Trials and tribulations

A friend of mine posted a link on social media about how forty percent of Republicans approve of how Donald Trump has handled the whole horrible mess surrounding the incriminating written records from convicted pedophiles Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, despite the fact that the way he's handled it is (1) denying the records exist, (2) saying that the records don't include him, (3) saying that Obama created the records to slander him, and (4) saying okay, but Bill Clinton is in there, too, so put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Apparently, a significant proportion of MAGA-inclined individuals think this is all just hunky-dory, and are capable of believing all four of these things simultaneously.

My friend appended a comment to the effect that the whole world has gone crazy.  And I certainly understand how he could reach that conclusion.  But still, I think he's got it wrong.

The world hasn't gone crazy.  The world is crazy.  The world has always been crazy.  It's just that because there are now eight billion people on the planet and a lot of us are electronically connected, the craziness is amplified more, and spreads faster, than before.

But people?  People have always been loony, or at least a great many of them.  And here's another thing; that saying about "the cream always rises to the top" is patent nonsense.  Yeah, the situation right now is pretty extreme, but a lot of our previous presidents were nothing to brag about.  I mean, Nixon?  George W. Bush?  Reagan?  I think writer Dave Barry hit closer to the mark: "When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command.  Very often, that person is crazy."

But if you still think today's leaders (and the ones who support them) are any nuttier than those in the past, allow me to introduce you to Pope Stephen VI.

Stephen was pope for only a little over a year, from May 896 to August 897.  He started out as a priest in Rome, but other than that we know little about his background.  Apparently in 892 he was appointed as bishop of Anangni "against his will" by the pope at the time, one Formosus.

Formosus died on April 11, 896, and was succeeded by Pope Boniface VI, who reigned for fifteen days.  (Amazingly, he's not the pope with the shortest reign; that dubious honor goes to Urban VII, who died of malaria twelve days after getting the nod from the College of Cardinals.)  Boniface supposedly died of gout, but given that the church historian Caesar Baronius called him a "disgusting monster guilty of adultery and homicide," it's possible he was given a little help in shuffling off this mortal coil.

Anyhow, the next guy to be elected was the reluctant bishop Stephen.  And this is when things really went off the rails.

Formosus had gotten himself involved in playing politics with the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, which, as Voltaire quipped, was "neither Roman nor holy."  The current emperor was Lambert of Spoleto, whom Formosus himself had crowned, but in 893 the pope was becoming a little twitchy about how aggressive the Spoleto faction was getting, and decided to invite Arnulf of Carinthia, Lambert's rival, to Rome.

Formosus crowned him emperor too.

This would probably have devolved into a bloodbath had both Arnulf and Formosus not conveniently died within months of each other in 896.  Whew, disaster averted, right?  All settled, right?

Wrong.

Lambert of Spoleto and his redoubtable mother, Ageltrude, came to Rome, stomped into the papal residence, and said to the pope -- at this point Stephen VI -- "what the fuck, dude, I thought we had an agreement?"  Stephen babbled something to the effect that it hadn't been him who'd double-crossed Lambert, it'd been that rat Formosus, and what the hell do you want me to do about it anyway, he's already dead?

Dead-shmead, doesn't matter, Lambert said, and demanded that Stephen make amends.

So he did.

He dug up Formosus's rotting corpse and put it on trial.

Le Pape Formose et Etienne VI, by Jean-Paul Laurens (1870) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The problem was -- well, amongst the many problems was -- that Formosus couldn't exactly speak on his own behalf.  As James Randi put it, "It's easy to talk to the dead; the difficulty is in getting them to talk back."  So Stephen appointed a deacon to be the voice of Formosus's defense.

I'm sure you can predict how effective a strategy that was.

At one point, Stephen demanded of the corpse, "When you were bishop of Porto, why did you usurp the universal Roman See in such a spirit of ambition?", and the deacon didn't have a good answer.  In fact, since the deacon was one of Stephen's friends, he deliberately didn't have a good answer for anything.  In the end (surprise!) Formosus was found guilty, stripped of his papal vestments, had three fingers of his right hand (the ones used in papal blessings) cut off, and was interred in a graveyard for the poor.  Then Stephen decided this wasn't sufficient, so he dug up the corpse again, tied stones to it, and threw it into the Tiber River.  All of Formosus's official acts were revoked and invalidated.

This, unfortunately, included Stephen's appointment as bishop of Anangni, but it took everyone a while to realize that.

Even this wasn't the end of it, though.  Despite being weighted down, the corpse washed up on the shores of the river, and people started claiming that touching it had worked miracles.  Cured the ill, made the lame walk, that sort of thing.  Maybe Formosus had been a holy man after all!  The public sentiment turned against Stephen, and he was deposed and arrested -- and one of the charges was that he'd become pope after telling everyone he was a bishop when he actually wasn't.  Given how widely he was hated, no one came up with the objection, "But... wasn't he the one who made the declaration that invalidated his own appointment as bishop?"  Didn't matter, as it turned out.  Stephen was strangled in prison in August of 897, after a reign of only fourteen months.  As for Formosus, his body was reclothed in the papal vestments and was reburied in St. Peter's Basilica, where he's remained ever since.  The next pope, Theodore II, only reigned for twenty days (cause of death unknown but highly suspicious), so he didn't have time to do much other than say "You know, I always thought Formosus was actually an okay guy," but the one after that, John IX (who reigned for a whole two years, which was pretty good for the time) rehabilitated Formosus completely, reinstated all of his official acts, excommunicated seven cardinals who'd gone along with the "Cadaver Synod," as it became known, and announced a prohibition against putting any more corpses on trial.

