Paleontological ghosts

When I was in elementary school, I developed a fascination with extinct prehistoric animals.  Not unusual, I realize; kids love big, powerful creatures with nasty pointy teeth.  But this interest has persisted for nearly fifty years.  The thought that millions of years ago, there were on the Earth strange beasts, the likes of which we will never see again, always raises in me a sense of wonder.  In the words of Charles Darwin, "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

Whenever I run into someone who shares this interest, my first question is always, "What's your favorite?"  I had a student in my AP Biology class last year who is mighty fond of Anomalocaris, which in my mind has always had a rather Lovecraftian look:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Another student has actually been on paleontological digs in North Dakota, and once told me he has a soft spot in his heart for the early mammal with the euphonious name of Didelphodon:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Me, I've always had a thing for flying animals, so my favorite group is the pterodactyloids, the best of which is the impossibly wacky-looking Rhamphorhynchus:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So it was with great interest that I read an article by Nick Redfern over at Mysterious Universe that claims that these guys might still be around.

Yes, you read that right.  Pterodactyls.  Big, leathery, weird flying reptiles.  In San Antonio, Texas, in fact.  Now, how there could be a breeding population of gigantic bird-lizards in Texas without people seeing them more often -- hell, given that it's Texas, without someone shooting one -- is a question that troubles Joshua P. Warren, investigator of all sorts of odd claims and author of the book Pet Ghosts.  

And it was undoubtedly the research for his book that drove Warren to an explanation regarding why people see pterodactyloids (and other prehistoric creatures), but said cryptids never leave any hard evidence:

They're the ghosts of extinct animals.

"It seems absurd to believe that pterosaurs might still be amongst us, but never, ever get captured or killed," Redfern writes.  "Could it be that, as Joshua Warren’s research suggests, we’re dealing with the ghosts of long dead pterodactyls?  It sounds bizarre, but if people live on after physical death, then why not animals, too?"

Well, yeah.  "If."  I'm not convinced on that last account, as you no doubt know.  And of course, the convenient thing about this explanation is that this means that the lack of evidence becomes, in some bizarre way, a support for the contention itself.  "Nothing there?  No fur, footprints, anything?  There you are, then.  It's a Ghost Saber-toothed Tiger."

So I'm still figuring that we're looking at eyewitnesses who were either (1) confused, (2) lying, (3) drunk, or (4) all of the above.  But that's unlikely to convince either Redfern or Warren.

And understand that it's not that I'm happy about this.  I'd love it if there was some way to see what these magnificent animals looked like when they were alive.  And if I couldn't see a live one, I'd settle for a ghostly one.  But unfortunately, I very much doubt if either of these is possible -- although next time I'm in Texas, I'll keep an eye out.  

Maybe the rare San Antonio Rhamphorhynchus will put in an appearance just for me.

Fiction come to life

Regular readers of this blog know that besides my two hats of Skepticism Blogger and High School Science Teacher, I also wear a third one, which is Fiction Writer.  And we fiction writers are, almost without exception, a strange breed.  Discussions with other authors has turned up a commonality, a psychic quirk that I thought for a time was unique to me: our fictional characters sometimes take on a life of their own, to the point that they seem...

... real.

The result is that there are times that I feel like I'm not inventing, but recounting, stories.  The plot takes turns I never intended, the characters do things that surprise me for reasons that only later become apparent.  In my current work-in-progress, a strange, neo-mythological novel called The Fifth Day that follows Stephen King's dictum to "create sympathy for your characters, then turn the monsters loose," one of my characters has turned out to be a great deal nicer than I ever suspected he'd be.  His soft side came from a history of childhood neglect that prompts him to befriend another character, a twelve-year-old boy.  I honestly had no knowledge of this when I started the story.

Of course, that won't stop me from killing him in a few chapters.  But still, it's nice to know he's not the macho jerk he seemed to be at first.

Be that as it may, I really do (truly) know that it's me inventing the whole thing.  My books are, after all, on the "Fiction" aisle in the bookstore.  Which makes the claims of a few authors even more peculiar than the Who's-Driving-The-Car sensation I sometimes get; because these authors claim that they've actually met their characters.

Like, in real life, in flesh and blood.  According to a recent article in The Daily Grail, more than one writer has said that (s)he has been out and about, and there, large as life, has been someone from one of their stories.

