidence against silly claims, am I having the effect of making the True Believers double down on their position?  If so, how could I approach things differently?

A study published this week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides the answer.  To convince people of the error of their ways, agree with them, strenuously, following their beliefs to whatever absurd end they drive you, and without once uttering a contrary word.

Psychologists Eran Halperin, Boaz Hameiri, and Roni Porat of the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel were looking at a way to alter attitudes between Israelis and Palestinians -- a goal as monumental as it is laudable.  Given the decades that have been spent in futile negotiations between these two groups, always approached from a standpoint of logic, rationality, and compromise, Halperin, Hameiri, and Porat decided to try a different tack.

150 Israeli volunteers were split into two groups -- one was shown video clips of neutral commercials, the other video clips that related the Israeli/Palestinian conflict back to the values that form the foundation of the Israeli self-identity.  In particular, the clips were based on the idea that Israel has a god-given right to exist, and is the most deeply moral society in the world.  But instead of taking the obvious approach that attacks against Palestinians (including innocent civilians) called into question the morality of the Israeli stance, the videos followed these concepts to their logical conclusion -- that the conflict should continue, even if innocent Palestinians died, because of Israel's inherent moral rectitude.

And attitudes changed.  The authors of the study report that members of the experimental group showed a 30% higher willingness to reevaluate their positions on the issue, as compared to the control group.  They showed a greater openness to discussion of the opposing side's narrative, and a greater likelihood of voting for moderate political candidates.  And the attitude change didn't wear off -- the subjects still showed the same alteration in their beliefs a year later.  Hameiri writes:

The premise of most interventions that aim to promote peacemaking is that information that is inconsistent with held beliefs causes tension, which may motivate alternative information seeking.  However, individuals—especially during conflict—use different defenses to preserve their societal beliefs.  Therefore, we developed a new paradoxical thinking intervention that provides consistent—though extreme—information, with the intention of raising a sense of absurdity but not defenses.

So apparently, Stephen Colbert is on the right track.

I find the whole thing fascinating, if a little frustrating.   Being a science-geek-type, I have always lived in hope that rational argument and hard data would eventually win.

It appears, however, that it doesn't, always.  It may be that for the deepest, most lasting changes in attitude, we have to take those beliefs we are trying to change, and force them to their logical ends, and hope that after that, the absurdity will speak for itself.