God, games, and prayers

Many years ago, when I lived in Seattle, I was intermittently part of an amateur theater group.  I had several minor roles, but then finally, in what turned out to be the last play I'd be in, I got a lead role in Paul McCaw's musical comedy The Trumpets of Glory.

The idea of The Trumpets of Glory is that angels are constantly interfering with human affairs, all the way from major world events (wars) down to minutiae (sports).  Angels take sides, and manipulate things so that their side will win, thereby scoring points and moving up in the hierarchy.  I played the villain (which will come as no surprise to former students) -- an archangel named Zagore, who was undefeated in the past 3,000 years, until he meets up with a hapless newbie in a contest over the outcome of a high school football game.

Of course, being musical theater, the underdog wins, and Zagore goes down to ignominious defeat.  Still, it was a fun role, especially since I got to strut around on stage being extremely badass while wearing renaissance garb, including a cloak and a velvet hat with an enormous feather in it.

All of this comes up because of a recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute, which indicates that half of the Americans polled actually believe that the universe works more or less like McCaw's play -- in spirit if not in exact detail.

"As Americans tune in to the Superbowl this year, fully half of fans — as many as 70 million Americans — believe there may be a twelfth man on the field influencing the outcome," PRRI CEO Robert Jones said.  "Significant numbers of American sports fans believe in invoking assistance from God on behalf of their favorite team, or believe the divine may be playing out its own purpose in the game."

Of the fifty-odd percent of Americans who believe that god cares about the outcome of the Superbowl,  26% reported that they have prayed that their team will win, 19% say that the winner is determined by god, and 25% suspect their team is cursed by the devil (this year, this last group probably includes 100% of the fans of the New Orleans Saints).

Furthermore, 62% of white evangelicals who responded to the poll said they thought that god favored athletes who were Christian themselves.

[photograph courtesy of Ed Clemente Photography and the Wikimedia Commons]

Now, I know that being an atheist, I'm to be expected to view all of this with a wry eye.  But even trying to be open-minded and ecumenical, and putting myself in the shoes of religiously-inclined sports fans, I find myself asking: how could this possibly work?  Does god employ an accountant, who keeps track of the number of prayers offered up on behalf of each team, and then he awards victory to the team that showed the greatest number of prayers?  (If so, the Washington Redskins fans may have some 'splainin' to do.)  Does the fervency of the prayers have an effect?  If so,  how do you measure the intensity of a prayer?  ("O Lord, the Seahawks fans offered up a total of 14,879 prayers, but their average prayer intensity only measured 3.47 tebows.  Do I let them win?")

What if everything comes out about even -- both teams have equal numbers of religious players, and the fans are all praying about the same amount?  Does god then just kind of sit back, crack open a beer, and say, "Heh.  Maybe I'll just wait and see what happens this time."

In all seriousness, I find the whole thing really puzzling.  As I've mentioned before, the concept of petitionary prayer has always struck me as the weirdest idea from conventional Christianity, as it seems to imply that you can change god's mind.  Even C. S. Lewis was uncomfortable with the idea, and in his essay "Does Prayer Work?" said that prayer doesn't exactly change god's mind, but it does influence things in some vague way: "He allows soils and weather and animals and the muscles, minds, and wills of men to cooperate in the execution of His will."

I dunno, the whole thing sounds kind of peculiar to me.  It boils down to my asking for god to do something, which either he already intended to do ("Yay, god is so awesome!") or else not ("Oh, well, god works in mysterious ways.").   Either way, it's hard to see how my praying (or not) had any influence whatsoever, and honestly, it seems to be more a way for me to feel good about having done something to help the situation without actually doing anything to help the situation.

But in the case of sports, it's even weirder, because then you not only have to believe that god exists, and considers the content of prayers, but cares who wins the Superbowl.  Which is just stretching credulity too far, even considering some of the other things religious people believe.

Of course, I guess it's to be expected that I'd have this response, and I'm writing this more in complete mystification than I am out of disapproval.  If any religious people who read this are so inclined, and want to explain to me how any of this could possibly work, I'd be willing to listen, even though I have to say up front that I doubt it'll convince me.  The suspension of disbelief I'd have to undergo in order to buy into any of this is just too great.

