Defaithed

Now here's a guy quick with the FinalCut Pro (or whatever the tool may be). The movie meister behind "God's Wonderful World" spun viewer suggestions into a Part II, featuring more of the horrors that take place under the holy nose of a "God" who just sits up there nodding and drooling, not lifting a finger to help his suffering creations.

(Warning to viewers: "God's" disasters, diseases, predation, and other cruelties make for some upsetting grue.)

The important thing to note in "God's Wonderful Circle Of Life!" is that none of the scenes (except, perhaps, the poor chicken on fire?) depict suffering caused by humans who have "forgotten God" and are thus caught up in "sin". The tornadoes, pestilences, floods, and animal-on-animal slaughter depicted are all part of God's holy and perfect and intentional creation – or at least, so say the religionists.

The great irony in all this? It's religionists' beloved claim that Charles Darwin was some amoral proponent of tooth-and-claw struggling for survival as a blueprint for society. When any reading of that proper Victorian gentleman's words shows that he advocated nothing of the sort.

Let me see if I've got the claims straight: Darwin observed the reality in which most living things suffer and die horribly from causes including drought, disaster, disease, and just plain being ripped to shreds by predators. Holy God, meanwhile, created and maintains that vicious reality. Therefore, Darwin was immoral and God is all-merciful loving sweetness.

Human brains with the logic circuits of a kumquat: More human "sin" or more of God's perfect creation? You tell me, believers.

Over on Debunking Christianity, I watched this video (whose creator says he was inspired by a Debunking Christianity post). (Warning: While the images stop short of presenting the real world at its goriest, they will put some pretty ugly scenes into your dreams.) 

Nice work. My hat is off to its creator.

I certainly appreciate the intent behind the video, but it's not nearly as powerful a message as it could be. Much of it is images are people harming people. That may still be an argument against "God cares" where more thoughtful believers are concerned, but the more simple-minded ninnies will just bleat "That's the evil that man causes through sin. See what happens when we ignore God?"

So let's see a version that shows the overwhelming evidence against "God cares" without handing apologists the easy escape route of "man's sin". A video focused on natural disasters, horrific diseases, hideous parasites, birth defects... Damn depressing stuff to even think about, let alone watch, but it'd send the powerful message that reality is full of horrors and injustices that have nothing to do with imaginary "sin", and that "the Magic Man loves us" is a mighty stupid fantasy.

Anyone know of such an existing video? I'd love to feature it.

(Note: I'd hoped to leave the above as a comment on Debunking Christianity, but that site seems one of those that goes out of its way to make posting difficult. After a couple of failed attempts I gave up.)

Want to upgrade your TV enjoyment pleasure from your boring old display to exciting new high-definition TV (HD TV) – at no cost?

It's easy! Just look what a study revealed:

One group of participants was told they were watching a brand new HDTV clip, while the other group was told they were watching a digital DVD clip. Both groups were in fact watching the same (low) quality DVD clip. ...The people framed to watch the HDTV clip were found to have a significantly more positive viewing experience. This shows that participants were unable to discriminate properly between digital and high definition signals but were influenced by the frame set for them.

See that? You get a higher-quality TV viewing experience just by thinking you're watching HD! 

Actually, that's not terribly surprising; neither are the implications for skepticism and critical thinking. As studies like this show time and time again, merely thinking that Vishnu guides your destiny, or that you tap into psychic glimpses of the future, or that a cabal of reptilian shapeshifters leads our government, can actually affect what your five senses tell you. Believing is seeing – even when belief makes you see what isn't there.

And that's why doubting the senses or the "obvious" understanding, and asking for evidence instead, works as a way to see what's real.

But anyway. I don't want to rail one-sidedly against our brains' plastic gullibility; with precautions taken, that wonderful brain creativity can be an awesome phenomenon. I'm thinking I'd like to put it to work! 

First up: My current lack of an HD TV. Let's give this a try. First, I create a new reality: "I have a stunning 60" HD TV." I'll repeat that a few times for good measure. Now I'll switch on the old 20" tube, and...

Oh yeah. Them's the pixels, baby. 

This is great! What else can I make myself believe?

"My car is a Porsche." (Wow! It's a stealth Porsche minivan!)

"My computer is a Mac." (Oh, wait. It actually is.)

"I can have any woman." ("I just don't want them all", I'll rationalize to myself.)

"Insurance companies just want what's best for me."

"Scientology is not a scam."

...*poof*

Damn, I just lost it all. That last one blew the fuse. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. 

Pro-science and anti-religion blogging machine PZ Myers rounds up some scientist opinions on the possible dangers to us from hypothetical human/alien first contact. As the biologist of the bunch, he himself steps beyond the Mars Attacks!-style clashes that some envision, to offer up a whole other worry: the Blorrxaforming of Earth.