Which you'd think would be one of those things you wouldn't have to pass a law about.

So there's some prime grade-A craziness that shows our current lunacy is nothing new.  I've heard it seriously claimed that the Earth is the mental ward of the universe; no less a luminary than George Bernard Shaw said, "The longer I live, the more convinced I am that this planet is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum."  I doubt Shaw was completely serious, but you know, I think he had a point.  And it's cold comfort to realize that the kind of insanity we're living through now has been going on for a very long time, given that at the moment we're stuck in the middle of it.

Humans seem to be capable of some serious nuttiness, and it all gets amplified a thousandfold when the nuts end up in charge.  But it bears keeping in mind that the nuts wouldn't end up in charge if it weren't for the support of lots of ordinary people, so we can't so easily absolve ourselves of the blame.

But "at least Donald Trump hasn't dug up a dead guy and put him on trial" is kind of a weak reassurance.  Especially since you can always follow that up with a powerful little word:

"... yet."

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Mystery, certainty, and heresy

I've been writing here at Skeptophilia for fourteen years, so I guess it's to be expected that some of my opinions have changed over that time.

I think the biggest shift has been in my attitude toward religion.  When I first started this blog, I was much more openly derisive about religion in general.  My anger is understandable, I suppose; I was raised in a rigid and staunchly religious household, and the attitude of "God as micromanager" pervaded everything.  It brings to mind the line from C. S. Lewis's intriguing, if odd, book The Pilgrim's Regress: "...half the rules seemed to forbid things he'd never heard of, and the other half forbade things he was doing every day and could not imagine not doing; and the number of rules was so enormous that he felt he could never remember them all."

But the perspective of another fourteen years, coupled with exploring a great many ideas (both religious and non-religious) during that time, has altered my perspective some.  I'm still unlikely ever to become religious myself, but I now see the question as a great deal more complex than the black-and-white attitude I had back then.  My attitude now is more that everyone comes to understand this weird, fascinating, and chaotic universe in their own way and time, and who am I to criticize how someone else squares that circle?  As long as religious people accord me the same right to my own beliefs and conscience as they have, and they don't use their doctrine to sledgehammer in legislation favoring their views, I've got no quarrel.

The reason this comes up is, of course, because of the election of a new Pope, Leo XIV, to lead the Roman Catholic Church.  I watched the scene unfold two days ago, and I have to admit it was kind of exciting, even though I'm no longer Catholic myself.  The new Pope seems like a good guy.  He's already pissed off MAGA types -- the white smoke had barely dissipated from over St. Peter's before the ever-entertaining Laura Loomer shrieked "WOKE MARXIST POPE" on Twitter -- so I figure he must be doing something right.  I guess in Loomer's opinion we can't have a Pope who feeds the poor or treats migrants as human beings or helps the oppressed.

Or, you know, any of those other things that were commanded by Jesus.

The fact remains, though, that even though I have more respect and tolerance for religion than I once did, I still largely don't understand it.  After Pope Leo's election, I got online to look at other Popes who had chosen the name "Leo," and following that thread all the way back to the beginning sent me down a rabbit hole of ecclesiastical history that highlighted how weird some of the battles fought in the church have been.

The first Pope Leo ruled back in the fifth century, and his twenty-one year reign was a long and arduous fight against heresy.  Not, you understand, people doing bad stuff; but people believing wrongly, at least in Leo's opinion.

Pope Leo I (ca. 1670) by Francisco Herrera [Image is in the Public Domain]

The whole thing boils down to the bizarre argument called "Christology," which is doctrine over the nature of Jesus.  Leo's take on this was that Jesus was the "hypostatic union" of two natures, God-nature and human nature, in one person, "with neither confusion or division."  But this pronouncement immediately resulted in a bunch of other people saying, "Nuh-uh!"  You had the:

• Monophysites, who said that Jesus only had one nature (divine);
• Dyophysites, who said that okay, Jesus had two natures, but they were separate from each other;
• Monarchians, who said that God is one indivisible being, so Jesus wasn't a distinct individual at all;
• Docetists, who said that Jesus's human appearance was only a guise, without any true reality;
• Arianists, who said that Jesus was divine in origin but was inferior to God the Father;
• Adoptionists, who said that Jesus only became the Son of God at his baptism; and
• probably a dozen or so others I'm forgetting about.

So Leo called together the Council of Chalcedon and the result was that most of these were declared heretical.  This gave the church leaders license to persecute the heretics, which they did, with great enthusiasm.  But what occurs to me is the question, "How did they know any of this?"  They were all working off the same set of documents -- the New Testament, plus (in some cases) some of the Apocrypha -- but despite that, all of them came to different conclusions.  Conclusions that they were so certain of they were completely confident about using them to justify the persecution of people who believed differently (or, in the case of the heretics themselves, that they believed so strongly they were willing to be imprisoned or executed rather than changing their minds).

Myself, I find it hard to imagine much of anything that I'm that sure of.  I try my hardest to base my beliefs on the evidence and logic insofar as I understand them at the time, but all bets are off if new data comes to light.  That's why although I consider myself a de facto atheist, I'm hesitant to say "there is no God."  The furthest I'll go is that from what I know of the universe, and what I've experienced, it seems to me that there's no deity in charge of things. 

