We’re still beating Turkey!

When we Americans need a little reassurance that we aren’t Number Last (or reminders that it could get worse), all we have to do is look to Turkey. A Turkish television show had a ‘debate’ that attempted to disprove evolution, in which the audience was treated to some serious intellectual problems.

They called in the question which evolution created angel and daemon, how felicities in the heaven evolved, how the snake came into existence out of the baton as well as the bird out of mud. The creationists tried to disprove evolution theory with these questions.

I give up. They’re right. Evolution cannot explain the origin of angels and demons. And that talking snake? It’s a complete mystery to the world of science.

The mermaid fatwa

We are often told that religion is a different way of knowing, that it can provide us with a different perspective and different information. I have not believed this at all, because no one has ever been able to give me an example of actual, useful information obtained from a religion, that could not have been generated by a reality-based approach.

Until now.

This is a question that I had never even considered before; it was unexpected and surprising. I think I’ve finally experienced an insightful religious question.

Are you allowed to eat a mermaid?

Apparently, the Koran or some of its promoters discussed mermaids at some point, therefore they are presumed to exist. The question is then a reasonable one: if you throw a net over the side of your dhow, and haul in a mermaid along with a nice catch of ordinary fish, is she halaal? Can you chop her up, sell her at the market, or take her home to the family for dinner?

There is a fatwa on the subject of eating mermaids that cites many scholarly Islamic sources. Here are a few.

Al-Durayr – a Maaliki scholar – said in al-Sharh al-Sagheer (2/182): Sea animals in general are permissible, whether it is dead meat or a ‘dog’ (shark) or a ‘pig’ (dolphin), and they do not need to be slaughtered properly. End quote.

Al-Saawi said in his commentary on that: The words “or a ‘dog’ or a ‘pig’ also include a ‘human’, referring thereby to mermaids. End quote.

Shaykh Ibn ‘Uthaymeen (may Allaah have mercy on him) said, after stating that it is more likely that it is permissible to eat crocodiles and sea snakes: The correct view is that nothing is excluded from that, and that all the sea creatures which can only live in water are halaal, alive or dead, because of the general meaning of the verse – i.e., “Lawful to you is (the pursuit of) water game and its use for food” [al-Maa’idah 5:64].

Well.

That was a revelation. I’ll never be able to watch Splash with the same eyes again.

Now I just need recipes. I’ve gutted enough salmon that I probably don’t need cleaning instructions.

Oh, and a mermaid. I wonder if the Asian market in the Twin Cities would have any?

(via Salty Current)

Biological pareidolia

Jesus in a pita, Madonna in bird poop, gods speaking through the arrangement of viscera…we’re used to ridiculous religious pattern seeking. A reader, Mike Barnes, wrote in to tell me about a scientist who has been playing the same game: Francis Collins sees DNA in stained glass windows.

i-c75755a92837fc70486265e96726c544-dna_rose.jpeg

Collins showed two images–a stained-glass rose window often seen in Christian churches, and an eerily similar graphic that he described as “looking down the barrel” of DNA’s double helix.

“I’m not trying to say that there’s something inherently religious” in the DNA image, Collins emphasized. “But, I think it is emblematic of the potential here of the topic to both interest people and to make them unsettled. Can you, in fact, admire both of these [images]? Can you do it at the same time? Is there an inherent problem in having both a scientific world view and a spiritual world view?”

You know you’ve taken a long stroll on a short limb when you start using phrases like “emblematic of the potential” and start seeing significance in the fact that people can see what they want to see in a random image. Collins is also making a peculiar leap to associate the Rose Window with ‘spirituality’. As Barnes explains:

In his 2008 lecture Francis Collins used a slide of York Minster’s beautiful Rose Window as his first religious analogy. Not only is this spurious in principle, but also in fact:

I went to York University; a good friend (and atheist) was doing his PhD on the stained glass of York Minster. First, and more trivially, the Rose Window only looks the way it does on Collins’ slide because the medium of film completely distorts the exposure to create a spurious silhouette effect. It was never intended to be seen, or its meaning ‘read’, this way.

Also, Collins uses the Rose Window/genome slide and asks “do you have to make a choice between these two?”. (science versus religion, he supposes) In fact the Rose Window was designed in the 16th century as propaganda for the bloodthirsty Tudor dynasty, celebrating the union of Henry 7th and Elizabeth of York. The rose was the dynastic symbol: red for Lancashire, white for York. So the roses round the edge are as much symbols of victorious, naked state power as swastikas were in Nazi Germany – albeit more picturesque.

