Quotable Onion (and because everyone else is doing it)

I usually don’t enjoy satire as I am often not in on the joke, but for this recent article about perplexed Sumerians and God’s creation, I’m glad I can laugh with everyone else:

“The Sumerian people must have found God’s making of heaven and earth in the middle of their well-established society to be more of an annoyance than anything else,” said Paul Helund, ancient history professor at Cornell University. “If what the pictographs indicate are true, His loud voice interrupted their ancient prayer rituals for an entire week.”

According to the cuneiform tablets, Sumerians found God’s most puzzling act to be the creation from dust of the first two human beings.

“These two people made in his image do not know how to communicate, lack skills in both mathematics and farming, and have the intellectual capacity of an infant,” one Sumerian philosopher wrote. “They must be the creation of a complete idiot.”

So Christians aren’t totally against carbon dating?

Read this:

Using radiocarbon methods, the investigators discovered that this man dated back to 1-50 C.E., and did not receive a secondary burial, which was particularly rare for this type of tomb.

And, while they found this man buried in a shroud (who in life had suffered from both leprosy and tuberculosis, according to his DNA), it was simply weaved, nowhere near as elaborately as the Shroud of Turin people like to claim had once touched Christ. Did that one ever get carbon dated and age verified? Apparently so, but I suppose this is a point where Christians claim the dating process is a sham, even though it so obviously isn’t. Why deny the validity of that research just to hold onto some silly miracle story?

Anything scientific that sheds light on actual, verifiable history is worth noting. Any false ideas that don’t hold up against scientific fact should be set aside.

Fascination isn’t what makes Christians keep their faith…

From Esquire of all places:

The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination. But over the past few decades our Christianity, at least here in the United States, has become less and less fascinating. We have given the atheists less and less to disbelieve. And the sort of Christianity many of us have seen on TV and heard on the radio looks less and less like Jesus.

A recent study showed that the top three perceptions of Christians in the U. S. among young non-Christians are that Christians are 1) antigay, 2) judgmental, and 3) hypocritical. So what we have here is a bit of an image crisis, and much of that reputation is well deserved. That’s the ugly stuff. And that’s why I begin by saying that I’m sorry.

Now for the good news.

I want to invite you to consider that maybe the televangelists and street preachers are wrong — and that God really is love

Define love, if you please. “God so loved the world” enough to routinely decimate entire populations in a fit of pique. He razed cities, supposedly flooded the earth and continues to burn California periodically because people all over the world are having gay sex and people who are say they know say God hates that. They also say they know that God also hates abortion, but there isn’t a verse in the bible that can illustrate why.

I found a great book at a discount store today, The Oxford Companion to the Bible (1993 edition). In it, under the topic of abortion (page 4), it states that any preoccupation in ancient times with birth likely had to do with low fertility rates and infant mortality rates approaching 50%. A cultural predilection toward large families back then also might have something to do with it. Obviously his genes must be divine and inspired by god if so few of his kids died…

Alternatively, it can be argued that abortion was practiced without censure. Many women died in childbirth, a strong incentive to avoid carrying a pregnancy to term. Biblical legislation, as in Leviticus 27, 3-7, indicates that the lives of children as well as women were not valued as highly as those of adult men, while no value whatsoever was given to a child under the age of one month. There is no indication that a fetus had any status.

It also brings in Exodus 21:22-25.

The Hebrew text at v. 22 literally reads “and there is no harm,” implying that contrary to current sensibilities, the miscarriage itself was not considered serious injury. The monetary judgment given to the woman’s husband indicates that the woman’s experience of miscarriage is not of significance, and that the damage is considered to be one to property rather than to human life. This latter observation is further supported by the contrast with the penalties for harm to the woman herself.

The last paragraph deals with Christians who’ll also point to Genesis 1:28 – “Be fruitful and multiply” and Luke 1: 41-44 as further evidence “that a child is cognizant in the uterus.”

Back to Shane Claiborne and Esquire:

I did not choose to devote my life to Jesus because I was scared to death of hell or because I wanted crowns in heaven… but because he is good.

Define good.

For those of you who are on a sincere spiritual journey, I hope that you do not reject Christ because of Christians. We have always been a messed-up bunch, and somehow God has survived the embarrassing things we do in His name.

According to Malachi 2 (among others), God totally hates hypocrites. God survives, but can still decide to send hypocrites to hell. And, this is interesting:

Malachi 3 reminds us that God said “I am the Lord, I do not change.” The things God hates and loves are the same today as they have always been.

