How to piss off an ecologist

There's a fundamental disconnect in the American brain.  I suspect that it's also true in most other "First World" countries, but that's only supposition.  I can say with some assuredness, however, that it's true here in the United States, because I've witnessed its results over and over.

This disconnect has to do with where stuff comes from, and where it goes after it's out of our sight.  If you asked people, for example, what the most common pigment in ordinary white paint is, most folks wouldn't know, despite its ubiquity.  (It's titanium oxide, zinc oxide, or a combination, if you're curious.)  Likewise, once something hits the trash can, it most people's minds, it's gone -- very few have any knowledge of, or interest in, what happens to garbage once it gets to a landfill.

This is an even stronger tendency when it comes to our own bodies, especially the "where stuff goes" part, because there's the added icky-poo factor when it comes to dealing with our own bodily wastes.  The concept of "materials cycling" is sadly lacking in our consciousness, most of the time.  When I tell students, "Every molecule of water in your body has been in many forms -- it's been glacial ice, it's been in the ocean, it's been in rivers, it's been water vapor in clouds, it's been groundwater, it's been tree sap, it's been in dinosaur piss," it usually elicits a few disgusted exclamations and a good many looks of disbelief.  When I further tell them that the molecules of water in them today aren't going to be the same ones that will be in their bodies in five years, mostly what I pick up from them is complete incomprehension.

It's true, though; this collection of atoms I call "me" is only going to be in association temporarily, and I'll be made up of a whole different collection of atoms, albeit in more or less the same configuration, many times before I die.  Earth is the great recycler, and unless the mechanism is pressed too hard, it moves stuff around with great efficiency, into, through, and out of organisms and ecosystems.

Which is why I thought it was somewhere between funny and horrifying that Portland, Oregon water management officials chose to drain 38 million gallons of water from the Mount Tabor Reservoir after security cameras caught footage of a teenager peeing into the reservoir.

Mount Tabor Reservoir [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

First off, don't they realize that other animals live around the reservoir?  Deer, raccoons, and bunnies don't pee in tidy little Non-Human-Mammal Port-a-Potties in the woods, for cryin' out loud.  Every drop of water you drink has been processed many times through another animal's digestive and excretory system -- and once the solutes are removed, either by natural or artificial processes, what's left is pure, drinkable water.

Second, we have an issue of the water officials not understanding the concept of "dilution" here.  The officials said that the urine poses "little to no risk" to the public -- which is true if you put emphasis on the "no" part -- but Portland Water Bureau official David Shaff told the Associated Press, "The basic commandment of the Water Bureau is to provide clean, cold and constant water to its customers, and the premise behind that is we don't have pee in it."

Sure you don't.  No animals pee near the reservoir, because, you know... they have signs up forbidding it.  ("No pissing allowed.  That means YOU, Bambi.")  But if the real concern is the human pee -- because humans, after all, are somehow different than other animals -- let's see how much pee there is in the reservoir from the one "incident" they caught on the security camera.

A webpage on kidney health from the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services says that an average person's bladder capacity is about 1.5 to 2 cups.  According to Wikipedia, urine is 95% water and 5% solutes (the one usually in the highest concentration is urea, a biodegradable nitrogenous waste; the next three, in order, are chloride, sodium, and potassium).

But never mind that.  Let's lump the 5% solutes together as the "icky" part.  So we have two cups of urine (assuming the guy really had to go bad), of which 5% is something other than water.  That's 0.1 cups of solute...

... mixed in 608 million cups of water in the reservoir (38 million gallons times 16 cups per gallon).  That is a ratio of 0.00000000016 : 1.  And that doesn't even account for the fact that microorganisms take up and degrade the urea and most of the other organic molecules, so within days, even that would be gone.

These are concentrations that only a homeopath would be concerned about.

