There was a Goop Summit in LA, where people paid $500-$1500 for the privilege of buying Goop merchandise and listening to goofy pseudoscientific quackery.

In the day’s first lecture, Sadeghi spoke for nearly 90 minutes about integrative photosynthesis, spiritual Wi-Fi, laterality to the body, neuro-vegetative signs and the ontological experience called your life.

He spoke of June 4, 1997, the day Paltrow first reached out, as the most important of his entire life, moreso than his marriage or the birth of his two children. He’s saved every email she ever sent him, and spent half an hour walking the audience through a detailed explanation of Paltrow’s first bloodwork, her then-recurrent urinary tract infections and an ovarian cyst that, he said, threatened to blow out her back. (One of the enduring mysteries of Paltrow’s success as a health and wellness guru is her endless stream of medical ailments.)

Sadeghi went off on some interesting tangents. What makes water wet? he asked, more than once. I nearly got a master’s in electric chemistry asking that question.

He stated that we still don’t know how birds fly, despite the Wright brothers inventing the airplane by observing birds in flight. I am probably one of the most authentic human beings you will ever meet, he said, a pronouncement usually reserved for anyone working a con.

The whole thing was oozing bullshit, but at least it was overpriced luxury bullshit.

What I found most interesting is that Gwyneth Paltrow did an interview on Jimmy Kimmel’s show, and it was incredibly revealing. She knows nothing about the stuff she sells! When asked about various items in the Goop catalog, all she provides is nervous laughter and embarrassed looks and denial.

It’s obvious that she is not a True Believer, so my impression of her intelligence grew a notch. Unfortunately, that means she’s a knowing con artist so my impression of her integrity and honest shrank two notches. I wonder what it’s like to be trapped in a lucrative job that you do not respect?

Actually, I also wonder what it would be like to be trapped in a lucrative job, period.

I was just reading this thought-provoking essay by Alan Levinovitz, The Awful Pleasures of Spiritual Pornography. Oooh, “spiritual pornography”, I wonder what that is, I thought. Levinovitz provides two examples: this is a review of Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture by Anthony Esolen and The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation by the unpleasant Rod Dreher. And I have to say, this kind of pornography isn’t fun at all.

…the soul of these books is not love of God; it is bitter loathing of those who do not share it. They are a kind of spiritual pornography that works against spiritual regret, designed to arouse climactic cries of Yes! Yes! in its readers, pleasing the soul’s darker parts by swapping a hollow fantasy of physical union for an equally hollow fantasy of moral warfare: a Manichean vision of a virtuous few battling mightily against everyone else.

The basic engine of what I read — and its intended effect on readers — is little different from that of 19th-century anti-Catholic literature, the Left Behind series, Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness, and Jack Chick’s wild-eyed cartoon tracts. Spiritual pornography, in all of its incarnations, stars easy heroes and villains. The heroes are idealizations of the target audience, which encourages narcissism, and the villains are caricatures of The Other, which encourages bigotry. And although a little spiritual pornography probably does no lasting harm, frequent, concentrated doses can seriously damage individual souls, and, worse, society at large.

I have to wonder if Dreher would find the comparison to Jack Chick to be terribly déclassé, but still rather flattering, in a vulgar way. He might think you’ve gone a bit too far if you point out another example of spiritual pornography, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which similarly treats the outgroup as literal child-murdering servants of Satan. But then this review makes a fairly safe accusation: that it’s not Jews or Catholics that are the new targets, but those damned liberal secularists. Dreher and Esolen would be fine with that, because their entire oeuvre is about how they deserve condemnation.

“Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan,” observed Richard Hofstadter in his classic essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” using as his exemplar a hugely popular 19th-century fabrication by one Maria Monk, who accused priests of systematically raping nuns, then baptizing and murdering whatever children resulted.

The 21st-century equivalent is not anti-Catholic but anti-secular, a category capacious enough for atheists, reform Jews, New Age mystics, nihilist Nietzscheans, even liberal Christians — the last of these described by Dreher, derisively, as “moralistic therapeutic deists,” and Esolen, appallingly, as Persecutors and Quislings — anti-anyone, really, whose religiosity is deemed less austere than that of the pornographer.

Calling spiritual pornography a fantasy helps to evoke its psychological appeal, but the world it conjures up is closer to that of the fairy tale. Both genres are built on two foundational features: dramatic arcs that proceed from Order to Disorder to Order, and clearly defined roles and rules that map neatly onto good and evil. It’s a world that trades humans for archetypes, nuance for simplicity, and the tangled skein of history for the orderly vectors of myth — but if you’re on the side of the angels, living in it feels really, really good.

I have to confess that I think this is where the atheist movement has gone astray, and has too often veered into secular pornography — we possess a kernel of truth, that there is absolutely no evidence for gods, or even a coherent definition of what a god is, and it’s all too easy to segue from that grain of true knowledge to an absolute certainty that those who don’t agree with us are total idiots in all things. We demonize them right back.