But if God appeared to me to point out the error of my ways, I'd kind of be forced to reconsider, you know?  It's like the character of Bertha Scott -- based very much on my beloved grandmother -- said, in my novella Periphery:

"Until something like this happens, you can always talk yourself out of something."  Bertha chuckled.  "It’s like my daddy said about the story of Moses and the burning bush.  I remember he once said after Mass that if he was Moses, he’d’a just pissed himself and run for the hills.  Mama was scandalized, him talking that way, but I understood.  Kids do, you know.  Kids always understand this kind of thing...  You see, something talks to you out of a flaming bush, you can think it’s God, you can lay down and cry, you can run away, but the one thing you can’t do is continue to act like nothing’s happened."

So while my own views are, in some sense, up for grabs, my default is to stick with what I know from science.  And the fifth century wrangling by the first Pope Leo over the exact nature of Jesus strikes me as bizarre.  As former Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin put it, "Some people are more certain of everything than I am of anything."

Be that as it may, I wish all the best to this century's Pope Leo.  Like I said, he looks like a great choice, and a lot of my Catholic friends seem happy with him.  As far as my own mystification about a lot of the details of religion, it's hardly the only thing about my fellow humans I have a hard time understanding.  But like I said earlier, as long as religious people don't use their own certainty to try to force me into belief, I'm all about the principle of live and let live.

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Thus sayeth the prophecy

I've wondered for years why people fall for conspiracy theories.

My surmise -- and admittedly, that's all it is -- is that when bad things happen, any explanation is better than there being no explanation other than the universe being a chaotic and capricious place.  Blaming the latest tornado outbreak on weather manipulation by the Bad Guys at least means there's a reason why communities were destroyed and lives were lost; otherwise it just appears that shit happens because shit happens, and nice people sometimes die and the world can be dangerous and unfair.

Which brings us to the death of Pope Francis, who died three days ago at the age of 88.

Even for many non-Catholics, Pope Francis seemed like a pretty cool guy.  He embodied tolerance, gentleness, humility, and a deep concern for our environment.  I didn't agree with his theology (obviously) but I did have a lot of respect for him as a person and a spiritual leader.

Now, it's not like his death was unexpected.  He'd been ailing and in a slow decline for months, and recently came out of a long hospital stay for double pneumonia.  Even so, the world's Catholics are in mourning -- and understandably anxious, in our current volatile world situation, about who will be chosen next to lead the world's 1.4 billion Roman Catholics.

And... also not unexpected... almost as soon as he died, the conspiracy theories started.

The first was that his death had something to do with a visit from Vice President J. D. Vance, who is nominally Catholic himself but embodies the exact opposite list of characteristics from those I listed for Pope Francis: intolerance, viciousness, arrogance, and a complete disregard for the environment.  I've seen a number of claims -- some tongue-in-cheek, others apparently quite serious -- that Vance did something to hasten the Pope's death because of Francis's condemnation of many of the Trump administration's policies.

I'm a little dubious, but I think we should deport Vance to El Salvador just in case.  He recently said he's fine with the "inevitable errors" that will come with eliminating due process, so he should have no problem with it, right?

Even more out there are the people who are now leaping about making excited little squeaking noises about the Prophecy of St. Malachi.  This curious document is a series of 112 phrases in Latin, each of which is supposed to refer to one of the Popes, in order, starting with Celestine II (who led the church from 1143 to 1144).  It was published in 1595 by Flemish Benedictine monk Arnold Wion, but Wion said it was actually from Malachi of Armagh, a twelfth-century Irish saint.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Andreas F. Borchert, Malaquías de Armagh (cropped), CC BY-SA 4.0]

Most modern scholars, however, think the whole thing was made up, if not by Wion, by someone in the late sixteenth century.  So any accurate passages that apply to the Popes from prior to 1595 or so shouldn't be looked upon as anything even close to miraculous.  It is, after all, easy to prophesy something after it's already happened.

Aficionados of the prophecy, though, have twisted themselves into pretzels trying to make the lines referring to events after 1595 fit to the Popes they allegedly are about.  #83, for example, which would correspond with Pope Alexander VII, translates to "Guardian of the Mountains," and Alexander's papal arms had a design of six hills.  Pope Clement X, whose line is "From a Great River," was allegedly born during a flood of the Tiber.  

When you get into the eighteenth century, however, things become dicier, because by that time the Prophecy of St. Malachi had become widely popular, so some of the Popes apparently did stuff to fit the prophecy rather than the other way around.  Pope Clement XI, for example, corresponds to the line "Surrounded by Flowers," and Clement had a medal created with the line "Flores circumdati," which is a pretty blatant attempt to make sure the Prophecy applies to him.

The reason the conspiracy theorists are getting all excited is that there are a total of 112 passages in the Prophecy, and -- you guessed it -- Pope Francis is the 112th Pope since Celestine II.  So, without further ado, here's the passage that's supposed to apply to Pope Francis:

Peter the Roman, who will pasture his sheep in many tribulations, and when these things are finished, the City of Seven Hills will be destroyed, and the dreadful judge will judge his people.  The End.

It's hard even for the most devoted conspiracy theorist to see how Pope Francis could be "Peter the Roman."  He's not Roman, he's Argentine; neither his chosen papal name nor his birth name (Jorge Mario Bergoglio) contains any form of the name Peter.  The best they've been able to do is to say that his chosen name (Francis) is after St. Francis of Assisi, and St. Francis's father was named Pietro, but even for a lot of woo-woos this is stretching credulity to the breaking point.

