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It’s rather childish of me to be amused by stories involving poo, I know, but I’ve just been reading about the Essenes in David Plotz’s rather excellent The Good Book (a review will probably follow when I finish it) and the tales he told of their toilet habits were too good not to share.
The Essene sect, as you probably know, were the fringe religious group who wrote and deposited the Dead Sea Scrolls. They were a strange and remote cult, living in a small, monastic community on the shores of the Dead Sea and waiting patiently for the apocalypse they keenly anticipated, shunning the outside world and generally keeping themselves to themselves. Among their stranger doctrines was an excessive obsession with personal hygiene. Much of the Qumran complex in which they lived was devoted to bathrooms, and their surviving literature suggests that they engaged in ritual ablutions at the drop of a hat. As a corollary to this, they were apparently extremely squeamish about going to the toilet – they avoided it entirely on the Sabbath (which must have made for some bloody uncomfortable, not to mention dehydrated, weekends) and when they had to do the necessary, they climbed up a huge great hill behind their kibbutz and took care of business up there.
In toilets, as in so much of real estate, location is everything. Putting the thunderbox at the top of the hill meant that every time it rained, the water filtered down through the rock and soil of the Essenes’ communal lavatory and straight into their water supply at the bottom, carrying with it the delightful melange of piss and shit that they had so dutifully deposited up the mountain. Of course, given their predilection for regular bathing, the Qumran monks basically washed in their own excrement several times a day, which didn’t do wonders for their general health. Life expectancy for the group was substantially shorter than for neighbouring communities, and it’s pretty likely that their unsanitary bathroom arrangements (ironically put in place because of their obsession with cleanliness) were primarily to blame.
Bart Ehrman is one of the most readable and insightful biblical scholars working today, and his latest book, God’s Problem does not deviate from the mould. The book is an investigation into the Bible’s attempts to explain the Problem of Evil – not the standard Free Will defence which has become popular in modern Christianity (although Ehrman does touch on it and examines its failure as a theodicy), but the work of the original writers, who looked around them and tried to explain the suffering they saw.
God’s Problem deal with three main approaches to the issue. The first to be addressed is what Ehrman calls the “prophetic” theodicy, as outlined by the Old Testament prophets Hosea, Jeremiah, Isaiah et al. This essentially states that suffering is the result of sin; that God punishes His people when they stray from His strictures. The second argument, outlined in the book of Job, suggests that we cannot know the cause of suffering, since God is too powerful to be questioned. Finally, the book looks at the “apocalyptic” approach; the idea that evil is the work of God’s cosmic enemies but that He will imminently usher in an era of peace and prosperity. Ehrman outlines these positions and a few other treatments of the concept with substantial biblical referencing and explanations of the historical context, before systematically showing how the positions presented in the Bible are unsound. His arguments are thorough and easily followed, but it’s actually the exposition of the Bible-writers’ ideas that is most interesting (let’s face it, most atheists can do the Problem of Evil in their sleep).
Interspersed with the arguments are real-life examples, including some from the author’s own life, and a bit of background on how theodicy informed Ehrman’s own journey away from evangelical Christianity and into agnosticism. These serve to give the book a personal touch, and make it read less like a theology lecture and more like a conversation. As I’ve mentioned before, Bart Ehrman is eminently readable, and his easy prose can convey quite complex philosophical issues in a manner accessible to almost anyone. Nevertheless, he still retains academic credibility by constantly referencing his sources and showing how they provide solid empirical support for his views.
All in all this is a nice, stylish piece of writing, on a par with the excellent Misquoting Jesus, and shows Ehrman at the top of his game. A fascinating insight into the thought-processes of biblical writers is combined with a coherent and well-organised dissection of the Problem of Evil, and the result is a book that should be required reading for Christians and atheists alike.
Lacking the ubiquitous 20-something male accessory of a games console, I was sorely tempted by Landover Baptist‘s compelling offer:
Accept Jesus and get a FREE Playstation 3!
With a cool modded version of Tony Hawks, no less. You have to admit, their dedication is admirable.