It gets worse when the only time atheists find common cause with religious absolutists is when they find another scapegoat to abuse. Right now we have a sect of atheists who have decided that one religious group, the Muslims, are wronger than another religious group, the Christians, so they argue about which one is more evil and form alliances to wage war on whole cultures and suggest that maybe we should convert them from one wrong philosophy to another wrong philosophy as a tool of pacification.

What we should be arguing, as atheists, is that all of them are wrong about the indefensible god-nonsense, but that all of them, like us, are humans who have one life to live, and who come from long lines of humans with rich histories and diverse cultures that we ought to acknowledge and respect. Our obligation as atheists is to protect the rights and dignity of all of our fellow human beings, not to use differences in belief as a pretext to deny those rights and dignities to other human beings. We should, as people of science, be in universal agreement that all people are people, with equal rights, including a right to live and think freely.

Yes, it feels really, really good to live in the reality of True Science and Reason. It feels a lot less good when you’re trapped in that reality with people who seriously argue that all those outside of our shared intellectual domain ought to be arrested, deported, bombed, and tortured, who doubt the intellectual capacity of people with darker skins, or people who were brought up in a different faith tradition. You’ve joined the so-called Rationality Club only to discover it’s also open to secular pornographers.

It’s kind of disillusioning.

It’s always strange to abruptly learn about potentially devastating scandals after they’ve been resolved. This email was the first I heard about a big potential problem for Atheist Alliance International, but it was a relief to learn at the same time that it has been satisfactorily taken care of.

On January 29, Atheist Alliance International received a fraudulent request for funds transfer, originating from our president@atheistalliance.org address. We did not honour the request, and we reported it to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), who assigned a case number. All AAI Board members are well-aware of AAI’s policy of Board approval for all non-operational expenses, excepting the President’s monthly discretionary spending. For obvious reasons, our Treasurer did not transfer the funds, and no further correspondence was received by the requester.

As a prominent atheist organization, AAI is no stranger to fraudulent request for funds. We ignore obvious scams, and when a financial institution is misrepresented, we forward said correspondence to their spoof or phishing reporting e-mail address. However, the timing of the request, closely coinciding with the other anonymous accusations against Mr. Romano, raised our Treasurer’s suspicions, so she reported it to the Board. Mr. Romano stated that he was unaware of the request prior, and that he did not send it nor the follow-up. The Board has no reason to doubt this is true. Our Treasurer turned in the relevant documentation to the local authorities, who assigned a case number. However, since AAI did not suffer a financial loss from this fraudulent attempt, it is unlikely that this case will get prioritized if even addressed.

Four days later, on February 2, 2017, Atheist Alliance International (AAI) received correspondence from an anonymous source, who accused our President, Onur Romano, of being “a serial abuser, and he escapes from law and persecution, country after country.” Our Secretary immediately contacted the local authorities in the city where Mr. Romano resides, as well as the authorities in the Secretary’s country of residence to report the accusation and offer our full cooperation.

Mr. Romano submitted his resignation on February 5, 2017 in the interest of preserving our organization’s reputation. AAI proceeded with an internal investigation. Mr. Romano has denied the allegations made by the anonymous accuser, and cooperated fully and transparently with both the local authorities and AAI, at his own expense. He denied the anonymous accuser’s allegations, and produced documentation showing a clean criminal record in Turkey, the US, and Canada, and documentation of his acquittal of the charges in USA. He has also issued a letter from his lawyer in USA, confirming that “although Mr.Cilek(Romano) requested a timely trial while the evidence and recollection of witnesses was fresh and the witnesses were in the area and available to testify,” the case against him was dismissed in 2003 because “the State felt that they would not meet their burden of proving a case against Mr.Cilek(Romano)”.

Our internal investigation further addressed an allegation by one of our member organizations’ leadership, who claimed that a member of their organization voted for Mr. Romano to the role of AAI President without authorization. Our records indicate that Mr. Romano nominated himself as an individual member of AAI, and did not identify any affiliate or associate member, or individual representing same, as an endorser in his application. His application was presented to AAI’s Board in November 2015, and the on-line motion to accept him as a Board member was unanimous. He was unanimously elected as President by the Board in April 2016, and the motion to confirm his role was passed at our 2015 AGM unanimously.

On April 7, 2017, the RCMP followed up, stating their investigation is finalized and did not support any of the anonymous allegations, confirming Mr. Romano’s clean record and legitimate residency in Canada, and advising us to regard the matter as closed.

In the unanticipated possibility that the relevant legal authorities seek further information from AAI, we remain committed to transparency, and we will cooperate to the best of our abilities to facilitate any legal investigation. In the interim, we consider this issue settled. AAI regards this investigation as closed. Further, the Board supported Mr. Romano’s immediate re-instatement as President of AAI on April 5, 2017.

