The missing day

Can I make the not-very-earthshattering observation that if you are explaining evidence supporting a belief, your argument is not made stronger by lying about it?

Especially if that belief includes the idea that your own personal religion is not only superior morally, but 100% true?

I'm referring to a story of dubious provenance that has been showing up all over the place lately, mostly on Christian apologetics sites, and then forwarded by people who (1) don't understand how science works, (2) don't know how to do a Google search to check for accuracy, or (3) would prefer something sound good than be correct.  Or all three.  I ran into it via the site Command the Raven, but other versions I've seen are substantially similar.  Here are a few excerpts, edited only for length:

For all you scientists out there and for all the students who have had a hard time convincing these people regarding the truth of the Bible – here’s something that illustrates God’s awesome creation and shows He is still in control.  

Did you know that NASA’s space programmes are busy proving that what has been called ‘myth’ in the Bible is true?  Mr. Harold Hill, President of the Curtis Engine Company in Baltimore, and a consultant in the space programmes, relates the following incident: "One of the most amazing things that God has for us today happened recently to our astronauts and space scientists at Green Belt, Maryland.  They were checking out the positions of the sun, moon and planets out in space where they would be 100, and 1000 years from now.  We have to know this as we do not want a satellite to collide with any of these in its orbits."

So we're off to a flying start, with the claim that NASA has to be very careful to make sure that satellites in orbit around the Earth don't collide with the Sun or Neptune or anything.  You can see how that could happen.

Computer measurements and data were run back and forth over the centuries when suddenly it came to a halt, displaying a red signal, which meant that either there was something wrong with the information fed into it, or with the results as compared to the standards.  They called in the service department to check it out, and the technicians asked what was wrong.  The scientists had discovered that somewhere in space in elapsed time a day was missing. Nobody seemed able to come up with a solution to the problem.

Which brings up the awkward question of how you'd discover that a day was missing.  Or even what "there's a day missing" means.  Were the technicians sitting around, monitoring the satellite transmissions, and suddenly one of them got this horrified look on her face and said, "Wait... where the fuck did I put last Tuesday?"  Then all of the other technicians and engineers and physicists and so forth all start searching under desks and in storage closets and behind garbage cans and so on, but to no avail.  Last Tuesday is definitely AWOL.

Finally one of the team, a Christian, said: “You know, when I was still in Sunday School, they spoke about the sun standing still…”  While his colleagues didn’t believe him, they did not have an answer either, so they said: “Show us.”  He got a Bible and opened it at the book of Joshua where they found a pretty ridiculous statement for anyone with ‘common sense’.  There they read about the Lord saying to Joshua: “Fear them not, I have delivered them into thy hand; there shall not be a man of them stand before thee.” (Joshua 10:8).  Joshua was concerned because the enemy had surrounded him, and if darkness fell, they would overpower him.  So Joshua asked the Lord to make the sun stand still!  That’s right – “And the sun stood still and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies.  Is this not written in the book of Ja’-sher?  So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven and hastened not to go down about a whole day.” (Joshua 10:13).

The astronauts and scientists said: "There is the missing day!"

So there was much rejoicing.  But then one of them pointed out that it wasn't a whole day that had been found -- it was only 23 hours and 20 minutes.  Which left 40 minutes unaccounted for, "which could mean trouble 1000 years from now."  Why it isn't trouble now, I have no idea, but concern for our distant descendants sent the NASA folks back on a search for the missing 2/3 of an hour.

And you'll never guess where they found it.

The Bible.  See, I told you you'd never guess.

As the Christian employee thought about it, he remembered somewhere in the Bible which said the sun went backwards.  The scientists told him he was out of his mind, but once again they opened the Book and read these words in 2 Kings.  Hezekiah, on his deathbed, was visited by the prophet, Isaiah, who told him he was not going to die.  Hezekiah asked for some sign as proof.  Isaiah said: “Shall the sun go forward ten degrees, or go back ten degrees?”  And Hezekiah answered: “It is a light thing for the shadow to go down ten degrees; nay, but let the shadow return backwards ten degrees.”  Isaiah the prophet cried unto the Lord, and He brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz.”  (2 Kings 20:9 -11).  Ten degrees is exactly 40 minutes!  Twenty-three hours and twenty minutes in Joshua, plus 40 minutes in 2 Kings accounted for the missing day in the universe!

