Fact check

I wasn't going to write a post about Michele Bachmann.  I told myself, "stay out of politics.  Blog on something safe and non-controversial, like evolution."  And I thought, "You're not going to convince anyone who isn't already convinced, so what's the point?"

Then, this morning, while perusing the news, I happened upon a story about Michele Bachmann's recent gaffe in which she identified Lexington and Concord and "The Shot Heard Around the World" as being in New Hampshire, and one of the comments posted after the story was the following:

"Sure, Bachmann has had here [sic] gaffes, like anyone that appears regularly on TV, radio, etc. But she's on the right side of the issues which, last I checked, is a great deal of what matters."

No, I'm sorry.  You're wrong.  Facts matter.

Bachmann, the oft-proclaimed "darling of the Tea Party," is becoming notorious for misspeaking.  She called the Smoot-Hawley Act the "Hoot-Smawley Act," and said it was signed into law by a Democrat, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who is therefore directly responsible for the Great Depression.  (It was signed by Herbert Hoover, a Republican, in 1930, three years before FDR was inaugurated, and may have contributed to the Depression, but was hardly its cause as most historians date the Depression as beginning in 1929.)  She even seems to think that epidemics are the Democrats' fault, as she blamed the 1976 swine flu outbreak on Jimmy Carter, even though Gerald Ford was president at the time.

This woman makes so many mistakes that you have to wonder if the Republicans have hired her to make Sarah Palin look intelligent by comparison.

Facts matter.  Yes, anyone who is a public speaker can misspeak; as a teacher, I've done it, more than once.  But you have to be careful -- one slip, or even two, can be laughed off as simply being a fallible human being, making a faux pas when under pressure.  At some point, however, you cross the line, and people start thinking, "what a moron."  And they stop giving what you say any credence.

Well, sometimes.  It appears that with Palin and Bachmann, all it's done is made their defenders more defensive, and propelled them even further into the spotlight.  Every day, I expect to hear that the Republicans have finally said, as a party, "these two have the IQ of road salt," and to see Palin and Bachmann dwindling back into well-deserved obscurity.  But somehow, their ineptness, their seeming inability to hire a fact-checker before they speak, makes them seem all the more "folksy" and like "regular people," and does nothing but increase their appeal.

Why is it that people want a leader who is "just one of us folks?"  Me, I want a president who is smarter than I am.  Way smarter.  I know I'm not intelligent enough for that job, not by a longshot.  But somehow, candidates who can tap into the image of being "average" have a strong appeal.  Is it because we are trying desperately to hang on to the myth that "anyone can become president?"  Are we falling for that perversion of the democratic ideal that because we all should have equal rights, somehow we all should be treated as if we have equal abilities?  Is it that we distrust the intelligentsia because of the negative portrayal of smart people in the media?

Or are the majority of Americans simply nitwits themselves?

And since I've probably already pasted a target on my own chest by publicly posting the foregoing, I may as well cock the pistol by adding that the whole belief that "facts matter less than opinions" is why 40% of Americans are still young-earth creationists.

The whole thing is exasperating.  At a time when we're in deep economic distress, and the world is facing uprisings, rebellions, and terrorism, we need a leader who has both breadth and depth of knowledge, and an ability to think critically about the problems we face.  What we don't need is someone who talks, and apparently thinks, in folksy sound-bites, and can't even get things straight in those. 

Simply put, whatever his/her stance is on the issues, I don't trust any candidate for president who apparently has a poorer knowledge of American history than my 11th grade students.  But I fear that I am in the minority.  And I think the specter of a Palin/Bachmann GOP ticket is all too possible.

Open season on Snorky

I know that there are many important things in the world I could be blogging about today.  I could be devoting my writing to the relief effort in Japan.  I could be posting about the current military operation in Libya, Operation Odyssey Dawn (the name of which made me wonder if the powers-that-be have actually read The Odyssey -- naming our actions in Libya after a book in which the hero wanders around the Mediterranean for ten years looking for friends, and all of the soldiers he brought along with him end up dying, seems like asking for trouble). 

