I lean towards being a “historicist,” which is to say that I think it’s more likely than not there was a living, breathing human being… but only a human being, likely named “Yeshua”… that the Jesus legend in the Bible is based on, as opposed to the mythicist who thinks the entire thing was made up out of whole cloth.  I won’t claim certainty or even near certainty on this, because the evidence for historicism is highly inferential; I usually say it’s 60-40 or 75-25 depending on my mood that day.

So I was eager to watch this video when I first heard about it; it could have changed my mind.  Unfortunately, it didn’t even really discuss the matter.  But I found it valuable for other reasons.  Let me explain…

In most matters (with one exception I will get to), here’s my advice, one moving picture worth a thousand words:

Dear Christian,

Well, you’ve heard it said… and I imagine many of you have said it yourself, exasperated with some atheist complaint about prayer in school or a creche scene in front of a courthouse:  “It’s freedom of religion not freedom from religion.”

Well, actually it is both; you cannot have the one without the other.  But take heart, since freedom from religion might not mean what you think it means.

No, I am not saying they are both a part of the first amendment and you have to accept a “packaged deal,”  I am saying it is metaphysically impossible to have freedom of religion without freedom from religion.  With one specific exception (which proves the rule) which I will get to.

Well Saturnalia is over–and I didn’t even get to see Saturn.

So I guess I will have to focus on Christmas instead.

The overwhelming majority of well educated Christians realize that there’s no evidence, not even from the bible, that this day is in any way the birthdate of Jesus.  I’ve heard that the context given in the nativity tales (and I said tales in the plural, more on that in a moment) implies it was autumn.  I’ve heard others say it was obviously spring.  Regardless, people want to celebrate the event, and this is as good a day as any (and this particular choice helps bury the competition by hijacking their holiday).  I guess they think that those who think the nativity happened on December 25th are well-intentioned but naive.

Here you will see a truly classic case of poetic justice.

Louisiana State Representative Valerie Hodges voted for a bill that would allow government money to be diverted to private, including religious, schools.  But she was in for a nasty surprise when it turned out that Muslim schools would be able to get in on the tax money giveaway.

You see she wanted only the religion of the founding fathers to get tax money.

I recently had occasion to be driving on I-40 from Oklahoma City (which, unlike Kansas City, is actually in the state of the same name) west to Amarillo, TX.

I first saw this mondo cross probably about 45 miles east of Amarillo.  I was able to bring my camera to bear and operate it one handed; this is the best picture (once cropped and shrunk) for getting a feel for the size of the thing.

This cross is next to a large church, out in the middle of nowhere.

There wasn’t much to speak of around this building; it’s a large church in the middle of nowhere.

My Impressions of the Waldo Canyon Fire

I live well northeast of Colorado Springs, so the Waldo Canyon fire did not affect me directly, other than the times the air was full of smoke.  Yet I grew up in Colorado Springs; I know some of the areas that burned; I know many who had to evacuate; and I got a look into Hell albeit from a distance. It has been a sobering and emotional week.

Well, I had decent luck taking pictures of the Venus Transit (I got no usable picture of the annular eclipse–that will teach me to leave the tripod adapter at home).   I tried a movie as well but the movie turned out to just be of a yellow disk, with no visible spot for Venus.

UPDATE

Boy do I have egg on my face.  Not just a chicken egg either, it’s an elephant bird egg.  I am drowning in egg.

You see, this Venus transit is happening on the 6th of June all right… the morning of the 6th of June in Europe.  Which means it happens on the evening of the fifth here.

FIFTH OF JUNE.

I sincerely hope no one misses it because of this mistake I have made.

Another update

Pictures here.

A What?

