Every sperm is sacred

A legislator in Mississippi has filed a bill in the state legislature titled “Contraception Begins at Erection Act”.

As written by Sen. Bradford Blackmon, the bill would make it “unlawful for a person to discharge genetic material without the intent to fertilize an embryo.”

There are also fines involved, the third strike resulting in the loss of $10,000 from the perpetrator.

In a statement to WLBT News, Blackmon wrote, “All across the country, especially here in Mississippi, the vast majority of bills relating to contraception and/or abortion focus on the woman’s role when men are fifty percent of the equation.

This bill highlights that fact and brings the man’s role into the conversation. People can get up in arms and call it absurd but I can’t say that bothers me.”

I am not sure if he is being genuine or this is a parody meant to highlight the extreme measures that anti-abortion extremists will go to to control the bodies of women.

Either way, it reminded me of this scene from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life (1983).

Kurt Gödel’s belief in the afterlife

Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) was a powerful logician whose contributions to logic, mathematics, and philosophy were immense. He was deeply interested in those aspects of philosophy that touched on religion and one of those was his ontological proof for God’s existence.

The argument is in a line of development that goes back to Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109). St. Anselm’s ontological argument, in its most succinct form, is as follows: “God, by definition, is that for which no greater can be conceived. God exists in the understanding. If God exists in the understanding, we could imagine Him to be greater by existing in reality. Therefore, God must exist.” A more elaborate version was given by Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716); this is the version that Gödel studied and attempted to clarify with his ontological argument.
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Gödel is not known to have told anyone about his work on the proof until 1970, when he thought he was dying. In February, he allowed Dana Scott to copy out a version of the proof, which circulated privately. In August 1970, Gödel told Oskar Morgenstern that he was “satisfied” with the proof, but Morgenstern recorded in his diary entry for 29 August 1970, that Gödel would not publish because he was afraid that others might think “that he actually believes in God, whereas he is only engaged in a logical investigation (that is, in showing that such a proof with classical assumptions (completeness, etc.) correspondingly axiomatized, is possible).”[2] Gödel died January 14, 1978. Another version, slightly different from Scott’s, was found in his papers. It was finally published, together with Scott’s version, in 1987.

(For more see Oppy, Graham. 2017. “Ontological Arguments.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (Summer 2017 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta.)
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Film review: The Name of the Rose (1986)

I saw this film a long time ago, soon after it came out. I did not remember much of the details except that it was dark and moody and set in a remote abbey in the Middle Ages and involved the murder of several monks that a visiting monk William of Baskerville (played by Sean Connery) and his assistant Adso of Melk (a very young Christian Slater) try to solve.

I read the book of the same name by Umberto Eco last month, and disliked it for its tedious and lengthy discussions of esoterica involving theology and heresy and religious and political intrigue of that period. The main redeeming feature of the second edition of the book was that it had a postscript by the author explaining how and why he wrote it the way he did, including his choice of the title. While it did not improve the book’s standing in my opinion, it did shed light on the writing process and what an author seeks to achieve.
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Book review: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (1980)

The setting is November 1327 in an abbey in the mountains of northern Italy. A highly learned English Franciscan monk William of Baskerville (formerly an Inquisitor) arrives with his aide, an Italian Benedictine novice named Adso of Melk to mediate a dispute between religious factions and investigate rumored claims of heresy. But just before their arrival, there is a mysterious death of a monk who falls from a high tower in the library. It is not clear if it was suicide or he was pushed but soon there occur a series of gruesome deaths so that it becomes clear that there is a serial killer at work and William sets about trying to unravel the mystery. He becomes convinced that the answer lies with a book that has been hidden away in a labyrinth in the fortress-like library which is zealously guarded by the librarian and the abbot to prevent anyone gaining access to some of the books.

William is described early in the book as having powers of observation and analysis that enables his to reach conclusions that amaze others (including Adso) by their perspicacity. He is an admirer of Francis Roger Bacon and William of Occam and the scientific methods they demonstrated. He is clearly modeled on Sherlock Holmes (his name being a hint) and Adso, as the narrator of the book, is his Watson chronicling his actions. So far, so good. One is prepared for a murder mystery set in a remote abbey in the Middle Ages.
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Even demons hate Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson is a very strange man, espousing all manner of hateful ideas and conspiracies. But his latest admission really takes his absurdity to a whole new level. He said that about a year and a half ago, while asleep one night he was attacked by a demon that left claw marks on his body.

No, really.

When I first read this news item yesterday, I thought that this was some kind of childish prank because the previous day was Halloween and that he would later admit that it was his idea of a joke. But no, this is something he said in a documentary about to be released.

Watch the clip where he talks about this.


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Chatting with Jehovah’s Witnesses

On Saturday morning there was a knock on my door. This is unusual since the condominium complex that I live in is not on a through street and hence the only people who knock on doors tend to be delivery people and I rarely order anything. When I opened the door, there were two women aged 65 or thereabouts standing there and I immediately guessed that they were Jehovah’s Witnesses.

