India Lodges Formal Protest with Pakistan

The government of India has lodged a formal protest with the government of Pakistan over the Mumbai terrorist attack:

Pakistan's High Commissioner was summoned and handed an official protest against Pakistan's alleged failure to crack down on terrorist groups within its country.

The Indian Government says the terrorist attacks in Mumbai were carried out by elements from Pakistan, and it expects the Pakistani Government to take strong action against those responsible.

Indian Minister of State for External Affairs Anand Sharma says the attacks are a grave setback to the relationship between the two nations.

But the Pakistani Government has denied any direct involvement in the terrorist strike.

Pakistan Prime Minister Syed Youssuf Rasa Gilani is urging calm, and says the blame game should be avoided at all costs.

— Source: Australian Broadcasting Company

This "let's not play the blame game" and the denial of direct government involvement in the attack seems a rather insufficient response on the part of Pakistan. It is worse if there was involvement between the terrorists and the Pakistani government, to be sure, but even if there is not, this doesn't excuse Pakistan's failure to clean up it's own house. The ISI certainly had a hand in breeding monsters in the past and the likelihood seems great that this latest batch of fundamentalist militants is at the very least a by-product of those past entanglements.

Pakistan has been, at least nominally, an ally to the United States in The War Against Terror (try the acronym from that one for size), and so its government has been aware of the use of Pakistan as an extremist breeding ground for some time now. They should have acted long ago to change the situation. They did not, and that is, indeed, their own fault.

That being said, a war in the region is unlikely to eliminate the terrorism and very likely to foster more of it. A destabilized Pakistan losing control of, or using, nuclear weapons is clearly in the best interests of no civilized segment of humanity, either. Pakistan should accept culpability in this and, as the brief description of the complaint given above notes, should take the strongest possible action on the most immediate terms possible to insure that they no longer serve as the launch pad for horrors visited upon people who are trying to do nothing more than live their lives.

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India and Pakistan May Be Readying for War in Aftermath of Mumbai Attacks

It's beginning to look like the religious militants of the Deccan Mujahedin may get their way. Indian government officials are stating that they have certain proof of a link between the Mumbai terrorists and elements with links to Pakistani intelligence. Pakistan, for its part, is ending military operations along the Afghan border and putting its own military on stand-by for a confrontation with India.

At war level: India raises security status amid grief

by Randeep Ramesh and Jason Burke

The Indian government raised the country's security to a "war level" yesterday saying it had certain proof of a Pakistani link to the Mumbai attacks.

The dramatic move prompted Pakistan to say it would end military operations against Islamist militants on the Afghan border, which are critical to the "war on terror", for an "unwanted conflict" with Delhi...

...Sri Prakash Jaiswal, India's minister of state for home affairs, said the country's "intelligence will be increased to a war level, we are asking the state governments to increase security to a war level"...

...the group named by India, Lashkar-e-Taiba, has longstanding relationships with Pakistan's security establishment...

The Indian minister said yesterday there was "no doubt that the terrorists had come from Pakistan ... We have evidence of their nationalities. We will reveal everything soon"...

Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is fighting Indian control of the disputed Kashmir region, was behind a deadly 2001 assault on the Indian parliament that pushed New Delhi and Islamabad to the brink of war...

Wonderful. Two nuclear powers may end up at war, thanks in no small part to the actions of religious fundamentalists who dehumanize and kill. More death, more destruction, more horrors... maybe huge horrors, and the deaths of more innocent people could be the result of all of this. These are countries with nukes pointed at one another, both of which contain influential religious factions willing to die for their causes in order that they reap some divine reward.

I hope both can be convinced to step back from this brink. I also hope that more moderate heads prevail, even if they are religious ones. (c.f. Muslims Against Sharia).

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Mumbai Mujahedin: Terror, Mass Murder and "Blasphemy" Resolutions

Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.

I wonder if the 85 members of the UN General Assembly who voted on November 25 in favor of the anti-blasphemy resolution from whence those words came are feeling any sense of irony today, the day after an undetermined number of terrorists sormed into the Indian city of Mumbai and turned it into a war zone and killing ground. At last count, at least 125 people have died, 325 have been injured, and hostages are still being held by a group calling itself the Deccan Mujahedin.

Indian military commandos continued to exchange fire with an unknown number of militants one day after coordinated groups of gunmen shot and blasted their way through tourist sites around Mumbai on Wednesday night, apparently targeting American, Israeli and British citizens for use as hostages...

One hostage, a Polish national, said he was very happy to be free and praised the Indian military commandos. Moments later, a man identified as being of Lebanese descent was carried out with two other people, too weary to address the throng of reporters.

Most of Mumbai remained in shock today. In many neighborhoods, 80% of the businesses remained closed as police warned residents to stay at home, where many followed the unfolding drama on television.

A previously unknown group calling itself Deccan Mujahedin said it carried out the attack.

We will, no doubt, get some perfunctory denunciations from countries like Saudi Arabia that will tell us all about how these new mujahedin aren't really Muslims. The "no true Scotsman" argument is used so frequently by religious fundamentalists that its faux kilt is in dire need of patching from all the wear. They're not really Muslims in the same way that Ted Haggard isn't really Christian. When the true-believers go astray and start blowing up innocent people or molesting a few children or having sex-for-money, it's so easy to disavow them, isn't it?

