Shades of gray

Sometimes, issues demand nuance. This is a complicated world and there are a great many subjects that simply aren’t reducible to binaries — we do a disservice to the subtleties when we discard them in favor of absolutes. And often I can agree that we need depth and breadth of understanding if we’re to navigate a difficult situation.

But sometimes the issues are black and white. Sometimes the answers are clear and absolute. And in those cases, attempts to bring out the watercolors and soften the story by blurring the edges do a disservice to reality. There are places where there are no ambiguities, and the only appropriate response is flat condemnation. And we witness them every day.

All around the world, people are killing and being killed; they are crossing the clearest, least arbitrary border we have. You don’t come back from death, and you can’t atone for extinguishing another life. There are no excuses. Life is not a video game, where your targets are smears of pixels with no history and no awareness. In the real world, those bodies are people, with 20 years or 30 years or 50 years or 70 years of stories and connections behind them, part of a web of humanity, and their every action tugs on the people around them. Dehumanizing them, as we often do, dehumanizes us. You are the killer, but you are also the killed.

  • …the enemy walks down the road, a distant figure in the sights of your rifle. You squeeze the trigger, there is a sharp report, and bam, the enemy is smashed backwards like a cheap tin target in the penny arcade, and a red mist slowly settles over his still form. You trot forward and look; a clean kill, the bullet went through the left eye and blew out the entire back of the skull, brains and blood are sprayed for yards behind the target, the face is a ghastly ruin of slumping flesh on the shattered armature of the skull.

    …you are walking down the road, anxious to be home since there are reports of the enemy lurking in the neighborhood, but still thinking ahead to mundane concerns, like what you’ll have for dinner or what the family has been doing while you were away, when…nothing. You suddenly cease to exist, without warning, without awareness, just abruptly, you are no more.

    Hours later, friends find your body and carry it home, and stretch it out on the table. On the wall above it is your wedding portrait. Your partner clutches your rigid hand, the flesh like cold clay, and looks at the portrait, and looks at the wreckage of your beloved face, and knows there will be nightmares, and that every happy memory will always be overlaid with the horror of this moment.

  • …you watch the crowd fill the streets, and when the numbers seem adequate, you tap the numbers into your cell phone, and instantly the car blooms into a flare of fire, and as you watch the bodies fly and flail away from it, you hear the rumbling thud of the detonation. You rush forward with everyone else — it wouldn’t do to be spotted guiltily scuttling away — and you see one of the enemy lying in the road, eyes blinking in shock, staring at the sky. You watch the lips move, but no sound emerges — you know the shock wave of the explosion would have pulped lungs that now lie in sodden useless tatters in the chest. The target tries to cough, spasms, blood gushes from mouth and nose, and then the feeble movements end, and the eyes glaze, seeing nothing ever again.

    …you join friends as you walk to the market, when a great hand lifts you and flings you against a wall and bounces you into the street. You can’t hear anything but an overwhelming ringing; you feel disoriented and confused; something is wrong with your body, it feels weak and helpless. You look up at the sky, it’s clear and blue and beautiful, and you dream that your mother will come and pick you up and all will be well, so you try to call out to her, but you can’t catch your breath, and all you feel is a vast welling bubble of pain rising up and up and breaking…and then darkness.

    Your mother arrives later, with people from all around the neighborhood. They file through the makeshift morgue, sorting through the bloody clothing and the shattered body parts, trudging through a charnel house to identify their loved ones, or fragments of them. One of the attendants has washed the blood and dust from your face and, unlike so many others, you look like one sleeping — your mother hopefully puts a hand to your cheek, feels the chilled motionlessness, and knows there is no hope ever again, and feels a shadow of that rising bubble of anguish herself.

  • …the enemy walks into the shop, and from your hiding place, you paint the wall of the building with your laser. Your headset whispers; the pilot of the plane flying invisibly distant, far above you, acknowledges the signal and calmly informs you that the package is inbound. Moments later, there is a streak of light from the sky and a thunderclap of sound and fire and dust and smoke, and the building vanishes, becoming a shallow hole in the ground surrounded by a corona of rubble.

