F Rosa Rubicondior: Atheism
Showing posts with label Atheism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Atheism. Show all posts

Saturday 16 March 2024

Why Religious People Find Atheism and Science Hard To Understand - Study Shows Atheists Are Generally More Intelligent Than Religious People


Why Are Religious People (Generally) Less Intelligent? | Psychology Today

One of the frustrating things about trying to debate with religious people in the social media, especially fundamentalists and creationists, is that they seem to have difficulty understanding simple logic such as the idea that the only reason for belief is evidence or the fact that lots of people believe something doesn't affect the truth of the belief.

There is also the impression (actually, it’s more than an impression, it seems to be a characteristic) that they think ignored evidence can be disregarded, so they will never read an article showing their beliefs to be wrong.

They generally seem more easily fooled by, for example, believing that an internet source supports them, when it is almost a rule that a link to a science paper provided by a fundamentalist will always say the opposite to what they claim it says, or that the ridiculous parody of science they've been fed by a creationist disinformation site such as AnswersInGenesis.com that no sane person would believe, is actually what real scientists believe. They have simply swallowed a lie and didn't see any need to check.

So, why do so many fundamentalists come across as limited in their ability to assimilate information and use it as the basis for opinions, other than an arrogant assumption that their beliefs must be true because they believe them, so no evidence is required and any contradictory evidence can be dismissed out of hand as 'wrong' or 'lies' or part of a giant conspiracy, and why do so many creationists came across as having the thinking ability of a toddler with a teleological view of the universe where even elementary particles are sentient and need to be told how to behave and which rules they must obey?

A meta-analysis of 63 earlier studies showed a statistically significant negative correlation between IQ and religiosity.

Tuesday 5 March 2024

Creationism in Crisis - "No! No! My God Is A Little God, And I Want Him To Stays That Way "


Webb Unlocks Secrets of One of the Most Distant Galaxies Ever Seen - NASA Science

Continuing a series showing how much more impressive the Universe is than religion's prophets ever thought it was.

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has just detected one of the most distant galaxies ever seen. Because the velocity of light through space is a finite quantity, this means that the radiation detected by the JWST left the galaxy when the Universe itself was only about 430 million years old, in other words about 13.4 billion years ago.

To put that into miles means calculating the distance light travels in a year and multiplying that by 13.4 billion. In one year, light will travel just over 16 billion miles, so the object the JWST has detected is about 214.4 trillion miles away, and, if it's still there, it will now be at least 13.4 billion years old - which is a really long time compared to the age the authors of the Abrahamic holy books thought.

To put that in perspective: here is how the Christian Bible describes the Universe:
The Universe as described in Genesis 1: 3-18
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

Gen 1:3-10

[…]

And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.

Gen 1:14-18
And here is how the scientists at NASA using the JWST and the Hubble Space Telescope describe just a tiny portion of the universe
Looking deeply into space and time, two teams using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have studied the exceptionally luminous galaxy GN-z11, which existed when our 13.8 billion-year-old universe was only about 430 million years old.

Initially detected with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, this galaxy — one of the youngest and most distant ever observed — is so bright that it is challenging scientists to understand why. Now, GN-z11 is giving up some of its secrets.

Vigorous Black Hole Is Most Distant Ever Found

A team studying GN-z11 with Webb found the first clear evidence that the galaxy is hosting a central, supermassive black hole that is rapidly accreting matter. Their finding makes this the farthest active supermassive black hole spotted to date.

“We found extremely dense gas that is common in the vicinity of supermassive black holes accreting gas,” explained principal investigator Roberto Maiolino of the Cavendish Laboratory and the Kavli Institute of Cosmology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. “These were the first clear signatures that GN-z11 is hosting a black hole that is gobbling matter.”

Using Webb, the team also found indications of ionized chemical elements typically observed near accreting supermassive black holes. Additionally, they discovered a very powerful wind being expelled by the galaxy. Such high-velocity winds are typically driven by processes associated with vigorously accreting supermassive black holes.

“Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) has revealed an extended component, tracing the host galaxy, and a central, compact source whose colors are consistent with those of an accretion disk surrounding a black hole,” said investigator Hannah Übler, also of the Cavendish Laboratory and the Kavli Institute.

Together, this evidence shows that GN-z11 hosts a 2-million-solar-mass, supermassive black hole in a very active phase of consuming matter, which is why it's so luminous.

Pristine Gas Clump in GN-z11’s Halo Intrigues Researchers
A second team, also led by Maiolino, used Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) to find a gaseous clump of helium in the halo surrounding GN-z11.

“The fact that we don't see anything else beyond helium suggests that this clump must be fairly pristine,” said Maiolino. “This is something that was expected by theory and simulations in the vicinity of particularly massive galaxies from these epochs — that there should be pockets of pristine gas surviving in the halo, and these may collapse and form Population III star clusters.”

Finding the never-before-seen Population III stars — the first generation of stars formed almost entirely from hydrogen and helium — is one of the most important goals of modern astrophysics. These stars are anticipated to be very massive, very luminous, and very hot. Their expected signature is the presence of ionized helium and the absence of chemical elements heavier than helium.

The formation of the first stars and galaxies marks a fundamental shift in cosmic history, during which the universe evolved from a dark and relatively simple state into the highly structured and complex environment we see today.

In future Webb observations, Maiolino, Übler, and their team will explore GN-z11 in greater depth, and they hope to strengthen the case for the Population III stars that may be forming in its halo.

