Discovery Institute Paranormal Apologetics: Klinghoffer's Baffling Illogic

The Discovery Institute has been for some years now a leading Disenlightenment think-tank. We could point to some rather strange stuff that emanates from its phlogiston-strewn halls well beyond its advocacy of Neo-Creationism. Nonetheless, it's left to David Klinghoffer to thoroughly explain what's at the core of this bizarre institution's ideology, which he does in an opinion piece appearing in today's Los Angeles Times:

Ghosts, aliens and us

By David Klinghoffer

When my wife and I had our twin baby boys circumcised in our home last year, the Hasidic rabbi who performed the bris left us with a surprising parting gift: an amulet for protection against demons... When I queried the rabbi about this... he gracefully dodged, referring me to unspecified kabbalistic secrets...

It was a reminder that, as much as we think of our age as cynical and literally disenchanted, supernatural belief has hardly been erased. In fact, it may be on the rise. A CBS poll in October reported that 48% of Americans believe in ghosts (and 22% claim to have seen one). Among those younger than 45, 54% believe, as opposed to 41% over that age. Belief in other forms of paranormal and occult phenomena is on the rise too: In the 1980s, 25% of Americans accepted the idea of alien abductions, for instance, but 40% say they do now, according to Newsweek...

...Sure, I'm skeptical about crop circles, conspiracy theories and cryptozoology. However, I'm also sympathetic to the late conservative philosopher and ghost-story writer Russell Kirk, who valued the paranormal for its suggestion that reality consists of more than mundane material processes. I get the persistent sense that something profound is affirmed by the eerie accounts...

Another possibility is that the human need to believe in the unseen world itself points to, while not proving, the reality of hidden dimensions. It could be that materialism -- the philosophical assumption that reality is nothing but physical stuff -- is a prejudice rather than a fact. Perhaps an unseen reality does exist, revealed in flashes that can be confusing or misleading, to which we sometimes give flaky designations. Like "Bigfoot."

Religions used to confidently navigate this twilight realm. Some faiths still do, quietly...

...As for the rabbi who presided over our twins' bris, the evangelistic branch of Judaism to which he belongs, Chabad, stands out as bucking the trend elsewhere in Judaism toward a pallid rationalism.

The same trend is mirrored in other faiths, especially the shrinking mainline Protestant denominations. It may be that such pallidness helps explain why Americans turn to florid paranormal beliefs, as opposed to traditional supernatural ideas...

Religious leaders representing respectable faiths, intimidated by secular prejudice, may wish to take note as they scan the empty pews. The human hunger for a vigorous, unapologetic interface with the unknown can't be entirely repressed...

In a nutshell (the best way to summarize the assertions of nuts, after all), Klingoffer's argument is that belief in UFOs and bigfoot are erroneous (don't tell Michael Medved!), but they arise because of an absence of the preaching of traditional forms of supernaturalism in religious institutions, and this belief, in turn, is evidence for the existence of the supernatural. This, in turn, indicates that materialism — or, more accurately, naturalism — is incorrect. Where to begin in this chain of fallacies?

I'll start off with Klinghoffer's lumping of bigfoot and UFOs with the supernatural. While these are, indeed, beliefs that something exists in the absence of any evidence that they do, or even can, exist in the real world, they are not themselves beliefs in anything supernatural. The belief that extraterrestrial spacecraft have or do visit our planet is a belief in quite natural, albeit unearthly, things. The aliens in the postulated ships are the products of the same natural forces we find all around us and the ships themselves would work by physical laws. Likewise, bigfoot, were it to exist, would simply be a huge North American ape that ate, breathed and reproduced like every other mammal. No prevalent ideas about bigfoot, as wrong as they might be, offer the conjecture that sasquatches are or do anything supernatural, and while the arguments in favor of their existence are incorrect, they are based precisely on naturalistic sciences like biology and ecology. Klinghoffer is equivocating right from the outset by redefining "supernatural" as meaning any phenomenon for which there is no reputable physical evidence. Given such a redefinition, he can proceed, as he does, to offer the misunderstanding of the physical world as evidence for the existence of a supernatural world or, as he puts it, "unseen dimensions." If one recalls that a common religious definition of "faith" is "belief in things unseen," it becomes immediately clear what he's up to. By doing it, he can assert that ignorance is religion; bigfoot is now an article of faith.

Which goes right to the next fallacy, namely the assertion that popular supernaturalism is the result of some diminishing of religious supernaturalism. This is a rather bizarre contention; all religion is based on belief in the supernatural. That is to say, there can be no religion that doesn't posit the existence of at least one deity which operates in a manner unbound by natural laws. Every religion, no matter how liberal it may be when it comes to social ideas and how rational it is when it comes to empirical reality, is rooted in a deeply held belief that something exists beyond the scope of the senses and beyond the possibility of measurement. Whether we're talking about non-evangelical forms of Judaism or mainline Protestantism, all religions must do this, and none of which I'm aware contend something to the contrary. Moreover, the postulation of supernatural causation to natural phenomenon is not some new thing; it has certainly diminished in modern times, but it just as certainly existed in the past, and that past is filled with any number of strange beliefs about the material world that have nothing to do with religion at all. Not so long ago, the supernaturalistic religious worldview was essentially all that existed, and yet the same people who believed in the religion also believed in ghosts and dragons and wizards. If anything, belief in those things were even more widespread in the past than they are today. When I walk down a city street today, I'm surprised if I see even one amulet hanging in a doorway to ward off the evil eye. If I were taking a walk through a 10^th century village, I'd be equally surprised to see a doorway without one. Religious belief in the supernatural is a factor that makes beliefs in other flavors of magic more palatable, not less. Conversely, the pews of churches and similar structures designated for the worshipful become emptier because the same knowledge that has led much of humanity to dispense with belief in ghosts and warlocks leads to less credulity when it comes to gods and devils. The former pair is far less of a leap, after all, than the latter couple. They were at least of human origin; ghosts used to be people, mages still are, and we know at the very least that people actually exist. There's empirical evidence that tells us at least that much. These other things, though, evaporate utterly when examined from a position of empiricism. It takes less of a leap of faith (and logic) to believe in magic than it does to believe in omnipotence or disembodied malevolence.

Still, all of this is but an appetizer before the main noxious entree, the assertion that any belief in the supernatural provides even a scrap of evidence that an "unseen dimension" exists. Using Klinghoffer's redefinition of "supernatural," this equation works out to the solution that one erroneous idea supports the validity of a different error. If I believe that cats visit the moon while I am asleep then angels are real. If I think that lightning bolts are hurled at the heads of sinners by angered ancestor spirits that live among the clouds then Moses parted the Red Sea. I am not exaggerating about this; Klinghoffer is actually asserting, after all, that belief in bigfoot means that there is a Kingdom of Heaven. It's an absolutely bizarre sort of reasoning, to use that term equivocally myself, but it's exactly what Klinghoffer proposes. Any sort of ignorant faith in things unseen and unevidenced will do for his purposes. This is the biggest and blackest tent of them all, and by accepting such things into it, Klinghoffer reveals to us the basis of all that he advocates as a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute. A statue of him should be erected at the front door of their offices, much like the Statue of Liberty. This statue would similarly hold a torch aloft, though it would have no flame upon it and the inscription upon the monument would read

Give me your ignorant, your superstitious,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe nonsense,
The innumerate refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the credulous, mistaken to me,
I lift my lump beside the night-dark tent flap!

The irony that someone who would himself engage in an archaic ritual in which the genitals of eight day old boys are cut up to mark a covenant with a deity, followed by hanging a magical talisman whose origins he does not know and is incurious enough not to bother investigating, arguing that naturalism is "bias" because it doesn't leave room for ghosts and demons, is rich and thick, indeed. That he accepts the "graceful dodge" of a holy man at its word and then denounces empiricism is laughable. This is the very stuff from which Dark Ages have always been made, no different from the taboos regarding treading in the shadows of ancient Egyptian priests or burning incense for the pleasure of the lares and manes. This is the very meat of the Disenlightenment served upon a darkly glittering platter of intellectual misdirection and garnished lovingly with something scraped from the bottom of a boot that has just come in from the cow pasture. For someone like Klinghoffer, the world can never be demon-haunted enough. Why else hang talismans warding off Lilith around one's home?

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Spot the Looney: Ralph Nader and Al Qaeda Say the Same Things

It's time once again to play...

Spot the Looney!

A couple of weeks ago, Ralph Nader used the term "Uncle Tom" to describe Barack Obama. Today comes revelation of a new (still to be fully vetted) audio recording featuring Al Qaeda's #2 lunatic, Ayman al-Zawahri. In it, the fundamentalist blood-sucker inveighs against Obama, calling him a "house negro" and complaining that he isn't enough like Malcolm X.

In an audio message which appeared on militant Web sites Wednesday, al-Zawahri said that Obama is "the direct opposite of honorable black Americans" like Malcolm X. He called Obama a "house negro."