In light of the UN General Assembly resolution, we're certain to be told that these mass murderers have no association with Islam. They're actually... what? Martians? Mutant ninja turtles? No, they're mujahedin. They're Muslim fundamentalist holy warriors, and their holy war means blowing up bombs and shooting up hotels and train stations. This is religion once again bringing people together... in morgues.

Although Mumbai has been the scene of several terrorist attacks in recent years, experts said Wednesday's assaults required a previously unseen degree of reconnaissance and planning. The scale and synchronization of the attacks pointed to the likely involvement of experienced commanders, some said, suggesting possible foreign involvement.

The terrorists struck almost simultaneously at the city's domestic airport and a railway station and sprayed gunfire at the Leopold Cafe, a restaurant popular with foreigners. As many as 16 groups hit nine sites on the southern flank of this crowded metropolis of 19 million...

Nobody knew, right? This is probably the biggest, most coordinated attack by holy warriors since the Afghan mujahedin were fighting the Soviets a quarter century ago... but nobody knew. No mullahs, no community leaders, nobody. No true Muslims were even complicit in this attack. Amazing. After all,

Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.

And how beautiful is this holy war that has been brought against the citizens and workers of Mumbai:

...Wednesday's attacks were a brazen frontal assault using automatic weapons.

The targets included police headquarters in south Mumbai, where some officers were pinned down by gunfire.

The victims included Mumbai's anti-terrorism chief, Hemant Karkare, and two of his senior police officers, which complicated the law enforcement response to the attacks. Television video showed Karkare donning a flak jacket and helmet minutes before heading into one of the hotels.

Witnesses said the attackers appeared to fire at random and made no effort to hide their identities, which, experts suggested, signaled a readiness to die...

How glorious. How noble. This is the will of God in action, is it not, that mujahedin should take up arms and fire randomly at human beings as they go about their daily business.

Across India, more than 3,600 people have been killed in terrorist incidents since January 2004, according to the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, many involving sectarian disputes...

None of them were killed by Muslim extremists, though, because Islam is wrongly associated with terrorism, just like Catholic priests have been wrongly associated with pederasty. Religious people just don't do this sort of thing.

Aren't we sick of this yet? I'm not talking about Americans or Indians, and I'm not talking about atheists or religious believers. I'm talking about human beings.

Look, I'll be honest. I honestly have no use for religion in my life. I think its widest role in modern civilization is divide people and to hold back the progress of reason in our world. There are plenty of people out there who disagree with me on these points, and that's fine. I don't want to blow any of you up, and I have enough faith in the vast majority of my species to believe that the feeling is mutual.

Still, isn't it about time to confront the fact that much of the violence of the kind that we're seeing in Mumbai, that has been see in India so frequently in recent years, that has happened in the US in places like New York and Oklahoma City, that took place in Guyana 30 years ago, that all of this is tied to religious belief and is justified in the name of doing the work of some deity or another? It's not my place to drum these strains of violence out of religion. People like me are more inclined to chuck the whole thing out and rely on empiricism and empathy, not on allegedly divine laws. It's the place of those within religion to make the changes, if they can be made at all, that will insure that things like what is happening even now in Mumbai never, ever happen again. That can only start when religious moderates come to understand that there is something present in their religion as it is understood by all too many people that calls for war, whether it's a shooting war in India or a culture war in America. When you call for war, you'll find volunteers to carry it out sooner or later.

In Mumbai, those volunteers call themselves the Deccan Mujahedin today. They are terrorists associated with Islam.

The UN General Assembly should spit that stupid anti-blasphemy resolution out like the mouthful of garbage it is and instead start looking into why Islam — and Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, all of these religions — sooner or later foster the birth of monsters.

The blood of the thousands, the millions, of the victims of dehumanized mujahedin calls out for this. Will it ever get done, or will there be another hundred Mumbai Novembers, 9/11's, Tamil Tiger suicide bombings, holy war without end?

Enough. Enough, enough, enough.

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Hindu and Christian Nutters Kill Each Other in India

It all began on the night of August 23. A Hindu holy man in the Indian state of Orissa, Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati, was murdered. Nobody actually knows who killed him. It might have been Maoist militants or Christian militants or somebody else. Nobody has been apprehended for the crime to date.

Still, that didn't stop the mobs from beginning to take vengeance on those they suspected of complicity. The logical thing for Hindu militants to do was, of course, to destroy an orphanage. Christian and Hindu groups decided that the best way to display their non-violence and adherence to the Golden Rule and generally turn the other cheek was to go out into the streets en masse with guns and bombs and start spilling blood.

Riots grip India's Orissa region
By Sandeep Sahu

Four people have been killed in armed clashes that broke out between Hindus and Christians in the Indian state of Orissa at the weekend.

Now a total of at least eight persons have been killed in the spiralling communal violence sparked by the killing of an eminent Hindu leader.

Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati was killed on Saturday night...

...rival groups attacked each other with guns and bombs...

Orissa Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik said: "Four bodies were found at the scene of the clash at Barakhama. But the identity of the deceased is yet to be established."

Making a statement on the incident in the State Assembly, Mr Patnaik said a small contingent of police personnel present there had done "its best but could not prevent the violence"...

Two people were burnt to death in Tiangia village in the district after rioters set fire to their houses last night.

One person had been burnt to death at Rupagaon village on Sunday night.

Arson and burning of Christian religious places continued on Tuesday in Kandhamal despite a curfew in all major towns and prohibitory orders in force throughout the district.