So I'm left where I started, which is that I really don't understand maybe half of the people who live in this country.  Which, I guess, is not all that shocking, considering the material I write about daily.  And if I'm entirely wrong, and there is a god up there, and he does factor in prayer in determining the outcome of events, allow me to say that had I known, I would have put in a good word for the Saints, because when they lose I kind of stop paying attention.

Many worlds

I've always had a fairly good memory -- for certain things, at least.  I usually lecture my classes without notes, for example.  I find that it keeps my teaching fluid, much more so than it would be if I were just reading from a script.  (Every once in a while, though, the technique fails me, and I have to check something, or simply can't remember a particular term -- an occurrence I'm finding ever more common as I mosey my way through my 50s.)

At the same time, though, I'm constantly aware of how plastic and unreliable human memory is.  We form impressions of events, and sometimes those impressions are actually very far from correct.  The odd thing is that these pseudomemories don't seem inaccurate, or fuzzy.  My personal experience is that memories which are flat wrong seem perfectly solid -- until someone points out that facts demonstrate conclusively that what I'm remembering can't be correct.

It is this seeming certainty that is puzzling, and sometimes alarming.  A study back in 2005 by James Ost, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Portsmouth (England), demonstrated all of this with frightening clarity.  Ost took a group of volunteers in England and in Sweden, and asked them if they'd seen CCTV footage of the 2005 Tavistock Square bombing, when in fact no such footage exists.  50% of the Swedish participants said they had, and a full 84% of the English ones did!  Further, when Ost asked the volunteers who had responded "yes" for details about the video footage, they gave surprising amounts of information.  Ost asked one participant, "Was the bus moving when the bomb went off?" and received the following response: "The bus had just stopped to let two people off, when two women got on, and a man.  He placed the bag by his side, the woman sat down and doors closed.  As the bus left there was an explosion and then everyone started to scream."

So, as unsettling as it seems, a lot of what we remember didn't happen that way, or perhaps didn't happen at all.  Not a pleasant thought, but it seems like it's pretty universal to the way the human mind works.

Ost's study makes what I ran across yesterday all the more bizarre.  On a website called "The Mandela Effect," we are introduced to a woman named Fiona Broome, whose interest lies in exactly the sort of memory side-slips that Ost researched.  Her curiosity about such occurrences started when she realized how many of her acquaintances "remembered" that Nelson Mandela had died in jail -- even recalled details of his funeral from news stories they'd read.  But instead of coming to Ost's conclusion, which is that human memory is simply unreliable, Broome has reached a different explanation.

Broome thinks that these represent memories accessed from alternate realities.

"That’s not a conspiracy theory," Broome writes.  "It’s related to alternate history and parallel realities.  Exploring the quantum / 'Sliders' concept further, I discovered an entire world of shifting realities that people try to reconcile daily...  These aren’t simple errors in memory; they seem to be fully-constructed incidents (or sequential events) from the past.  They exceed the normal range of forgetfulness.  Even stranger, other people seem to have identical memories."

What are these "identical memories" that many people supposedly share?  They include:

• The deaths of Billy Graham, actors Henry Winkler, Shirley Temple, and David Soul, and televangelist Jimmy Swaggart.
• Plots and various other details on Mystery Science Theater and Star Trek: Voyager.
• Details and release dates of the movies Avatar and Terminator.
• Various PS1 games that don't exist.
• The locations of New Zealand and Sri Lanka.

And apparently, Fiona Broome and the others of her mindset actually think that all of this is better explained by their somehow accessing an "alternate universe" than it is by their simply not remembering stuff correctly.

Even if you buy the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics -- a conjecture which is far from settled amongst physicists, however many plots of science fiction movies depend on its being correct -- there's absolutely no reason to believe that we still have access to alternate timelines once splitting has occurred.  If that were true, and people could jump back and forth between universes, it kind of throws the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy right out of the window.  And that law pairs up with the Second Law of Thermodynamics as two of the most fundamental building blocks of our understanding of the universe, and -- more importantly -- they are two laws for which no exception has ever been shown.

[image of "Schrödinger's Cat and Universe Branching" courtesy of Christian Schirm and the Wikimedia Commons]

Even ardent many-worlds supporters like Hugh Everett and John Archibald Wheeler believed that once the timeline has forked, the two universes are permanently sealed off from one another.  No information, much less matter and energy, can get from one to the other, which means that if many-worlds is right, there's no way to prove it (this, in fact, is one of the main objections from detractors).  So even though timeline-jumping is a central trope in my novel Lock & Key, I am very much of the opinion that the entire idea rests on a physical impossibility (which is why the novel is filed in the "fiction" section).

