Sanal Edamaruku has fled India and the hounds of the Catholic church. He’s somewhere in Europe.
The church has said they will drop the complaint if Edamaruku apologizes — apologizes for exposing a weeping magic statue as the product of a mundane leaky pipe.
Edamaruku says, “NO.”
Edamaruku says, “NO.”
I marvel at that — the courage of just saying no, of refusing to bow before religious authorities. My admiration is unbounded.
Edamaruku says, “NO.”
What a beautiful word.
Here’s a study in contrasts: Emma Goldman and Sikivu Hutchinson. Both so different and both so good.
Oh, you just have to love a new quack and cult leader — they come up with the wackiest stuff, and people fall for it.
Serge Benhayon, a former tennis coach from Maroubra, has up to 1000, mainly female, devotees to his movement, Universal Medicine, based in the hills outside Lismore on the north coast of NSW.
Mr Benhayon told The Sun-Herald he had no medical qualifications but stood by the effectiveness of his treatments, including “esoteric breast massage” – administered only by women – and “chakra-puncture”. His daughter, Natalie, 22, claims to be able to talk to women’s ovaries – for $70 an hour.
I can talk to women’s ovaries, too! Also their kidneys and uvulas and hippocampi and elbows. I can also chat up a pair of breasts, if you’d like (they understand the language of motorboats). You should only get the big bucks if they answer, though.
Esoteric breast massage sounds fun, but chakra-puncture…no thanks, that sounds agonizing.
He’s drafted a whole lot of professional women with no understanding of medicine or science to buy into this nonsense, and make recommendations that funnel public health care money directly into Benhayon’s pocket. And of course there’s the New Age jargon everywhere, substituting for evidence.
Ms Greenaway offers “esoteric connective tissue therapy”, a technique created by Mr Benhayon. It promises to improve energy flow by “allowing the pulse of the lymphatic system to symbiotically correspond with the body’s own ensheathing web”.
You know, the lymphatic system doesn’t have a pulse, and symbiotic doesn’t mean what she seems to think it means. They also claim to do “craniosacral massage” and to measure a “craniosacral pulse”, which just tells me they’re obsessed with heads up asses.
It’s disgraceful nonsense, but Benhayon has an answer to charges that he’s a charismatic con-artist.
“A handful of people say what we have here is a cult. What if I can bring 2000 people to say it’s not?”
<pictures 2000 people in robes standing glassy-eyed and chanting “we are not a cult”>
Much like any child with a loving mother, I was often lulled to sleep by her gentle and comforting voice as she read me a story. Unlike most mothers though, she rarely read from the newest selections of the public library, instead delighting me with tales of Samson, King David and of course Jesus Christ himself. I was a young Hispanic Catholic boy and she was smart enough to sprinkle the adventure-laden stories and parables in with the more philosophical readings to tug at my boyish tendencies. Not that she needed to trick me into belief in a God, Hispanic culture being one of the last enduring bastions of Catholicism. And being a 1st generation immigrant from Ecuador, for her belief was simply the default option.
I saw this new Batman movie last night, and it was fairly good: complex and twisty and dark, mostly, the way I like ’em. It was far from perfect though, so I’ll send you off to this review that lays out the very same problems I had with the movie. No spoilers, it’s safe!
It doesn’t mention one big problem I had with the ending, though, and this one is a bit of a spoiler, so I’m putting it in rot13: Ongzna cbvfbaf bprnaf naq ungrf svfu! I just cringed at the solution to one terrible problem, which treated another serious issue cavalierly.
Also, the ending sets up the possibility of sequels, which is getting mildly annoying. Maybe these stories have roots in pulp serials, but I’d kind of like to see a story with a real ending someday.
All right, the last few times I’ve done this, I’ve hit you with concentrated cuteness. Now, though, it’s a shotgun-blast of multiple qualities: cute, colorful, squishy, stingie, and slimy, all the things we look for in an adorable critter. Nudibranchs!
It’s enraging that we have blinkered, stupid Christians declaring that a shooting spree is caused by evolution, or liberals, or atheism. Why? Because there’s the obvious fact that the perpetrators of such crimes are usually not biologists, liberals, or atheists, but also because it is logically fallacious and offensive: the majority of atheists are not committing crimes, and there’s nothing in the principles of atheism that even implies we should be freely slaughtering other members of our communities. It is also the fallacy of mistaking a specific particular for the general properties of the whole; it’s like arguing that one cold day means the climate isn’t warming.
Atheists wouldn’t make such a stupid mistake, though, would they? The killer in Colorado was a church-going Presbyterian — we’re not going to see atheists crowing in triumph and saying that that shows the Christianity turns you into a mass-murderer, are we? That would be just as false as blaming it on evolutionists — the overwhelming majority of Christians feel no compulsion to murder, so it seems to be a rather ineffective ideology for encouraging killing sprees. One could argue that it does short-circuit critical thinking, and that at least the American version seems to endorse destructive policies, but pinning the actions of one unusual individual on the teachings of a religion? We wouldn’t be dumb enough to make that mistake.