    …you open the door and walk into the room, greeting your friends, when, in an instant, you are vaporized, your flesh so thoroughly churned in the violence of the explosion that all that will remain are small clumps of blood and dust sown across the landscape. No recognizable trace will ever be recovered.

    All your children will know is that one day their parent left them, abandoned them, disappeared somehow in the diffuse chaos and instability that is their life. They shall inherit anger and a sense of betrayal, but remember little else about you.

  • …you are part of the mob. How dare they insult your people! Your fury rages, and together you grab sticks and stones and knives and you surge to their home, where the guards stand surprised and frightened by the spontaneous rush of howling people. You overwhelm them. You stand over one, stomp on an exposed arm, and see it bend and break; you pick up a rock, kneel down, and see the enemy’s face, hear the screams of pain and terror, smell the shit and blood as the enemy’s guts are spilled on the dirt, and raise that rock and smash and smash and smash. The body is dead, but everyone continues to tear at it, ripping scraps of smeared clothing and even souvenirs of flesh and passing them back to the crowd behind them, where they are waved like bloody flags.

    …you stand momentarily as the mob charges, torn between duty and fear, and then you try to break and run …but too late. There are too many to fight, they batter you everywhere, you can’t think — all you know is agony and horror and you feel fingers tearing at your eyes and your limbs breaking and the sharp tearing of knives and finally numbing, crushing blows to the skull, and then you’re dead. But the mob doesn’t stop, and continues to rend and mutilate.

    Your body is sent home in a sealed coffin. There is a decorous funeral, the words are solemnly said, the family weeps. In the somber procession, though, suddenly your father drops to his knees, broken. He remembers the laughing child he carried on his shoulders, and he can’t reconcile that moment with this one. He wants to know what happened, but he can’t know. He wants to have helped, but he is helpless. And there is no way to overcome this grief.

I know what it is like to lose someone you love, and it’s a pain so great that I can’t imagine reaching out to cause that pain in anyone else; what killers must do is blind themselves to the enormity of their act and wall themselves off from the empathy that all human beings should have. They also must bury that portion of their mind that can sympathize with their victims in an avalanche of pretexts, these excuses that later apologists will call “nuance”, or “shades of gray”, or “complications”. And they will dredge up the familiar roll call of empty ghosts to water down the evil of what is done. They will call it God. Country. Honor. Justice. Revenge. The priests and the mullahs and the politicians and the generals are experts at softening the contrast and blurring the edges and persuading one person that that other person over there, so much like you in every way that matters, deserves to have everything important extinguished and brutalized and disregarded.

They are so damned good at it that they can stir up the killing frenzy over anything at all. A gang of fanatics, driven by superstition and ethnic bigotry, kill thousands in a terrorist attack in one country. So zealots stir up their own froth of superstition and ethnic bigotry, and convince the targeted country to attack and kill people of yet another country that had nothing to do with the terrorist attack. What a waste of lives, yet everyone on both sides is smug and confident that the deaths on the other side were warranted.

Or even more ridiculously remote: one side takes such extreme offense at the lack of reverence shown by a few people on the other side towards some copy of a sacred object, that they then slaughter unrelated targets.

Stirred up by three angry mullahs who urged them to avenge the burning of a Koran at a Florida church, thousands of protesters on Friday overran the compound of the United Nations in this northern Afghan city, killing at least 12 people, Afghan and United Nations officials said.

…

Unable to find Americans on whom to vent their anger, the mob turned instead on the next-best symbol of Western intrusion — the nearby United Nations headquarters. “Some of our colleagues were just hunted down,” said a spokesman for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, Kieran Dwyer, in confirming the attack.