But no.  My topic for the day is:  why the hell do I have the theme song from The Banana Splits stuck in my head?

For those of you who are too young to remember the 60s, or who were, shall we say, otherwise occupied at the time, The Banana Splits was a short-lived and rather ill-conceived Saturday morning cartoon.  It ran, insofar as I can remember, on the variety-show model, with a number of short clips (both animated and live-action), music, and so forth.  It was hosted by a foursome of actors in animal suits (the eponymous "Banana Splits") -- Fleegle the dog, Snorky the elephant, Bingo the gorilla, and Drooper the lion.  It was, in a word, weird.  It is second only to "H. R. Pufnstuf" as being the trippiest Saturday morning cartoon ever aired.  (And for those of you who haven't heard of this amazingly freaky cartoon, the only way I can give you a flavor for it is to imagine what would happen if J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a script for an episode of Barney and Friends while on LSD.  You think I'm kidding?  Ask anyone over 50.  Or check out the Wikipedia entry, which gives an interesting take on the series, as well as many links to related sites.)

But I digress.

Anyhow, the theme song of The Banana Splits -- whose lyrics I kindly won't share, partly out of consideration for my readers and partly because the bit of it that is currently whirling around in my brain consists mostly of "la la la" -- is one of the worst earworms in the world.  An earworm, as defined by psychologist James Kellaris, is a song, jingle, or fragment thereof, which gets lodged inside your skull and will never ever ever leave, even if you try to remove it using an electric drill and a shop-vac, until finally you go completely and totally MAD AND BEGIN TO FROTH AT THE MOUTH AND START CALLING ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS WHO ARE HUNTERS AND ASKING THEM IF THEY WOULD HAVE AN ETHICAL PROBLEM WITH KILLING AN ELEPHANT NAMED "SNORKY" EVEN THOUGH ELEPHANTS ARE AN ENDANGERED SPECIES.

Whoa, sorry, got a little carried away, there.  And perhaps I exaggerate a tad.  Even the most annoying earworm will eventually leave, but often only because it's been supplanted by an even worse one.  So once I have the theme song from The Banana Splits out of my head, who knows what musical adventures I have to look forward to?  Maybe "Copacabana."  Or "Benny and the Jets."  Or the "Kit-Kat" jingle ("Gimme a break, gimme a break, break me off a piece of that Kit-Kat bar.")  There are so many my brain can choose from!  I can hardly wait!

The worst of it is considering what a waste of mental energy this must be.  When I think of the amount of brain space I'm currently devoting to keeping "la la la, la-la la la, la la la, la-la la la" ricocheting off the inside of my skull, it just makes me depressed.  I could be writing a symphony, coming up with a Grand Unified Field Theory, solving world hunger, or figuring out why President Obama has suddenly turned into Dubya Lite.  But no.  I'm sitting here, going "la la la."  And worse yet, writing about it.

Good lord, I just realized something.  Now I've infected all of you.  I'm really sorry about that, truly I am.  And if all of you go out and infect others, it'll be... it'll be.. a pandemic!  Bananasplitsitis!  US productivity will grind to a halt!  (The Russians and Chinese are immune, because during the 60s they were too busy having Cultural Revolutions and Great Leaps Forward and Sputniks and Missile Crises to come up with pointless, psychedelic cartoons.)  World markets will collapse.  Pandemonium will ensue.  And it will all be my fault.

Wow.  I feel just awful about this.  I think I need to lay low this morning, just to recover from the guilt feelings.  Find something to take my mind off all the trouble I've caused.  Maybe relax, daydream a little.  Daydream about... about a magic land... where everything is alive!  Filled with whimsy and weirdness!  Where the mayor is a brightly-colored dinosaur!