— Source

Compare this to Nader's June 25, 2008 statements as well:

He wants to show that he is not a threatening . . . another politically threatening African-American politician. He wants to appeal to white guilt. You appeal to white guilt not by coming on as black is beautiful, black is powerful. Basically he's coming on as someone who is not going to threaten the white power structure, whether it's corporate or whether it's simply oligarchic. And they love it. Whites just eat it up.

Ding ding ding, we have a winner.

Ralph Nader should feel proud that he has found common ground with Al-Zawahri. Since it should be apparent to even Nader by now that he's never going to win any public office in the US, perhaps he should look into the possibility of becoming Al Qaeda's official consumer protection advocate. I hear some of the car bombs they're using are "unsafe at any speed."

Buh-bye, Ralph, and thanks for playing Spot the Looney!

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Obama is the Antichrist, the Sky is Falling, and Bigfoot is Coming to Take Your Soul

I shouldn't be astounded at the profound depths of superstition into which great chunks of America has sunk anymore. Really, nothing should surprise me when it comes to the extremes of irrationality that grips far too many people anymore. Nonetheless, it does. It truly does. Even as some of the world comes to better understand the world as it is, to peer deep into the heart of matter and prize out the basic mechanisms by which it works, other parts of it retreat further and further into the dark dungeon of ignorance and fear and bar the door behind them.

It is thus that we find that there are people walking among us who are utterly terrified of the supernatural implications of the last presidential election. Apparently, it's the boogeyman who will be moving into the White House in January. Hellfire is going to rain down upon the planet because of this. The world is ending.

The number one question being asked: Is Barack Obama the antichrist? I've received dozens of emails pointing out the odd fact that the day after the election, the daily pick-three lottery number in Obama's home state of Illinois was "6-6-6..."

I don't see anything shocking in last week's election. I do believe strongly that a dark demonic cloud has swept over the land, but this is how we should expect the end times to play out. And, I foresee more negative events to come. The only thing that worries me is the Christians who fail to see the danger that comes from prophecy being fulfilled in our day.

I believe we are entering a time when Christians really need to set their priorities. Your last chance to do something for the kingdom of God may be sooner than you realize...

— Todd Strandberg, "Fasten Your Seatbelts"

Ummm, yeah. See pp. 51-59 of John Allen Paulos' Irreligion about that first paragraph. On November 5, as on every day, there are several numbers drawn in the Illinois lottery, and the fact is that the Evening Pick 3 number was 666. By the same token, the Midday Pick 3 was 779 and the Evening Pick 4 was 7779. What to make of that set of two numbers numbers? The odds that the combination 7-7-9 would be picked twice in the same day is far smaller than the odds off 6-6-6 being drawn once, so it would seem to me that on purely probabilistic terms the first combination would be far more significant than the latter, but this is a classic case of confirmation bias. 6-6-6 has a special significance to some people, whereas 7-7-9 doesn't, so they notice one number while ignoring the other. It's also worth noting that 6-6-6 was also drawn as the winning number for the Midday Pick 3 of the Illinois lottery on 10/23/08, the Evening Pick 4 (as 0-6-6-6) on 7/5/08 (the day after Independence Day! Clearly, America is Satanic!), the Evening Pick 3 on 3/22/08 the first day of Spring!), and the Evening Pick 3 on 1/16/08, and nobody made a big deal about these other four instances of the same number being drawn on these other days in the very same lottery. Why is that? Simple: on those days, it was simply a random number, just as it was the fifth time it was picked in 2008 on November 5.

It's all in their heads, of course. Sheer superstitious nonsense... omens and portents and witchcraft. Some people who want to believe that the next President of the United States is the Anti-christ go out of their way to find evidence to support their conclusion, then trumpet it about the lunatic echo-chamber until it becomes some superstitious blogger's "number one question." Said blogger, sharing to some extent in the belief (in this case, that Obama may not be the Anti-christ, but he's certainly going to help set this mythical figure on some throne) doesn't do any research to determine if there could be any significance. He simply furthers the ignorance and insanity in which he shares and chucks out a bunch of self-serving babble drawn from something entirely unrelated to American politics, probabilities or evidence from the same lottery that might refute the very thing he mentions yet again. Why dispel a bizarre rumor with sound information when you can preserve it with gibberish?

But wait, what if Obama isn't merely the Anti-christ? What if he's Satan himself! Isn't that special?

I have never been one for making "political" commentary, and I'll admit I haven't deeply explored the issues, but watching from the sideline, I am seeing some connections between our new president, and our old prophecies. Seems like people have been looking for the Antichrist for years, and each generation has never been disappointed to find one, even several! Maybe we have moved past that now to something even more ominous - the beast...

I have heard of Christians who voted for him for economic reasons. They believe he will save the economy. If economics is the most important thing, then our focus is in the wrong place. We cannot serve both God and money. Incidentally, there is only one other reference that I know of in the Bible regarding the number 666, and it is regarding Solomon's gold. If the mark of the beast has to do with our love of gold instead of our love of God, then maybe this is the time when the man of lawlessness has been revealed. Just maybe.

— Nicodemus, "Obama Is Not The Antichrist...But Maybe Something Worse"

Who could possibly refute the argument that people being overwhelmingly concerned about economics during a period of economic stress and voting accordingly is evidence that the person they voted for is Satan? I mean, aside from anyone who wasn't already of the opinion that the person elected was some supernatural force of evil. That economic collapse itself might usher in a period of terrible hardships across the nation and around the globe isn't important. What's important is that anyone who doesn't agree with Nicodemus' priorities, based in turn on his religious ideology, just helped but Beelzebub in power. Shame on you, worrying about the possibility of your kids not being able to get a higher education, about not having money on which to survive after retirement, about being able to keep your family fed and sheltered. All of that's just a distraction! Your family doesn't need such things, because Jesus is signing unemployment checks.

Still, for sheer desperation to believe that Obama heralds the end of the world, it's hard to beat the blatant idiocy of "evidence" like this:

One thing that has amazed me is how Barack Obama is not only considered to be a president-elect of the United States, but also president OF THE WORLD...

The Economist reported that Mr. Obama "quickly scooped support from readers in China, India and most of Europe, as well as from the United States itself. Mr. Obama won the backing of an overwhelming share of voters in 56 countries — including the likes of Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Indonesia and South Korea — claiming the support of 90 percent (or more) of those who voted."

The world map was almost a monochromatic blue expressing strong support for Obama, including in the Philippines. The only exceptions were Iraq, Algeria, Cuba and Congo in favoring Sen. John McCain. The general result of this Global Electoral College poll may look lopsided, but it is not unexpected. Opinion polls including one carried by the BBC also revealed that Mr. Obama is the world's overwhelming choice.

How about that? This is significant considering that the Antichrist will also have support of most of the world when he begins his reign. I cannot think of a time in history when an American president was viewed as an "overwhelming choice of the world."

Another fascinating feature about the antichrist is his charismatic personality that leaves people awe struck...

— Rich Wilbur, "Is Barack Obama The Antichrist?"

The fact that the election of Obama is celebrated by a world that has worried over the last eight years of the Bush Doctrine of preemptive warfare against any nation we think might be some kind of threat at some point in the future is a sign of the apocalypse, you see. That Obama is charismatic, that he might have (shudder to think!) a global view, that he's not bellicose and threatening, that the world might breathe a collective sigh of relief... these are signs of an evil nature. Normally, of course, the United States elects uncharismatic presidents who are lazy and anti-intellectual, who view the outside world as a threat, whose finger trembles perennially just above the metaphorical big red button. The election of someone not like this, someone that the rest of humanity thinks might actually be a shift away from a dangerous America, is evidence that he might be the Antichrist.

Now, in all fairness this same author isn't fully convinced that Obama is the son o' Satan:

...Remember, the identity of the antichrist is not for us to know, but for the world to know. He will offer himself up to the world...

In the mean time, we will continue to watch and pray and make associations of what the bible says about the antichrist to Obama or anyone else who fits the bill.

Hmmm... then again, Rich Wilbur is saying that Obama "fills the bill." Wilbur doesn't know that Obama is the Antichrist, but he clearly could be, and Wilbur spends a good deal of time in this piece providing evidence that he is before leaving himself an out at the very end of his supernaturally paranoid screed just in case, you know, it turns out that he isn't.

Of course, we can save any of these bloggers the trouble by simply pointing out that history is filled with Antichrists pointed out by any number of Millennialists and the world is still here and they're still in it. The thing is, these people want to believe this nonsense. They're living in a demon-haunted world, a sort of paranoid parallel universe, inhabited by Christ and Antichrist, witches and ghosts and things lurking under the bed. Spooky stuff, that.

You know, sooner or later someone inspired by the kind of religious fear embodied by these three authors (and untold thousands more equally fretful true-believers; these are just three examples I happened across) is going to try to "stop the Antichrist" with a bullet. It's a pathetic likelihood, but I'm sorry to say that I think it's coming. It'll be someone like Jim Adkisson, some self-styled foot soldier who gets "the message" and decides to do something about it. Sooner or later, there's going to be one lunatic out there who thinks that he or she is going to be covered in glory for attempting to put a bullet into the 44^th President/Antichrist/Terrorist-in-Chief.