This year the 6th of June is not just the anniversary of D-day–which is noteworthy enough.  It is also the date [edit--if you are in the eastern hemisphere!  Otherwise it's on the 5th of June.] of one of the rarest predictable astronomical events.  And if you miss it the next one is in December of 2117, so you have plenty of time to get ready.  (The last one was in 2004–these events come in pairs about eight years apart–but the pairs themselves have 100+ year gaps between them.)  Many, many people like my grandfather (1899-1986) or other grandfather (1913-1995) live long lives and never get even the opportunity to see this event.

It’s an annular solar eclipse, and you can see it in large parts of the western US.

I suppose I should clarify:  “annular” is not some weird redneck mangling of the word “annual.”  These things don’t happen every year.  It comes from “annulus” which is Latin for ring.

Here is the Wikipedia page for this particular eclipse.

We here on earth are the beneficiaries of an extremely fortunate coincidence.  The sun is four hundred times (or so) larger than the moon.  And it is four hundred times further away as well.  So the moon and the sun appear to be almost exactly the same size.  They cover about half a degree of sky, each.  On average the moon is just a tiny bit larger.

You’ve all heard the claim that we aren’t really atheists, we are just mad at god.  (Or you will see such things as “so and so claims to be an atheist.”)

Today I saw an argument in an atheist chat room between a couple of atheists and a theist, and in a forum post on the same site, I saw someone else’s account of an argument they had out in public.  What I saw made me stop and wonder if we aren’t sometimes encouraging this line of bullshit, albeit unwittingly.

Dear Christian,

Yes there they go again.  Some atheist (well, actually many times it’s not an atheist,but rather a Christian who understands that the separation of church and state protects him too) is complaining about a creche scene in front of a court house, or a prayer at a public high school graduation or football game or even a government meeting.  Or maybe it’s some sort of display or sign that’s pretty explicitly Christian or otherwise religious, on government property.

“Can’t they just get a life,” you might ask yourself.  Or maybe, “what’s wrong with that?”  or some variation thereof.

Well, some other time, maybe, I can try to explain that to you.  (Hint:  it isn’t an attack on your freedom to worship, but it does has to do with the fact that these are happening on government property, with government sponsorship.)

Right now I am more interested in your reaction to these sorts of things.  Or actually, your reaction to some other people’s reactions.  What do I mean by that?

Shortly after sunset, if you face west there is a very bright “star” in the sky:  Venus.  It’s easy to identify.  Someone once put it this way.  If you put three bags over your head and face the wrong way you might miss it.   It’s still above the horizon at 9-10 PM depending on your time zone, and it’s so bright you think it’s an airplane landing light or something like that.

It’s not going to be there for long.  Venus is about to “lap” us as it passes us up in its orbit, and when it does so it appears to move very fast in the sky; seen from one night to the next at identical times, it will drop like a rock now, after it has been hanging high in the evening sky for so long (about a month ago it was in a beautiful lineup with Jupiter, for instance).

By June 1st it will be low in the sky shortly after sunset, probably not visible in the glare of twilight, but if you can manage to see it, it will be 1/5th of a degree from Mercury (the full moon is half a degree wide).  Perhaps you could see both planets at the same time in a telescope if you knew where to point it, and have a good low-power/wide angle eyepiece.  You’ll have maybe 20 minutes to look for it right after sunset.

On June 6th, though, Venus will cross directly in front of the Sun.  That won’t happen again until late 2117. (That is not a typo!)  I’ll have a lot more to say about that as the date approaches.

Continuing my “celebration” of Orthodox Easter, I got this picture from a friend, and found it hilarious in a sort of sick way.

It’s still Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Easter as I write this, so it’s just under the wire.

Last Sunday (Protestant and Catholic Easter) as I was walking out of a Secular brunch that we hold every second and fourth Sunday of the month (no one seems to complain that it conflicts with church services!)  I mentioned to someone that Good Friday and Easter Sunday are only two days apart.  He looked stunned.  I suppose he grew up a Christian, and it had never occurred to him, even though it was staring him in the face all these years, that Friday is two days before Sunday.  The bible of course says it’s three days from Good Friday to Easter Sunday.