These twelve people were human beings, reduced to a statistic in a newspaper article, and dehumanized and exterminated by a mindless mob, inflamed by religious fanatics. Similarly, the hundred thousand or more killed in Iraq, the ongoing war in Afghanistan, all of these are also genuine, thinking, feeling human beings, wiped out in a cold-hearted calculus of delusion and greed. There is no justification sufficient for these acts.

Yet somehow we get lost in the wrong questions. Do we have the right to burn the Koran? Is it unreasonable to think that Afghans might have cause to be angry? Should we not defend the right of fascist politicians to live, and perhaps it is OK to grant a limited license to murder to certain people if they are of the correct political stripe or the appropriate faith? Shall we weigh the sins of a Florida preacher against those of three Afghan clerics, and come up with a number that will tell us which is the greater offender, and by how much?

I’m an extremist in this debate, I will freely confess. I hold an absolute view that no killing is ever justified, that individuals have the necessity to defend themselves against assailants, but that even that does not grant moral approval to snuffing out the life of another. Don’t even try to pull out a scale and toss a copy of the Koran on one side and the life of a single human being on the other — the comparison is obscene. Do not try to tell me that some people are ‘moderates’ when they tolerate or even support and applaud war and death and murder for any cause, whether it is oil, or getting even, or defending the honor of wood pulp and ink.

The bone is bleached white. The flesh is burnt black. The blood splashes scarlet. You can’t render it in grays and pastels without losing sight of the truth.

It’s about as meaningful as selling indulgences, I suppose

I had never heard of these before:

Papal knighthoods are awarded to lay men and women for conspicuous service to the church and society. They are among the highest honours the Pope can bestow.

Surprise, surprise, though…the “highest honours the Pope can bestow” can be purchased for £50,000. Somehow, the venality of the church is no surprise at all to me.

I also had to roll my eyes at this fact about the priest intermediary who has been selling knighthoods:

Fr Seed is honorary chaplain to the International Committee on Human Dignity

That an “International Committee on Human Dignity” has a chaplain in the first place is a betrayal of that purported dignity; that it is a money-grubbing Catholic con-artist is just a cherry on top of it all.

Imagine a perfectly spherical sacred cow…

The BBC is reporting the imminent extinction of religion. This is an end result to be hoped for, which just makes me all the more critical, and I have to say up front that this is the work of mathematicians, engineers, and physicists modeling sociology. It’s interesting stuff that looks at the very biggest picture without addressing the details, and it could very well be entirely true, but I’m always going to be a little bit suspicious of academics crossing boundaries that much. Sociologists are not stupid people; I’d like to see more of them pick up on this mode of analysis, and then I’ll trust it more.

You can read the paper for yourself, it’s available on arxiv, and it’s not a piece of crackpot pseudoscience; it analyzes gross historical trends away from religious belief in diverse regions around the world, and fits a reasonable curve to the pattern using an extremely simple model of group dynamics. The simplicity of the model is the troubling part — I’m a biologist, I don’t believe in simple any more — but the fact that the model works well for at least the selected regions is a little reassuring. Here’s the short summary of what they did:

Here we use a minimal model of competition for members between social groups to explain historical census data on the growth of religious non-affiliation in 85 regions around the world. According to the model, a single parameter quantifying the perceived utility of adhering to a religion determines whether the unaffiliated group will grow in a society. The model predicts that for societies in which the perceived utility of not adhering is greater than the utility of adhering, religion will be driven toward extinction.

The data look wonderfully clean, too.

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(About that rescaled time axis: the data from different regions show different rates of the deconversion process, with timescales from decades to centuries; they all fit their model with different parameters for the perceived utility of religion. The rescaling shows that the model provides a good fit to all of the data, but you can’t use this to predict the date of the worldwide Atheist Rapture — it’ll happen at different times in different regions.)

The authors also express reasonable reservations. I was wondering about these questions, myself.

