Here's looking at you!

One of the most iconic images from the movie trilogy The Lord of the Rings is the Eye of Sauron, the flaming, all-seeing slit-pupilled eye at the pinnacle of Sauron's castle of Barad-Dûr.  The idea is terrifying; putting on the One Ring allows Sauron's eye to see you, wherever you might be.  You become invisible to everyone else, but uniquely visible to the Dark Lord and his servants.

So it's no wonder that the concept captivated the imagination.  And now, an artist in Russia is making a replica of the Eye of Sauron as part of an installation on the top of a 21-story building in Moscow.

Which has caused the powers-that-be of the Russian Orthodox Church to freak out.

"This is a demonic symbol," the Russian Orthodox Church’s head of public affairs, Vsevolod Chaplin, told Govorit Moskva radio station in an interview.  "Such a symbol of the triumph of evil is rising up over the city, becoming practically the highest object in the city.  Is that good or bad?  I’m afraid it’s more likely bad.  Just don’t be surprised later if something goes wrong with the city."

This is hilarious on several levels.

First of all, the installation, "practically the highest object in the city," is all of one meter tall.  Next to the way the Eye of Sauron was represented in the movie, this thing would be about as impressive as Mini-Me.  

Secondly, the Eye is going to be lit for seven hours.  That's it.  If lighting up a one-meter-tall art installation for seven hours is enough to cause the Triumph of Evil, maybe Evil deserves to win.

Third, I don't even see how the Eye of Sauron could be considered a symbol of evil's triumph.  Sauron was defeated, remember?  The One Ring got melted, and Barad-Dûr collapsed into a heap of rubble, taking the Unblinking Eye along with it.  So if anything, it should be a symbol of the fact that Evil doesn't always win.

But fourth, and most importantly; it seems to have escaped the higher-ups in the church that The Lord of the Rings is fiction.  I.e., it's not real.  Sauron never existed, and therefore by extension his Eye didn't either.  I know this is some pretty complex logic to expect them to follow, but even so.

You have to wonder how such superstition survives.  What kind of worldview do you have to espouse to believe that a rather underwhelming art installation representing a fictional character could cause god to curse a whole city?  This raises magical thinking to new heights.  Higher than 21 stories, even.

And I also wonder what the church leaders are going to try to do about it.  Pray, possibly, because there's nothing like fighting a non-existent threat with a useless solution.  The seven-hour lighting is supposed to happen tonight, and I hope we find out one way or the other.

What I think is likely is that the church will hold some kind of pray-in, the installation will be lit up on schedule and turned off on schedule, and nothing untoward will happen.  Then the church leaders will conclude that the pray-in deflected god's wrath, further reinforcing their view that they've understood the universe correctly.  Hallelujah!  God is so great!

Kind of makes you feel like what Frodo did was all for nothing, doesn't it?

Lawsuits and sinking ships

It's been a bad week for the creationists.

First we had the news in Kansas that U. S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree has dismissed a lawsuit by Citizens for Objective Public Education that claimed that teaching evolution amounted to the endorsement of atheism, calling it "without merit."

COPE objected to the Next Generation Science Standards, which are unequivocal in their support of the evolutionary model, saying that they "lead impressionable students into the religious sphere by leading them to ask ultimate questions like what is the cause and nature of life in the universe — 'where do we come from?'"

This casts science teachers in the role of theologians, COPE says, even though science "has not answered these religious questions and never can."

What's interesting about this is that they're partly right.  Science is closing in on more and more of the big questions -- how the universe began, the origins of life on Earth, whether life might be possible on other planets orbiting other stars.  But where they get this badly wrong is that these aren't religious questions.  Religion answers these questions one way -- "god did it" -- and then promptly says "q.e.d." and closes the book.  It makes no tests of its claims, runs no experiments, does not revise the model if new data comes to light.