Even a Flag March by paramilitary forces did not deter the rioters, who went on a rampage setting fire to churches, vehicles and government facilities.

Meanwhile, it has been revealed that the woman who was burnt to death in an orphanage in Bargarh district yesterday was a Hindu...

Can't you just hear those angelic choirs singing? Laxmi weeps tears of purest joy over the restraint shown in this situation. And why wouldn't they, when people are doing the work of their deities so well by shooting and bombing and reducing an orphanage (see photo at right) to rubble.

Today, however, things are quieting down a bit. The Pope has taken time off from his frog persecuting duties to issue a statement about the situation. Christians and Hindus, meanwhile, are doing what rival religious factions do best when their adherents get killed. They're blaming one another and coming up with religious justifications for the violence which, it turns out, is largely about true believers from one group converting to the other side. Religion is, after all, all about uniting humanity... so long as the uniting takes place under the banner of a particular religious group.

Catholic schools in India protest

Eleven people have died after a Hindu leader was killed in the state's Kandhamal district last Saturday.

Authorities said Maoist rebels were behind the killing, but some Hindu groups have accused Christians.

Over 3000 police have been deployed but attacks on churches continue. Hundreds of Christians have fled their homes.

The Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has described the violence as a "national disgrace".

The Pope too has condemned the violence and the Italian government has also expressed its concerns...

The violence was condemned by Pope Benedict XVI who said he was "profoundly saddened" and called for communities to try to restore "peaceful coexistence

"I firmly condemn any attack on human life," Pope Benedict told a crowd of pilgrims on Wednesday.

"I express spiritual closeness and solidarity to the brothers and sisters in faith who are being so harshly tested..."

There's a statement bound to instill a feeling of peace and unity. I wonder whom Pope Ratzi means when he refers to "brothers and sisters in faith." Peaceful coexistence? I doubt it ever existed. But there's more.

The BBC's Rahul Tandon in Bhubaneswar says this is a complex issue - Hindu groups have long accused Christian priests of bribing poor tribes and low-caste Hindus to change their faith.

Christians say lower-caste Hindus convert willingly to escape the Hindu caste system.

As the authorities struggle to deal with the present situation, the divide between the two communities grows wider and wider, our correspondent says...

That's what it's all about. The death of the holy man, which likely wasn't caused by Christians, is just an excuse to start the blood flowing. At the root of all of this is a religious conflict; one religious sect is somehow pilfering followers from another religious sect. This is all yet another instance of people who believe in sky-ghosts taking matters into their own hands when their impotent, in fact non-existent, deities fail to step in and change things. They justify it in their own minds as their acting as the agents of their gods, of course, because it never occurs to them that a deity that needs the protection of its followers is not one that is worth worship in the first place.

The cure for this kind of madness, the clashing of violent mobs, is one that is simple in principle but, sadly, unlikely to happen in reality. It's this: forget the popes and swamis, the gods and ghosts and homa and communion. Chuck it all. All of the rituals, all of the prayers... it's just a shill to separate humanity into insular little groups and ensure that this kind of violence will plague us forever. Instead, look each other in the eye and exercise the power of empathy with which we have been endowed by four billion years of evolution, that slow process of change over time that has honed us into thinking, feeling, moral beings capable of imagining ourselves in the place of the other. Religion is a fog by which reason becomes obscured, and when reason is veiled then what comes forth is animalism. What word could better describe the events in Orissa? These mobs have stripped off their humanity in favor of what they believe is a service to their deities of choice, a thing that they have placed above the value of human life.

Send all the holy men packing. Just be men (by which I mean human, not one gender). The ritual of violence is justified by the ritual of sacrifice. Ask why the sacrifice of life is ever necessary in religion, why Jesus had to die or why a goat was ever tied to a yupa. When the gods are bloodthirsty, can the followers be otherwise?

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Indian Christians Smash Newspaper Offices, Set Fires Over Newspaper Image of Christ

I've mentioned this already in my last entry, but I think it deserves an entry of its own.

When Muslims in Europe and elsewhere protested and called a fatwa against the publishers of a Danish newspaper over the publication of a derogatory image of Mohammad, many American Christians pointed to it as an example of the difference between Christianity and Islam. Christians, it has been claimed, don't do things like that. Christianity is peaceful, Islam is violent, and blah de blah de blah.

A lot of people realized at the time that this was nonsense, of course. While it might be true that Americans are less likely to riot and burn things over something they consider blasphemous (how much less still remains to be seen), this isn't a function of a religious difference between Christianity and Islam but one of cultural context. A most excellent and graphic proof of this comes to us today from India, where yesterday there were violent protests, including the smashing of newspaper offices and fires set to newspapers in the street. The provocation?

A newspaper printed a "blasphemous" picture of Jesus holding a beer mug.

Protests by Christians across State

HYDERABAD: Christians across the State strongly protested the publication of an objectionable picture of Jesus in a Telugu daily on Sunday.

Publication of the picture triggered an attack on the office of Sakshi daily in Chirala town in Prakasam district and demonstrations in Nandyal, Guntakal, Anantapur, Guntur, Ongole and Bhimavaram. Copies of the daily were set ablaze in some places.

The picture published in the religion column of the features section of the daily owned by Chief Minister Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy's son Y. S. Jaganmohan Reddy showed Jesus Christ in a manner that was reprehensible and hurt the sentiments of the community, Christian organisations alleged.