Our assumption that the perceived utility of a social group remains constant may be approximately true for long stretches of time, but there may also be abrupt changes in perceived utility, a possibility that is not included in the model. We speculate that for most of human history, the perceived utility of religion was high and of non-affiliation low. Religiously non-affiliated people persisted but in small numbers. With the birth of modern secular societies, the perceived utility of adherence to religion versus non-affiliation has changed significantly in numerous countries, such as those with census data shown in Fig. 1, and the United States, where
non-affiliation is growing rapidly.

That is a real concern. Their mathematical models are built around a parameter called perceived utility, ux, which they extract from the overall data — it’s not something that can be measured directly in individuals or populations, but is derived from historical trends and then used to calculate future trends, which is a little bit circular. I’d be more confident in their prediction if perceived utility had some independent measure that could be used in the curve fitting.

And of course, as they note, it’s not at all certain that that perceived utility will remain constant — it can’t have, for one thing, or the process of deconversion would have started a long time ago, we’d be further along the curve, and we’d all be atheists now. And unfortunately, the work doesn’t address the interesting question of what caused the historical shift in the perceived utility of religion, and without that, we can’t know what kind of factors might cause it to shift back.

I’ll still hope the math is a good predictor of the fate of faith.

What is this ‘interfaith’ nonsense, anyway?

I concur with Ophelia Benson: “interfaith” is a code word for the religious clubhouse. It’s used to exclude secularism and promote a unity of faith, any faith, where it doesn’t matter what BS you believe, as long as you really, really believe. I think we ought to rename the ideology of all those people who cheerfully and indiscriminately embrace every faith without regard for content as “tinkerbellism”.

That our government is embracing all faiths is just as much a violation of the separation of church and state as if they were to declare Episcopalianism as the state religion…its only political virtue is that it doesn’t antagonize any of the other superstitions.

A Catholic explains atheism, amusement follows

Jennifer Fulwiler is an ex-atheist, she says, and is now a Catholic. With her deep knowledge of both Catholicism and atheism, she is writing a book about her conversion experience and has now posted a short guide to understanding atheists for her Catholic fellows. Oh, did I say deep knowledge? My error, I meant to say “bubble-headed delusions”.

She lists five misconceptions Catholics have about atheists, and tries to explain how atheists really think. She gets one right.

  1. First she argues against the idea that atheists feel like they’re missing something in their life, which is one of the more common faith-based claims. I’ve lost track of the number of times some sincere believer has asked me if I wouldn’t feel better if I brought Jesus into my life. Fulwiler gets this partly right, in that she recognizes this is a misconception, but then she goes on to say this:

    …looking back, I actually did have a pervasive sense of incompleteness, but I simply didn’t know how to recognize it. I do believe that each of us has a God-shaped hole in our hearts, that only God alone can heal.

    Nope. I’m not incomplete. But if I turned Catholic, I would be—I’d have lost my sanity.

  2. She gets the second one right when she explains that arguments laced with Bible quotes are completely unpersuasive.

    …most atheists think that large parts of the Bible simply aren’t true, and many see the entire thing as a work of fiction.

    Her only failing here is understatement.

  3. She thinks it is a misconception to believe that atheists are aware of Catholic doctrine. No, we’re actually fairly familiar with the basic concepts, although we might be fuzzy on the specific details of their magic spells and incantations. I think a better case could be made that most Catholics are unaware of Catholic doctrine, or at least, that they ignore a lot of it. American Catholics and contraception, anyone?

    And then she gets really silly.

    I find that when misconceptions like this are cleared up, my atheist friends are pleasantly surprised at how fair and reasonable Catholic doctrine is.

    Bwahahahahahaahaha! No, not at all. Original sin, the trinity, blood sacrifice, transubstantiation, souls, Space Disneyland after you die, etc., etc., etc. Catholicism (and Christianity, heck, religion in general) is crazy town.

  4. She thinks it’s a fallacy to try and simply reason with atheists — you also need to have an emotional appeal. And I think that is partly right, that there is more to an argument than cold-blooded reasoning. But while she pays lip service to reason and evidence, she really doesn’t understand how fundamental that is to getting through to us — see #3 above.