This is the sickness that confronts us, even here in the 21^st century, centuries after the Enlightenment. Americans still believe in evil spirits, and they believe that anything they don't like is the result of one of them. And then, sooner or later, one of them tries to kill it.

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Amazing Things Fungi Can Do: Diverting a Plane

They can degrade chitin, clean up environmental toxins and make beer — but did you know that fungi can also change the course of a passenger jet? It happened on Monday. Mushrooms made a plane bound from Budapest to Dublin land in Frankfurt.

A bag of mushrooms grounds Ryanair flight
by MILES ERWIN

A Ryanair plane was forced to make an emergency landing – because of a bag of mushrooms...

...as the mushrooms defrosted, juice seeped through the locker and dripped on to a passenger who suffered an allergic reaction...

The aircraft was diverted to Frankfurt-Hahn airport in Germany after the passenger complained of a swollen neck and started choking.

Doctors transferred the passenger to a nearby hospital and grounded the jet saying the mushrooms had contaminated the plane's air conditioning system...

Fungal terrorists were at work. I never did trust those Agaricus bisporus. Now we'll no doubt see generic profiling of fungi attempting to board planes and perfectly honest agarics will be unable to fly.

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BEING HUMAN ET AND SEEING ET UFOS'S IS NORMAL: Headsplosion Imminent

The American Chronicle describes itself as:

...an online magazine for national, international, state, local, entertainment, sports, and government news. We also provide opinion and feature articles...

It is also a frequent goldmine of truly headsploding woo, but this recent column by "freelance journalist" Theresa J. Thurmond Morris is bizarre by any standard. Before you proceed, go get a roll of duct tape. Wrap your head thoroughly with it. It may be the only way to stop it from exploding due to a massive influx of woo.

OK, head all wrapped up tight?

Let's continue.

BEING HUMAN ET AND SEEING ET UFOS'S IS NORMAL!
Theresa J. Thurmond Morris

Being human and extraterrestrial is okay. Seeing ET UFOs is fine with me. I am human but does spirit and God exist in my soul? Are we all human souls and mirroring creation?

My name is Theresa Janette Thurmond Morris and am told I am a kind spiritual intellectual. I want to believe that since others perceive me and I desire to mirror back to them their own selves and energy creation. Some say I am an alien hybrid based on my extraordinary experiences. What if me being contacted by ET UFOs is normal?

I propose a theory that we are all here to discover our true selves as extraterrestrial in nature and origin.The time of revealing being human is here. Extra terrestrial beings in ET UFOS are making contact.

We are all of the same sentient intelligent being humanoid species. Some of us may be programmed with misinformation and falsifications...

There are many ways to consider revealing information and personally I have made many mistakes in my past while on earth. I found out what it was like to be human. What being human means to me is finding my way back home to the creators who are not of earth but are extraterrestrial and they are those who hover in spacecraft above earth and can maneuver under the water on earth...

Is Jesus the door, and God the building in which we live with the omnipresence being the universe or is there more? Mohamed and other leaders are dead and gone. Gone where? Does anyone really know until they are dead themselves? I died. I know things but some things and not all things.

It does not matter where their biological vessel or physical body was originally conceived. In other words, they can be from another planet and galaxy. This does not mean that they are not part of the humanoid species...

Atlantis, Lemuria, Semuria, Athens, North America as an Indian, Maya, Egypt are past life memories real? Where do they come from if not inside our souls?

Like computers that most of us are familiar with using at the office or in our home, I have learned a great deal about people, places, things, and services offered while I am visiting this planet. We are explorers...

We are all spiritual intellectuals consisting of energy in human form.

We are all here to be a part of something wonderful and much larger than ourselves in one container unit...

When one thinks about themselves in this way the whole reason that we are here on earth makes sense. Why else would we be put here on a planet with an inner guidance system of desiring to survive no matter what that was implanted as life by our creators. One regardless of the location will still desire to maintain life and survive or is that simply a perception of mine? Some people when lost will take their own lives.

Killing has always been the one eternal negative energy or sin in religious faiths. We are not here to end our own lives but to live life to it´s fullest and to accrue energy and maintain energy while we discover and investigate life and create energy of all types, shapes, forms, and matter...

Let us begin learning about others that resemble ourselves on earth first. Although this may not be our own home planet, we are here now.

We all may be created of energy and/or spirit in side an earthly vessel or physical body but we all did not land in the same proximity when we came to earth. We all were born into separate areas and were placed on separate continents which we decided would be called home...

...Is their a mid-level where God and the celestial kingdom exists and is their a lower realm for angels and another third of the host of Heaven? Is earth and humans lower in spirit than God because they were created in God´s image/ Do the one´s called angels really have to bow down to humans because we have a spirit, and soul in a human body and the angels are lacking a portion of this creation? What of the Nephalem, the angels of good, or demons of bad? Were there really good and bad angels or only good and bad spirits on earth?..

I learned that all those beings that were of other places and matter from other locations other than earth were all like me and were curious about themselves, their planet, and mine. I learned that we were all basically the same regardless of our energy and matter.

I learned that extraterrestrials were simply sentient intelligent beings that were learning about life and what being a sentient human intelligent being on earth is all about. I learned to accept myself, my species, my world, my galaxy, and my universe. I learned that being human is about making ET UFO contact. Knowing I am human but come from ET origin and seeing UFO´s is okay with me. I may be human and ET and there are others the same as me.

This article is dedicated to all those humans on earth but specially those who are choosing to assist me in building the Ascension Center.

OK, you can unwrap your head now.

I want to write some witty comments about this, but what could I possibly add that was funnier and more bizarre than what's already here? It's got everything; New Age babble, Creationist crapulence, UFOs, Atlantis, reincarnation, religion... this is it. I have struck the motherload of woo and its name is Theresa Janette Thurmond Morris.

All of these things go quite well together, really. Is it truly any more bizarre to believe that one is an extraterrestrial spiritual intellectual than it is to think that a magical sky-man poofed life into existence? Theresa doesn't think so, and neither do I. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

I know that I, for one, will be spending the rest of today looking for the spaceships hovering in the sky and under the water. Someone has to make the droids get back in those trees!

For those whose appetite for even more insane woo has only been whetted, here's a link to more information about Theresa J. Thurmond Morris God Emperor of Dune's Ascension Center. Click it to learn more about how:

• GUS, a crashed alien shuttlecraft, gave us extraterrestrial technology that's already in use in your home!
  
• ...alien spacecraft use technetium as a power supply... and you can, too!
  
• ...making a profit from the Internet is wrong and ruining the mission of protection undertaken by UFO pilots!
  
• ...Theresa will reveal her true self and mission in December 2012!
  
• ...and much, much more!

Heck, she even has a CV for your perusal in case anyone wants to hire her to, I don't know, consult on how to build underwater flying saucers in order to construct pyramids in Lemuria for Jesus.

You know, the Internet is an amazing thing. It can unite all sorts of woo and give rise to entire wooful movements. In fact, the Discovery Institute ought to consider beaming Morris up to their mother ship. She'd make an ideal Senior Fellow. She and Michael Medved could be a whole new Dynamic Duo of Woo!

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Omiscient Committee: Man Earns Divine Diploma Writ in Burning Bushes

'Beyond and After Life': Finding Your Inner Utopia

LANCASTER, Calif., Aug 25, 2008 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Christine J. Haven's new book, Beyond and After Life, published by Owl Creek Press, will help people during complex times to find their inner utopia.

Readers will realize why David Haven proclaims that the Supreme Being, the Creator of everything and all Religions -- God, is still alive and He continues to communicate with humans as needed.

"Holy Graduel," Haven says, "is 466 pages and is the true story of God's Angels coming into David's life and God's Concept of Life, which David learned while earning his Master's Degree under the guidance of God's Angels."

From the fall of 1996 until December of 2004, David A. Haven received his Master's Degree studying under God's Angels...

And you thought your committee was tough? It took this guy eight years to earn an MA. You would think that an omniscient committee wouldn't even require a defense. Shouldn't they have known instantly what the master's thesis was going to look like and not have taken nearly a decade to grant the degree?

You've got to wonder what line of funding Haven had. I don't think the NSF would be involved with this sort of thesis work. Maybe he was a TA for eight years.

I'd ask to examine his diploma, but it would probably make my head melt like that scene in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark when the Ark of the Covenant was opened.

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Baby Bunnies That Kill You in Seven Days: YouTube Weirdness

A friend of mine, knowing my fondness for The Ring, sent me a link to a YouTube video. Someone spliced together video of cute baby bunnies with footage from the cursed video from The Ring to produce something just a little bit perverse.

If you've just watched the above, you have seven days to live before succumbing to fuzzy baby bunnies — from hell!

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There's Something Wrong with John McCain

Listen carefully to this video of John McCain's comments about the Russia-Georgia conflict delivered during an interview on CNN:

Nations don't invade other nations in the 21^st century? That certainly explains a lot about why tens of thousands of American troops are in Iraq right now! We didn't invade Iraq and remove its previous government in 2003. What we did was send our military men and women over there for a long vacation. They were just having a nice picnic when Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party fell and the damnable MSM whipped up a bunch of nonsense that we had something to do with the situation. Barack Obama wants to end our forces' holiday and make them come home, but John McCain knows how hard they work and wants to keep the happy fun party going for as long as possible! There ain't no party like a Baghdad party 'cause a Baghdad party don't stop.