Be that as it may, there are still a lot of people who think the Prophecy is serious business, and they are especially focusing on "the City of Seven Hills will be destroyed" part.  Because now that Pope Francis is dead, that means the rest of the prediction is imminent, so Rome is about to be hit by a massive earthquake or something.

I'm thinking it's probably not worth worrying about.  I mean, for cryin' in the sink, this is worse than Nostradamus.  Plus, it's not like we don't have enough real stuff to lose sleep over.  I'm not going to fret over a prophecy that couldn't even get the name and origin of the Pope right.

But for some reason, this kind of stuff thrills a lot of people, and I really don't see the appeal.  I guess it gives some mystical gloss to day-to-day events, rather than things happening because the world is just kind of weird and random.  In any case, to any of my Catholic readers, my condolences for the loss of your spiritual leader.  He did seem like a pretty cool guy, and I hope they can find a suitable replacement to step into his shoes.

But for those of you who live in Rome, no worries about the city burning down or anything. 

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When the saints go marching in

My mom was an extremely devout Roman Catholic, and I still recall her instructing me to "pray to St. Jude" when I was worried about a bad outcome.

At some point I thought to ask her, "Why St. Jude?"

"Because he's the patron saint of lost causes," she explained.

I pondered on that for a moment.  "If he's in charge of lost causes," I finally said, "wouldn't he be the worst person to pray to?  Shouldn't I be asking for help from someone with a better track record?"

My mom, who had many fine qualities but was born without a sense of humor, didn't appreciate my attempt at levity.  She took her saints seriously.

St. Jude is hardly the only Catholic saint whose story is a little on the odd side.  Consider, for example, St. Rita of Cascia, who lived in the fifteenth century in Perugia, Italy.  Rita at first seemed like she was destined to live a completely ordinary life.  She was the daughter of a moderately wealthy couple in the town of Roccaporena, and upon reaching marrying age was wedded to a nobleman named Paolo di Ferdinando di Mancino.  Mancino turned out to be a nasty piece of work, and was verbally and physically abusive to poor Rita, but by her "humility, kindness, and faith" she was able to convert him to better behavior.  They had two sons, Giangiacomo Antonio and Paulo Maria, and everything was going on swimmingly until a guy named Guido Chiqui, who belonged to a rival family, stabbed Mancino to death.

Well, Rita was understandably upset, especially after all the effort she'd put in to turn her husband into a nice guy, and she was even more chagrined to find out her two sons were planning on taking revenge and murdering Chiqui, so she prayed that they be spared from doing something that would land them both in hell forever.  God obliged by making them both die of dysentery.

So be careful what you pray for, I guess.

Rita, now husbandless and childless, decided to join a convent, where she died in 1457.  She's now the patron saint of abused people.

A painting of St. Rita of Cascia from her tomb [Image is in the Public Domain]

Then there's St. Lidwina of Schiedam, a fourteenth-century Dutch woman who was injured while ice skating at age fifteen, and afterward supposedly didn't need to eat anything.  Despite this -- and the alarming and bizarre claim that she "shed skin, bones, and parts of her intestines, which her parents kept in a vase and which gave off a sweet odor" --  she lived another thirty-seven years, and upon canonization became the patron saint of chronic illnesses... and ice skaters.

Seems like if I was an ice skater, I'd want to pray to someone who hadn't nearly died doing it, but that's just me.

Then there's the third-century St. Denis, who was a Christian bishop among the Parisii, a Gaulish tribe who lived along the banks of the River Seine (and for whom Paris is named).  St. Denis went around preaching, and apparently was so well-spoken that he converted a lot of local pagans, which pissed off the local authorities.  They appealed to the Roman Emperor Decius, who gave the order to arrest Denis and his friends Rusticus and Eleutherius.  After a stint in prison, all three were beheaded with a sword on the highest hill in the area -- what is now called Montmartre.

So far, nothing too odd.  But after Denis was beheaded, his body stood up, picked up his own head, and walked three miles with it, his head preaching a sermon the whole way.  At some point evidently even holiness couldn't propel him any further and he collapsed and died (again) -- on the site where the Basilica of St. Denis currently stands.  But this is why many images of St. Denis are shown with him holding his own head:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Thesupermat, Paris - Cathédrale Notre-Dame - Portail de la Vierge - PA00086250 - 003, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Besides being the patron saint of both Paris and France as a whole, guess what else St. Denis is the patron saint of?

Headaches.

Another third-century saint who is mostly famous for how he died is St. Lawrence, who came from the town of Huesca in Spain.  He preached all over southern Europe but got himself in trouble when he was in Rome in 258 C.E. by recommending redistribution of wealth to the poor.  (If you can imagine.)  The powers that be decided Lawrence needed to go, and they came up with a nasty way to do it -- they chained him to a grill and roasted him over an open fire.  Lawrence, defiant to the end, yelled at his executioners, "You can turn me over, I'm done on this side!"  And this is why he's the patron saint of cooks... and comedians.

But the weirdest claim I've seen along these lines is an obscure seventh-century British saint, St. Rumbold of Buckingham.  Rumbold was supposedly the grandson of King Penda of Mercia, who was a prominent pagan, but his parents (names unknown) converted to Christianity.  Rumbold was born in 662 C.E. and only lived three days -- but was born able to talk.  His first words were allegedly "Christianus sum, Christianus sum, Christianus sum!" ("I'm a Christian, I'm a Christian, I'm a Christian!"), which even if you're devout must have been creepy as hell.  Afterward Rumbold  politely requested baptism, and preached several sermons before expiring.  