Ahem... "H. R. Pufnstuf, where'd'ya go when things get rough, H. R. Pufnstuf, you can't do a little 'cause you can't do enough..."

It's just a sad song that pulls you along...

A student who took my Brain & Senses class last year just sent me a link to a Tufts University study, with the note, "I think you'll find this interesting."  I'd say that was an understatement.  But before I tell you about the study, a brief bit of background.

I have been fascinated ever since I can remember with music's capacity for evoking emotion, and in particular, the universality of the phenomenon.  What is it about minor keys that conveys sadness, and major keys that conveys happiness?  It's a consistent pattern throughout western cultures and genres.  If you really want to make people reach for the kleenex box, whether you're writing rock, country, Celtic, French lounge music, or Bulgarian love songs, put your music in a minor key.

This has a huge effect on choices in background music in movies and television.  Two students from my AP Biology class two years ago used this as the inspiration for their final lab project.  They took the same video clip -- some guys crawling across a field on their hands and knees -- and showed it to three groups of students.  In the first group, the clip had no background music.  In the second, the music was dark, minor key.  In the third, it was upbeat, bouncy, and major key.  They then asked the students questions such as, "why were the guys in the clip crawling in the field?", "who were the guys?", and "what emotion was evoked by the clip?"  They were also asked to note anything else about the clip they noticed.

The results were fascinating, if not surprising.  In the first group, the students largely expressed puzzlement about what was going on in the clip, and why.  Most of the second group believed the guys were soldiers in war time, commando-crawling across a field to keep from getting killed.  The third group thought the guys were playing a game -- manhunt, perhaps -- just "fooling around."  Intriguingly, there were members of the second group who thought the clip was slowed down -- and the third group thought it was sped up!  To me, however, the most interesting thing was the bafflement of the first group, who watched the clip without music, and couldn't figure out what was going on.   It's as if the background music doesn't just set a mood, it actually conveys information about what we're experiencing.

All of which is just meant as a setup for telling you about the Tufts study.  The lead researcher, Meagan Curtis, has found something intriguing -- that music's ability to communicate meaning applies not only to actual music, but to spoken language, as well.

Curtis' group used sound recordings of two-syllable words or phrases like "all right," "okay," and "let's go," and determined the pitch interval between the two syllables.  They then played the recordings for test subjects, and asked the subjects to evaluate the utterances for emotional content.  (You can listen to some of the recordings here.)

Curtis found that descending minor thirds and minor seconds were associated with sadness; ascending minor seconds and either ascending or descending diminished fifths with anger; and either ascending or descending major seconds, perfect fourths, and perfect fifths as conveying positive emotions such as happiness or pleasure.

What I find most astonishing about this is how consistent these findings are.  The ethnic origin of the test subject didn't seem to matter; nor did age, gender, or any other obvious demographic.  There is something about musical intervals that conveys meaning, and it works across just about every group -- leading me to wonder if it might not be hard-wired into the brain.  But how?  And why?  It's certain that picking up social cues in language is pretty critical, and having it encoded this way -- through musical intervals rather than actual phonetic content -- is a much less language-specific, and thus more potentially universal, way to do it.  But how on earth could such a thing be wired into the human brain?

I wonder how this perception affects the use of tonality in tonal languages, such as Mandarin and Thai, in which pitch changes within a word communicate meaning.  Do they use minor-key tonal intervals for negative words, and major-key intervals for positive words?  I know almost nothing about Asian languages, so it really is just an idle speculation -- but it would be an interesting thing to look into.

Of course, it then brings up a deeper question, of the chicken-and-egg variety; which came first, our perception of minor key music as sad, or our perception of a minor interval in spoken language as conveying negative emotions?  Given Curtis' study, I would strongly suspect the latter.  We know for certain that music is a very, very old phenomenon, confirmed by the recent discovery of a flute made out of bone that dates from the time of the Neanderthals.  It appears that the capacity for using music to evoke emotion is something that is so fundamental that it not only has driven every known culture to make music -- it directs how we communicate emotion even in our spoken language.