The research on the pristine gas clump in GN-z11’s halo has been accepted for publication by Astronomy & Astrophysics. The results of the study of GN-z11’s black hole were published in the journal Nature on January 17, 2024. The data was obtained as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), a joint project between the NIRCam and NIRSpec teams.
But it's not fair to blame the authors of the Bible for getting it so hopelessly wrong. They were doing their best with what little knowledge they had.

Monday 19 February 2024

Old Dead Gods - With Long Forgotten Religions - And No Way To Recover Them


Joint interment of a dog and a human perinate.

Photo by S.R.Thompson, courtesy of SABAP-VR Soprintendenza archeologia, belle arti e paesaggio per le province di Verona, Rovigo e Vicenza.

Laffranchi Z, Zingale S, Tecchiati U, Amato A, Coia V, Paladin A, et al. (2024)
Some Pre-Roman humans were buried with dogs, horses and other animals | ScienceDaily

I've made the point several time before, but another paper published recently, reinforces it again, that when old gods are forgotten and old religions die, there is nothing on which they can be reconstructed because religions are never founded in verifiable evidence.

Unlike religion, science, which is a description of reality, could be rediscovered if it, or a major branch of it, was somehow wiped from our collective memories and all text books on the subject were wiped clean. And the rediscovered science would be the same as it is today. Atoms would have the same structure and properties, chemistry would do what we know it does today; physics would have the same explanations for the different colours of light, for the way energy is conserved; entropy and the laws of thermodynamics would be the same; and the description of the universe, together with the Big Bang, how suns form and how planets form around them, would be the same.

In fact, we can be as sure as eggs is eggs, that if ever we contact intelligent life from another planet, their science will be the same as ours, although they'll use different words to describe it and their numbering system may well have a different base.

But, expunge every trace of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hindi, Shintoism, etc., and erase everyone’s memory of them, and we would never again know what the followers believed or what they believe their god(s) did or didn't do. We would know no more about the major religions of today than we know about the ancient religions before writing was invented. We have not the slightest idea what inspired the builders of Stonehenge and Silbury Hill in Wiltshire; we don't have a clue what the people who built the oldest existing roofed building in Europe, in Menorca in the Balearic Islands believed or what the Minoans of Crete believed, or even the names of their gods, and, unless someone decodes the language the Minoans wrote, we never will. We only know anything about the Egyptian and Sumerian pantheons because someone learned to read their writing.

And we know nothing about the gods and religion of the people who buried horses and dogs with their dead in Late Iron Age, Northern Italy - the subject of a recent paper in PLOS ONE.

In information from PLoS, cited in Science Daily, the authors explain their findings:

Tuesday 13 February 2024

Atheism - Eight Things You Probably Didn't Know


8 facts about atheists | Pew Research Center

Atheism is the lack of belief in the existence of any god or gods, nothing more and nothing less. This position is based on the self-evidence fac that the only intellectually honest basis for belief is evidence and the equally self-evidence fact that there is not (and cannot be) any definitive evidence for the existence of anything supernatural because, by definition, nothing supernatural can be detected. All there is, is the material universe and anything beyond that has nowhere and no time to exist in and could not interact with or influence events in the material universe, so is indistinguishable from nothing. Belief in anything supernatural is thus a superstition for which there is no supporting evidence.

Atheism is a belief position, not a knowledge claim. Since again the only intellectually honest position is that all knowledge has a degree of uncertainty, atheism is not Agnosticism since Agnosticism allows for the possibility of Atheism being wrong, but any assessment of the probability of the existence of any god must be subjective since there can be no observations to base it on. So, an Agnostic cannot express that probability without it becoming a belief position. As it is, Agnosticism is a pedantic knowledge claim which has no measurable probability of being different to Atheism, in the accuracy of its claim.

Recently, the Pew Research Center published 8 facts about Atheism based on its opinion polling in the USA and elsewhere. Most of them refer to Atheism in the USA, where Atheists make up 4% of U.S. adults, according to their 2023 National Public Opinion Reference Survey. That compares with 3% who described themselves as atheists in 2014 and 2% who did so in 2007.

That figure of 4% for the USA lags someway behind the UK (12%), Netherlands (17%), Sweden (18%), France (23%) and even once staunchly Catholic countries of Spain (10%) and the Republic of Ireland where 14.2% gave Atheist/No religion, as their religion, (if any) in the 1922 census (an increase of 187% since 2011). However, with a great deal of stigma still attached to Atheism in the USA and pressure to conform with regular church attendance, the true figure for Atheism is probably very underestimated and hidden within the large and growing 'Nones, which currently stands at 28% in the USA.

Pew Research Center's eight fact about Atheism are:

Saturday 13 January 2024

Creationism in Crisis - Americans Are Now Abandoning Religion As Fast As Europeans Did A Generation Ago


Belief in Five Spiritual Entities Edges Down to New Lows
As the chart on the right shows, the decline in belief in God and Heaven has been the most dramatic, falling 16 percentage points in 22 years and the decline in belief in other magical entities like Angels and Satan has run in parallel, the differences being within the statistical error of the data.