What he hates turns out to be hypocrisy, unfairness, divorce, and double talk. What he loves is truth, justice, reverence and obedience. “Obedience is KEEPING IN STEP WITH JESUS.” They thought caps were necessary, therefore I keep them.

Esquire again (sorry if it’s confusing)

I am convinced that the Christian Gospel has as much to do with this life as the next, and that the message of that Gospel is not just about going up when we die but about bringing God’s Kingdom down. It was Jesus who taught us to pray that God’s will be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” On earth.

Exactly what is God’s will in this case? I think I’ll look that up for another post. Stay tuned.

Entertainment break

Yesterday’s post was grimmer than I like doing so I’m not going to mock Rapture 2009 today like I’d intended. You can giggle at their salvation prayer page on your own time. I’ll just point out that Hebrew is read reverse of English and vowel sounds exist as dots that alter the look of a symbol that people may have started adding in later. To see a dot or three in a symbol means the symbol gets pronounced a different way. In Hewbrew spelling of YHWH, there are no vowel dots which is likely why the Greek/English spelling has none. Speaking G-d’s name (in vain or otherwise) was a no no anyway, driven by a fear they’d say it wrong and would therefore commit an unforgivable, grievous sin.

How can people who probably can’t read Hebrew and probably haven’t bothered finding out some history of the original books trust a computer construct that churns out twenty god related yet random words onto a page of Hebrew symbols and think they’ve gotten a message about the end times?

I remember being amused when those Bible code books came out. The Skeptic’s Dictionary has a nice article about this. I’ll just quote this bit about the author of one such tome from 1997, Michael Drosnin, and a critic named Brendan McKay.

Drosnin once said, “When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby-Dick, I’ll believe them.” McKay promptly produced an ELS analysis of Moby-Dick predicting not only Indira Ghandi’s assassination, but the assassinations of Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, and Yitzhak Rabin, as well as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Mathematician David Thomas did an ELS on Genesis and found the words “code” and “bogus” close together not once but 60 times. What are the odds of that happening? Thomas also did an ELS analysis on Drosnin’s Bible Code II: The Countdown (2002) and found the message “The Bible Code is a silly, dumb, fake, false, evil, nasty, dismal fraud and snake-oil hoax.”* Does this mean that God put in a code to reveal that there is no code?

Moral of the story, people like to find what they’re looking for. This isn’t real science. It’s hokum dressed up as a science. I’d bet a cookie that Drosnin’s method would find all kinds of word patterns that could be manipulated. They wouldn’t all be about death and politics. But whatever doesn’t support his supposed “hypothesis” gets ignored. Any book large enough to give you enough lines to work with could net similar results as Moby Dick. Stephen King’s books would have bundles. Does it really mean God put the pattern there, or do our eyes just look for patterns because human beings like patterns?

Hoaxes, jokes, and journalism.

There’s been a spate of stories demonstrating some rather craptacular journalism lately. So keen are they to be first on the story, they’ll bypass all the footwork/phonework that used to be required to verify a report prior to publishing.

It’s not just pranks and stupidity getting to the top of the headlines. Scientific discovery is always one of those topics where journalists leap on early findings and never seem to get around to checking back about their later accuracy. This goes for health breakthroughs, new pills, the next food that will kill you, and on and on.

For the purpose of this post, though, it’s an paleontology correction and not the fault of journalists screaming “Eureka!” and launching themselves out of the tub without considering the need for caution on a wet floor.

Remains were found some months back that suggested the skeleton, nicknamed Ida, could be a distant relation to humans and possibly lemurs. Richard Dawkins makes a point in his book, The Greatest Show on Earth, that every species can be linked to another if one were to trace genetic heritage back far enough, so the hypothesis isn’t too flawed. So what happened? Well, I guess they were mistaken. The New York Times recently published an article about research correcting their initial hypothesis.

Remember Ida, the fossil discovery announced last May with its own book and television documentary? A publicity blitz called it “the link” that would reveal the earliest evolutionary roots of monkeys, apes and humans.

Experts protested that Ida was not even a close relative. And now a new analysis supports their reaction.

In fact, Ida is as far removed from the monkey-ape-human ancestry as a primate could be, says Erik Seiffert of Stony Brook University in New York.