Jargon

Being a fanatical birder, I belong to several birding listservs.  One of them is the Cayuga Basin bird listserv, which posts regional sightings for the benefit of other birders in the area.  A couple of days ago, the following message appeared:

"Heard/saw EAPH today -- my FOY -- is this FIB?"

Most people, upon reading this, might be excused if they responded, "Heard/saw what you WROTE today -- my WORD -- is this ENGLISH?"

In fact, of course, it is English.  The individual who posted this was using abbreviations.  Translated, it says, "Heard/saw an Eastern Phoebe today -- it was my first of the year -- is this the first in the (Cayuga) Basin?"

Although I understood what the person wrote, it did cross my mind to wonder why he felt the need to write it that way.  Did he think he was being charged by the letter, or something?  The four-letter bird codes, such as EAPH for Eastern Phoebe, were designed primarily to give a standard shorthand for cataloguing things such as bird song recordings.  As such, they act a little like SKU codes for produce -- they are handy for keeping track of inventory, but they were never meant for common conversation.  If you said over breakfast, "Wow, this 4011 is a little overripe," your family might look at you a little oddly.

Which brings up the topic of jargon.  I define jargon as meaning "specialist vocabulary that is meant to deliberately conceal meaning from outsiders."  To me, the four-letter bird codes that people throw around in posts on listservs are clearly jargon.  They add nothing to the clarity of the post; they make it harder for beginners to understand and participate in discussions; and they give an air of being in the know without actually providing anything additional in the way of information.

It's often hard, however, to see when scientific language crosses the line into jargon.  Scientists do use specialized vocabulary, and when it is used well, it clarifies the situation rather than muddying the waters further.  To give a fairly simple example, when I tell my biology classes that botanists use the word "fruit" differently than cooks do, to mean "whatever develops from the ovary of the flower, and contains the seed(s)," it points up something fundamental and (hopefully) interesting about nature.  The word "fruit," then, becomes a word whose scientific meaning is more clear and precise than its common meaning.  (Although it can be counterintuitive; a zucchini and a cucumber are both fruits, although they're not sweet, and rhubarb is not a fruit, although it's delicious in pies.)

On the other hand, consider the following example, which I found by randomly pulling a copy of the magazine Nature from my bookshelf.  It's the conclusion sentence in an article on neurology.

"Whether applied in basic science or clinical application, the spectral separation between the NpHR and ChR2 activation maxima permits both sufficiency and necessity testing in elucidation of the roles of specific cell types in high-speed intact circuit function; indeed, integration of GFP-based probes and fura-2 with the NpHR/ChR2 neural control system delivers a powerful and complementary triad of technologies to identify, observe, and control intact living neural circuitry with light."

Now, to point out a couple of things here:  first, I'm a biology teacher, and teach (amongst other things) an introductory neurology course, and I haven't the vaguest idea what that sentence means.  Second, I didn't select this sentence for its lack of clarity.  I scanned the article, and if anything, the rest of it is worse -- as the conclusion of the article, the authors seemed to be trying to sum up the punch line of their research as concisely and cogently as possible.

The fault, of course, is not entirely with the authors.  I'm a generalist, not a specialist, both by nature and by training.  Reading stuff like this makes me even more convinced that I'd never have had the brains, or the focus, to survive in the rarified air of academic research.

But you do have to wonder how much of it is a deliberate attempt to conceal, to keep scientific knowledge in the realm of the initiates.  During my brief stint as a graduate student in the Department of Oceanography at the University of Washington, I was horrified by the disdain that the professors and most of the graduate students had for popularizers -- for people like Bill Nye and Carl Sagan, who bring science to the masses.  One of the professors, I recall, made the statement, "I have made a practice of never accepting a graduate student who mentions Jacques Cousteau in his interview."  Well, whoop-de-doo, doesn't that make you a cut above?  I wonder how many people have been inspired to study the oceans because of reading your scientific journal articles?