What this reflects is the trend that has been apparent in American religious belief since about the mid 1960's where the younger generation have tended to be significantly less religious than their parents with belief in God and the importance of religion tending to increase in older generations. However, as people age, they tend to keep the religious beliefs they formed by the age of about 25-30. What these charts show then is the effect of the older generations dying and the younger generations moving up through the age groups, as the following chart shows:

Tuesday 9 January 2024

My Books on Amazon - And Other Good Book Sellers



The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting The Intelligent Design Hoax

ID is not a problem for science; rather science is a problem for ID. This book shows why. It exposes the fallacy of Intelligent Design by showing that, when examined in detail, biological systems are anything but intelligently designed. They show no signs of a plan and are quite ludicrously complex for whatever can be described as a purpose.The Intelligent Design movement relies on almost total ignorance of biological science and seemingly limitless credulity in its target marks. Its only real appeal appears to be to those who find science too difficult or too much trouble to learn yet want their opinions to be regarded as at least as important as those of scientists and experts in their fields.

Available in Hardcover, Paperback or ebook for Kindle

Saturday 23 December 2023

Small Gods - More Magnificance Of The Real Universe Revealed,


The Running Chicken Nebula comprises several clouds, the most prominent of which are labelled in this vast image from the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), hosted at ESO’s Paranal site. The bright star labelled Lambda Centauri is actually much closer to us than the nebula itself, and can be seen with the naked eye. The clouds shown in wispy pink plumes are full of gas and dust, illuminated by the young and hot stars within them. Overall, this image spans an area in the sky of about 25 full Moons, one of which is shown to scale for reference.

Credit: ESO/VPHAS+ team. Acknowledgement: CASU
New 1.5-billion-pixel ESO image shows Running Chicken Nebula in unprecedented detail | ESO

Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory in Chile have revealed in unprecedented detail, the so-called, 'Running Chicken' nebula, named not after creationists when asked a direct question, but because some people think it resembles a running chicken. The photographs were taken using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) as a series of images capturing different wavelengths of light, then carefully stitched together to form this detailed composite image.

The Running Chicken Nebula actually comprises several regions, all of which we can see in this vast image that spans an area in the sky of about 25 full Moons [1]. The brightest region within the nebula is called IC 2948, where some people see the chicken’s head and others its rear end. The wispy pastel contours are ethereal plumes of gas and dust. Towards the centre of the image, marked by the bright, vertical, almost pillar-like, structure, is IC 2944. The brightest twinkle in this particular region is Lambda Centauri, a star visible to the naked eye that is much closer to us than the nebula itself.

There are, however, many young stars within IC 2948 and IC 2944 themselves — and while they might be bright, they’re most certainly not merry. As they spit out vast amounts of radiation, they carve up their environment much like, well, a chicken. Some regions of the nebula, known as Bok globules, can withstand the fierce bombardment from the ultraviolet radiation pervading this region. If you zoom in to the image, you might see them: small, dark, and dense pockets of dust and gas dotted across the nebula.

Other regions pictured here include, to the upper right, Gum 39 and 40, and to the lower right, Gum 41. Aside from nebulae, there are countless orange, white and blue stars, like fireworks in the sky. Overall in this image, there are more wonders than can be described — zoom in and pan across, and you’ll have a feast for the eyes.

This image is a large mosaic comprising hundreds of separate frames carefully stitched together. The individual images were taken through filters that let through light of different colours, which were then combined into the final result presented here. The observations were conducted with the wide-field camera OmegaCAM on the VST, a telescope owned by the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy (INAF) and hosted by ESO at its Paranal site in Chile’s Atacama Desert that is ideally suited for mapping the southern sky in visible light. The data that went into making this mosaic were taken as part of the VST Photometric Hα Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge (VPHAS+), a project aimed at better understanding the life cycle of stars.

Contrast this small fraction of the visible universe (it occupies an area of the night sky about the size of 25 full moons) with the laughably naïve description of the Universe in Genesis 1: 6-18:
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day.

And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth. And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
The Universe as described in Genesis 1: 6-19
And, just to reinforce the ignorance of the authors of Genesis who guessed what they didn't know and got it so spectacularly wrong, here is a selection of deep-space images from the ESO:

Wednesday 13 December 2023

Creationism in Crisis - How Wrong The Bible's Authors Were! Why Would Anyone Believe Anything Else They Wrote?


The Universe as described in Genesis 1: 6-10
NASA’s Webb Stuns With New High-Definition Look at Exploded Star - NASA

The description of the Universe in the Bible is so naïve and radically different to the real universe, it beggars belief that there are grown adults who think the Bible is the inerrant word of a creator god.

There is nothing about the authors' description of it which can be described as allegorical or metaphorical, without the most contorted of mental gymnastics. It is not metaphorical or allegorical; it is quite simply wrong; spectacularly and conspicuously, with no shadow of a doubt, wrong!

What we now know are hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with maybe half a trillion stars, many with planetary systems, the authors of the Bible thought were little lights stuck to the underside of a dome over a flat Earth, that can be shaken loose and will fall down to Earth where they can be trampled on by a goat! (Daniel 8:10).

They described this flat Earth with a dome over it as standing on pillars and the fixed and immobile center of the Universe, round which a small sun orbits. They described the sky above the dome as being made of water. Their universe ran on magic.

Sunday 3 December 2023

Creationism in Crisis - How America's East Coast Formed - 230 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'


Vector graphic of the land mass of the supercontinent Pangea.

Credit: Rainer Lesniewski
Study Illuminates Formation of U.S. East Coast During Breakup of Supercontinent Pangea - SMU

It's not just the biologists who are incidentally refuting creationism with just about every peer-reviewed research paper; now the geologists are doing the same.