Alan Moore, for example, author of the Hellblazer series, said that he ran into his character John Constantine in a London sandwich bar.  "All of a sudden, up the stairs came John Constantine," Moore said in an interview.  "He looked exactly like John Constantine.  He looked at me, stared me straight in the eyes, smiled, nodded almost conspiratorially, and then just walked off around the corner to the other part of the snack bar."

Moore considered following him, but then decided not to.  "I thought it was the safest," he said.

Graphic novel artist Dave McKean has also met a fictional character, but not one of his own; he says he's run into the character Death from Neil Gaiman's series Sandman.  Which has to have been pretty alarming, considering.

Of course, most people, myself included, chalk this up to the overactive imagination that we writers tend to have.  We picture our characters vividly, imagine the scenes in full Technicolor and Sensurround, so it's not really that surprising that sometimes we see things that make us wonder if maybe our fictional worlds have come to life.  But some people believe that this isn't a coincidence -- some chance resemblance of a person to a character in one of our stories -- but a real, literal manifestation of a fictional being into the waking world.

The (fictional) Japanese evil spirit Oiwa [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Such fiction-become-real beings even have a name.  They're called tulpas, from a Sanskrit word meaning "conjured thing."  In the western occult tradition, the idea is that through the sheer force of will, through the power that the imagined being has in our minds, it becomes real.

And not just to its creator; believers claim that a tulpa has an independent reality.  Graphic novel writer Doug Moench, in fact, says he met one face to face.  The story is recounted in Jeffrey Kripal's book Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, and is excerpted in The Daily Grail link I included above; but it suffices to say that Moench was writing a scene in one of his Planet of the Apes comics about a black-hooded bad guy holding a gun to the head of a character, and heard his wife call him -- and he went into the room to find a black-hooded intruder holding a gun to his wife's head.

Understandably shaken by this experience, Moench apparently went through a period where he was uncertain if he should continue writing -- because he was afraid that it would become real.

Predictably, I think what we have going on here isn't anything paranormal.  Moench's experience was almost certainly nothing more than a bizarre, and very upsetting, coincidence, and a fine example of dart-thrower's bias (think about all the millions of scenes writers have created that haven't come true).  But there's something about the tulpa thing that still gives me a bit of a shiver, even so.  There are plenty of characters I've created that I'd just as soon stay fictional, thank you very much.  (The old man in the interrogation room from my soon-to-be-released novel Kill Switch being a case in point; that sonofabitch was awful enough on the printed page.)

But there are a few characters from stories I've written that I wouldn't mind meeting.  Tyler Vaughan from Signal to Noise comes to mind, because more than one person has told me that Tyler is actually a younger version of me, and I'd like to apologize to him for saddling him with my various neuroses.  But the majority of 'em -- yeah, they can stay fictional.

So I'll take a pass on the whole tulpa thing.  For one thing, I see no possible way it could work.  For another, all the accounts of authors meeting their characters are way too easily explained by the fact that writers' skulls tend to be filled with things that I can only call waking dreams, so we're to be excused if sometimes we blur the edges of reality and fiction.

And third: I'd rather not have some of the scenes I've written come to life.  I had a hard enough time putting my characters through some of that stuff.  No way in the world would I want to live through it myself.

The politics of fear

In M. G. Miller's amazing book Bayou Jesus, we read about four characters on a deadly collision course in early 20th century southern Louisiana -- the young, unwed African American woman Miss Zassy, her saintly son Frank Potter, Miss Zassy's sadistic employer Samson Boudreaux, and his daughter Alice.  Throughout the book there is a sense of tragic inevitability, driven by Miller's elegant prose and his character Samson's pervasive fear of the dark-skinned race who were freed after what he calls "The War of Northern Aggression."

It's the fear that struck me, throughout my reading of this book.  What, exactly, was Samson so afraid of?  He phrases it in self-justifying platitudes: "Give them an inch, they'll take a mile."  "If you don't keep them in their place, they'll take over the whole world."  And despite my knowing that Miller's depiction is sadly accurate, and that there were people in the Deep South who believed this -- after all, Bayou Jesus is set only a stone's throw from where I spent most of the first twenty years of my life -- I couldn't help but think more than once, "how can Samson look around him, and honestly think that the poor, powerless, disadvantaged African Americans in his home town are any kind of threat?"