I’m disappointed to see that we do have stupid atheists. Witness Why James Holmes’ Rampage is the Result of the Teachings of Christianity. I hang my head in shame. That’s no different than what Rick Warren or the American Patriarchy Association or any of a thousand other ideologues playing the blame game have done.
Christianity is piss-poor at doing more than providing lip-service against violence, but it’s at best a passive enabler. Blame it on the real causes: a culture that glorifies violence, easy availability of deadly weapons, and mostly James Fucking Holmes. Anything else is a distraction from correcting the real causes.
The London Olympics 2012 has a logo. It’s hideous.
I don’t quite understand why a jumble of jagged shapes is supposed to be welcoming, and somehow, this set of shapes is supposed to evoke “2012”. But even worse, I then saw this interpretation and now that’s all I see.
Iran is complaining that all they see is the word Zion. I suggest we tell them about the Simpsons interpretation, and their complaints will immediately evaporate.
Also, the Olympics mascots are one-eyed trouser snakes. It’s the perviest Olympics ever.
You have creationists, too!
(Sorry, we Americans are so used to being infested with these idiots that I have to gloat when I see we’re not alone.)
If you’re looking for a meaty weekend read, look no further than Paul McBride’s thorough dismantling of Science and Human Origins
The creationists are howling. McBride’s evisceration, with Carl Zimmer’s detailed description of the evidence for chromosome fusion, all discrediting what they thought would be a hot new text on the scientific evidence for creation, has made them so furious that they’re even lashing out at me in email — I just linked to the evidence, so I imagine Zimmer and McBride must be seeing some entertaining spectacles in their inboxes. I do so love to see the creationists dancing in the flames of their own immolation.
I will say this, though: I did get one very polite email from a creationist, who told me that he was not a scientist, but that he’d read a couple of articles that sounded impressively sciencey to him, and asked if they didn’t represent a legitimate criticism of the chromosome fusion idea? And he very nicely sent along the two papers for me to read. Here they are:
Bergman J, Tomkins J (2011) The chromosome 2 fusion model of human evolution—part 1: re-evaluating the evidence. Journal of Creation 25(2):106-110.
Tomkins J, Bergman J (2011) The chromosome 2 fusion model of human evolution—part 1: re-evaluating the evidence. Journal of Creation 25(2):111-117.
Two things jumped out at me: it’s by batty Jerry Bergman, no credible source at all, and it’s published in the inbred in-house journal of the Institute for Creation Research. These are not legitimate science papers, although they do throw around enough science terms and techniques, and follow the form of a real science paper, to generate confusion in the mind of the naive reader. They’re beautiful examples of cargo cult science by creationists. Would you like to read them, or use them as bad examples? Here you go, download it for entertainment purposes only.
I read them anyway. I’m not going to bother with a detailed refutation, but I’ll give you the gist. The fundamental confusion in both papers is the nature of the evidence for an ancestral chromosome fusion, and a focus on irrelevant details that are not central to the argument.
The story is this. At some time after the separation of the human and chimpanzee lineages, two ancestral chromosomes, #12 and #13 in the chimpanzee, fused end-to-end to form a single chromosome, #2, in humans. Chimpanzee chromosome 13 forms the short arm (2p) and part of the long arm (2q) of human chromosome 2, while chimpanzee chromosome 12 forms most of the long arm (2q) of chromosome 2.
The primary evidence for this fusion is the comparative genetic content of these chromosomes. That is, most of the genes in chimpanzee chromosome 13 are found in human 2p, and most of the genes in chimpanzee chromosome 12 are in human 2q. The chromatin binding patterns line up, the sequence analysis confirms, and there have been some lovely FISH studies that show the correspondence.
What has since been done is that a prediction was made that there ought to be fragments of telomeres (the end caps of chromosomes) in the middle of chromosome 2, at the fusion site. Which has been examined. And the prediction has been confirmed.
Bergman and Tomkins ignore every single bit of that. Instead, what they do is focus on just the region of the fusion, and complain that it is a tangled mess and hard to interpret — that it is a degenerate telomeric region, rather than a complete and intact telomere, which is what they demand be present. This is an unrealistic expectation, given that every paper on the structure of the fusion region makes the point that it is degenerate.
An analogy: imagine a red Ford Mustang and a blue BMW X6 are in a head-on collision, and both have totally wrecked front ends, with bumpers and radiators and headlights interlocked and everything about their grilles in tangled confusion, and with bits and pieces torn loose and flung about. You’d be able to look at the crash and still tell by everything in and behind the engine compartment that Car #1 was a Mustang and Car #2 was an X6.
Bergman and Tomkins are the bewildered and incompetent investigators who ignore every other factor in the crash, look at a few particularly mangled bits of the wreckage, and declare that they can’t identify it, therefore…the two vehicles were assembled at the factory in this particular configuration, and no crash occurred. But they use lots of sciencey language to explain this at tendentious length, which is sufficient to convince non-scientists that the interpretation of an obvious historical event has been refuted. And that’s all they need to do to accomplish their goals: fling about unfounded fear, uncertainty, and doubt to win over the ignorant.