The problem for creationists is that their superstition has no basis in facts because it didn't happen and the record of how it did happen is in the evidence that science is revealing, so inevitably that evidence is going to refute the childish fairytale that creationists were taught by their parents who were taught it by their parents...

Take this piece of geological research into the formation of the East Coast of the USA, for example. It was carried out by scientists from the University of New Mexico, Southern Methodist University seismologist, Professor Maria Beatrice Magnani, and scientists from Northern Arizona University and the University of Southern California. It occurred in that long 'pre-Creation' history before creationists think Earth was magicked up out of nothing.

It is based on the knowledge that the East Coast of America formed when the supercontinent, Pangea, broke up some 230 million years before creationists think Earth existed.

Because it wasn't known about by the parochial and scientifically illiterate Bronze Age authors of their holy books, creationists are completely unaware of the way the present land-masses were formed on the breakup of Pangea, despite the abundant tectonic evidence in the form of mid-ocean ridges with their embedded record of multiple magnetic reversals over millions of years, subduction zones, earthquakes, volcanoes and uplift folds to form hills and mountains at tectonic plate margins.

Geology is a science about which my education has been somewhat lacking (I'm a biologist, physiologist and biochemist by training) but as I understand it, the edges of continents that were the site of the original rifts that opened up to form the oceans, particularly the Atlantic Oceans, will also show evidence of magma that would have welled up in the initial stages of the split.

In the case of the North American Atlantic coast, which is passive in this process because it is simply being pulled away from what is now Northwest Africa, and has not been subject to collisions with other plates, or any significant volcanic activity, these traces of magma are still to be found in the edges of the continental shelf beneath the ocean floor. Associated with the passive margin is a magnetic anomaly, The East Coast Magnetic Anomaly (ECMA), that runs parallel to the American East Coast.

My knowledge of the American East Coast is limited to two week vacation in Boston about 12 years ago, during which I tried bathing in Cape Cod Bay from a beach near South Wellfleet, to discover that I was standing barefoot on king crabs, either dead or alive (their remains littered the beach along Cape Cod), so I didn't spend long in the water - not that they were any threat to me but because they are not very pleasant to walk on.

As the Southern Methodist University news release explains:

Sunday 29 October 2023

Superstition News - The USA is Not The Only Country Where a Large Number of People Believe in Magic and Would Welcome a Theocracy


Religion in South and Southeast Asia: Key facts | Pew Research Center

Although post-war Europe has seen major changes in religious affiliation and beliefs with Atheism and acceptance of the scientific view of human origins now the largest demographic by far in many countries, including the UK, the USA continues to be an outlier amongst Western industrial democracies in this regard, with a large number of people believing in magic and the special creation of humans as is, on an Earth that is just a few thousand years old.

Another feature of Western European post-war culture is the presumption that religious freedom comes not from a close association between church and state but by strict secularism, so that many countries that were formerly solidly Catholic or Protestant are increasingly secular. This contrast markedly with American evangelicals, who, whilst not being in the majority in what is also becoming an increasingly secular society, would like nothing more than a theocracy with Christianity even being required to qualify as a 'proper American' and the church being involved in education, the judiciary, the legislature and even the executive, in a Taliban-style theocracy.

As this Pew Research survey shows, American Evangelicals closely resemble South and Southeast Asian Buddhists and Muslims in this respect. The survey is the subject of a report by Jonathan Evans, Kelsey Jo Starr, Manolo Corichi and William Miner and a summary by Jonathan Evans.

It shows that in "three Buddhist-majority countries (Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Thailand) and two Muslim-majority countries (Malaysia and Indonesia), as well as the religiously diverse country of Singapore", religion is an important part of everyday life with both Buddhism and Islam having some similarities in terms of belief, personal and national identity and to what degree it should be involved in politics, laws and customs. In all these measures, religion, regardless of the sect, had a remarkable similarity to Evangelical Christianity in the USA, especially amongst the far-right Christian Nationalists.

Friday 27 October 2023

Catholic Sex Abuse News - Spanish Catholic Priests Sexually Abused Over 200,000 Children


Cardinal Isidro Gomá y Tomás, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain, when the Catholic Church was at the height of its power in Spain.
Spanish clergy sexually abused more than 200,000 children, inquiry estimates | Spain | The Guardian

The routine sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests is back in the news after an independent commission, led by Spain's national Ombudsman, former education minister, Ángel Gabilondo, has discovered that more than 200,000 minors have been sexually abused by Catholic priests since 1940.

This figure is an estimate based on extrapolating the figure of 0.8% of 8,000 Spanish adults in a survey who reported being sexually abused by Catholic priests before the age of 18 - a figure which rose to 1.13% (360,000 of Spain's 32 million adult population) if lay members of the church were included. Lay members of the church perform some of the duties of priests but are not ordained or under holy orders. As such, they come under the authority and control of senior church figured, usually the bishops, archbishops and cardinals in charge of diocese.

For most of the period, the Spanish Catholic Church was a privileged and protected institution that considered itself largely above the law - a position that derived from its active support and cooperation with General Frano's Fascist regime. During this period, the Catholic Church was given control of most of the influential and welfare aspects of Spanish life, including education, health and institutions such as orphanages, mother and baby homes and homes for single mothers, many of whom were themselves victims of sexual abuse.