Nations don't invade other nations in the 21^st century?



What happened to the requirement that a US president actually be born a citizen of the US? Clearly, McCain isn't from the same planet as the rest of us, let alone the same country. Or maybe he's just figuring that since Dubya got elected to a second term after demonstrating that he had the IQ of a half-eaten Pop Tart he ought to get a jump on the game and prove to the public that he's stupid enough to be president. There must be some cunning strategy involved here. Or maybe he's just demonstrating to us once again that he's a yoga master capable of going into his famous "goat swallows his hoof" stance at any moment.

Still, I'm inclined toward the most parsimonious explanation of this latest air biscuit issuing from the mouth of McCain. That is, he's simply an idiot.

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Texas Exorcism Case May Go to Supreme Court

Following up the case of Laura Schubert, the former Texas woman who was subjected to an involuntary exorcism by a fundamentalist church, the Fort Worth Star Telegram reports that the Schubert family is going to attempt a hearing before the Supreme Court:

Family resolves to take fight over exorcism to Supreme Court

By MAX B. BAKER

...The 1996 episode left her physically and emotionally scarred, and "this stuff is still hard to talk about," Pearson told the Star-Telegram after the Texas Supreme Court dismissed her lawsuit against the church June 27. The majority said the courts can't get involved in a religious debate over church doctrine...

After the exorcism, she dropped out of high school her senior year, began to cut herself as many as 100 times over several years, and refused to leave the house. Pearson slit her wrists with a box cutter.

Her father, a former missionary and minister, became an agnostic.

But Pearson and her parents, Tom and Judy Schubert, say they are willing to go to the U.S. Supreme Court in their fight against a church they once loved.

As the parents see it, Pleasant Glade members abused their daughter in the same way a husband or a boyfriend abuses a wife or a girlfriend — and all under the guise of serving the Lord...

Too bad her father wasn't agnostic before a bunch of superstitious yahoos forcibly attempted to drive boogeymen out of his daughter's body. Lawsuit or not, this kind of lunacy never has to happen to anyone. Laura Schubert's own recounting of how events unfolded goes into more detail about just how superstitious and how irrational the members of this church became than did the article linked here last month:

...Pearson and her brother, Joseph, had been left with their older sister, Amy, while their parents went on a fundraising trip in Indiana. She was going to hang out with the church youth group and work at her part-time job. On June 7, a Friday, Pearson went to the church to help the youth group prepare for a garage sale. At about midnight, one of the teens rushed in saying he had seen a demon in the darkened sanctuary.

Rod Linzay, the youth pastor, urged everyone to anoint the sanctuary with holy oil. They rapped on pews. They prayed. They propped a cross against the doors to keep demons out or drive them out. They were up until early morning.

"I had been around [the church] all of my life, but I had not experienced anything of this sort.  . . .  After being up all of those hours and involved in all of that, it was easy to believe what was going on was real," she said.

Exhausted, Pearson went home and then to work but was unable to sleep that night. By the time she returned to the church on Sunday evening, she had been up for 72 hours.

It was then that people believed demons had possessed her and the first exorcism was performed. Pearson said she collapsed on the floor out of exhaustion. During the trial, doctors suggested she was hypoglycemic. She clenched her fists, gritted her teeth, made guttural sounds, cried and yelled.

"I was moving my head back and forth, and I hear people saying things are wrong with me and the youth pastor's wife saying it was the demons," Pearson said. They held her down, but after the thrashing stopped, Pearson was allowed to get up after saying the name Jesus.

On Wednesday, Pearson returned to the church. After hearing a sermon about "putting on the whole armor of God to fight off the devil," Pearson said she went off to a corner, curled into a fetal position and prayed.

When another youth asked to pray for her, Pearson refused. Eventually, she was held spread-eagle on the floor. She fought those holding her and asked to be let go. They said "it was the devil talking," Pearson said.

McCutchen then entered the room. He tried to calm Pearson and told her to "just say the word Jesus." Eventually, he called Pearson's parents, who came and took their "dazed" daughter home. Later they saw the bruises and carpet burns. Soon she began having nightmares about hands and faces coming out of her bedroom walls to grab her...

I don't fully understand why she went back to the church, although the fact that her parents had initially left her in that organization's care and that she had been brought up to believe in this stuff to begin with might have a good deal to do with it.

The idea that some teenager's panicked assertion that he'd seen a demon in the place could touch off this kind of sorcerous nonsense — splashing magical oil about and rapping on wooden benches to drive away evil spirits — indicates to me a level of sheer foolishness and ignorance that I wish I couldn't believe was still with us in 21^st century America. These people shouldn't be role models held up for praise of their values, they should be laughed at as backwards relics of a time when fear born of the shadows from mankind's childhood hadn't yet given way to the daylight of reason. That this moldering mind-junk, this kind of superstition-fueled melodrama, is repeated every day all over the country, that it's broadcast on television (ever seen Rod Parsley? I watched some of that last week), should be seen as a disgrace to a nation that once led the world in scientific progress — and now is losing that edge. Could there be a connection between this latest superstitious revival and America beginning to lose its edge in scientific and technical leadership? Ya think?

At least one person has learned the correct lesson from what happened to Laura Schubert, though:

[Laura's father, Tom] Schubert has lost his faith, while his wife and daughter continue to believe.

"I do not hold the religious views I once held," Schubert said. "I don't know what is out there. I don't think what is out there is what I thought was there in the past.  . . .  I don't believe in demons and such.  . . .  I doubt that God exists."

Good morning and welcome to rationality, Tom Schubert. I hope the rest of your family — and the rest of mankind — catch up with you very, very soon.

There is simply no justification at all for there to be exorcisms. There are no evil spirits to be cast out, no boogeymen hiding under our beds, no monsters in the closets (unless you count Fred Phelps), no ghosts, no vampires, no djinni, no mermaids. If an adult were to tell us of his fervent belief in unicorns, we would think him strange. For some reason, though, there are still people who are commended for their belief in maleficent spooks that can leap in and out of bodies and can be removed by old men chanting in dead or invented tongues while sprinkling water imbued with magical essences about the room. There are people who believe more that they can keep said spirits out of a room by propping a crucifix against a door more than they believe the word of a woman who tells them to leave her alone, that she's not under the command of some infernal, goat-headed hobgoblin dreamed up by some agrarian imbiber of suspect grain products a millennium prior. This is not how adults comport themselves. Even most children know better.

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Ben Stein's Corollary to Godwin's Law: Hitler is Everywhere

I'm not sure whether Ben Stein is mentally deranged, has had some kind of stroke, or has just come to the decision that the "anything I don't like is Hitler" gambit used in Expelled should be spread about as much as possible, but there's something very wrong with him. Whatever the reason, he seems to have come up with something that I think should be named Ben Stein's Corollary to Godwin's Law, or Stein's Corollary for short. That is, anything that Hitler did, no matter how much it may have been done by other people, can be used in an attempt to silence any possibility intelligible discourse.

Stein recently employed this corollary while appearing on CNN's Glenn Beck Show in reference to the plans underway for Barack Obama's acceptance of the Democratic nomination at an outdoor arena apart from the main convention in order to accommodate the large number of people who want to attend the event:

...that is not the way we do things in political parties in the United States of America... Seventy-five-thousand people at an outdoor sports palace, well, that's something the Fuehrer would have done. And I think whoever is advising Senator Obama to do this is bringing up all kinds of very unfortunate images from the past.

Seriously, what neurological circuit has shorted in Stein's brain to make this kind of analogy and expect it to sound even remotely reasonable? He seems to be seeing the zombie Hitler everywhere.

Even if no other American politician had ever given a speech at an arena before, so what? Does the mere fact that both Obama and Hitler have appeared in an outdoor arena mean that there is some meaningful similarity between the two?

Hitler wore shoes. I wear shoes. Therefore, I want to exterminate Jews, gypsies and homosexuals. It makes every bit as much sense. But wait... I've never seen Ben Stein barefoot! He could be a Nazi.

But wait again... Barry Goldwater held a rally at Colt .45 Stadium in Houston in 1964!

Besides baseball, we also played for a Barry Goldwater rally in the stadium just before the 1964 presidential election. That may not have been the last event at Colt Stadium, but we were there.

— Source

Barry Golwater held a rally at a sports stadium, and Hitler held rallies at stadiums... so Barry Goldwater was like Hitler. So much for Stein's "we don't do things like that in America" delusion.

That a politician speaking at a large sporting venue automatically conjures up images of brown shirts in Stein's mind tells us nothing about the speaker and everything about the ongoing degeneration of Stein's relationship with reality. What's next... Obama wears shoes and Hitler wore shoes (anyone ever seen a photo of Hitler's bare feet)? They both prefer to breathe the same mixture of gases when appearing in public? Hitler is everywhere! Head for the hills!