Reports reaching the State headquarters said irate Christians attacked the Sakshi office at Chirala. The enraged youth raided the office, ransacked the furniture and threw down the computers. They also damaged window panes of an APSRTC bus...

[from a different source]
...The daily's Sunday edition carried a picture showing Jesus with a beer mug in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The chief minister's family, which practices Christianity, has tendered an apology...

Yep, nothing like what offended Muslims did. Could the innate differences between Christianity and Islam be made any clearer?

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Drippy Painting in Mumbai Draws True Believers

Strictly speaking, the Daily Jesus refers to incidents of pareidolia. That is, a spontaneously occurring pattern is seen by one or more observers to be an image of some recognizable human form or face connected with Biblical lore. It's usually Jesus himself, but we get Mary every so often and occasionally Joseph, too.

Today's Daily Jesus is a little different but still great fun. It comes to us from St. Michael's, a Catholic church in Mumbai, India. A painting of Jesus there is exuding a red substance that Indian True-Believers think is a miraculous occurrence. Even a local priest's contention that it's nothing more than some of the painting's pigments dissolved in water isn't dissuading throngs of the faithful from thronging the place for the chance to touch the plastic wrap that's been put in place to protect the painting. True-Believers say that the blood is coming from the heart of Jesus, but the location of the red stain on the painting is not where a heart is located in a human body.

The Times of India has the story, but I'm enjoying some of the comments even more than.

Christ 'bleeds', but church says it's only moisture
by ASHLEY D'MELLO,TNN
MUMBAI: Thousands of Mumbaikars queued up outside the St Michael's Church in Mahim on Saturday to catch a glimpse of the framed picture of Jesus Christ with a red stain on his heart, being considered by devotees a miracle.

On Friday, reports of a portion of the picture around the heart of Jesus darkening had crowds flocking in till about 1am. The Catholic Church, however, said it is not regarding this as a miracle...

Fr Donat D'Souza of St Michael parish said the darkening of the stain was noticed soon after the last service in the Church on Friday at around 8.45 pm. "It could be caused by moisture," he said.

Several people, acting as ushers at the church, were convinced it was a miracle. Sandeep Piedade said "I think it is a miracle, what else can it be," he said. P Moses another usher exclaimed," Can it be anything except a miracle."

Well, yes, P. Moses. It could be old paint and humidity. Not only could it be, it almost certainly is.

From the photo, it's easy enough to see that the "bloodstain" isn't anywhere near the heart but is on the lower right abdomen, at or just above the waist. If an organ has been nicked at all, it'd have to be some part of the large or small intestine. "The bleeding intestine of Jesus" doesn't have the same sort of allure as a coronary puncture, though.

The comments to the story on the Times of India website range from the credulous to the skeptical to the downright comical, of course. Aside from the quite rational response of Father D'Souza, here's an example of each.

The skeptical:

This is a publicity stunt. Do any body believe in miracles of this sort? If it is in any other religion, it will be called superstition. Height of hypocrisy!

— Babuchandra, India

The credulous:

As mentioned in this article "Christ bleeds", its not from the heart, Jesus was pierced by a sword in the side while on the cross, its about that location that the bleeding is noticed (in the picture)

— DJ, New Zealand

The downright comical:

Jesus Christ is alive,you have to pray,belive to see the miracle of the Bleeding love of our Lord

— Cecil Lancelot, Nagpur

I hope that Babuchandra will consider moving to the USA. Yes, people still believe in this sort of thing, and having him here would swing the proportion of those who don't leap to conclusions of supernatural intervention by one more person willing to think. A few thousand people like him settling in Louisiana, Texas or Mississippi might well do some good.

DJ reveals himself a true believer when he (correctly) notices that the stain on the painting is nowhere near the heart, but doesn't then proceed to the next simple step in logic. The Biblical passage mentioning Christ getting stuck with Longinus' spear is John 19:34 (the other gospels don't mention it at all):

But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water.

The passage gives no indication of which side was stabbed nor how high on the body the stabbing occurred. It could have been on the left or the right and it could have been from the armpit to the hip, even if we assume it happened at all (and 3 out of 4 allegedly authoritative sources give it a complete miss). DJ is seeing what he wants to see in the stain. He makes the leap to asserting that the stain is in the proper location, but there's no way of knowing that, not even from the Bible itself. That's True-Belief in action for you.

Still, Cecil Lancelot's comment is my personal favorite here. I don't want to behold the "bleeding love" of your lord. I don't care to see anybody's bleeding love, thank you. Some things are best kept private.

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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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Virgin Mary Burns Out Eyeballs: An Amaculate Conception

Just when you've thought you'd heard it all about religious fanaticism the true-believers go that one step further into absurdity. Witness this tale of "woah" from India, where fifty people so far have burned their eyes by staring into the sun in hopes of seeing a reputed image of the Virgin Mary.

50 people looking for solar image of Mary lose sight

At least 50 people in Kottayam district have reportedly lost their vision after gazing at the sun looking for an image of Virgin Mary.

Though alarmed health authorities have installed a signboard to counter the rumour that a solar image of Virgin Mary appeared to the believers, curious onlookers, including foreign travellers, have been thronging the venue of the ‘miracle’.

St Joseph’s ENT and Eye Hospital in Kanjirappally alone has recorded 48 cases of vision loss due to photochemical burns on the retina. “All our patients have similar history and symptoms. The damage is to the macula, the most sensitive part of retina. They have developed photochemical, not thermal, burns after continuously gazing at the sun,” Dr Annamma James Isaac, the hospital’s ophthalmologist, said...