Monday 10 April 2023

Fake News - Pope Francis Can Declare the Truth- But God Needs to be Kept Informed

Fake News

Pope Francis Can Declare the Truth!
But God Needs to be Kept Informed
Fake News

Pope Francis Can Declare the Truth!
But God Needs to be Kept Informed
Fake News

Pope Francis Can Declare the Truth!
But God Needs to be Kept Informed
Fake News

Pope Francis Can Declare the Truth!
But God Needs to be Kept Informed

Francis focuses Easter message on hope, with prayers for an end to global conflicts

In his traditional Easter address 'Urbi et Orbi' ([to] the City and the world), Pope Francis announced that it was a solid fact that Jesus has risen, leaving historians bemused and wishing they too had the powers to declare truth by fiat. It would save an awful lot of time and money.

Scientists, of course, have long been envious of the magical power of religious clerics to simply declare facts to be true, even mutually contradictory ones and ones proven to be false. No need for all that experimentation and analysis; simply give it some thought, decide what would be convenient if it were true, and declare it to be so! Voilà! (Or should that be, Shazam?)

The Pope has this magical power, apparently, because an omniscient God speaks directly to him and informs him of the inerrant truth - rather like a mega-rich televangelist in that respect. All Pope Francis must do is announce it, and, at least as far as the Catholic Church and its followers are concerned, it is so.

However, he then went on to throw that whole 'fount of divine wisdom' thing into confusion by calling on the world to pray for peace between Russia and Ukraine. (There is nothing like an empty gesture in times of trouble, and it's a heck of a lot cheaper than sending aid.)

But hold on!

Sunday 9 April 2023

Crucifiction News - What Took Christians So Long to Depict The Crucifixion?

Crucifiction News

What Took Christians So Long to Depict The Crucifixion?
The Crucifixion by Andrea Mantegna, painted between 457 and 1459
The central panel of an altarpiece for church of San Zeno, Verona, Italy

The Louvre, Paris

The Crucifixion by Giotto
The Crucifixion by Giotto di Bondone (c 1303-1305)
Arena Chapel, Padua, Italy
The crucifixion gap: why it took hundreds of years for art to depict Jesus dying on the cross

As it is Easter, when Christians traditionally celebrate the repugnant notion of vicarious redemption through the blood sacrifice of a supposedly innocent person, I thought it would be good to examine the whole notion of the crucifixion of the legendary founder of the Christian religion, Jesus.

What I'm not going to do is point out the glaring and irreconcilable inconsistences in the accounts of the crucifixion and the alleged resurrection, which betray the fact that any pretense to be eye-witness accounts are just that - pretense.

If you want more information on that you're more than welcome to try the Easter Challenge to see if you can resolve the accounts into a coherent narrative incorporating all the alleged events.
The origins of Easter have nothing to do with the alleged crucifixion of course, being based, at least in part on the Roman festival of Hilaria:
For example, the timing of Easter is determined by the first full moon after the vernal equinox, which was also an important time in the Roman calendar. The Roman festival of Hilaria, which was held in honor of the goddess Cybele, was celebrated around the same time as the vernal equinox and involved parades, feasting, and gift-giving.

Reference:
  • "The Origins of Easter" by Mark Cartwright, Ancient History Encyclopedia: https://www.ancient.eu/article/1294/the-origins-of-easter/
  • "Easter" by Christine M. Tomassini, Encyclopædia Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Easter-holiday
  • "The Pagan Roots of Easter" by Jennifer Billock, History: https://www.history.com/topics/holidays/history-of-easter-origins-of-easter-traditions
ChatGPT. (2023, April 9). What are the Roman origins of Easter?
Retrieved from https://chat.openai.com/chat
The name 'Easter' comes from the Old English 'Ēastre', the name of an Anglo-Saxon festival celebrating the spring equinox which was used by the Christian Church as the arbitrary date of the alleged crucifixion of Jesus, which has as much basis in fact as the supposed date of his birth, i.e., none at all.

Perhaps the first thing to point out about the story is its unlikelihood.

Friday 31 March 2023

Creationism in Crisis - The Fallacy of the Fine-Tuned Universe

Creationism in Crisis

The Fallacy of the Fine-Tuned Universe

Great Mysteries of Physics 2: is the universe fine-tuned for life?

It won't be long in any debate forum with Creationists, or even theists who are not Bible literalists but still like to think their magic invisible friend created the Universe with them in mind, that someone will claim the Universe is fine-tuned for life. The claim is that there are about 30 constants which all have to have just the values they have for intelligent life to exist.

There are of course many problems with this claim, most of which the person making it will be completely unaware, having only read what they want to believe and not anything that might contradict their 'faith'.

The main ones are:
  • In effect, they are arguing that their putative creator god can only create life within very narrow parameters, and yet an omnipotent god who allegedly created the 'rules' should be capable of creating anything it wants to create in any given set of parameters. So, if the creator constrained by natural laws and incapable of working outside its limitations? If so, who or what set those limitations.