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Millenialism, Childhood Trauma and Barack Obama: The Sad Case of Molly Kagan

It's been a trend among some local newspapers to offer their readers the opportunity to create blogs attached to the papers' websites for some time now. Doing so probably garners these bloggers a larger number of local readers than they'd otherwise get. The Tallahassee Democrat offers such "reader blogs," one of which belongs to Molly Kagan. There are two things that can be safely said about Kagan; she hates Barack Obama and she loves Jesus. OK, three things. She's obsessive and paranoid about both, and this is pointed out particularly well in her most recent blog article. In it, she reveals that the Gospel of Matthew is trying to warn us not to vote for Obama whom, she says, "will play a major part in prophecy" — and not a good one.

Obama and Biblical Prophecy

For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect. MT. 24:24

I was raised in church and I remember seeing a movie when I was little about the second coming of Jesus Christ. It scared the hell out of me. People woke up and their husbands, wives and kids were gone. People driving were suddenly gone and cars crashed. Many people remaining knew what had happened and some ran to church. Jesus Christ had returned for believers.

In my more than seven years of experience with blogging, I've found that it's a good rule of thumb that anything that starts off with a Bible quote in red font is followed by a torrent of crazy. Molly, for her part, reveals to us the origin of her disorder. She was traumatized in a church, with the consent of her parents, no doubt, by a film designed precisely to frighten the credulous little children. She's like a casebook example for those who maintain that religion is child abuse. I don't think that's a necessary connection, but what was done to Molly Kagan certainly qualifies. It's sad to see someone later in their lives who was subjected to such abuse as a child and is now manifesting the kind of paranoia that follows in what she's written about a Senator from Illinois.

What does that mean? It means that you have repented to God and admitted that you are a sinner, believe that Jesus is the son of God and he died for your sins, and that you confess your faith in Jesus as your Savior and your Lord.

Sounds easy, huh? Well, in the movie their were a lot of people who had not done that and they were left to suffer quite a bit. They had to hide their faith and some were beheaded, etc. In today's world it is the same. The gospel has been told to many people who have turned their back on the Lord. No one knows exactly what will happen to the non-believers, but those of us who believe know the end is near.

Ah, Millennialism, that reeking pile of mental degeneracy that leaves its believers waiting for the cosmic hitman to come and start the beheadings. Can you imagine taking a little girl to see a film in which others were tortured and beheaded for not believing the right things? If I were to take my four year old niece to the kind of gory zombie movies that I enjoy on occasion, if I were to expose her to such blood and violence, people would rightly think that there was something wrong with me. They'd likely call me a child abuser and they would be correct in saying so. But apparently if I show her movies about the return of one particular living dead individual that results in death and dismemberment, it's excused as "religious education." This is sick and depraved stuff without question. This is emotional abuse, and the fact that a movie is shown in a church shouldn't exempt it from the same standards that would apply if it were shown in a theater. Both are public places, and small children shouldn't be exposed to this kind of violence in either place. Kagan's paranoia is testimony to the emotional impact and damage that results from such exposure.

Obama falls right into Jesus' plan for his return. Everything he says is subject to his whim, or polls, or his advisors. He was the most liberal Senator prior to his Presidential candidacy. Now, he has become more of a moderate. His wife is being given advice to soften and be less vocal. They are both deceptive and it is very obvious that although Mr. Obama is not the anti-christ, he will play a major part in prophecy. He is the epitome of the aforementioned bible verse.

Wait... I thought True Believers wanted Jesus to return. Kagan now seems to be worried that he'll show back up if Obama is elected. This strange sort of ambivalence is typical of people who have suffered childhood trauma. It's a psychic dissonance that crops up time and time again. These people have been scared shitless by their own religion all their lives and they don't understand that the condition exists because it's all they've ever known. As human beings, they're frightened of the ramifications of their own faith — as well they should be if they aren't complete sociopaths. The Christian Tribulation is a terrible thing, a holocaust of the greatest scale.

If Molly Kagan truly believed that the return of Jesus was something desirable, and that the election of Barack Obama would hasten that Second Coming, she would logically be Obama's biggest fan. A vote for Obama would effectively be a vote for Christ. As it stands, she sees the return of the Nazarene as a reason not to vote for Obama.

There are a good many reasons for which one might be concerned about an Obama presidency, but reading him into a text written nearly 2,000 years ago is not one of them. Seeing a modern individual in such a text is a kind of paranoia. The astounding bound beyond the confines of rational thinking required to arrive at such a conclusion defy the definition of a sound mind. Whoever wrote Matthew doesn't demonstrate any knowledge of there even being a continent that we now call North America or a country called the United States let alone that there would someday be a Senator from a state called Illinois who would run for president of that country. The Bible is replete with overt lists of nations of which the authors of its various books were aware, so the assumption that one of them would cloak the identity of some other nation to whom he was giving advice (which is precisely what Kagan is saying) has no basis in precedent and can be seen as nothing better than wishful thinking. Matthew 24:24 could equally be applied to John McCain, Robert Mugabe or Larry Craig as it could be to Barack Obama. It could be applied, in fact, to almost any politician from any period in the history of any tribe, city or nation. Politicians have always been deceptive to an extent, particularly in times and places where they relied on the good will of citizens to hold office. Politicians who require the ballots of the people — whatever people we might care to name — spend a certain amount of their energy on telling the voters what they think will appeal to the greatest possible majority. Kagan goes into her Bible-fueled, fear-saturated rant already thinking that Jehovah has picked a candidate (who just happens to be the one whom Kagan herself supports), so she applies the verse she's selected a posteriori to the one she doesn't like in order to connect with other True Believers on an emotional basis, to inspire fear of punishment. Essentially, Elohim are watching over your shoulder in the voting booth and will hold you accountable if you don't vote for the person whom Kagan says the God says to vote for. God the wrathful busybody is speaking to you through a blogger in Tallahassee, and you'd better listen up or you'll wind up beheaded while the righteous and prophetic Molly Kagan smiles down on the bloody scene from her vantage point in the clouds.

Does it get much loonier than this?

Please think about your vote. Think about Obama's constantly changing words. Think about what will become of our beloved nation. Repent and be ready.

Gee, it's a good thing that we have Molly to remind us to think about our votes. We would have forgotten to do that without her scary, scary reminder of religious violence and the end of the world and how the streets will someday run red with the blood of the infidels. I hadn't taken into account that I might have my head lopped off if I didn't cast my ballot for John McCain in November. Let me think about that for a moment...

Hmmmm.

Nope, I don't see it as a valid reason to vote for dogcatcher, let alone president. It still seems like a bunch of crazy nonsense cooked up in a roiling kettle of mental injury. She further reinforces her own outcome of childhood trauma with an appeal to another gibbering paranoiac; Kagan links to an even crazier article written by Michael Bresciani which, amongst the many bizarre contentions made, includes this following gem:

In thirty five years of teaching the Bible tenants of the second coming of Christ (eschatology) I have heard the question 'do you think he could be the Antichrist' asked thousands of times about dozens of people. Now I see the question being asked about Sen. Obama on blogs and websites and in fellowship halls more than any other name to date.

I don't believe that he is the Antichrist because according to scripture the Antichrist comes from and rules over Europe. But since the false prophet who aids the Antichrist comes from a completely different nation I am watching Obama's meteoric rise with that fact in mind.

We who love America and its constitution and original purpose are disgusted beyond measure with what is happening to our nation. We who love God and trust his word are seeing prophecy unrolling right before our eyes. It doesn't make it any easier to swallow but we are always thankful that warnings were part of Gods grace to us so we wouldn't be easily deceived or overcome. Christ comforted those who were to see the ugliness of the last days bring the world to its knees with a saying that calls the big cry for change for the sake of change what it really is; a cunningly attractive deception.

For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect. MT. 24:24

Sound familiar?

This Millennialism or eschatology or whatever other names it may go by is a pernicious influence upon both our politics and our culture, to put it gently. It seeks to make what would otherwise be a very good reason for treatment with lithium and thorazine the basis for legal and political decisions. I hope there will come a day when children are no longer traumatized with the sort of horrific imagery that has resulted in this emotional disorder, resulting in adults like Kagan and Bresciani injecting their madness into the political process. As it stands now, it seems that America is saddled with far too many of these nuts. In the days before the internet and cable television, they would have largely existed as isolated individuals walking up and down the street screaming "The end is nigh!" as passersby rolled their eyes and sought to avoid them. Thanks to the vast worldwide network, they can find one another now. They can support each other's paranoia and take on an undeserved air of legitimacy that helps their numbers to snowball. They would have been given treatment, and treatment they need far more than newspaper-sponsored blogs.

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Gel of the Day: ...and Then a Miracle Happens

If you're the kind of person who reads this blog then you have probably seen the cartoon with two physicists standing in front of a chalkboard. In the middle of a bunch of equations are the words "and then a miracle occurs" and one of the physicist is saying "I think you should be more explicit in step 2."

