Diamonds, water, the Great Flood, and car wrecks

When I was thirteen years old, I witnessed a car crash in front of my parents' house.

It was a bright red convertible, going far too fast -- and the driver was not quite able to negotiate the curve that the road made right by our driveway.  The car hit a road sign, went airborne, flipped in midair, and skidded down the hill in the neighbor's yard on its top.

My dad and I ran toward it, knowing that the likelihood was that there was a severely mashed human underneath.  But amazingly, this was the one-in-a-million situation where not wearing a seatbelt had saved the driver's life.  He'd been thrown clear, and came away with no more than cuts and bruises (and a totaled car).

But what I remember about this incident most of all is the feeling of complete helplessness -- watching the car careening down the road, seeing it launch itself into the air, being certain at the time (although I was happily proven wrong in the end) that that driver was seconds from his death.  To this day, I still have this feeling when I see something rushing toward an outcome that I am powerless to prevent.

It's an intensely uncomfortable sensation.

I experienced this feeling just yesterday, albeit in a less life-threatening situation, when I ran into a seemingly innocuous story over at the BBC News Online entitled, "Mineral Hints at Bright Blue Rocks Deep in the Earth."  In it, we hear about the discovery of inclusions of a mineral called ringwoodite in diamonds that had formed deep in the Earth (an estimated 600 kilometers underneath the Earth's surface).

[image of a ringwoodite crystal courtesy of photographer Jasperox and the Wikimedia Commons]

"Diamonds, brought to the Earth's surface in violent eruptions of deep volcanic rocks called kimberlites," the article states, "provide a tantalising window into the deep Earth.  A research team led by Prof Graham Pearson of the University of Alberta, Canada, studied a diamond from a 100-million-year-old kimberlite found in Juina, Brazil, as part of a wider project."

So far, something of interest only to geologists.  But then the article went on to explain one of the odd things about these inclusions:

"While ringwoodite has previously been found in meteorites, this is the first time a terrestrial ringwoodite has been seen. But more extraordinarily, the researchers found that the mineral contains about 1% water.  While this sounds like very little, because ringwoodite makes up almost all of this immense portion of the deep Earth, it adds up to a huge amount of deep water...  They also provide the first direct evidence that there may be as much water trapped in those rocks as there is in all the oceans."

And that's when I saw the impending car crash.

"A key question posed by the observation," the article continues, "is to understand the extent to which plate tectonics on Earth leads to oceans of water being recycled deep within our planet, and to predict the likely amounts of water trapped in other rocky planets."

No, no, stop, please stop...

"Prof Joseph Smyth of the University of Colorado has spent many years studying ringwoodite and similar minerals synthesised in his laboratory.  He said: 'I think it's stunning! It implies that the interior may store several times the amount of water in the oceans. It tells us that hydrogen is an essential ingredient in the Earth and not added late from comets.'"

Too late.

You do see where this slow-motion auto accident is heading, right?  Let me make it clear by posting three of the comments that showed up when the story, in somewhat abbreviated form, made its way onto The Daily Mail:

The Christian bible has some things to say about incredibly large amounts of water deep within the earth. KJV Genesis 7:11 Noah, his family and the creatures, enter the ark 11 In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. KJV Genesis 8:2 The waters subside 2 The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained; KJV Proverbs 8:27-29 27 When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth: 28 When he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the fountains of the deep: 29 When he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment.

This water was mentioned in the bible when it told of God making all the water below the earth rise and flood the world. Read about Noah. Believe what the bible teaches us. Your soul is at stake.

"....all the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of the sky were opened. And the rain fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights. " Genesis 7:11 cf John Lennox Mathematician Oxford U. It is certainly scientific to believe in God, and really now, what sort of spirit promotes hatred for people who do?

Then some poor slob, who hasn't figured out yet that arguing in the "Comments" section of popular media is completely pointless, responded that in order to believe the biblical account of the Great Flood, you'd have to accept that it rained enough in "forty days and forty nights" to cover the entire surface of the Earth, a quantity he calculated as 2000 million cubic kilometers of water.  (I haven't checked his math, but it doesn't seem to be off by much, given that the surface area of the Earth is 510 million square kilometers.)

 

To no avail.  Of course.

[1] Direct your free water clarifications to the DM which created the headline, "Revealed:The vast reservoir hidden beneath the Earth's crust that holds as much water as ALL of the oceans." [2] You say, "2000 M cubic km of water fell as rain." Where does the bible say that? Read Genesis 7:11 again. It specifically mentions the breaking up of the fountains of the deep along with the windows of heaven being opened up. This implies that all the water did not come from rain. Besides providing the source for your claim, please show your calculations along with your assumptions. [3] You don't know and can't prove that these bible stories are myths anymore than you can definitively show what a photon is or what gravity is. Neither can you prove by testable replication where and how life originated and diversified. You are as powerless to explain these things as you are to definitively reject these verses in the bible.