Myself, I think you never lose by making an understanding of the natural world as accessible as possible, and you lose little of its wonder and complexity in so doing.  I could make my students memorize all of the steps of the Krebs Cycle, but I firmly maintain that they understand it far more deeply when I compare it to a merry-go-round where at every turn, two kids get on and two kids get off.  Le Chatelier's Principle is like the chemistry version of a teeter-totter.  Photorespiration in plants in dry climates is like living in a state with high property taxes; you can solve the resulting cash flow problem two ways, CAM (getting a better job) or C4 (moving to a state with lower taxes).  And so on.

Of course, to any scientists amongst my readership, I've now probably painted myself as hopelessly shallow-minded.  To which I respond:  oh, well.  Guilty as charged.  But at least I don't look through my binoculars, and say, "Wow!  Look at that EAPH!  It's my FOY!"

"Hello, pot...?"

Today, we have two cases of mystics pointing fingers at other mystics for being mystics.

From the Balkans, we have a story of an Orthodox monk, known only as Brother Visarion.  Visarion lives in the Greek community of Mount Athos, but was born and raised in Bulgaria; and it is in his homeland that he has raised a storm of controversy in his new book, Peter Danov and Vanga: Prophets and Precursors of the Antichrist.

Peter Danov was the founder of the White Brotherhood, which preached the unity of man and nature, and was revered by such luminaries as Albert Einstein and Jiddu Krishnamurti.  Vanga, on the other hand, was a blind psychic whose healing powers were apparently legendary across Bulgaria.  Both, Visarion claims, are occult figures, "tortured by dark forces," and are to be reviled, not revered.

A priest from Vanga's home town of Petrich, whose name was not mentioned in my source, has responded to Visarion's statement with outrage.  "Vanga was a holy woman," he said.  "Her gift was from God.  She should be canonized."

Undaunted, Visarion shot back, "Instead of explaining to people what fortune-tellers, magicians and psychics are and that these incidents are renounced by God, he (the priest) is trying to set evil as an example."

Then we have the story of the current campaign by the Raelians to undermine Christianity.  

The International Raelian Movement has apparently purchased a huge billboard near a freeway in Las Vegas, and put up the words, "GOD IS A MYTH," to the general outrage of the Las Vegas Christian community.

Some of you may be questioning why I'm commenting upon this in a post on mysticism, and wondering why, in fact, I'm not cheering them on.  If so, you must not know who the Raelians are.

The Raelians, it turns out, are themselves a church, although some more orthodox believers would probably object to my using that word to describe them.  The whole things was dreamed up in 1973 by an auto-racing journalist named Claude Vorilhon.  The basic tenet of the Raelians is that life on earth was created by an advanced race of extraterrestrials called "The Elohim" (you might recognize that word as one of the Hebrew words for god; that, say the Raelians, is no coincidence).  From this, they deduce that (1) there are other universes inside atoms, (2) world governments should be handed over to people with genius-level IQs, (3) the resurrection of Jesus will be accomplished by cloning, (4) you should have sex as often as possible and with as many people as possible, and (5) both men and women should go shirtless whenever the weather is warm.

Notwithstanding that most guys would be supportive of (5), I think the majority of people would read this list, and say, "These people are a bunch of wingnuts."  Me, I'm thinking, "they criticize the Christians for having wacky beliefs?  Seriously?"

So basically, what we have here is two cases of people who, with no apparent sense of irony, are objecting to the mystical beliefs of others, not because mysticism itself is (by definition) a bunch of claims for which no evidence exists, but because they think the others' weird mystical beliefs aren't as good as their own weird mystical beliefs. 