Back when I was a Taoist, I followed a path which might be called “Philosophical” Taoism, concerning myself with the underlying worldview of the Tao Te Ching and its instructions on how to live. There are other ways to approach the Taoist faith, though, and one of the sects that I found most peculiar was the school of “Alchemical” Taoism. Historically, alchemical Taoists direct their efforts towards producing and ingesting the elixir of immortality, thus cheating death and becoming indestructible. Since the two primary ingredients of the elixir were cinnabar and mercury (both highly toxic), success rates were rather low…
Now, it seems, the elixir of life is available for sale on the internet (are you surprised?). Yes, you too can become an immortal, through the simple expedient of White Powder Gold. Popularised by pseudohistorian Laurence Gardner (author of Bloodline Of The Holy Grail and other such Da Vinci Code-inspiring tripe), White Powder Gold is touted as the “monoatomic” form of gold (monoatomic elements are those in which atoms are not bound to one another – the noble gases are a good example), which rather ignores the fact that gold atoms don’t actually form molecules anyway – gold atoms align themselves in a lattice-like structure, but effectively there’s no such thing as a “molecule” of gold. Apparently, its monoatomic properties make White Powder Gold a superconductive restorative, which reverses the ageing process, cures all diseases and leads to immortality. “Brilliant,” you think. “We’ll just get the world’s chemists synthesising the stuff in bulk, and we’re sorted!” Sadly, it isn’t as simple as that.
White Powder Gold, you see, can only be made by an alchemical, not a chemical process – meaning that if you aren’t a proper bona fide alchemist, with special achemist consciousness and connection to interdimensional higher powers, all you’ll get from processing gold into White Gold Powder is – a bunch of gold. Well, there’s a shock, and no mistake. Plus, you’d want to avoid infringing David Hudson’s patent for the stuff. Thankfully, some thoughtful alchemists have decided to put their talents to good use fleecing the gullible making this precious substance available for sale for only $90 an ounce plus shipping, so you can start your path to immortality today!
I always thought White Gold was only magical in the Land…
Should you ever need to avail yourself of the services of a mental health professional, you would probably want one who knows what the fuck they’re doing. Unfortunately, a recent study by the BMC Psychiatry journal shows that a full sixth of the profession still think they can “cure” homosexuality through treatment, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Read the full story at the BBC site here, and try to avoid beating your keyboard against the desk in anger.
Professor Edzard Ernst, co-author of Trick Or Treatment?, has a good article on the BBC website today about the dangers of so-called “integrated” medicine (that’s the new rebranding for “complementary”, which in turn replaced “alternative”. Still a bunch of steaming horsecrap, though.). Required reading for anyone who still thinks that homeopathy will cure cancer.
So I was running an online booksearch today (all part of the job) when I came across this…
Another fruit-loop attempting to crack the mysteries of the Apocalypse – this time it’s one claiming that the whole process started last December, just prior to Christmas (a day on which, as Mr Stollorz helpfully notes, “nothing publicly noticeable happened”). What Stollorz and his fellow prophets of doom fail to realise is the contextual disconnect between what they’re predicting and what the writers of their beloved prophecies actually thought…
Like every other doomsday activist, Stollorz bases most of his theory on the books of Daniel and Revelation, with a smattering of Jesus’ more pessimistic pronouncements thrown in. These are the predominant biblical apocalypses: tales of strange dreams and portents with an underlying sense that the end of the world is imminent. As EbonMuse points out in his essay “2000 Years Late”, Jesus himself thought that the endtimes were just around the corner, and the writers of Daniel and Revelation were no different. Both were writing for a people undergoing a period of persecution (Daniel’s author was working during the occupation of Israel by the Greek Selucid empire, Revelation’s was writing during the early days of the Christian church, at a time when Christianity was not a popular lifestyle choice around the Mediterranean), and both were attempting to convey the same message – hang in there guys, soon the bastards will get what’s coming to them. In many ways, this is also at the core of Jesus’ teaching – the Sermon on the Mount, with its predictions of imminent glory for the downtrodden, is a classic piece of apocalypticism. The idea that God will come soon to punish the wrongdoers and raise his faithful to new heights of shininess is an ideal sop for a group of people currently being pissed upon from all sides.
Reading such books as a prophecy of the future is to completely misunderstand their purpose. The book of Daniel is a prime example. Written around the 2nd century BC, during or just prior to the Maccabean uprising, it purports to tell the story of a fictional Jewish prophet during the Babylonian exile (some four centuries earlier). The character Daniel predicts the events of the 400 year gap, including the rise to power of Antiochus IV, the ruler whose oppressive edicts catalysed the Maccabees to revolt. The ingenuity of the tale, though, lies in the book’s attempted future predictions – having had his prophet accurately foresee the events leading up to the present, the author then puts his own optimistic apocalypse in Daniel’s mouth. It’s noteworthy that beyond the Selucid predictions, the book of Daniel has to be interpreted very loosely and figuratively… Nonetheless, the writer’s intend was straightforward. Claiming that a Babylonian prophet had anticipated all the events that the Jewish people had experienced up to that point, he was then able to have said prophet foretell a glorious victory for Israel, led by one “like a son of Man”. The underlying point is clear – “this guy could predict the future, right, and he says it’ll all turn out for the best, so hang in there, ‘kay?”