There are several places named after him, including St. Rumbold's Well in Buckingham:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Fractal Angel, St Rumbold's Well - geograph.org.uk - 423381, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The best part of the whole story, though, is that Boxley Abbey in Kent had a famous statue of St. Rumbold, that was small and light (because, of course, he was a baby), but sometimes inexplicably would become so heavy no one could lift it.  The deal was, the monks said, that only someone who was holy and pure of heart could lift the statue.  Well, when the Dissolution of the Monasteries happened during the sixteenth century, and Boxley Abbey was abandoned and largely torn down, it was discovered that the statue was fixed to its heavy stone base by a wooden pin that could be released by a person standing unseen behind the alcove.  So, basically, one of the monks would check out whoever was trying to lift the statue, and decide if they were holy enough to pull the pin for.

Sometimes even Miracles of God need a little human assistance, apparently.

Anyhow, that's our cavalcade of holiness for the day.  Unsurprisingly, I think the whole thing is kind of weird.  I feel bad for the saints who got martyred -- no one deserves that -- and even for poor St. Rita with her life-long run of bad luck.  I don't think I'll be praying to any of them, though, however much our country could use some help from St. Jude at the moment.

Or even from talking babies and guys walking around carrying their own severed heads.

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Rules for miracles

In today's News of the Surreal, we have: the Vatican is tightening the rules on what it's willing to call divine supernatural phenomena.

It's tricky business, isn't it?  In science, there's a well-established protocol for evaluating the strength of a claim, involving stuff like evidence and logic (and, if possible, a statistical analysis of the data).  But how do you do that in religion, where the only real rule is God does whatever the hell he wants?  Most of the claims of miracles are, by definition, one-offs; after all, if the same sort of thing kept happening over and over, it wouldn't be a miracle.  It's not like when Moses saw the Burning Bush, he was able to say, "Okay, let's compare this to other times we've had booming voices speak out of a flaming shrubbery, and see if this is a real phenomenon or if maybe I shouldn't have eaten those suspicious-looking mushrooms at dinner." 

So now, according to the new rules, bishops are being given the unenviable task of deciding whether a given apparition or miraculous healing or whatnot is real.  The first hurdle, apparently, is to determine if it is an outright lie to make money -- and the problem is these sorts of claims are ridiculously lucrative, so such scams abound.  The apparition of the Virgin Mary in the little village of Medjugorje, Bosnia and Herzegovina, wherein six adults were supposedly blessed for their faith and told such surprising revelations as "don't have an abortion" and "same-sex marriage is naughty in God's sight," led to it becoming the third most popular pilgrimage site in Europe (after Fátima in Portugal and Lourdes in France).  Over a million people visit the shrine every year, bringing in huge amounts of revenue; in 2019, sixty thousand young Catholics from all over the world descended on the village, accompanied by fourteen archbishops and bishops and over seven hundred priests -- despite the Vatican making the rather equivocal statement that such pilgrimages were okay "as long as there is no assumption the [apparitions of Mary] are confirmed to have a supernatural origin."

One of the many gift shops in Medjugorje [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sean MacEntee, Virgin Mary Statues (5778409684), CC BY 2.0]

Don't try to tell me that religion isn't big business.

Once the bishops determine that any given claim isn't simply fraudulent, they issue a nihil obstat ("there is no obstacle") decree, which is the religious version of "Whatever floats your boat, dude."  Nihil obstat effectively says, "Okay, fine, we can't stop you from worshiping this thing, but we're not saying it's real, either."  In the new guidelines, bishops are warned against going from there to stating outright that the phenomenon is divine in origin; issued prematurely, the Vatican says, jumping from nihil obstat to "this is a message from God" can lead to "damage to the unity of the Church" and could "cause scandals and undermine the credibility of the Church."

Well, yeah, that's the problem, isn't it?  There is no good evidence-based litmus test for differentiating between a "real" supernatural event (whatever that means) and a mere delusion; if there was, the event wouldn't be supernatural, it would simply be natural.  So we're still down to the sketchy grounds of having a bishop say, "I prayed to God and God said it was so," which then hinges on whether the bishop himself is telling the truth.

Because I can't think of any times bishops have been involved in hinky stuff, can you?

So the new rules don't really solve anything, just kick the can down the road to give the impression that there are now hard-and-fast rules for determining the veracity of something that by definition doesn't obey the laws of nature.  The BBC article where I learned about this story (linked above) ends with what has to be my favorite line I've read in a news source in months, to wit: "And so the Vatican, an institution peppered with mysticism, and which still communicates via smoke signals when electing a new pope, will be hoping its new rules can regulate claims of the supernatural."

Heh.  Yeah.  The Catholic Church, of course, is kind of in an awkward position, because they do more or less accept science most of the time, as long as the science doesn't fly in the face of the status quo.  The Big Bang Model was actually the brainchild of an astronomer who was also an ordained priest (Monseigneur Georges Lemaître) and the Vatican stated outright that the Big Bang was completely compatible with Catholic theology in 1951.  They officially pardoned Galileo in 1992 (better late than never), and have at least refused to condemn biological evolution.  But the fact remains that -- as the writer for the BBC News stated -- the entire institution is rooted in mysticism, which is a deeply unscientific approach to understanding the world.  I suppose I'd prefer this sort of waffling to (say) the views of the fundamentalists, who pretty well reject science in toto, but it still strikes me that trying to play it both ways is not gonna turn out to be a winning strategy.  Once you accept any kind of evidence-based criteria for establishing the truth, you're solidly in science's wheelhouse, and -- despite the "non-overlapping magisteria" stance of people like evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould -- the result for religious claims has almost always been a solid thumbs-down.