So What The Fuck?  Is this the most ridiculously obvious Bible contradiction out there?

Well, I hate to say it.  We have to face facts here.

No, it isn’t.  Well, probably not.

It’s a miracle.  My hotel room at the Reason Rally had this door to the bathroom.

You can clearly see the image of Cthulhu in it.

I hesitated to reveal this information to the world, for fear of causing a major panic.

“Women are people. Fetuses aren’t people.”

“Hallelujah!” said I when I saw this in a comment on an atheist forum.

So rarely do I hear someone who is pro abortion rights actually come right out and say this.  It needs to be said, it needs to be said repeatedly, and it needs to be said loudly.

I am going to address this to those who are pro-choice, or pro-abortion rights, but who for whatever reason, don’t say this.

Why should you change your tack?  Why should you start making this point?

This one is just too good to pass up.  I don’t know if anyone ever actually tried this and got these results or not but still…

Ordinary hydrogen consists of a single proton, which has a positive electrical charge, with a negatively charged electron “orbiting” it.  The proton makes up the nucleus of the hydrogen atom.  The electron weighs almost nothing compared to the much more massive proton, and the mass of this lone proton is generally denoted as approximately 1 Atomic Mass Unit (1 AMU).  Meanwhile the atom has a net electric charge of zero because the proton and electron have opposite charges.

If you add an uncharged neutron to the mix, you just about double the mass of the atom, since neutron and proton masses are almost identical, so you have a 2 AMU nucleus.  Since the neutron is uncharged, you still need just the one electron to keep the atom electrically neutral.  The proton and neutron together make up the nucleus of this configuration.

What you have is still hydrogen, but it’s twice as heavy, so the chemical behavior will end up being noticeably different, unlike most cases where larger atoms might have an extra neutron or two.  (For example there is no significant difference in chemical behavior between a uranium atom with 92 protons and 143 neutrons, and one with 92 protons and 146 neutrons–the weight difference is barely 1 percent rather than 100 percent.)  The just-a-proton hydrogen is called hydrogen-1, ¹H, or protium while the heavier proton-and-a-neutron hydrogen is called hydrogen-2, ²H or deuterium.  Physicists even informally give deuterium its own chemical symbol, D.  (Officially, it’s a no-no to do this.)  When talking about just the nucleus of deuterium, it’s called a deuteron, and the study of deuterons is deuteronomy.

What, you thought this was going to be an article on the Bible?  Check the date of this post!

The Reason Rally was held March 24 on the Washington DC Mall.  There’s little to be said about it that hasn’t been said already (especially here), but I took a number of photographs I thought I’d share.

Two of the most prominent popularizers of science to have ever lived, Carl Sagan

..and Neil deGrasse Tyson

…have both made the same point:

Every atom in our bodies–hell every atom on earth (other than the hydrogen) was “cooked” in the center of some very large star (ten or more times the mass of our sun) or another, at least 4.6 billion years ago, then blown out into empty space when those monster stars exploded in a staggeringly violent way.  Later the debris from these supernovas coalesced to form new stars and planets, like our familiar sun and the earth.

As I’ve seen people say it, “Jesus didn’t die for you, stars did.”  And how.

Dear Christian,

Many of you believe yourself to be moral, upstanding members of your communities.  Many of you are leaders in your communities, or respected businessmen, or perhaps even clergy.

So I’d like to ask you a “what if” question.

Let’s say when you get to be early middle aged.  You have children aged, oh, about seven to ten years old.

And at that time your mother lets it be known that she is an atheist.  That she does not believe there even is a god, much less a heaven or hell, or a need to be saved, or to be forgiven your sins.  What would your reaction be?

[Note:  This contrasts with the events discussed in this post]

This is the dog that did not bark.

Apparently an American soldier went on a rampage in Afghanistan the night of 11/12 March, killing 16 Afghanis, 11 of whom were from the same family.  Staff Sergeant Robert Bales has been charged with this offense and is currently cooling his heels in a cell in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Edit, 19 March 2012–added some images.