Science teachers aren't theologians.  Far from it.  Science and religion as methods are diametrically opposed to one another.  If science and religion come to different answers about a question, you have to choose one or the other.  There is no reconciling them, because their ways of arriving at the truth have little in common.

But in a way, by teaching evolution, we are making a statement with some theological import.  We're saying that science works, that it is in this case a better way of knowing the truth than religion is.  But this isn't that shocking, really.  Even most extremely religious folks trust science in a host of other areas.  It's not like fundamentalists are asking us to jettison the periodic table in favor of revealed truth regarding the composition of matter.  Evolution has become something of a last-stand battleground, where science's evidence-based answers and religion's evidence-free claims are coming to blows.

Crabtree, predictably, danced around that point a little, merely claiming in his ruling that COPE had not been able to provide specific enough details of the injuries NGSS is supposed to have inflicted upon innocent children.  I guess it wouldn't be politic for a federal judge to come right out and say, "Get your damn noses out of the science classroom."


So this has understandably put creationists on the defensive, and far be it from Ken Ham not to be the leader of the pack.  He announced this week that he's starting a billboard campaign in Kentucky, aimed at people who have laughed at his "Ark Encounter" project:

What I find most amusing about this is that he has somehow linked an understanding of science with being liberal, which last I checked weren't the same thing.  But as a ploy, it's pretty shrewd, given that he's operating in a part of the United States where "liberals" are right up there with "baby eaters" in popularity.

But as Hemant Mehta points out, there are a number of other problems with Ham's claim, first and foremost being that atheists could care less if Ham builds an ark, we just want him to follow the law while he's doing it.  (Recall that the whole project came under legal scrutiny when it was found that Ham was requiring all of his employees to sign a contract promising that they'd adhere to biblical literalism, which is illegal for a for-profit corporation that is in line for $18,000,000 in state tax breaks.)

And as Mehta also mentioned, you can't sink this ship largely because it's on land, and we're not really friends.  But Ham has never been known to allow reality to intrude on his vision, so there's no reason we should expect him to start now.

In any case, these efforts strike me as desperation, and it may be that we're seeing the last gasps of this fundamentally anti-science worldview.  At some point, they're bound to give up, right?

One can only hope.  If the creationists are struggling in states like Kansas and Kentucky, it might be that as a nation we can finally move past Bronze Age mythology as a primary basis for understanding.

Skin deep

We were talking in my AP Biology class yesterday about the potential for skin damage from exposure to ultraviolet light.  Later in the day,  a student sent me a YouTube video called "How the Sun Sees You" that uses a UV-sensitive camera to see the sun damage on people's skin (and also illustrates that sunscreen does work, given that it looks an opaque black when filmed in the ultraviolet region of the spectrum).

All of which is well and good, but then I scrolled down to the comments section, which I know I should never do, and I found the following.  Spelling and grammar are as written, so I don't use up my "sic" allotment all in one go:

First off everyone has to stop believing that Melanin a.k.a. Carbon protects us from u.v. rays.  Carbon in the skin actually absorbs ultraviolet rays in a process that is now being called Ultrafast Internal Conversion.  Not one person has mentioned this..  The Elemental Compound for C Carbon is 666.  6 Electrons 6 Neutrons 6 Protons.  The origins of the 666.  The Catholics call It "the mark of beast" which is code for "mark of the our destroyers"  We all know that Carbon is the building blocks of life.  Carbon defines life therefore us Moors who are incorrectly referred to as "Black People" are the building blocks for Human life and biology.  This is true because no one else on the planet possesses the levels of Carbon in the body and brain quite like The Moors. (remember a moor is a black man or women)  In other words, us "Black people" are and forever will be The genetic template for the Human being.  Black ppl we are Human In it's truest form.  Of course there are plenty lies circulating the damn truth.  All non black people are merely human hybrids.  All races were genetically engineered from the supreme Human.  Clones much?  DARK POWER!!

