At my old blog, I ran a feature called “Religious People Are the Best People.” The more recent of the previous 49 installments can be found here (link fixed).

The subject of today’s 50th installment is especially horrific:

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The mother of a young girl known as “Precious Doe” pleaded guilty Thursday to second-degree murder in the death of her 3-year-old daughter, whose decapitated remains were found in a park and left unidentified for four years.

Michelle Johnson, 32, of Muskogee, Okla., also pleaded guilty to child endangerment, abandoning a corpse and tampering with evidence. She admitted that she knew her daughter, Erica, was badly injured but did nothing to help her as she lay dying after allegedly being abused by her stepfather.

I didn’t see anything conclusive about how religious Ms. Johnson is, but the clues suggest that that element is at play here, as it seems to be in all of these stories.

Here’s what I could glean from press accounts:

“Roughly on April 28th, the stepfather in this case kicked the poor young girl Erica in the head,” Sanders said. “After kicking her in the head, she essentially laid in the house for a roughly two-day period. It was after she quit moving, after I think it was fairly certain … that she was no longer with us, that they decided to take her to the church …”

And:

Reacting to Michelle Johnson’s emotional plea Thursday, community activist Alonzo Washington, said, “Knowing that Michelle Johnson was at the prayer vigils, knowing that she still married a man after he murdered this child is just a deep thing.”

And:

Some of the hair came from the mother’s brush, and she gave some of it to the tipster after he told her he would put it in a Bible under the 23rd Psalm to bring her good luck, said Alonzo Washington, a Kansas City community activist who has long championed efforts to identify the girl.

Well, at least using the Bible in a bald-faced act of lying (imagine that!) had its benefits.

A representative of both church and state has ruled that God wasn’t looking out for this poor child:

“Erica tragically experienced death in the early morning of life. But this was not God’s will … but the will of wrong,” said U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, whose district includes the neighborhood. Also a minister, he officiated at the burial.

Why would that be? Did Baby Jesus have something better to do than save a little girl from murder and decapitation? Was he busy ginning up another flood or terrorist attack to punish the abortionists and sodomites?

Meanwhile, the world’s hottest tabloid story begins thusly:

After Kate and Gerry McCann prayed for a miracle at Fatima, the holiest Roman Catholic shrine in Portugal, on May 23, they embarked on an international tour to publicize the disappearance of their daughter Madeleine. The three year old (by now she’d be four) vanished from the family’s holiday apartment in southern Portugal on May 3, while the McCanns dined with friends in a tapas restaurant just 100 yards away. The Roman Catholic community in Fatima wrote a special prayer for the occasion of Kate and Gerry’s visit: “Dear God, please change the hearts of the people who have Madeleine to give her back.” Surrounded by crowds of Portuguese who wept when the couple lit a candle, and who sent their own children to kiss Kate’s cheek, the two British doctors, both devout Roman Catholics, were treated like honorary Portuguese. Back in Praia da Luz, the tiny vacation resort where Maddie had disappeared on May 3, the family was given their own key to the village church, allowing them to seek sanctuary at any time. Locals plastered shop windows with “Find Maddie” posters.

All these months later, the prayers at Fatima have been far from answered, as Madeleine’s parents have become the target of ever-growing suspicion and even hostility in Portugal. To the incredulity of many following the search for Madeleine from afar, last week the police named the McCanns as suspects in the disappearance of their own daughter.

Circumstantial evidence, sure, but at some point the Jesus fish on the trunk starts to resemble the trout in the milk.

I already liked Kathy Griffin and her My Life on the D-list.  And now, more reason to: Fox is censoring her Emmy acceptance speech for “hate speech”.  And what horrible thing did say?  

“…a lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus… Suck it, Jesus.  This award is my god now!”

(via Pharyngula: Kathy Griffin is my new hero; more info at Griffin’s Emmy Remarks to Be Censored.)

Big Brother IS Watching You, Starting October 1st

Beginning in October 2007 the Department of Homeland Security will open a new office called the National Applications Office (NAO) charged with civil/domestic intelligence gathering. This new division of Homeland Security was conceived entirely by the Executive Branch, with no Congressional input, and will serve as a clearinghouse for requests to access the data provided by military spy satellites, with a resolution of inches, to view the territorial United States. During the hearing Charles Allen, Assistant Secretary for Intelligence & Analysis told Chairman Bennie Thompson that their legal and civil rights oversite concerns were misplaced. [...] The plan is for the NAO to serve as a clearing house for law enforcement requests to access the spy satellite data upon NAO’s approval. That approval will be granted through inhouse review, with no Judicial oversite, and no explaination forth coming to the Committee as to what, exactly, the guidelines for approval would be. The legal staff of both Homeland Security and the NAO declined to attend the hearings, claiming, according to Chairman Thompson that they did not wish to appear on a panel that included the ACLU.

Happy October, everyone.

And always remember: you won’t care about any of this unless you have something to hide.

