Here I go again, addressing the bad biology in Jordan Peterson’s claims. Don’t worry, I’m confident this will be the very last one — I’m just surprised anyone believes anything this guy says.

I’m home! I get one day of rest before charging on another venture, but I thought I’d let you know about some Important News. It’s an old story.

A billionaire-funded Christian organization is currently working to clone Jesus Christ after obtaining DNA from the Shroud of Turin and feel confident they will have a Jesus clone in 2016.

Which means, of course, that Jesus would now be in his Terrible Twos. I hope you’re ready for tantrums and loud shouts of “NO!”.

Although, actually, they may have hit a hitch or two. Reviewing their protocol, which is somewhat interesting and makes me wonder why fundamentalists haven’t seized on this idea before to hasten the Second Coming, there are substantial problems.

“The Jesus Has Returned Project is a private organization devoted to bringing about the Second Coming of Our Lord, Jesus Christ, as prophesied in the Bible,” the The Jesus Has Returned Project spokesman said. “Our intention is to clone Jesus, utilizing techniques pioneered at the Genetic Research Group in Switzerland, by taking an incorrupt cell from the Shroud of Turin, extracting its DNA, and inserting into an unfertilized human egg (oocyte), though the now-proven biological process called symbiotic cellular transfer. The fertilized egg, now the zygote of Jesus Christ, will be implanted into the womb of a young virginal woman (who has volunteered of her own accord), who will then bring the baby Jesus to term in a second Virgin Birth.”

Random thoughts:

• The shroud isn’t going to be a particularly rich source of Jesus cells. It would have had only brief, weak contact with the body, and probably contains far more cells from passing pilgrims and holy men over the centuries. You’re more likely to resurrect some 15th century priest who is not going to be very happy with the high expectations given to him.

• The shroud isn’t old enough — it’s been dated to the 13th century. You’re not going to find any Jesus cells at all. Although you may extract a few cells from the fraud who manufactured it, in which case the resurrected man, if such traits are at all hereditary, might be very happy to take advantage of your expectations.

• Haven’t the Shroudians argued that the imprint was produced by a burst of intense energy from the miracle that raised Jesus from the dead? Any cells might have been exposed to all kinds of ionizing radiation. Maybe you’d get Jesus — but it would be mutant Jesus. A tumorous, deformed Jesus. Which would be kind of cool, at least for the atheists.

• Unfortunately, we do not have a technique for extracting whole human genomes from dead cells and inserting them into enucleate cells. Transferring nuclei is one thing, but this is going to require large scale synthesis and reassembly of over 3 billion nucleotides. We can’t do that yet.

• I am intrigued by the notion of “incorrupt cells” from Jesus lurking in the Shroud. Does this imply that all of the, for instance, shed skin cells from Jesus were also brought back to life? What about toenail clippings? Does the site of Jesus’ barber shop contain still-living hair and follicle cells creeping about in the dust of the cellar? Are they independent cells still crawling about like amoeboid Jesi?

• I can see a serious theological issue here, too: 40 days after his resurrection, Jesus ascended into heaven. All of his old cells may have done so as well — we have to imagine that as Jesus rose bodily into the clouds, there was a corresponding ascension of all the flecks of sloughed tissue, the crusty socks, the gunk in the shower drain, sewer sludge in Jerusalem, all the accumulated detritus of his residence on earth. In which case the shroud may well be totally devoid of any shred of Jesus tissue.

• This, unfortunately, prompts another worry. On arriving bodily in heaven, was Jesus also rejoined by everything that had ever flaked or oozed or squirted or dripped off of his body in life? I’m picturing a man surrounded by several times his body weight in slime, walking about the garden paths of heaven, repelling everyone he encounters.

Sorry, it’s been a long day of travel. I get home and my brain is a bit off-balance and is easily sent scurrying off in weird directions.

In the Larry Nassar case, Rachael Denhollander gave a strong and very religious statement.

