Perverted Science

Writing for the Finance section of Townhall.com (wait, the Finance section?), Mark Baisley has great hopes for the future of science.

Galileo was a true scientist.

I like Wikipedia’s description, “He displayed a peculiar ability to ignore established authorities, most notably Aristotelianism. In broader terms, his work marked another step towards the eventual separation of science from both philosophy and religion; a major development in human thought. He was often willing to change his views in accordance with observation.”

Based on recent trends in education and politics, I predict that human thought in the 21st Century will progress even further with a new separation of science, this time from politics. Three recent, unrelated publications; a video study, a book, and a movie; give me encouragement that the contemporary version of geocentricism is about to get its comeuppance.

He bases this hope on three things: a video from Focus on the Family, a book by William Dembski, and the move Expelled.

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Gay Marriage in the 10th century Church?

I have to confess, I’m a bit skeptical of this story about St. Serge and St. Bacchus. But it is interesting.

While the pairing of saints, particularly in the early church, was not unusual, the association of these two men was regarded as particularly close. Severus of Antioch in the sixth century explained that “we should not separate in speech [Serge and Bacchus] who were joined in life.” More bluntly, in the definitive 10th century Greek account of their lives, St. Serge is openly described as the “sweet companion and lover” of St. Bacchus.

In other words, it confirms what the earlier icon implies, that they were a homosexual couple who enjoyed a celebrated gay marriage. Their orientation and relationship was openly accepted by early Christian writers. Furthermore, in an image that to some modern Christian eyes might border on blasphemy, the icon has Christ himself as their pronubus, their best man overseeing their gay marriage.

I have no doubt that gay relationships go back to long before there was a Judeo-Christian faith, but I have a hard time believing that the medieval Christian Church openly accepted and celebrated such relationships, let alone elevating the couple to sainthood with Jesus as their best man. I’d expect any gay love between them to be strictly in the closet.

Porn safer than religion

A study by antivirus giant Symantec reports that if your anti-malware protection isn’t quite up to snuff, you’re probably safer sticking to porn sites and avoiding those that serve up Bible studies and other ideological exhortations.

Websites with religious or ideological themes were found to have triple the average number of “threats” that those featuring adult content, according to Symantec.

The study reports that porn sites ranked 10th overall in the survey of sites most compromised by malware, and speculates that the purveyors of porn are keeping their shops cleaner in order to avoid discouraging repeat business.

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Gospel Disproof #47: The Bad Master

In Matthew 24 and Luke 12, Jesus is reported to have told a very interesting parable.

And the Lord said, “Who then is the faithful and sensible steward, whom his master will put in charge of his servants, to give them their rations at the proper time? Blessed is that slave whom his master finds so doing when he comes. Truly I say to you that he will put him in charge of all his possessions. But if that slave says in his heart, ‘My master will be a long time in coming,’ and begins to beat the slaves, both men and women, and to eat and drink and get drunk; the master of that slave will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he does not know, and will cut him in pieces, and assign him a place with the unbelievers. And that slave who knew his master’s will and did not get ready or act in accord with his will, will receive many lashes, but the one who did not know it, and committed deeds worthy of a flogging, will receive but few. From everyone who has been given much, much will be required; and to whom they entrusted much, of him they will ask all the more.

Like all parables, this is a story that’s supposed to be relevant to people’s everyday lives, and that highlights some important principle about how we relate to God. What’s interesting is that, even though the point of the parable is to encourage us to obey God (the master), Jesus ends up painting a pretty negative picture of what kind of master God really is. He had to, though, in order to keep the parable realistic.

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Gospel Disproof #46: On the proper use of beer and religion

In the book of Proverbs, chapter 31, we are instructed as to the proper use of beer and wine.

Let beer be for those who are perishing,
wine for those who are in anguish!
Let them drink and forget their poverty
and remember their misery no more.

Part of the attraction of alcoholic beverages is that alcohol physically deadens the brain, starting with the parts that allow you to perceive and reason clearly. If life is good, you don’t necessarily want that, because it diminishes your ability to experience and appreciate the good things available to you. But if life basically sucks, then maybe you are better off being too drunk to know it, just like the Bible says. On the other hand, some of us might suggest you’d be better off improving your life instead of just stupifying yourself to the point that you can no longer see how bad it really is.

What’s interesting is that you sometimes hear Christians arguing that their faith plays a similar role to beer and wine. What harm is there in faith, they ask, if it makes people feel better about their lives? Let them drink and forget their poverty and remember their misery no more.

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Gospel Disproof #45: A self-fulfilling prophecy

Back when I was an active member in the Church of Christ, I got myself in trouble with the pastor and the elders because I pointed out some discrepancies I’d found between what the church teaches and what it was actually practicing. For example, one of their big teachings is that the church has to have New Testament authorization for everything it does, and yet they’d taken it upon themselves to substitute grape juice instead of wine in the weekly communion. They had all kinds of arguments about why this exception—or “necessary inference,” as they called it—was ok, but these inferences were fairly easy to expose as mere rationalizations.

They, unsurprisingly, didn’t want to hear it, and the eldest of the elders took it upon himself to warn me about the error of my ways. “You think too much,” he declared. “You’re on the road to atheism. Everyone I’ve met who thought about the Bible like you do ended up as an atheist.” If he’d come up to be and literally dumped a bucket of ice cold water over my head, my emotional reaction (at the time) would not have been much different.

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Analytical thinking and religious belief

I bet we hear more about this one: a study at the University of British Columbia has found that analytical thinking actually decreases religious belief.

The study, which will appear in tomorrow’s issue of Science, finds that thinking analytically increases disbelief among believers and skeptics alike, shedding important new light on the psychology of religious belief…

Researchers used problem-solving tasks and subtle experimental priming – including showing participants Rodin’s sculpture The Thinker or asking participants to complete questionnaires in hard-to-read fonts – to successfully produce “analytic” thinking. The researchers, who assessed participants’ belief levels using a variety of self-reported measures, found that religious belief decreased when participants engaged in analytic tasks, compared to participants who engaged in tasks that did not involve analytic thinking.

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Kiss the Fourth Amendment good-bye

Wow, I thought the vote was supposed to be today, but it looks like CISPA has already been rushed through the House.

The measure, which some are calling the Son of SOPA, allows internet service providers to share information with the government, including the Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Agency, about cybersecurity threats it detects on the internet. An ISP is not required to shield any personally identifying data of its customers when it believes it has detected threats, which include attack signatures, malicious code, phishing sites or botnets. In short, the measure seeks to undo privacy laws that generally forbid ISPs from disclosing customer communications with anybody else unless with a court order.

Orwell was off by a few years, but he had the right general idea. Big Brother is going to be watching you. Purely in your own best interests of course.

Right.

CISPA facing amendments

The International Business Times is reporting some possible good news on the individual liberties front.

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act [CISPA] is the greatest potential threat to Internet freedom and privacy currently before the U.S. Congress, and many critics have been warning in recent weeks that it has the potential to do even more harm to Internet privacy than the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act would have done.

As such, the House is reigning in the bill in order to address some of the privacy concerns that have been raised by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), millions of petition-signers and other opponents around the globe.

We need to keep the pressure on, because there are a number of business and political interests that could make substantial profits if certain legal protections were stripped away from us. Attacks like SOPA and CISPA are going to continue, just like creationism. Our only hope is constant vigilance.