So naturally I thought, "Well, that's a viewpoint I've never run into before."  (I also thought, "I hope this person is on medication" and "this is what it looks like when someone fails high school biology.")  But I did some research, and I found out that this is not the claim of a lone wacko.  This is the claim of a large number of wackos.  There's a whole school of thought (although I hesitate to use either word in this context) that revolves around the contention that people of African descent are superior because they have lots more carbon in them.

Take, for example, the page "Carbon & Melanin Secret of Secrets" over at the amazingly wacky site Godlike Productions.  In it, we find a wall of text that can be summarized as follows:

• Carbon is some seriously mystical stuff.  Besides the 6-6-6 thing mentioned above, it has four bonds that are shaped like a swastika.
• It also has something to do with the Buddhist "om," the Christian cross, and the Greek letters alpha and omega.
• Melanin is dark.  So is carbon.  Therefore melanin is carbon.
• Melanin is the "key to life" and is the "organizing molecule for living systems."
• Melanin is an ordinary conductor, a semiconductor, and a superconductor.  Don't ask me how it can be all three at the same time.
• Satan and Saturn are the same thing.
• Because the symbol for carbon is C, and the symbol for cytosine (one of the nitrogenous bases in DNA) is C, they're the same thing.  It couldn't be because in English, both of them have names that start with "c."
• Some other weird stuff about DMT and alchemy and prophecies that frankly I couldn't read because my eyes were spinning.

I read this whole thing with an expression like this:

What bothers me most about all of this is not that crazy people are making shit up.  That's what crazy people do, after all.  What bothers me is that apparently this claim has gotten some traction amongst people who want justification for believing that dark-skinned humans are intrinsically better than light-skinned humans, and who cannot even be bothered to take a look at the Wikipedia page for melanin, wherein we find that melanin isn't carbon.  It contains carbon, but after all, so does chalk, which last I looked was white.

The ironic thing is that when you talk to actual anthropologists and geneticists, most of 'em will tell you that the biological basis for race is tenuous at best.  Race is a cultural phenomenon, not a genetic one.  If you want your mind blown on this topic, consider the following quote from Alan Goodman:

Richard Lewontin did an amazing piece of work which he published in 1972, in a famous article called "The Apportionment of Human Variation." Literally what he tried to do was see how much genetic variation showed up at three different levels. 

One level was the variation that showed up among or between purported races. And the conventional idea is that quite a bit of variation would show up at that level. And then he also explored two other levels at the same time. How much variation occurred within a race, but between or among sub-groups within that purported race. 

So, for instance, in Europe, how much variation would there be between the Germans, the Finns and the Spanish? Or how much variation could we call local variation, occurring within an ethnicity such as the Navaho or Hopi or the Chatua? 

And the amazing result was that, on average, about 85% of the variation occurred within any given group. The vast majority of that variation was found at a local level. In fact, groups like the Finns are not homogeneous - they actually contain, I guess one could literally say, 85% of the genetic diversity of the world. 

Secondly, of that remaining 15%, about half of that, seven and a half percent or so, was found to be still within the continent, but just between local populations; between the Germans and the Finns and the Spanish. So, now we're over 90%, something like 93% of variation actually occurs within any given continental group. And only about 6-7% of that variation occurs between "races," leaving one to say that race actually explains very little of human variation...

But, for the most part, you know that the basic human plan is really the basic human plan, and is found almost anywhere in the world. Most variation is found locally within any group. Why don't we believe that? Because we happen to ascribe great significance to skin color, and a few other physical cues... And, in fact, though, these may happen to be a few of the things that do widely vary from place to place. But, that's not true under the skin. Rather, quite another story is told by looking at genes under the skin.

Which should really inform us about how we treat people who don't look like us, shouldn't it?  We're all human.  We have a vast overlap in our genetics, even if you choose two people who look very different from each other.  And at our cores, most of us want the same things -- food, shelter, love, security, compassion.  When we start claiming that people of different ethnicities deserve different levels of privilege, we're engaging in a mindset that is not only destructive, it's counterfactual.

