The bankruptcy of denialism

Dear readers:

It's time for me to take a short break from Skeptophilia.  Next week I'll be donning my other hat (fiction writer) and attending/giving a talk at the Storytellers of America conference in Fayetteville, Arkansas, so this will be my last post until I return, Monday, July 18.

During the interim, you should check out a few of my favorite skeptic/atheist sites.  Here are some suggestions:

Pharyngula 

Friendly Atheist 

Bad Astronomy 

Respectful Insolence 

Skeptical Raptor 

SkepticBlog 

NeuroLogica

Or, alternatively, you could read some of my fiction, links to which have been helpfully provided at the right.  I have three novels (Kill Switch, Lock & Key, and Sephirot) out in print from Oghma Creative Media (but also available for e-readers); my short story "The Hourglass" is also available in e-reader format, for only 99 cents.

Such a deal.

In any case, have a lovely week, hoist the banner of skepticism high, and keep those cards & letters coming.  I'll be back at it when I return from Fayetteville next weekend.

*****************************

I try to be open-minded and balanced about things, but there comes a point when anyone who is truly using evidence and logic as the sine qua non of understanding has to say, "Okay, the time for debate is over.  This is settled."

That time has come for the climate change deniers.

I know I've rung the changes on this topic a number of times before, but two things popped up in my newsfeed yesterday that highlighted the fact that the deniers are at this point not only without a leg to stand on, evidence-wise, but are morally bankrupt as well.

First, we had a meeting this week of Britain's Global Warming Policy Foundation, which despite the name is a pro-fossil-fuel, climate change denialist lobby that is seeing an opportunity in the recent vote by Great Britain to withdraw from the European Union.  The keynote address was given by David Campbell, professor at Lancaster University, wherein his main point was the unfairness of the Paris Accord's mandate that rich nations make carbon cuts while poor nations do not, along with a withering criticism of China's greenhouse gas policy (drafted last year) as completely unrealistic.

It was only after Campbell tried to access his link to the Paris Accord document that he realized his mistake.  The site was an "expired link" and would not load.  The reason?

The passage he quoted was from a draft that was superseded by an updated version of the Accord in which said mandate had been removed.

Oops.

And about China's policy, he conveniently failed to mention a billion-dollar investment approved by the Chinese government -- in clean energy.

The audience overcame their embarrassment quickly, because there's nothing like assuming your conclusion for maintaining support of a position.  One attendee went back to the tired old denialist claim about the global warming "pause" -- neglecting the fact that 2016 has thus far been the warmest year on record, beating the previous record (2015), which beat the previous record (2014), and so on and so forth.

That's some pause, right there.

[image courtesy of NOAA]

Then, here in the States, we had a revelation (surprising no one who keeps up with such news) that one of the leading denialist groups in the US, The Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, was being funded by recently-bankrupted coal giant Peabody Energy, Inc.

This, you may recall, is the group that published papers such as the never-to-be-forgotten "The Many Benefits of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Enrichment."

The head of the CSCDGC, Craig Idso, is a familiar name in the denialist world.  He has spoken at meetings of the Heartland Institute, the political lobby group driven by fossil fuel interests, and was instrumental in pushing a committee to draft policy countering the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's statement that climate change was here and now, and that mitigation was absolutely critical.

So the rallying cry of the denialist movement, "Follow the money" -- intended to imply that the scientists were in the pay of environmental lobby groups -- turns out to be a far better guide for sorting fact from fiction than the deniers ever intended.

And outside, the world continues to warm.  Here in the Northeast, we're in the middle of a sweltering drought; only a few states to the south, they're being washed away by flash floods.  The southwest has been under a "heat dome" for weeks that has brought the air temperatures up to 120 F in Phoenix, Arizona.  Hell, it was 93 F in Siberia a couple of days ago.

And we haven't even reached the hottest part of the summer yet.

So we still have room for more warming coming soon, perhaps even getting near last summer's record -- an unimaginable heat index of 165 F in Bandar Mahshahr, Iran on July 31.

"Global warming pause," my ass.