So if the initial publication of the article led me to feel like I was watching the beginning of an intellectual train-wreck, the aftermath left me doing repeated headdesks.

And just because I feel obliged to say it:  no, the discovery of a great deal of chemically-bound water in the mantle transition zone does not support the biblical flood story.  For one thing, the rocks down there are at at temperature of about 1600 C, so if god "broke up the fountains of the deep," what would come out is not pure, clear water, but a huge gusher of extremely hot magma.  No, there is nothing even remotely possible about a Great Flood Covering the Earth, not to mention the whole Noah's Ark nonsense.  In order to accept any of that as literal fact, you either have to be (1) ignorant, or (2) engage in confirmation bias to an extent that is truly mind-boggling.

And to the scientists who published this research; I know you were just trying to do some cool geology.  I know you were excited by your find, and what it might tell us about the chemistry of the Earth's mantle.  But we skeptics already spend way more of our time than we should arguing against the biblical literalist lunatics, and trying to stop them from spreading their nonsense into public schools -- and now they think they have some scientific support for their Bronze-Age mythology.

Yes, I know it doesn't really support their beliefs, but they think it does, and as a result we're going to be hearing about it for the next ten years.  And for that, I don't know if I can ever forgive you.

No miracles for the Ivy League

I suppose that I'm an optimist at heart.

I always live in hope that people will see reason.  Regardless of what illogical and counterfactual thinking they've been guilty of in the past, I try to keep focused on the fact that they could, eventually, recognize that what they're saying is nonsense, and subscribe to a more reasoned approach.

It's what I'd hoped of Pat Robertson.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I know, I know.  Pat Robertson has proven, over and over, that he's a raving lunatic.  As I described in a previous post, he's the one who said that Katrina and the Haitian earthquake were the wrath of god, that martial arts were evil because they required you to "inhale demon spirits" prior to practice, and that good Christian children shouldn't participate in Halloween because the candy could have been cursed by witches.  I think I can say without fear of contradiction that these are not the pronouncements of a sane man.

But then, last month,  he said something... reasonable.  Like, really reasonable.  It was shortly after the Ken Ham/Bill Nye debate, and Pat said on his show, The 700 Club, that Ham had better give up trying to defend the young-Earth creationist stance:

Let’s face it.  There was a Bishop [Ussher] who added up the dates listed in Genesis and he came up with the world had been around for 6,000 years.  There ain’t no way that’s possible.  To say that it all came about in 6,000 years is just nonsense and I think it’s time we come off of that stuff and say this isn’t possible.

Let’s be real, let’s not make a joke of ourselves.

We’ve got to be realistic, and admit that the dating of Bishop Ussher just doesn’t comport with anything that is found in science, and you can’t just totally deny the geological formations that are out there.

Well... um... yeah.  Exactly.

The creationists, of course, were not going to take that lying down, especially given that Pat is one of their own and is still widely listened-to in the evangelical world.  Paul Taylor, who along with Eric Hovind is the host of Creation Today, took serious umbrage with Pat's pronouncements.  "Pat Robertson is claiming, then, that 6,000 years comes from Ussher’s book and not the Bible," Taylor said.  "The point is, where did Ussher get his figure of 6,000 years?...  Now, then, Pat Robertson, are you claiming the Bible is not [divinely] inspired when the Bible clearly tells us that the world is 6,000 years old?"

Which, I guess, was a fair enough criticism, given Taylor's assumptions about both the inerrancy of the bible and Pat Robertson's opinion thereof.  But as for me, I was heartened.  Maybe there's hope after all, I thought.  If someone like Pat Robertson could be convinced of the antiquity of the Earth, then there's hope for converting others to a more scientific view of the universe.

Optimism, sometimes, is a losing proposition.

I say this because of a story that popped up yesterday that described another proclamation Pat made on The 700 Club, this one just this past Monday.  A listener called in and asked Pat why the incidence of miracles was so much higher in "places like Africa" (the listener's words, not mine, allow me to point out) than it is here in the U.S.  Why don't we see miracles happening every day, like in biblical times, when it seemed like every other day there was a talking snake or a burning bush or a dude getting the crap smitten out of him for blasphemy or a dead guy coming back to life?  Why, the listener asked, don't we see stuff in the U.S. like prayer restoring sight in the blind and the ability to walk in the lame?

Ah, yes, that, Pat said.  It's because...

... god doesn't like us because we're too smart:

People overseas didn’t go to Ivy League schools.  We’re so sophisticated, we think we’ve got everything figured out.  We know about evolution, we know about Darwin, we know about all these things that says God isn’t real.

We have been inundated with skepticism and secularism.  And overseas, they’re simple, humble.  You tell ‘em God loves ‘em and they say, ‘Okay, he loves me.’  You say God will do miracles and they say, ‘Okay, we believe him.’

And that’s what God’s looking for.  That’s why they have miracles.