Though people have been flocking to the “blessed land” - hastily christened Rosa Mystica Mountain - for long, the mad rush for the image in the sky began a week ago.

There are quite a few people still seeking the miracle, despite the experiences of their unfortunate predecessors and strict health warnings against gazing at the sun with the naked eye.

“The patients show varying degrees of severity. They are mostly girls in 12-26 age group. Our youngest patient is 12 and the oldest 60. Most of them were looking at the sun between 2 and 4 pm, when UV1 and UV2 rays are harshest,” Dr James Isaac said. He added that they could identify the problem as solar retinopathy because they were aware of the local sensation.

“Most patients may hopefully improve their vision. But there may be long-term effects on the retina,” he added.

What does it take for belief to overwhelm reason to the extent that one goes blind? I'm used to asking that question as a metaphor, but apparently the answer can be very literal.

Hyphal tip to Jeff of Wormtown Taxi for the lead on this story.

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Chutney Space Woo: India Daily Claims Distant Galaxy Engineered by Alien Civilization

Some things must be seen to be believed.

Four years ago, astronomers exploiting the phenomenon of gravitational lensing discovered the most distant galaxy ever observed, Abell 1835 IR1916. The galaxy is a located a bit more than 13 billion light years from earth, meaning that it had to have come into existing very early on in the cosmogonic process. It's interesting and, if you're particularly interested in such things, a bit exciting.

On the other hand, there appear to be some people claiming that the galaxy was literally engineered by some group of alien construction contractors. In fact, an editorial appearing in India Daily asserts that the whole of the Cosmic Renaissance is a product of such a feat of construction by a "Type IV civilization that created the big bang in their massive inter-universe particle colliders." It must be true, because unidentified "scientists" say so!

Signs of type IV extraterrestrial influence in Abell 1835 IR1916, a galaxy 13,230 million light-years away, merely 470 million years young from the time of big bang

t is the furthest galaxy on the record. The galaxy Abell 1835 IR1916 is located about 13,230 million light-years away. Hence, it is seen at a time when the Universe was merely 470 million years young, that is, barely 3 percent of its current age.

Scientists are finding extraterrestrial influence in this galaxy. It seems the galaxy was engineered and fit into place by artificial forces...

Some 13.7 billion years ago, after the big bang, the Universe plunged into darkness. Neither stars nor quasars had yet been formed which could illuminate the vast space. The Universe was a cold and opaque place. Some thing went wrong, according to some scientists. Intervention was needed by the Type IV civilization that created the big bang in their massive inter-universe particle colliders. The big bang created a black hole in the hyperspace – our universe with three spatial dimensions and a forward moving single time dimension. According to scientists this was the start of ‘dark ages’ that was eventually corrected through the intervention of the Type IV civilization.

The galaxy Abell 1835 IR1916 is part of the "Cosmic Renaissance" that was artificially engineered by the Type IV civilization.

Errrr... which scientists are saying that ET was going around building galaxies? We're not given so much as a single name here by which we could check this wild assertion. Nor are we told by what criteria these hypothetical scientists would make the claim that a galaxy was engineered in an "inter-universe particle collider." How would they know this? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and I can't think of a more extraordinary claim than one that insists that galaxies were engineered by spacemen... but there's no proof here, nor even an inkling as to where one might go to review the evidence leading to the claim.

Several passages in this editorial seem perilously close to an article published by the BBC on March 2, 2004, however, shortly after this distant galaxy was discovered. I remember having seen it because March 2 is my birthday, and it's not every day that news of such a discovery breaks on ones birthday. Luckily, I even had a bookmark for the old article saved and had no trouble finding it again. The title of the BBC article is somewhat less sensational, too, as one might expect:

Telescope probes far off galaxy

The VLT, which is sited in Chile, has pictured a small cluster of stars that are about 13.2 billion light-years from Earth.

The galaxy is being seen at a time when the Universe was just 470 million years old, which is barely 3% of its current age...

To make their observations, both teams used what is known as a "gravitational lens" - a massive foreground object that can bend and magnify the light of objects much further away...

Astronomers are now getting closer to what they term as the "Dark Ages", the time in the Universe's history when hydrogen and helium atoms had formed but had yet to come together to form the first stars.

Scientists want to see the "Cosmic Renaissance" - the time of first ignition - and the European team believes it has come very close...

Nowhere in the original story are there any scientists proposing that extraterrestrials engineering this or any other distant galaxies. The term "Dark Ages" has certainly been given a very different context in the new editorial, too. When the scientists who discovered the galaxy use the term, they're referring to a time period when hydrogen and helium atoms hadn't coalesced into masses great enough to begin the process of nuclear fusion. How one gets from that to a "black hole in hyperspace" is a bit of a mystery to me. Still, it's no less of a mystery than leaping from the scientific idea of "Cosmic Renaissance" as the moment at which fusion began due to a natural force like gravity to it being "artificially engineered by the Type IV civilization."

Isn't the universe interesting enough without having to invent woo-full science fictions plots as the India daily Technology Team has done in their bizarre editorial? Moreover, I have to wonder why they would decide to publish this four years after the discovery of the galaxy! Perhaps they were waiting for memories of legitimate articles regarding the discovery to fade before making up their Tales of Woo? Only they know for sure why they did it, but I know for sure that the people who discovered the galaxy haven't seen anything that made them think it's a product of alien intelligence.