    The fine-tuned argument is actually an argument against the existence of an omnipotent creator god, not for one.
  • Discussions about the existence of intelligent life can only be conducted in a Universe in which intelligent life exists, therefore, the fact that the debate is taking place means the Universe must be capable of giving rise to intelligent life. Trying to work out the probability of something happening that has already happened is statistical nonsense. The probability is 1 (certainty).
  • Assuming those constants do have a range of possible values (and that's only an assumption with no evidence ever presented), in order to calculate the probability of it having the value it has in this Universe, we would need to examine a large sample of universes. That of course is impossible, so, for all we know, the probability of any constant having its current value may be certainty, i.e. it might not be capable of having any other value. That the probability of it having its current value being unlikely, is merely an assumption - a claim without evidence which can be dismissed without evidence.
  • In this universe, the vast majority of it is highly hostile to life as we know it. Even in this planetary system, life can only exist on one planet, and intelligent (human) life can only exist on a fraction of the surface of this planet and within a few thousand feet of its surface without special equipment. So, far from being fine-tuned for life, almost all of it is fine-tuned to make life impossible.
  • Earth is not particularly well designed for human life (which is what Creationists men by 'intelligent life'). It is tectonically active which means it is subject to frequent natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis; humans cannot survive for long and without equipment in the oceans or at the top of mountains, in deserts of at the poles. Earth is subject to occasional cosmic disasters such as meteorite strikes and it orbits a sun which will one day destroy it by turning into a red giant, hence intelligent life such as that on Earth will only exist for a fraction of the time the Universe will exist.
  • There are very many more black holes in the Universe than there are humans, so it would be more logical to argue that the Universe is fine-tunes for making black holes.

Saturday 18 March 2023

Old Dead Gods - No-One Mourns for the Old Dead Gods of Arabia

Old Dead Gods

No-One Mourns for the Old Dead Gods of Arabia

Mustatil ('rectangles") in the heart of Al-Nafūd Desert, Northern Saudi Arabia, are the remains of religious buildings from 7,000 years ago

Enigmatic ruins across Arabia hosted ancient ritual sacrifices

Long before a clan of camel herders and traders along the western edge of Arabia were forced by tribal loyalty to follow a new, charismatic 'Prophet of Allah", and long before a tribe of Canaanite hill farmers in the hill of southern Syria adopted the god Yahweh from the local pantheon as their own, and created a mythical history to give them a unique identity and justify their land-theft, genocide and territorial expansion, scattered bands of early pastoralists had banded together to build hundreds of massive monuments for religious rituals in the Al-Nafūd Desert in the north of Arabia, close to the Western end of the 'fertile crescent'.
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Detail of north-west (preserved) interlocking cells of associated feature IDIHA-F-0011149.
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The four I-type platforms located west of IDIHA-F-0011081, photo orientated west.
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The main (central) chamber of mustatil IDIHA-F-0011081 with three up-right stones (A-C). Flat stones in centre of image acted as support for primary up-right stone in the rear. The blocked doorway is visible in the left of the photo.
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Transverse grooved hammer stone found upside down and in situ in Phase 1.
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Bos sp. horn (#0032) recovered from Phase 4A, note the positioning in relation to up-right stone A.
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Horns found on a collapsed “bench” in Phase 4B. Left to right, large cattle horns/sheaths (#0043) and (#0033), goat horn sheath (#0047), goat (#0041), and cattle horn (#0040).
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Spatial relationships between the main and secondary chamber.

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Riverstone surface associated with courtyard, further pebbles were set within the doorway.
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Two mustatil at site IDIHA-0030862 in Khaybar County orientated (base) towards a body of standing water, photo orientated west.

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Three mustatil at site IDIHA-0030914, orientated (base) towards a small seasonal wadi in Khaybar County, photo orientated south-west.

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Mustatil IDIHA-F-0011081 orientated (head) towards a playa located to the east, photo orientated east.
These structures were only discovered in 2016 by satellite imagery. Now known by the local people as Mustatil ('rectangles")., they were constructed some 7000 years ago, before the Pyramids of Egypt or Stonehenge in southern England and are probably the oldest man-made stone structures on Earth. The organisation and manpower required to build these structures suggests some unifying idea across a large area to give a commonality of purpose to scattered tribes, pointing to a single religion with maybe an accepted central religious authority associated with the site in northern Arabia where these structures were created.

They are also associated with elaborate rock-carvings of strange geometric shapes and patters, which were probably originally painted.

As with the Pyramids and the Bronze Age structures of Stonehenge and Silbury Hill, in Wiltshire, UK, they suggest an organised state with an economy strong enough to provide a surplus wealth and food production sufficient to finance these constructions and feed the workers.

And yet, because they left no records, like the religion that inspired the building of Knossos in Minoan Create, we have no idea what that religion was or why it was able to inspire the creation of these structures for the rituals that were performed there, and why the people living there considered it necessary and worth all the effort!

Clearly, the god(s) (and it was probably a pantheon of gods, like the neighbouring Mesopotamians had later) had massive imaginary powers, giving the priesthood enormous powers of command and control, and elaborate rituals were considered necessary to appease or thank them. Yet we have no idea what those imaginary powers were, and whatever they were believed to have done, or not done in response to the rituals continued to be done or not done when the rituals ceased, their last believer died, and the monuments crumbled.

Rosa's Laws of Religion:

The First Law of Theodynamics:
Gods can be created out of nothing and will disappear without trace.
This is a phenomenon that has been repeated time and again throughout human history as religions have come and gone together with their imaginary gods. No one now mourns at the graveside of these old dead gods.

No-one believes in Mars, Ra, Wodan, Thor or Saturn, and no-one says the rituals that were once essential to keep the seasons coming and going, the crops growing or the Nile flooding, and yet the seasons continue to come and go, the crops grow and the Nile still floods at the right time.