    …at some point you have to have an openness in your heart as well as your mind. This is why we should always focus more on showing Christ to our atheist friends rather than just offering data about him.

    No Catholic has ever offered me data about Jesus, nor have they shown him to me. All the fervent heartfelt belief in the world wrapped around an empty data set is not going to convince an atheist.

  5. Guess what? She thinks we’re not immune to the power of prayer, and suggests that a good Catholic response to an atheist is “doing nothing but praying for him”.

    Hey, maybe she really is an atheist mole! I can think of no better advice to give the religious than that they should shut up, crawl into a closet, and beg and plead their magic man in the sky and all of his angels and all of his saints to persuade us of the power of faith. She’s completely wrong — prayers will do nothing at all — but I totally approve of her proposal to send all the god-praisers off on a futile snipe hunt.

Bishops being helpful

You know the Catholic church just wants to do good. That’s why North Dakota bishops (the most enlightened kind!) issued a fatwah against certain heinous so-called charities last week.

The two Roman Catholic bishops in North Dakota issued guidelines last week naming several well-known, and in some cases, church-related, organizations they say Catholics should not support, with money or volunteer work.

Bishop Samuel Aquila of the Fargo diocese and Bishop Paul Zipfel of the Bismarck diocese, released a joint document “Guidelines on Charitable Giving,” on Ash Wednesday, March 9.

You may be wondering why the church wants to dry up revenues to certain charities: it’s because they also directly or indirectly support contraception, stem cell research, abortion, or equality for homosexuals. It doesn’t matter what good they do.

You may also be wondering what organizations were condemned. Here they are.

  • The American Association of University Women
  • Amnesty International
  • Crop Walk (an anti-hunger organization)
  • Church World Services
  • The March of Dimes
  • Susan G. Komen for the Cure
  • Planned Parenthood (no surprise)
  • UNICEF

I’m sure, though, that the reason you wondered about that is because this must be a pretty good list of organizations worth supporting with your charitable donations. You can always rely on the Catholic church’s moral compass — whatever direction it points, you should go the other way.

Twelve million dollars!

Martin Nowak has written a peculiar paper, recently published in Nature, in which he basically dismisses the entire concept of inclusive fitness and instead promotes a kind of group selectionist model. It’s an “analysis” paper, and so it’s rather weak on the evidence, but it also seems mostly committed to trashing the idea that inclusive fitness models are the whole of selection theory, which is a bit weird since no one argues that. Jerry Coyne and others will be publishing a critique next week, which should be fun.

I would like to draw your attention to a different kind of critique, though. Nowak is also a fellow of the Templeton Foundation, and he’s been using his work on the biology of cooperation to promote Jesus, because as we all know, Christianity over the past two millennia has been a paragon of altruism and gentle loving persuasion — just ask the Arians and the Albigensians! Oh, you can’t. They’re all dead. OK, so just ask the Jews!

Anyway, it turns out that being cozy with the Templeton Foundation reaps great rewards. Nowak has both served on Templeton advisory boards and been the recipient of large awards. How large?

  • A grant from Templeton to Nowak on “The Evolution and Theology of Cooperation: The Emergence of Altruistic Behavior, Forgiveness and Unselfish Love in the Context of Biological, Ethical and Theological Implications.” Amount: $2 million (work conducted at Harvard University).

  • A grant from Templeton on “Foundational questions in Evolutionary Biology”, which runs from 2009-2013. Nowak is the leader of this project at Harvard, and the amount is $10,500,000 (!)

The second one is to a group, and superficially doesn’t sound anywhere near as silly as the first, but still, $10 million dollars…wow. That’s a nice bucket of money. Of course, if you look at Templeton’s promo for that grant, you can see what appeals to them: part of the research is into “teleology and ultimate purpose in the context of evolutionary biology” (really?), and is touted as “directly relevant to a wide range of philosophical and theological discussions and debates.” Nowak himself uses “the language of god” rhetoric in a video at the Templeton, and talks about an “unchanging reality” beneath the changing patterns of evolution.