Dr. Seiffert and his colleagues compared 360 specific anatomical features of 117 living and extinct primate species to draw up a family tree. They report the results in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

Ida is a skeleton of a 47-million-year-old cat-size creature found in Germany. It starred in a book, “The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor.”

Welcome to the wonderful self-correcting world of science. Too late for the documentaries and publishers, but it’s not the first time the buzz got ahead of the bee. This is science at its most basic, trustworthy best. Finding a better answer to the riddle this thing poses is still a success and should be advertised as one. But how does one who is against evolution treat the new findings?

When anthropologists find fossils that “prove” evolution, it is always front page news. Then, when the findings are later overturned, the news is less publicized.

The fossil doesn’t “prove” evolution. It just allows researchers to study its resemblance to things living today, and other fossil remains found already. That their initial assumptions proved to be wrong about Ida’s relation to us doesn’t mean the whole of evolution is “overturned” or anything. Evolution still happens no matter what animal can claim Ida as an ancestor.

If I get tired of seeing that argument, I wonder how scientists feel.

I agree with the rest of the comment in terms of how corrections get reported; it’s unfortunate that people might not see a correction article. It probably happens in far more stories far more often than it should. Regret the Error can’t possibly collect them all, but they’re trying.

“Finding this skeleton was more than luck”

National Geographic has a terrific article out about a recently announced discovery. The bones of a human ancestor from way back. Way way way back…

The first, fragmentary specimens of Ardipithecus were found at Aramis in 1992 and published in 1994. The skeleton announced today was discovered that same year and excavated with the bones of the other individuals over the next three field seasons. But it took 15 years before the research team could fully analyze and publish the skeleton, because the fossils were in such bad shape.

After Ardi died, her remains apparently were trampled down into mud by hippos and other passing herbivores. Millions of years later, erosion brought the badly crushed and distorted bones back to the surface.

They were so fragile they would turn to dust at a touch. To save the precious fragments, White and colleagues removed the fossils along with their surrounding rock. Then, in a lab in Addis, the researchers carefully tweaked out the bones from the rocky matrix using a needle under a microscope, proceeding “millimeter by submillimeter,” as the team puts it in Science. This process alone took several years.

Pieces of the crushed skull were then CT-scanned and digitally fit back together by Gen Suwa, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tokyo.

In the end, the research team recovered more than 125 pieces of the skeleton, including much of the feet and virtually all of the hands—an extreme rarity among hominid fossils of any age, let alone one so very ancient.

“Finding this skeleton was more than luck,” said White. “It was against all odds.”

Oh, what a labour intensive job they have, and yet so rewarding. Congrats to everyone who worked this out. Truly.

—
Edit 5:17pm Pharyngula has pictures!

Introducing the new and improved bible

Actually, it’s an extremely old but newly digitized bible, and it’s got people excited.

The early work known as the Codex Sinaiticus has been housed in four separate locations across the world for more than 150 years. But starting Monday, it became available for perusal on the Web at http://www.codexsinaiticus.org so scholars and other readers can get a closer look at what the British Library calls a “unique treasure.”

“(The book) offers a window into the development of early Christianity and firsthand evidence of how the text of the Bible was transmitted from generation to generation,” said Scot McKendrick, head of Western manuscripts at the British Library.

As it survives today, Codex Sinaiticus comprises just over 400 large leaves of prepared animal skin, each of which measures 15 inches by 13.5 inches (380 millimeters by 345 millimeters). It is the oldest book that contains a complete New Testament and is only missing parts of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha.

The 4th-century book, written in Greek, has been digitally reunited in a project involving groups from Britain, Germany, Russia and Egypt, which each possessed parts of the 1,600-year-old manuscript.

Now I wish I was in Britain. They have an exhibit at the British Library detailing the process from ancient print to digital image, running until September 7th. Whether a person believes the book is the scribbled out words of god or not, it’s still pretty amazing to realize what’s been accomplished here. It must have been a tremendous amount of work and careful, delicate work at that. Oh, to see that exhibit…

Grasping at apocalypse straws?

Apparently it’s been predicted now that Jesus is really truly coming back to Earth, but not until 2023.

Robert Singer’s gone through a lot of trouble (and maybe done some wacky math) to come up with that figure based on the book of Daniel, some junk Jesus supposedly said, and the crackpot visions of John, who gets author credit for the super psycho trip that is Revelations.

But, it turns out he got his idea for this article from a book called The Cassandra Prophecy by Ian Gurney. And yes, of course there’s a website. All it does is tease and tantalize the viewer about the secrets revealed in the book, unfortunately. They did steal all the good reviews off the Amazon website, though, like this one from Martin R.