So, nothing to do with god or Jebus – or is the mere fact it’s situated in a Cathedral enough for Collins?

I’ve seen this comparison of Rose Window/DNA genome on Christian propaganda before and as someone who saw the original it annoys me a lot. Collins assumes a photographically-distorted soft-focus image can ‘say’ something about the genome. Unless he simply means, ‘here’s something old and pretty to see, and hey, the genome kinda looks like it’ the facts about the Rose Window blow his analogy to pieces. Or maybe he really loves old, bloodthirsty tyrants?

I can look at the Rose Window and see a piece of history; some interesting architecture; a pretty pattern; the product of skilled human labor; a monument to oppression; a relic of institutionalized superstition. There are also a few things I do not see. I do not see DNA, except that both DNA and the window share the extremely general property of exhibiting radial symmetry. I also do not see the hand of any god, because it is entirely the product of human hands and minds. There is an inherent problem in “having a spiritual worldview”, in that it compels Collins to see things that are not there.

Whatever you do, don’t let anyone show Collins the structure of laminin or potassium channels! I know it’s too late to shield him from the sight of waterfalls.

Suffer the little children

Heresy is so easy to do, you don’t even have to try. My wife is off helping kids at Camp Quest, which is, apparently, a horrible, awful, evil act. Just ask the Jebus-lovers of Rapture Ready, who were recently all agog at the opening of a godless summer camp in England. Here are a few of their reactions, stripped of the animated smiley faces and garish signatures they like over there.

Poor kids! What will they sing about?

Give peace a chance?!?

They could sing about sex and drugs and rock and roll, I suppose…but songs about peace sound like they’d be very nice. Why would a Christian find peace songs to be an unfortunate subject?

what kind of boring atheist themed arts and crafts will they do there?

sounds lame.

Heh. When I was a young fellow, I went to Vacation Bible School, so I know all about those exciting Christian-themed arts and crafts: making crosses out of popsicle sticks, making wallets with crosses embossed in them, making scenes out of pieces of felt, like Christ on the cross. Don’t tell me about lame, I have lived it.

Last I heard from Mary, the kids had been doing canoeing, swimming, archery, hiking, some Indian dance and movement exercise, the traditional smores, basket and candle making, and something to do with parachutes, while also bringing in people to work with the kids in skeptical exercises. They sounded very busy.

very sad indeed…..Jesus is exactly what these precious children need, along with their parents…How tragic.

I like that. Kids get together, have fun, learn things, and what they really need is…Jesus. Jesus, however, never shows up at summer camp.

Yeah, but this camp is not open to all faiths… its excludes those with FAITH. It is a demonic tool to lose souls of those that might hear the true Gospel but will be filled with poison in advance. IMO Every souls that is “won” to the athiest is another soul that will burn in hell for eternity! I would think that might be significant.

I don’t think that Camp Quest actively excludes people of faith — you’re welcome to send your kids there. It’s just that one of the many things they do there is teach critical thinking and expose kids to a plurality of beliefs. When I visited a while back, for instance, they had a pagan priestess come in and talk about her beliefs, and they had a regular program of bringing in advocates of weird religions, like Christianity, to come in and make a case for their superstitions.

But yes, if you believe a magic man in the sky sits petulantly on a great golden throne and wants human beings to spend all their time worshipping him, then he probably is planning to throw all those happy, free-thinking children into a lake of fire, so he can chortle over their eternal torment. If such a god existed, though, I don’t think I’d want to worship it.

Here’s my favorite comment from Rapture Ready. No embroidering from me is necessary.

Lets face it Atheism is bankrupt so they have to indoctrinate young children.

A misdirected life’s goal

I’d never heard of Roger W. Babson before, but maybe some of you at east coast colleges have seen one of his monuments. He was an eccentric millionaire who founded the Gravity Research Foundation and donated money for anti-gravity research. He gave money to colleges that would accept one of his granite monuments to “remind students of the blessings forthcoming when science determines what gravity is, how it works, and how it may be controlled.” It was his obsession. Apparently, his concern traces back to one event:

Babson, born in 1875, was a self-made millionaire who founded three colleges and once ran for the U.S. presidency as the candidate of the Prohibition Party. He became obsessed with gravity at the age of 18 when his younger sister, Edith, drowned in Massachusetts’ Annisquam River.

“She was unable to fight gravity,” Babson later wrote, “which came up and seized her like a dragon and brought her to the bottom.”

The fool! It wasn’t gravity that was the enemy, he needed to fund anti-viscosity research!