KellanStec

Looks like Alberto Gonzales is resigning, effective September 17. He hasn’t given a reason, nor has a replacement been chosen.

I’m sure you all remember his testimony to congress about the firing of all those district attorneys, when he had to choose between coming clean about it or lying; thus exposing his incompetence. Or maybe you don’t recall. Gonzales sure didn’t. His official testimony contained over 70 variants of “the dog ate my homework”. For old time’s sake, here’s a video.

A Texas megachurch has backed out of providing a service for a deceased Navy veteran 24 hours before it was to start because he was gay.

It’s okay though. Their justification for doing this has me convinced that it was the right thing to do.

We did decline to host the service — not based on hatred, not based on discrimination, but based on principle.

Right. Based on their principle of…hating and discriminating gays?

Most Christians like to believe their faith conveys the virtues of love and understanding more effectively than any other. What the church should have done was have the memorial service in spite of the man being gay, on principle. What a statement that would have made. Imagine if the pastor would have instead said this:

We are choosing to host the service — not based on tradition, not based on conventionality, but based on the Christian principle of “love thy neighbor”.

“It’s not that we didn’t love the family”, he continues. Tough love I guess. The man isn’t even alive to feel the hatred. His family, however, is. They have done nothing wrong. By mere accident of birth, they happen to belong to the same family as a gay man. They can feel the hatred after this church metaphorically kicked them in the balls.

I’m curious to know why the church thinks this is not discrimination.

Thanks to PZ for the link.

Are primates really that closely related to us? I have had people tell me that it is demeaning to even consider the idea that we are related to any animal. Myself being an animal, I have no problem believing we came from a different animal. But how different are we from primates, really? Is it that much of a stretch to see the resemblances in our phenotypes, genotypes, and culture? (Yes, primates do have culture.)

I hadn’t thought about this much recently until I read an article on the Guardian detailing a primate closely related to chimpanzees found only in the Congo. Time also wrote about this in 2005. Initially all that was known about these animals was known through the locals describing “lion killers”. There isn’t much evidence for the primates killing large cats from what I can tell. From the evidence, the idea stops at legend.

There is another species of chimp living in the same area commonly known as Bonobo. The term is used to describe a type of “pygmy chimpanzee”, although they are not noticeably smaller than a normal chimp. The scientific term for the species is Pan paniscus. The species shares a common ancestor with the other chimps, Pan troglodytes. This common ancestor, then, shares a common ancestor with modern humans. This means that humans are more closely related to chimpanzees than chimpanzees are to gorillas.

I thought I should clear that up, because when I begin writing about some of the traits this species has, it would be easy to think that this species was more closely related to humans than the other species of chimpanzees, and this is simply not the case. To the left, you can see the phylogenic tree for primates. If you are wondering how we are able to map this tree, please read this.

The Bonobo were discovered in 1928 by American anatomist Harold Coolidge. The find was represented only by a skull, and was at first mistaken for an juvenile chimpanzee. We now know that they are a separate species.

There are a number of things that distinguish this species from the rest of its primate cousins. The Bonobo have a gait that is commonly upright in situations where they need to carry things, such as food or nest-building material. They seem to have much less problems accomplishing this than the other chimpanzees. They are able to walk upright about 25% of the time.

What got me interested, though is not what makes them different from other primates, but what makes them similar to us. It is not only the Bonobo and other chimps that share suprisingly similar characteristics with humans, but most of the closelt related primates do. If you’d like to read more about the similarities, see this page. It is very interesting to see that things we would normally consider human–maternal bonds, depression, guilt, shame, love–are not unique in humans at all. Even their sexual behavior is astonishingly similar.

I’d like to direct your attention to a talk that I watched on TED a while ago. Taken directly from the description:

Savage-Rumbaugh asks whether uniquely human traits, and other animals’ behaviors, are hardwired by species. Then she rolls a video that makes you think: maybe not. The bonobo apes she works with understand spoken English. One follows her instructions to take a cigarette lighter from her pocket and use it to start a fire. Bonobos are shown making tools, drawing symbols to communicate, and playing Pac-Man — all tasks learned just by watching. Maybe it’s not always biology that causes a species to act as it does, she suggests. Maybe it’s cultural exposure to how things are done.

Give it a watch. It’s very interesting.

In what year was Jesus born? Many would say somewhere around the year 0. It’s way more confusing than most people realize.

Well, there was no year 0, but the historical equivalent is AD 1. AD 1 immediately precedes 1 BC on the Julian and Gregorian calendars. Got it? Okay.

Now, once Jesus was born, the world did not begin using the AD years. The year was not calculated until AD 525, and was not widely adopted until the 8th century. Confused yet? Me too.

Okay, in the year 525, Dionysius Exiguus did come calculations to determine the number of years that had passed since the birth of Christ. I’m not sure how he got that number, and I don’t think anyone else is either. That’s not what I’m concerned with anyway.

We’re using the same system that Dionysius devised, so it’s safe to assume that Jesus was born somewhere around AD 1, right?

Let’s check the Bible.

We’ll look at the first Gospel, Matthew. In chapter 2, Matthew talks about the flight to Egypt to avoid Herod’s slaughter of the innocents.

Then they [the Magi] had departed, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, flee to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you. Herod is going to search for the child to destroy him.” Joseph rose and took the child and his mother by night an departed for Egypt. He stayed there until the death of Herod, that what the Lord had said through the prophet [Hosea 11:1] might be fulfilled, “Out of Egypt I called my son.”
Matthew 2:13-15, NAB

The latest this could have taken place was in 4 BC, when Herod died. Dionysius was only four years off. This is, of course, assuming that the slaughter took place in Herod’s very last year. Still, not bad for calculating the date five centuries later.

I wonder what the other gospels say. None of the other gospels mention the slaughter of the innocents. Seems like a significant detail to omit. It doesn’t have any historical standing outside of Matthew either. It also bears a striking resemblance to Moses’ story (Exodus 1:15-16,22). Interesting, but we’ll ignore all that for now. The only other Gospel that says anything about the birth of Jesus is Luke. Chapter 2. We’re talking about the census here.

In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that the whole world should be enrolled. This was the first enrollment, when Quirinius was governor of Syria.
Luke 2:1-2, NAB

Okay, so when was Quirinius governor of Syria? It must have been somewhere around 6-4 BC.

Quirinius became governor in the year 6. See? I told you. I knew I–wait a minute. Does that mean AD 6? It does.

After the banishment of Herod Archelaus in 6, Iudaea Province (the conglomeration of Samaria, Judea and Idumea) came under direct Roman administration. One of Quirinius’ first duties was to carry out a census to assess the new province for tax purposes.

But that means…

The Bible is wrong? No, it can’t be! There must be a reason that there is a ten-year discrepancy between the only two existing accounts of Jesus’ birth–both of which seem to be (sort of) intertwined into (unverifiable) historical events.

Oh wait. I got it.

Time travel. It makes perfect sense now.

Who said the Back to the Future series was over? Excuse me while I write a script. Do you think I could get Lloyd?