And that applies to all racists equally, whether they're neo-nazis or cranks who claim that anyone without much melanin in their skin is an evil hybrid clone.

Songs of the flowers

I remember a family friend when I was a child who talked to her plants.

Mostly she gave them ultimatums.  There was a particularly recalcitrant chrysanthemum, I recall, that didn't want to flower, and our friend told it that it had one more year to show up to the game, or it'd find itself on the compost pile.

The chrysanthemum flowered like crazy that year.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Now I don't think that our friend really believed that her talking to the plants made any difference; it was more of a running joke.  But there are definitely people who believe that plants are conscious.  A lot of them still believe the completely discredited claims of Cleve Backster, who back in 1966 said he hooked up a polygraph machine to a house plant and then threatened to burn it with a lighter.  The needle, Backster said, jiggled crazily.

Supposedly the plant also knew when Backster was on an airplane that was experiencing a rough landing.  Given that this is the same guy who had threatened to torch it, maybe it was excited at the prospect of getting rid of him.

Be that as it may, Backster has become something of a hero to the woo-woo world.  His experiment was written up in the International Journal of Parapsychology in 1968, and he went on to try to show that not only were plants telepathic, so were bacteria and sperm.  None of these "experiments" were ever replicated under controlled conditions, and virtually all scientists consider Backster's claims to be unsubstantiated nonsense.

But that hasn't stopped people from wanting it to be true, and just a couple of days ago I ran into some people who are making an extraordinary claim.  Before, we could talk to plants, and all we could do is assume they heard us.  But these folks have invented a device...

... that lets the plants talk back.

Apparently, the device, which costs £499 (not including shipping), hooks up some kind of electrical sensor to plants' leaves, and then converts the minute signals registered thereon to music.  You might be thinking: well, that's cool, but that doesn't mean they think these are deliberate communications, do they?

The answer is yes, they do:

Do you talk to your plants?  Would you like to hear them respond?  Nature has many incredible ways of communicating, and with the Music of the Plants U1 device, there is finally an avenue of expression for the plant world.  A Music of the Plants device in your home or garden will awaken a deeper sense of awareness and connection to the natural world.  Crafted by hand, the U1 is the result of over forty years of fascinating research at Damanhur.  The music created is organic and relaxing, allowing listeners to be at one with nature and to appreciate the impact that our interactions and intentions have on the plant world.  Discover this a unique and profound connection for yourself.

So naturally, I had to find out more about Damanhur, which I discovered is a commune north of Turin, Italy that calls itself the "Laboratory of the Future."  A lot of what they talk about -- peaceful and sustainable living, supporting each other in achieving goals, living harmoniously -- sounds pretty awesome, honestly.  But of course, they couldn't just leave it at that.  When I went to their page about their plant "research," I found the following:

Researching and exploring aspects of human potentiality results in the amplification of individual sensitivity.  As such, it's easy to intuit that plants, just like humans, animals, and other life forms, have their own intelligence and sensitivity...  As early as 1976, Damanhurian researchers had created equipment capable of capturing electromagnetic changes on the surface of leaves and roots and transforming them into sounds.  The trees learn to control their electrical responses, as if they are aware of the music they are creating.

There was a recording of some of the music from red and white roses on their website, so I decided to give it a listen.   And my considered opinion is: if that's all the plants have to say, it's no wonder most humans don't pay much attention.  It sounds like a piece that was rejected from Music From the Hearts of Space on the basis of not being peppy enough.

Maybe it's just because they picked roses, I dunno.  My dad grew beautiful show-quality tea roses, but only by pampering them continuously, so maybe they're too hoity-toity to say anything with substance.  It'd be interesting to see what the results would be if they listened to, say, crabgrass.