In any case, there you have it.  New rules for miracles.  I guess it's a step up from the bumper sticker I saw a while back that said, "The Bible said it, I believe it, and that settles it," but given the other options, I'm still going with the laws of scientific induction any day of the week.

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Spark of lies

Let me just say for the record that if you're making a claim, your case is not strengthened by lying about the evidence.

The topic comes up because of a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who sent me a link along with a message ending with the words "HUGE FACEPALM," and I have to say that is, if anything, an underreaction.

The story starts with a piece of (legitimate, and actually fascinating) research that appeared in Nature a few years ago.  It used the technique of fluorescence tagging to establish that rapid movement of zinc ions at the moment of fertilization is one of the mechanisms that prevents polyspermy -- the fusion of an egg with two sperm cells, which would result in a wildly wrong number of chromosomes and (very) early embryonic death.

Well, a woman named Kenya Sinclair, writing for Catholic Online, found this research -- I was going to say "read it," but that seems doubtful -- and is claiming that this "zinc spark," as the researchers called it, represents the moment the soul enters the embryo.  Thus proving that an immortal soul is conferred at the moment of conception.

Don't believe me?  Here is a verbatim quote:

Catholics have long believed life begins at the moment of conception, which is why in vitro fertilization and the use of contraceptives are considered immoral.  Now, with the discovery of the spark of life, science just may have proven the Church has been right all along...

Researchers discovered the moment a human soul enters an egg, which gives pro-life groups an even greater edge in the battle between embryonic life and death. The precise moment is celebrated with a zap of energy released around the newly fertilized egg.

Teresa Woodruff, one of the study's senior authors and professor in obstetrics and gynecology at the university, delivered a press release in which she stated, "to see the zinc radiate out in a burst from each human egg was breathtaking."

Of course it is breathtaking - she saw the moment a soul entered the newly fertilized egg!

Though scientists are unable to explain why the egg releases zinc, which then binds to small molecules with a flash, the faithful recognize this must be the moment God allows a miracle to occur.

This then spawned a YouTube video (because of course it did) that has garnered over forty thousand views, and comments like the following:

• This gives the idea that the Shroud of Turin somewhat resembles this kind of event, where a burst of light brings someone into life.
• Glory to Lord and Savior Jesus for all eternity Thank you Lord, THANK YOU!!!
• For me if soul exist then also god exist
• In vitro fertilizaton [sic] is playing God, and should be illegal, and fertilized eggs SHOULD NOT BE DESTROYED, they are killing human beings!  Life begins at conception no matter what athiest [sic] scientists say!
• I am a Christian but I'm confused on this.  If the flash of light has something to do with God and the souls entering the body, why does it happen in animals?  I've been told that animals don't have souls... is that wrong idk?

IDK either, honestly, but mostly what IDK is how people who post this stuff remember not to put their underwear on backwards.

The whole thing put me in mind of the map that was circulating in the months after the 2011 Fukushima disaster, and was claimed to show the spread of horrible toxic nuclear contamination from the breached nuclear reactor:

I mean, look at that!  Glowing purple at the center, with evil red and orange tendrils reaching out like some kind of malign entity all the way across the Pacific!

There are just a couple of problems with this.  First, if you'll look at the scale on the right, you'll see that the colors represent something measured in centimeters.  I don't know about you, but I've hardly ever seen radioactivity measured in units of distance.  ("Smithers!  We've got to get out of here!  If this reactor melts down, it will release over five and a half furlongs of gamma rays!")

In fact, this is a map showing the maximum wave heights from the tsunami.  But that didn't stop people from using this image to claim that NOAA and other government agencies were hiding the information on deadly contamination of the ocean in a particularly nefarious and secretive way, namely by creating a bright, color-coded map and releasing it on their official website.

Look, I get that we all have our pet theories and strongly-held beliefs, and we'd love it to pieces if we found hard evidence supporting them.  But taking scientific research and mischaracterizing it to make it look like you have that evidence is, to put it bluntly, lying.

And the fact that you're successfully hoodwinking the gullible and ignorant is not something to brag about.

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Snake in the grass

Okay, now I've heard everything.

If you ever run across a more ridiculous claim, I do not want to know about it.  This one already lowered my opinion of the average intelligence of the human species by ten IQ points.

You've probably heard the conspiracy theories about COVID-19 -- that it was deliberately started by the Chinese, that the vaccine contains microchips so The Bad Guys ™ can keep track of us, and so on.  But none of them can hold a candle to what one Bryan Ardis is saying.  Ardis is allegedly a "chiropractor, acupuncturist, and medical researcher," but after you hear his claim, you will probably come to the conclusion that his medical degree came from Big Bob's Discount Diploma Warehouse.

Ready?

Ardis says the Catholic church created the COVID-19 virus from cobra venom, and is using it to turn us all into Satan worshipers.

So far, it's just a wacko guy who came up with a wacko idea.  Nothing special, because after all, that's what wacko guys do.  What sets him apart is that radio broadcaster Stew Peters took him seriously enough that he made a documentary about Ardis and his idea -- a documentary called "Watch the Waters" which has already gotten 640,000 views and is trending on Twitter.

