I may have found a mirror universe

In this essay by John Pavlovitz, a liberal Christian, he makes the argument that the path evangelical Christianity has taken is toxic — that the hatred of Muslims, the contempt for the LGBTQ community, and the rise of celebrity preachers and professional Christians is driving good people away. I have to agree with him, and I think most atheists would agree, that much of the institution of Christianity is purest poison to anyone with a social conscience.

In record numbers, the Conservative American Church is consistently and surely making Atheists—or at the very least it is making former Christians; people who no longer consider organized religion an option because the Jesus they recognize is absent. With its sky-is-falling hand-wringing, its political bed-making, and its constant venom toward diversity, it is giving people no alternative but to conclude, that based on the evidence of people professing to be Godly—that God is of little use. In fact, this God may be toxic.

And that’s the irony of it all; that the very Evangelicals who’ve spent that last 50 years in this country demonizing those who reject Jesus—are now the single most compelling reason for them to do so. They are giving people who suspect that all Christians are self-righteous, hateful hypocrites, all the evidence they need. The Church is confirming the outside world’s most dire suspicions about itself.

…

With every persecution of the LGBTQ community, with every unprovoked attack on Muslims, with every planet-wrecking decision, with every regressive civil rights move—the flight from Christianity continues. Meanwhile the celebrity preachers and professional Christians publicly beat their breasts about the multitudes walking away from God, oblivious to the fact that they are the impetus for the exodus.

I’m reading it and thinking that gosh, this sounds familiar. It was like looking in a mirror. I think that the path the atheist/skeptic movement has taken is toxic — that the hatred of Muslims, the contempt for the LGBTQ community (and women!), and the rise of celebrity atheists and professional skeptics is driving good people away.

So I have some reassuring news for Mr Pavlovitz, if his worry is simply about church membership. If the behavior of the church is making atheists, those shiny new atheists are arriving at the atheist/skeptic community and finding exactly the same behavior and will bounce right back. Or maybe wander about between, in the cynical “pox on both your houses” domain of the nones (which we atheists will eagerly, and unwarrantedly, claim as ours).

Of course, if we’re actually concerned about supporting good people with generous views about diversity and Nature and culture, rather than what building they spend their Sunday visiting and which public speaker they spend their money on, well, both sides are screwed. It’s almost as if we ought to care more about building broader communities with healthy, progressive ideas rather than which god they believe in, or don’t believe in.

Nah, that can’t be it.

Donohue: those Catholic priests didn’t rape anyone, and besides, it’s The Gays’ Fault

Portrait of Bill Donohue

Bill Donohue has come out with his defense of the Catholic Church in the Pennsylvania case (pdf). A couple of things leapt out at me. He often parses the language finely to excuse the problems. For instance, it wasn’t rape.

Most of the alleged victims were not raped: they were groped or otherwise abused, but not penetrated, which is what the word “rape” means. This is not a defense—it is meant to set the record straight and debunk the worst case scenarios attributed to the offenders.

Furthermore, Church officials were not following a “playbook” for using terms such as “inappropriate contact”—they were following the lexicon established by the John Jay professors.

Examples of non-rape sexual abuse found in the John Jay report include “touching under the victim’s clothes” (the most common act alleged); “sexual talk”; “shown pornography”; “touch over cleric’s clothes”; “cleric disrobed”; “victim disrobed”; “photos of victims”; “sexual games”; and “hugging and kissing.” These are the kinds of acts recorded in the grand jury report as well, and as bad as they are, they do not constitute “rape.”

It’s OK if there was no penetration! Is this a new Catholic rule? Priests get to get naked with teenagers while watching porn and grope them, and that’s not a problem?

Then he plays games with the numbers.

How many of the 300 were probably guilty? Maybe half. My reasoning? The 2004 report by the John Jay College for Criminal Justice found that 4 percent of priests nationwide had a credible accusation made against them between 1950-2002. That is the figure everyone quotes. But the report also notes that roughly half that number were substantiated. If that is a reliable measure, the 300 figure drops to around 150.