In any case, I don't think that the "music of the plants" is going to take either the music world or the scientific world by storm.  If you convert random electrical signals to music, you'll get random music, which is pretty much what they've done here.  Ascribing meaning to it only is possible if you apply to it the meaning you'd already decided it had, which makes the whole exercise one big study in confirmation bias.

Even so, I think I might have a talk with the lime tree in my greenhouse.  It keeps getting infested with scale insects, then spreading them to my other plants.  Maybe it'll try harder to stay healthy if I threaten it.  Might sing another tune, you think?

Cult of the week

It appears that we have a new religion on our hands.

Vice reported this week that actor Andrew Keegan has founded his own cult, called "Full Circle," in (surprise!) California.  Keegan, you may recall, was one of the actors in the movie 10 Things I Hate About You, and is also known for his bravura performance as "Gotham PD Police Officer In Fight At End" in The Dark Knight Rises.

So you can kind of see why he might have turned his attention away from acting.  Keegan's nascent religion attracted the attention of reporter Brett Mazurek not only because of Keegan's debatable fame, but because it's a pretty peculiar belief system.  "Full Circle" members don't see it that way, of course; they describe it as "the highest spiritualism founded on universal knowledge" and say that Mazurek came to talk to Keegan and his followers because he "came through the vortex of Keegan's energy."

Whatever that means.

Oh, and one of Keegan's inner circle said his name was "Third Eye," following in the great tradition of being known for having non-standard numbers of body parts, such as Six-Fingered Man in The Princess Bride and One-Legged Man in Treasure Island.  (Yes, I know he's talking about the "mystical Third Eye," not an actual extra eye in the middle of his forehead, or anything.  But there isn't the slightest bit of evidence that the "mystical Third Eye" exists, so I'm not sure how else someone like me is supposed to interpret it.)

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What do the Full Circlers believe, you might be wondering?  Here's the belief system explained, in Keegan's own words.

Synchronicity.  Time.  That's what it's all about.  Whatever, the past, some other time.  It's a circle; in the center is now.  That's what it's about...  We're very, very aware of the shift that's happening in the mind and the heart, and everybody is on that love agenda.  We're very much scientifically, spiritually, and emotionally aware of how it works, meaning that there's power in the crystals, there's power in our hearts, there's an alignment, there's a resonance... and it transfers through water...  (T)he mission is to take the war out of our story, which is essentially peace, but activated peace.

All of this puts me in mind of the Random Deepak Chopra Quote Generator, which strings together words and phrases from Chopra's Twitter feed, and comes up with fake Chopra quotes that sound convincingly like the real thing (i.e., they have lots of New Age buzzwords, but don't really mean anything).  Here's the one I got: "Eternal stillness is the wisdom of universal sexual energy."  Which I think should be added to Keegan's mission statement.

In fact, they should just use the Random Deepak Chopra Quote Generator to create their entire dogma.  It'd probably be more sensible than what Keegan himself said about it.

As far as how Keegan came to found Full Circle, he told Mazurek that he had been attacked by two gang members on the same day as the tsunami hit Japan -- March 11, 2011.  That had to mean something, Keegan said.  And after that, he had some odd experiences:

I had a moment where I was looking at a street lamp and it exploded.  That was a weird coincidence.  At a ceremony, a heart-shaped rose quartz crystal was on the altar, and synchronistically, this whole thing happened.  It's a long story, but basically the crystal jumped off the altar and skipped on camera.  That was weird.

So I suppose at that point, he had no choice but to form a cult.

So far, Keegan has attracted what looks like about three dozen members of his church.  Which is kind of surprising, not only from the standpoint that most of what he talks about seems to be woo-woo gibberish, but also because they apparently believe that everyone should have regular colon cleanses. That would have turned me away all by itself.  I mean, I'm all for seeking enlightenment, but I'm pretty sure that it has nothing to do with what amounts to sticking a garden hose up your ass and turning it on.

So there you are.  A new religion, because evidently we didn't have enough of them before.  I'm guessing this one won't last very long; these things have a way of coming and going pretty quickly.