I'd like to hope a significant chunk of the views are by people who are saying, "Whoa, listen up to what this nutcake is saying," but chances are, there are enough people who believe him that it's troubling.  Here's what Ardis says, which I feel obliged to state is verbatim:

The Latin definition historically for virus—originally and historically, virus meant, and means, "venom."  So, I started to wonder, "Well, what about the name ‘corona’? Does it have a Latin definition or a definition at all?"  So I actually looked up what’s the definition and on Dictionary.com, it brings up thirteen definitions: ‘Corona, religiously, ecclesiastically, means gold ribbon at the base of a miter.  So, this actually could read, "The Pope’s Venom Pandemic."  In Latin terms, corona means crown.  Visually, we see kings represented with a crown symbol.  So put that together for me: king cobra venom.  It actually could read, "King Cobra Venom Pandemic."

I actually believe this is more of a religious war on the entire world.  If I was going to do something incredibly evil, how ironic would it be that the Catholic Church, or whoever, would use the one symbol of an animal that represents evil in all religion? …  You take that snake or that serpent, and you figure out how to isolate genes from that serpent and get those genes of that serpent to insert itself into your God-given created DNA.  I think this was the plan all along; to get the serpent’s—the Evil One’s—DNA into your God-created DNA.  And they figured out how to do this with this mRNA [vaccine] technology.  They’re using mRNA—which is mRNA extracted from I believe the king cobra venom—and I think they want to get to that venom inside of you and make you a hybrid of Satan.

 Probably needless to say, I read this whole thing with this expression on my face:

It does leave me with a few responses, however:

• Satan has DNA?
• Linguistics is not a cross between free association and a game of Telephone.  
• When mRNA is injected into you (e.g. the COVID vaccine), it degrades in only a couple of days.  By that time, if the vaccine worked, you've begun to make antibodies to the protein the mRNA coded for (in this case, the spike protein).  It doesn't get into your DNA, nor affect your DNA in any way.  So if the COVID vaccine was engineered to turn us into demons, we'd all turn back into ordinary humans a couple of days later, which now that I think of it could be kind of fun.
• Injecting king cobra venom into you would kill you within minutes, given that this is basically what happens when you get bitten by a king cobra.
• "Corona" is Latin for "crown," that bit is correct.  But coronaviruses are a big family of viruses that has been known to scientists since Leland Bushnell and Carl Brandly first isolated them in 1933, and were named not for the pope's miter but because the rings of spike proteins on the surface look a little like a crown.
• Is Bryan Ardis stark raving loony?  Or what?

So there you have it.  We are now in the Pope's King Cobra Venom Pandemic.  Despite these dire warnings, my wife and I have both been vaccinated three times, and we haven't turned into hybrids of Satan.  But we have, so far, avoided getting COVID, which is kind of the point.

But I will end with reiterating my plea: if you find a crazier claim, please don't tell me about it.  Reading about this one made countless cells in my cerebral cortex that I can ill afford to lose die screaming in agony.  From now on in Skeptophilia, I think I'll focus on happy bunnies and rainbows.  We'll see how long that lasts.

Hopefully a while, at least.  The last thing we need is my brain cell loss contributing to a further drop in the average human IQ.

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Holy chemtrails, Batman!

If there's one thing I've learned from nine years of writing here at Skeptophilia, it's that there is no idea so weird that someone can't alter it so as to make it way weirder.

On Saturday, we looked at the woman in Japan who is convinced that the way to get rid of pesky ghosts is to buy a high-quality air purifier.  This would put ghosts in the same class as indoor air pollutants and that greasy smell left behind when you fry bacon, which is not how I'd like to be remembered by my nearest and dearest.  "Gordon's back!  Turn on the air purifier!" is not what I'd want to hear, if I was a ghost.

But according to a Roman Catholic bishop in Colombia, there's another way to get rid of evil spirits.  Have an airplane fly over and create a "chemtrail"...

... out of holy water.

I'm not making this up, but I kind of wish I was, because I did some repeated headdesks while researching this post while trying to find out if it was actually true or the result of someone trying to trap me (and others) in Poe's Law.  Sadly, it appears that the whole thing is real.  Monsignor Rubén Darío Jaramillo Montoya, bishop of the city of Buenaventura, is distressed by the unpleasant stuff that goes on down in this port city of 340,000 inhabitants.  So far this year there have been 51 murders, says Monsignor Montoya, which is double what occurred during an equal-length time interval last year.  So the only answer is to douse the entire city in holy water, to "take out these demons that are destroying the city's port."

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Amazingly enough, the powers-that-be in Buenaventura are all-in on this idea, and plan on spraying the city on July 13 or 14.   "In Buenaventura we have to get rid of the devil to see if we return the tranquility that the city has lost with so many crimes, acts of corruption with so much evil and drug trafficking that invades our port," a church representative told reporters.

There's no doubt that Buenaventura is kind of a mess.  Besides the murders, which are certainly shocking enough, there's the fact that it's a major hub of the drug trade (especially of cocaine) heading north to the United States.  Efforts by the government to clean the place up have been largely ineffective, and a lot of the city is controlled more by the Cali cartel than it is by law enforcement and elected officials.

On the other hand, mass exorcisms to get rid of crime and drug trafficking have been tried before, and the results were fairly unimpressive.  Back in 2015, Mexican "renowned exorcist" Father José Antonio Fortea organized an "Exorcismo Magno" to evict the demons that were behind all the murders and mayhem and drug trade, and as far as I can tell Mexico is still as dangerous as it ever was.  So as far as I can tell, exorcisms aren't that great a solution to crime and drug trafficking, ranking right behind building a wall to stop the Bad Hombres from getting in.