The Pennsylvania reports says that 300 cases of abuse were credibly supported by the evidence — this was a specific analysis of the evidence in Pennsylvania. So Donohue argues that other, national figures say that half of their cases are unsubstantiated…so he evades the specifics and tries to claim that half the Pennsylvania cases are unsubstantiated. You don’t get to do that.

Also, even if he were right (he’s not), it’s 150 child molesters in the Pennsylvania clergy. What number is acceptable? I’m saying zero would be a number to shoot for.

His next excuse: most of the cases can’t be tried, because we’ve past the statute of limitations.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh “Salacious” Shapiro admitted on August 14 that “Almost every instance of child abuse (the grand jury) found was too old to be prosecuted.” He’s right. But he knew that from the get-go, so why did he pursue this dead end?

Because even if the crime can’t be prosecuted, the criminals should be exposed? Because this is an ongoing problem in the Catholic Church, so the church needs to be constantly prodded to make changes? Because the law isn’t always about justice, but justice must be pursued?

And then, most despicably, he doesn’t mince words in one excuse. This isn’t a problem with pedophilia in the church; this is a problem with The Gays.

How do I know that most of the problem is gay-driven? The data are indisputable.

The John Jay study found that 81 percent of the victims were male, 78 percent of whom were postpubescent. Now if 100 percent of the victimizers are male, and most of the victims are postpubescent males, that is a problem called homosexuality. There is no getting around it.

It’s an 80/20 male/female ratio of victims, but priests are 100% male, and priests are mostly going to be in charge of boys and young men. This ratio sounds like a ratio of opportunity.

Did I say he doesn’t play word games with this one excuse? Not quite. You see, Donohue argues that if the victims were post-pubescent, it doesn’t count as pedophilia. I don’t see a difference that matters — they’re all minors under the supposed care of the priest. It’s a vile abnegation of responsibility and decency. But to Bill, it’s just plain The Gay Abomination.

How many were pedophiles? Less than five percent. That is what the John Jay study found. Studies done in subsequent years—I have read them all—report approximately the same ratio. It’s been a homosexual scandal all along.

No, Bill. It’s been a Catholic scandal all along, and you’re not helping.

Friday Cephalopod: Another sign of the Cephalopocalypse

Last week, I reported that a 3-meter long clubhook squid had washed up on an Oregon beach. This week, I must report that it has happened again.

You must understand that if a few have died of natural causes, there must be a legion of them lying in wait off the coast. This can mean only one thing: the Cephalopocalypse is nigh. I must get myself to Oregon soon, so I can stand on the beach to greet the onrushing horde, and praise them, as they devour me first.

Fighting ugly with ugly

As usual, I’m torn. Is the answer to one ugly, pretentious monument to superstition to put up another ugly, pretentious monument to superstition? It’s the strategy we seem to be going with, anyway, because apparently too many people are able to grasp abstract principles. So the Satanists are trying to erect a statue to Baphomet in the Arkansas capitol.

I get it, really I do. They’re highlighting the hypocrisy of government favoring one religion over another. The Satanists understand that, too.

Satanic Arkansas cofounder Ivy Forrester, who helped organize the rally, said “if you’re going to have one religious monument up then it should be open to others, and if you don’t agree with that then let’s just not have any at all.”

It’s especially true when one of the advocates for putting up a Ten Commandments monument, Senator Jason Rapert, says this sort of thing.

In an online statement, Rapert said he respected the protesters’ First Amendment rights, but also called them “extremists” and said “it will be a very cold day in hell before an offensive statue will be forced upon us to be permanently erected on the grounds of the Arkansas State Capitol.”

OK, fine. I consider Southern Baptists to be extremists, and the Ten Commandments to be a terrible set of laws, and celebrating them with an offensive statue to be a violation of my rights. I guess every day is a cold day in Hell in America.

