James McGrath discovered this devotional song from the Ewokian sect. I suspect that this is going to cause strife.

Jub Jub.

There’s been a lot of talk about how Glenn Beck and the conservative movement in general have tried to associate themselves with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

One thing that struck me was how many of the conservatives seemed to be getting their entire understanding of Dr. King from his “I have a Dream” speech. But this was probably the most optimistic of King’s speeches. They ignore all the rest of Dr. King’s speeches, and the rest of what he worked for. They’re very good at recognizing the color-blind society that was Dr. King’s ultimate goal, but they ignore the steps that he thought would be necessary in order to bring it about.

Conservatives are doing with Dr. King what they so frequently do with the Bible: they are proof-texting.

Dr. King still has enormous moral authority in our culture, and some folks want to seize hold of it without having to listen to the whole message. They’d like to remember his “I Have A Dream” speech, but forget that it was delivered during the “March of Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” They want to remember his martyrdom, but forget that it happened while he was supporting sanitation workers who were on strike.

I was going to compare some of Beck’s statements to selections of Dr. King’s speeches, but unfortunately my copy of A Testament of Hope is packed away. Luckily, Ben Dimiero over at MediaMatters has his copy, and he’s done an excellent job of comparing Beck’s favorite themes to Dr. King’s. Consider a few quotes:

Beck: “They’re collapsing the system and replace it with a system of guaranteed annual income for all the workers! Workers of the world unite!” [...]

King: “We must develop a program that will drive the nation to a guaranteed national income.” [...]

Beck: “The thing that I do find about Barack Obama is that — and I think America is starting to catch on to this — this guy really is a Marxist. He believes in the redistribution of wealth. He believes in the global government and everything else.” [...]

King: “[W]e are dealing with issues that cannot be solved without the nation spending billions of dollars — and undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power.” [...]

Notice how much King sounds like Beck’s worst nightmare? Yet this is the man whose mantle Beck is trying to wear? Consider this quote from a speech he gave to his staff in 1966 and tell me how Beck and his crew would react:

“We are now making demands that will cost the nation something. We can’t talk about solving the economic problems of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with the captains of industry … Now this means that we are treading in difficult waters, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong … with capitalism … There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a Democratic Socialism. ”
(“Frogmore Speech”, quoted in I May Not Get There With You, pp. 87-88)

I recently picked up Vincent Bugliosi’s book arguing against the conspiracy theories around the JFK assassination, titled Four Days in November. It’s over 600 pages with index and endnotes, making it a hefty trade paperback and keeping it about equal with Gerald Posner’s Case Closed.

Of course, Four Days is really just a précis, a mere summary of Bugliosi’s real work: Reclaiming History. This clocks in at over 1,600 pages and weighs over five pounds – without endnotes, which come on a CD that ships with the book and add another 1,000+ pages. It’s a work guaranteed to end any debate with a conspiracist, provided you can hit them with it.

The Atlantic called it “a magnificent and, in many ways, appalling achievement, ” which the publishers used as a blurb with some well placed ellipses.

If you total up all the pages written and research done, I suspect that those few minutes at the Daley Plaza are the most closely examined minutes in human history. More work has been done to determine exactly what happened during those minutes than any other moment, ever. And yet, we’re even more divided on what happened today than we were back then.

It’s disturbing how difficult it can be to convince people of even the simplest detail when they don’t want to hear it. Take, for example, the question of what religion the American president belongs to. Given the flap over his former preacher, you’d think most people would remember that he’s a Christian. Yet, according to the New York Times (quoting Pew Research), 18% of America now believes he’s a Muslim.

What can you do to convince people of a thing they don’t wish to believe?

The contortions of the religious right are unabated. The latest schism seems to be between Ann Coulter and the conservative news site WorldNetDaily.

The story starts with a group called GOProud, one of the few gay conservative groups. Such groups have problems right from the start, since most people consider the words “gay republican” to be a contradiction. GOProud has apparently now decided to go on the offensive by inviting Ann Coulter to deliver the keynote speech at their next big convention:

Today, GOProud, the only national organization representing gay conservatives and their allies, announced that conservative author Ann Coulter is headlining their first annual Homocon – a party to celebrate gay conservatives. “The gay left has done their best to take all the fun out of politics, with their endless list of boycotts and protests. Homocon is going to be our annual effort to counter the ‘no fun police’ on the left,” said Christopher Barron, Chairman of the Board of GOProud. “I can’t think of any conservative more fun to headline our inaugural party then the self-professed ‘right-wing Judy Garland’ – Ann Coulter.”