So that's the news from the climate change front.  The fossil fuel industry is still pulling the strings, and the politicians are still dancing to their tune.  How much longer that will continue probably depends on how much worse the weather gets.  Because if there's one thing that will turn things around, it's when the crazy weather starts to affect the pocketbooks of the wealthy business owners.

Then we might see some change on a political level.

But the tragic part is that by then, it might be too late to do anything about it.

Ark afloat

So yesterday, Ken Ham's flagship project Ark Encounter opened with much fanfare, thus proving that it takes $102 million dollars and a crew of thousands six years to support the contention that a 500-year-old man and his three sons could do the same thing in a few weeks without power tools.

Ham, naturally, is delighted.  It hasn't been smooth sailing; he was plagued with funding problems and a lawsuit over discriminatory hiring practices when it was discovered that he was receiving tax breaks from the state of Kentucky while simultaneously requiring that anyone who worked there (including volunteers) had to be practicing Christians who believed in biblical inerrancy.  That he actually succeeded was something of -- dare I say it -- a miracle.

"Nobody’s ever attempted anything like this before," Ham said, in an interview with Forbes, "because God never has brought all of these kinds of people — literally thousands of people — together to make it happen, until now."

Not even once, four thousand years ago?  Really?  Wasn't that kind of your point?

"We are bold about the fact that we’re doing it because we’re Christians and we’re doing it for the Christian message," Ham said.  "But we’re not trying to force it on people.  What we want to do is challenge people to consider that what they’re seeing was true and feasible.  We want to get them to take the Bible seriously."

Ken Ham [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Because anyone with a shred of critical thinking ability would take seriously the conjecture that (1) there was enough rain to flood the entire Earth, followed by (2) all the water miraculously going somewhere ("away," presumably), followed by (3) all the sloths somehow ambling their way from Palestine back to the Amazon Rain Forest unaided.

And we won't even go into the mental gymnastics that it would take to believe that two of every animal species on Earth would fit on a 512-foot-long ship in the first place.

Ham is thrilled by the whole thing, as one might expect, but is not content to rest on his laurels.  He is -- according to Forbes -- planning on taking on as his next project building a full-size replica of the Tower of Babel, to commemorate another time that the God of Love decided to smite the shit out of his creations for getting uppity.  Apparently, though, Ham has to figure out how tall to build the thing, because that's never mentioned in the bible -- just that it was "tall enough to see heaven."

Which is pretty freakin' tall.  I bet he'll need an even bigger budget this time.

I'm happy to say, though, that for those of you who prefer to deal with reality, there is an exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City that has models of what scientists currently believe dinosaurs looked like (with no nonsense about trying to keep velociraptors on a boat for forty days and forty nights without their eating everything in sight).  And the current research is that many of them had... feathers.  Which kind of changes our perception of them, doesn't it?  No more scaly terrors, à la Jurassic Park; the current conception is more like a nightmarish cross between Godzilla and a chicken.  All of which, by the way, is borne out by the evidence, which includes fossilized feather imprints around dinosaur skeletons, not to mention actual feathers preserved in amber.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So as counterintuitive as it is, the dinosaurs actually didn't go extinct.  We still have dinosaurs -- we just call 'em "birds."  Think about that next time you're feeding the chickadees.

Anyhow, if I'm going to blow some money on admission, I think I'm heading to New York rather than Lexington.  I don't have anything against fairy tales as long as they're labeled that way, and the fact that Ham et al. are trying to fool yet another generation of children into believing that Science is Evil and the Earth is 6,000 years old just grinds my gears.  Plus, I think just reading the labels on the displays would probably send my blood pressure through the roof, and heaven knows I don't need that.

Ground state

It's been a while since we've looked at bizarre alt-med health claims, so I was excited to stumble on an article in WellnessMama called "How to Get Healthy While You Sleep: How to Use Earthing & Grounding to Boost Health."

We're put on notice right away in the first paragraph when we read the following:

I’ve been self-testing an innovative new way (inspired by a very old way) of reducing stress and improving sleep lately and I now feel like I have enough personal data to pass on my results to you.