Well, even overlooking the blatant white-privilege attitude that would cause someone to label an entire freakin' continent with the word "simple," this strikes me as a completely baffling attitude.  Let's put you in god's shoes (size 12 loafers).  Now say you've got two people that you're considering doing a miracle for.  And you're not just considering doing your garden-variety miracle like hitting all of the stoplights green or finding two perfectly ripe avocados at the grocery store or hearing something that's true on the History Channel.  No, this is going to be something big, like regrowing a lost limb or having your dog start talking to you to tell you that you need to repent your evil ways and return Unto The Lord.

Now, both of the people you're thinking about granting a miracle to are unbelievers.  But one is a dirt-poor, uneducated farmer from Senegal.  The other is a highly influential, wealthy, Ivy League academic from Boston.

Logically, which one should you choose?

Well, if god is trying to reach the maximum number of people -- which, presumably, he is -- the obvious choice is the Bostonian academic.  No offense to our Senegalese farmer, but if he was suddenly converted via a divine message spoken by his dog, he might tell three or four people, maybe a couple of dozen, at most, and that would be it.  The Bostonian?  Especially if he could prove that something miraculous had happened, like hard evidence that he had regrown a lost finger, or something?

You're talking a reach of millions.

So either (1) god doesn't see things that way, and doesn't understand the concept of "biggest bang for the buck," or (2) I was wrong about Pat Robertson, and he actually is crazy as a bedbug.

Sadly, I'm putting my money on the latter.

Bring out your dead!

I have, at times, been accused of selecting only the most grotesquely absurd examples of woo-woo belief to examine in this blog.  Thus, say my detractors, avoiding the necessity of answering difficult questions about more plausible, rational, and scientific claims.

To which I say: maybe.  I don't think I really shy away from odd (but plausible) ideas; there are a good many claims to which I give my stock response of, "The jury's still out on that one," and which I am eager to consider.  (An obvious example is the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence.)  But if I sometimes fall prey to the temptation of going for the low-hanging fruit, I can excuse myself on two bases:

1. They are so freakin' common; and
2. There are so many people who fall for them.

As an example, take the article that popped up on The Freethinker yesterday, which I had to read twice to convince myself that I wasn't falling victim to Poe's Law.  The title?  "Evangelical Christians Want Access to More Corpses... To Hone Their 'Raising the Dead' Skills."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I'd like to be able to tell you that this isn't exactly what it sounds like... but it is.  Tyler Johnson, of Bethel Church, Redding, California, runs something called "One Glance Ministries" -- and an integral part of this is the "Dead Raising Team," about which Johnson himself has the following to say:

The DRT offers a service of support to any family that is grieving the loss of a loved one.  In addition to giving the bereaved spiritual and emotional support, our team of trained ministers will offer prayers of resurrection on the behalf of the deceased.  Handling each situation with the utmost sensitivity, our team travels to the funeral home, morgue, or family's home where the deceased is being kept.  Upon arrival, we spend time in prayer with the family, as well as the deceased.  We will stay as long as we are needed.  Since it was started, the DRT has comforted families in the midst of grief, as well as having eleven resurrections to date as a result of their prayers.  If this is a service you would like to make use of in the midst of your pain, please contact us as soon as possible.  Nothing is impossible with God.

Call me a Doubting Thomas, but after reading the mention of the "eleven resurrections" I wanted to type in [Source Citation Needed!].  But unfortunately, Johnson isn't forthcoming with details.  As the Freethinker article put it:

Johnson is unwilling to provide successful case studies. And in general, the proof that believers cite is a bit unconvincing ­– for example, there is an American heart surgeon who allegedly brought a heart attack patient back from the dead with prayer … oh, and a defibrillator.

Other doctors find the story entirely unremarkable. One wonders why.

On the DRT website, you can check out the details of "training," which include sessions on "The Theology of Dead Raising" and "The Practicals of Dead Raising."  I would expect the latter to be especially... informative.

I'd like to say that this kind of thing is limited to the US, but apparently there are also lunatics of this stripe in the UK.  Again, from the article in Freethinker:

Alun and Donna Leppit... [are] a British couple who are convinced that the dead can be raised through the power of prayer.  

During the course of the [BBC 4] broadcast, Donna lamented that there aren’t too many corpses in the UK that they can practice on.

The one that they did try to resurrect to was Donna’s brother,  who died of a heart attack.

By the time they got to the mortuary, he had been dead for eight hours. They prayed over him for nearly an hour, and although at one stage they thought they saw him move, that was as good as it got.

Are they discouraged?  "Not at all," says Alun.  "Practice makes perfect," adds Donna. "But in this country, we don’t often get access to dead bodies."

No, Donna, and there's a reason for that.

Funny that there's no Amputee-Restoration Team, isn't there?  Seems like amputees eager to have god (with whom Nothing Is Impossible) restore their lost limbs would be easier to come by than corpses.  Wonder why they don't give that a shot?