So sadly, loading up holy water in a crop duster isn't likely to do much, either.  I suppose it falls into the "no harm if it amuses you" department, although it must be said these sorts of "thoughts and prayers"-type solutions are problematic in that they give people the impression that you're doing something when you really aren't.

But that's not going to stop Monsignor Montoya and the rest of the Holy Chemtrails Squad from doing their thing the second week of July.  I'm just as glad I won't be there when it happens.  If I got sprayed with holy water, I'd probably spontaneously combust, which would be unpleasant for me, even if it might be entertaining for any onlookers.

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Richard Dawkins is a name that often sets people's teeth on edge.  However, the combative evolutionary biologist, whose no-holds-barred approach to young-Earth creationists has given him a well-deserved reputation for being unequivocally devoted to evidence-based science and an almost-as-well-deserved reputation for being hostile to religion in general, has written a number of books that are must-reads for anyone interested in the history of life on Earth -- The Blind Watchmaker, Unweaving the Rainbow, Climbing Mount Improbable, and (most of all) The Ancestor's Tale.

I recently read a series of essays by Dawkins, collectively called A Devil's Chaplain, and it's well worth checking out, whatever you think of the author's forthrightness.  From the title, I expected a bunch of anti-religious screeds, and I was pleased to see that they were more about science and education, and written in Dawkins's signature lucid, readable style.  They're all good, but a few are sheer brilliance -- his piece, "The Joy of Living Dangerously," about the right way to approach teaching, should be required reading in every teacher-education program in the world, and "The Information Challenge" is an eloquent answer to one of the most persistent claims of creationists and intelligent-design advocates -- that there's no way to "generate new information" in a genome, and thus no way organisms can evolve from less complex forms.

It's an engaging read, and I recommend it even if you don't necessarily agree with Dawkins all the time.  He'll challenge your notions of how science works, and best of all -- he'll make you think.

[If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia!]

Pew-pew-pew

Because it's always a losing bet to say the state of things in the United States couldn't get any weirder, today we have: a priest holding a mass of exorcism to protect Brett Kavanaugh from a spell cast by witches.

I wish I were making this up.  You might have heard about the witches, who were so pissed off about Brett Kavanaugh's nomination and ultimate accession to the Supreme Court that they hexed him.  Twice.  Once before the confirmation vote, and once, for good measure, afterwards.

The event, sponsored by spiritualist/occult book store Catland Books, explained it thus:

We will be embracing witchcraft's true roots as the magik of the poor, the downtrodden and disenfranchised and [its] history as often the only weapon, the only means of exacting justice available to those of us who have been wronged by men just like him. 

[Kavanaugh] will be the focal point, but by no means the only target, so bring your rage and all of the axes you've got to grind.  There will also be a second ritual afterward — "The Rites of the Scorned One" which seeks [sic] to validate, affirm, uphold and support those of us who have been wronged and who refuse to be silent any longer.

Well, far be it from the Righteous to take this lying down.  So Father Gary Thomas, who serves as an exorcist for the Diocese of San Jose, California, decided to take some serious action.  "Conjuring up personified evil does not fall under free speech," Thomas said, making me wonder what laws it would fall under.

Spinello Aretino, The Exorcism of St. Benedict (1387) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Although given the current administration's reputation for doing whatever the evangelicals want, I wouldn't be surprised if the next bill to go through Congress is a Satanic Attack Protection Act.  Or perhaps a law preventing demons from immigrating into the United States.  Or maybe just a suggestion to build a wall along the border between the U.S. and hell.

Thomas went on to explain further:

They are going to direct the evil to have a permanently adverse effect on the Supreme Court justice.

When curses are directed at people in a state of grace, they have little or no effect. Otherwise, [I have] witnessed harm come upon people such as physical illness, psychosis, depression and having demons attach to them. Curses sometimes involve a blood sacrifice either through an animal or a human being, such as an aborted baby...

The decision to do this against a Supreme Court justice is a heinous act and says a lot about the character of these people that should not be underestimated or dismissed. These are real evil people.

I suppose this is to be expected from someone in my position, but to me this really sounds like two kids fighting with finger guns, one saying, "Pew-pew-pew!  I got you!  You're dead!" and the other saying, "No, I'm not, I got my magic invisible shield up in time!"

Only these are adults, and I have the sneaking suspicion that a significant proportion of Americans think this is perfectly normal behavior.  And these people vote.

So that's today's contribution from the Department of Surreal News.  I keep thinking that we have to have plumbed the depths of government-endorsed insanity, but I keep being wrong.  A friend of mine thinks that all this is happening because we're living in a computer simulation, and the programmers have gotten bored and now are simply fucking with us to see what we'll do.

And I have to admit, it makes as much sense as any explanation I could have come up with.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is something everyone should read.  Jonathan Haidt is an ethicist who has been studying the connections between morality and politics for twenty-five years, and whose contribution to our understanding of our own motives is second to none.  In The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics, he looks at what motivates liberals and conservatives -- and how good, moral people can look at the same issues and come to opposite conclusions.

His extraordinarily deft touch for asking us to reconsider our own ethical foundations, without either being overtly partisan or accepting truly immoral stances and behaviors, is a needed breath of fresh air in these fractious times.  He is somehow able to walk that line of evaluating our own behavior clearly and dispassionately, and holding a mirror up to some of our most deep-seated drives.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]