Sadly, this leaves Fiona Broome et al. kind of getting sliced to ribbons by Ockham's Razor.  Bit of a shame, really, because it would be cool if we could get a glimpse of alternate universes.  It brings to mind a quote from C. S. Lewis's novel Prince Caspian:

"You mean," said Lucy rather faintly, "that it would have turned out all right – somehow?  But how?  Please, Aslan!  Am I not to know?

"To know what would have happened, child?" said Aslan.  "No. Nobody is ever told that."

It may well be that Broome's conjecture is more appealing than Ost's is; that our memory lapses represent the glittering remains of sideward steps into other worlds instead of simple neural failures.  But unfortunately, Ost's conclusion lines up better with the evidence.  Other studies, showing how easy it is to implant false memories, and how completely convincing those pseudomemories seem, indicate that what's really happening is that we are creating our recollections as we go, and some of them are simply invented from bits and pieces, from suggestions, or out of thin air.

The world, it seems, is far more solid than our memory of it.  So if Sri Lanka appears to have moved to the southeast, as some people apparently believe, then it's much more likely that you simply don't remember your geography very well than it is that you've had a glimpse of an alternate Earth in which the island is anchored elsewhere.

Psychic alien Nazi spies

Some of my readers may remember that last year, Iranian news agencies announced that they had invented a spaceship that ran on "regular matter, dark matter, and antimatter."  The whole thing came as a bit of a shock to scientists in other parts of the world, given that astrophysicists have been trying for several years even to detect dark matter, and suddenly here's this guy saying he has a whole ship full of the stuff.

A few months later, we had the story of another amazing Iranian invention -- a machine which, at a touch, could correctly identify your age, gender, occupation, number of children, and education.  The English translation of the story, originally in Farsi, called it a "time machine," but that seems to have been a mistake -- not that the actual claim had any better grounding in reality.

So when I saw yesterday that there was a new story from Fars, the semi-official Iranian news agency, and it was making the rounds of conspiracy theory sites, I said (and I quote) "Uh-oh."  And sure enough, we have another winner.  This one beats dark-matter spaceships and psychic machines put together.  Are you ready?

Edward Snowden, of NSA-whistleblower fame, is in cahoots with evil aliens, who are secretly running the NSA and pretty much everything else in the US government.  Back in the 1930s and 1940s the aliens were behind the Nazis, but once the Nazis were defeated the aliens decided to infiltrate the allies, and more or less took over.  These days, Snowden himself is channeling a message from the aliens, which is designed to distract everyone from their real agenda, which is domination of the ENTIRE SOLAR SYSTEM.  *insert evil laugh here*

It does bring up a question, however; isn't just dominating the Earth enough?  There's no one much to dominate on, say, Mercury.  Mercury is so close to the Sun that if the aliens landed there, they would just have time to leap out and say, "Ha ha!  We are dominating Mercury!" before they burst into flame.  And Neptune, as another example, is also a place that would be rather pointless to try to dominate.  Neptune is largely made of extremely cold methane, making it essentially a giant frozen fart.

So as far as I'm concerned, the aliens can go ahead and dominate the majority of the Solar System.  It's pretty inhospitable out there.

Be that as it may, the Iranians seem mighty serious about this accusation.  There's only one problem with it -- and that is that Fars seems to have lifted the story, in toto, from a completely wacko conspiracy website called What Does It Mean?  The people in charge of this site believe, amongst many other things, that the key to enlightenment is carried by a group of esoteric mystics called the "Order of Sorcha Faal," which was founded in County Meath, Ireland in 588 B.C.E. by Tamar Tephi, the daughter of Zedekiah, the last king of Judah.

 Tephi, by John Everett Millais [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

How she got from Palestine to Ireland is a bit of a mystery.

In any case, what we have here is a loony website about Irish Israelite princesses and psychic Nazi alien overlords, which the media over in Iran evidently took as literal fact.  And because the Iranians quoted it in their news, it's gotten into Huffington Post and various other US news sources, meaning that the entire thing has essentially gone viral by jumping halfway around the world.