Which would have been the cause for even more rejoicing, if the whole thing hadn't been made up.  I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist (a real one, I mean, like they have at NASA) to find the story eye-rollingly ridiculous, but it has been so widely circulated -- I've seen it three times on Facebook just in the last week -- that it actually has a Snopes page dedicated to it.  In it, we find out that Harold Hill was the president of Curtis Engine Company of Baltimore, but that's pretty much the only thing in the story that is true.  First off, Hill wasn't a NASA consultant.  It turns out that Hill was an evangelical Christian with a fairly loose interpretation of the word "true," because he'd read about the "lost day" legend in a book by Harold Rimmer entitled The Harmony of Science and Scripture and decided that the story would carry more punch if he claimed he'd witnessed the whole thing happening.  He embellished his account -- adding, of course, accolades such as "NASA consultant" for himself -- and repeated it many times in public speeches.  He even devoted a whole chapter to it in his 1974 book How to Live Like a King's Kid, apparently because by then, he'd told the tale so many times that he actually was beginning to believe it.

John Martin, Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still Over Gibeon (1816) [Image is in the Public Domain]

And now with the amazing bullshit conduit that is the internet, the story has roared into life again.  Snopes writer David Mikkelson says about it:

To those who've given over their hearts to God and the Holy Word, this is a deeply satisfying legend.  Faith is, after all, the firm belief in something which cannot necessarily be proved, a quality that can leave believers (especially those who find themselves in the midst of non-believers) feeling unsatisfied.  As steadfast as their certainty is, they cannot prove the rightness of the path they tread to those who jeer at their convictions.  And this is a heavy burden to shoulder.  A legend such as the "missing day explained" tale speaks straight to the hearts of those who yearn for a bit of vindication in this life.  Being right isn't always enough: sometimes what one most longs for is sweet recognition from others.

Which may well be the case, but doesn't take away from the problem of a devout follower of a religion that considers "Thou shalt not bear false witness" as one of its fundamental teachings passing along a story that is essentially one long lie.  It makes me wish that as a corollary of the ninth commandment, Yahweh had seen fit to add, "And this meaneth that thou shalt spend five fucking minutes and do a Google search before thou postest this shit on Facebook."

So anyway.  No, NASA is not spending its woefully tiny budget paying scientists to verify the Old Testament.  There's no evidence whatsoever of a "lost day," because against what clock would you be able to verify that time had stopped 3,000 odd years ago?  I'd be much obliged if the people who think that God is going to bless them if they pass along this nonsense would just stop already.  Thank you.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is one that has raised a controversy in the scientific world: Ancient Bones: Unearthing the Astonishing New Story of How We Became Human, by Madeleine Böhme, Rüdiger Braun, and Florian Breier.

It tells the story of a stupendous discovery -- twelve-million-year-old hominin fossils, of a new species christened Danuvius guggenmosi.  The astonishing thing about these fossils is where they were found.  Not in Africa, where previous models had confined all early hominins, but in Germany.

The discovery of Danuvius complicated our own ancestry, and raised a deep and difficult-to-answer question; when and how did we become human?  It's clear that the answer isn't as simple as we thought when the first hominin fossils were uncovered in Olduvai Gorge, and it was believed that if you took all of our millennia of migrations all over the globe and ran them backwards, they all converged on the East African Rift Valley.  That neat solution has come into serious question, and the truth seems to be that like most evolutionary lineages, hominins included multiple branches that moved around, interbred for a while, then went their separate ways, either to thrive or to die out.  The real story is considerably more complicated and fascinating than we'd thought at first, and Danuvius has added another layer to that complexity, bringing up as many questions as it answers.

Ancient Bones is a fascinating read for anyone interested in anthropology, paleontology, or evolutionary biology.  It is sure to be the basis of scientific discussion for the foreseeable future, and to spur more searches for our relatives -- including in places where we didn't think they'd gone.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Tying god's hands

Today, for what must be the tenth time, I saw the following image posted on social media:

The people who posted it apparently decided for some reason that it was acceptable to use the tragic murder of seventeen innocent people to lob some snark at the atheists, secularists, and others who believe in the separation of church and state.  But what I want to address here is the toxicity of the mindset behind the message -- apart from what would spur someone to think that this is an appropriate time to post it (and truthfully, I can't think of an appropriate time to post it).