And yet he, and the real white supremacists who were all too common in the post-Civil-War South, did feel exactly that.  It had nothing to do with logic, facts, or even reality, and yet it drove them to harass, torture, and kill innocent people who weren't trying to do anything other than eke out a meager living in peace.

African Americans during the Civil War [photograph by Mathew Brady, 1864]

Which brings me to conservative columnist John Zmirak's claim that Christians in America are facing imminent genocide.

In an interview with radio talk show host Joe Miller, Zmirak made the following statement, which I quote here in its entirety:

When a dominant group wants to persecute a minority, the first thing they do is vilify them.  You had the dominant secularists in France before the French Revolution spend about twenty years vilifying the Christian clergy; the moment they took power in the French Revolution, they started killing the Christian clergy.  When the Turks decided that the Armenians were a dangerous minority almost 100 years ago to the day, they started out with a propaganda campaign saying that the Armenians were all traitors working for the Russian czar; within a few years, they were butchering in the streets and driving them into the desert to die of thirst.  Same thing happened in, of course, Nazi Germany, they vilified the Jews, preparing people for the Holocaust.  You saw it happen again in Rwanda, where the once-powerful Tutsi minority, they were declared on government radio stations for weeks and weeks, they were called cockroaches, ‘we must exterminate the cockroaches.’  It was repeated over and over and over again and it was followed, of course, by a genocide that in the course of a month or two, killed more than a million people. 

I think this vilification of faithful Christians could lead to violence in America.  I think the churches have been persecuted before, Christians are being persecuted all around the world by Islamists — and the U.S. government is doing nothing, of course — I could imagine Americans standing by while churches are padlocked and pastors are arrested for being hatemongers, while children are being taken away from their parents because they don’t want them to be taught their extremist views. 

It’s happened so many times before, and all the signs are there that the enemies of Christianity are seeing ‘how much can we get away with?  Can we close down a pizza parlor for even theoretically being willing to discriminate?  Can we get teachers from religious schools fired?  They’re going to keep pushing until they hit pushback.  And unless there’s powerful pushback from Christians now — not five years from now, when it will be too late, but now — we’re going to see ourselves reduced to the status of second-class citizens the way Christians are in countries like Egypt and Syria.

There are three takeaways I had from this:

1. 74% is a minority?  Even in the most secular parts of the United States, there are more Christians than any other group.  In some places, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who's not a Christian.
2. Saying that Christians (and anyone else, for that matter) can't discriminate is not "vilification."  In fact, it's kind of the opposite.  It's saying you can't use your religion to vilify someone else.
3. In Egypt and Syria, Christians comprise about 10% of the population, and the entire government, virtually all schools and public institutions, and even the legal system, is dominated by non-Christians.  How can you draw an analogy between the Middle East and the United States?  Unless... you know, you were to reverse it, to demonstrate that non-Christians might be a persecuted minority here in the United States?

But none of those facts matter.  Like the fictional Samson Boudreaux, who felt that wealthy, privileged Caucasians were in imminent danger from poor, downtrodden African Americans, John Zmirak thinks that the Christian majority -- whose members control virtually every level of government -- are about to be overthrown and oppressed by secularists.

And all because we're trying to make sure that pizza parlor owners can't refuse to serve people on the basis of their sexual orientation.  (And allow me to point out that the pizza shop owner who is the focal point of all of this is so far from an oppressed "second-class citizen" in the eyes of most Americans that she received over $840,000 in donations from like-minded Christians for her refusal to serve gays.)

It's amazing what fear will do, isn't it?  Because that's what drives the whole thing.  Fear of The Other, fear of losing your way of life, and worst of all -- fear that the people you hate will treat you the way you'd like to treat them.  When, of course, most of the members of the groups Zmirak and his ilk detest want only what everyone wants -- the freedom to live without being ridiculed, harassed, discriminated against, and (to use Zmirak's own word) vilified.

But this isn't about reality, and as has been said many times before, you can't logic yourself out of a position you didn't logic yourself into.  More to the point, I'd like to end with a quote from Ken Keyes: "A loving person lives in a loving world.  A hostile person lives in a hostile world.  Everyone you meet is your mirror."