*ring ring *  "Hello, pot?  This is the kettle.  You're black."  *click*

In my shoes, of course, the whole thing seems crazy.  After reading these stories, I chuckled a little about how bizarre some folks' thought processes can be.  Then I thought about the whole concept of "crusade" and "religious war," and my smile faded a little.  I thought, "it's a good thing that people like this aren't in power."  But then I remembered the fanatics who are heads of state in some countries in the Middle East, and some of the legislators here in the United States who want to use the bible to direct national policy, and I thought, "Maybe some of them already are."  And then I really didn't feel like laughing any more.

Writers' marketing

In the last week or so I've been looking for a venue for my other writing, namely, my fiction.

I've written fiction ever since I can remember, starting with some truly dreadful stories when I was in middle school, fortunately none of which have survived, a fact which will probably frustrate my future biographer but for which the rest of us should be extremely grateful.  I have written fairly steadily thereafter, and probably passed the mark of "marginally adequate" when I was about 25, thus proving that if you keep doing something long enough, eventually you get better at it.

I have, at last count, three full-length novels, seven novellas, and six short stories that I consider reasonably good.  I have tried repeatedly to get something published through the traditional route of querying an agent, submitting manuscripts for perusal, waiting 18 months for them to return it with a note that says, in toto, "No thanks," and then going on to the next agent.  At some point I realized that at this rate, I would be 450 years old before I would have even odds of having something published, and I sort of gave it up as a bad job.  As a result, all of my writing is now slowly mildewing in the Black Hole of Calcutta, a.k.a. my bottom desk drawer.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine passed along an article about the new "e-publishing" route, in which authors can upload their work onto a server, and readers can download them for a small fee (think iTunes for writing, and you've got the idea).  My first thought was that it was cheating -- that it was a little like vanity publishing.  My pride rebelled.  Then, realizing that I could keep my pride at the cost of keeping my status as an "unpublished author," I decided to look into it. 

I was surprised at what I found.  Through sites such as Smashwords, Lulu, and PubIt!, authors can submit their work, along with cover art, and actually get their work out there more quickly and effectively than traditional publication.  The author retains all rights, and gets a cut of the proceeds.  Because of the low overhead, the cost to the reader is much less than a printed book (downloads generally run between $0.99 and 5.99).  Some new, previously-unpublished writers have gone viral, and had tens of thousands of downloads.  So that part, naturally, sounds pretty intriguing.

The downside is that the author is also completely responsible for publicity -- I would guess that the great majority of works uploaded to these sites only are downloaded a handful of times, mostly by the author's friends.  And I know about myself that self-promotion is not something I'm very good at, notwithstanding the fact that this entire post is basically self-promotion, which I felt that I should point out before someone else did.

On the other hand, some readings are better than no readings, which is more-or-less where my writing has been for the past fifteen years.  So I've decided to give it a try.  To quote Hilaire Belloc, "When I am dead, I hope it is said, 'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.'"  For no particular reason I decided to use Barnes & Noble's service, PubIt!, and this weekend started messing about with cover art for three of my pieces (two of the novellas and the short stories, which I intend to submit as a collection).  This entailed that I learn a little bit about Photoshop, further bumping up the angle of the learning curve on all of this.

The long-and-short of it is that I have three pieces of cover art I'm actually fairly proud of, and am ready to go to the next step, which is to register, write up blurbs for each of the pieces, write an Author's Bio (I'm thinking that it probably needs to say something more than, "Gordon used to really suck as a writer, back when he was in middle school.  Now he doesn't suck quite so much.  We hope you'll agree."). 

After all this, in my opinion, comes the hard part.  How do I sell my work?  I have a couple of ideas, mostly revolving around sending a broadside email to all of my friends saying, "Please please pleeeeeease buy my stories," but I'm suspecting that there's more to marketing than that or otherwise people wouldn't go to college and major in it.  My problem is that of all of the jobs in the world that I'd really hate, "salesperson" would fall somewhere near the top of the list, probably immediately after "cat groomer" and "arctic explorer."  So I'm going to have to give this some thought.