Because if there's anything that we find out from any reputable scientist, it's that the plural of "anecdote" is "data."  But this is only the beginning of the issues with this article, so we'll let that be for the moment.

The next thing she tells us is that we would all benefit from coming into direct contact with the ground regularly, i.e., walking barefoot.  I'm certainly not opposed to that; in fact, when the weather is warm, I tend to wear the legally permissible minimum amount of clothing, and in fact have been known to enjoy a nice skinnydip in my pond at times when no one is looking.  But wait till you find out why she thinks that going barefoot is good for you:

Basically, the theory is that our bodies are meant to come into contact with the Earth (a “grounding” force) on a regular basis. Positive electrons in the form of free radicals (ever heard of those guys?) can build up in our bodies and direct contact with the ground balances this out as it is a negative grounding charge. 

Our bodies and cells have electrical energy, and especially with the high prevalence of Electromagnetic waves, Wi-Fi and mobile phone waves, many of us have a high amount of positive electrons built up in our bodies.

"Positive electrons" do exist, by the way.  They're better known to physicists as "positrons."  But there's one problem with her claim, and that is that positrons are actually antimatter.  If your body built up a "high amount of positive electrons," they would come in contact with the plain-old-garden-variety negative electrons in your body, self-annihilate, and you would explode in a flash of gamma rays.

Which honestly sounds worse than being stressed and sleepless.

[image courtesy of CERN and the Wikimedia Commons]

Oh, but it's all real, she assures us:

At first I was skeptical that something so simple could work but after researching it... it seemed at least plausible that it would work.  I also ran the idea by some electrical engineer friends and a friend who has done research in the biomedical field and they confirmed that there was some science to back it up.

So let me get this straight; you told some electrical engineers and biomedical researchers about your body building up positive electrons, and how those were the same thing as free radicals, and they said that this all made sense?

Where did your friends get their degrees, Big Bob's Discount Diploma Warehouse?

Then we hear some of her evidence that this works:

Have you ever noticed that you sleep better on a beach vacation after walking in the sand or being in the ocean?  The sand and ocean water and both naturally conductive materials and both help ground the body and remove excess positive electrons.  For the same basic reason that we ground electrical outlets to avoid the build up of excess positive charge, our bodies need the same ground effect.

No, I think I sleep better while on vacation because I don't have to spend every spare minute thinking about lesson plans and grading papers.  And we don't ground electrical outlets to "avoid the buildup of excess positive charge," it's so that if there's a short in the wiring, the current will divert harmlessly rather than electrocuting you or burning your house down.

Or did you learn about that from your electrical engineer friends, too?

Then we hear all about the things that walking barefoot can cure, which include high blood pressure, insomnia, muscle aches, headaches, jet lag, bedsores, and (I'm not making this up) snoring.

Bet you didn't know that snoring was caused by excess positrons in your nasal cavity, did you?  I sure didn't.

In any case, the reality is that even if you wear rubber-soled shoes -- hell, you could wear an entire rubber suit if you wanted -- you ground yourself every time you touch a faucet (or anything metallic that's in contact with the ground) with your bare hand.  It's the principle of the carpet shock; you do sometimes build up a static charge (it could be positive or negative) on your body, but if you brush against a grounded object, the excess electrons will jump one way or the other and you're going to become neutral with respect to that grounded object.

Because that's the way electricity works.

Then she goes into how we should not only all walk barefoot, we should buy "grounding mats" to sleep on.  At that point, my eyes were crossing and I had to stop reading.

So the upshot of it all: go barefoot if you want.  It does feel nice, although we do have shoes for a reason, which you'll discover the next time you're "grounding yourself" in your front yard and you step on a thistle.  As far as the rest of her claim, it seems to be unadulterated fiction.

Just like her "free radical positive electrons."

Keep on truckin'

Remember last summer, when the "Jade Helm" training exercise in Texas got a whole bunch of conspiracy theorists stirred up about how the military (acting under Obama's orders, of course) was about to take out the governor of Texas and institute martial law, complete with guillotining of innocent civilians?

