A recent survey in New Zealand reveals that only 40% of the people believe in a god, and 10% do but have doubts. Only 52% believe in an immortal soul, and 80% accept evolution. I marvel at that — a country where I would not be a member of a rare minority, where I could start a conversation with a stranger and reliably encounter someone who wasn’t barking mad, where the populace doesn’t believe in angels? Next you’ll be telling me the streets are paved with gold.

It’s not perfect. There are still lots of conspiracy theorists and UFO buffs and lucky number innumerates, but man, it’s just that the background looks so much less cluttered with nonsense (they also found a positive correlation between god-belief and belief in the paranormal, unlike a recent deeply flawed survey in the US, which tried to get around this problem by redefining belief in angels and miracles as not paranormal.) You must take a look at the full summary to believe it.

And then…they have a museum where they carry out public dissections of giant squid.

I’m having a hard time imagining such a place. Paradise doesn’t really exist, you know.

The cracker incident has had yet more fallout.

I just learned that one of you generous readers did more than send a letter of support — they actually sent a nice sum of money to the university that is being transferred to the biology discipline, and which we will be using to support biology instruction. Thanks very much, whoever you are!

Larry has briefly floated the idea of organizing a trip to London, visiting Down House, the Natural History Museum, etc. There isn’t much of a response — if you’re interested, let him know.

Then you should sign up for the Steve list. They’re trying to get 900 qualified evolution supporters with names that are variants of “Steven” — I think they should aim for a nice round one thousand.

I don’t know…should I reward her with a link when I’m seething with envy as GrrlScientist is in London?

I’m going to be on Atheists Talk radio on Sunday morning to talk about the Galápagos, and as long as I’m in the big city, I was also going to join the godless gang at Q. Cumbers at 11:00am Sunday for a little brunch. If you want to join us, come on down!

Everyone must read this article about ‘Joel’s Army’ and be afraid. It’s a movement by radical Dominionists to build an informal paramilitary organization (at this time, it seems to be more attitude than organization) to prepare to fight to impose a kind of Christian fascism on the world. It may be a group small in number (but not that small, I fear), but they have a lot of fanaticism and lunacy to amplify their power.

Todd Bentley has a long night ahead of him, resurrecting the dead, healing the blind, and exploding cancerous tumors. Since April 3, the 32-year-old, heavily tattooed, body-pierced, shaved-head Canadian preacher has been leading a continuous “supernatural healing revival” in central Florida. To contain the 10,000-plus crowds flocking from around the globe, Bentley has rented baseball stadiums, arenas and airport hangars at a cost of up to $15,000 a day. Many in attendance are church pastors themselves who believe Bentley to be a prophet and don’t bat an eye when he tells them he’s seen King David and spoken with the Apostle Paul in heaven. “He was looking very Jewish,” Bentley notes.

Tattooed across his sternum are military dog tags that read “Joel’s Army.” They’re evidence of Bentley’s generalship in a rapidly growing apocalyptic movement that’s gone largely unnoticed by watchdogs of the theocratic right. According to Bentley and a handful of other “hyper-charismatic” preachers advancing the same agenda, Joel’s Army is prophesied to become an Armageddon-ready military force of young people with a divine mandate to physically impose Christian “dominion” on non-believers.

“An end-time army has one common purpose — to aggressively take ground for the kingdom of God under the authority of Jesus Christ, the Dread Champion,” Bentley declares on the website for his ministry school in British Columbia, Canada. “The trumpet is sounding, calling on-fire, revolutionary believers to enlist in Joel’s Army. … Many are now ready to be mobilized to establish and advance God’s kingdom on earth.”

These people are insane. They’re fed on a diet of lies and encouraged to believe that violence will be the answer, and reason is to be rejected.

The anti-intellectualism is overt. They’re actually proud of their contempt for learning; the article discusses the influence of a Canadian (errm, what is it with all the mild-mannered Canadians in this outfit?) Pentecostalist, William Branham.

Michael Barkun, a leading scholar of radical religion, notes that in 1958, Branham began teaching “Serpent Seed” doctrine, the belief that Satan had sex with Eve, resulting in Cain and his descendants. “Through Cain came all the smart, educated people down to the antediluvian flood — the intellectuals, bible colleges,” Branham wrote in the kind of anti-mainstream religion, anti-intellectual spirit that pervades the Joel’s Army movement to this day. “They know all their creeds but know nothing about God.”

I’m rather offended to be lumped in with bible colleges, but compared to Joel’s Army, the bible colleges actually are beacons of rationality. And if you think that’s bad, an insider, Ernie Gruen, has revealed some of their other doctrines…which sound vaguely familiar.

According to Gruen’s report, students at the school were taught that they were a “super-race” of the “elected seed” of all the best bloodlines of all generations — foreknown, predestined, and hand-selected from billions of others to be part of the “end-time Omega generation.”