But that first grant only looks small in comparison to the second. Two million dollars to study the “theology of cooperation”, whatever that is, is an astonishing sum of money for what looks like a humanities project. Maybe I should mention to my colleagues on the other side of campus that they, as individuals, could get a grant that would put the entire science division at my small university to shame, if only they suck up to Jesus enough.

Don’t try to tell me that Templeton influence doesn’t have the potential to greatly distort and poison academic research. When they’re throwing millions at fluff, it’s going to twist attention to more fluff.

You’ve got to be kidding me

Scarcely do I put up a post arguing with Jerry Coyne, when I notice he has put up another with an example of evidence for a god from John Farrell. And lo, I did look, and verily, I did become depressed at how stupid and pathetic it was.

An archeologist working in Israel, discovers an ossuary from the NT era: the inscription on the stone in Aramaic reads: “Twice dead under Pilatus; Twice born of Yeshua in sure hope of resurrection.” And the name corresponds to what in Greek would be Lazarus.

There are bones, so presumably with luck there may be some DNA that could be sequenced, but my main idea is that you have a clear physical candidate for an actual person written about in the Gospel of John. (There are some scholars who have argued that the author of the Gospel of John was Lazarus.)

Now, this isn’t evidence for “God” in his omnipotent sense, which I know is more what Jerry Coyne and PZ were debating. But, given most scholars believe the four gospels were composed no sooner than 70AD, and for that reason less likely to be reliable accounts, you now have evidence from decades before of a key character in one of the Gospels. And more: an inscription that, whatever we might think, clearly indicates whoever buried him knew of the miraculous story of his raising from the dead and believed it.

Seriously? This is the best that Farrell can do? Confirmation that people really believe in myths and fairy tales is not evidence of a deity. Nor is the existence of people named Jesus or Lazarus in the first century AD a point of contention or dazzling supporting evidence for a magic man in the sky.

With that level of empirical support, we could point to even older inscriptions that reference Jupiter Optimus Maximus and conclude that Jupiter actually was the bestest and greatest god ever, and therefore we all ought to worship him.

Farrell seems to realize his invention is rather feeble, so he adds another level of nonsense to it.

What if the family members from the same ossuary showed a related genome (as expected for his brothers, sister, parents) except that cancer-causing mutations in all of them were…found to be missing from his genome. Or even more startling, found to be ‘corrected.’

How do we know they’re all family members? Aside from the shared ossuary, all we’d have is genetic evidence…and here he’s saying there is genetic evidence that they are not related. I think if we went poking around in various families nowadays we might discover a few surprising insertions into the family gene pool, and I doubt that anyone’s first assumption would be that a Holy Ghost had been dicking around with Great Aunt Mary, or that an angel must have tweaked Cousin George’s genome when his mother wasn’t looking.

And what the heck is the difference between a particular allele being “missing” and being “corrected”? Does this guy even have a clue about what he’s talking about?

Anyway, here’s the general conflict: material evidence will have material explanations. Any natural explanation will be preferable to a supernatural explanation that drags in an all-powerful invisible boogey man in order to explain the arrangement of nucleotides in one set of old bones.

Calvinball no more!

Uh-oh. Jerry Coyne is calling me out and reopening our old argument about whether there could be evidence supporting a god. I said no, for a number of reasons, but I haven’t convinced Coyne.

The statements by P.Z. and Zara seem to me more akin to prejudices than to fully reasoned positions. They are also, of course, bad for atheists, since they make us look close-minded, but I would never argue that we should hide what we really think because it makes it harder to persuade our opponents. On the positive side, a discussion like this one is really good for sharpening the mind.

He’s also gone to the Big Guy in the UK, Anthony Grayling, to get some allies; Unfortunately for him, Grayling is siding more closely with me than him. And now Ophelia Benson also sides with those who say gods are incoherent. This is not going well for him.

