We’ve generally found that the scientific method is a useful tool for testing explanations, and apparently Catholics are envious, so they’ve evaluated their method for identifying supernatural phenomena and have come up with their own method, officially declaring changes in their protocols. Unfortunately, I struggled through a summary and haven’t been able to see exactly what’s new — the answer seems to be that they’re going to defer more to the authority of the Pope.

They are concerned that too many charlatans outside of the church are profiting from weird claims of supernatural manifestations of Catholic phantasms. That money should be going into Catholic coffers!

The Vatican’s doctrine office revised norms first issued in 1978, arguing that they were no longer useful or viable in the internet age. Nowadays, word about apparitions or weeping Madonnas travels quickly and can harm the faithful if hoaxers are trying to make money off people’s beliefs or manipulate them, the Vatican said.

The new norms make clear that such an abuse of people’s faith can be punishable canonically, saying, “The use of purported supernatural experiences or recognized mystical elements as a means of or a pretext for exerting control over people or carrying out abuses is to be considered of particular moral gravity.”

But there’s now denying that there are great sums of money to be made from wild-ass claims of apparitions appearing to the faithful. The Catholic church has profited from such claims for centuries.

When confirmed as authentic by church authorities, these otherwise inexplicable signs have led to a flourishing of the faith, with new religious vocations and conversions. That has been the case for the purported apparitions of Mary that turned Fatima, Portugal, and Lourdes, France, into enormously popular pilgrimage destinations.

Church figures who claimed to have experienced the stigmata wounds, including Padre Pio and Pope Francis’ namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, have inspired millions of Catholics even if decisions about their authenticity have been elusive.

Francis himself has weighed in on the phenomenon, making clear that he is devoted to the main church-approved Marian apparitions, such as Our Lady of Guadalupe, who believers say appeared to an Indigenous man in Mexico in 1531.

So the answer to this conundrum is to change the rules. Claims of supernatural events cannot be granted official status by local bishops, but must instead be reviewed and evaluated by a Vatican committee, and if acceptable must be rubber-stamped by the Pope. I don’t think they will be assessed on the evidence, but rather, on compatibility with church doctrine and potential to generate revenue. Of course that’s not the excuse the defenders of the Catholic church use.

Robert Fastiggi, who teaches Marian theology at the Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, Michigan and is an expert on apparitions, said at first glance that requirement might seem to take authority away from the local bishop.

“But I think it’s intended to avoid cases in which the Holy See might feel prompted to overrule a decision of the local bishop,” he said.

“What is positive in the new document is the recognition that the Holy Spirit and the Blessed Mother are present and active in human history,” he said. “We must appreciate these supernatural interventions but realize that they must be discerned properly.”

Right. Ghosts are real, if “discerned properly.” I guess I haven’t been discerning right.

True Freethinkers™ also wouldn’t wear a baseball cap backwards.

We should all go! Registration is open, and of course it’s free!

I wonder if Atheists for Liberty will be there?

I’m trying to figure out if I can manage to make it myself — this is a busy working summer. Maybe if I take the train? There must be a train from Minneapolis to St Louis, right?

She said, the longer you wear a mask, the more unhealthy you get.

She thinks vaccines wreck chromosomes. For those of you who say you are Christians, what will your life review look like at the end of your life? Will the Lord say to you: ‘You coerced people into being injected with this gene-modification technology that irreversibly disrupts your chromosomes?

She claims that that there is “some sort of an interface, ‘yet to be defined’ interface, between what’s being injected in these shots and all of the 5G towers, and that the vaccines have caused thousands of deaths in the U.S.

She also says I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures all over the internet of people who’ve had these shots, and now they’re magnetized. They can put a key on their forehead, it sticks. They can put spoons and forks all over them, and they can stick. Because now we think that there’s a metal piece to that.

She thinks cities are liquifying dead bodies and pouring them into the water supply.

She has a mission.

In one session, Tenpenny implores God to release the U.S. from the tyranny of the mask, argues America is founded on your word and expresses hope it will return to being one country under God. In another, she refers to vaccines as a bioweapon to damage your children created by satanists who allow Black Lives Matter and antifa activists to operate as a front to drive socialism through the heart of America, which turns into communism.

I’m sure you’ll all be relieved to know that the state medical board has restored Sherri Tenpenny’s license to practice medicine in the state of Ohio.

It’s fun to watch religious conservatives grapple with pop culture, because they really don’t get it. Today is the goofy pseudo-holiday called May the Fourth (it’s not a real holiday, ‘k? It’s a silly riff on the phrase “May the force be with you from Star Wars). The big dumb dorks at Answers in Genesis would like to get in on the fun in the worst possible way. Like a particularly clueless high schooler showing up at the prom to tell everyone dancing is stupid, their way of celebrating a fake holiday is to announce that Star Wars is fake.

We know, guy.

The AiG approach, though, is to “prove” that intelligent aliens don’t exist using theological “logic”. They imagine a group of fictitious aliens finding a Bible.

Let’s consider physical, intelligent beings like Wookies, Klingons, or other “humanlike” beings. Although they definitely make for good entertainment in sci-fi movies and shows, the concept of advanced alien races is theologically problematic. Let me explain using the following (imaginary) scenario, with Chewbacca, Superman, and Spock reading the Bible: can these intelligent aliens be redeemed from the curse? (See Genesis 3 and Romans 8.) In other words, does God’s plan of salvation apply to them?