Though he’d once promoted these doctrines himself, Gruen became convinced that the movement was turning into an end-times cult, marked by what he summarized as “spiritual threats, fears, and warnings of death,” “warning followers to beware of other Christians” and exhibiting “a ‘super-race’ mentality toward the training of their children.”

Let’s hope this is a fringe cult that will fade away, rather than rising to greater power. Let’s hope. But … Sarah Palin’s home church is dominionist, with connections to Joel’s Army.

Afraid yet?

I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish
Christianity to be true; for if so, the plain language of the text seems to
show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father,
Brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished.
And this is a damnable doctrine.

Charles Darwin

The counter to the side is ticking off the number of people who have died since you opened this webpage. The vast majority of those people are entering Hell. Christ commanded his followers to share the Gospel with those who are perishing… who have you shared with today?

The Surretts, an insufferable family of missionaries in Peru

They both seem to be saying the same thing. The difference: Darwin deplores the idea of damnation, the Surretts have made it the reason for their existence. I know which side I favor.

We all regret the loss of Blue Collar Scientist to cancer a short while ago. Now we have an account of his last few days — he died dignified and living well to the last moment, on a visit to Down and Westminster Abbey.

MAJeff here.

LisaJ’s Danio’s (hangover error) posts about Usher Disease (I and II), as well as my own syllabus preparation for the upcoming semester, have gotten me thinking about issues of intersexuality. In particular, her noting of the geographic issues related to the prevalence of various forms of Usher disease reminded me of the concentration of five-alpha-reductase deficiency in parts of Turkey, Papua New Guinea and the Dominican Republic.

Some folks are probably asking, “What is this intersexuality thing?” Basically, it’s a range sexual development disorders in which people’s bodies develop in such a way as to place them in a “border region” of sex. Hermaphrodism is what people usually think of, but there is a wider range of conditions, including hypospadias and congenital adrenal hyperplasia.

If any of you have read the novel Middesex you already have an idea of what I’m talking about with five-alpha-reductase deficiency. People with this condition are genetically XY, but during fetal development something happens such that in many people the testicles may not descend, the scrotal sac may not fuse, and the penis can appear more like a clitoris (such an ambiguous thing is often called a microphallus). Because of these developmental issues, people with this condition are given a female gender designation at birth. Once puberty hits, though, the testicles descend, the penis may enlarge, the “labia” fuse to form a scrotum, and other male secondary sex characteristics appear. One of the things I find so interesting about this particular condition is the way that it has been routinized in the patterns of life and cultural systems in parts of the Dominican Republic. The people living in these areas have their own term for the condition, “guevedoce” (“eggs/balls at 12”).

In class, I often use a video produced by the Intersex Society of North America, an organization that shut its doors this years in favor of a different advocacy organization, the Accord Alliance. In particular, this segment of that video talks about, and interviews, someone who identifies as a guevedoce, as well as his family. (YouTube won’t allow it to be embedded.)

It’s this issue of how people with various conditions are integrated into social life that is my primary concerns. One of the things intersex activists have been challenging for the past decade or so is infant genital surgery. When children with some sexual development disorders are born with ambiguous genitals they are quite literally made to fit into one of the existing gender categories. “Fixing” them means surgery to make their genitalia more closely resemble “normal” genitals. If the phallus falls inside the middle range, where it’s “too long” for a clitoris or “too short” to be a penis, well, it’s snip-snip time. Many of the decisions to engage in surgery are based not on medical necessity, but social preference. Questions such as, “Will he be able to stand to urinate?” or “Will her partners be turned off by such a large clitoris?” or “How will the parents deal with looking at such a strange body while changing diapers?” can become more important issues when determining whether to operate than such things as “Will cutting part of the phallus off affect this child’s sexuality later in life?” (Ann Fausto-Sterling has an excellent discussion of these issues.)

Not surprisingly, surgeries do affect folks. Many report a loss of sensitivity from having such operations performed on them. (As one of my students once said to the other women in the class about the possibility of having half a clitoris and no sensitivity, “Wouldn’t it just make you tense all the time!”) It’s more than loss of sensitivity, though. There are often other complications that require more than one surgery. Ongoing pain or recurrent infections are not uncommon.

This is one of those spaces where I get all anti-normalization. These people’s bodies are being normalized–they are being reconstructed so they fit within normative assumptions about what genitalia must look like based on statistical averages. And, it’s done without their consent. Intersex activists have been successful in increasing awareness in the medical profession, but there are still issues. Many of these flow from the gender order we have in this society. The problem with such medically unnecessary genital surgeries isn’t these babies’ bodies, but social beliefs about what those bodies are supposed to look like.