Only a fool would think they found the tomb of Jesus

Perhaps the only good result of the dissolution of Scienceblogs is that I’m no longer even distantly associated with National Geographic. I say this because, as usual, the magazine is indulging in religious pandering to the old people who still subscribe to it.

They are reporting on the age of “Jesus’ tomb”. That is, they found some mortar in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that dates back to Roman times…which is not news. Jerusalem was a Roman city in Roman times, it contains many ancient buildings, and finding Roman structures is not evidence that this particular hole in the ground is the specific tomb of a specific executed criminal in 33AD, nor that a slab of rock is specifically where Jesus was laid out after death. The mortar was dated to 345AD, which compounds the confusion — how is the erection of a temple 300 years after the purported execution evidence that this is Jesus’ hole in the ground?

Also, the identity of this particular spot was generated by a Christian zealot, Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine, who went swanning about Jerusalem around 325AD, pointing at rocks and sticks and random plots of ground and declaring them to be sacred Christian treasures. She claimed to have found the True Cross™, the True Ropes™ that bound Jesus to the cross, the True Nails™ that staked him to the cross, the True Tunic™ that Jesus wore, and the True Tomb™ where he was buried, purportedly briefly. It’s all nonsense and not credible, but NatGeo makes it a big feature in their magazine, and it’s also going to be the subject of a documentary on the National Geographic Channel on Sunday.

It’s part of the tradition. Helena and Constantine contrived a set of fake holy sites to fleece the ancient and medieval rubes, and NatGeo regularly contrives phony stories about Jesus to fleece the more modern, but still equally gullible, rubes.

Our president is a certifiable madman

The other day, he tweeted something from a site called MAGAPILL, because they’d posted something praising him for his ‘accomplishments’. Here’s what else MAGAPILL endorses.

It’s an astonishing expression of paranoid insanity. You can get lost in all the bizarre details.

We’re using HAARP, DEWs, and satellite lasers to control the weather. GMO crops are agents of control. Lone gunmen are false flags to encourage gun control.

We have off-planet secret space programs. CERN is somehow tied to 666? Bilderbergers, Knights Templar, and Luciferian Rituals. George Soros. What is it with George Soros? I don’t know anything about Soros. To me, he’s an old guy with an undeservedly large fortune, just like all the other rich fucks, nothing more. That he sometimes endorses progressive causes doesn’t seem to warrant the foaming-at-the-mouth hatred he gets.

I’m also bewildered by the fondness of MRAs and Nazis for an old Keanu Reeves movie. Why all the Matrix allusions? It’s really strange that the fascists of today saw a movie by Lilly and Lana Wachowski and decided that yes, that was the uniform for their movements.

Everything about these guys, Donald Trump included, simply screams warped and dangerously demented perception of reality. And they’re running the country? Goddamn.

If you really want to zoom in on that mess, here’s a link.

I expressed myself about Genesis: Paradise Lost

In case you don’t want to listen to a whole half hour of this, here’s my concluding statement:

Look. I’m an atheist. This stuff plays directly into my hands — if your religion demands that every statement in your holy book must be absolutely, inarguably true, and that your entire faith hinges on a complete lack of metaphor, poetry, allusion, and analogy in that book — that it is as dry and literal and factual as a table of measures in an engineering text — then I’ve got you. I am going to win over your children to my side, and you know it.

As an atheist, I’m often told that I don’t understand your religion. But I do. I understand it better than the fanatical literalists, anyway. Religion has a long history of struggling to reconcile reality and belief, to find humanity’s place in a largely unknown and complex and frequently hostile universe. If there is any saving grace in faith at all, it is that it is an attempt to find a rock of certainty in the unpredictable chaos of life — it is aspirational, a search for truth. As such, religion changes over time. It evolves.

Where it fails is when people like Ham and the Hovinds give up on the search and the struggle and decide that they have an absolute lock on an irrevocable and ultimate truth, one that will no longer bend to the evidence, that will no longer care about the nature of reality, but only the nature of one antique interpretation of the words of a book. They will not change any more. They will cling stubbornly to this one unmoving stone of dogma, and they will insist that everything else is wrong. They will close their eyes and grasp tighter and tighter to that one illusion of certainty as it crumbles around them. By refusing to bend, they commit themselves to someday breaking.

The movie goes on like this for another hour and a half: more tiresome and tired old creationist arguments interspersed with brief episodes of bad CGI accompanied by a slow, lugubrious voice of god. It ends with another 10 or 15 minutes of fast cuts between their cast members, all testifying and preachifying about the glory of god and how lovely Jesus makes them feel.