So I’ve got to pile on.

Religion has had a couple of millennia to make a case for its fundamental concepts: the existence of the supernatural, the existence of deities, the effectiveness of priestly intermediaries, etc. It has failed. It does not provide support in the form of evidence or logical consistency; it also fails to show any pragmatic utility. Religion never does what it claims to do. At what point do we learn from experience and simply reject the whole worthless mess out of hand? The abstract possibility that the god-wallopers will finally come up with a tiny scrap of evidence for their outrageous beliefs in the coming eon is not enough to win it credibility as a reasonable contender, either; you might just as well speculate that archaeologists could unearth artifacts from Middle Earth, or astronomers observing a galaxy far, far away will discover The Force. There is no cause to expect fictions and fantasies to manifest themselves as actual realities.

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Religion plays Calvinball. There are no rules except what they make up as they go. You might think that maybe you ought to concede that they could get a score of 13 and beat your 12…but they are already convinced that their Q trumps your puny pair of digits. And if they get a score of Oatmeal-Sofa, they’ll announce victory. Heck, if they somehow end up in the realm of numbers with you and get a 7, they’ll declare that they win because they’ve got a Mersenne prime and we don’t. Or because it’s like a golf score. The mistake is to play the game in the expectation that the other side has the same respect for evidence that we do, or that evidence even matters.

Here’s an example. This is part of a debate between Peter Atkins and William Lane Craig. Craig is an exceptionally glib debater, and he’s also an evangelical Christian who supposedly defends a very specific doctrine, that his god turned into a human who lived on Earth 2000 years ago, and that belief in his magical powers is your ticket to a Disneyland for dead people in the sky. I’d like to see some evidence for that, but no…his tactic here is to demand proof of bizarre assertions from science, answering questions that his religion can’t.

What’s amazing here is that Christians are actually impressed with Craig’s millimeter-deep, reason-free handwaving. Ha ha, you scientific smartie-pants, you can’t use science to prove you’re not a simulation on a computer of a brain in a vat that was created five minutes ago with false memories of your life, so therefore, Jesus. Never mind that science doesn’t deal in proofs. Never mind that Craig’s religion can’t prove it either, except by blind obdurate asseveration. Never mind that those are all non-questions, non-issues, irrelevant sophomoric wanking. Never mind, it’s Calvinball! The score is now Paisley over Feldspar, we win!

In science, we’re used to incremental progress and revision of our ideas. Evidence is our currency, it’s how we progress and it’s what gets results. It is a category error, however, to think that the way to address free-floating word salad and flaming nonsense is to take the scalpel of reason and empiricism and slice into it, looking for definable edges. No, what you do is look over the snot-ball of self-referential piffle, note that it has no tenable connection to reality, and drop-kick it into the rec room, where the kids can play with it, but no one should ever take it seriously.

Just make sure the kids wash their hands afterwards. That thing is slimy.

On second thought, just dump it in the trash. The kids would rather play video games, instead.

It was all our fault…or was it?

You knew the religious folk were going to look at the disaster in Japan and start pointing fingers. This time, though, it wasn’t the fault of gays and lesbians, nor was it the sight of jiggling breasts…no, this time, it was the atheists’ fault.

Senior pastor Cho Yong-gi of Yoido Full Gospel Church, the largest Christian church in the world, has faced vicious public condemnation as he called the catastrophic Japanese quakes and tsunamis “God’s warnings.”

“I fear that this disaster may be warnings from God against the Japanese people’s atheism and materialism,” an online Christian press quoted the elderly religious leader as saying Saturday.

Wow, I feel almost as powerful as an exposed nipple now.

But wait. We may not be able to take credit for this one. Someone else has stepped forward to shoulder the blame: American Christians. This young lady is overjoyed: she and her friends prayed to her god to teach those atheists a thing or two, and within days he answered by shaking up Japan.

Alert Homeland Security. She threatens to ask her vengeful super-thug to do the same thing to America and Europe, too.