Yes, that's the conversion of our backyard into something else's idea of a better home and garden. The way for a race (including humanity) to spread throughout the galaxy, he argues, is to send "home" ahead of the travelers: launch probes loaded with bacteria and more complex organisms, to take root on alien worlds and get them ready for the later visitors. That sets up the concern:

Don't expect alien tripods with lasers, watch out for alien viruses and bacteria turning the soil and atmosphere poisonous or unsupportive.

That is, indeed, possibly the most fascinating (and terrifying?) form of alien invasion we might imagine. In fact, if you want to see the scenario play out in all its gory, apocalyptic horror, I've got one word for you:

CHTORRRR!

That's the battle cry of the man-eating (and everything-eating) red worms that headline The War Against the Chtorr. It's one of my favorite sci-fi reads ever. Author David Gerrold has a clear fascination with alien forms – he's the screenplay writer of the famous Star Trek Tribbles episode – and so unleashed a whole ecology upon a stunned Earth. First come viruses that wipe out most everything and everyone, then omnivoracious worms, unstoppable kudzu-like plants, sea creatures the size of aircraft carriers, and countless other creatures with bizarre reproductive or eating habits. (There are also Tribbles with the serial numbers filed off.)

These lifeforms support each other in a complex ecological web which, as reckoned by what passes for scientists among surviving humanity, has the distinct advantage of an extra half billion years or so of evolution compared to Earth life. The Chtorrans are meaner, tougher, hungrier, and faster-breeding, and they're very quickly winning. (If you like, you can read into it an allegory for European explorers and colonies traveling around the globe and often wiping out local populations of people, other animals, and plants with their accompanying pigs, rats, goats, and germs.)

The four books published so far (from 1983 to 1993) can make for grim reading, but the imagined biology and ecology are intricately detailed and fascinating. I highly recommend the series – if you can find it. The books have traditionally been hard to dig up (I ended up nabbing a couple, autographed, from the author himself - how cool is that?). Fortunately, Amazon.com appears stocked with them at present (see link below).

Get caught up; the remaining three books will supposedly start shipping in fall 2011. Maybe then we'll finally learn who, if anyone, seeded the Earth with red-furred worms that see you as lunch.

So. Any other Chtorr fans out there? What's your favorite Chtorran critter?

The War Against the Chtorr Books

Really, they do. They rock so hard their backs no longer have any bone (to add the obvious witticism taken from a well-known expression).

I had a real fascination with planaria back in my religious but science-loving childhood. You see, in a decrepit dresser that stored junk in the family garage I came across the mouldering old college biology textbook of one parent. Neither parent was a biologist, or academic of any type; in fact, neither had finished college. (If they had done so, and learned more about the natural world and possibly about critical thinking, would they have resisted the pitch of the Jehovah's Witnesses years later? Who knows. But that's another story.)

While I don't recall either parent ever displaying a particular interest in biology, clearly one had taken a class or two. The book was awesome. Its name and author, I didn't note. And much of the college-level content was clearly above my reading level. But there was plenty that I eagerly read. I remember a few can't-look-away photos of cleft palates and other human deformities, and of course there was plenty of stuff about the reptiles and other animals I always loved reading about. Plus those diamond-headed flatworms with the crazy cross-eyed look, the planarians, recently in the headlines as scientists further tease out the secrets of their amazing regenerative abilities.

Take a planarian, said the textbook I found, cut it into pieces, and those pieces will regenerate into new flatworms. I already knew that an earthworm's front half could regenerate a lost back half, but the flatworms went one better: an amputated back half could regenerate a new head! Wow!

Wait, it gets better: Cut it into two lengthwise, said the book, and the strips will regenerate into whole worms. Zoinks! (Try that, annelids. I didn't think so.)

The madness didn't stop there. Split just the planarian's head lengthwise, and – this still blows my mind – the two flopping half-heads will each regenerate into a full head, creating a two-headed – but apparently perfectly healthy – freak. Bo-i-i-i-n-n-g!

All that was capped with the most stunning claim of all. Take a flatworm, teach it some simple lab behavior like shock avoidance, and cut it into two. When the pieces become whole again, both regenerated worms remember the behavior. Hold on; that's just the warmup. Here's the kicker: take a flatworm with learned behavior, grind it up and feed it to other flatworms, and the fattened cannibals acquire the behavior. Education via eating the smart! (Just imagine: that famous slogan "A mind is a terrible thing to waste" not as a call to support college educations but as an admonishment to clean your plate.) 

