Religious Oppression in the Military

Jason Leopold at Truthout has a follow-up to a story first reported by Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars and noted here:

A military watchdog organization filed a lawsuit in federal court Tuesday against the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and a US Army major, on behalf of an Army soldier stationed in Iraq. The suit charges the Pentagon with widespread constitutional violations by allegedly trying to force the soldier to embrace evangelical Christianity and then retaliating against him when he refused.

The complaint, filed in US District Court in Kansas City, by the nonprofit Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), on behalf of Jeremy Hall, an Army specialist currently on active duty in Speicher, Iraq, alleges that Hall's First Amendment rights were violated beginning last Thanksgiving when, because of his atheist beliefs, he declined to participate in a Christian prayer ceremony commemorating the holiday.

Jeremy Hall, it may be noted, was the author of two letters to Stars and Stripes ("Biased Views Out of Step" and "Camp Quest Legal") I previously quoted from here. Jason Leopold continues:

"Immediately after plaintiff made it known he would decline to join hands and pray, he was confronted, in the presence of other military personnel, by the senior ranking ... staff sergeant who asked plaintiff why he did not want to pray, whereupon plaintiff explained because he is an atheist," says the lawsuit, a copy of which was provided to Truthout. "The staff sergeant asked plaintiff what an atheist is and plaintiff responded it meant that he (plaintiff) did not believe in God. This response caused the staff sergeant to tell plaintiff that he would have to sit elsewhere for the Thanksgiving dinner. Nonetheless, plaintiff sat at the table in silence and finished his meal."

The other specific incident referred to in the article is the one already covered by Ed Brayton's piece. When Jeremy Hall set up a meeting for atheists and freethinkers with permission from the chaplains' office, "his supervisor, Army Major Paul Welborne, broke up the gathering and threatened to retaliate against the soldier by charging him with violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice." Brayton's informant was a bit more graphic:

...the Major ... verbally berated the other attendees, accused them of plotting against Christians and disrespecting soldiers who have died protecting the Constitution, and threatened them with punishment under the UCMJ for their activities (said they were "going down") and said he would do whatever it took to shut the meetings down. Keep in mind that by this point, he had two of the attendees (one soldier fled when the shouting started) standing at the position of attention so that he could yell at them, berate them, and humiliate them. This apparently went on for several minutes at which time the Major shut down the meeting by saying he wasn't some "push-over Chaplain" and that he would not tolerate the meetings to continue.

Jason Leopold adds "The complaint also alleges that Welborne vowed to block Hall's reenlistment in the Army if the atheist group continued to meet - a violation of Hall's First Amendment rights under the Constitution. Welborne is named as a defendant in the lawsuit."

News Bazaar

Sparks from the Telegraph

Paris--A French periodical has revealed an odd moment in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. When George Bush was attempting to persuade Jacques Chirac to support his planned attack on the oil-rich nation, he seems to have argued that Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East, and that the ancient prophecies of Ezekiel were on the verge of being fulfilled. The French President had no idea what the crazed Texan was talking about, and promptly called a theologian at the University of Lausanne for an explanation. Thomas Römer filled him in on these obscure figures from ancient near-Eastern mythology. As we all know, Jacques Chirac was unimpressed. Neither Weapons of Mass Destruction, nor the terrible Gog and Magog, were enough to convince him to join the Coalition of the Willing. And French fries would become freedom fries in the Washington cafeteria. (Rue 89; English translation at Truthout)