Maybe because they know it wouldn't work -- and the amputee would still be around, sans limb, to give lie to the whole proceeding.

Okay, I know all Christians aren't like this, and I won't fall into the trap of judging all of them on the basis of a loony few.  But in my experience, the loony ones are often the loudest.  Look at Michele Bachmann.  (Not directly!  Wear protective eyewear!)  Her shrill neo-Puritanism draws huge crowds -- despite the fact that she has stated outright that America should be run on the basis of "a biblical view of law."  (And has also said, "If I felt that’s what the Lord was calling me to do, I would do it. When I have sensed that the Lord is calling me to do something, I’ve said yes to it.")

A "biblical view of law" would include, presumably, doing things like stoning disobedient children and burning down towns where there are unbelievers, since those are both clearly mandated in the Old Testament, along with the prohibition against homosexuality she is so fond of quoting.

So I'm perhaps to be excused for being a little wary when someone says, "Oh, Christians aren't like that!"  Maybe many Christians aren't.  Maybe even most aren't.  But if enough of them are potential clients of the Dead Raising Team that people like Michele Bachmann (and Jim DeMint, and Sam Brownback, and Ted Cruz) can get elected, then there's something seriously wrong.  (Read this article in Patheos if you are still in doubt.)

So it's easy for rationalists to laugh at the Dead Raising Team and the rest of the wacko fringe, but there is a significant percentage of Americans who believe in such things whole-heartedly.

So maybe the "low-hanging fruit" isn't quite so facile a target as it may have seemed at first.

The disappearance of Flight 370

Well, I'm happy to say that The Weekly World News has been supplanted as the world's first and foremost disseminator of bullshit.  The crown has now officially been passed to Natural News. 

It's not that the competition wasn't stiff.  The Weekly World News has had some doozies.  (My all-time favorite TWWN headline: "Santa's Elves Actually Slaves From The Planet Mars.")  But Natural News has edged them out, on two bases: (1) they have better writers, so their stories actually sound plausible and therefore sucker more people, and (2) they have mastered the art of distributing bonkers "news" stories via social media.

At first, it was just health stuff (and their site is still sub-headed, "Natural Health News and Scientific Discoveries").  And as such, they confined themselves for some time to articles telling you about how Big Pharma is trying to kill us all, how you can cure cancer with lemon juice, how putting onions in your socks draws out toxins, and how you won't get heart disease, diabetes, cancer, or old age if you eat Indian gooseberries.  (You thought I was going to say I made those up, didn't you?  Well, ha.  Those are real article topics from Natural News.  Teach you to make assumptions.)

But now, they've branched out.  And because of this, we have a monumentally screwy piece of journalism, to wit: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared because it... disappeared.

[image courtesy of photographer Aero Icarus and the Wikimedia Commons]

Yup.  Disappeared.  "Poof."  Or "zap," or whatever noise you prefer your teleportation device to make.  And admit it: it's not really that surprising.  Given that we're talking about the loss of a huge passenger jet, it was only a matter of time until the conspiracy theories started flying around.

Author Mike Adams does it right, I have to give him that.  First, it's hammered into our brains how MYSTERIOUS and BAFFLING it is that the plane vanished (words to that effect appear dozens of times), and then we're offered a possible explanation:

This is what is currently giving rise to all sorts of bizarre-sounding theories across the 'net, including discussions of possible secret military weapons tests, Bermuda Triangle-like ripples in the fabric of spacetime, and even conjecture that non-terrestrial (alien) technology may have teleported the plane away.

But no, Adams says, that would be ridiculous.  We couldn't believe that without evidence.  Instead, he asks us to believe the following:

The frightening part about all this is not that we will find the debris of Flight 370; but rather that we won't. If we never find the debris, it means some entirely new, mysterious and powerful force is at work on our planet which can pluck airplanes out of the sky without leaving behind even a shred of evidence.

If there does exist a weapon with such capabilities, whoever control it already has the ability to dominate all of Earth's nations with a fearsome military weapon of unimaginable power. That thought is a lot more scary than the idea of an aircraft suffering a fatal mechanical failure.

Righty-o.  Because planes have never disappeared before, or anything.  It's not as if there's a list of 122 airplane disappearances that have never been resolved, right there on Wikipedia -- 36 of them since 1966, when black boxes were required on commercial aircraft.  It's not as if there is precedent for it taking a long while to locate wreckage -- such as the remains of Air France Flight 447 in 2009, which took three years to recover.  (The black box was finally found under 13,000 feet of water in the South Atlantic.)

Marginally more plausible theories have been trotted out, mostly centering on some kind of Chinese-led terrorist attack designed to get rid of one or more people who were on the plane.  To that, I can only respond: why the hell would the Chinese blow up an entire airplane to get rid of a few people?  The plane was headed to Beijing, fer cryin' in the sink.  Couldn't they have just arrested them when they got there?  It's not like the Chinese are shy about doing that sort of thing, after all.