After saying hello, one woman (let’s call her A) asked me whether I read the Bible and I said that I used to but no longer. She asked me why and I said that it no longer made any sense to me. The other woman (let’s call her B) then asked me whether I stopped reading because of the way that the world was these days and I said no, that was not it, but that I could not reconcile the idea of a god with what the laws of science said about how the world works. B was curious and asked me what scientific field I was referring to and I said physics.
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Great moments in child psychology

Louisiana has passed a law that requires the Ten Commandments to be posted in every classroom. Needless to say, that law has been challenged as violating the Establishment Clause of First Amendment clause of the US constitution. However, the governor Jeff Landry says that if parents have a problem with it, the solution is simple.

The far-right Louisiana governor, Jeff Landry, has told parents who don’t want the Ten Commandments hung in up classrooms across the state – as now required by law there – to tell their children to “not look at them”.

The Republican’s remarks came at a news conference on Monday defending the mandate, about two months after Louisiana became the first state in the country to order the Ten Commandments to be displayed in all public school classrooms.
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Shortly after the order was signed, several Louisiana families, backed by civil rights groups, filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to block the order. The families, who are made up of a coalition of Jewish, Christian, Unitarian Universalist and non-religious parents, argued that the law is unconstitutional. They contend that the law violates US supreme court precedent as well as both the constitutional protection to freely exercise one’s religion and the prohibition against establishing a state religion.

We all know that the best way to stop children from looking at something that is easily visible is to tell them not to look at it, right?

Also, politicians like Landry are the ones pushing for the banning in school libraries of books that they think some parents might object to. Why don’t they use the same logic and say that if those parents dislike certain books, they should simply tell their children not to look at them

Problem solved, right?

Getting religion back in schools

Religious conservatives in the US are determined to get Christianity back into the school curriculum. For the longest time, they were on the retreat as the US Supreme Court pushed back against attempts to use public schools as vehicles to teach religious ideas, arguing that the First Amendment to the constitution that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” implied that no agency of the state could show preference to one religion over another or to religion over no religion. Thus not only was teaching the Bible excluded but even religious ideas such as intelligent design creationism could not be taught in science classes as an alternative to the theory of evolution.
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Senseless deaths

Common sense would tell you that when temperatures rise to extraordinarily high levels, you should avoid exertion and stay indoors. The hajj pilgrimage in Mecca, Saudi Arabia undertaken by devout Muslims is done outdoors and is pretty grueling at the best of times. But when it is done during a heat wave, it is positively dangerous, and so it proved this year when temperatures reached 125F.

At least 550 pilgrims have died during the hajj, underscoring the gruelling nature of the pilgrimage which again unfolded in scorching temperatures this year.

At least 323 of those who died were Egyptians, most of them succumbing to heat-related illnesses, the two Arab diplomats coordinating their countries’ responses told AFP.

“All of them [the Egyptians] died because of heat” except for one who sustained fatal injuries during a minor crowd crush, one of the diplomats said, adding that the total figure came from the hospital morgue in the Al-Muaisem neighbourhood of Mecca.

At least 60 Jordanians have died, the diplomats said, up from an official tally of 41 given earlier on Tuesday by Amman.

The new deaths bring the total reported so far by multiple countries to 577, according to an AFP tally.

The diplomats said the total at the morgue in Al-Muaisem, one of the biggest in Mecca, was 550.
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Saudi authorities have reported treating more than 2,000 pilgrims suffering from heat stress but have not updated that figure since Sunday and have not provided information on fatalities.

At least 240 pilgrims were reported dead by various countries last year, most of them Indonesians.

The hajj is one of the five pillars of Islam and all Muslims with the means to must complete it at least once.

The pilgrimage is increasingly affected by climate breakdown, according to a Saudi study published last month that said temperatures in the area where rituals are performed were rising 0.4C (0.72F) each decade.

Temperatures hit 51.8C at the Grand Mosque in Mecca on Monday, the Saudi national meteorology centre said.

It is madness to choose to go out in such temperatures. These people died because of their religious fervor.

What, no more Jesus on toast?

For the longest time, Catholic churches and individuals have made money from claims of the supernatural, such as religious statues weeping or bleeding or the image of Jesus appearing on toast or in stains on walls, people claiming to have seen visions of Mary, and so on. Some of these claims were given credence by local priests and bishops.

The Catholic church has decided that this nonsense has gone too far and is exposing the church to ridicule and has decided to crack down, at least on some of the sillier claims.

Apparitions of the Virgin Mary and weeping statues have been part of Catholicism for centuries, but the age of social media has prompted the Vatican to issue a crackdown against potential scams and hoaxes.

New rules issued on Friday say that only a pope, rather than local bishops, can declare apparitions and revelations to be “supernatural”. The document, Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena, updates previous guidance issued in 1978 that is now considered “inadequate”.
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There was “the possibility of believers being misled by an event that is attributed to a divine initiative but is merely the product of someone’s imagination, desire for novelty, tendency to fabricate falsehoods (mythomania), or inclination toward lying”.

The new rules strip bishops of the power to recognise the “supernatural” nature of apparitions and other purportedly divine events. Instead it offers bishops six potential conclusions, ranging from nihil obstat (nothing hinders), which would allow and even encourage popular devotion, to a declaration that a phenomenon is not supernatural.

Well, there goes a great source of amusement.