And most importantly, how none of that happened?

Well, here we go again.

A couple of days ago, a guy named Jeff Stern was on a highway near Lexington, Virginia, and noted the presence of several military vehicles labeled "UN" on the road with him.  He took pictures, and posted them to his Facebook page along with the caption, "Can't begin to tell you how many of these I passed today on 81 near Lexington VA.  Interesting times ahead!"

And with that, we're off to the races.

[image from a Facebook screen grab]

Posts began popping up all over with many and varied hypotheses about what was going on with the trucks.  One claimed that these were trucks containing troops intended as peacekeepers during the Republican and Democratic Conventions, scheduled for later this month; another that it was the first sign of martial law being declared; a third said that they were heading south to put down an upcoming armed insurrection that was going to declare Texas to be an independent country; a fourth, predictably, that President Obama is up to something, probably in cahoots with his Muslim buddies; and the fifth and most popular one, that this was the precursor to an invasion by a coalition from the United Nations that was so completely sneaky and top secret that they rode around on an interstate highway in trucks labeled "UN."  

So naturally, every conspiracy theory site in the entire world was buzzing with what this could all be about.  And if you ever want to truly despair of the future of the human race, go to a conspiracy theory site and read the comments.  Because remember the fundamental rule of the internet: the comments section is always weirder, stupider, and crazier than the article to which they're appended.  Here, that sets the bar pretty high.  Take, for example, the following comment on the site Hidden Americans:

Nothing should surprise you as the Obama administration has almost revoked our constitution with the help of congress and the supreme courts [sic] insane decisions.  We can't be surprised at anything that is going down.  We are not going to be surprised if somehow this election is cancelled and Obama declares marshall [sic] law.

I thought Marshall Law had something to do with rebuilding Western Europe after World War II.  But I could be remembering wrong.

Fortunately, while the conspiracy theorists were busy having multiple orgasms over the latest Black Ops, a few people with some degree of common sense did some digging and found out what was really happening.  And it turned out to be... boring.  The actual story was broken in The Blaze, because the only thing that would make this whole thing more ridiculous is having a news site run by Glenn Beck be the voice of reason and common sense:

The U.N., an international organization that does not have authorities in the United States, was simply having their trucks manufactured in Virginia at Alpine Armoring, Inc, an international supplier and manufacturer of armored vehicles. 

A representative from Alpine confirmed to The Blaze that the vehicles were, in fact, purchased by the U.N. and were being delivered to a nearby port for use outside the United States. 

When the photos first made headlines, one person who commented on a post by Facebook user Jeff Stern, who shared the images, said, “These are manufactured in Danville. Thats why you saw them in VA. They were being delivered.”

Which, of course, had exactly zero effect on the conspiracy theorists, who immediately began to leap all over the story in The Blaze, claiming that it was TOO martial law, dammit.  Here are just a few of the comments I read before my prefrontal cortex cried "uncle:"

• ANY UN vehicle in the US is illegal AND a legitimate TARGET.  NO UN “resolution” SUPER-CEDES the US Constitution….
• Lock and Load, this is why the 2nd amendment exist
• the ones for our neighborhoods are unmarked.
• Sure, they were just manufactured in the U.S. and are being sent overseas.  Yeah, that’s the ticket and if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor and Benghazi was caused by some stupid video that a Jew produced.  When the anti-Christ takes over America, it will be like taking candy from a baby.

And then, there's my favorite one:

• Like they would tell you they are prepositioning equipment to seize control. lol They don’t even need to preposition just put in a large order and then drop the troops in them and take over.

I wonder how you "preposition equipment?"  "Of the tank, by the tank, for the tank...?"

So yeah.  I have to keep telling myself that the people who post these things are the loud, insane minority.  Because if I start focusing too hard on the fact that these people vote, I end up curled up in a fetal position under my desk for the rest of the day.