So, then, you might ask: what do I think happened to the plane?

Are you ready? 

I don't know.  There's no evidence at the moment, and in the absence of evidence, that's what we say.  It's not that hard, really -- say it after me:  I don't know.  It might have been an equipment malfunction; it might have been a terrorist bomb; it might have been shot down by someone on the ground.  It might have been any number of other things.  We don't have any information yet, so any speculating is kind of pointless, and it sure is a little premature to start talking about alien teleportation.  But that didn't stop the commenters on the Natural News article from writing stuff that was, if you can believe it, even loonier than the original article:

Why Does Mike Adams not offer any speculation about The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal hearing charging Israel with genocide? Also the Former Malaysian Prime Minister until 2003 who once stated 9/11 was a false flag and it's Jews that run the world. The plane being fitted with the Boeing uninterruptable autopilot system?

The possibility exists that this plane instead of moving towards the ground has moved away from the ground. In other words it has moved into outer space. It is beyond Earth orbit because it would have been detected in orbit by some instrument. This would explain why the black box signal is not detected.

Have you seen LOST!!! What if this is just like LOST! The radiation from Fukishima [sic] is probably changing the sky now too.

Mike is blessed with a unique ability to analyze, rationalize and discern evil. For those who want Mike to ignore politics, remember that millions more innocent people have been murdered by governments than from toxins in their food.

So, the reason that they haven't found the wreckage yet couldn't be the fact that the Gulf of Thailand, where the plane disappeared, is fucking huge?

Nope.  Has to be a "new, mysterious force that plucks airplanes out of the sky."

Look.  I'll grant you this:  I don't know what happened, either.  (Cf. what I wrote several paragraphs ago, and then asked you to say along with me.)  The difference is, I don't pretend that I do, and I don't have any interest in getting people all freaked out over idle speculation that will almost certainly turn out to be false.  But I'll go this far -- if it does turn out to be a "new, mysterious force," or aliens, or time warps, or the fact that the Bermuda Triangle decided to go on vacation in Southeast Asia, I'll happily publish a retraction.

It'd be nice to receive the same from Mike Adams if, on the other hand, I turn out to be right -- but I'm not expecting it.

Race, ethnicity, Einstein, and King Tut

Today we have two stories that are mostly interesting in juxtaposition.

First, we have an article by Jo Marchant over at Medium entitled, "Tutankhamun's Blood," wherein we hear about the work done by Yehia Gad to sequence the young pharaoh's DNA -- and how it set off a war over what race/ethnic group gets to claim him.  First, there was concern that the test would show a connection between the Egyptian king and... *cue dramatic music* the Jews:

The editor of Archaeology magazine, Mark Rose, reported in 2002 that [proposed DNA testing] was cancelled “due to concern that the results might strengthen an association between the family of Tutankhamun and the Biblical Moses.” An Egyptologist with close links to the antiquities service, speaking to me on condition of anonymity, agreed: “There was a fear it would be said that the pharaohs were Jewish.”

Specifically, if the results showed that Tutankhamun shared DNA with Jewish groups, there was concern that this could be used by Israel to argue that Egypt was part of the Promised Land.

This might seem an outlandish notion, but given the context of the Middle Eastern history, it is understandable...  For many Egyptians, the idea that their most famous kings could share some common heritage with their enemies is a hard one to cope with.

Yet the possibility that Tutankhamun could share some DNA with ancient Jewish tribes is not far-fetched, says Salima Ikram, an Egyptologist and mummy specialist at the American University in Cairo. After all, the royal family might well have shared genes with others who originated in the same part of the world. “It is quite possible that you might find Semitic strains of DNA in the pharaohs,” she says. “Christians, Jews, Muslims—they all came from a similar gene pool originally.”

Yehia Gad finally was allowed to do the DNA testing, under the direction of an Egyptian antiquities expert, the archaeologist Zahi Hawass, and the results turned out to be controversial, but for a different reason:

A Swiss genealogy company named IGENEA issued a press release based on a blurry screen-grab from the Discovery documentary. It claimed that the colored peaks on the computer screen proved that Tutankhamun belonged to an ancestral line, or haplogroup, called R1b1a2, that is rare in modern Egypt but common in western Europeans...  This immediately led to assertions by neo-Nazi groups that King Tutankhamun had been “white,” including YouTube videos with titles such as King Tutankhamun’s Aryan DNA Results, while others angrily condemned the entire claim as a racist hoax. It played, once again, into the long-running battle over the king’s racial origins. While some worried about a Jewish connection, the argument over whether the king was black or white has inflamed fanatics worldwide. Far-right groups have used blood group data to claim that the ancient Egyptians were in fact Nordic, while others have been desperate to define the pharaohs as black African. A 1970s show of Tutankhamun’s treasures triggered demonstrations arguing that his African heritage was being denied, while the blockbusting 2005 tour was hit by protests in Los Angeles, when demonstrators argued that the reconstruction of the king’s face built from CT scan data was not sufficiently “black.”