Should you ever reach the point of truly facing what you have done, the guilt will be crushing. And that is what makes the gospel of Christ so sweet. Because it extends grace and hope and mercy where none should be found. And it will be there for you. I pray you experience the soul-crushing weight of guilt so you may someday experience true repentance and true forgiveness from God, which you need far more than forgiveness from me — though I extend that to you as well.

Not to diminish the crimes committed against her and the other girls abused by Nassar, but that’s sugar-coating the Bible. She may have personally found solace in religion, but Christianity, as practiced by most Christians, does not extend grace and hope and mercy to everyone — it has been used as a weapon against black people, against gay and lesbian people, against trans men and women, against Jews and atheists. It is a blunt instrument that can be wielded in the aid of just about anyone, and against just about anyone…including, often, women.

For the record, it should be noted that the abuser read the Bible, too — Nassar was a practicing Catholic.

Former MSU employee Larry Nassar was a catechist for St. Thomas Aquinas Church’s seventh grade class, though the parish is not eager to claim him.

Nassar also served as a Eucharistic minister at St. John Church and Student Center, also part of St. Thomas Aquinas Parish, according to the spring 2000 edition of Communiqué, the magazine of the College of Osteopathic Medicine.

Denhollander is aware that there’s more to moral behavior than the Bible. She has rebuked the church.

Yes. Church is one of the least safe places to acknowledge abuse because the way it is counseled is, more often than not, damaging to the victim. There is an abhorrent lack of knowledge for the damage and devastation that sexual assault brings. It is with deep regret that I say the church is one of the worst places to go for help. That’s a hard thing to say, because I am a very conservative evangelical, but that is the truth. There are very, very few who have ever found true help in the church.

It’s not the Bible, it’s not God, it’s not Sacred Reason, it’s not conservative or liberal, it’s the people. What matters is humanism. Churches are poor places for that, but it’s not just the church — atheism can be severely anti-humanist, too.

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By the way, does this sound familiar?

The reason I lost my church was not specifically because I spoke up. It was because we were advocating for other victims of sexual assault within the evangelical community, crimes which had been perpetrated by people in the church and whose abuse had been enabled, very clearly, by prominent leaders in the evangelical community. That is not a message that evangelical leaders want to hear, because it would cost to speak out about the community. It would cost to take a stand against these very prominent leaders, despite the fact that the situation we were dealing with is widely recognized as one of the worst, if not the worst, instances of evangelical cover-up of sexual abuse. Because I had taken that position, and because we were not in agreement with our church’s support of this organization and these leaders, it cost us dearly.

I wouldn’t have thought this possible, but it’s happening: the rise of the I-Love-Jesus atheist. I’d qualify it a bit, though, because this isn’t the generic benign Jesus, but the immigrant-hating white Jesus of American evangelical Christianity, and it’s also a Jesus divorced from any religious tradition. They’re accepting one religious figure to spite women and people of color. It’s revealing that many atheists weren’t in the movement for freethought or a rejection of dogma, but for the anti-feminism, anti-Muslim side of atheism, and they’re now enthusiastically joining forces with the regressive right, no matter their views on gods, to exercise that hatred further.

Not surprising. None of the chaos within atheism has been about our beliefs (or lack thereof) in gods, but about our beliefs about how other human beings should be treated.

Earlier, I expressed my concern that a quarter of college grads are creationists, and was worried about the students at my university. Maybe it’s not so bad. My excuse is that maybe those other colleges, like Wallace State, are bringing the average down.

The Wallace State Alumni Association is planning a group trip to…the Ark Park and Creation “museum”. Their chipper coordinator happily chirped out a few words of praise.

“This should be a great trip,” said LaDonna Allen, WSCC Alumni Coordinator. “The Ark Encounter opened in July 2016 and is a sister attraction of the Creation Museum located about 40 miles apart. We’ve heard lots of good things about both.”