First, I thought y'all were the ones who believed that god was everywhere, was omnipotent and omnipresent and omniscient and omni-what-have-you.  What you're implying here is that a handful of people who think religion has no place in a public, taxpayer-funded institution have somehow overpowered an all-powerful god's ability to do anything to stop a crazed gunman.  (Probably explaining why the Florida State Legislature, having decided to do fuck-all about gun law reform, has decided instead to pursue a bill requiring "In God We Trust" to be posted in public schools statewide.)

So we're already on some shaky theological grounds, but it gets worse.  What the above message suggests is that somehow, god's attitude is, "if you won't pray in schools, innocent children deserve to die."  That given the choice of using his Miraculous God Powers to stop a massacre, he just stood there smirking and afterwards said, "See?  Told you something like this would happen if you didn't worship me all the time and everywhere.  Sorry, but my hands were tied."

Me, I think any deity that acts like this is a monster, not an all-loving beneficent creator.  That said, it's entirely consistent with the depiction of the Lord of Hosts in the Old Testament.  The Old Testament God was constantly smiting people left and right for such heinous crimes as gathering firewood on the sabbath, and when the Chosen People of Israel conquered a place, the word from above was "kill everyone, including children."

Don't believe me?  There are plenty of instances, but my favorite is 1 Samuel 15:

This is what the Lord Almighty says: "I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt.  Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them.  Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys."  So Saul summoned the men and mustered them at Telaim—two hundred thousand foot soldiers and ten thousand from Judah.

Long story short, Saul did as told, killing everyone up to and including the donkeys, but the Lord was still pissed off for some reason, and the Prophet Samuel told him so.  Apparently it had to do with the fact that Saul had spared the Amalekite King, Agag (like I said before, to hell with the children).  So Saul executed Agag, but the Lord still wasn't happy with him.

So what this shows is by posting bullshit like the above image, the people who think this kind of deity deserves worship are simply walking their talk.

The whole thing brings to memory a quote from Richard Dawkins.  I know his very name raises hackles, but it's so germane to this topic that I would be remiss in not including it:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

To which I can only say: touché.

The deepest problem, though, is the one the people who post this nonsense would be the least likely to admit; when they advocate tearing down the wall between church and state, they're absolutely adamant that it can only be for the benefit of one church.  Start talking about having Jewish prayers or quotes from the Qu'ran or some of the Ten Thousand Sayings of Buddha festooned about the walls of classrooms, and you'll have these same people screaming bloody murder.

So as usual, what we're talking about is a combination of ugly theology and complete hypocrisy.  And it would be hardly worth commenting on if it weren't for the power that these attitudes still have, and the degree to which they still influence policy in the United States.

Other than railing about it here on Skeptophilia, I'm not sure what to do.  Anyone who really believes this -- anyone, in other words, who wasn't just trying to score some points off the atheists -- has subscribed to a belief system that is very close to the definition of evil.

And people talk about us atheists being amoral.

The missing day

Can I make the not-very-earthshattering observation that if you are explaining evidence supporting a belief, your argument is not made stronger by lying about it?

Especially if that belief is that your own personal religion is not only superior morally, but 100% true?

I'm referring to a story of dubious provenance that has been showing up all over the place lately, mostly on Christian apologetics sites, and then forwarded by people who (1) don't understand how science works, (2) don't know how to do a Google search to check for accuracy, or (3) would prefer something sound good than be correct.  Or all three.  I ran into it via the site Command the Raven, but other versions I've seen are substantially similar.  Here are a few excerpts, edited only for length:

For all you scientists out there and for all the students who have had a hard time convincing these people regarding the truth of the Bible – here’s something that illustrates God’s awesome creation and shows He is still in control. 

Did you know that NASA’s space programmes are busy proving that was has been called ‘myth’ in the Bible is true? Mr. Harold Hill, President of the Curtis Engine Company in Baltimore, and a consultant in the space programmes, relates the following incident: "One of the most amazing things that God has for us today happened recently to our astronauts and space scientists at Green Belt, Maryland. They were checking out the positions of the sun, moon and planets out in space where they would be 100, and 1000 years from now. We have to know this as we do not want a satellite to collide with any of these in its orbits."