Or maybe just write a blog post ending with "Please please pleeeeeease buy my stories."  $2.99 each, available through PubIt!.  Release date to be announced presently.

A bone to pick

From the news today comes two stories that are interesting mainly in their juxtaposition.

First, the skull of Mary Magdalene is touring California.  I didn't know that skulls went on tours, did you?  I thought only rock bands did that.  Although I have to admit that looking at Mick Jagger and Steven Tyler these days, there may be some overlap.  Be that as it may, the "holy relics" of Mary Magdalene, who was according to the bible the first person to find that Jesus' tomb was empty, are making the rounds, including visiting a penitentiary at Atwater. 

What happened to Mary Magdalene after the biblical account is a matter of some conjecture, but Catholic traditionalists believe that she was imprisoned for a time, and after her release went to France, where she became an itinerant preacher.  She then went to live in a cave at Sainte-Baume, where she lived for thirty more years.

After her death, the story goes, her bones were in the care of monks near Sainte-Baume, and during the Saracen invasion they were hidden so as to protect them from the hands of the heathens.  They were then rediscovered in 1279, were mentioned in a pontifical bull from Pope Boniface VIII, and have been venerated as authentic relics in a monastery ever since. 

Me, I wonder.  It puts me in mind of the whole thing about the "relics of the true cross," about which John Calvin famously quipped that if you put all of the relics of the true cross together, you'd have enough wood to fill a battleship.  A pious 19th century clergyman, Rohault de Fleury, needled by Calvin's claim, set about to estimate the volume of the chips of wood claimed as pieces of the cross, and came up with only four million cubic millimeters, which sounds like a lot, but is actually a cube six inches on a side.  De Fleury's conclusion was, "Ha, Calvin!  Take it!  We showed you!  They are real!"  (I paraphrase slightly.)  However, it must be pointed out that de Fleury included only the ones that he thought were genuine, which is a small fraction of the relics that have been claimed to be pieces of the cross.  In fact, back during the Crusades, there were a couple of chunks in a church in Constantinople that were "as thick as a man's leg and a fathom in length."  So I think I'm to be pardoned if I have some degree of skepticism about the authenticity of the relics of the true cross, the relics of Mary Magdalene, and relics in general.

Now, on to our second story.

In Clearfield, Utah, a man named Robert Casillas-Corrales was booked into Davis County jail after police raided his home and found, in a shed, human skulls and the bones and carcasses of animals. 

No one is alleging that Casillas-Corrales killed the people whose skulls were found on his property; he claims he brought them with him from Cuba, and indeed, they seem to be long dead.  He told police he is a practitioner of Santería, a religion of African origin commonly practiced in the Caribbean and in Central and South America, which holds that the bones of powerful men and women retain their power after death and can be used in rituals.  He claims that he was only using them for good purposes, and that they were part of his religious practice.

Nevertheless, he remains in jail on the charge of desecration of human remains.

Is it just me, or is there some similarity between these two stories?

Okay, now hold on just a second.  Maybe I'm being too hasty, here.  Let's examine the differences.

In the first case, we have a wealthy, powerful group of religious people who are taking human bones around and are using them for religious worship and rituals.  In the second case, we have a poor, relatively powerless group of religious people who are taking human bones around and are using them for religious worship and rituals.

Ah, I get it, I understand now why no one is throwing the Catholics into jail!  Makes perfect sense.

Allow me to go on record as saying that I'm not somehow pro-Santería and anti-Catholic; in fact, I think both beliefs are a little on the sketchy side, and I'd give thanks for my being an atheist except for the fact that I have no idea who to thank.  What struck me is more that the difference has nothing to do with belief -- it has to do with power structure.  The fact that one is perceived as legitimate, even holy, behavior, and the other is perceived as creepy and weird (and worthy of being sent to jail) is not because there is a substantial distinction between the two actions, but because the first one has the backing of one of the most powerful agencies in the world, and the second one does not.

To put it more succinctly:  a religion is a cult with more members.