Fermi's Paradox, fast radio bursts, and extraterrestrial intelligence

Just because I believe that science works, and that its methods are sound, doesn't mean that I have to like its conclusions.  And one of my least favorite pieces of sound scientific reasoning is Fermi's Paradox.

Named after the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi, Fermi's Paradox originally took the form of a succinct response to all of the speculation about life in other star systems.  According to everything we know about stellar evolution, planet formation, biochemistry, and evolutionary biology, life should be common out there.  And just considering the fact that some star systems with planets are likely to be considerably older than ours, it also stands to reason that there should be civilizations out there considerably more advanced than ours.

Upon hearing this sort of argument, Fermi responded with a simple question:  "Where is everybody?"  If life, and intelligent life, is as common as all that, we should be bombarded with signals from extraterrestrials.  And in fact, despite decades of searching the skies, there has never been a single unequivocal transmission found from an intelligent life-form.  (Although the "WOW Signal" might be a contender; it's yet to be explained.)

There are a number of possible explanations for the lack of extraterrestrial communications, and most of them are depressing.  It could be that the likelihood of intelligent life developing on planets is, for some reason, a great deal less likely than we think it is (i.e. we here on Earth were just damn lucky).  It could be that most civilizations destroy themselves shortly after achieving the capacity for long-distance communication.  Some astronomers even think that there are cosmic reset switches -- natural phenomena that periodically wipe the galaxy clean of life, requiring a prolonged reboot, and preventing most life ever from achieving technology.  (For example, consider gamma-ray bursters, but only if you want to spend the next few days worrying about the entire solar system suddenly getting fried.)

Being someone who would love nothing better than to witness the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence, I find the Fermi Paradox a significant downer.  I do have one possible answer that may still allow for a rich diversity of intelligent life in the galaxy, however; because we are looking for communication in the radio region of the spectrum (the fashion in which we as a species first learned to do long-distance transmission of information), it might be that such discernible, signal-producing modes of communication are quickly superseded by more sophisticated technologies that produce much less in the way of a footprint when observed from light years distant.  In other words; societies might only be detectable during the first few decades of their technological existence, when they're communicating with each other by shouting from the rooftops.  After they learn more efficient means of transmitting information, they seem to go silent.

I hope.  Because otherwise, it's mighty lonely here, you know?

All of this comes up because of a paper published just last week by Michael Hippke, Wilfried Domainko, and John Learned called "Discrete Steps in Dispersion Measures of Fast Radio Bursts."  In this interesting bit of research, an analysis was done of the dispersion measures of microseconds-long pulses in the radio region of the spectrum.  The paper is quite technical -- even with a B.S. in physics, it was over my head -- but insofar as I understand it, the curious thing about the eleven radio pulses thus far detected is that their dispersion measures are all integer multiples of 187.5 parsec/cm3 -- something that admits of no particularly obvious natural explanation.

Carl Sagan, in his wonderful novel (and later movie) Contact, used the idea of encoding a signal with some mathematical pattern as a way of broadcasting a "We're Here" signal into space -- or, conversely, looking for such a signal as a way of detecting life that's out there.  If a radio signal could be encoded with the first ten digits of pi, or (as in Contact) the first few prime numbers, that would be instantly recognizable as an unequivocal signal from an intelligence.  So the discovery of the 187.5 pattern in dispersion measures for FRBs was immediately jumped upon as evidence that the radio bursts originate from some alien civilization.  (The International Business Times, for example, was all a-quiver with the possibility.)

The astrophysicists, of course, are being more circumspect.  All that Hippke, Domainko, and Learned concluded from their research is that the pattern is currently unexplained, if suggestive:

(A)n extragalactic origin would seem unlikely, as high (random) DMs would be added by intergalactic dust.  A more likely option could be a galactic source producing quantized chirped signals, but this seems most surprising.  If both of these options could be excluded, only an artificial source (human or non-human) must be considered, particularly since most bursts have been observed in only one location (Parkes radio telescope)...  In the end we only claim interesting features which further data will verify or refute. 

They also suggest that the FRBs might actually be perytons, signals that appear to originate from space when they actually are entirely terrestrial in origin -- i.e. human-generated signals that are being misinterpreted, or simple radio telescope glitches.