Now, I know that there have been studies that have found human sewage contaminants in river water -- most famously, a study of the Thames River in which there were measurable (albeit small) amounts of the breakdown products of cocaine, diazepam, caffeine, acetaminophen, nortriptyline, and other legal and illegal drugs in river water.  Keep in mind that we're talking about a huge population -- the water that comes out of the London sewage treatment system, and into the Thames, has been filtered through a great many kidneys before it ends up in the treatment plant -- and still the amounts were tiny, averaging below one part per million.  (It's still being researched if these chemicals remain biologically active at those concentrations.)

But one kid taking a piss in the reservoir?  Not an issue.  Not even close to an issue.  Okay, ticket him and fine him for public urination, if you want to make a deal out of it.  But draining the reservoir, at the taxpayers' expense, because the water monitoring board of Portland (and/or their constituency) has no understanding of materials cycles or dilution, and an exaggerated "this-is-gross" reaction to human waste?

Ridiculous.

Fear, the amygdala, and "Whistle"

I find fear fascinating.

Fear is an eminently useful evolved characteristic; the ability to recognize and avoid threats has an obvious survival benefit.  Fears can be learned, but as the famous "Little Albert experiment" showed, the object of our fear can result in overgeneralization, which is probably the origin of phobias and other irrational fears.  (For those of you unfamiliar with this interesting, but dubiously ethical, experiment, researchers back in 1920 showed a toddler a variety of objects, including a white rat -- and when the baby reached for the rat, they made a loud noise.  Soon, "Little Albert" would cry when shown the rat, but also when shown other white objects, including a rabbit, a stuffed bear, and a Santa mask.)

All of this comes up because of some recently-published research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where neuroscientist Bo Li and his colleagues have discovered how we encode fear in the brain -- and how those memories result in behavior.

It has been known for some time that the fear response results from activation of neurons in the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure deep inside the brain.  In 1998, K. S. LaBar et al. used fMRI studies to demonstrate the role of the amygdala in responding to fear stimuli, but it was still unknown how that structure actuated the behaviors associated with the fear response -- sweating, increased pulse, freezing in place, and the fight-or-flight reaction.

Now Li and his colleagues at Cold Spring Harbor have found that there are neurons that connect the amygdala to the brainstem, and that activation of a fear response causes a feedback between the amygdala and brainstem via those neurons -- thus turning an emotional response into a behavior.

"This study not only establishes a novel pathway for fear learning, but also identifies neurons that actively participate in fear conditioning," says Li.  "This new pathway can mediate the effect of the central amygdala directly, rather than signaling through other neurons, as traditionally thought."  Li hopes that his study will be useful in understanding, and perhaps remediating, cases of severe phobias and post-traumatic stress syndrome.

I find myself wondering, however, how this evolved system, with its elaborate architecture and neurochemistry, can explain why some people seek out fear-inducing experiences.  I've been drawn to horror stories since I can remember, and have written more than one myself.  The cachet that writers like Stephen King and Dean Koontz have is hard to explain evolutionarily -- given the fact that fear is unpleasant, intended to drive us to avoid whatever the evokes the response, and is supposed to communicate to our brains the message, "Danger!  Danger!  Run!"

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Take, for example, one of my favorite scary stories -- one I remember well from my youth.  My grandma, who was an avid book collector, had a little paperback copy of a book by C. B. Colby called Strangely Enough.  This book had dozens of odd little one-to-two page stories, most of which fell into the "urban legend" or "folk tale" categories and were entertaining but not particularly memorable.  But one of them, a story called "The Whistle," has stuck with me -- and evidently not only me.  When researching this post, I looked up Colby, and found his little book had been mentioned more than once in websites about scary stories -- and damn near everyone mentioned "The Whistle" as being the scariest of the lot.

I don't have to tell you the story, though, because two film directors, Eric Walter and Jon Parke, thought it was good enough to make a short film based on the story.  It's only seven minutes long, but it captures the essence of what is chilling about Colby's story -- without a single word of dialogue.  It's not gory (for those of you who dislike such things), just viscerally terrifying.  And all of you should right now take seven minutes and watch "Whistle."

