KellanStec

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.

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?

Yesterday, one of my friends forwarded me to this article on Newsweek. It discusses some new discoveries in the physiology and cell mechanics of the human body. Apparently, once someone has died–that is, their heart has stopped beating–their cells aren’t really dead. Clinically, their body is declared dead, even though their cells are not. The cells can survive for an hour or more with no oxygen!

What was even more amazing is what triggers the cells to die. After more than five minutes of oxygen deprivation, the cells die when the oxygen supply is resumed–a process called reperfusion. The cell death is a misfiring of the natural process of cell suicide (apoptosis) carried out by the mitochondria. This cell suicide is a method of controlling cancer. When the cells are deprived of oxygen and are reperfused more than five minutes after deprivation, the cells are tricked into thinking that they are cancerous and kill themselves. Dr. Lance Becker quotes:

It looks to us as if the cellular surveillance mechanism cannot tell the difference between a cancer cell and a cell being reperfused with oxygen. Something throws the switch that makes the cell die.

Amazing! The implications of this are startling: the standard procedures for treating victims of a heart attack are exactly backward. In attempting to restore oxygen to the cells–and succeeding–we are inadvertently killing the cells.

So, doctors are now experimenting with new methods of resuscitation. What they do is use a heart-lung bypass machine to maintain circulation to the brain while the heart can be safely restarted with minimal cell death resulting. The procedure found an eighty percent success rate among a group of 34 individuals, while the traditional method produced a fifteen percent success rate.

The article closes with a chilling quote:

The body on the cart is dead, but its trillions of cells are all still alive. Becker wants to resolve that paradox in favor of life.

Now, my friend and I were thinking: what could this mean to the world’s religions that believe in an afterlife? If we brought back a number of people from an hour or more of death, we would know for certain whether or not one exists. We would be able to verify what science says about near-death experiences–that they are a result of the natural release of chemicals of a dying brain. Many religions rely on the afterlife as a “great equalizer” for the injustices that we suffer in this world. It gives comfort to those who have lost a loved one to know that they are in a better place.

How many people would be willing to accept the truth if it were presented to them? I wouldn’t have much of a choice to accept the reality if we discovered that there was no afterlife. On the flip side, what if we were to discover for certain that there was an afterlife? Those who do not believe in the supernatural would have to radically alter their worldview to reconcile with this new evidence. Those of faith could boast to be certain about something that no human could possibly be certain about today. I am not saying that this itself could determine whether or not an afterlife exists, but I think there’s reasonably strong evidence that can go either way.

So, my question is: if we could unequivocally say whether or not there was an afterlife, would you be willing to radically alter your current worldview to coincide with the new evidence?

This is going to be good. And I mean that in the most sarcastic way possible. For those of you who do not know what I am talking about, there was a discovery made about 27 years ago of a tomb containing ten bone boxes–some of which contain names of Biblical significance. There’s a documentary set to air this Sunday, March 4 on the Discovery Channel brought to you by the same man who brought us the vomit-inducing three hours that is The Titanic: James Cameron. The names found in the tomb include:

• Yeshua` bar Yehosef – “Jesus son of Joseph”
• Maryah – “Mary”
• Yoseh – “Joseph”
• Mariamene e Mara – “Mary also known as Mara”
• Mattiah – “Matthew”
• Yehudah bar Yeshua` – “Judas son of Jesus”

Before we jump to any conclusions, let us look at the facts. Tombs like these are discovered all the time. Hundreds of tombs and thousands of bone boxes have been discovered in the Jerusalem area since the 1970s. Not only are the tombs common, but the names inscribed on the bone boxes are commonly from a pool of fifteen or so names. From our current discoveries, there are 45 bone boxes labeled “Joseph”, 22 labeled “Jesus”, and 42 labeled “Mary”.

But we are talking about something explicit. Right there it is: a bone box containing Jesus, son of someone named Joseph. How likely is it that these two names are found in the same tomb, one claiming to be the father of another, which seems to match the biblical story? Well, David Mavorah, a custodian of the Israel museum in Jerusalem, points out just how common these names were. “We know that Joseph, Jesus and Mariamene were all among the most common names of the period” he says, “To start with all these names being together in a single tomb and leap from there to say this is the tomb of Jesus is a little far-fetched, to put it politely.” Is it wrong to assume the connection, though?

There are several problems with the assumption that it must be the same family the bible describes. First, it presupposes that it was extremely unlikely that a man named Joseph ever sired a man named Jesus. This is one of the reason that the filmmakers turned to statisticians to verify the unlikelihood of coincidence. The odds that these names would be found together run anywhere from 1:600 to 1:1 million, depending on the statistician you turn to. These aren’t particularly good odds on which to base an assertion–especially since we know how common these names really were. Just to give you an example, Jesus was the sixth most popular name of Jewish men. Mary was more popular still, ranked at number one among women. But let’s look at the second problem: translation.

Things written two thousand years ago, even when carved into stone, don’t conserve as well as we would like them to. Aside from the difficulty in reading, translating the names has generated a fair amount of controversy. Stephen Pfann, a biblical scholar at the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem is even uncertain that the name Jesus on the caskets was read properly. He thinks it’s more probably the name “Hanun.” Ancient Semitic script is infamously tricky to translate. Just check out the picture to the left.