Daniel (post-Selucid), like Revelation and the apocalyptic statements of Jesus, is a fiction; a message to the persecuted not to give up hope, because God’s Kingdom is just around the corner. Trying to use them to predict a date for Armageddon is futile, since they weren’t writing about us – they were writing for and about the people around them, millennia ago. God is no more coming in a cloud of glory this week than he was in 160BC, and whilst the Rapture Ready may find the same comfort in Daniel’s tall tales as his original audience did, they will also be joining those ancient Israelites in looking to a future that doesn’t exist.
Computers are, frankly, brilliant. Even having to pay Bill Gates the equivalent of a small child every time I want an upgrade doesn’t detract from the usefulness of the magic wonderbox on my desk. Without computers, we would be deprived of so much that makes modern life so comfortable – virtually every field of technology requires some binary bit-work to make it function. Not only that, but your daily (ish) fix of Right To Think is also dependent on the continued functioning of several different PCs, so really, you have a lot to be grateful to Ada Lovelace for.
Don’t say “who?”! Ada Lovelace; close friend of Charles Babbage and daughter of Lord Byron (yes, that Lord Byron), who was the first person to write a computer program (some time before Babbage invented the computer, so that should give you an idea of how smart she was). Her contribution to technology inspired the creation of Ada Lovelace Day, on which bloggers can choose to write about the women they admire in the scientific world, and in celebration of this, I’m going to bore you with a bit of writing about the often-overlooked Rosalind Franklin.
Is that another cry of “who?” Shame on you. Rosalind Franklin has probably had more effect on anti-creationists than any other women working in the sciences, since it was her work that enabled Francis Crick and James Watson (you know who they are? Good stuff) to decipher the structure of DNA. Without her, we would probably know a good deal less about the function and structure of our genetic building blocks. A highly experienced researcher in the field of x-ray diffraction and crystallography, Franklin was headhunted by James Marshall of The Medical Research Council to work on DNA structure (taking over the studies being carried out by Maurice Wilkins, with whom she was to have a long-standing feud). Here, she was able to take the first clear x-ray diffraction 
photographs of the DNA molecule, including the infamous “Photo 51” (shown left). I say “infamous,” because it was this photo which led Watson and Crick to discover DNA’s double-helix structure – after it had been passed to them by Wilkins, without Rosalind’s approval. In fact, her papers show that she had been working on a double-helix model even before Watson and Crick got their act together and published their proof in April 1953, but her caution led Franklin to require more experimental evidence before she would commit to a dual-helix structure.
It wasn’t until long after her death from cancer in 1956 that Franklin’s contribution to the solution of the DNA mystery began to come to light. Watson’s account, The Double Helix, published in 1968, was the first time her contribution was publicly recognised, and even then Watson suggested that she had been unable to correctly interpret her data. She also missed out on consideration for the Nobel Prize shared by Crick, Watson and Wilkins in 1962 (by virtue of having died six years earlier). In many ways, the story of Rosalind Franklin is a classic example of a scientist’s vital and foundational work being overlooked in the light of subsequent developments by her peers, so take a moment today to consider how little we might know about our genetic heritage if it weren’t for the work of one woman with an x-ray diffractor.
One of the strongest arguments in an atheist’s arsenal is the existence of multiple religions. Some of the more intellectually honest theists with whom I’ve discussed this readily admit that, had they been born in a different time and place, they would probably follow a different faith to their current one; however, most religious folk are at pains to point out that their religion is special, unique and the only true path to God. I was considering this today, and realised that Christianity does have one distinctive claim to exclusivity that other faiths don’t. I’m not talking about the whole sacrificed-and-resurrected god thing (there’s a whole bunch of now-defunct ancient belief systems which claim exactly the same, from Ishtar to Osiris to Mithras), at least not directly. What I have in mind is the idea that salvation comes from belief.
Now, you may say that all religions require a level of belief from their adherents, and you’d be right. However, in strict Judaism, say, believing in Yahweh’s existence is not enough to score you a Get Out Of Hell Free card. There’s a plethora of observances, dietary laws, rituals and recitations to keep an eye on, and (according to strict Rabbinic law) it’s these that get you into Yahweh’s good books. True, there would be little point in keeping the Sabbath, avoiding cheeseburgers and attending synagogue if you didn’t believe in Him, but technically it’s the rites and obedience to the Law which make you a worthy Jew.