There.  Did I tell you?  What I find the scariest about this film is that... almost nothing happens.  You never see the monster, if monster it was.  All there is is a whistling noise.  But it's got all the elements; a widowed woman living alone; a dog who tries to warn her that something is amiss; an old house; a radio that mysteriously malfunctions.

But why is it scary?  It is, I think, precisely because we fear the unknown.  What is known is (usually) harmless; what is unknown is (possibly) deadly.  We've undergone millions of years of evolutionary selection to create brain wiring that keeps us from making stupid decisions, such as confronting a predator while weaponless, trusting a stranger without caution... or staying outside when there's a strange, unearthly noise.

Perhaps that explains why we're drawn to horror fiction.  The character trapped in the story is in danger, perhaps mortal danger, from which (s)he may not be able to escape.  We, on the other hand, can experience the character's fear on a visceral level, but then we can turn the movie off, close the book, go back to our safe, normal lives, secure in the fact that we're not going to die, or at least not yet.  We can get the rush of terror, but then when the scary story is over, the pleasure-and-reward circuits that our brain also evolved can turn on and reassure us that the monsters didn't get us, that we've survived for another day.

And now Bo Li and his colleagues have discovered how the brain helps us to do that.  As for me, I'm going to go have some coffee, and wait until my amygdala calms down, because while I was doing this post, I had to watch "Whistle" again, and now I'm all creeped out.

The king's name is a tower of strength...

As regular readers know, I'm not particularly impressed at this point by the evidence that's been brought to bear in cases of alleged hauntings.  It's not that I'm saying it's impossible, mind you; it's just that we lack the two things that a skeptic would require: (1) hard evidence, for which a ghostly presence is the best explanation; or failing that, (2) a plausible mechanism by which spirit survival could occur.

Neither of these has yet been demonstrated.

Take, for example, the claim earlier this week that some spiritualists in England were contacted by a spirit who may have been King Richard III.  (The spiritualists were careful to say that it may not have been the Hunchback King himself, but someone else named Richard.  There are, after all, lots of Richards out there.)

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Medium Gill Hibbert was with a group in Donington le Heath Manor House, the place where King Richard spent his last night before riding out to his death in Bosworth Field in 1485, and they were using a "ghost box" that allegedly "allows spirits to speak through white noise."

So if you listen to the clip on the link provided above -- which I would prefer you do with your eyes closed, for reasons I'll describe in a moment -- you first hear nothing but crackles and static, and then you allegedly hear the ghost speaking a single word.

Now, here's the difficulty.  On the recording, there is captioning that tells you what the ghost is supposedly saying.  And therein lies the problem.  Because if someone tells you what you're hearing, it becomes almost impossible not to hear it.  Take, for example, this wonderful "Misheard Lyrics" version of the classic Orff choral piece "O Fortuna," from Carmina Burana:

I know a good bit of Latin, and when I watch this video, I find myself unable to hear anything but the rather twisted English version (I still guffaw at "Salsa cookies!  Windmill cookies!  They give you gonorrhea!").  So once the ghost hunters tell you what you're listening for in the white noise, they've biased you to hear it.

Still, they heard it when they first recorded it, right?  But remember, they already had an idea about what they were hoping the ghost would say.  And given that, is it any surprise that they picked out that particular word?  It's what they expected to hear -- which is the exact definition of confirmation bias.

So, okay, maybe it was King Richard III, hanging around the premises 530-odd years after his death, for some reason.  Seems like an odd thing to do -- if I was a spirit, I'd probably head off to Maui or Belize or somewhere, rather than haunting the place where I was hunted down by hostile knights and then gutted like a fish and left to die on the battlefield.  But to each his own, I suppose.  And I need more evidence than this to come to that conclusion.