Right-wing Judy Garland? … yeah, anyway, Coulter seems to be on board with this, and it’s cost her. Most notably, WorldNetDaily dropped her from the lineup of speakers for one of their upcoming conferences. According to Joseph Farah, the head of WND:

“Ultimately, as a matter of principle, it would not make sense for us to have Ann speak to a conference about ‘taking America back’ when she clearly does not recognize that the ideals to be espoused there simply do not include the radical and very ‘unconservative’ agenda represented by GOProud. The drift of the conservative movement to a brand of materialistic libertarianism is one of the main reasons we planned this conference from the beginning.

Coulter responded – actually quite reasonably – that she’s a paid speaker and that speaking before a group does not automatically equal an endorsement. That doesn’t seem to have settled the issue, because she’s begun lashing out at Farah. In a recent episode of Fox News’ Red Eye, she called Farah and his crew “fake Christians who are trying to get publicity.” She’d know, I suppose.

Candace Chellew-Hodge over at Religion Dispatches suggests that some conservatives like Coulter and – surprisingly – Glenn Beck are moving towards toleration of homosexuals. These would be the new wave of conservatism that has realized that the gay rights battle is lost. I’m skeptical. Frankly, if conservatives begin repositioning themselves, I suspect it’s because they believe that the current wave of anti-Islamic feeling is a more successful wedge issue than gay rights.

Jezebel republishes an article that makes an interesting comparison:

Like Texas, many of the same states that resist comprehensive sex ed are the same places that pride themselves on loose laws for gun ownership. Gun-rights advocates maintain that straight-forward education, not regulation and licensing, is the best way to keep kids safe.The National Rifle Association leads the way: they have a cool program called Eddie Eagle, aimed at exactly the same age group those parents are up in arms about learning about their own bodies. According to the site, the curriculum is designed to be used in schools. Anyone can use it—you don’t need to be an NRA member or certified to teach anything at all. The curriculum is even available in Spanish.

According to the NRA, it doesn’t aim to teach kids that guns are either “good or bad”, but rather how to stay safe when you see one. “Like swimming pools, electrical outlets, matchbooks and household poison, they’re treated simply as a fact of everyday life. With firearms found in about half of all American households, it’s a stance that makes sense.”

I don’t have a gun in the house, but I can agree with that line of thinking. Like it or not, guns are around, so kids at an early age should learn how to be safe around them.

Now, genitals, at my last count, are in 100% of households. Why not use the same common sense approach that knowledge is power, and give our kids straight forward, age appropriate information?

Proving that tired old line about great minds, Darrell at Stuff Fundies Like created this:

I found this interesting. An article from the Boston Globe about the relationship between moral feelings and disgust.

This is the argument that some behavioral scientists have begun to make: That a significant slice of morality can be explained by our innate feelings of disgust. A growing number of provocative and clever studies appear to show that disgust has the power to shape our moral judgments.

Research has shown that people who are more easily disgusted by bugs are more likely to see gay marriage and abortion as wrong. Putting people in a foul-smelling room makes them stricter judges of a controversial film or of a person who doesn’t return a lost wallet. Washing their hands makes people feel less guilty about their own moral transgressions, and hypnotically priming them to feel disgust reliably induces them to see wrongdoing in utterly innocuous stories.

Some of the article reminds me of the book SuperSense by Bruce Hood. There he talks about the Killer’s Cardigan experiment, where he asked people if they would be willing to wear a non-descript jacket for money. Many people raised their hands, but when he suggested that the jacket had previously been worn by a serial killer, those hands automatically went down.

Hood suggests that we have an instinctive feeling of contamination, even when we know – rationally – that there is no justification. I like this idea, since it might explain things like the “purity codes” found in religions. Of course, those feelings may be carried by instinct, but they are shaped by culture:

But to David Pizarro, the most interesting — and perhaps most important — question to answer is how flexible disgust is, how much it can change. Fifty years ago, many white Americans freely admitted to being disgusted by the thought of drinking from the same drinking fountain as a black person. Today far fewer do. How did that change? Did their sense of disgust ebb as they spent more time in integrated restaurants and workplaces and buses, or did they find ways to actively suppress their feelings? Pizarro isn’t sure, but he’d like to find out.