In any case, there you have it; this summer's answer to "Jade Helm."  Which will result in nothing, just as Jade Helm did -- no martial law, no executions, no overthrowing of state governments, no troops storming in and taking over small-town America.  In fact, the only thing Jade Helm seemed to accomplish was giving Alex Jones something to rant about for six months, which is probably what will happen again here.  But because the conspiracy theorists never seem to remember that they have a batting average that is so close to zero as to make no difference, the next time some odd-looking vehicle is spotted in Minnesota or somewhere, we'll start all over again from the beginning.

Because conspiracy theories are the gifts that keep on giving.

State-supported abuse

In the past few years, the religious right has cultivated an attitude of persecution amongst its followers.  It's worked; we hear over and over about the War on Christmas, how anti-discrimination laws are restricting the rights of the religious, even how the Evil Federal Government and Their Activist Judges are plotting to round up Christians and put them in jail for their beliefs.

And instead of being laughed into well-deserved obscurity, these ranting loons have actually convinced large numbers of apparently sensible people that Christians are a persecuted minority in the United States, despite the fact that 83% of Americans self-identify as Christian.  Also despite the fact that churches and church property are tax-exempt.

And also despite the fact that in many states, Christian private schools receive little to no oversight from state education departments.

I didn't realize the extent to which this can go awry until I read the exposé published last week in the online news source Alabama.  Written by Anna Claire Vollers, this article is entitled "Former Students Share Harrowing Stories of Life Inside Alabama's Worst Religious Private School," and was as gruesome and hard to read as the title would lead you to believe -- but I strongly urge all of you to read it, because it's brilliantly written and there is more to the story than the few details I have room for in this post.

Under the guise of providing religious guidance and education to troubled teens, the Restoration Youth Academy of Prichard (outside of Mobile, Alabama) was allowed for years to engage in practices that as an educator I can only describe as "destroying children."  Teenagers were shackled, beaten, put in solitary confinement for speaking up for themselves or others, deprived of food and clothing.  One 14-year-old was confined naked in an "isolation room;" a girl made to stand in front of the others while the leaders called her derogatory names.   The only curriculum provided was ACE (Accelerated Christian Education) which is an ultra-fundamentalist school curriculum that teaches young-earth creationism and that anything other than traditional gender roles is sinful.

Lucas Greenfield, who when 14 was locked into an eight-foot-by-eight-foot room with blank walls and a single bare light bulb, said, "When you're inside a tiny room where all you can see is four walls, you start – I won't say hallucinating, but you start going crazy.  All you think about is, what's the best way to kill myself?  Is there any way out of this?  This is ridiculous.  I hope I die...  This kind of program should not be allowed to exist.  All because you put a cross on top of a building and call it a Christian program, we're supposed to overlook all that happens in those places?"

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

There are stories of mandatory boxing matches, often deliberately pitting younger and weaker children against stronger and more aggressive ones.

"They'd have the bigger kid beat the shit out of the other kid," said Greenfield.  "They'd make us form a big circle. You can't get out and you can't get back in.  They would always have somebody, normally me, pray before we'd have the boxing match. Will [head instructor William Knott] told me to pray nobody got killed.  I was like, really?  You're the one making them fight."

Greenfield is one of the lucky ones.  He was freed in 2015, and has completed his high school diploma, and has plans for his future.  Others still suffer from PTSD and anger issues.  Many have dropped out of the public schools to which they were transferred after being released.  Several have retreated into drug abuse.

And all of this went on for years, with the state turning a blind eye.  Vollers writes:

Alabama law (Code of Alabama 16-1-11.1) says state regulation of any religiously affiliated school would be an unconstitutional burden on religious activities and directly violate the Alabama Religious Freedom Amendment.  State law also says the state has no compelling interest to burden nonpublic schools with licensing or regulation. 

While Alabama does have a few basic reporting requirements for private schools, it exempts those that are church schools in every instance.  Teachers do not have to undergo background checks and schools do not have to be inspected.  While many church-affiliated schools do choose to pursue licensing or accreditation by outside agencies, it's not a mandate in Alabama.