Whatever the explanation is, the FRBs are an interesting phenomenon, and give me hope that there might be an eventual answer to Fermi's Paradox.  I have to be careful about letting my desire for there to be intelligent life elsewhere in the universe get in the way of my objectivity in evaluating the evidence at hand; but even so, the strange mathematical pattern that Hippke et al. have discovered might be the best contender we currently have for an alien civilization saying, "Here we are!"

Civil disobedience and standardized tests

I begin the unit on ethics in my Critical Thinking class today.  I always look forward to this; it seems to me to be the heart of the curriculum.  And one of the many questions we wrestle with is what the difference is (or whether there is a difference) between the words ethical, moral, justifiable, legal, and right.

It's the legal one I've been thinking about this morning, especially apropos of the action taken by the New York State legislature last week.  They rubber-stamped Governor Andrew Cuomo's budget -- which means, among other things, accepting his mandates about public education, including tying 50% of a teacher's numerical evaluation score to his/her students' performance on a single standardized test, and requiring that observations by administrators be done by individuals from outside the school (i.e., not the teacher's own principal or supervisor).

I've already explained, in some detail, why I think this is a terrible idea.  To recap as succinctly as possible: standardized tests don't measure much of anything other than your ability to take standardized tests; it makes our state's education system beholden to multi-million-dollar exam-prep firms like Pearson Education; it does not account for variables such as differences in funding and poverty level; it does not differentiate between teachers who teach classes that nearly everyone passes the assessment for (such as AP classes) and ones where nearly everyone does not (such as 15/1 special education classes); and it puts administrators in the tough place of evaluating teachers they don't know teaching curricula they have not overseen.

Despite all of the flaws, we now are looking at this evaluation system being used to determine tenure and retention -- and, ultimately, as a tool to revoke tenure for established teachers.

But none of that apparently mattered.  The legislature caved and passed the budget, and its ancillary requirements for schools, by an overwhelming margin, even though some of the members apparently hadn't read what they were voting on.  Assemblywoman JoAnne Simon said, after its passage, "The budget adopted by the Senate and Assembly and signed by the Governor no longer links teacher performance evaluations to standardized test scores and outside evaluators," a statement that in complete cluelessness ranks right up there with Michigan Representative Joe Forbes's famous comment, "Mr. Speaker, what bill did we just pass?"

But if you've been reading my blog, you know all of that.  The question is, what do we do now?

And this is when we run into conflicts with defining the words I'm going to be throwing at my Critical Thinking classes this week.

Because I believe it's time for a little civil disobedience.

Schools are mandated by the state to give standardized tests.  Different ones, depending on the state, but all state Departments of Education require students to sit for some battery of exams each year.  Here in New York, we have various reading and mathematics exams in elementary and middle school, and in high school the subject-specific "Regents exams."  And what I'm going to suggest puts me (as an employee of a public school) in the realm of doing something dubiously ethical, and the school district (should it get involved in an official capacity) in downright illegal territory:

We need to have students opt out of all state-mandated exams.

Not just a few students, and not just a few exams.  Not only the low-stakes ones, the ones not tied to grades, like the elementary reading assessments.  All of the state-mandated exams.  If the State Department of Education is going to use exam data to evaluate teachers in a way that nearly everyone who's analyzed it thinks is completely specious, then we should give them no data to work with.

Of course, it's the parents who have to be on board to do that; it's their children who are the ones who will be affected.  But well-reasoned discussion and polite protest and letter-writing campaigns had exactly zero effect.  This is the point where we need to raise the stakes.

What if we threw an exam, and no one showed up?

Maybe it's time we find out.  If Governor Cuomo and his lackeys in the legislature want to destroy public education -- and by this time, it is apparent to me that this is their goal -- then we need to blunt their weapon.

We're heading into testing season, starting with the grades 3-8 English/Language Arts exams starting the week of April 13th, and the grades 3-8 Mathematics exams the week after that.  So I'm making an appeal: parents, keep your kids home.  All kids.  Opt right the hell out.  If the school contacts you and asks why your child missed the exam, tell them (s)he was sick.  If they offer to reschedule it, tell them your child will be sick that day, too, I'm ever so sorry.

Is it risky?  Sure.  But the result of doing nothing is riskier; losing talented teachers from "failing schools" because they are being penalized for teaching disadvantaged children, unfairly targeting teachers of remedial or special education classes, discouraging young, intelligent, and energetic college students from pursuing a career in education because it's simply too insecure.  Ask yourself how else we are going to make a point to a governor who seems bound and determined to destroy the foundations of public education.