The prayers and rituals that once influenced these old gods are no longer needed, and the natural occurrences that were once 'obviously' caused or created by them are now just as 'obviously' caused or created by different gods in response to different prayers and rituals. And they will still occur when the current batch of gods have been consigned to the graveyard of the gods along with all the others.

What started me thinking in that line, was a recent article concerning the Arabian monuments in The Conversation by Melissa Kennedy, and Hugh Thomas, Lecturers in Archaeology at the University of Sydney. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original can be read here



Enigmatic ruins across Arabia hosted ancient ritual sacrifices

A group of three mustatil and later Bronze Age funerary pendants on a rocky outcrop, southeast of AlUla County.

Source: AAKSA / The Royal Commission for AlUla,
Author provided

Melissa Kennedy, University of Sydney and Hugh Thomas, University of Sydney

Over the past five years, archaeologists have identified more than 1,600 monumental stone structures dotted across a swathe of Saudi Arabia larger than Italy. The purpose of these ancient stone buildings, dating back more than 7,000 years, has been a puzzle for researchers.

Our excavations and surveys reveal these were ritual structures, constructed by ancient herders and hunters who gathered to sacrifice animals to an unknown deity – perhaps in response to ancient climate change. The study is published in PLOS ONE today.

Desert discoveries

In the 1970s, the first archaeological surveys of northwest Saudi Arabia identified an ancient and mysterious rectangular structure. The sandstone walls of the structure were 95m long, and although it was determined to be unique, no further study of this unusual site was undertaken.

Over the following decades, airline passengers would see similar large “rectangles” dotted across the country. However, it was not until 2018 that one was excavated.

The main architectural features of a mustatil.

Credit: AAKSA /
The Royal Commission for AlUla,
Author provided
These structures are now known as mustatils (Arabic for rectangle). We have been studying them for the past five years as part of a larger archaeological study sponsored by the Saudi Royal Commission for AlUla.

The smallest mustatils are around 20m long, while the largest are over 600m. Previous work by our team determined that all mustatils follow a similar architectural plan. Two thick ends were connected by between two to five long walls, creating up to four courtyards.

Access to the mustatil was through a narrow entrance in the base. There would then have been a long walk, perhaps in the form of a procession, to the “head”, where the main ritual activity took place.

Previous studies determined that the mustatils are at least 7,000 years old, dating to the end of the Neolithic period.

Cattle remains

In 2019–2020, we undertook excavations at a mustatil site called IDIHA-0008222. The structure, made from unworked sandstone, measures 140m in length and 20m in width.

Excavations in the head of the mustatil revealed a semi-subterranean chamber. Within this chamber were three large, vertical stones. We have interpreted these as “betyls”, or sacred standing stones which represented unknown ancient deities.
The excavated mustatil at IDIHA-0008222.
Credit: AAKSA / The Royal Commission for AlUla,
Author provided

Surrounding these stones were well-preserved cattle, goat, and gazelle horns. The horns are so well preserved that much of what we find is the horn sheath, made of keratin – the same substance as hair and nails. We found only the upper cranial elements of these animals: the teeth, skulls, and horns. This suggests a clear and specific choice of offerings.

Further analysis suggests the bulk of these remains belonged to male animals and the cattle were aged between 2 and 12 years. Their slaughter would have formed a significant proportion of a community’s wealth, indicating these were high-value offerings.

Human remains

Current evidence suggests that the mustatils were in use between 5300 and 4900 BCE, a time when Arabia was green and humid. However, within a few generations, the ancient inhabitants of Saudi Arabia began to reuse these structures, this time to bury human body parts.

At IDIHA-0008222, a small structure had been built next to the mustatil. Inside were a partial foot, five vertebrae and several long bones.

Their placement suggests soft tissue was still present when they were buried. Forensic anthropologists were able to determine that the remains likely belonged to an individual aged between 30 and 40 years.

Our work at other mustatils has revealed similar deposits of human remains. Were these remains buried in attempt to claim ownership of the structure or some form of later ritual? These questions remain to be answered.

Pointing to water

The mustatils are changing how we view the Neolithic period not just in Arabia but across the Middle East. The sheer size of these structures and the amount of work involved in their construction suggests that multiple communities came together to create them, most probably as a form of group bonding.

Moreover, their widespread distribution across Saudi Arabia suggests the existence of a shared religious belief, one held over a vast and un-paralleled geographic distance. Currently, fewer than ten mustatils have been excavated, so our understanding of these structures is still in its infancy.
Map of Saudi Arabia showing the locations of the known mustatils.
Mustatil locations in Saudi Arabia, with the location of site IDIHA-0008222 marked in red.

Credit: Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics, the GIS User Community, USGS, NOAA /
AAKSA / The Royal Commission for AlUla,
Author provided
The key question to be answered is “why were they built?” A survey trip by our team may have, in part, solved this mystery.

While recording these structures after rain, we noted that almost all mustatils pointed towards areas that held water. Perhaps the mustatils were constructed and the animals offered to the god or gods to ensure the continuation of the rains and the fertility of the land.

The possibility remains that the mustatils were built in response to a changing climate, as the region became increasingly arid like it is today.
Two mustatil in Khaybar County pointing to standing water after rain.
Credit: AAKSA / The Royal Commission for AlUla,
Author provided
Our study of the mustatils is ongoing. Our new project at the University of Sydney is focused on understanding why these monumental structures and others were built and what brought about their end.