Having not read anything like this before, I was hooked and had to keep reading ’til I got to the end in one session. If Gurney is right this book will become the biggest seller ever.

Well, Singer states in his article that the book is out of print, so somebody’s wrong. Big sellers tend to be the ones that offer the reader hope and monetary success, not flaming pits of hell and damnation, am I right?

But, who knows, maybe old Gurney really is a Cassandra figure here. Maybe tidal waves will wreck New York and California will quake apart and drop to the ocean floor and the Catholic Church will crumble under the weight of utter wrongability and all those demonesque ramblings will ramble down what’s left of Broadway, wishing they’d timed their arrival for when Cats was still playing.

Let’s just see if we survive 2012 first…

(This is slightly related – did you know that prophecy and prophesy mean two different things? I didn’t. Thought they were spelling variations, but prophesy is a verb, not a noun. To prophesy. To prophesy a prophecy. I wonder how many times I’ve screwed that up over my lifetime…)

Ice age tools considered “a wonderful connection”

It’s stories like these that make me wonder how in the world anyone can buy into the 6000 year old Earth fantasy.

Named the Mahaffy Cache, after Boulder resident and landowner Patrick Mahaffy, the collection is one of only two Clovis caches — the other is from Washington state — that have been analyzed for protein residue from ice-age mammals, said Bamforth.

In addition to the camel and horse residue on the artifacts, a third item from the Mahaffy Cache is the first Clovis tool ever to test positive for sheep, and a fourth tested positive for bear.

The Mahaffy Cache consists of 83 stone implements ranging from salad plate-sized, elegantly crafted bifacial knives and a unique tool resembling a double-bitted ax to small blades and flint scraps.

Discovered in May 2008 by Brant Turney, head of a landscaping crew working on the Mahaffy property, the cache was unearthed with a shovel under about 18 inches of soil and was packed tightly into a hole about the size of a large shoebox. It appeared to have been untouched for thousands of years, Bamforth said.

“The idea that these Clovis-age tools essentially fell out of someone’s yard in Boulder is astonishing,” he said. “But the evidence I’ve seen gives me no reason to believe the cache has been disturbed since the items were placed there for storage about 13,000 years ago.”

It’s amazing they found the cache at all, frankly, let alone so many pieces so well preserved. I’m really surprised they were able to track down what kind of animals the tools were used on. Science has really come a long way, hasn’t it?

Merciful Zeus! Thank the archeologists!

Sometimes I wish I’d gone into that field, really and truly. Hard to make a decent living off it, probably, but once in a while you get your name in the papers for something pretty damned cool and there you have it.

It’s not hard to see why Zeus was such a popular god with the ancient Greeks. He not only wielded a thunderbolt, but he also got into all sorts of trouble, including liaisons with humans and goddesses – much to the annoyance of his wife, Hera.

Greek gods were figures people could relate to, said archaeologist David Romano of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. And worshiping Zeus apparently involved some serious partying.

Working at the remote Mount Lykaion in Greece, Romano has found “evidence of a drinking party and possibly feasting” around a famous altar built on the 4,500-foot peak. These relics go back 3,200 years, about the time the earliest stone tablets started to refer to Zeus as the godfather of the gods.

“What’s new is this mountaintop altar had cult activity that’s continuous from the Mycenaean to the Hellenistic periods,” Romano said, meaning between the 14th and second centuries B.C. At various depths, he and colleagues have unearthed silver coins and other Zeus icons, including a tiny bronze hand with a silver lightning bolt.

Romano will speak on his latest finds tomorrow at 6 p.m. at the Penn Museum.

Mount Lykaion is mentioned in myth as the birthplace of Zeus, Romano said, and it appears no one lived on the desolate peak, though the view is spectacular. For hundreds of years, people apparently hiked there for religious ceremonies and feasts.

Last year, Romano announced that the site contained primitive pottery shards that go back to the end of the Neolithic or New Stone Age period, more than 5,000 years ago, before the first Greek-speaking people arrived. He suspects this material stems from some sort of religious or cult activity. But no one knows if the deity before Zeus was a party animal, too.

It’s a real pity those party gods fell out of favour. Everything got so darn serious and sinful and all the fun of life was sucked out by silly pointless traditions put in place by folks in funny hats and bathrobes. Sad. Very sad.