Think about it.  If there's a better way, go for it.

But if not: keep your kids home.  Let the empty seats speak for us, and then see what he does.

Ball's in your court, Cuomo.

NOTE:  For anyone who is interested in opt-out information, including a downloadable refusal letter for parents, go here.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

Dear readers,

I'm going on a short break from Skeptophilia.  Next week, I'm heading down to Fayetteville, Arkansas to meet the fine people of Oghma Creative Media.  We'll be discussing the release on April 14 of my latest novel, Kill Switch, through Oghma's Fleet Press imprint.

Kill Switch will be available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and many other bookstores, and will be available both in print and for Kindle or Nook.  But what's it about, you might be asking?

Mild-mannered high school teacher Chris Franzia comes home on the last day of school to find two FBI agents waiting for him in his driveway.  They tell him that there's been a string of murders in the past month, and the only commonality is that all of the victims were in a particular graduate class at the University of Washington thirty years earlier.

And Chris is likely to be the next one in the gunsight.

After two near misses convince Chris that the FBI men were telling the truth, he flees on a cross-country race against time, trying to stay one step ahead of an invisible, implacable enemy who is tracking his every move.  The problem is... Chris has no idea why they're after him.  But figuring that out is now literally a matter of life or death.

So check it out when it hits the shelves.  It is, in the words of one reviewer, "a conspiracy theorist's wet dream."


One other bit of news:  a friend of mine has started a Secular Services Directory, a site that acts as a clearinghouse for businesses that are secularist/atheist friendly.  Here's the gist of it, from their "About" page:

This national directory is the brainchild of a couple who are both long-standing secularists.  Over the years, we’ve encountered ignorance, misunderstanding, and even prejudice in seeking out services that support our values.  We’ve often wished that there was a resource to identify businesses that operate on a basis of critical thinking and rationality.  For years we’ve joked that it seems just about every affinity group out there has its own directory, except us. 

Until one day we had the thought, “Why don’t we just build one ourselves?”  So we did.  Welcome! 

Now, there are a lot of settings where a person’s religious or spiritual beliefs (or lack thereof) don’t really come into play.  For instance, whether or not our grocer or the gas station on the corner operates along secular lines doesn’t really matter to us. 

But for more personal services where we’re most vulnerable — medical care, legal advice, mental health counseling, and so on — we want to feel secure that we don’t have to deal with proselytizing or judgment on top of the needs we’re trying to meet.
We hope you find value in what we’re creating, and welcome any support or assistance you feel moved to offer.

So I hope you'll visit their site, and if you own a business, that you'll register it with them.  At the very least, you can give their Facebook page a "like."


Thanks again to all of my loyal readers for visiting Skeptophilia and for your support and positive comments.  I'll be back on Monday, April 6 with more news from a skeptical view.

Modern-day Caligulas

Is it just me, or do a lot of high-profile members of the evangelical wing of Christianity seem to have lost their minds lately?

I mean, it's not like they haven't been saying some odd things for a while.  Pat Robertson, for example -- who at this point must be what, 148 years old? -- has been entertaining us for as long as I can remember.  But now we've got apparently insane hyper-Christians, many of whom have been elected to public office, making statements that under normal circumstances would qualify a person for medical supervision.

First we have Governor Mike Pence of Indiana, signing into law the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which "prohibits state or local governments from substantially burdening a person's ability to exercise their religion — unless the government can show that it has a compelling interest and that the action is the least-restrictive means of achieving it."  All of which sounds pretty innocuous until you realize that what prompted the bill was a series of cases in which Christian-owned businesses wanted government protection for their decision not to serve gays and lesbians.

Making it clear that this was what the bill was about, Eric Miler of Advance America said about the bill's passage, "It is vitally important to protect religious freedom in Indiana.  It was therefore important to pass Senate Bill 101 in 2015 in order to help protect churches, Christian businesses and individuals from those who want to punish them because of their Biblical beliefs!"

And despite this, Governor Pence swears that the RFRA has nothing to do with discriminating against LGBT people.  "This is not about discrimination," he said, in a press conference.