If that's not ridiculous enough, just yesterday we had a story from Haaretz about an apparently insane Iranian cleric who claims that Albert Einstein was actually a Shi'a Muslim:

The report cites a video by Ayatolla Mahadavi Kani, described as the head of the Assembly of Experts in the Islamic Republic of Iran, who says that there are documents proving the Jewish scientist embraced Shiite Islam and was an avid follower of Ja'far Al-Sadiq, an eighth-century Shi'i imam.

In the video, Kani quotes Einstein as saying that when he heard about the ascension of the prophet Mohammed, "a process which was faster than the speed of light," he realized "this is the very same relativity movement that Einstein had understood."

The ayatollah adds: "Einstein said, 'when I heard about the narratives of the prophet Mohamad and that of the Ahle-Beit [prophet's household] I realized they had understood these things way before us.'"

What I find wryly amusing about all of this he's-mine-no-he's-mine tug-of-war over famous historical figures is how it ignores the reality of what race and ethnic identification actually are.  There is some biological basis for race, which is how we can generate cladograms for ethnic groups like the one pictured below:

Note what is, for some people, the most surprising thing about this tree; two very dark-skinned individuals, one a Native Australian and the other a Bantu from Zimbabwe, are far more distantly related to each other than an Englishman is related to a guy from Japan -- even though both the Bantu and the Australian are routinely lumped together as "Black," and the Englishman and the Japanese consider themselves different races.

Professor Emeritus Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, the acclaimed and much-cited population geneticist at Stanford, writes, "Human races are still extremely unstable entities in the bands of modern taxonomists…  As one goes down the scale of the taxonomic hierarchy toward the lower and lower partitions, the boundaries between clusters become even less clear…  There is great genetic variation in all populations, even in small ones.  From a scientific point of view, the concept of race has failed to obtain any consensus…the major stereotypes, all based on skin color, hair color and form, and facial traits, reflect superficial differences that are not confirmed by deeper analysis with more reliable genetic traits and whose origin dates from recent evolution mostly under the effect of climate and perhaps sexual selection."

That's not to say that there's nothing to race at all.  Self-perception, privilege, culture, religion, and language are all strongly connected to, and influenced by, race and ethnicity.  But the genetic connection is tenuous at best, which is why I always find it funny when someone tells me that (s)he is "1/32 Native American," and then decides to adopt a Native name, wear Native-style jewelry and clothing, and so on.  By the time your ancestry has that small a proportion from any ethnic group, you are hardly Native American in any cultural sense, so doing all that sort of stuff -- and yes, I know more than one person who does -- is little more than an affectation.

But it's also not to say that I'm not proud of my roots.  My family is predominantly French and Scottish, with some Dutch, German, English, Irish, and Native American thrown in for good measure (and the latter, I'm afraid, isn't much more than 1/32 of my heritage).  Ethnically, I'm a southern Louisianian, and if you don't think that's an ethnic and cultural group, you should spend some time in Lafayette, Louisiana.  But I am, at the same time, fully aware of how fluid a concept ethnic identification is.  I've lost most of my Cajun accent in the three decades I've lived in YankeeLand, and my children -- who share about the same proportion of Cajun blood I do, since their mother was also half south-Louisiana-French by ancestry -- were raised in upstate New York and therefore aren't ethnically Cajun at all.

And all of this is why the wrangling over whether King Tut was "actually" European (or Black, or Semitic, or whatever) and whether Albert Einstein was "actually" a Muslim, is ridiculous.  We are all mixtures of genetics and culture; and each of those brings along with it physical and cultural baggage.  It's wonderful when someone embraces his or her ethnicity for the positive features (the perspective on the world, the music, the language, the food) and jettisons the negative aspects (the divisive us-vs.-them mentality, the notions of superiority and inferiority, the assumption of privilege).  An understanding of what ethnicity and race are, and are not, is a critical step in growing into a world where we value each other's shared humanity more than we worry about what labels we choose to place on ourselves.

Saying no to Noah

There are times when I want to tell people, "Stop.  You are making it way too easy for me."

I would almost like it better if the loonies had stronger arguments, you know?  Make me work for my posts.  Stop me in my tracks with some actual logic or evidence.

Sadly, that rarely happens.  I won't say "never;" I have more than once posted retractions or corrections.  And I live in hopes that the wingnuts will eventually start adopting the scientific method as their modus operandi.

But I don't see it happening any time soon.  Instead, we still have daily examples of what my father used to call "shooting fish in a barrel."

The latest example of fish-shooting has to do with the reactions to the soon-to-be-released Darren Aronofsky biblical epic Noah, starring Russell Crowe and Emma Watson.  (Watch a trailer here.)  The movie is due in theaters on March 26.