Because this recording isn't doing much for me, honestly.  Hibbert et al. say they're going to turn the recording over to professionals to have it analyzed further, which is a good idea, but even if it turns out that it was a human voice, it very much remains to be seen that it was a ghost's.

So at the moment, I'm putting this into the "Interesting but unconvincing" category.  Once we have a ghost show up, in full view, preferably in broad daylight, and tell us some verifiable piece of information that no one in the room had any way to know ahead of time, then I'll be convinced.  Until then, I'm going with the "Suck juice from moose" explanation.

Blood moons and End Times

I would have thought that most of us knew enough science, and had discarded enough superstition, to be past the "Look For Portents In The Sky" approach to knowledge.

Apparently I'm wrong.

The next couple of years are going to be unusual in having four total lunar eclipses, the first of which happened two days ago.  (Subsequent ones will occur in October 2014, April 2015, and September 2015.)  Which is quite spectacular and cool, although I must protest to the Weather Gods (speaking of indulging in superstition) for sending upstate New York cloudy weather a couple of nights ago, obscuring our view of the first in the "tetrad."

[image courtesy of photographer Alfredo Garcia and the Wikimedia Commons]

So far, only something of interest to astronomy buffs.  But then someone nicknamed them "blood moons," because of the deep red color the Moon assumes during a total lunar eclipse, and that was enough to get the loons going full-force.

First, we had Pastor John Hagee, of Texas's Cornerstone Church, who claims that the "four blood moons" are signs of the End Times:

In Acts 2:19-20, it is written, “And I will show wonders in Heaven above and signs in the Earth beneath, the sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood before the coming of the great and awesome day of the Lord...”  Just as in biblical times, God is controlling the sun, the moon, and the stars to send our generation a signal that something big is about to happen.  The question is: Are we watching and listening to His message?

No, Pastor Hagee, actually the question is, do you understand how eclipses work?  There's nothing supernatural about them, so there's nothing supernatural about four in a row, either.  There was one such "tetrad" in 1949, and another in 1967, and the world didn't end.

Oh, but Hagee says, stuff happened both times!  Big stuff!  1967 was the year of the Six-Day War between Israel and Egypt, and 1949 was... um... soon after the state of Israel was founded.  Okay, two years after, but maybe god was busy elsewhere and didn't get to that event's Four Blood Moons until later.  He's got a lot to manage, okay?

Not to be outdone, Pastor Mark Biltz said that not only were the Four Blood Moons a portent of evil, it was President Obama's fault:

Barack Obama quite recently, expressing his frustration that Republican members of Congress won’t give him what he wants, threatened arbitrary executive action, promising that he has a “pen and phone.” 

But there are “flashing red warning lights” in the heavens that should command peoples’ attention right now, because the one behind those warnings, God, had “more than a pen and a phone in his hand,” according to the author of “Blood Moons: Decoding the Imminent Heavenly Signs.” 

Pastor Mark Biltz, whose book is creating a tidal wave of interest right now with the first of four lunar eclipses expected to become visible early Tuesday, was speaking to Breaking Israel News... 

“I believe the moons are like flashing red warning lights at a heavenly intersection saying to Israel as well as the nations they will be crossing heavenly red lines and if they do, they will understand as Pharaoh did on Passover night 3,500 years ago that the Creator backs up what He says. 

“Like Pharaoh the leaders and pundits of today will realize when it comes to crossing the red lines of the Creator of the universe he has more than a pen and a phone in his hand.” 

Whooo-weee, that's one persuasive argument.  "The Moon looks funny tonight" + "I don't like Obama" + "I don't understand science at all" = "God agrees with my political beliefs and is trying to send the Democrats a sign by coloring the Moon red."

Well, can't argue with that.

What's funniest about Biltz's argument, though, is that he's acting as if somehow god could have stopped the lunar eclipses from happening, if only President Obama had been a good boy.  It's not like we haven't known for years that this "tetrad" was going to occur; it would have happened even if Mitt Romney had been elected.  So how the hell can this be a portent of anything if it would have happened no matter what?