Besides, the Christian monument is also ugly. It looks like a damned tombstone.

Let’s just not have any at all, OK?

That’s a swift death on a cellular scale, not a slow one

There’s this article in the popular press titled “Scientists calculate the speed of death in cells, and it’s surprisingly slow”, and the title is backwards. It’s summarizing an article in Science magazine which measured the speed of a wave of apoptotic signaling in dying cells that concludes the exact opposite: cells die fast.

Apoptosis is an evolutionarily conserved form of programmed cell death critical for development and tissue homeostasis in animals. The apoptotic control network includes several positive feedback loops that may allow apoptosis to spread through the cytoplasm in self-regenerating trigger waves. We tested this possibility in cell-free Xenopus laevis egg extracts and observed apoptotic trigger waves with speeds of ~30 micrometers per minute. Fractionation and inhibitor studies implicated multiple feedback loops in generating the waves. Apoptotic oocytes and eggs exhibited surface waves with speeds of ~30 micrometers per minute, which were tightly correlated with caspase activation. Thus, apoptosis spreads through trigger waves in both extracts and intact cells. Our findings show how apoptosis can spread over large distances within a cell and emphasize the general importance of trigger waves in cell signaling.

To put that in context, 30 µm/min is more than 40,000 µm/day, or 40mm/day. Back in the day when I’d stick proteins in one end of a cell and wait for them to get to the other end, we’d estimate that the rate of transport was a couple of millimeters per day — so if you were working with an axon that was a couple of centimeters long, you might have to wait a week or two for a complete traverse. I’m impressed with 30 µm/min.

Another way to look at it is that if your typical cell is about 10µm across, once the apoptotic enzymes in one spot are activated, the whole cell is self-destructing in 20 seconds. The pop sci article uses a different example: “That means, for instance, that a nerve cell, whose body can reach a size of 100 micrometers, could take as long as 3 minutes and 20 seconds to die.” That’s still fast. That’s faster than diffusion. The authors ruled out diffusion as the mechanism, and suggest that it’s a wave of activation.

The unusual size of the Xenopus egg raises the question of how an all-or-none, global process such as apoptosis spreads through the cell. One possibility is that apoptosis spreads through the egg by random walk diffusion, ultimately taking over all of the cytoplasm. A second possibility is suggested by the existence of multiple positive and double-negative feedback loops in the regulatory network that controls apoptosis. These loops may allow apoptosis to propagate through self-regenerating trigger waves. Trigger waves are propagating fronts of chemical activity that maintain a constant speed and amplitude over large distances. They can arise when bistable biochemical reactions are subject to diffusion or, more generally, when bistability or something akin to bistability (e.g., excitability or relaxation oscillation) is combined with a spatial coupling mechanism (e.g., diffusion or cell-cell communication). Familiar examples include action potentials; calcium waves; and the spread of a fire through a field, a favorable allele through a population, or a meme through the internet. Trigger waves are an important general mechanism for long-range biological communication, and apoptotic trigger waves may allow death signals to spread rapidly and without diminishing in amplitude, even through a cell as large as a frog egg.

That makes sense. The apoptotic enzymes are distributed throughout the cell in an inactive state at all times; you don’t have to physically move the proteins around, you just have to switch one on, which then switches on its neighbor, which switches on its neighbor, and so on.

I’ve seen many cells die, as I’m watching them in the microscope. It’s always impressively swift and thorough: one minute, round, plump healthy cell; next minute, membranes are blebbing out all over the place, the cytoplasm goes all granular and curdled, and at the speed of light I’m cussing over yet another failed experiment.

I’m not sure why the editor or whoever slapped that confusing title on the article. There may have been some confusion about scale: a 2 meter tall human doesn’t die by the propagation of a signal from a single point on a cell, spreading at a rate of 40mm/day (if it worked that way, you’d stub your toe, a cell would die, and you’d have to wait a month and a half for the death signal to reach your brain). That would be slow. Multicellular organisms die by systemic failure of a network, not the progressive collapse, cell by cell, of all of its components.