I discovered this link via a blogversation with a Muslim on the NGB – and a lot of the nonsense contained therein was/is pretty funny.

One of the more amusing (as well as sadder) points, is that most Muslims are unaware that the Old Testament has been pretty thoroughly debunked in re: historicity.

The Exodus, that seminal event of Judaism, never occurred. Simple as that. That Islam has been built on the backbone of Judaism makes Islam even simpler to refute.

But of course, like their Christian counterparts, they seize upon some obscure parchment (presupposition firmly entrenched) as proof of the non-event.

I speak of the Ipuwer papyrus.

The first link provided says this:

“The details in the papyrus regarding the disasters that struck the people of Egypt are just as described in the Qur’an. In the Qur’an, we are told about these catastrophes. This Islamic account of this period of human history has been confirmed by the discovery in Egypt, in the early 19th century, of the Ipuwer papyruses dating back to the Middle Kingdom. After the discovery of this papyrus, it was sent to the Leiden Dutch Museum in 1909 and translated by A. H. Gardiner, a prominent scholar of ancient Egypt. In the papyrus were described such disasters in Egypt as famine, drought and the fleeing of the slaves from Egypt. Moreover, it appears that the writer of the papyrus, one Ipuwer, had actually witnessed these events.”

But the second link (the answers.com entry) stipulates this instead:

“The sole surviving manuscript dates to the later 13th century BCE ( No earlier than the 19th dynasty in the New Kingdom). Egyptologist Dr Halpern believed that the papyrus was a copy of earlier copy in the Middle kingdom. The dating of the original composition of the poem is disputed, but several scholars, have suggested a date between the late 12th dynasty and the Second Intermediate Period (ca. 1850 BCE – 1600 BCE).^[3] The theme of this work has previously been taken either as a lament inspired by the supposed chaos of the Second Intermediate Period, or as historical fiction depicting the fall of the Old Kingdom several centuries earlier, or possibly a combination of these.

Ipuwer describes Egypt as afflicted by natural disasters and in a state of chaos, a topsy-turvy world where the poor have become rich, and the rich poor, and warfare, famine and death are everywhere. One symptom of this collapse of order is the lament that servants are leaving their servitude and acting rebelliously. Because of this, and such statements as “the River is blood”, some have interpreted the document as an Egyptian account of the Plagues of Egypt and the Exodus in the Old Testament of the Bible, and it is often cited as proof for the Biblical account by various religious organisations.”

And this website provides a (nearly) full translation. It also says this:

It is impossible to give a date for the composition of this document. The surviving papyrus (Papyrus Leiden 334) itself is a copy made during the New Kingdom. Ipuwer is generally supposed to have lived during the Middle Kingdom or the Second Intermediate Period, and the catastrophes he bewails to have taken place four centuries earlier during the First Intermediate Period.
    On the other hand, Miriam Lichtheim, following S. Luria, contends that

the ‘Admonitions of Ipuwer’ has not only no bearing whatever on the long past First Intermediate Period, it also does not derive from any other historical situation. It is the last, fullest, most exaggerated and hence least successful, composition on the theme “order versus chaos.”

M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Volume I, p.150

    Fringe historians often compare the content of this papyrus with Exodus, the second book of the Bible [1]. Similarities between Egyptian texts and the Bible are easily found, and it is reasonable to assume Egyptian influence on the Hebrews, given their at times close contacts. But to conclude from such parallelisms that the Ipuwer Papyrus describes Egypt at the time of the Exodus, requires a leap of faith not everybody is willing to make.

 Five minutes on the Internet, and it flies about the room like an inflated, untied balloon, and comes to rest wrinkled on the floor.

So there you have it. An obscure piece of papyrus, nigh well undateable, with no mention of the Israelites outside of some brief references to foreigners, the alleged ‘plagues’ easily attributable to volcanic activity (we’ll just skip the ‘forty years of travel’ bit – it’s WAY too ludicrous); let’s just call it a wrap, it’s a load of crap.

Til the next post, then.

I was reviewing the Chaser’s War on Everything and found this. Enjoy and have a great weekend.

Click on the underlined phrase above. Also Dr. James Kennedy has died. One more of the founders of the Religious Right has gone to where he will be most wanted. Worms need fed.

Here’s a newsworthy article that I overheard on my morning commute:

“Tommy Tester, 58, of Bristol, Va., was wearing a skirt when he was arrested last week after allegedly urinating in front of children at a car wash, police said.

Police also said Tester offered to perform oral sex on officers who were sent to the scene.”

Holy shit, the term ‘walking wounded’ springs immediately to mind.

Guess Herr Tester has a…thing for authority figures. Of course, this follows:

“Authorities identified Tester as the minister of Gospel Baptist Church in Bristol and an employee of Christian radio station WZAP-AM in Bristol.”

I guess that’s why most folks favor Christianity: the bar is low, they let just about anyone in. And of course, his fellow cultists simply rushed to his side:

“There was no immediate response Tuesday to calls to the church and Tester’s home.”