If anyone knows what the India Daily Technology Team is in the habit of smoking before they write something like this, please pass that information along. I'd like to get some, too. Anything potent enough to produce visions of little green men with particle colliders producing entire galaxies to fill in hyperspace black holes has got to be terrific fun at parties!

Hyphal tip to Rebecca at Memoirs of a Skepchick for the heads-up on this hyperdimensional hilarity!

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Hindu Radicals Demonstrate that the Opposite of Fundamentalism is Love

Since I've mentioned both Christian and Islamic fundamentalists this morning, it seems only fair to throw in something about Hindu fundies as well. Valentine's Day, one of the least religious holidays in the world, one which celebrates human beings' capacity to love one another in real, nonabstract, healthy ways — despite sappy greeting cards and fattening chocolate — has become quite popular in many countries. It has gone over like gangbusters in India, much to the chagrin of Hindu zealots there. Thus, these fundamentalists choose to mark the holiday with protests and beatings. Incapable of love, and perhaps jealous of that capacity in others, they react with the only things fundamentalists have left in its place — hatred, violence, and disdain for the free will of others.

"We are deadly against Valentine's Day," said Sapan Dutta, a regional leader of the hard-line Shiv Sena group. "We are for civilized love and affection..."

"Our volunteers will check parks, hotels and restaurants and swoop upon young lovers found walking hand-in-hand," said Vijay Tiwari, a Shiv Sena activist in Lucknow...

In recent years, there have been several cases of couples being attacked while seeking privacy in local parks...

— Source

Yes, "swooping upon young lovers" certainly sounds civilized to me. Let's see what the Hindu fundamentalist notion of "civilized" looks like:

Right-wing Hindu activists Thursday were beating young couples in India's northern Uttar Pradesh during Valentine's Day protests across the country, news reports said. Police told the IANS news agency that activists from the Hindu hardline Shiv Sena group beat up couples in a public park in Bareilly town and made girls hold their ears and apologize for celebrating Valentine's Day.

Young men were forced to do sit-ups and crawl on the ground...

Fifty activists of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party's student wing attacked a shop selling Valentine's Day gifts in Hyderabad and set fire to the greeting cards.

They carried saffron flags and chanted slogans such as "Save Culture" and "Death to Valentine's Day..."

— Source

Doesn't that all sound rather civilized? Nothing says respect like intimidation, beatings and arson. Nice swooping there.

No matter what religion they might be part of, no matter what country they're from, fundamentalists are fundamentalists. They're the self-styled morality police, deciding what is proper and what is not for everyone, even those who disagree with their fairytales. Nothing is more hateful, nothing is closer at all times to committing acts of violence, and nothing is more pathetically deluded about what it means to be human than a fundamentalist. Unable to save themselves from their own psychological dissonance in their dealings with reality, they unleash their madness upon any who would dare demonstrate that the world is not like what their respective religious writs say it should be. To their minds, it is better to beat others into submission rather than adjust their view of the world to include the possibility that maybe the way we are — the way we love, the way we think, the way we learn, the way we experience life and this marvelous collection of tissues called a body through which we experience it — is the way it should be. No, their books and the natterings of their holy men say otherwise... and death to whomever dares to violate those worthless edicts.

The opposite of fundamentalism is love.

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Hottest Pepper in the World

If you like spicy food, have I got a pepper for you! It's called Bhut Jolokia or Naga Jolokia (Capsicum chinense Jacq. cultivar) and is a native of India. The common name means "ghost pepper," giving some indication of it's supernatural-like ability to set your mouth on fire or perhaps convince you that your oral cavity has descended into hell.

How is the hotness of peppers determined? They're rated in Scoville heat units (SHUs) on the Scoville heat scale. Their content of mouth-burning chemicals are measured using high pressure liquid chromatography which, technically speaking, doesn't yield a measurement in SHUs but the conversion is so simple that it doesn't really matter. What does matter is that a very precise measurement based on chemistry is yielded. Bhut jolokia measures about 1,000,000 SHUs on the Scoville scale.

How hot is that? The previous record-holder was the red savina pepper, measured at 577,000 SHUs. Red savina is the same species as the ghost pepper but a different cultivar. Still, all this talk about SHUs probably doesn't say much about how hot this monster-pepper really is, so here's a table I've lifted from Wikipedia that might put things into perspective:

So, if you can't get some Bhut jolokia to try for yourself, here's a way to simulate the experience that you can try at home. Take a can of pepper spray and, while wearing proper protection, spray it into a plastic cup until you have an appreciable amount accumulated. Next, mix together sugar and water. Combine the pepper spray and sugar water in equal volumes and consume. Mmmmmmmm. Can you say, "Somebody help me!" No? You will.

You can read more about this killer pepper from hell here. The original article is, alas, behind a pay wall. There is a quite nice website available that tells the story of how this pepper got its recognition and how hot it really is. Also, here's a handy description of what it's like to eat one of these peppers:

Around here, in the hills of northeastern India, it’s called the “bhut jolokia” — the “ghost chile.” Anyone who has tried it, they say, could end up an apparition.

“It is so hot you can’t even imagine,” said the farmer, Digonta Saikia, working in his fields in the midday sun, his face nearly invisible behind an enormous straw hat. “When you eat it, it’s like dying.”