So we're off to a flying start, with the claim that NASA has to be very careful to make sure that satellites in orbit around the Earth don't collide with the Sun or Neptune or anything.  You can see how that could happen.

Computer measurements and data were run back and forth over the centuries when suddenly it came to a halt, displaying a red signal, which meant that either there was something wrong with the information fed into it, or with the results as compared to the standards.  They called in the service department to check it out, and the technicians asked what was wrong.  The scientists had discovered that somewhere in space in elapsed time a day was missing.  Nobody seemed able to come up with a solution to the problem.

Which brings up the awkward question of how you'd discover that a day was missing.  Were the technicians sitting around, monitoring the satellite transmissions, and suddenly one of them got this horrified look on his face and said, "Wait... where the fuck did I put last Tuesday?"  Then all of the other technicians and engineers and physicists and so forth all start searching under desks and in storage closets and behind garbage cans and so on, but to no avail.  Last Tuesday is definitely AWOL.

Finally one of the team, a Christian, said: “You know, when I was still in Sunday School, they spoke about the sun standing still…” While his colleagues didn’t believe him, they did not have an answer either, so they said: “Show us.” He got a Bible and opened it at the book of Joshua where they found a pretty ridiculous statement for anyone with ‘common sense’. There they read about the Lord saying to Joshua: “Fear them not, I have delivered them into thy hand; there shall not be a man of them stand before thee.” (Joshua 10:8). Joshua was concerned because the enemy had surrounded him, and if darkness fell, they would overpower him. So Joshua asked the Lord to make the sun stand still! That’s right – “And the sun stood still and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is this not written in the book of Ja’-sher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven and hastened not to go down about a whole
day.” (Joshua 10:13).

The astronauts and scientists said: "There is the missing day!"

So there was much rejoicing.  But then one of them pointed out that it wasn't a whole day that was had been found -- it was only 23 hours and 20 minutes.  Which left 40 minutes unaccounted for, "which could mean trouble 1000 years from now."  Why it isn't trouble now, I have no idea, but concern for our distant descendants sent the NASA folks back on a search for the missing 2/3 of an hour.

And you'll never guess where they found it.

The bible.  See, I told you you'd never guess.

As the Christian employee thought about it, he remembered somewhere in the Bible which said the sun went backwards. The scientists told him he was out of his mind, but once again they opened the Book and read these words in 2 Kings. Hezekiah, on his deathbed, was visited by the prophet, Isaiah, who told him he was not going to die. Hezekiah asked for some sign as proof. Isaiah said: “Shall the sun go forward ten degrees, or go back ten degrees?”  And Hezekiah answered: “It is a light thing for the shadow to go down ten degrees; nay, but let the shadow return backwards ten degrees.”  Isaiah the prophet cried unto the Lord, and He brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz.” (2 Kings 20:9 -11). Ten degrees is exactly 40 minutes! Twenty-three hours and twenty minutes in Joshua, plus 40 minutes in 2 Kings accounted for the missing day in the universe!

Which would have been the cause for even more rejoicing, if the whole thing hadn't been made up.  I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist (a real one, I mean, like they have at NASA) to find the story eye-rollingly ridiculous, but it has been so widely circulated -- I've seen it three times on Facebook just in the last week -- that it actually has a Snopes page dedicated to it.  In it, we find out that Harold Hill was the president of Curtis Engine Company of Baltimore, but that's pretty much the only thing in the story that is true.  First off, Hill wasn't a NASA consultant.  It turns out that Hill was an evangelical Christian with a fairly loose interpretation of the word "true," because he'd read about the "lost day" legend in a book by Harold Rimmer entitled The Harmony of Science and Scripture and decided that the story would carry more punch if he claimed he'd witnessed the whole thing happening.  He embellished his account -- adding, of course, accolades such as "NASA consultant" for himself -- and repeated it many times in public speeches.  He even devoted a whole chapter to it in his 1974 book How to Live Like a King's Kid, apparently because by then, he'd told the tale so many times that he actually was beginning to believe it.