It just makes me terribly sad. These are lost minds committed to battling against the real world.

A delicate exercise

It must be tricky to critique flat Earth stories, which are risibly goofy and in defiance of the evidence, when you personally believe in young Earth stories, which are just as idiotic, but Danny Faulkner of Answers in Genesis tries. He attended a flat earth conference, and what’s remarkable about his essay is how gingerly he treads. Make no mistake, Faulkner does not believe in this flat earth crap, he gives a few specific criticisms of some of their rationalizations, and it is not currently the policy of Answers in Genesis to support flat earth claims (they say the Bible does not claim the Earth is flat), but give them time — if flat-earthers become numerous enough to be fleeced, expect even more niceness from AiG.

It’s just the irony of it all. Faulkner was getting a little taste of how loony these fringe Bible kooks look to the rest of us, with their weird claims that flout all the evidence, but are fervently held solely because they connect them to their religious beliefs. No, the Bible doesn’t flat out state that the Earth is flat, but it is a reasonably inferred part of the mythology, and there are all kinds of hints that the ancient authors modeled the world that way; it also doesn’t come right out and say that the Earth is only 6000 years old, but it is also clear that the ancient authors had no concept of deep time, and so AiG has inferred and imposed a set of interpretations on the Bible that bolster their preferred preconceptions. There is no difference between flat-earthers and young-earthers in their methodology or their biases or their abuse of science.

There’s also the lack of perspective. I’ve attended creationist events, and this is exactly what they sound like: disappointingly vague, reliant entirely on religious testimonies and that damnable Christian persecution complex.

I was a bit disappointed by the content of the conference. I had expected that I would hear and see information about flat-earth that I hadn’t encountered already, but that wasn’t the case. Many of the presentations largely were personal testimonies of how people had come to believe in flat earth. Hence, I didn’t learn much about the flat-earth model that I didn’t already know. However, I did learn much about the flat-earth movement itself. In conversations and in the presentations, I learned how people came to lose jobs, friends, and even family members once they, in their own words, “came out of the closet about flat earth.” Therefore, many of the people in attendance clearly viewed the meeting as a safe refuge where they could meet ostracized people like themselves. This clearly brought joy to many attendees, and I suppose the last thing these people would do would be to castigate someone in their midst who isn’t a flat-earther, provided that person behaved as a guest.

I’ve never seen a creationist talk that wasn’t thickly larded with personal testimonies about their religious beliefs, that didn’t end with pious ranting about Jesus, and that wasn’t full of offended indignation that those wicked seculars wouldn’t let them preach the Gospel in public schools.

If you want some real fun, Faulkner mentions this nice flat-earther he met, named Noel Hadley. He’s a hoot. He thinks Francis Crick learned about the structure of DNA from LSD-fueled sex parties, Peruvian shamans, ancient Egyptians, and snake myths.

But let’s not forget, the Egyptians also had a part in Crick’s discovery. Did Pharaoh not wear a cobra on his crown as a symbol of the divine word and third eye—the pineal gland—by which true hidden knowledge might be discovered to the devoted initiate? In his book, The Secret in the Bible, author Tony Bushby suggests the capstone of the Great Pyramid was once a clear crystal or glass that produced a visible beacon of light from its apex. He writes: “Whenever a light is shone down into a glass pyramid in exact scale or proportion as the Great Pyramid, a ‘Rainbow Serpent’ is created. The light provides a type of force or energy that, in turn, creates the vertical spiral of light, a serpent upraised, invisible in rock, but visible in a clear substance. That is what the Ancient Egyptian Priesthood meant when they said, ‘A serpent lies coiled in the Great Pyramid.’” Bushby’s conclusion is as you might now suspect. The Rainbow Serpent, directly referenced by the priesthood, was a double helix like representing Francis Crick’s strand of DNA.

Every continent seems to have a role in ancient serpent worship. Claude Lévi-Strauss writes of the Aztecs: “In Aztec, the word coatl means both ‘serpent’ and ‘twin.’ The name Quetzalcoatl can thus be interpreted either as ‘Plumed serpent’ or ‘Magnificent twin.’” Throughout shamanic religions, from Australia to Tibet and eastern Asia, back into Egypt again, throughout Africa, and finally North and South America, visions of “spiral ladders” or “braided ropes” cannot be overlooked either. Authors Mircea Eliade, Willard R. Trask, and Wendy Doniger write in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, “the symbolism of the rope, like that of the ladder, necessarily implies communication between sky and earth. It is by means of a rope or a ladder (as, too, by a vine, a bridge, a chain of arnyaw, etc.) that the gods descend to earth and men go up to the sky.”