And the scary thing is, Biltz and Hagee are only two of hundreds.  If you Google "blood moons end times" you will get thousands of hits on sites all owned by people who apparently don't know a single thing about planetary astronomy.

I shouldn't let this kind of thing frustrate me, I suppose, but I keep hoping that humanity will one day choose science over superstition.  People like Hagee and Biltz, however, don't make it easy, with their appeal to people's primal fears and political biases.

As for me, I'm just going to enjoy the photographs people have posted of the event, and hope for better weather in October.  And I'll be willing to bet that we'll make it through all four lunar eclipses unscathed, with no sign of the Antichrist -- just as we've done countless times in the past.

Hallmark, censorship, and the culture of persecution

So apparently, someone over at the Hallmark Channel thought it'd be a good idea to censor out the word "god" in their broadcast of the movie It Could Happen to You.

The backlash was immediate and vitriolic.  The Facebook page for Hallmark Channel USA erupted in comments like the following:

I watch you [sic] channel all the time. WHY DID YOU BLEEP OUT THE WORK [sic] GOD IN THE MOVIE IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU.  Same [sic] on you.....Without GOD you would have no network. 

REALLY HALLMARK!!!!  BLEEPING OUT THE WORD GOD!!!!  HAVE WE FORGOTTEN THAT YOU USED TO BE A CHRISTIAN NETWORK!!!  WTH!!!  HOW ABOUT NOT OFFENDING CHRISTIANS!!!! 

We are very disappointed in Hallmark's decision to delete the word GOD from their presentation of "IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU"...  We will wait for Hallmark to issue a public apology before resuming our support of the Hallmark Channel etc... 

Why did you bleep out the word God from the movie "It Can Happen To You" broadcast today? I think it is time to block your channel. You make a lot of money off the rising of God's only son who died and rose again day of rising [sic], yet you bleep his Name.  I am beyond disgusted. 

Some freak High on pot says it was ok for them to do this.  I bet he collects a check on our dime.  This is exactly what is wrong.  When you are high~~you think you are god! 

I am so furious and upset. I am sick and tired of "god" offending people.  Hallmark has some explaining to do!  I have written Glenn Beck, Bill O' and Hannity.  This country is so far gone!

Marvelous.  Go ahead and tell Hannity, Beck, et al., and they'll make a capital case out of it, giving the pathological persecution-culture that is becoming more and more common amongst American Christians further fertilizer to grow on.

And fertilizer it is, friends, as in the bovine variety.  Because the reason that Hallmark censored the word "god" in It Could Happen to You wasn't because they were trying to eliminate the mention of a deity from the movie; it was because it occurred in the phrases "oh my god" and "I swear to god," and therefore constituted biblically-forbidden instances of taking the Lord's Name In Vain.  Yup -- that's right; they didn't bleep out "god" because it was holy, but because it wasn't holy enough.

[image courtesy of photographer Kevin Probst and the Wikimedia Commons]

And it's not the first time this sort of thing has happened.  Back in 2002, a mention of "Jesus" by the co-host of The View (in the context of saying "Thank you, Jesus," for her losing weight) was censored out on similar grounds, leading to a petition by outraged Christians who thought that this constituted suppression of religion.  In 2007, an ABC censor mistakenly bleeped out all mentions of the word "god" in the in-flight version of the movie The Queen, because he thought it contravened the rules against blasphemous use of religious language.

Each time, censors erred not because they were trying to offend, but because they evidently knew that these people have the sensibilities of petulant children.  For all the good it did.  If there's nothing to be angry about, they'll find something.  The phrase "damned if you do, damned if you don't," comes to mind.