The debate over the Islamic community center in downtown Manhattan heats up. Over at Religion Dispatches, Kambiz GhaneaBassiri compares the current flap to 19th century paranoia about Catholicism. One Catholic, not to be outdone, decided to win back the coveted “most distrusted” award by arguing that only virtuous Catholics should be allowed to vote:

I’m sure that right now, Americans are looking at the Catholic churches being shut down because all the money is going into pedophilia lawsuits and thinking, “This is the organization I want running my country. What was the last big confessional Catholic country? Franco’s Spain? Yeah, gimme more of that.”

I know that the upper ranks of the Catholic hierarchy have had problems with Democracy for a couple of centuries now. We could talk about Pope Leo XIII and the error of “Americanism”, and we could talk about the tensions between John Coutney Murray and Alfredo Ottaviani.

We could also talk about Pope Pius IX and his Syllabus of Errors, which was a heavy broadside against the separation of Church and State, freedom of religion and democracy. But let’s be fair: Pope Pius IX was -- and I say this with all due respect -- batshit crazy. This was the man who had Edgardo Mortara kidnapped. He was not on speaking terms with sanity.

But I’ve always thought that these arguments were largely confined to the hierarchy and the academics. My impression had always been that the rank-and-file Catholic priests and the laity just ignored it. After Vatican II, I figured no one outside the ivory towers in Rome would be talking about it.

I know we’ve got a lot of lapsed Catholics in the audience. Is this sort of argument common?

[Edit: The original video was taken down recently. I suspect it was the post from PZ that did it. Thanks to richarddawkins.net for the mirror.]

During the western Middle Ages, Christian monasteries would compete for pilgrims by boasting of the relics of saints held within their walls. The more prestigious the relic, the higher the status conferred to the monastery and the greater the lines of pilgrims at the gate, hoping for healing, miracles or the forgiveness of sins.

In these more enlightened times, it seems we’re playing for tourism dollars. That’s the impression I get from the flap of the alleged remains of John the Baptist. (Custador tried to write about this when it first hit the news, but we couldn’t get the BBC video to embed.)

Archaeologists in Bulgaria claim they have found remains of John the Baptist while excavating the site of a 5th century monastery on the Black Sea island of Sveti Ivan.

A reliquary – a container for holy relics – discovered last week under the monastery’s basilica was opened on Sunday and found to contain bone fragments of a skull, a hand and a tooth, Bulgaria’s official news agency BTA reported.

Excavation leader Kazimir Popkonstantinov lifted the reliquary’s lid in a ceremony in the coastal town of Sozopol attended by dignitaries including the Bishop of Sliven, Yoanikii, and Bozhidar Dimitrov, a government minister and director of Bulgaria’s National History Museum, BTA said.

The name of the island translates to “Saint John,” which would probably considered the first clue. Popkonstantinov argues that the bones are authentically John the Baptist because the reliquary is inscribed with the date of June 24 – the date that the Orthodox Church celebrates as John’s birthday.

This is a very slim twig to hang the identity of the bones on, particularly since the reliquary itself dates to the fifth century. I suspect that Popkonstantinov knows that, and that’s why we’re getting press conferences ahead of the facts rather than journal articles afterwards.

Dr. Christopher Rollston, a historian qualified to talk about the ancient near east, has some suggestions of what evidence would be necessary for Popkonstantinov to make his case:

1. A reliable ancient tradition, preferably from the late(r) 1st century or very early 2nd century CE, stating that the bones of John the Baptist had been moved to an island in the Black Sea; 2. An inscription on the burial box that stated something like “The bones of John the Baptist” (i.e., name and title…something such as ”John” would not be sufficient); 3. A palaeographic date for the inscription itself that was late 1st century or very early 2nd century (after all, arguably no one in later centuries would be able to locate precisely the burial site of John the Baptist in Palestine and it may be that even in the late 1st century no one would have been able to have done so!). (4) Carbon 14 dating of the bones that yielded a 1st century CE date.

A question came up in the comments of my last post, and I thought it might be useful to bring it out.

What is a “New Atheist”?

How are the New Atheists different from the previous generations of atheists? Who constitutes the New Atheists, and who are still Old Atheists?