We hope future excavations and analyses will reveal further insights into the life and death of the mustatils and the people who built them. The Conversation
Melissa Kennedy, Lecturer in Archaeology, University of Sydney and Hugh Thomas, Lecturer in Archaeology, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

Copyright: © 2023 The authors.
Published by PLoS. Open access. (CC BY 4.0)
The paper referred to in the article is published, open access in the online journal PLOS ONE:
Abstract

Since the 1970s, monumental stone structures now called mustatil have been documented across Saudi Arabia. However, it was not until 2017 that the first intensive and systematic study of this structure type was undertaken, although this study could not determine the precise function of these features. Recent excavations in AlUla have now determined that these structures fulfilled a ritual purpose, with specifically selected elements of both wild and domestic taxa deposited around a betyl. This paper outlines the results of the University of Western Australia’s work at site IDIHA-0008222, a 140 m long mustatil (IDIHA-F-0011081), located 55 km east of AlUla. Work at this site sheds new and important light on the cult, herding and ‘pilgrimage’ in the Late Neolithic of north-west Arabia, with the site revealing one of the earliest chronometrically dated betyls in the Arabian Peninsula and some of the earliest evidence for domestic cattle in northern Arabia.

In the words of H.L.Mechen:
Where is the graveyard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds? There was a day when Jupiter was the king of the gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus. But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter today? And what of Huitzilopochtli? In one year—and it is no more than five hundred years ago—fifty thousand youths and maidens were slain in sacrifice to him. Today, if he is remembered at all, it is only by some vagrant savage in the depths of the Mexican forest. Huitzilopochtli, like many other gods, had no human father; his mother was a virtuous widow; he was born of an apparently innocent flirtation that she carried on with the sun. When he frowned, his father, the sun, stood still. When he roared with rage, earthquakes engulfed whole cities. When he thirsted he was watered with ten thousand gallons of human blood. But today Huitzilopochtli is as magnificently forgotten as Alien G. Thurman. Once the peer of Allah, Buddha and Wotan, he is now the peer of General Coxey, Richmond P. Hobson, Nan Patterson, Alton B. Parker, Adelina Patti, General Weyler, and Tom Sharkey…

But they have company in oblivion: the hell of dead gods is as crowded as the Presbyterian hell for babies. Damona is there, and Esus, and Drunemeton, and Silvana, and Dervones, and Adsalluta, and Deva, and Belisama, and Axona, and Vintios, and Taranuous, and Sulis, and Cocidius, and Adsmerius, and Dumiatis, and Caletos, and Moccus, and Ollovidius, and Albiorix, and Leucitius, and Vitucadrus, and Ogmios, and Uxellimus, and Borvo, and Grannos, and Mogons. All mighty gods in their day, worshiped by millions, full of demands and impositions, able to bind and loose—all gods of the first class, not dilettanti. Men labored for generations to build vast temples to them—temples with stones as large as hay-wagons. The business of interpreting their whims occupied thousands of priests, wizards, archdeacons, evangelists, haruspices, bishops, archbishops. To doubt them was to die, usually at the stake. Armies took to the field to defend them against infidels: villages were burned, women and children were butchered, cattle were driven off. Yet in the end they all withered and died, and today there is none so poor to do them reverence. Worse, the very tombs in which they lie are lost, and so even a respectful stranger is debarred from paying them the slightest and politest homage.

H.L. Menchen "Memorial Service".

Thank you for sharing!






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Saturday 11 March 2023

Icons of Feminism - Mary Woolstencraft and Rejection of Religious Doctrine

Icons of Feminism

Mary Wollstonecraft and Rejection of Religious Doctrine.

Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie, c. 1797
Source: Wikipedia

Mary Wollstonecraft, by John Keenan, 1787
Mary Wollstonecraft, by John Keenan, 1787
Mary Wollstonecraft: an introduction to the mother of first-wave feminism

Reading this account of the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the first 'radical' feminists, by Bridget Cotter, Lecturer in Social Sciences, University of Westminster, UK, one of the things that stands out most vividly is the religious inspiration for the repression and subjugation of women in Victorian England, and how much of that religion is now seen as wrong and antisocial by the vast majority of decent people.

Far from providing society with a fixed moral framework, religion has served to hold back moral development as society evolves, only to have to reluctantly acceded to the new standards when the tension becomes irresistible.

One of the great crimes of religion, or rather the clerics who control it, is the theft of control of social ethics by a clique who knew they would lose control if they allowed the people too much freedom to think for themselves.

If we give all men the vote, where will it all end? Women demanding the same?!"

"If we give way on feminism, where will it all end? Women priests?!"

"If we give way on contraception, where will it all end? Sexually liberated women?!"

“If we give way on same-sex marriage, or allow gays to become priests, Where will it all end?

… Etc, etc, etc.

Because she challenged these imposed social norms and questioned the authority of those who sought to impose them on us, Mary Wollstonecraft was considered a dangerous revolutionary. Ironically she was opposed most vigorously by the same church that proudly, but wrongly, proclaims its founder as a dangerous revolutionary who challenged authority and the prevailing social norms and cultural ethics.

And today, much of what Mary Wollstonecraft campaigned for is taken for granted as right and proper in most civilised countries.

Bridget Cotter's article in The Conversation is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license. The original can be read here.
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