Outsiders, he insisted, shouldn’t even try it. “If you eat one,” he told a visitor, “you will not be able to leave this place.”

— Source

Still want to try some? You can order products made with the stuff from this site. Just don't come crying to me when you have third degree burns on your brainstem!

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Rama, Jehovah, Zeus, Whatever

Six times out of ten when I write here about fundamentalism and ignorance, I'm writing about the Christian flavor because I live in the USA and that's the kind we encounter here most often. Another three times out of ten, I suppose, I'm writing about Islamic fundamentalism because we read and hear so much about it here and even encounter it (LL works with East African women's health issues, too, so it comes from that angle as well). Once in awhile, though, a little variety needs to be thrown into the mix, and so today our flavor is South Asian.

In particular, it has to do with Hindu fundamentalists in India who insist that their religious texts are literally true. Part of the Indian government wants to dredge a passage between the south and Sri Lanka to provide a continuous shipping lane. The fundies don't like this because they believe that the area was sacred... because an incarnation of the god Vishnu, who went by the name Ram, got an army of monkeys under the command of a monkey-god named Hanuman to build a bridge across the same area in order to rescue his wife, Sita.

There is a sort of bridge there, and just to be certain it wasn't actually designed and constructed by an army of monkeys, geologists applied scientific methods to investigating its origins. No surprise, it turned out to be a natural sandstone bridge. That isn't enough for the fundamentalists, though, because they find it impossible that it couldn't have been built by monkeys... because it says so in a book they consider sacred, and infallible, Ramayana.

I admit to having a particular fondness for the old Indian religious texts myself. They're full of wonderful stories and insights that were often far ahead of what was going on in Europe at the same period in history. I've read Ramayana, Mahabharata, several of the Puranas, many of the Tantras, all of the Vedas, and some really obscure stuff (Grahanamandana, anybody?) For all of that, it makes no more sense to take any of that stuff literally than it does to take the Old Testament literally. In fact, both the Puranas and Tantras teach that the stories can be wrong, not that they're infallible. Most of the Puranas contain multiple creation stories and at least one that I can recall (Lingapurana, I think) concludes that nobody knows and we have to keep investigating if we ever want to know how it all began. It seems to me that these fundies are missing the point of the teachings of their own religion, and I'm always surprised when that happens in a faith that's normally as syncretistic and mutable as the various religions that are collectively known as Hinduism.

Well, surprise surprise!

Gods row minister offers to quit
India's culture minister has offered to resign in a row over whether Hindu gods are mythological figures.

Officials had presented the argument in court to support construction plans for an area devotees believe has remnants of a bridge built by the Hindu god Ram.

Minister Ambika Soni said she would quit if asked to by the prime minister.

She also confirmed that two directors of the Archaeological Survey of India, which prepared the court affidavit, had been suspended.

Hindu devotees believe the area between India and Sri Lanka - now known as Adam's Bridge - was built millions of years ago by Lord Ram, supported by an army of monkeys.

But scientists and archaeologists say Adam's Bridge, or Ram Setu, is a natural formation of sand and stones.

On Wednesday the Archaeological Survey of India told the Supreme Court that the religious texts were not evidence that Lord Ram ever existed.

Hardline Hindu opponents of the government accused the administration of blasphemy and protesters carried out demonstrations in the area and in Delhi, Bhopal, and on a number of key highways.

The next day the report was withdrawn...

The government wants to build a canal to link the Palk Strait with the Gulf of Mannar by dredging a canal through the shallow sea.

The $560m Sethusamudram Ship Canal Project is expected to provide a continuous navigable sea route around the Indian peninsula.

As far as I'm aware, there is no evidence that Lord Ram ever existed. Even if there were, that wouldn't constitute evidence that the story in the Ramayana was true and that Ram was a corporeal manifestation of a god named Vishnu, nor that any man has ever been assisted in building a gigantic stone bridge by an army of monkeys. But this, you see, is faith. Faith is an active choice to cling to the implausible in the face of all the facts in the world.

Christian fundamentalists would no doubt ridicule this, and that's ironic. It's more nor less ridiculous than stories of resurrected sons of Jehovah and virgin births and laying on hands to cure leprosy. They're all just stories, whether we're talking about stonemason monkeys or unbowing jin or sword-wielding angels. There's no evidence for a bit of it. The stories may be great fun, but that's all they are. There comes a point where one must let go of the fairy tales and get on with the business of dealing with the world as it is.

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Sadder and Scarier

When I was a kid back in the late 1970's and early 1980's, my friends and I believed that we wouldn't live to the age of 30. We thought that nuclear war with the USSR would happen before we had the chance to get that old. There wasn't much point, in our minds, in planning to live to the age at which we were likely to have families and careers and such. Life was all about escaping from that very frightening "reality" by whatever means were at hand. We were wrong, I'm happy to say. I'm still here and, as far as I know, so are they.

Still, the world seems determined now to revert to the way things were in that much scarier time. I don't know how children are reacting to it, or even if they're aware of it. There are so many more distractions now than when I was their age. It must be easier to tune it all out. All we had back then were drugs, essentially. Now there's technology of various sorts, too. One can easily plug things into one's sensory apparatus and remove oneself from their environment, hiding behind iPod and cell phone and DVD and such. Does anybody watch the new anymore? I can't blame them if they don't. I still keep up, though.