These imaginary aliens would not think about that at all, any more than you would wonder whether you were going to be rewarded with some kind of paradise if you found some book of mythology. Are you wondering if you’ve been sufficiently “cleared” to earn Scientology’s afterlife? Probably not. Chewbacca is going to be similarly unconcerned about meeting weird-ass Christian criteria. However, AiG’s theology says poor Chewie is either “fallen” or irrelevant.

Romans 8 makes it clear that Adam’s sin affected all creation—not just mankind. So then we have to ask the question: are these high-level sentient aliens fallen? If not, then they’re redundant. God already has the angels (the cherubim, seraphim, etc.). And even if these aliens have never sinned, they would still suffer the effects of sin, suffering under the bondage of corruption—despite having never sinned!

So are they claiming that the Bible accuses the Wookies of Kashyyk of being slammed with the guilt of sin when Eve bit into the apple? Because it doesn’t say that. No human has any knowledge of aliens on other worlds, so it would be really weird if Moses, the putative author of certain books of the Bible, had enumerated all these unrelated alien creatures. So this is a rather stupid assertion. Also, sin is not an actual phenomenon — it’s invective used against certain behaviors, rather than something intrinsic to humans or aliens — so claiming it’s a property of people as well as Wookies is not demonstrable.

As for being irrelevant…that’s an ugly anthropocentric and often racist attitude.

Obviously, it makes no sense to have intelligent beings—who suffer because of Adam’s sin—but cannot be saved! Christ is able to redeem man because he represents man by taking upon himself a second nature—as being fully God and fully man. Christ is the God-man (i.e., he’s not the “God-Klingon” or the “God-Wookie”).

“Obviously” and “it makes no sense” are phrases no fundamentalist/evangelical Christian should ever use. The whole premise of their religion, that a god turned into a man who died and thereby allowed everyone to go to heaven, “obviously” “makes no sense.”

AiG somehow turns this strange twisted logic into proof that aliens don’t exist, because “it makes no sense.”

Simply put, the work of Jesus cannot atone for the sins of advanced alien beings. And so, the idea of intelligent life existing on other planets is completely unbiblical! Actually, these kinds of issues highlight the problem of trying to mix unbiblical ideas into a biblical worldview. I mean, can you imagine a gospel message that begins with: “Long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” No, that would obviously trivialize the gospel!

And speaking of the gospel, I should also quickly mention that it’s unbiblical to believe Jesus somehow visited multiple alien worlds, lived there, died for them, rose again . . . and repeated this process on each world. In other words, Jesus dying multiple times is NOT biblical! The Bible makes it very clear that Jesus died once (e.g., Romans 6:10; Hebrews 9:28; 1 Peter 3:18).

There’s an awful lot of bullshit excused as “biblical”, so “unbiblical” is not the condemnation they think it is.

They then leap to rebut an argument no one has made. What about unintelligent life? The argument from sin and salvation wouldn’t apply, so maybe tauntauns could exist? Nope. Any planets orbiting those 10²³ stars in the universe must be completely sterile.

…recall from Genesis 1 that God created everything for man’s benefit and enjoyment. In other words, we have dominion over God’s creation (Genesis 1:28), which is also stated in Psalm 8. So the question would be: do we have dominion over those plants and animals on alien worlds? What purpose would they serve for us? So, for this reason alone, I believe it’s unlikely that there’s any non-intelligent life out in the cosmos.

So trillions of dead planets many light years away must have been put there for “man’s benefit and enjoyment.” How does that work, anyway? What benefit do I get from an unreachably distant scorched cinder orbiting Betelgeuse, pray tell? Doesn’t the fact that I don’t, and that I don’t have dominion over distant planets, show that their interpretation of the Bible is already wrong?

Brian Cox (not the astronomer) is an actor who often plays brusque, rude, loud characters, and he’s usually, at least superficially, a bad guy. So of course he turns out to be an atheist in real life.

Now, he’s got some spicy words for the Bible and religion, which he ultimately calls “stupid”—mostly because of the “patriarchal” lens it puts on the world.

“We created that idea of God and we created it as a control issue,” he continued on the podcast. “It’s also a patriarchal issue. That’s how it started and it’s essentially patriarchal. We haven’t given enough scope to the matriarchy and I think we need to move matriarchically.”

“We have to go more towards a matriarchy because the mothering thing is the thing which is the real conditioning of our lives,” he explained. “Our fathers don’t condition us ‘cause they’re too bloody selfish, but our mothers have to because they have an umbilical [cord],” he said, adding that women’s “umbilical relationship” to the their children contrasts a father’s: “Men do not have that, they’re just sperm banks—moveable sperm banks that walk around and come and go.”

A “matriarchal” society makes a lot more sense, Cox said, but the “propaganda” in the Bible gets in society’s way of this world view. “It’s Adam and Eve,” he continued, “The propaganda goes right the way back—The Bible is one of the worst books ever, for me, from my point of view because it starts with the idea that Adam’s rib—that out of Adam’s rib, this woman was created. I don’t believe it… ‘cause they’re stupid.”

Instead of this patriarchal worldview taken from the bible, Cox said, society should “honor” women and “give them their place.”

He ultimately concludes that people “need” religion because “they need some kind of truth,” but “they don’t need to be told lies.” And The Bible is “not the truth,” he stressed.

That’s all a bit overly simplistic, but he was on a roll.

Maybe the other one, Professor Brian Cox, will get crankier as he gets older and less pretty and grows into his name?

Villains love dichotomies.

I am reminded of the way Answers in Genesis builds up this phony definition of Real Science™ so they can declare that conclusions they don’t like are Fake Science.