Today I had a similar thing happen with one of my gels:


The first two are DNA from taxa that didn't come out last time I tried. The last group of four is a positive control. I used stock DNA and the same primers for all. Now, here's the really weird part: lanes 4 and 8 shouldn't have a product in them at all. No bands should be there. They're the products of a cytochrome oxidase I primer that I discovered today should not work. The primer I was given is for the wrong beetle family; the one I'm studying is too divergent. I was just investigating the problem this morning, in fact, right after I put these samples in the thermocycler. I wound up designing two new Tenebrionidae-specific COI primers and sending an email off to two of my committee members telling them that I'd done so.

So, of course, the primers that have never worked before, and shouldn't have worked this time, are the only ones that produced bands in the first two taxa... but NOT in the positive control. The only band I got in that one is for the small subunit. I should have one for the large subunit as well. It worked last time using the same dilution and primers.

I would just like to say "Argh." Really, what else can I say?

Now, it may be that I used the wrong primers. I've been very out of sorts after not getting enough sleep last night and I could have screwed up. Still, the way I load my tubes, I should have gotten the same result in the positive control (#001) if that were the case. But I didn't.

Tomorrow, I'll clean the PCR products and get them ready for sequencing using the old COI primers. My bet is that I'll get back nothing. And then I'll just start all over again. Maybe someone tampered with the annealing temperature on the thermocycler or something.

I dunno.

I need a drink.

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Witch Trials and Exorcism Get Green Light from Texas Supreme Court

In 2002, the family of Laura Schubert sued the Pleasant Glade Assembly of God Church for an incident that occurred in 1996. The church's staff had decided based upon the accusation of one of its younger members that Schubert was possessed by a demon that he'd seen. They forcibly held her down and performed an exorcism on her against her will. She was injured both physically and emotionally and her family won the suit. The church appealed to the Texas Supreme Court.

Yesterday, the court reversed Schubert's award in a 6-3 decision, ruling that church's can't be sued for performing exorcisms — even when they do so without the consent of the person being exorcized. Even if that person is injured. Churches can now perform these archaic, bizarre rituals without any concern for the well-being of their victims, because the state's Supreme Court has effectively ruled that a church's freedom of religion trumps an individuals protection against false imprisonment. According to this ruling, a church could feasibly hold a person against their will for as long as it deemed necessary, physically restrain them in any way they thought appropriate, withhold food and water, and do whatever they believed necessary to drive imaginary boogeymen from real flesh-and-blood.

Texas Supreme Court rules church can't be sued in exorcism
By MAX B. BAKER (maxbaker@star-telegram.com)

A divided Texas Supreme Court ruled in favor of a former Colleyville church Friday, saying church members who were involved in a traumatic exorcism that ultimately injured a young woman are protected by the First Amendment.

In a 6-3 decision, the court ruled that the Pleasant Glade Assembly of God staff's efforts to cast out demons from Laura Schubert presents an ecclesiastical dispute over religious conduct that would unconstitutionally entangle the court in church doctrine.

Schubert described a wild night in 1996 that involved casting out demons from the church and two attempts to exorcise demons from her. The incident left Schubert physically bruised and so emotionally scarred she later tried to commit suicide. She was 17 at the time.

Justice David Medina, writing for the majority, said that while Schubert's argument regarding physical injuries might be tried without mentioning religion, her case was mostly about her emotional or psychological injuries from a religious activity that was sanctioned by the church.

For the court to impose any legal liability for engaging in a religious activity "to which the church members adhere would have an unconstitutional 'chilling effect' by compelling the church to abandon core principles of its religious beliefs," Medina wrote.

"Religious practices that might offend the rights or sensibilities of a non-believer outside the church are entitled to greater latitude when applied to an adherent within the church," Medina wrote.

He went on to say that when claims involve "only intangible, emotional damages allegedly caused by sincerely held religious belief, courts must carefully scrutinize the circumstances so as not to become entangled in a religious dispute."

Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson, in a stinging dissenting opinion, wrote that the majority opinion is at times "imprecise and overbroad" and imposes an "erroneous standard" that would allow a church to simply claim a "religious motive" to avoid being sued.

He wrote that this "sweeping immunity" is inconsistent with U.S. Supreme Court precedent and that the First Amendment "guards religious liberty; it does not sanction intentional abuse in religion's name."

"This overly broad holding not only conflicts with well-settled legal and constitutional principles, it will also prove to be dangerous in practice," Jefferson wrote.

"Texas courts have been and will continue to be confronted with cases in which a congregant suffers physical or psychological injury as a result of violent or unlawful, but religiously sanctioned, acts," he wrote...

Schubert's account of what happened over several days at the Pleasant Glade church in June 1996 is harrowing.

Schubert and her brother were involved with church activities while their parents were out of town.

On Friday evening, during preparations for a youth group garage sale, the atmosphere became "spiritually charged" when another youth said he saw a demon.

Under direction of the youth minister, the youth frantically anointed everything in the church with holy oil until, at 4:30 a.m. Saturday, the minister told the exhausted youth that they had finally been successful.

At the Sunday evening worship services, Schubert collapsed. Church members "laid hands" on her and forcibly held her arms crossed over her chest, despite her demands to be set free.

She reportedly cried, yelled, kicked, sweated and hallucinated while also making guttural noises.

She was released after she calmed down and replied with requests to say the name Jesus.

The following Wednesday, during a weekly youth service, Schubert reportedly began to act in the same manner. She curled into a fetal position and asked to be left alone. Church members thought she was in distress and held her down in a "spread eagle" position with youth members holding down her arms and legs.

During the incident, she suffered carpet burns, a scrape on her back and bruises on her wrists.

Her father, Tom Schubert, himself an Assembly of God pastor and missionary, questioned what happened at the church.

His daughter experienced angry outbursts, weight loss and self-mutilation and eventually dropped out of high school her senior year. She was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder...

A jury found the church and its members liable and awarded Schubert $300,000 for mental anguish, but the 2nd Court of Appeals in Fort Worth cut $122,000 from the verdict for loss of future income.

In the church's appeal to the state Supreme Court, it raised the question of whether the Fort Worth appeals court erred when it said Pleasant Glades' First Amendment rights regarding freedom of religion do not prevent the church from being held liable for mental distress triggered by a "hyper spiritualistic environment."

Justice Medina said that the court does not mean to imply that "under the cloak of religion, persons may, with impunity," commit intentional wrong, such as sexual assault or a minister having an affair with someone in marriage counseling, and get away with it.

"Freedom to believe may be absolute, but freedom of conduct is not, and 'conduct even under a religious guise remains subject to regulation for public safety,' " Medina wrote.

Pruessner, the church's attorney, agreed, saying that church members were simply trying to help Schubert and that there wasn't any evil intent.

"This was clearly a religious controversy, and I don't see how anyone can argue that they were seizing on religion as a get-out-of-jail-free card," Pruessner said. "I disagree vehemently with the spiritual beliefs of the church and how they handled it; it doesn't mean they are legally liable..."

Somebody needs to screen Justice David Medina for possible use of crack, because it's more than a little opaque as to how he thinks that churches are still regulated for public safety if someone can be held against their will and physically abused as was Schubert. AT what point does the supposed regulation kick in? A 17 year old was held against her will, restrained and injured; apparently that's not enough in Texas. Would it have been enough if Laura Schubert's bones had been broken? If she'd been pressed beneath stones? If she'd been hung by the neck until dead? What happened to Schubert is alarmingly reminiscent of the Salem Witch Trials of the late 17^th century.

Look where Goodwife Cloyce sits on the beam suckling her yellow bird between her fingers!

— Ann Putnam, 1692

The First Amendment says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

In Texas, that now means that as long as some bunch of demon-haunted yahoos claims religious motivations for their actions, they can get away with anything they deem appropriate as a response to one of their own pointing a finger at someone and shouting "Witch!" I suppose that the Texan Supreme Court will next be taking up the thorny legal issue of whether angry mobs have the right to bear torches and pitchforks.

Perhaps if Sergio Aguiar had driven to Coleyville, Texas instead of Turlock, California before smashing his son to a pulp against the asphalt he'd be alive and free today. Anything to get those pesky demons out.

What is happening here, people?

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Teach the Controversy: Humans Resulted When Angels Mated with Apes

Galloping out of Stilwell, Oklahoma comes a bold new "theory" to explain human origins. John Sparacio has discovered that humans are really reptilian creatures that resulted when angels mated with apes. Contradicting the claims of Young Earth Creationists, Sparacio reveals that the world was created 29,000 years ago, not a mere 6,000. Humans weren't created by God, though. We weren't part of the plan; we're the product of evil and so tainted with original sin.

Why isn't this being taught in schools yet? Evolution is just a theory, and so is this. I'm sure some schoolteacher in the great state of Louisiana will pick this up and run with it someday.

Buckle yourself into your chairs before reading this, people. I nearly fell out of mine.

The First Born; my reptilian roots

Man is a derivative of a reptilian and mammal species. The story of genesis was passed down and mistranslated by the Hebrews. They had taken bits and pieces of ancient verbal and written fragments and joined these writings together into a narrative which by no fault of there own is misleading. We, humans that is, where created by evil and in evils image. Look at the passage in genesis where "the sons of gods had taken the daughters of men and defiled them" defiled means mated with.