You couldn't make this stuff up if you tried.

So anyway.  Watch out for that Snowden character, he's on the side of the aliens.  As far as the Iranians, it's hard to tell whose side exactly they're on, because when they're not busy blowing the cover of the aliens who are running the United States, they're building dark-matter spaceships and time machines and whatnot.  My general sense is that we here in the North America have nothing to lose by just sitting back and letting the aliens do what they like.  Maybe the "Order of the Sorcha Faal" will get involved, and we'll end up having the Irish run the world, which seems like it would be kind of cool.  I'll take the Irish over either the Nazis or the Iranians, on the basis of having great music and really awesome beer, not to mention being less generally inclined to commit large-scale genocide.

Homeopathy, allopathy, and the right to prescribe drugs

New from the "This Is Seriously Not A Good Idea" department: the Indian Medical Association has just announced a decision to allow homeopathic "doctors" prescribe real medicines, i.e., substances that have actual therapeutically active compounds in them.

Not everyone is thrilled by this idea, fortunately.  Dr. Jayesh Lele, who is the secretary of the IMA's Maharashtra chapter, didn't sound particularly sanguine.  "We have gathered over thirty judgments delivered in various Indian courts, including the Supreme Court, that ruled against practitioners of alternative therapy prescribing allopathic medicines," Dr. Lele told The Times of India.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the terminology, "allopathy" means "real medical science."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

You'd think that the homeopaths would be elated to have this kind of Official Seal of Approval.  After all, the fact that they're being allowed to prescribe actual medicines could be construed as some sort of vindication of their skills as healers by the powers-that-be.  But in an odd twist, not all of the homeopaths are happy with the decision.  "Dr." Shreepad Khadekar, a Mumbai homeopath, hinted that the ruling would dilute homeopathic practice, which I find so ironic that it should somehow be added to the Alanis Morissette song.

Khadekar said, "It is definitely the darkest period in a real homeopath's life.  Soon my science will become extinct, thanks to the unfortunate decision."

My response, predictably, is I doubt that we'll be that lucky.   Khadekar's "science" has thus far survived a concerted effort by the folks over at the James Randi Educational Foundation, not to mention a whole list of lawsuits against the manufacturers of homeopathic "remedies" and the charlatans who dispense them.  Of course, the situation in India adds a whole new layer of crazy to the topic; do we really trust people who don't understand the concept of serial dilution, Avogadro's limit, and the placebo effect to dispense real drugs correctly?  Individuals who in order to prop up their bizarre concept of how the body works have to resort to blathering about "energies" and "vibrations" and "quantum imprints?"

I mean, at least before, all they were handing out were vials of water and sugar pills.  Sure, they weren't curing diseases, but at least what they were giving you was harmless.

I have a dear friend whom I watched studying for the board exams to become a nurse practitioner -- the amount of information you have to have at your fingertips in order to decide which drug to prescribe, not to mention correctly calculating dosage, is absolutely immense.  So the folks over in India think it's a good idea to allow people to do that who evidently don't understand the fact that zero atoms of an active ingredient have no effect?

I don't see this ending well.

I find it amazing that this nonsense is still out there, given what we now understand about biochemistry.  Here in the United States homeopathic "remedies" are ubiquitous -- they're on the shelves in our local pharmacy, row upon row of glass vials containing nothing of value (but quite expensive, I feel obliged to point out).  But at least we haven't taken the further step of allowing the homeopaths themselves to have access to real drugs.  That, fortunately, is still the purview of people who have the educational background to know what they're doing.  If you're in India, though, and you fall ill -- well, all I can say is, make sure you ask what your medical service provider's background is before you take his or her advice, and beyond that, caveat emptor.

Thoughts about the Hand of God

I'm going to issue a plea to scientists:

Can you please stop giving scientific stuff suggestive names?

Let me clarify: I am not talking about that kind of suggestive.  That kind of suggestive I couldn't care less about.  You can name the next astronomical feature you discover the Giant Pair of Bazongas Nebula, as far as I'm concerned.

What I am talking about is the use of religious symbolism in names.  First we had poor Leon Lederman, who has lived to regret his choice many times, nicknaming the Higgs boson "the God Particle."  Then we had a bunch of population geneticists, studying human DNA haplogroups, calling the progenitor of the human Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA, respectively, "Adam and Eve."