John Martin, Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still over Gideon (1816) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And now with the amazing bullshit conduit that is the internet, the story has roared into life again.  Snopes writer David Mikkelson says about it:

To those who've given over their hearts to God and the Holy Word, this is a deeply satisfying legend.  Faith is, after all, the firm belief in something which cannot necessarily be proved, a quality that can leave believers (especially those who find themselves in the midst of non-believers) feeling unsatisfied.  As steadfast as their certainty is, they cannot prove the rightness of the path they tread to those who jeer at their convictions.  And this is a heavy burden to shoulder.  A legend such as the "missing day explained" tale speaks straight to the hearts of those who yearn for a bit of vindication in this life.  Being right isn't always enough: sometimes what one most longs for is sweet recognition from others.

Which may well be the case, but doesn't take away from the problem of a devout follower of a religion that considers "Thou shalt not bear false witness" as one of its fundamental teachings passing along a story that is essentially one long lie.  It makes me wish that as a corollary of the ninth commandment, Yahweh had seen fit to add, "And this meaneth that thou shalt spend five minutes and do a Google search before thou post this shit on Facebook."

So anyway.  No, NASA is not spending its woefully tiny budget paying scientists to verify the Old Testament.  There's no evidence whatsoever of a "lost day," because against what clock would you be able to verify that time had stopped 3,000 odd years ago?  I'd be much obliged if the people who think that god is going to bless them if they pass along this nonsense would just stop already.  Thank you.

Smiting the unbelievers

One question I have for people who believe that there are powerful, invisible beings in control of the universe is why those beings don't seem to object more strenuously when they are disbelieved in or mocked outright.

I'm not just talking about deities here, as you'll see in a moment, although mythology does provide a great many examples of tales which, if true, should give scoffers pause.  The Greeks gods, in particular, were always smiting people for pretty much nothing.  Remember when Athena turned Arachne into a spider for claiming that she was the best weaver ever?  Or when King Salmoneus of Pylos was vaporized with a thunderbolt by Zeus when he claimed to be a god?  Then there was poor Actaeon, who was turned into a stag and then ripped limb from limb by his dogs just because he happened to catch a glimpse of the goddess Artemis naked.

Looks from the picture like Actaeon was naked at the time, too, which certainly ups the creepiness factor and makes it understandable why Artemis freaked out a little.  But it still seems like an overreaction to me.

The Norse gods were a little better in that regard, although not if you were a Frost Giant.  Odin and Thor were always smiting the crap out of the Frost Giants, which is probably why you see so few Frost Giants around now.

And look at Yahweh in the Old Testament.  Given how many of his own followers he slew for various minor offenses, it's a wonder there are any of them left, either.  He killed seventy people just for looking at the Ark of the Covenant in 1 Samuel 6:19, bringing up visual images of the melting Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.  God also was not above using animals to do his dirty work -- remember how he sent bears to help out his pal Elisha in 2 Kings 2:23-24, and the bears ripped apart two dozen children who had teased Elisha about being bald?

And let's not even go into how Yahweh killed virtually the entire population of the Earth during the Great Flood, men, women and children, just for some unspecified "wickedness."

So, we have some serious precedent, here, that being a non-believer, or (worse) an outright scoffer, isn't a safe thing to do, inviting being turned into or eaten by various animals, struck with lightning, drowned, or just suffering a generic smiting.

And here I sit, healthy as ever.  Odd, that.

All of this comes up, however, not because of anything connected directly with religion.  You probably know about the Reptilians, a race of shapeshifting evil cold-blooded aliens who have infiltrated the political world for nefarious reasons.  We're talking about some serious bad guys, here, worse even than Ann Coulter.

Now, belief in the Reptilians does share some of the same characteristics as religion, in that it requires faith-based acceptance of powerful entities whose existence, by definition, can't be proven.  So it is perhaps unsurprising that this week, on the wonderfully weird blog Phantoms & Monsters, we found out that like Zeus and Artemis and Yahweh and the rest, the Reptilians do not take kindly to being taunted.