 [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

You would think that the staunch Christians would be tickled pink that Hollywood is putting a biblical story on the Big Screen -- they certainly loved the gruesome Passion of the Christ, not to mention classics like The Greatest Story Ever Told and The Ten Commandments.

But no.  The site Christian News published an article called "New 'Noah' Film Starring Russell Crowe Flooded With Controversy," which described the reactions of Christians who have been allowed to pre-screen the movie.  "Earlier reports of the film expressed disapproval that Noah was depicted as being centered on an environmental agenda, and that Aronofsky viewed Noah as the 'first environmentalist,'" author Heather Clark writes, implying that Christianity and environmentalism are somehow antithetical.  "Noah is also stated to be tormented with guilt for surviving the flood while others perished."

Well, yeah.  I'd guess he would be.  But it only gets weirder from there.  Angie Meyer-Olszewski, an entertainment publicist, was interviewed by Fox411 and said, "You can’t stray from the Bible in a Bible-based film without upsetting a percentage of the Christian faith base.  Interpretations may vary, but if the story changes, even a little, it’s deemed offensive.  When a studio releases a movie that’s biblical, they are playing a game of religious roulette."

But no one had a stranger, or more bizarrely ironic, reaction than our old pal Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis.  In an interview with Newsmax, Ham said, "In the movie, it seems Noah is a far cry from the Noah of the Bible.  He's angry, even crazy.  It makes a mockery of Noah's righteous nature and is actually anti-biblical...  Noah was a preacher of righteousness, (but) this just isn't the case in Hollywood's version.  He's a delusional, conflicted man, more concerned about the environment, animals, and even killing his own grandchild than he is with his family and his relationship with God."

Ham then went on to say, in a quote that I swear I'm not making up, "Sure, after watching the film, people could be directed to read the true story for themselves in the Bible.  But in this day and age, young people have a hard time deciphering reality from fiction and don't often take the time to form their own educated opinions."

*irony overload*

The last quote prompted atheist blogger Hemant Mehta to say, "He didn't really just say that... did he?"

Then noted evangelical wackmobile Ray Comfort weighed in, because things weren't surreal enough.  "I wouldn't encourage a soul to pay Hollywood to make any movie that undermines the credibility of the Bible, and this one certainly does," Comfort said.  "Do it right -- according to the script in the Scriptures -- and we will support it in the millions, as we did with Ben-Hur."

Ah, yes.  I do remember the famous chariot race scene from the Gospel of Luke, don't you?

And if this weren't enough, we now have word that the movie is being banned in Muslim countries, thus far Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, with Jordan, Kuwait, and Egypt expected to follow suit.   The reason -- it is an insult to depict any of Allah's prophets (of which Noah is considered one), and the movie "contradicts the stature of prophets and messengers... and antagonizes the faithful."

Well then.  This just shows, once again, the truth of the South African proverb, that there are forty different kinds of lunacy, but only one kind of common sense.  I mean, really; do they expect that a movie is going to follow the "script in the Scriptures" to the letter?  If it did, it would be, what, fifteen minutes long?  And have no character development or, frankly, plot.  But there you have it; I guess you can't please everyone.  And it's not like it's the only biblical epic you have to choose from, if that sort of thing floats your, um, ark.  The Jesus's-life movie Son of God is already in the theaters, and seems to be generating better responses from the faithful, for what it's worth.

As far as director Aronofsky's feelings about the controversy surrounding Noah, the media depicts him as upset by it, but I honestly doubt he is.  The kerfuffle over the movie's biblical accuracy, and whether it should be viewed by the devout, is keeping it in the media -- which is exactly where Aronofsky wants it to be.  I predict it'll be a roaring success, at least for the first few weeks.  Irish poet Brendan Behan said it best: "There is no such thing as bad publicity."

Type tests, weird verbiage, and Pod'Lair

It seems like lately, self-inquiry tests are all the rage.

They range from the banal ("What Harry Potter character are you?"  "What rock star are you?"  "What Joss Whedon character are you?") to the tried and true (the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is still really popular) to the absurd (the various sorts of astrology).  And on the face of it, there's nothing wrong with the urge to find out more about what makes you tick.  After all, the legend "Gnothi Seauton" (Know Yourself) was inscribed on the Temple of Delphi over 2,500 years ago, and those Greek philosophers were no slouches in the wisdom department.

[image courtesy of photographer Thomas Hawk and the Wikimedia Commons]

Still, some of them seem to be making unduly heavy weather out of the whole thing, and I ran into an example of this just the other day.  Called "Pod'Lair," for no reason I could find, it is described as follows:

Pod'Lair methodology reads a person's innate nature, what we call their Mojo, with an accuracy never before possible, which allows humans to know themselves in truly unprecedented ways, ending the debate on whether or not people have qualia and what it involves...