The good news -- if we can call anything connected to this nightmare "good news" -- is that Restoration Youth Academy has been closed, and its owner, Pastor John David Young, head instructor William Knott, and guidance counselor Aleshia Moffett, were arrested and charged with multiple counts of aggravated child abuse.  They are scheduled to stand trial this fall, and astonishingly, deny all wrongdoing.

What sickens me most about all of this is that these three monsters spent years overseeing the ruin of children's lives, and because they are a "religious institution" the state made no effort to check on what they were doing.  There are children who were imprisoned in RYA (yes, I use the word "imprison" deliberately, although people in prison are treated more humanely than this) who will never recover.

It's time that state and federal officials recognize that religious institutions, like any human-created and human-run endeavor, can be wonderful and life-enriching or sadistic and destructive.  There is no justification (and never has been) for the government giving carte blanche to places like RYA simply because they're afraid of being accused of a campaign of persecution by the religious.  

Giving proper oversight to churches and church schools and treating them as equivalent to any other organization aren't encroaching on "religious freedom;" it's doing what government should do, which is to protect the rights and safety of the citizens from the unethical, unscrupulous, and as is the case here -- the downright evil.

A win against hypocrisy

A couple of days ago, it was "Heterosexual Pride Day," which gave me an opportunity to reflect on the long, hard road I've had coming out and being accepted as a straight white cis-gender male.  A day to stand up tall and not be afraid to be who I am.

Or as the rest of the world calls it, every other damn day of the year.

I suppose the only cheering thing about this dazzling display of "I Don't Get It" is that it's indicative that we've made some strides in accepting that sexual orientation and gender identification aren't as either/or as the bigots of the world would like us to believe.  We're finally approaching a place where LGBT individuals have both recognition and a voice, which means that inevitably there's going to be some backlash.

The fact that we're moving forward, if too slowly for a lot of us, is supported by news out of (of all places) Mississippi, where a federal judge has blocked House Bill 1523, euphemistically called by its supporters the "Religious Freedom Law."  Because in some people's minds "religious freedom" apparently means "freedom to discriminate."  These are the same people who worship a figure who is described in the bible as socializing with (and caring about) prostitutes and tax collectors, and yet somehow they still think it's a sin to bake a cake for a gay couple.

Fortunately, U.S. District Court Judge Carlton Reeves saw through this hypocrisy, and wrote sixty pages' worth of opinion tearing the claim to little shreds.

Judge Carlton W. Reeves [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Here is a bit of the actual opinion:

The Establishment Clause is violated because persons who hold contrary religious beliefs are unprotected – the State has put its thumb on the scale to favor some religious beliefs over others.  Showing such favor tells “nonadherents that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and . . . adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community.” Santa Fe Indep. Sch. Dist. v. Doe, 530 U.S. 290, 309-10 (2000)...  And the Equal Protection Clause is violated by HB 1523’s authorization of arbitrary discrimination against lesbian, gay, transgender, and unmarried persons... 

As the Obergefell majority makes clear, the First Amendment must protect the rights of [religious] individuals, even when they are agents of government, to voice their personal objections – this, too, is an essential part of the conversation – but the doctrine of equal dignity prohibits them from acting on those objections, particularly in their official capacities, in a way that demeans or subordinates LGBT individuals... 

In this case, moreover, it is difficult to see the compelling government interest in favoring three enumerated religious beliefs over others.  “[T]he goal of basic ‘fairness’ is hardly furthered by the Act’s discriminatory preference” for one set of beliefs. Edwards, 482 U.S. at 588.  It is not within our tradition to respect one clerk’s religious objection to issuing a same-sex marriage license, but refuse another clerk’s religious objection to issuing a marriage license to a formerly-divorced person.  The government is not in a position to referee the validity of Leviticus 18:22 (“Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.”) versus Leviticus 21:14 (“A widow, or a divorced woman, or profane, or an harlot, these shall he not take.”)...