Okay, I know that Hollywood is a pretty liberal place, and that much of what's on the air these days is there because of its capacity to shock (Family Guy, I'm looking at you).  But picking on The Hallmark Channel?  Really?  The network that was created from the merger of the American Christian Television System and the Vision Interfaith Satellite Network?  You'd think that someone watching a movie on Hallmark would take for granted that whatever was being done was somehow motivated by an attempt to honor Christian values.  I mean, I can see assuming the worst of Syfy or Comedy Central, but Hallmark?

I found out about this from a Facebook post, where I saw yet another comment by an outraged Christian, to wit: "14% atheists in the US, and 71% Christians, and for some reason we're letting the atheists run the show!"  Which might qualify as the single most moronic statement I've seen in months.  "Run the show?"  Being an atheist in the United States pretty much automatically dumps you into the category of "politically powerless."  If we were running the show, do you seriously think that there would be a bill that looks likely to pass in Louisiana declaring the bible to be "the official state book?"  Would there be a bill still in conference in South Carolina declaring that the mammoth is the official state fossil -- and that it was created on the Sixth Day?  Would the governor of Iowa have just signed a proclamation stating that July 14, 2014, be set aside as a "day of thoughtful prayer and humble repentance according to II Chronicles 7:14?"

Running the show, my ass.

Censor that, Hallmark.

Green ghosts and falling plates

It's been a while since we've had any interesting ghost claims, here at Skeptophilia, so today we'll look at a couple of curious ones from the last few days.

The first one comes from Coventry, England, where a photograph of a talk being given by Irish President Michael Higgins at the city's Medieval Guildhall caught something strange:

Here's a close-up of the odd apparition:

I wonder if you'll notice what I immediately found interesting about these photographs; the fact that it isn't simply a camera flare, or other such optical glitch -- because whatever the green blob is has a clear reflection in the polished floor in the first photograph.  Further (if you'll look at the photograph gallery in the Coventry Telegraph article I linked above) you'll see that the image persists in subsequent photographs, meaning that whatever it was hung around for a while.

The Guildhall is rumored to be haunted; it is the site of a famous photograph from thirty years ago, taken at a meeting of the Coventry Freemans, in which there appeared a monk-like figure who hadn't been there when the picture was taken.  So given its reputation, the paranormal enthusiasts have been having a field day with this.

Now, I still think that there's a rational explanation for the Guildhall Green Ghost; I just don't know what it is.  Anyone who might have expertise in photography, and who might have some ideas -- I'm a-listenin'.

Also curious, but perhaps explainable as a hoax, is last week's claim of a poltergeist in a Gilford, New Hampshire general store.  In a surveillance camera video, which you can view at the link provided, we see a glass plate slide off the counter and shatter on the floor of the Ellacoya General Store.

Employee Heidi Boyd, who heard the plate crash and was the first on the scene afterwards, denies it was rigged.  "We did not make this up, people," she wrote, after skeptics claimed that the whole thing was a setup.  "I was the only one in the store!  Couldn’t slide off and leave everything under it untouched."

Well, maybe.  There have been previous claims that the store was haunted -- store manager Lisa Giles said that when the store first opened, she saw a figure of a man standing in the doorway which vanished when she approached, and other employees have heard the sounds of ghostly whistling when the store was empty.  But even so -- given human ingenuity, and the free publicity that something like the rumors of poltergeist activity could provide, you can't rule out that the falling plate clip could be a fake.  Myself, I'm not ready to throw myself into the "sold" column based upon an odd video.

As I've said before; between the general tendency of the human perceptual apparatus to interpret incorrectly what we're experiencing, and the fact that some people seem to enjoy perpetrating hoaxes, I need more than a few curious images to convince me that there's a dead dude's spirit hanging around a place.  A direct, unequivocal experience of ghosts would go a long way, not some second-hand account.  Of course, given my temperament, I'd appreciate it if any ghosts who are reading this would wait to appear when I'm not alone in a house at night, because besides being curious, but I'm also a big fat coward.  Thank you.