Once you understand the basics of Pod'Lair theory, and you've begun to see the Mojo phenomenon for yourself, it improves your understanding of and interaction with every facet of your life, including: education, career, relationships, community, politics, spirituality...basically all of existence.

Well, naturally, I was curious about what my Mojo was, even though it's really hard for me to take anything with the name "Mojo" particularly seriously.  And it required that I send in a ten-minute video of myself, which I wasn't going to do.  The whole thing apparently hinges on subtle facial movement cues that are supposedly indicators of personality types, a bit like Bandler & Grinder's neurolinguistic programming (which honesty compels me to mention has also been flagged as having many of the characteristics of pseudoscience).  So I went to the "About Us" page, where I read passages like the following:

The Mojo Dojo Pathway is the Universal Pathway for the Language of Mojo. This pathway is focused on Mojo Reading of yourself and others, in order to understand how Mojos interact with one another in Social Alchemy. This is the objective study of Mojo, as it applies to the relationships within the Human Matrix.

Well, I think I'm at least above average at reading comprehension, and while reading a lot of the stuff on this site I was wearing a perplexed expression, my head tilted a little, rather like my dog does when I try to explain something complex and difficult to him, like why he shouldn't try to hump the cat.  Unfortunately, unlike my dog, I wasn't able just to wag my tail and forget about it all.  Some sort of perverse drive kept me working my way through this website:

It is essential to know how to rein in your top two Powers. Modulation causes stress on the system, which is Keening. The individual Mojos begin to have shut-down mechanisms designed for self-protection and energy conservation. These are healthy to a point, but over the long term they can shut the system down in a way that is damaging, temporarily or permanently, which is known as Stress Lock.

No, really, I shouldn't read any more, I really think that's...

You can generate energy from within, but as you generate that energy, it encounters the Bubble of your home and responds to it. Much like a creature in the womb reaches out consciously to get nutrients, it needs to be a conducive womb for the creature to get what it needs. This sounds simpler than it is because in many ways humans have stepped away from their Bubble being an essential part of their harmonious existence, having been told what to do by Bubbles that are already in place.

I mean, I have other things to do this morning, and it's not necessary that I...

Spirit Forms refers to the Unconscious Genius that every human has. The unconscious portions of the psyche often present themselves as autonomous entities that when dialogued with improves a human's understanding and performance in any endeavor, be it artistic, scientific, athletic, etc. The Language of Spirit Forms includes the Pathways of Spirit Ambassador (Universal Pathway) and Temple of Spirits (Personal Pathway).

Merciful heavens, please stop...

Humanity is within Gaia, Gaia is within the Cosmos, the Cosmos is within Natural Law, and this all came to be where we are now. To attempt to tell the Human Collective, Gaia, Cosmos, and everything above it what to do is the height of arrogance.

OKAY.  Thank you very much.  So anyway, after I spent way more time trying to read this stuff than I should have, and coming away with the understanding that Humans Are Heroic Love And Cosmic Energy, or something, I did a little digging and found out that evidently some people who are cognitive psychologists think there might actually be some legitimacy to the whole thing (read one interesting thread here, where Pod'Lair is considered seriously along with MBTI and neurolinguistic programming theory).

What strikes me, though, is the question of how a skeptic, with a reasonable background in human neurology, could decide if there's anything to this at all from the outside -- the writing is so dense, and (frankly) so mixed up with woo-woo verbiage, that it's impossible for me to tell.  Even one indicator that the whole thing had been tested against other sorts of psychological assessments, and found to have value, would have made a difference.  Instead, under "Evidence," we're just given some vague hand-waving arguments coupled with a much longer section about why Jung, Maslow, MBTI, typology, and astrology (!) are all wrong, and that's supposed to be enough to go on.

Oh, and we're also given descriptions of the 32 basic Mojo types, including "Xyy'nai," which "engage the dynamics of human communities through interpersonal connection, social awareness, and shepherding, creating an attentive and diplomatic character." We are also told that example "Xyy'nais" are Barack Obama and Miley Cyrus.

Because those two clearly have so much in common.

Now, mind you, it's not that I think that there's anything wrong with pursuing self-knowledge. Far from it.   It's more that I have the sense that any test that purports to divide all of humanity into a small number of classes based upon artificial distinctions is doomed to failure.  And I also wonder if any of these type tests -- be it MBTI, Pod'Lair, or "What Dr. Who Character Are You?" -- is telling us anything about ourselves that we couldn't have figured out with an hour's honest self-reflection.

But being an inquisitive sort, I am tempted to send in a video.  I'd like to see what they'd make of my rather unfortunate face.  And to anyone who goes to the Pod'Lair site (which I linked above), and decides to participate -- do come back here and post the results.  Like I said before: there's nothing like actual results to support a conjecture.  And even if the evaluation of its accuracy would have to come from one's impression of oneself, it'd be interesting to see whether the whole thing has any basis in reality.