Even Einstein fell prey to it -- when he first heard about the quantum probability theories of Erwin Schrödinger, he quipped, "God does not play dice with the universe."

So it's not like it's without precedent.  I'm just asking for it to stop.

All of this comes up because of the following image of an exploding star, recently released by NASA:

[image courtesy of NASA and JPL]

And what are they calling this?

"The Hand of God."

Now, I'm sure that whatever scientist first called it this had tongue planted firmly in his or her cheek.  But the problem is, that's not the way the average American layperson perceives it.  Given that something around 80% of your average American laypeople subscribe to some form of religion, this sort of thing sounds mighty serious to a significant fraction of the public.  And even amongst those who don't believe that this is literally the hand of a deity, it can give rise to overwrought articles like "Beyond NASA Photo, 'Hand of God' Seen Everywhere," in which we are told that science and religion go, um, hand in hand:

This ubiquitous natural wonderland caused man to acknowledge and honor the Creator of creation, as Copernicus did when he wrote, "[The world] has been built for us by the Best and Most Orderly Workman of all."  Or as Galileo wrote, "God is known … by Nature in His works and by doctrine in His revealed word."  Or as Pasteur confessed, "The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator."  Or Isaac Newton: "When I look at the solar system, I see the earth at the right distance from the sun to receive the proper amounts of heat and light. This did not happen by chance."

The author goes on to state that even modern scientists admit that there's room for faith:

"Now,” [astronomer Robert] Jastrow continues, "we would like to pursue that inquiry farther back in time, but the barrier to further progress seems insurmountable.  It is not a matter of another year, another decade of work, another measurement, or another theory; at this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation."

The famed scientist’s ultimate conclusion is astonishingly candid, particularly in light of his own professed agnosticism: "For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream.  He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

Oh, come on.  It's not that I think that religion and science are incompatible, exactly; I know plenty of religious scientists (and quite a few rational, logical religious people).  It's more that all of the historical fuddling about really doesn't mean anything.  Copernicus and Galileo were religious, sure; but Copernicus didn't release the official draft of his manuscript until he was on his deathbed because he was terrified of the Christian powers-that-be (and sure enough, they burned every copy of his book they could get their hands on).  And Galileo had his own struggles with the Vatican, ones that are so well known that they hardly need to be detailed here.  The only reason that Newton and Pasteur didn't run into problems is that by their time, the power of the church had waned some (and what they were proposing didn't bring them into direct conflict with religious dogma in any case).

So the issue isn't that you can't be both religious and scientific; the issue is more that when they come to opposing conclusions, you have to choose one or the other, because they approach knowledge from completely different directions.  I've made the point before, as regular readers undoubtedly know.  So it really isn't relevant that Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and Pasteur were religious; what is relevant is that when it came to their science, they didn't get it from the bible, nor even some kind of mystical divine revelation, but from rigorous analysis of the evidence.

And as far as Jastrow; seriously?  We scientists are pictured as pulling ourselves along, stumbling blindly uphill, finally reaching the pinnacle of knowledge, and coming across... theologians?  I'm sorry, Dr. Jastrow, but do you really want to compare the list of discoveries, advances in knowledge, and inventions that have helped the human condition that have been produced by science, and those that have been produced by religion?  I know you were talking about some kind of final, teleological understanding of the Big Picture -- but honestly, given their respective track records, I'm betting that if we ever get to the Cosmic Big Answer, it's going to be the scientists who do it, not the theologians.  The theologians will still be too busy arguing over whether god cares about what consenting adults do in their bedrooms.

So, anyway.  Let me say it again: it's hard enough to keep the terms of the discussion clear without the scientists themselves making it worse by giving stuff religiously suggestive names.  I mean, if you really want to go that direction, at least pick a god nobody much believes in any more.  If you'd wanted to call the exploding star The Mighty Fist of Thor, I doubt anyone would have cared, except people who are passionate about Marvel Comics, and honestly, I think they can manage the cognitive dissonance better than the religious people can.