I bet this kind of thing is a huge problem for any atheist organization: a Turkish atheist, like Romano, is always going to be a target. It sounds like AAI did everything right, treating the accusations seriously and investigating thoroughly. My one concern is that it mentions an internal investigation; that’s fine unless there are deeper concerns about the culture at the organization. Would anyone trust an internal investigation into sexual harassment claims by Uber? AAI does not have that kind of reputation — their bylaws mandate diversity in their board, for instance — but repeated accusations ought to face external review of some sort.

AAI retains my confidence, though.

What a weirdly fascinating article, on the history of that most holy relic, Jesus’s prepuce. It also, by the way, includes the very best explanation for the prolific numbers of body parts of dead saints and prophets.

Once brought to light, the Holy Prepuce reproduced itself at a rapid rate. In a few hundred years, dozens of churches, including Saint John Lateran in Rome (the seat of the Pope) claimed to own a piece or all of the Holy Prepuce. Some suggested that there were so many different Holy Prepuces because it could, like the fish and loaves, multiply to feed hungry pilgrims.

But of course! If you believe in multitudes being fed with a few loaves and fishes, then it is no problem at all imagining that fragments of corpses are replicating. Fingerbones, shinbones, toenail clippings, whole skulls, and obviously, bits of penises, all slithering together at night in the dark corners of cathedrals, briefly writhing and clattering together, and then, voila, spawning a new relic. I imagine it also gives those immortal dead saints a little bit of an erotic outlet. You can’t blame them.

As long as they leave me out of it. Old Catholic mystics seem to have been more than a little pervy, with kinks I never even imagined before. Here’s Catherine of Siena, engaged in a little imaginary sexy vision game with Jesus.

“My beloved,” [Christ said], “you have now gone through many struggles for my sake. . . . Previously you had renounced all that the body takes pleasure in. . . . But yesterday the intensity of your ardent love for me overcame even the instinctive reflexes of your body itself: you forced yourself to swallow without a qualm a drink from which nature recoiled in disgust [i.e., pus from the putrefying breast of a dying woman]. . . . As you then went far beyond what mere human nature could ever have achieved, so I today shall give you a drink that transcends in perfection any that human nature can provide. . . .” With that, he tenderly placed his right hand on her neck, and drew her toward the wound in his side. “Drink, daughter, from my side,” he said, “and by that draught your soul shall become enraptured with such delight that your very body, which for my sake you have denied, shall be inundated with its overflowing goodness.” Drawn close . . . to the outlet of the Fountain of Life, she fastened her lips upon that sacred wound, and still more eagerly the mouth of her soul, and there she slaked her thirst.

All right, all right, I know, consenting adults and all that. You can do all the pus-drinking and wound-sucking you want in the privacy of your church. But you should know that all the sexual behaviors you currently condemn are looking pretty damned sane and healthy in comparison right now.

I’m afraid this article on the Ark Park and their plans for expansion is a little too subtle. It’s main thesis is that the people behind Answers in Genesis are glorified carnies, working to rake in the bucks from the rubes, while pushing an oddball version of Christianity. Ken Ham is talking out of both sides of his mouth: to his co-religionists, he declares his collection of carnival rides to be a sacred mission for the church, but when he’s talking to anyone else it’s a commercial enterprise that deserves state support because it will bring in jobs.

Except that it doesn’t.

But the project’s single largest source of funding was actually $62 million in junk bonds floated by the town of Willamstown, population less than 4,000, home to the Ark Encounter and the county seat of Grant County, which faced bankruptcy this spring.

“In terms of revenue for the county, we don’t get too much from them,” says the county’s chief executive, Stephen Wood. The Ark Encounter negotiated a vastly discounted 30-year rate on property taxes in 2013 under a previous administration. “I hate it, but that’s the deal,” says Wood.

A town smaller than the one I live in can float $62 million in bonds? I do not understand economics.

And what few jobs it does create have some rather restrictive limitations.

As a condition of employment, the museum and ark staff of 900, including 350 seasonal workers, must sign a statement of faith rejecting evolution and declaring that they regularly attend church and view homosexuality as a sin. So any non-Christians, believers in evolution, or members of the LGBT community — and their supporters — need not apply. (Although, due to less stringent hiring requirements for contractors, an actor who allegedly operated a gay porn site was hired to portray Adam in one of the Creation Museum’s original videos.)

The article is fine on explaining how the Ark Park is a tourist trap constructed with subsidies of dubious legality, but once again, the bad science isn’t adequately highlighted. I guess I’m going to have to do it.

I’m attending the 2017 Midwest Zebrafish Meeting in Cincinnati next month, and on Friday, 16 June, before the meeting starts, I’m planning to visit the Ark Park, take pictures, put together some commentary and rebuttals, etc. Anyone else care to join me?

Unfortunately, one other thing I learned from the article is the cost of admission: $40 freaking dollars per adult. They really are trying to fleece the flock. I’ll go once to catalog the lies, but never again.