Right. The guy who illustrated his article with this abomination knows a lot about DNA.

Danny Faulkner, meet Noel Hadley. You two are indistinguishably crazy twins, and you don’t even know it.

Quick report on the Genesis movie

As promised, I saw this crappy movie last night. I’ve got a pile of notes, and will provide a more thorough review this weekend, but just to quickly summarize:

  • There’s no story here. It’s built around the 6-day creation myth with a deep-voiced sonorous slow-talker telling the story of Genesis 1, but it’s almost like an afterthought. It’s a framing device that isn’t actually used effectively as a narrative structure.

  • The real story is that they interviewed a bunch of creationists, who sit alone in different rooms and who rant at the camera, saying stupid, familiarly tiresome things. They then sliced up these interviews into tiny snippets, interleaved them with each other and with some CGI, and then tossed them in a large mixing bowl with some vinaigrette. This is called “editing”.

  • The CGI is terrible. Seriously cheap. Everything from dinosaurs to humans has a kind of rubbery, plasticky surface in shades of brown — although Adam is a notably pale shade of brown.
    It’s very low rez, too. There are a couple of scenes where they’re showing off hominid skulls for comparison, and the detail is pathetic — they look like the kind of cheap plastic skulls you’d pick up from the Walmart Halloween decorating section.

  • They had a dodge for when the CGI was egregiously bad: defocus! They were constantly blurring everything, which I suppose they thought was artsy, but was clearly to hide the fact that they couldn’t render convincing detail worth a crap. They also did this with the creationist interviews: they’d occasionally blur the person, or slowly move the camera around, and then you’d end up with this segment of the interview where the subject was drifting off to the right side of the screen.

  • One of the reasons they’d move the subject out of the center was that they had these cheesy, 3-D animated titles that would rotate and also drift — so you’d start with camera on the subject, then you’d see these bronzey metallic letters appear on the left, like “ENCE”, let’s say, and you’d be wondering what that was about, and the camera would wander over to the floating keyword as the speaker was ignored, so that you could finally figure out that the magic word was “EVIDENCE” or whatever. It was painfully gimmicky.

I’ll go through some of the actual content this weekend, but for now, let it suffice to say that there was nothing new here, they were creationists making the same old tired assertions from ignorance that they’ve been saying since the 1960s — dating methods are circular, there are no genetic mechanisms for increasing the amount of information in an organism, we can explain all of geology with the Great Flood catastrophe, if you don’t accept Genesis then you’ll reject the Gospels and burn in Hell, you know, the stuff you can get in a Chick tract. It was nothing but old creationist arguments presented in a particularly incoherent manner with irrelevant computer graphics.

Oh, and it ends with so much Jesus. All the interview subjects babble on at length about salvation and God and Our Lord Jesus Christ and how God clothed himself in flesh in order to redeem our sins by dying a horrible, painful death, and that shit never makes any sense.

I know I’m going to regret this

But I’m going to The Genesis Movie tonight. I figure this is my only chance before it is relegated to church basements around the country. I’ll be at the Parkwood 18 theater in Waite Park if anyone wants to join me in misery.

Just so you know, though, I do follow the Prime Directive in these events — no interference with the primitive, crude, barbaric civilizations that put on these ignorant demonstrations. I’m there to observe; I might ask questions of citizens who are open to that sort of thing, but otherwise, only respectful behavior while I take notes on the foolishness on display. If your intent is disruption, no no no, stay away from me.
There is a good chance I’ll get thrown out even if I’m quiet and polite, so I don’t need need any assistance from rowdy compatriots.

Busy busy busy — #MnCOSE17 and #Skepticon

This day is just done. I’m at the MnSTA conference on science education today, speaking about the state of evolution education this afternoon (there is bad news, and there is good news, but the bad news is surprisingly manageable). Once I’m done babbling, I’m rushing off through rush hour traffic to catch a plane to Skepticon, sorta. In my quest for a cheap flight that was compatible with my awkwardly full schedule, I’m catching a flight to Baltimore (?), with a connection to Atlanta, and from there to Springfield, Missouri. This is too complicated. I’m already scheduled to not get in until tomorrow morning, and I have a feeling that something is going to break and who knows when I’ll arrive. Everyone will be all partied out by the time I drag myself in.

Anyway, you know the drill. Behave yourselves while I’m out of touch, spit venom at the trolls, and I’ll clean up the mess tomorrow morning.