Canadian alien invasion conspiracy

The conspiracies have been coming hard and fast lately.  I'm finding it hard to keep up with all of them.  We have all of the "false flag" operations (from the various school shootings to the death of actor Paul Walker), assorted weather phenomena that clearly are man-made (such as this week's polar vortex event), and miscellaneous accusations of Top Secret Scary Stuff (like what I dealt with in yesterday's post, which was the hidden agenda at CERN to use the Large Hadron Collider to resurrect the Egyptian god Osiris).

Which brings up an interesting question: if you're a conspiracy theorist, are you required by the bylaws to believe in all of them?  Or do you pick and choose?  Are there some ideas so idiotic that even Alex Jones would say, "Naw, that's just ridiculous"?

Because if the latter is true, I think I may have found the odds-on favorite.  Jim Garrow, an "Obama birther truther" and general wingnut, appeared on a radio show a few days ago hosted by Fox News contributor Erik Rush, and in an interview that should win some kind of award for sheer bizarreness, told us all about how President Obama is part of a secret plot.  He's upset by his decreasing approval ratings, and he's found a way to remedy the problem.  And that solution is to sell us out to aliens and Canadians.

No, I'm not making this up.  Here is a direct quote:

What we’re going to be seeing soon is the unveiling of the concept that we have, in fact, been contacted and have been in communication with people from other civilizations beyond earth, and that will be part of the great deception...  It’ll be a great fraud, the whole basis of this, it is a great hoax.  Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper have signed an agreement to assist one another militarily in the event of an insurrection.  Now we’re bringing in a new element, a group of people who could be armed and could be in a position to shoot American civilians who have never sworn allegiance to the Constitution.  I don’t know where that would fit with respect to the Chinese and Russian, who happen to be here under whatever guise, whether it be training or sharing of information, who knows what they might be in place.  But it opens up a pretty scary scenario.

Amazingly, Rush didn't immediately call in his assistants to have Garrow forcibly brought to a mental institution for evaluation.  He just said, "Wow."  And Rush's other guest, Tea Party commentator Nancy Smith, said, in a serious voice, "Personally I’ve already heard some other sources saying the very same thing that you’re saying."

Seriously?  We're being sold out to the Canadians?  Who are going to come over and shoot up the place?  You do know that you're referring to the single most courteous society on Earth, right?

But no.  Rush et al. just kind of sat there and acted as if what Garrow said was completely normal.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that in previous appearances on Rush's show, Garrow told us how he also believes that President Obama ordered the murders of Andrew Breitbart, Michael Hastings, and Tom Clancy because they'd all figured out that Obama is a Saudi operative and were about to blow his cover.  And that if that didn't work, he was going to give up the subtle approach, and just drop nuclear bombs on Charleston, South Carolina, except that three of his military leaders talked him out of it, so he fired them.

Man, that brings "no more Mr. Nice Guy" to a whole new level, doesn't it?

Seriously, folks, what does it take to stop people from listening?  Are there really individuals who are that gullible?  I'm pretty certain that Garrow himself is simply insane; but in order to keep appearing on Erik Rush's radio show -- which presumably has sponsors and listeners -- someone has to be paying attention, and believing this guy.

Which worries me.  Because these people vote.  And if people like Garrow keep getting spots on the public airwaves, it's providing an avenue for distributing their craziness, and simultaneously giving it a veneer of credibility.  I mean, we have enough ways to spread stupid ideas out there, what with how easy it is to simply click "Share" on social media, without radio talk show hosts giving paranoid loonies a forum.

But I guess I should look at the bright side; even if Garrow's right, I'd take my chances with the Canadians over people like Michele Bachmann and Louie Gohmert.  Even if they passed a law mandating that we switch from Big Macs and milk shakes to poutine and beer, the Canadians have a national health care system, they're the country that has the highest number of citizens with advanced degrees, and they're the world's largest producer of cheese.  So they must be doing something right.

So I say what the hell.  Let the Canadians take over.  They couldn't possibly screw things up any worse than we're already doing.

ConCERNing Osiris

Many of you undoubtedly know about CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), the world's largest particle physics laboratory, located on the border of France and Switzerland.  It's home to six particle accelerators and some of the most impressive discoveries in subatomic and high-energy physics in the world, including last year's demonstration of the existence of the elusive Higgs field, the field that confers the property of mass to every bit of matter in the universe.

Pretty impressive stuff, and most of it over my head even given my bachelor's degree in physics.

Now, switch gears for a moment.  You'll see why in a bit.