You can find any level of anti-science idiocy on the internet, especially from some of the really nutty fundamentalists.

The Challenge

Here for example is someone named MegaSage007 and he issues the following challenge to “atheists” (though perhaps he really ought to issue challenges like this to astrophysicists).

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a rather lengthy post on the history of “In God We Trust” on US coins and paper money.  I ended up giving short shrift to the paper money, and as I researched paper money some more I found out the history is a lot more complex than I thought.

I live near Colorado Springs.  Something that just happened here caught my attention.

http://www.gazette.com/articles/springs-134547-church-presbyterian.html

In case this article disappears or goes into a paid archive or something like that, here’s the gist of it.  A Presbyterian church, founded in 1872 (one year after Colorado Springs itself was) has voted to leave the national Presbyterian congregation and join a new startup.

The claim is often made that “In God We Trust” did not appear on US Currency until 1957. Well, yes and no.  And why is it important?

Currency Technically Means Coins, Too

The definition of currency is the money that circulates, especially the paper money.  But it does technically include coins even if most people seem to think it’s just a fancy word for “paper money.”  The strictly correct statement is that IGWT was added to US dollar bills (paper money) in 1957, and got added to other denominations in 1964-1966.  But it has appeared on some US coins since 1864.  It became universal on all US coinage in 1938.  So the 1957 date is not by any means the whole story, or the beginning or even the end of it; rather it was a gradual process that took slightly over a century.

But the important point to remember is that it did not always appear on US currency.  I’ll come back to that later.

Well, it looks like religious nutjobs are at it again.

This time it’s Muslims.

The day my last post got published (I had written it a couple of days earlier and queued it) I read an article in Analog Science Fiction and Fact (May 2012 issue, and yes, I know it’s only February but their calendar seems to run a couple months fast) that expanded–greatly–on a point I touched on in that post.  I said:

Contrary to something many creationists (and other scientific illiterates) claim, you do not need to be able to run experiments in a laboratory in order to do science, as would be the case for chemistry or nuclear physics.  There are sciences where you look at the world, collect information, and use that information to try to understand the world.  The most obvious of these is astronomy.  You cannot experiment on stars (imagine the property tax on a laboratory big enough!) and only rarely on other material in outer space, yet no one seems to doubt that it is a science.  Instead of experimenting to test some hypothesis, you look at more and more things in more and more sophisticated ways, with more and more sophisticated instruments to make sure that everything you see continues to be consistent with the hypothesis.

I realized, as I read the editorial, that I was a bit harsh damning people who believe this as illiterates.  You see, this is precisely what is taught in elementary and secondary school, and you cannot really blame people for believing it.

One of the confirmations that the earth is old–very old–can be found in considering which radioisotopes are present in nature, and which ones are not.  It’s not absolute ironclad proof, but what it is is a strong confirmation of the hypothesis that the earth is billions of years old–and it’s one that was not available to the geologists who first determined that the earth is old.

“If You Can’t Repeat It, It Ain’t Science” — Bull!

Contrary to something many creationists (and other scientific illiterates) claim, you do not need to be able to run experiments in a laboratory in order to do science, as would be the case for chemistry or nuclear physics.  There are sciences where you look at the world, collect information, and use that information to try to understand the world.  The most obvious of these is astronomy.  You cannot experiment on stars (imagine the property tax on a laboratory big enough!) and only rarely on other material in outer space, yet no one seems to doubt that it is a science.  Instead of experimenting to test some hypothesis, you look at more and more things in more and more sophisticated ways, with more and more sophisticated instruments to make sure that everything you see continues to be consistent with the hypothesis.

So that should put paid to Stupid Creationist Argument #537, where they claim that since you can’t run an experiment to reproduce the evolution of dinosaurs, it’s not scientific.