Maybe I should allow the shock to settle in before I rush to judgment, but I can almost hear the apron strings being brutally cut: “He ain’t with us!” (Christians tend to indulge in a rather nuanced social darwinism, you ask me.)

And they bitch at us when somebody misrepresents them – problem is, there’s just so damn many examples to choose from.

I’m not in any way inferring that religion made this fellow indulge in transvestitism, drugs or drink or anything else.

Rather, my pet peeve is the claim that it improves folks somehow.

The numbers say otherwise.

And numbers don’t lie, baby.

(Cross posted at The Uncredible Hallq)

Christopher Hitchens once said that “The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey.” Not too long ago I relayed this quote to a friend in the aftermath of a philosophy club meeting, and his response was along the lines of “Well of course–then they can do whatever they want to you.” It struck me as strange how detached his “of course” was from the original context of the quote: it’s from Hitchens’ most recent book, God is not Great, attacking religion.

2000 years of cultural conditioning has gotten us to speak in dignified tones about impossible rules, so long as they occur in the context of religion. To give only the most recent example I know of, when Hitchens and Bill Donohue sparred over Mother Teresa’s doubts, and Donohue made a sarcastic comment along the lines of “well, yeah, she was also a sinner.” In that context, the gut reaction is to say Donohue had a point, even for someone like me who shakes his head at it a half-second later.

Remove the insubstantial religious trappings, however, and my friend’s “of course” becomes the only possible response. Can you imagine an actual government writing laws to guarantee that everyone will wind up guilty, and then making pardons conditional on loyalty to the leaders? Such a government sounds horrific, yet that is exactly the program that has been a major strand of Christian theology since Paul.

A healthy contrast to such dogmas comes in the coda of Bertrand Russell’s essay “On the Value of Scepticism,” published as the introduction to his anthology Sceptical Essays:

Only a large measure of scepticism can tear away the veils which hide this truth from us. Having achieved that, we could begin to build a new morality, not based on envy and restriction, but on the wish for a full life and the realisation of that other human beings are a help and not a hinderance when once then madness of envy has been cured. This is not a Utopian hope; it was partially realised in Elizabethan England. It could be realised tomorrow if men would learn to pursue their own happiness rather than the misery of others. This is no impossibly austere morality yet its adoption would turn our earth into a paradise.

Notice that none of what Russell says is premised on the claim that humans have no tendency whatever to behave badly. Indeed, Russell knew that they do, and he knew it more keenly than most people have, because he saw through the webs of lies used to tell people that selfish or downright insane behavior is noble. Still, Russell hoped for change. The key difference is that for Russell, behaving badly meant making fellow humans miserable. For orthodox Christian thinkers, to refrain from doing so and to guard against the tendencies that lead people to do so is not enough. If you stare at a woman’s chest, you deserve eternal damnation, though of course you can be let off by being a true Christian, whatever that means. This view deserves our contempt, and we must be vigilant in not allowing it to disguise itself as an honest look at human nature. Honestly looking at ourselves can only make the world a better place, but the orthodox doctrine of sin was never good for anything other than controlling people.

 Scientists have finally been able to replicate OBE’s:

Out-of-body experience recreated

Near-death events have triggered out-of-body experiences

Experts have found a way to trigger an out-of-body experience in volunteers.

The experiments, described in the Science journal, offer a scientific explanation for a phenomenon experienced by one in 10 people.

Two teams used virtual reality goggles to con the brain into thinking the body was located elsewhere.

The visual illusion plus the feel of their real bodies being touched made volunteers sense that they had moved outside of their physical bodies.

The researchers say their findings could have practical applications, such as helping take video games to the next level of virtuality so the players feel as if they are actually inside the game.

Clinically, surgeons might also be able to perform operations on patients thousands of miles away by controlling a robotic virtual self.

 Like an old DOS machine, it seems more and more likely that we can trick the operating system into believing odd, odd things.

While this is the first of many forays that has provided some insight into that weird labyrinth that we term ‘human consciousness’ (for want of a better word), this is yet another step towards a rational explanation for those items the religious proclaim mysteries.

I have written elsewhere of the experiments of one Dr. Michael Persinger – and I have spoken here of my own theory of the origin of identity (probably someone else’s as well: I’m sure the more pedantic of my brethren will be quick to point that out) – and there’s no doubt that I’m rather fond of Jaynses’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, wherein he speaks of the consciousness residing elsewhere. Mind you, it is still in the skull, but it lends one to wonder: if we, as a primarily visual species, consistently place our consciousness right behind our eyes, where does a congenitally blind person place it? The pituitary gland? Or perhaps at the ears, or nose, or even the skin entire?

It is all a chemical response. Naught else.

Yet still we can set sail on an ocean of mirror neurons, our ships sped by winds of wonder, into the deep seas of the mind.

Don’t forget to bring your fishing pole. Who knows what you might catch?

Till the next post, then.