Well. You could hardly expect a proper youngster to be satisfied with mere black-and-white photos of awesome two-headed grotesqueries. I must have planarians of my own to mutilate.

Imagine my joy (yes, genuine joy) when I discovered these weren't obscure creatures living in deep-sea vents off of Madagascar or some such, but were there for the taking in the American Midwest streams where I was always on the search for snakes and frogs. Just turn over rocks in the stream, and if you really looked closely, little dark, fingernail-length flatworms were stuck to the underside of the rocks.

So I got a bunch of flatworms, an X-acto knife, and... well, I did my best to split heads down the middle, but it's not easy with no real equipment. The worms are small and they move. I managed to messily cut and/or crush some heads into a lopsided split, and tossed the patients into a jar along with pieces of planarians I had simply cut into halves or thirds (a much easier operation).

What happened? I wish I recalled the details better, but I can only tell you that I never saw any two-headed monsters. Or much of anything. The mutilated worms seemed to disappear, leaving nothing behind but a few floating bits of crud in the jar! Did they crawl out at night, drying up somewhere unseen? Did they die from problems with the water and quickly dissolve into soup? (I knew enough to keep them in their creek water, not tap water, but maybe the temperature was wrong or the water lacked oxygen?) Or did they – and this was the coolest possibility – eat each other, with only the last survivor's disappearance a mystery? (Yes, they were in pieces, but surely the pieces had some means of eating; how else would they gain the energy and mass for regeneration?)

I've no doubt that I could have solved the mystery with more experimentation, but I apparently lost interest and moved on to other shiny things. (That's why I don't blame my religious upbringing alone for my not becoming a scientist; clearly, I was also lacking the required persistence for science.) That leaves me wondering whether the amazing regenerating planarians also include escape artist secrets or even teleportation among their bag of tricks.

Okay, probably not. And in the years since, I learned that one of the more astounding flatworm facts doesn't hold water: Scientists have not been able to replicate the claim that planarians acquire the learned behaviors of fellow flatworms they ingest. The original results have been written off as observer bias (see Wikipedia entry). So, sorry, no gastrovascular mind-meld powers in our worms.

But hey, just because Wolverine doesn't have laser eye-beams doesn't mean he's not awesome. Flatworms still got lots, including the magic two-head trick. Planarians, my crazy diamond-headed pretties, I remain your number one fan.

(And now I'm curious, too. If you take a two-headed flatworm and split each of those heads, can you get a quadracephalo model? Just how far can we take this hydra creation? Hmm, just how sharp is my X-acto?)

So the other day I'm walking through a Tokyo-area shopping center, and in a drug store I see stacked boxes of Jesus Body! (exclamation mark theirs).

What's this? Communion crackers? No, those would make for grisly boxes of actual Jesus flesh (or so the priests insist). The tomato-red Jesus Body! boxes I saw are a diet product – 180 tablets of slimming ingredients. 

Putting aside the skeptic's natural suspicion of diet tablets, why the name "Jesus Body"? Well, the association of Jesus with miracles must be part of it. But I assume the product is mainly seeking to attract lady shoppers with a well-known popular image: the lean, slim-bodied Jesus that artists have been hanging on the cross for near 2000 years now.

(I mean, Buddha was a miraculous guy too, but would Buddha Body! sell?)

So, there's no mystery behind the appeal of a savor who always looks so fit (well, fit apart from the blood and the dying and all that). But on the other hand, there may be more to a "Jesus body" than just slimness. A church in Oklahoma has a painted Jesus whose... interesting anatomy has some faithful up in arms. (And maybe has a few swooning as well.) 

My, Christ certainly does appear to be pointing the way to heaven, doesn't he. Or as quicker wags have already quipped: I knew Jesus was crucified, but I didn't know he was hung! 

Exorcism?

Here in the second decade of the 21st century, you might think that the only exorcism still to be found in the Church involves casting altar boys out of their robes. But while that may the mainstream of Catholic practices, good old-fashioned hellspawn expulsion remains on the Vatican's menu of imaginary services.