Right. Shouldn't we be explaining this to our kids when we teach them the facts of life? "When a man and a woman love each other very much, the man defiles the woman, and that's where babies come from."

Concerning our interpretation of good-looks. I reason that men and women at there highest state of beauty, according to us, derives from Lucifer who was said to be the most handsome and charming of all angels, this is where we get our idea of good-looking but I say to you look at each other very closely you will start to see the reptilian resemblance. This reptilian DNA comes from millions of years ago which is latent in all living thinks on earth. The angels inseminated their blood into the ape blood which houses this reptilian DNA and created the human form. I surmise that the creation took place approximately 29000 years ago. After the creation process the angels started to mate with humans and bare children who are the modern day people of this earthly world. This explains why we are so physical and deadly as for the gentle side we also have the DNA of rabbits and flowers but this gentler side seems too be over powered by the reptilian blood. Sometimes it causes such confusion that some of us end up in suicide or malfunction like serial killers and rapist. Why the reptilian blood seems to dominate the mammal blood is a mystery to me but the physical signs are extraordinary.

Hmmmm. Anyone get the impression that Sparacio doesn't get out much? I don't imagine he's very popular with members of the opposite (or same) sex. "My, but you're looking scaly tonight" is a compliment most potential partners don't take very well... unless one is attempting to "defile" an alligator, I suppose. That opens up a whole set of problems that I don't have time to discuss here.

Here are a few key points concerning our reptilian side; we have reptilian brains which form during fetal development, our skin is microscopic scales like snakes, we shed our skin like snakes; women especially, like to wear high-heals hence walking on there toes like the dinosaurs who walked on there toes, this is a subconscious emulation; women and men like to grow there nails long but women especially because of there instinct to protect, we have tail bones and our legs resemble in muscular terms those of amphibians such as frogs.

It's true that we have brain structures inherited from our reptilian ancestry, of course, and they do develop in utero. So do all the other parts of our brain, of course. Our skin isn't really all that much like that of a reptile, though, and I'm very familiar with the manner in which reptiles molt. When a lizard sheds, as Tycho has demonstrated for us many times, the skin comes off all at once to reveal the new skin beneath. Humans and other mammals continually shed dead cells individually. The only time we shed like reptiles is when we're recovering from a bad sunburn. It's possible that Sparacio made his observation after being out in the sun too long. I find it a bit of a stretch to equate a woman in high heels with a therapod and am of the opinion that our legs resemble those of frogs — which, if anybody was wondering, aren't reptiles but amphibians, so I don't know why Sparacio throws them into the mix — because both amphibians and mammals share a very distant common ancestral tetrapod and thus share some similar structures (what biologists who haven't been eating the blue-staining mushrooms call "homologous structures"). Still, all of my objections amount only to a "theory" and so are no more credible than John Sparacio's "Apes and Angels" theory. Teach the controversy!

I really don't believe that God, as we think of him, would of made such a blunder. I do believe that these fallen angels did have the Holy spirit in there blood since they came from heaven(another name for the universe) and it was transmitted at the formation of us to us. But it lies deep down under thousands of years and millions of generation in our subconscious. The only way to release it is through the teachings of the Holy Bible. This book acts as a key would to a lock and streams hidden bits of electrical data into our minds opening the door and path to our savior, God...

Thousands of years and millions of generations? I haven't spent much time in Oklahoma, so maybe things work differently there. Can someone currently in that state confirm for me, please, whether humans can reproduce successfully there at less than one year of age? One thousand is one one-thousandth of a million. Assuming that a generation occurs every twenty years, for there to be one million generations in one thousand years would require that humans started popping out babies at an age of one one-thousandth of twenty years... or 0.02 years old. That's approximately 7.3 days. Are week-old babies giving birth in Oklahoma? I can't see offhand how this could be possible, but perhaps if I read the Bible so that hidden bits of electrical data streamed into my mind then it would all make sense. Teach the controversy!

...Jesus came not to save the world for he and all the prophets before him knew it was of evil and couldn't be saved but to tell men of there roots in the Holy Spirit. That they have the ability to open the locked subconscious mind and have everlasting life beyond this world of pain and torment.

This explains why there are so many mentions of women in high heels and apes mating with angels in the New Testament, of course. The psychological seat of millennial ideas is revealed in spades when Sparacio informs us that we live in a world of "pain and torment" (which is kind of odd since just a couple of paragraphs before he told us that "heaven" is a word that means "universe." I was under the apparently mistaken impression that the world we live in is part of the universe, and that would make it part of heaven. I didn't think that pain and torment were supposed to go on in heaven, but I make no claim to understanding Sparacio's theology. I'm having enough trouble with his biology). Sure, there's suffering in the world, but there are plenty of joys and pleasures to be had, too. Then again, I'm the sort of fellow who routinely "defiles" those dinosaur-like women and who can appreciate a good walk in the woods or a bad horror flick, too. Perhaps Sparacio's vision of the entirely terrible world would change if he tried some of those things, too.

Man should never have been created this way. This is why we suffer so since our creation was not according to Holy law but done as an act of dishonest and secretive manipulation by disobedient beings. Anything derived from a lie or untruth ends up in disaster just look around you at the human world in its entirety and you will see the disaster coming.

I do see disasters created by humans, of course, but those human-created disasters are quite often the result of exactly the kind of ignorance that Sparacio himself displays. As a millennialist, Sparacio sees the world as evil, sees humans as inherently evil, and aspires to be one of the privileged few who benefits when some divine hitman descends from heaven to destroy everything that he doesn't like. It's not terribly different from what Ron Graham wrote earlier this month about 13 foot tall superhuman hybrids and the end of the world.

But leaving aside the theological aspects of Sparacio's ramblings, what's so wrong about it in terms of a theory to explain human origins? It's no crazier than what's put forth under banners like Creationism and Intelligent Design. There's been just as much research that has uncovered evidence for Sparacio's ideas as there is for those two "alternative theories" and it doesn't contradict the evidence that has come forth from evolutionary biology anymore than those, either. There's no empirical reason, then, that Intelligent Design and Creationism should be taught alongside evolution while Sparacio's theory is excluded from the classroom.

Teach the controversy, I say!

According to his profile, John Sparacio is 47 years old. How can we have people in this country who can reach that age and still come up with this stuff? Something is profoundly wrong in America if we can have this kind of scientific (and linguistic!) illiteracy in those who have managed even to graduate from the eighth grade. If this were something isolated then it would be understandable as a sort of cultural and societal outlier. The fact is, however, that a majority of Americans buy into ideas that are every bit as outrageous and unevidenced and which fly in the face of what we know about the universe as does the stuff quoted above. How, in the 21^st century, can this be?

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Chutney Woo in Space: Jumping to Conclusions All the Way to Mars

They're baaaaaaaack.

You might remember the crack (smoking) India Daily Technology Team from February, when they announced in a largely plagiarized article that scientists had found that extraterrestrials built a distant galaxy. Now they've jumped on the latest space-related news, the recent potential discovery of water ice just below the surface of Mars. If it turns out that they have found water on Mars, that would be a very interesting discovery and would indeed increase the possibility that microbial life has existed on that planet at one time.

Then again, it wouldn't be nearly as interesting as if the following were true:

Who transported 7 million tons of earth soil to Mars?

NASA is slowly uncovering signs that soil on Mars may contain microbial life. It is just a matter of time that we get to know first extraterrestrial life forms in Mars that can survive harshest of the environments.

Scientists also estimate that close to 7 million tons of earth soil is sitting on Mars. The biggest question is who transported it? The way earth's soil is distributed in Mars makes an evolutionary biologist nick up again and again.

Who transported such massive amount of earth soil to mars?..

The answer lies in lost ancient civilizations in the earth that were many times more sophisticated than that of ours. It had an extraterrestrial origin which brought Type III level sophistication in technologies.

Millions of years back the extraterrestrial civilization that reigned the earth created a super highway between earth and Mars through the moon. As earth deteriorated in living conditions, shifting of colonies took place. Eventually when conditions in Mars also deteriorated, they left to other solar systems. They left microbial life forms (their genetically manipulated so call 'life') of seed that will blossom into intelligent life one day if and when earth becomes more livable. We are the result of those genetic seeds. What we are finding in Mars is the same genetic seeds that created 'life' including us. If and when Mars become livable again, the microbial genetic seeds will eventually allow evolution of intelligent life forms.

I have to ask the same question of the India Daily Technology Team that I recently asked of Texas' Don McElroy:


First of all, scientists aren't even sure yet whether they've found so much as water ice on Mars, let alone knowing with any certainty whether liquid water was ever present there. There are some clues that there might have been; there's a decent possibility of that condition having existed long ago. There's been no strong evidence found yet that martian soil harbors microbes at present nor even at any time in the planet's history. The best we can say right now is that there are iron oxides included in some debris originating from Mars that, on earth, is normally associated with certain bacteria. To say that scientists are slowly uncovering evidence of microbes on Mars is an overstatement. It's like saying that a glacier is slowly winning the Indianapolis 500.