A third consideration, and possibly the most damaging facet to the claim (aside from the utter lack of historical evidence that Jesus ever existed, although I suspect he probably did), is the extreme unlikelihood that the Jesus of the Bible and his family were ever buried in such a tomb. Archaeologist Amos Kloner is unconvinced of the connection, and even states that Jesus’ family probably never had a tomb, much less a tomb in Jerusalem. “It makes a great story for TV, but it’s nonsense,” he told the Jerusalem Post in February. “There is no likelihood that Jesus and his relatives had a family tomb. They were a Galilee family with no Jerusalem ties. The Talpiot tomb belonged to a middle-class family from the 1st century CE.”

Alright, so it’s not very likely that these bone boxes contain the same family written about in the Bible. However, James Cameron remains determined to somehow connect this discovery to the Da Vinci Code. Laughably, he plans to do this using DNA evidence to show that the Jesus and one of the Marys in the tomb are not genetically related, giving credence to the theory that Mary Magdalene and Jesus were romantically involved. You read right. James Cameron is perverting science and archaeology to support something that Dan Brown just made up.

This sick publicity stunt is designed from the inside out to profit James Cameron and his pseudoscience and pseudo history. The worst part is, the profit will be coming from innocent people who are unable to differentiate a fabrication from reality. This could lend a damaging blow to people’s faith that Jesus resurrected on the third day–something many hold dear. The idea that Jesus rose from the dead and is now in heaven is essential to the Christian faith. This depends on an empty tomb.

In conclusion, there is little credible evidence that suggests we should think this tomb contains the family described in the Bible. There are several major problems associated with the assumption that they are connected, and the documentary has little basis in fact. I’m kind of curious to know exactly where Cameron will go with this.

What do you think?

In the midst of one of our seemingly frequent late night religio-philosophical discussions on Morey 3N, there were two claims made a pair of the more prominent Christians on my floor that startled me. I would like to mention them and thoroughly debunk the claims made. Before I get started, I must state that I have absolutely no problem with opening religion up to debate. If you oppose someone’s political position, you are free to criticize it. But, question an opinion about how the Universe began and who created it, and you’ll find yourself at the business end of a metaphorical (or in the case of historical times, real) torch. I have absolutely no problem with religion, and these two men are among the nicest and most well-mannered of all that I know. But, at the same time, I am not obligated to respect their beliefs just because they are considered “holy”.

Claim 1: Charles Darwin recanted on his deathbed; accepting Christianity and rejecting evolution.
To many Christians (Young-Earth Creationists at least), Darwin was a villain who postulated a godless creation. I’m not exactly sure what this claim is supposed to mean in an argument regarding the truth (or fiction) of evolution. Even if it were true, so what?

I can debunk this one with a single quote, but I’ll elaborate on details first. It has been said that a woman by the name of Lady Hope visited Darwin while on his deathbed, and upon reading the Epistle to the Hebrews, changed his mind saying, “How I wish I had not expressed my theory of evolution as I have done.” This story has unfortunately been repeated by the religious for decades in an attempt to delegitimize evolution–in spite of many Christian websites testifying the truth. This seems unlikely due to the fact that Darwin, while repeatedly rejecting Christianity throughout his later years, generally avoided controversy. Darwin was at most a deist and at least an agnostic in terms of his religiosity.

The lie, however, was laid to waste in 1922 when Darwin’s own daughter denied claims of a deathbed conversion. “I was present at his deathbed,” she wrote “[and] Lady Hope was not present during his last illness, or any illness. I believe he never even saw her, but in any case she had no influence over him in any department of thought or belief. He never recanted any of his scientific views, either then or earlier. We think the story of his conversion was fabricated in the U.S.A….the whole story has no foundation whatever.”

Claim 2: A freshly killed penguin was carbon-dated to be 1,000 years old.
At first, I thought this one had just been fictitious. But, after a quick Google search, it turns out to be true–though the implications of this do not discredit the use of carbon-14 dating, as is the intention of the argument. It was a seal rather than a penguin, but that isn’t important. We know exactly why this happened. Read the link for yourself, but I’ll summarize. Basically, Antarctica has a slightly different carbon exchange than what is expected in the rest of the world. Old carbon is up welled along the Antarctic coast from deep in the ocean, and is introduced into the plant life, and eventually this “old carbon” makes its way into the animals higher in the food chain. This is one of the limitations to radioactive-dating, but it does not invalidate the tool.

These are just a couple of little things mentioned in the conversation that I can remember, and I don’t usually concern myself with things such as these. But, it’s been on my mind since last night, so I figured that I would write about it to get it off my mind so I can concentrate on finishing my midterm papers. It is just frustrating to me that some people snub some facets of scientific advancement if they are irreconcilable with their religious beliefs, and yet take advantage of all advancements that do such as cell phones, central heating and air, automobiles, and electricity. The evidence for evolution by natural selection and that we share a common ancestor with primates–indeed, we are primates–is so utterly overwhelming that to deny it, you may as well deny that the Sun is a star.