A lot of folks lately have been talking up the story of "Father" Gabriele Amorth, cross-slinging demon-buster of the Holy See, who claims a Vatican-roaming Satan himself is behind Church improprieties ("the Devil made them diddle", I guess). Reading words about – and by – the 85-year-old priest is a trip into utter lunacy, of course, but I gotta say it's awfully entertaining wackiness. Here are some things I've learned about the Church and the exorcist biz in particular: Readeth thou more

An addition to yesterday's Texan Democrats (a little) less religious than Republicans: Let's take things up from one state to the national level. In Republicans v secular America, Dan Kennedy of Guardian News and Media reports on the latest machinations by a party salivating over the prospect of religion-based control over the US populace. Yes, that's all nothing you don't already know, but it's a jolting drink of gasoline to see so many voices of inanity gathered into one article:

• Tim Pawlenty: "God is in charge ... In the Declaration of Independence it says we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights. It doesn't say we're endowed by Washington, DC, or endowed by the bureaucrats or endowed by state government. It's by our creator that we are given these rights."
• Mitt Romney: Deflects suspicion toward his wacky Mormon sect by embracing "any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty" – but apparently, only such believers.
• Sarah Palin: Prays to invisible spirits for oil pipelines. (I presume the difficult words were written on her palm.)
• Mike Huckabee: "I hope we answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ."

But wait! There's more! Virginia State Delegate and Republican Bob Marshall just added, in a rant against Planned Parenthood:

"The number of children who are born subsequent to a first abortion with handicaps has increased dramatically. Why? Because when you abort the first born of any, nature takes its vengeance on the subsequent children. In the Old Testament, the first born of every being, animal and man, was dedicated to the Lord. There's a special punishment Christians would suggest."

That's right: We're one-tenth into the 21st Century, and this guy claims that handicapped children are a punishment from the Old Testament Yahweh.

Fiscal conservatism? Proper role of government? Those and a thousand other matters are reasonable discussions on real-world topics to be had between "the left" and "the right" in the US, with meaningful ideas potentially coming from both sides. But as long as the Republican party is chock full of nuts like the above, who want to move their adherence to an ancient Middle Eastern cult from an appropriately private matter to a public requirement, any American wanting to keep religion and government separate (as the nation's founders clearly intended) needs to support the lesser of the two evils, the Democrats.

Or get to work cleaning house in the Republican party, pronto. Is it so hard to throw out morons who want to base government on supernatural voodoo? 

UPDATE: The same breed of idiots claims that any gathering of atheists is, by definition, a hate group.

Over in the US of A, modern culture divides the nation into two wildly polarized, at-each-other's-throats, black-vs-night, white-vs-day, Spy-vs-Spy (?) factions: Republicans and Democrats. (The big sad joke being, of course, that the two are slightly different variants of the same bland centrist position.)

Given the screaming and the hate that flies back and forth between the two, you'd think they were warring religious sects, not political parties. Yet it turns out religion isn't entirely removed from the goings-on. The proponents of the two parties do differ in their religious leanings – though in the Jesus-packed theme park that is America, we're again talking two mild permutations of the same thing.

The Texas Tribune reports on the sorry state of the state (Meet the Flintstones): Nearly one in three Lone Star citizens admits to a fantasy in which humans walked the earth with (and maybe roped and saddled?) dinosaurs, while a similar number drawled an addled "don't know". Only 41% of Texans comprehend that 65 million years of separation would make the Amarillo Trachodon Rodeo a wee tough to schedule.  

The article spells out the the numbers on Texan religiosity. My interest was in the latter part, which broke down Republican vs Democrat responses. Noteworthy differences include:

• Both groups attend church in similar proportions, though the Republican side attends more often.
• Over a third of each group imagines evolution taking place guided by God, but only Democrats also have a significant number willing to acknowledge evolution without God.
• Both groups show depressingly large numbers of persons denying evolution, including development of humankind from earlier lifeforms, but Democrats yielded notably better numbers willing to accept the reality of evolution.

Check the details for yourself in the news story. While the results speak only to Texas, you can expect to see similar divisions between Republican vs Democrat pretty much anywhere in the country. 

And that largely explains my own political leanings. The sad fact is that the leadership and members of both parties rate far too high on Jesus-loving evolution deniers, but at least the Democrat bunch is slightly more rooted in the real world. Given the continuing necessity to choose between these two parties in the US, then whatever the differences or similarities in actual political platforms, the religion factor alone keeps me – well, not exactly attracted to the less-religious Democrat half of the bag of nuts, but at least less repulsed by it. 

Yeesh, that's a depressing place to be. Is there a proper secular party in the house?

What? People are angry at Elton John for suggesting Jesus was gay? Says the star-spectacled one:

I think Jesus was a compassionate, super-intelligent gay man who understood human problems.

(Via Richard Dawkins' site)

Jesus? Gay? Well, what do we know about Jesus from writings, legend, and religious art? 

He was neat. Slim. Thirty-ish. Never married. Never touched a woman. Spent all his time with (and liked to wash the feet of) twelve smelly guys. Oddly silent on the whole "kill the homos" thing when pushing his uptight Dad's old laws. 

Do the math, believers. Jesus was gayer than a figgy pudding. 

(See also Is there something Jesus wasn't telling us?)