A man who gave his name only as "Matt R." was interviewed a week ago with Daniel Ott of The Edge Radio Show, a weekly broadcast that bills itself as "exciting interviews on topics such as 9/11, Angels, Near Death Experiences, Planetary Anomalies, Black Ops, to Alternative Science, Prophesies, Lost Continents, Aliens, Cryptozoology, Bio Warfare and much more!"  Matt R. was describing his various abductions by Reptilians (he's apparently had more than one), and Ott made some kind of wisecrack about Reptilians.  Here's what happened next:

In the last 10 minutes of the show, the host cracked a joke about killing reptilians.  What can only be described as an inhuman growl jumped into our conversation immediately after.  Apparently, whatever reptilian was on the line wanted to voice their displeasure with his joke.  During this conversation, I was sitting inside a parked car with the engine off. I was talking on my Skype app, over my phone's 4G connection.  There was no other radio or computer anywhere near me.  I can't think of anything that could have produced a growling noise that vivid.  That certainly didn't sound like line interference.  There are no audio files or ring tones on my Samsung S3 that sound like that.  There was a deep guttural quality to it, which made it similar to what I've heard from reptilians before.  Mr. Ott does not have a history of pranking people on his program.  And I know there is no possible explanation for generation of that noise on my end.

And I'm thinking, "that's it?  A nasty growl is the best that the ultrapowerful, black-hearted controllers of the Earth can do?  After crossing the galaxy in their faster-than-light spaceships, infiltrating the government and replacing world leaders by assuming human form, and engaging in all sorts of evil stuff from genetic engineering of alien/human hybrids to inducing Miley Cyrus to "twerk" at the Video Music Awards, the best they can manage when someone threatens to kill them is a 'guttural growl?'"

Maybe that's why supernatural entities get so little respect these days.  I mean, if a god appeared in my classroom and turned a mouthy student into an earthworm, I would definitely stand up and take notice.  Depending on who the student was, I might even sacrifice a sheep or something as a way of saying, "Thanks."  And just think of all of the people in the world who really deserve being vaporized by lightning bolts.

If Thor is up there with his hammer, I know we'd all appreciate it if he'd get up off his lazy ass and use the thing, preferably starting with someone like Bashar al-Assad.

But of course, that sort of thing never happens.  It's kind of inconvenient, the way we never get any direct evidence of all of these things we're supposed to believe in, isn't it?  I mean, I've scoffed at both Reptilians and various religious beliefs pretty much continuously for two decades, and I haven't even heard so much as a growl.

Of course, you never know what's around the corner, so it could be that I'll get struck by a meteorite or something on the way to work today.

If that happens, won't I feel silly?

The abominable cotton-polyester blend

So, a couple of days ago, in my post about how gays cause wildfires, I commented on how the biblical literalists seem to focus on specific commands from the Old Testament (such as the prohibition on homosexual acts) and ignore others entirely (such as the prohibition on eating shellfish).  I suggested that I might amuse myself that day by breaking some weird, arbitrary biblical commands, such as the prohibition against wearing clothing made of two different kinds of thread woven together, a command that was apparently so important that it was mentioned twice (Leviticus 19:19 and Deuteronomy 22:11).

Well, imagine my surprise when I found out that these verses have recently been the subject of an intense discussion on the Christianity subreddit.  I'm to be forgiven for not having seen it; I tend to avoid this subreddit, suspecting that even if I went there as a lurker, the more rabid members would somehow realize it, and shouts of "BURN THE UNBELIEVER!" would echo down the fiber optics cables of the internet.

But fortunately for me, a regular reader of Skeptophilia saw it and sent me the link.  And you should read the whole thread.  It's a doozy.

First, though, let's take a look at what the actual biblical passages say:

Leviticus 19:19:  "You are to keep My statutes. You shall not breed together two kinds of your cattle; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed, nor wear a garment upon you of two kinds of material mixed together."

Deuteronomy 22:11: "You shall not wear a material mixed of wool and linen together."

So, the second one seems only to be concerned with wool and linen, leaving you the option of a nice cotton-polyester blend, but the first one seems to indicate that this would be An Abomination In God's Eyes as well.

There's no mention of what the penalty is for all of this naughty stuff.  I'd imagine stoning to death, since that seems to be the penalty for damn near everything.  Maybe just flogging, especially if it's only socks or something.