Religious freedom was one of the building blocks of this great nation, and after the nation was torn apart, the guarantee of equal protection under law was used to stitch it back together.  But HB 1523 does not honor that tradition of religion freedom, nor does it respect the equal dignity of all of Mississippi’s citizens.  It must be enjoined.

To which I would only have added, "Booyah!"  (Illustrating why I did not choose law as a career.)  I think it was that second-to-last paragraph that I enjoyed the most; pointing out that the folks who would like to exercise their bigotry against LGBT people usually don't blink an eye about other things that are prohibited in the bible -- like divorced people remarrying, like eating shellfish, like women stating their opinions on religious matters.  (The latter was considered so important that it appears in two places, 1 Timothy 2:12 and 1 Corinthians 14:34 -- the actual quotes are, "I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence" and "Women should remain silent in the churches.  They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.")

The upshot of it all is that we're making progress toward treating all people with dignity -- however slow the motion forward is, we are moving forward.  And to Judge Carlton Reeves, I can only say thank you on behalf of my LGBT friends.  It's about time someone in an official capacity stands up and calls out these "religious freedom laws" for the bigoted hypocrisy they are.

Vandals for god

When I wrote last year about ISIS's systematic destruction of the archeological treasure-trove in Palmyra, Syria, one of my readers stated, "And there you have one more difference between the Muslims and the Christians; you don't see Christians participating in this kind of wanton destruction."

After a brief exchange in which I at least got her to add the words "... any more" in the interest of historical accuracy, I let the matter drop.  Whether the aggressive proselytizing by Christian missionaries in the 20th century, especially in Africa, could be looked upon as accomplishing the same thing was a direction I didn't have the inclination to take the conversation.  In any case, arguments about religion rarely ever accomplish anything but hard feelings on both sides.

And to be fair, the scale on which ISIS and the Taliban have destroyed the cultural heritage of Syria and Afghanistan is far beyond anything similar we've seen recently.  But that doesn't mean the same sort of impulses don't drive some of the Christian fringe.  They just have less opportunity to exercise their crazy ideas.

Enter the Christians who are working in Mexico to destroy the iconic Mexican pyramids because they're "used for devil worship."

Authorities in the village of San Bartolo Tutotepec are investigating damage to the 7,000 year old pyramid of the same name, after Jehovah's Witnesses took credit last month for similar damage to the Makonikha sanctuary in Hidalgo.

"We are following the word of God," a spokesperson for the church told Mexican news source Telesur after the first incident.  "We believe that the sites are still used for traditional rituals that are not Christian and may involve devil worship."

The pyramid of San Bartolo Tutotepec [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

In fact, San Bartolo is used for religious observances by the Otomi people to worship and give sacrifices to their deities of earth and water.  But apparently there are those who follow the general scheme of "if it's different than what I believe, it's devilry," and think this equates to "worshiping Satan."

Mexican authorities have stated that it may not be the same people who participated in the earlier incident, and are also investigating some local villagers who have voiced the same opinions.  But whoever turns out to be responsible, it comes from the same motives; the idea that it's somehow virtuous to be vandals for god.

I think what galls me most about this is that these people, and others like them, think that the beliefs of others don't matter.  They are not content to follow the tenets of their religion insofar as it guides their own ethics and morals; they take the further step of claiming that god is directing them to control how everyone else lives.

Plus, of course, there's the tragedy of irreparable damage to a beautiful structure that has withstood 7,000 years of human use and natural wear and tear.  The idea that these people would think they had the right to walk and and vandalize it makes me feel a little sick.

I'm also amazed at how far some people will go to give the vandals a bye simply because they're Christians.  I was discussing this with a friend a couple of days ago, and he said, "You can see why they think it's devil worship.  You do know that those temples were once used for human sacrifice, don't you?"

Yes, well, they aren't now, are they?  If we were to tear down every structure that had ever been devoted to torture, execution, and man's general inhumanity to man, we wouldn't have much left.  Starting with the Tower of London and working our way outwards from there.

So I can't find any mitigating circumstances here.  I hope that the vandals get caught before they can do any further damage, and that "wait, it's my religion" isn't pulled out as some kind of Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card.