It’s a war over education

Keep this in mind when you see so-called intellectuals like the gang at PragerU, or Jordan Peterson, or just about any Republican, demonizing universities as the domain of cultural Marxists with entire disciplines in the humanities and social sciences that need to be razed to the ground. They’re not stupid. They know exactly what they’re doing. Wrecking the electorate’s ability to think and process information is what keeps them rich and in power.

Do we support bombing school buses full of children?

Apparently, we do. The US is part of this Saudi-led coalition killing civilians in Yemen, and an American-made 500lb bomb was dropped on a bus with 40 kids on their way to a field trip, killing most of them.

This is just the latest string, unfortunately, of really brutal attacks on civilians in Yemen. It is not the worst of its kind in terms of the numbers of people killed, but certainly because all of the—40 out of the 51 people who were killed were children, it really is just an extreme form of this Saudi-led coalition bombing in Yemen. Here were these kids on a school trip. They were excited. There’s footage—we see them laughing and really being excited. Some of the parents said that they couldn’t really sleep the night before because they were so looking forward to—and here’s the sad part—they’re going to a cemetery just to be able to enjoy some time outside. And as the bus entered a busy market, it was targeted by the Saudi-led coalition and most of these children were killed. Of course, we know that the U.S. is part of the Saudi-led coalition, so we are in fact responsible, just as much as the Saudis and Emiratis are, in the bombing of those children.

You might be wondering how we can justify our participation in these crimes. Have no fear! The excuses are flowing faster than the blood of shattered children. Here’s an AP reporter explaining the logic of the attack.

What is very hard to determine in Yemen is what the children were doing. We worked on covering Yemen since 2015. We know that the Saudi-led coalition has bombed civilian targets all the time—markets, hospitals, schools. This is not a surprise. But we also know that the Houthis are actively recruiting the children and then they send them to the front lines. And the question marks here that are not answered yet—what were the children doing at the time?

There are no schools right now at Yemen. There are no buses carrying children from one school to the house. This is a luxury. The children were visiting a cemetery, and that is where they promote the whole notion of jihad and martyrism. So I mean, on one hand, the Saudi-led coalition is blamed for killing the civilians and this has been ongoing without any—no question about it. But at the same time, we have a look at the other side of the picture and see what the Houthis were doing with the children.

Dude. I’m having flashbacks, man. I grew up during the Vietnam War (I was too young to go, fortunately, but this stuff was in the news all the time), and I remember all the rationalizations for dropping napalm on villages. This is the same old story: we don’t know exactly what these kids were doing, but we can imagine all kinds of nefarious schemes, so let’s pretend after the fact that they were all evil terrorists in training. It is all too familiar.

Let’s ask a Yemeni scholar to reply to that.

To just quickly respond to what your guest just said, it doesn’t really matter what the children were doing. They were children, they were in summer school and for the Saudi-led coalition to bomb a bus full of children is a war crime, regardless of what the children were doing.

Exactly. We’re done. It’s inexcusable.

But he does go on, about all the other children killed in this war.

And to talk about really what the U.S. intervention in Yemen looks like, we know what it looks like. We know the devastation that it has caused. Yemen is falling and all of the services have been failing. 113,000 children died in 2016 and 2017 alone of starvation and preventable diseases such as cholera. What we need from the Senate, what we need from Congress right now is to continue to push toward ending the U.S. involvement in Yemen, given how much the Saudis and the Emiratis rely on U.S. support, on U.S. weapons, on U.S. maintaining and repairing of their aircraft, on U.S. midair refueling and on U.S. targeting assistance.

We know that they cannot continue to wage war on Yemen without extensive U.S. assistance, and Congress needs to act quickly to continue to introduce resolutions in the Senate and in the House to push the U.S. out of Yemen.

The United States has been awfully good at minimizing blood shed on our side, and awfully good at maximizing blood shed and terror in other places. Can we stop, please?