Anyhow, this all seems pretty straightforward (albeit bizarre), so I was kind of confused when I saw that the title of the thread on the Christianity subreddit was "Help understanding Leviticus 19:19."  My general opinion is, if you need help understanding this passage, you probably would be out of your depth with Green Eggs and Ham.  It's not that hard, really.  Don't wear clothes made of two kinds of material.  End of story.

But I was wrong.  Here are some of the bits of commentary on the passage, as laid out by the readers of the Christianity subreddit:

Linen is a plant derivative, wool an animal derivative. And how we should not allow our nature to overcome our humanity is the basic message behind this commandment.

You have to look at it in historical context. Linen was often used back then for religious purposes (like curtains in the tabernacle, or the priest's garments, or the temple veil). Wool, on the other hand, was the more common fabric. This law is often taken as symbolism for mixing the secular with the sacred.

I would like to point out how there is much less resistance to taking this passage less literally than other parts of Leviticus. Coincidentally, 90% of the world is not fundamentally disgusted by the image of wool and linen being mixed. Hmmmm.

I watched a lecture that mentioned Jesus and the Mosaic laws(@ 21:00) just this afternoon. The presenter was making the case that Jesus must not have been clear on how/if the laws would have applied to gentiles, otherwise there wouldn't be so much debate about it now.

Mosaic law spoke to external behaviors. Jesus spoke to internal states of mind. It's why he was always going, "You have heard it said such and such, but I tell you some other thing." An exegesis of sorts...  This is a very utilitarian way to look at it. Sure, the "do not do such and such" seems like a wet paint sign at first, but when you understand that it speaks to the idea of thinking healthy vs. unhealthy thoughts, that really brings it all together. And it turns out it was for my benefit after all.

There are a lot of laws about not mixing different kinds of things to remind the Israelites that they're a particular people, called out to be different from everyone around them.

Sure, it's meant to be taken literally. The question that nobody ever asks, with regard to Leviticus, is by whom? Leviticus is the set of rules written for the priest class formed after the disaster at Sinai. The tribe of Levi was the only one to stand with Moses, so from then on all priests came from his tribe. Leviticus are the rules written to prevent those priests from falling into error. 

So, I'm reading through all of this, and I'm thinking; don't these people realize that all they're doing is taking the passage, and then making shit up?

If you read something in the bible you don't like, you rationalize it.  Or say "it had a historical context that doesn't apply now."  Or say it was meant for someone else.  Or say that Jesus superseded it.  Or whatever.  All of it just strikes me as special pleading; I want to be able to discriminate against gays and claim a biblical basis for it (after all, because some people find gays "fundamentally disgusting") but I still want to be able to eat my shrimp alfredo and roast pork.  So the parts I like are the inerrant word of god, and the parts I don't like are just some arbitrary rules that Jesus gave us a pass on anyhow.

It reminded me of a joke that was sent to me by a Jewish friend, regarding the kosher law.  Apparently God and Moses had a conversation on Mt. Sinai:

God:  And remember, Moses, in the laws of keeping Kosher, never cook a calf in its mother's milk. It is cruel.

Moses:  I see!  So what you are saying  is that we should never eat milk and meat together.

God:  No, what I'm saying is, never cook a calf in its mother's milk.  It is cruel.

Moses:  Oh, Lord forgive my ignorance! What you are really saying is we should wait six hours after eating meat to drink milk so the two are not in our stomachs, right?

God:  No, Moses, what I'm saying is, don't cook a calf in its mother's milk.

Moses:  Oh, Lord! Please don't strike me down for my stupidity! What you mean is we should have a separate set of dishes for milk and a separate set for meat and if we make a mistake we have to bury that dish in the dirt outside...

God:  Do whatever the fuck you want, Moses.

All of this is wryly funny in light of the latest intrusion of religion into American politics, in the person of California state senator Mimi Walters, who has just announced she is running for the House seat to be vacated by the retirement of Representative John Campbell.  [Source]  Walters' biggest financial backer is Fieldstead & Co., run by Christian reconstructionist and general wingnut Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson, who publicly advocated "total integration of biblical law into our lives."

Presumably, this "biblical law" also includes 1 Timothy 2:12:  "I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet."  So you have to wonder how Ms. Walters, should she be elected, will ever get anything done.  Which, honestly, might not be a bad thing.