Still, compared to where this editorial winds up going. A Type III civilization that existed on earth millions of years ago, had access to extraterrestrial technology, built a superhighway to Mars (with an off ramp to the moon, apparently)... even if we were to discover microbes on Mars that contained DNA resembling that of terrestrial microbes, nothing about that would provide the slightest bit of evidence for any of this sort of junk. This is silliness that would make even Erich von Daniken blush. Not only have we not found anything that looks like the slightest shred of evidence that humans or extraterrestrials have visited Mars, we certainly haven't found anything that would support the contention that there was anything remotely like a civilization on earth millions of years ago.

This kind of editorial is what you get when you lose the ability to separate science from science fiction. The civilization types that the India Daily Technology Team likes to mention is loosely based on the Kardashev Scale, a rather subjective ranking of hypothetical civilizations based on what they use to provide energy for their technology. A "type III civilization" is one that is capable of using an entire galaxy as an energy source. The scale itself lacks any supprting evidence for its utility; it's purely a thought exercise.

A thinking person might ask the following question about the IDTT's wild speculations about the ancient civilization that supposedly transported millions of tons of soil containing genetically engineered microbes to Mars: If they could harness the energy of an entire galaxy, why couldn't they use that energy to fix whatever supposedly went wrong with the earth in the first place rather than dropping off a few bacteria and then high-tailing it out of the solar system? Moreover, if they could predict and/or engineer the entire evolutionary history for these bugs, from microbial to human-like intelligence, and they could travel anywhere in the galaxy, why wouldn't they have foreseen that Mars was going to become a dry, frozen ball of dust whose surface is bombarded with enough solar radiation to slice the DNA in their bugs into oligonucleotides in a matter of hours? You'd think they'd have considered the possibility, even if the geniuses at India Daily hadn't.

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World Ends on Thursday, June 12

That's all folks. Yet another Millennialist prophet has seen the end of the world, and it's coming in just 6 days.

Looks like Ron Graham was right after all!

Ah well. At least I don't have to worry about paying back my student loans anymore.

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Deep-Down Crazies and the Demon-Haunted World

I stumbled across something today that just blew me away with its craziness. Granted, I've never been able to feel any sympathy for the Millennialist mindset, the strongly-held belief that the world is about to be purged of most of humanity at any moment for the benefit of true-believers. I don't live in a world haunted by giants from alternate realities and demons and angels. I'm firmly of the opinion that man's achievements and man's problems are man's, not supernatural entities hovering invisibly over our shoulders and waiting for some final confrontation.

Still, there are people who seem to spend a lot of their time hoping for massive destruction and pain and death. How does one live with such a morose view of the world?

The End is In Sight
By Ron Graham

In Matthew 24 Jesus gives a quick sketch of what the end times would look like, but He doesn't go into intricate detail. Everyone knows what wars are and rumors of wars. This isn't really a sign since earth has had wars and rumors of wars since time began. Later in this chapter He refers to the days of Noe (Noah). Again He just gives a sketch because everyone knew what He meant when referring to the days of Noe (Noah).Just before the Flood there was the almost complete corruption of the human genome by the fallen angels...

Mmmmm, I love the smell of blood libel of the whole human race in the morning. Smells like... ewwww. It's a silly thing when fanatics get hold of scientific terminology.

n Genesis chapter 6 we're given a very scary scenario. Somehow fallen angels (sons of God) co-habited with human women to create a complete hybrid race of super beings. They were known as the Nephilim and only Noah and his family were spared from this corruption from the seed of Satan...

A complete hybrid race of super beings; all of humanity, in this mythology, were super beings. Clark Kent is the anti-Christ, people!

Jesus being fully God is telling us that the end of the world will be in sight when these things (Matthew 24) begin to come to pass. So just what are we expected to see come to pass in these last days? We see man inventing new ways to create new life such as cloning. We see genetics being manipulated by scientists who have their own agendas. It was Satan that introduced his seed into the human genome in the days of Noah and it is Satan that is manipulating men's minds and actions in hopes of corrupting this current civilization. Just like in the times of Noah, just before the flood waters came...

Ah, the evil scientist hypothesis; we're out there "manipulating genetics" willy-nilly to suit "our own agenda" because Satan is manipulating our minds. But wait... if Satan is manipulating our minds, how can we have "our own agenda?" And if doing so will result in the purging of the world, then why would Satan be doing it, anyhow? You'd think the Prince of Darkness would be able to read Ron Graham's ravings and even the Book of Matthew and all of that. I know, I know, it doesn't have to make sense. Mythology has the luxury of being incoherent. Religious fantasy doesn't have to be rational; reason is the enemy of faith.

Civilization has now advanced to a place in time that just a few years ago would have been considered science fiction. Yet here we are living out our greatest fears. The demonic activity in this world is pervasive and easily noticeable by those with a discerning eye. Advancing civilization through gene manipulation to obtain a completely new species of human is quite frankly an abomination to God, and just as He did before the flood, God will put a stop to Satan's plans.


The reasoning behind these incredible feats of genetic manipulation is to provide us with ways to increase our life span (which it hasn't), to eliminate disease (which it hasn't), to give the humans on this planet a complete makeover so to speak (have you seen the human ear growing out of the mouse's back?)

Don't be fooled into believing Satan's demonic emissaries. Satan is here to supplant God's authority on earth and ring in his own creation, a creation of Nephilim...

Apparently, manipulating the genomes of crops in order to prevent diseases that wipe them out is "demonic." Investigating ways to eliminate heritable diseases is demonic, and it's just a ruse to cover the real agenda of creating super beings called Nephilim which, as we'll learn later, are 13 feet tall. Yeah, that's what we need; 13 foot tall super beings.

How exactly does growing an ear on the back of a mouse qualify as an effort to "make over" humanity, anyhow? The point of that experiment, as I recall, was to investigate techniques for growing tissue replacements for the maimed and diseased. Is Graham trying to say that part of science's nefarious plan is to breed a race of 13 foot tall superhumans with mice growing out of their ears? I don't think the NSF has a grant for that.

As we watch the world changing before our very eyes, Jesus' words come shinning through time and time again. The end of this secular world is quickly approaching...

Repent! The end is nigh! The internet has given a safe, dry home to those who would formerly have been forced to don sandwich boards in the streets in order to frighten the children. News flash for this particular crazy (although I know he won't read it and wouldn't accept it if he did): the world has been changing since the dawn of time, and human society has been changing since such a thing first came into the world. Change of any sprt scares the hell into these people, though, and it always will. The answer is always in the dim Bronze Age past; anything new is the work of Satan. What must that be like?

Believers should be watching with anticipation for the next sign. The Nephilim re-immerging could easily be that sign. It should be impossible to miss them. These evil hybrids were huge, standing over thirteen feet tall with immense strength. Those who believe the Bible's explanation of the Nephilim have no problem understanding the building of those great monumental structures we see around the globe that have scientists baffled as to their origin. Were extraterrestrials responsible for the pyramids at Giza, or Stonehenge, or any of the other unexplainable phenomenons all over this planet? Not extraterrestrials but intre-dimensional...

You heard it here, folks. Stonehenge was built by 13 foot tall superhuman hybrids from another dimension. Humans couldn't possibly have built the pyramids because... well... for some reason. It's much more believable that giant monsters from an alternate reality did it — if you're out of your mind. Mind you, even while waiting for the end of the world, people who believe in this nonsense are the same ones who want to set educational curricula. I bet Don McElroy agrees with a lot of this stuff.

Jesus, save me from the "intre-dimensional" 13 foot tall supermen!

People, the end is in sight. What that means is all the signs Jesus said were going to happen at the end just before His return have become quite evident right now.

Nothing more needs to happen before the Rapture of His Church. There's a number that needs to be reached, a final number to complete the Church. So the next person you witness to who turns their life over to Jesus may be that final number. Get busy!

This nutcase is not only gleefully anticipating the deaths of most of the human race, he's urging fellow believers to work hard to make it happen. According to this homicidal fantasy, all that needs to happen is for a certain number of people to convert to this particularly malevolent religion and then fire will rain from the skies and billions will be wiped out... but they're not really human, anyhow. Most of humanity, according to this author, are the result of "ungodly unions" and not people at all but superhuman 13-foot tall hybrids from another dimension who want to grow mice on their ears and build pyramids. It all makes sense now.

Honestly, I can't fathom what it must be like to live with a mentality that dehumanizes humanity to the point that one hopes it will be essentially wiped out. Not just to hope for it, but to work for it. Fundamentalists like to say that religion is necessary for morality, but to me it looks from articles like Graham's that it's role in this murderous psychology is to create a proxy that will do the dirty work of killing for the sake of the faithful. Instead of picking up an automatic weapon and firing on the "Nephilim" from some campus clock tower or flooding a subway with nerve gas, the Millennialist true-believer works to insure the creation of the conditions for the coming of a cosmic hitman.

People believe this stuff. This is what reality looks like to them. Can anyone explain how this doesn't qualify as a pathological condition?

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