Many of you undoubtedly also know about Osiris, the ancient Egyptian god of the dead, although perhaps not the same ones who knew about CERN.  Osiris was one of the most important gods in ancient Egypt, given their fixation on the afterlife.  Unlike his fellow deities, who had animals' heads, Osiris looked pretty much like an ordinary guy, except that he had green skin.

Osiris became the god of rebirth when he was killed by his brother Set, who chopped his body up and threw it into the Nile river.  Osiris's wife Isis found her husband, in chunks, and sort of stuck the chunks back together and brought him back to life, only to find out afterwards that there was a chunk missing.  Unfortunately for Osiris, that chunk turned out to be a body part that most of us males are pretty fond of, if you get my drift.  Understandably upset at his wife for not finding a fairly important bit of him, he convinced Isis to make him a new one out of gold, which strikes me as a pretty poor substitute, all things considered.  But it must have worked, because soon after Isis gave birth to the god Horus, who looked just like his parents hoped except for the possible problem of having a falcon's head.

Then Osiris died again.  Poor guy just couldn't catch a break.

Now, by this time you're probably wondering what CERN and Osiris can possibly have to do with one another.  So let me explain.  CERN, you see, isn't just a place where physicists go to conduct complex and far-reaching experiments about the subtle structure of matter; it is actually a portal whose chief purpose is to create a wormhole, which will allow Osiris to be raised from the dead.

Again.  Hopefully they'll remember to bring along his penis this time.

Don't believe me?  Take a look at this article over at UFO Sightings Hotspot, called "Ta-Wer AKA Osiris AKA CERN."  Here's the main argument, if I can dignify it by that name:

According to researcher William Henry, the ancient Egyptian object named Ta-Wer aka “Osiris” device, was a stargate machine capable to open wormholes or dimensional openings used by Seth and Osiris to “travel across the underworld.”Is CERN the new “Osiris Ta-Wer”? A modern stargate machine based on ancient technology?

When work at CERN's Large Hadron Collider is completed in 2015, the collider should have twice the power and be able to help unlock more of the universe's mysteries and to explore an entirely new realm of physics.

With the LHC power doubled, they will start looking for what they think is out there and they hope that something will turn up that no one had ever thought of.

It is known that the secret societies are obsessed with the raising of Osiris and maybe they already know what they are looking for and was the placement of a Shiva Statue outside the CERN Hadron Collider a hint?

Sure.  Because a green-skinned Egyptian god and a multi-armed Hindu god are clearly the same guy.  But do go on:

According to Stephen Hawking: “ bending space-time is theoretically possible— by exploiting black holes, or wormholes if they exist, or by traveling at super speeds, based on Einstein’s theory of relativity.”

Although many people believe that time travel is science fiction, it is not, and taking into account the obsession of the illuminati to use CERN as a stargate machine, it may be possible in the near future, we will face God’s miracles as seen by the ancient Hindu people when their Gods travelling through stargate devices. 

You know, if I were Stephen Hawking, I would be really pissed at the way nutjobs use quotes from legitimate research, lectures, and interviews to support their bizarre ideas.  These guys cherry-pick almost as much as the fundamentalist Christians do.  And at least the evangelical Christians basically understand the stuff they're reading.  With articles like this one, though, you get the impression that the folks that write this sort of woo-woo horse waste have about as much actual comprehension of quantum mechanics as my dog.

They end, though, with a question:

Is there some occult ritual being carried within the LHC facility and is Shiva the one they are attempting to bring to Earth?

No and no.  Thanks for asking.  And once again, Shiva and Osiris aren't the same dude.  By no stretch of the imagination is a three-eyed, eight-armed dude wearing a necklace of skulls even remotely like a green-skinned bearded dude with a missing wang.  Are we clear on that now?

 And CERN has nothing to do with gods of any kind.  They do physics there.  End of story.

It's a regrettable tendency on the part of a lot of people to hear bits and pieces of stuff they don't understand, combine it with other stuff they only partially understand, and come to drastically wrong conclusions.  The cure, of course, is to try and find out a little about the actual facts, to learn some real science, but that, unfortunately, is a level of hard work that some people are unwilling to undertake.  So we haven't seen the end of this kind of thing.

Woo-woo wingnuttery, it seems, will be with us always, sort of like death and taxes but even more annoying.