One item that has really grabbed my attention in the last couple of days is the conspiracy to blow up JFK airport in New York. It has come out that there is a tie to Trinidad in this, and it worries me on a personal level. First, I worry because I love Trinidad. I spent time there some six years ago and it became my favorite place on the planet. The people and the land itself are the most wonderful I have encountered in my life. The only time I encountered overt anti-Americanism on the island was when I wandered into one of the poor parts of Port-of-Spain while looking for a roti shop. Exactly one angry Trini uttered the phrase "Yankee go home" at me, and that was the extent of it. Aside from that one incident, I found myself being invited into homes and Hindu temples and having long conversations with strangers who quickly became friends. One of the things I learned of Trini culture was its general openness. This is a place where Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Orisha cooperated on staging public festivals for one another's holidays. It's sad to think that there could be murderous extremists in such a place. For it to come out now is also sad to me because I had intended and still do) to go back there in the next couple of years to do field work on cataloging the fungal flora of the rain forest that still covers half the island.

But again, Trinidad had (and I assume still has) a tremendous gulf between rich and poor. I saw people dying of AIDS lying on flattened cardboard boxes just outside the downtown business section of Port of Spain. Two of the people whom I met were Nizam Mohammed and his daughter Shelly, the former being a vice president of Halliburton. Trinidad is blessed with a huge and somewhat untapped reserve of natural gas, and of course Halliburton can thus extract a great deal of wealth to ship off overseas, and not nearly a fair amount goes back to Trinidad itself. Perhaps that imbalance might have to do with why a small segment of the Muslim population of that nation is becoming more radical. I don't know this, but I do suspect it as a cause. I still believe, in any case, that Trinis are the sweetest people on the planet, and I still plan to go back there when the time comes. I'll take my chances. I just don't want Americans here at home to start looking at Trini immigrants (and there is a good number of them in New York) as all being suspect because of the action of one or two. Americans can go overboard with these things at the drop of a hat, and it would be a great shame upon the USA if they did that to Trinis at home and abroad.

Moreover, the nuclear issue raises its head again. Iran, it is said by our government (and it may or may not be true) is working to develop a nuclear arsenal. Pakistan already has one, albeit a small one at present. That Pakistan has such weapons should scare the hell out of us. Musharraf is himself a dictator who seized power in a coup. He has become increasingly unpopular and been subject to several assassination attempts. Sooner or later, his government is going to come down, and then who knows who will get control of those weapons and how prone they'll be to launching an attack on India, which itself has an arsenal. Still, the American government seems to be just fine with Pakistan proliferating weapons of mass destruction, so long as they seem on the surface to be helping to hold back the rising tide of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Baluchistan and Waziristan. It's the same stupid game that has gotten us into so much trouble over the years; we make monsters elsewhere in the world and then cry bloody murder when those monsters come to roost here. Why allow them to be born in the first place?

To add to that awful situation, now our fearless leader (fearlessness is often a symptom of psychopathology) and his cronies in ShrubCo. are going gangbusters to develop a "nuclear defense shield" that threatens Russia. At one time not long ago, Dubya met up with Vladimir Putin and declared that he'd looked into Putin's eyes, seen his soul, and found him to be a genuinely good man cut from the same cloth as Bush himself. Perhaps that last part is true; both seem to enjoy surrounding themselves with secrecy and using questionable methods to achieve their goals. Still, here what Putin had to say recently about the US putting its "shield" into Europe:

"If a new missile-defense system will be deployed in Europe, then we need to warn you today that we will come with a response," Putin said. "We have to ensure our security, and we are not the initiator of this process."

— Source

Most people in Eastern Europe oppose the building of such a shield, and I find it dubious whether the US needs one. Aside from Russia, nobody over there has weapons capable of reaching the US, or even Western Europe. The most advanced arsenals, in fact, are in Pakistan and India, not in Iran or any countries with major terrorist threats. Who are we shielding whom from, then? Is America going to draw the Iron Curtain back down across Eastern Europe and cram our interests down the throats of those countries in a manner not terribly different than that of the USSR only a few decades ago? If we do, we may well see a backlash in that part of the world, I think. The irony that the American administration would do this precisely to counter the monsters we created in Central Asia and the Middle East should be screaming to us how wrong our course has been.

We're going backwards. The US is not making the world a safer place. If we are sliding into a new Cold War where superpowers point missiles at one another and coldly calculate mutual assured destruction, then all we have achieved is the ultimate failure. If we are instigating radicalization from the Caribbean to the Balkans, we will succeed only in recreating a terrible climate across the globe, just like the one I remember all too clearly. I hope for all of us that we aren't going to have a planet upon which children grow up believing that they won't live to age 30. Not that we already don't; if we didn't, nobody would be strapping on explosive vests and destroying markets in Baghdad and Jerusalem. All the missile shields and military technology in the world can't change that situation. The only answer to it is to create hope, and that comes about by fostering societies in which people feel like there is a future for them to live for. Yes, there will always be extremists and killers. We will never be absolutely safe; that's the human condition. Still, the idea should be to minimize that, not make it worse. That's what we're doing right now, though. We're making it worse. The world is getting sadder and scarier. When does the American administration, with all it's "culture of life" rhetorix, wake up and realize that no culture life has ever existed under the nightmare mushroom-shaped cloud of impending incineration nor can ever take root in decades-old refugee camps nor in nations where dictators grab power and start concentrating ²³⁵U?

Haven't we been down this road before within recent memory, and why can't these idiots figure out that we've planted our feet on it once again?

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