Islam is similar – again, there are certain laws and proscriptions to be kept to. Hinduism, too, promulgates the idea that it is your religious acts and observances which expiate your karmic debt and ensure the beneficence of the gods. Even Buddhism has a degree of legalese in its doctrines. The point is, your belief in any of these religions is secondary to your actions when it comes to assessing your worth. Christianity is different. Certainly there are ceremonial elements to it (particularly in Catholicism, but every branch of Christianity, from Unitarians to Baptists, has its own rites and rituals), but at base, the fundamental tenet of Christianity is that you are saved not by your own acts but by Jesus’ nailed-to-a-stick routine. All you have to do is believe that, and you’re in with the Big Guy.
Here’s my problem with this idea: what happens if you can’t believe? I mean, I find the idea of an invisible sky-god incarnating himself as his own son, then arranging to have himself/his son killed in order that he can forgive the sins of humanity (sins which he defined himself), then coming back to life again sort of far-fetched. It’s a bit like telling me about a magic penguin who lives inside the Sun and will buy me a Porsche if I just believe in his existence. No matter how much I want that Porsche, that’s not a belief I can hold – it’s just too big a leap away from rationality. In the same way, I don’t really have a choice in my rejection of Christianity – I simply don’t find the Jesus myth plausible, and so I can’t believe in it. A possible response from the Christian camp would be that Jesus will grant me belief if I make a leap of faith and really, really want to belive, but I’ve tried that, with utter sincerity, and if anything the subsequent experience pushed me ever closer to atheism.
A further thought: if God existed, and truly wanted people’s faith, would He not have made Himself more credible? The very fact that Christianity requires faith in the impossible makes it less likely that their God exists, or at least is anything like they imagine Him. Demanding that people believe the implausible as a prerequisite for salvation is a pretty good guarantee that there will be a lot of folk burning in fiery torture for all eternity. A loving God, one who genuinely wanted faith and no more, would not be hard-pressed to make His truth a bit more obvious – simply not being a concept riddled with internal contradictions would make a good start. A God who was a right bastard, however, would conceal Himself in obscurity, refute all possibility of His own existence, then say, “Ha ha, you didn’t have faith in Me, BURN, FUCKERS!” to every poor sod who pulled up at the Pearly Gates.
So if we are saved by faith, then God is a git. On the other hand, if salvation come through ritual rather than belief, then Christianity’s claim to uniqueness is void, and any other world religion (or none of them) may turn out to be correct. It can’t go both ways.
You are, I’m sure, sick to the back teeth of the tired old argument that evolution contravenes the Second Law of Thermodynamics – and that’s a Law, whilst evolution is just a Theory, which isn’t as good, so nyah nyah, nyah…. It will thus please you to hear, I’m sure, that I will not be trotting out the standard, “The Sun! The frickin’ SUN, people!” rebuttal again. Instead, I’d like to look at a different fundamental law of physics – the Law of Conservation of Parity – and show why it’s not necessarily a good thing to rely too heavily on the idea of natural “laws”…
Parity, as all good quantum physicists know, refers to the spatial co-ordinates of particles. The Law of Conservation of Parity stated that particles will behave in the same way if they are spatially inverted – in other words, laws of physics are the same in a right-handed universe as in a left-handed one. To put it another way, imagine that the image you see in a mirror represents another world just like ours, but where left and right are reversed. All physical interactions in this mirror-world would be the same as in our own, thus gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear forces etc. would all have identical values. Most importantly, atomic decay would occur at the same rate regardless of which side of the mirror a particle was on. That’s conservation of parity, and for the first half of the twentieth century, it was as basic a law as you could hope to find in physics.
Unfortunately for physics, in 1956 Chien-Shiung Wu of Columbia University (in collaboration with members of the National Bureau of Standards) proved that the Law of Conservation did not hold true for a cobalt isotope, cobalt-60. By polarising cobalt-60 nuclei at close to absolute zero and measuring their beta particle output, Wu was able to show that there was a substantial variance in the rate of decay depending on the direction of the nuclei’s spin. He therefore proved that there was no Law of Conservation of Parity, and that the hypothetical mirror-world might have demonstrably different physical laws from the real one. What’s more, Wu’s discovery (and the subsequent abandonment of the law) precipitated a sudden leap forward in nuclear physics – freed from the false constraints of parity conservation, the chaos of subatomic particles began to look much more orderly, since many elementary particles could now be regarded as effects of nuclear forces, rather than as physical bodies.
What am I driving at with this? Well, my point is simply that scientific laws, just like scientific theories, can be subject to revision. The great strength of scientific enquiry is that it is subject to these periodic corrections, resulting in a greater and more complete understanding of the universe with each amendment. It is precisely because science isn’t a static body of knowledge that it can be so precise in describing and predicting our surroundings, and can continue to further human progress, whilst slavish dedication to the teachings of ancient parchments from two millennia ago remain as mired in fallacy as such scrolls were at their inception.
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