Although people would probably have said the same thing about L. Ron Hubbard when he founded Scientology.  So maybe we should keep our eye on this one.

Ghosts of Christmas present

Ouija boards are back in the news again, perhaps because of the recent release of the movie Ouija, which has people stirred up despite getting a 7% rating over at the site Rotten Tomatoes and reviews such as, "... strikingly like High School Musical, only with screaming."

Be that as it may, there is something about Ouija boards that really scares people.  Tales abound of people getting freaked out by messages from demons or evil spirits, even though the stories are usually of the "I heard it from my best friend's uncle's barber's daughter" type.  When you try it yourself, you quickly find that any "messages" that come through are banal at best, and easily explained through the ideomotor effect.  (For a really cool experiment that demonstrates this conclusively, go here.)

Further, there was a test run by none other than James Randi, where people who believed in the powers of Ouija boards were blindfolded and then asked their spirit friends to deliver messages anyhow.  The spirits all of a sudden seemed unable to see, themselves, and what they put out was gibberish, unless there's a language in the spirit world where "GHISKNNDPSBPLG" means something.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But still, the risks from demons and ghosts is ever-present for some people, and there are many warnings to "stay away from those things," even though you'd think Hasbro wouldn't sell many of 'em if every kid who used them ended up possessed.

This fact evidently has escaped some of the devout, who are alarmed by the hype that the movie has caused.  Ouija boards are expected to be a sellout this Christmas, which has freaked out the powers-that-be enough that a priest in Ireland made a public statement -- although under conditions of anonymity.  Maybe he didn't want the demons and evil spirits to find out he's been trash-talking them, assuming the demons and evil spirits read The Independent, which is where the story was covered.

"It's easy to open up evil spirits but it's very hard to get rid of them," the priest said in an interview.  "People, especially young people and teenagers who are likely to experiment with Ouija boards on a whim, can be very naive in thinking that they are only contacting the departed souls of loved-ones when they attempt to communicate with the dead using the boards.  It's like going to some parts of Africa and saying I'm personally immune to Ebola.  But it does leave people open to all kinds of spiritual dangers.  People don't intend any spiritual harm by it, but we live in a spiritual realm and you have no way to control what may impinge on you."

Yes, it's just like saying you're immune to Ebola, except that Ebola actually exists.  

The anonymous priest wasn't the only one to make a public statement.  Church of England vicar Peter Irwin-Clark is equally appalled by the surge in popularity of the toy, and told a reporter for The Daily Mail, "It is absolutely appalling.  I would very strongly advise parents not to buy Ouija boards for children.  It’s like opening a shutter in one’s soul and letting in the supernatural.  There are spiritual realities out there and they can be very negative.  I would hugely recommend people not to have anything to do with the occult.  People find they are having strange dreams, strange things happening to them, even poltergeist activity."

I wonder if that's what's wrong with my wife, who two nights ago dreamed she was participating in a chicken rodeo.

So anyway.  Predictably I'm siding with James Randi et al., who think that the Ouija board is just a silly toy.  I'd invite anyone who is looking for a Christmas present for me, though, to get me one, and it will occupy an honored spot next to my decks of Tarot cards.  I'm assuming that this will be a more economical choice than the other thing I want, which is a "haunted sword" that appeared over at Craigslist a couple of days ago, with a price-tag of $150.  You can get a Ouija board over at Target for around $20, which I think you have to admit is quite a savings.

Redirecting the outrage

I have to wonder, sometimes, why so many Christians seem to be more concerned with what people do with their naughty bits than they are with Jesus's dictum to Love Thy Neighbor As Thyself.

And to forestall the flood of comments I get when I post on topics like this, yes, I know it's not all Christians.  But it's enough of them, and there's crashing silence on the topic from a good many of the rest.

Let's start with the Arizona pastor who has recommended getting rid of AIDS by executing all homosexuals, "like God recommends."