The state is already beginning to experience a backlash.  Supporters of non-discrimination policies have begun pulling out of Indiana, most dramatically the software company Salesforce, which operates a S&P 500 corporation headquartered in Indianapolis.  "We have been an active member of the Indiana business community and a key job creator for more than a decade," Scott McCorkle, CEO of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud division, wrote in a letter to Indiana lawmakers. "Our success is fundamentally based on our ability to attract and retain the best and most diverse pool of highly skilled employees, regardless of gender, religious affiliation, ethnicity or sexual orientation.  Without an open business environment that welcomes all residents and visitors, Salesforce will be unable to continue building on its tradition of marketing innovation in Indianapolis."

But what Pence and the Indiana state legislature has done is sane compared with what we're hearing from other right-wing Christian elected officials.  How about Senator Sylvia Allen, a member of the State Senate of Arizona, who last week proposed a way to fix the problems in the United States: mandatory church attendance.

In a debate over laws governing carrying concealed weapons, Senator Allen suddenly made the following statement, which should be an odds-on contender for the 2015 Non Sequitur Award:

I believe what's happening to our country is that there's a moral erosion of the soul of America.  It's the soul that is corrupt.  How we get back to a moral rebirth I don't know.  Since we are slowly eroding religion at every opportunity that we have.  Probably we should be debating a bill requiring every American to attend a church of their choice on Sunday to see if we can get back to having a moral rebirth.

What does that have to do with concealed-carry laws?  I have no idea.  Neither, apparently, did the rest of the senate, who just sort of sat there staring at Senator Allen with their mouths hanging open.

Then we have State Representative Gordon Klingenschmitt of Colorado, who on his television show Pray in Jesus's Name commented upon a brutal attack on a pregnant woman that occurred earlier this month, and said that the attack had happened because of the "curse of God upon America for the legalization of abortion."  Worse, still, when people reacted with outrage to Klingenschmitt's statement, he informed us that he has the right to say any damn thing he wants to, because, you know, 'Murica.

I'm against evil and I'm in favor of good. If other people are offended by the Bible, that's okay, they don't have to agree with me or come to my church or watch my TV show.  It's a free country.  If you're offended because I quote the bible in church, I ask you to forgive me but I will not apologize for quoting the Bible in church.  If the government is now going to step into my church on Sunday and say "oh, you're not allowed to do that because you are an elected official," I would ask people to take a step back and think about how the government should be protecting your freedom of worship on Sunday and maybe cut me a little slack.

Then we had a war of words between conservative Idaho State Representative Paul Shepherd and a LGBT activist named Dylan Hailey.  Shepherd had forgotten to renew his subscription to the website domain name www.paulshepherdusa.com, so Hailey bought it and converted it to a website describing the struggles of LGBT individuals in Idaho.

Well, Shepherd wasn't going to take that lying down.  In an interview with Melissa Dalvin of Idaho Reports, Shepherd made an analogy that "WTF?" doesn't even quite cover:  "Slave owners were very good Christians and good people," Shepherd said.  "They weren't terrible, rotten, horrible people.  And that's how I see gay people."

And it wasn't just the elected officials.  It appears that because of a byzantine rule regarding the way proposals for laws work in California, an attorney named Matthew McLaughlin may be in position to force lawmakers to consider a bill called the "Sodomite Suppression Act."  Here's an excerpt:

Seeing that it is better that offenders should die rather than that all of us should be killed by God's just wrath against us for the folly of tolerating wickedness in our midst, the People of California wisely command, in the fear of God, that any person who willingly touches another person of the same gender for purposes of sexual gratification be put to death by bullets to the head or by any other convenient method.

Now, nobody thinks that this bill has a chance of passing -- it's doubtful if even people like Klingenschmitt and Shepherd would vote for something like this.  But just the very fact that it's under consideration is terrifying.

You know, the whole thing makes me think about the Roman Empire.  It worked pretty well for a while, you know?  Then all of a sudden, you had people like Caligula having his horse elected to the Senate and ordering his armies to whip the ocean because he wanted to teach the god Neptune a lesson, Nero singing songs in praise to himself while watching people being burned alive, and Elagabalus, who made up his own religion revolving around the idea that prostitution was holy, and killed anyone who refused to join it.

Actually, I hope I'm wrong, here.  Because once the Roman Empire more-or-less imploded, the whole place was overrun by barbarians, and that wasn't much better.  So let's hope we can replace our own modern-day Caligulas with people who are interested in sensible governance.