Hmmm. Maybe Wallace State doesn’t want to be taken seriously by educated people, which is an awfully peculiar attitude for a college to take. They are sending out a crystal clear message that it’s a place for religious loons with no respect for science.

Jordan Peterson is mystifying. He’s a boring, tendentious, unoriginal authoritarian who gets most everything wrong. He’s not an atheist, as the following clips show, so why do atheists pay attention to him?

Here is the quick Jordan Peterson video that I did few months ago on Facebook that sent the Peterson cult into fits. Peterson in his own words. Part 1. pic.twitter.com/AIjtnTvQo2

— Dusty Smith🐓 (@cultofdusty) January 28, 2018

Peterson in is own words part 2. pic.twitter.com/jjJWO3HmhL

— Dusty Smith🐓 (@cultofdusty) January 28, 2018

He has written a book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (of course a conservative book is all about arbitrary rules), which gets savagely reviewed.

Peterson, who has become one of the most prominent critics of anything that can be labelled as “political correctness”, is especially conservative on gender and family roles. “Female lobsters . . . identify the top guy quickly, and become irresistibly attracted to him,” he writes. Generalising from the crustacean to the human he adds, “This is brilliant strategy, in my estimation.”

Apparently, the secret to success is to appeal to the vast audience of male lobsters.

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Oh, look. David Brooks gives Peterson a thumbs up. Now we know what kind of person favors our Canadian authoritarian.

A new poll shows that the number of creationists has declined to a new low. Hooray! Party time!

Except that the new low is 38% of the American population.

Oh, sure, it’s better, and the trend is going in the right direction, for now, but that’s the kind of percentage that can get a bad president elected. It’s not a majority, but it’s not a fringe group, either. It’s shocking that our citizens can reach adulthood and still be that ignorant.

We’re also supposed to be consoled by the fact that a university education helps some. “Only” a quarter of college graduates are creationists! You go through 4 years of solid advanced education in a first world technological nation, and still a fourth of them come out thinking there might be some merit to the idea that the Earth winked into existence sometime at the start of the Naqada culture in Egypt, or the Uruk era in Mesopotamia. Oh, and hey, the Assyrians must have been shocked that everyone went extinct (except for 8 people) right at the start of their empire. Must have been a small empire.

I don’t know if I want to know how many of our UMM seniors believe in this bullshit. I especially don’t want to know how many of our science majors leave here confident that they didn’t come from no monkey. It can only break my heart.

Jen Gunter attended a Goop conference in New York. She didn’t make a big deal of it, just paid the conference fee, sidled on in under her own name, and listened. I think she expected the wacky wellness woo, but maybe was a little surprised at the psychic mediums, the death cult vibe, and the boring tedium.

This fascination with death was 50% of the day and not in a productive “lets talk about how we die in America” kind of way, but in death is trip reserved for the privileged, like a cross between the movie Flatliners and cultures that believed in human sacrifice where the class born to be sacrificed were brought up to believe death is a goal and an honor. Monetizing death in this way is clearly profitable. The message seems to be I know you are afraid of dying so read my book or cross my palm with cash and I will share with you secrets about death that no one else can.

This is the way of it. Every time I’ve gone to a creationist or paranormal conference, I know I’m going to get a load of anti-science drivel, but I’m always disappointed by how bad they are, and how once the speakers are in the midst of the believers, how far they’ll scurry towards even greater lunacy. There’s no reward for moderation, so they’ll make the most outrageous, irrelevant claims, and the audience will eat it up. Sure, that guy over there was just in a coma, and claims to have visited heaven, but he had a heartbeat the whole time. I died, and I had turned into a giant tumor, and I was rotting, and bits were falling off me, and I came back from the dead by force of will, so you should believe me more!

I’d recommend that everyone should attend one of these kinds of events at least once, just to see how nutty they are, but I’m afraid some people might be persuaded by the fervency of the believers, and the visit would just add more lost souls to their ranks.