Steven Anderson, of the Faithful Word Baptist Church of Tempe, posted a YouTube video this week (which you can watch at the link posted above, if you can stomach it) in which he had the following to say:

Turn to Leviticus 20:13, because I actually discovered the cure for AIDS.  "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death.  Their blood shall be upon them."  And that, my friend, is the cure for AIDS. It was right there in the Bible all along — and they’re out spending billions of dollars in research and testing.  It’s curable — right there.  Because if you executed the homos like God recommends, you wouldn’t have all this AIDS running rampant.

And about his taking a more hate-the-sin, love-the-sinner approach, Anderson said:

No homos will ever be allowed in this church as long as I am pastor here.  Never!  Say "You’re crazy."  No, you’re crazy if you think that there’s something wrong with my "no homo" policy.

And this is the same guy who has spoken from the pulpit about the evils of women speaking in church -- which, after all, is also mandated by the bible.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So far I have seen one (1) self-professed Christian post this story and repudiate this wacko's statements.  But let's contrast this with the twelve (and counting) times I've seen outrage over the story about football player Ben Watson, who wrote a moving piece about the Ferguson riots and ended it with a statement about his religious beliefs:

I'M ENCOURAGED, because ultimately the problem is not a SKIN problem, it is a SIN problem. SIN is the reason we rebel against authority. SIN is the reason we abuse our authority. SIN is the reason we are racist, prejudiced and lie to cover for our own. SIN is the reason we riot, loot and burn. BUT I'M ENCOURAGED because God has provided a solution for sin through the his son Jesus and with it, a transformed heart and mind. One that's capable of looking past the outward and seeing what's truly important in every human being. The cure for the Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner tragedies is not education or exposure. It's the Gospel. So, finally, I'M ENCOURAGED because the Gospel gives mankind hope.

Which was all well and good, until he was interviewed on CNN after his words went viral.  Watson was asked a question about his religious beliefs near the end of the interview, and he said, "The only way to really cure what's on the inside is understanding that Jesus Christ died for our sins," immediately before the time ran out on his segment.

What was the response of the devout?  Outrage that Watson had been "brutally censored for mentioning Jesus."

Really?  Come on, now.  If CNN hadn't wanted Watson to mention Jesus, they either (1) wouldn't have asked him the question, or (2) wouldn't have interviewed him in the first place.  Watson's being cut off was either a timer issue or a technical glitch (or both), but a lot of Christians are so sunk in a persecution complex that it became yet another opportunity to claim that they're oppressed.

Just like the "War on Christmas," which yes, is starting up again this year.  (Before I even had a chance to put up my Christmas tree, darn it.)  Just like author and political commentator Ben Carson's claims this week that it's the LGBT activists who are the ones who engage in hate speech:

The enemies are the people who try to divide each other.  The enemies are the ones who try to incite people to hatred, to anger...  Somebody who is pro-traditional-family, they’ll come up and say, "he’s a homophobe, they hate gay people, they’re nasty" and they just try to incite all this stuff really to further their own agendas...  Instead of getting into their respective corners and reacting to all of this hate speech, let's actually talk about the issue...  (T)he reason that a lot of those hateful people don't want to talk is that they've been reading a book by Saul Alinsky called Rules for Radicals, which says never have a conversation with your enemies, because that humanizes them, and you want to demonize them.

Right.  Like claiming that we should be executing homosexuals in order to get rid of AIDS.

I'll say something I've said before: it's going to take regular old Christians standing up and saying "SHUT UP" to this kind of thing to stop people like Anderson and Carson from being the public face of Christianity.  It'll take a shift in focus by the devout, from a conviction that they're being oppressed and persecuted to redirecting their outrage towards issues of social justice.

It'll take their suddenly remembering that Jesus himself put a lot more emphasis on things like "Whatever you do to the least of my brothers, you do unto me" than he did to the stone-damn-near-everyone laws of Leviticus.