Gays, god, and forest fires

Many of you have undoubtedly been following the news of the horrific wildfires, last week in Colorado and this week in Arizona.  Thus far these fires have cost millions of dollars in damages and at least 21 lives, 19 of whom were members of an elite firefighting team who died this weekend in a blaze near Phoenix.

These fires are thought to have multiple causes.  The southwest saw record or near-record temperatures last week, coupled with low rainfall.  Some people also attribute the severity of the fires, especially in Colorado, to the population explosion of the pine bark beetle, which has killed huge stands of ponderosa pines all through the Rocky Mountains.  But in so attributing the fires to these reasons, people are ignoring the role of the most powerful natural-disaster-creating force known to man:

Gays.

Yes, gays.  According to Colorado pastors Kevin Swanson and Dave Buehner, the recent fires are god's wrath against the people of Colorado for their liberal attitudes toward homosexuality.

In an interview on Generations Radio, the two ministers were clearly in agreement about what was going on here.  Said Buehner, "Why Colorado Springs?  Understand that Colorado itself is a state that is begging for God's judgment.  How did we do that?...  Our legislative session opened up this year and their very first order of business, their most pressing order of business..."  Swanson then interrupted with, "... they could hardly wait, they could hardly wait..."  And Buehner finished, "Like the first day, was to pass a Civil Union Bill, which is an uncivil bill."

And, of course, the whole thing wouldn't be complete without some mention of gay guys kissing, in this case State Senate Majority Leader Mark Ferrendino kissing his partner when they found out that the Civil Union Bill had passed, a photograph of which appeared on the front page of the Denver Post.  Said Swanson:

"When you have a state where the House leadership is performing a homosexual act on the front page of the Denver Post two months ago?  Does God read the Denver Post?  Do you think He picks up a copy of the Denver Post?  He gets it.  God gets the Denver Post."

Delivered right to His Almighty Doorstep, I'm sure.

Then, the question came up as to why, if god was trying to smite Colorado for supporting gays, the fires hit the religious and conservative areas near Colorado Springs, rather than far more liberal bastions of Denver or Boulder.  Buehner said, "Judgment begins in the House of God," as if that made complete sense, and added that the fact that god hadn't yet destroyed the entire state was an "act of grace."
 
What strikes me about all of this is that god, for all of his supposedly omnipotent smiting power, so often chooses to smite parts of the world with disasters that they pretty much already had happening beforehand.  He sends earthquakes to places that are on fault lines and near subduction zones, hurricanes to the Gulf Coast and US Atlantic Seaboard, tornadoes to the American midwest, and catastrophic forest fires to the southwestern United States and the arid parts of southern Europe.  Funny thing, that.  If I didn't know better, I would think that this meant that these events are purely... natural.

The other thing that crosses my mind, here, is that if gays really are behind all of this, maybe they should flex their muscles a little.  Hey, if you have this kind of power, why not enjoy it, especially since god's aim seems to be a bit off?  You guys could be the next generation of Mad Scientists -- but instead of rubbing your hands together and cackling maniacally before firing up your Laser Cannons, all you do is stand around and kiss, and god smites, say, Omaha.

It'd be even better if you could figure out how to target this force a little better.  Wouldn't it be cool if, for example, you could kiss and have god send a tornado to destroy the Westboro Baptist Church?  If I thought that would happen, I would happily kiss a guy, and I'm not even gay.

So anyhow, that's today's news from the Wacko Fringe Religion Department.  As I've pointed out before, however crazy this stuff sounds to nonbelievers -- and even, I hope, to most sensible Christians -- it really is completely consistent with the behavior of god as laid out in the Old Testament.  So these guys, however they seem like they're in dire need of jackets with extra long sleeves, are actually just preaching what the Holy Book says.

I'm not saying it's sensible, mind you.  I still think the folks who believe this stuff are crazy as bedbugs.  All I'm saying is that it's consistent.

Anyhow, I guess I'll wind things up here.  It's time for me to go take a shower and get dressed, which will offer me several more opportunities to break some Old Testament rules.  Maybe if I wear a shirt woven from two different kinds of thread (such an important rule that it was mentioned twice, Leviticus 19:19 and Deuteronomy 22:11) then god will smite Ann Coulter.

Hey, it's worth a try.