Spinning Jesus's wife

New from the "Tempest In A Teapot" department, we had an announcement on Thursday that the fragment of papyrus that mentions Jesus's wife was not a modern forgery.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Predictably, the hue and cry started almost immediately, especially after historian Karen King of Harvard Divinity School, who brought the papyrus to light last year, stated, "The main point of the [fragment] is simply to affirm that women who are wives and mothers can be Jesus’s disciples."

Some were in favor of the whole thing.  Hal Taussig, of Union Divinity School, said that the idea of Jesus not being celibate would be a "huge shift."  "This is where people will take the most offense," he said.  "But for many married people, this might make Jesus feel closer."

Then there were the ones who started claiming immediately that the woman referred to in the scrap of papyrus was Mary Magdalene, and that therefore "Dan Brown was right."  Evidently not recognizing the fact that The Da Vinci Code is still shelved in the "Fiction" section at Barnes & Noble.

Others, however, were not so sanguine, although only marginally more grounded in reality.  Reverend James Martin, a prominent Jesuit writer, said, "It’s incredible that the four Gospel writers wouldn’t have mentioned Jesus’s wife if he had one.  They mentioned everyone else in his family.  There are Gospels that talk about Jesus turning stones into birds...  [F]unnily enough, the people who are quick to accept the veracity of this appear to be liberal Christians who question the veracity of other biblical accounts, including that of the Resurrection."

Reverend Henry Wansbrough, English biblical scholar and Prior of the Cathedral of Norwich, echoed Martin's sentiments.  "It will not have a great deal of importance for the Christian church.  It will show that there was a group who had these beliefs in the second century - Christians or semi-Christians - who perhaps had not reflected enough on the implications of the canonical scriptures - to see that Jesus could not have been married.  It's a historical interest, rather than a faith interest."

Then we have Professor Alberto Camplani, of Sapienza University in Rome, who added that the text "should be read purely symbolically."

Whatever that means.

What I find funny about all of this is that the fragment doesn't date to the 1st century C. E.; it dates to somewhere between the 6th and 9th centuries, and "possibly even earlier," according to the Harvard Theological Review.  So, at best, the fragment was written four hundred years after Jesus's death.  So it's a little like we had a fragmentary account that said only, "King Henry VIII said to his girlfriend..." and forthwith started arguing over whether the phrase was referring to Anne Boleyn, with others commenting that no, it can't mean that, that it wasn't referring to Boleyn but to another woman, who, by the way, had nice legs and spoke with a French accent, and yet others who claimed that the phrase was entirely metaphorical in nature and that "Henry's girlfriend" referred to the country of England.

Given that, it's no wonder that Ben Witherington, Professor of New Testament Interpretation at Asbury Theological Seminary, said that the papyrus was not a "game changer" with respect to belief and biblical understanding.  Of course it isn't.  People have come to the conclusions they have -- whether Jesus likes gays or is pro-welfare or would have been in favor of the Iraq War or thinks that premarital sex is verboten -- by cherry-picking whatever biblical quotes seem to support the point of view they already had.  Because a big, complex, internally inconsistent document like the bible, that has been translated and copied and retranslated and recopied hundreds of times, and which in any case reflected the changing beliefs of a bunch of Middle Eastern mostly-illiterates over a period of perhaps two thousand years, is bound to contain support for damn near any worldview you happen to have, whether you are a bleeding-heart liberal tree-hugger or a steely-eyed close-the-borders conservative.

So if you come to understanding a different way than science, you can end up wherever you want, really.  The science says that the document isn't a forgery, and dates to somewhere around 1,400 years ago; the linguistic analysis gives us an idea of what the Coptic text said.  And that is all.  After that, if you want more, you have to leave the realm of rational, evidence-based understanding.  But it you do that, you can take the results and spin it whichever direction suits your fancy.

Which is mostly what people do anyhow.  So business as usual, I guess.