Logan, West Virginia--Raging Red reports: "Megan Williams, a 20-year-old mentally challenged black woman from Charleston, was held captive in a shed for a week in Big Creek, WV (about an hour southwest of Charleston) and was raped, beaten, stabbed, choked, forced to eat animal feces, and tortured in various other ways, until police received an anonymous tip and found her. Six people, all white, were arrested and charged with sexual assault, kidnapping, malicious wounding, battery, and lying to the police, among other charges. The group of six includes a mother and her son and another mother and her daughter, plus two other men." Although her captors are said to have repeatedly used racial epithets in addressing her, local pundits are reluctant to call it a hate crime. "Racists? Possibly," editorializes the Charleston Daily Mail, "But emblematic of Logan County's people, of West Virginia 'culture' or 'American race relations,' as some inevitably claimed? No. ... Distortions of that nature are a disservice to Megan Williams, whose suffering deserves the full attention of the justice system." And from Create West Virginia we learn "On WCHS-AM Charleston 580 radio's afternoon call-in show on Wednesday, an African-American man called in to share his frustration. He described himself as a well-educated professional who often runs into intolerance and racism in our state. The hosts had little patience for his attempt to connect the dots between other acts of intolerance in WV with the current Logan County situation. 'Right now, it's about Megan and helping her, not politicizing the situation. We can talk about that other stuff later.'" So it seems talking about racism or the nature of this hate crime is apparently "politicizing" matters. Somehow. Go figure. (From Raging Red

Quotation of the Day

"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."

Alan Greenspan

Timeless Moments

I've never understood why people feel the need under trying circumstances to promote their particular brand of dogma. Some guy is pulled out of a river half-dead by a well-trained emergency crew operating from a helicopter and then revived by another bunch of trained medical workers--and asked about the "miracle" rescue, replies something like "I owe it all to Jesus"--or to Allah or to the Hidden Hand of the Free Marketplace or whatever his particular belief-system may be. If he forgets--well, on at least one occasion I actually saw a news interviewer remind the interviewee with words like "and of course God" when that person didn't mention a deity.

I personally find this at best tiresome, and at worst absolutely obnoxious. If people want to use their fifteen minutes of fame to put in a plug for something, what about some other kind of product? "Only the thought of once again enjoying sharp Tillamook cheese on Ritz crackers gave me the strength to go on." "I'm just glad I was wearing my Burlington Coat Factory jacket--that made all the difference." "I want to thank the good people at Hershey for making that wonderful candy bar that kept me going through the long cold night." It's no less ridiculous. And when it comes to thanking the deity for aid in a sports victory or an award, we're really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Which is why I got a kick out of reading about Kathy Griffin's reported acceptance speech on receiving an Emmy: "A lot of people get up here and thank Jesus for helping them win this award, but I have to say nobody has been less helpful in getting me to this moment than Jesus. I don't know what I ever did to him, I just think he doesn't like me that much, and if he had his way, Caesar Milan would be holding this statue right now, but he's not and I am! So I guess all I can really say is, 'Suck it, Jesus! This statue is my God now!'" (Kathy Griffin: loving her Emmy, hating the VMAs | My Life on the D-List | The Q&A | TV | Entertainment Weekly)

This well-deserved rebuke to those who tastelessly parade their religious notions at inappropriate moments was right to the point. It's high time somebody poked fun at this senseless (and annoying) custom. Of course not everybody sees it that way. William Donohue of the KKKatholic League, for example, rather predictably blew his top in feigned outrage over this "hate speech." As Aaron Kinney (Kill The Afterlife) aptly observed, "Donohue thinks that is hate speech? Oh man, he wouldn't know hate speech if it spoke to him!"

In response (apparently) to Donohue's intimidation E! has promised to censor Kathy Griffin's remarks from the broadcast version. As Dave (No God Blog) notes:

But now, the Emmys are bigoted. Say what you want about God and Jesus, as long as it's positive and thankful. If it's positive and thankful, it doesn't matter who gets offended or left out.

BUT... disavow Jesus, and you might as well be swearing, and you'll get bleeped.

Folks, this is discrimination, pure and simple. Theistic talk is welcome, Atheistic talk is not. Truly an uneven playing field, from the good folks who gave us the most boring television in the world.

But wait a moment! This is not discrimination. You see, Kathy Griffin is simply flat-out wrong, according to a concert pianist and former Miss Minnesota who covers religion for Fox News. "Jesus had everything to do with her winning that award. And here's the reasoning," writes Lauren Green. You're going to have to follow along closely to get this, so hang on tight.

Jesus died on a cross 2,000 years ago. His dying words were, "Forgive them Father for they know not what they do." He died and they buried him in a rock cut tomb. Three days later, as the Bible says, he rose from the dead. That day is what Christians celebrate as Easter.

After the resurrection, Christianity began to take off like wildfire, spreading from the Middle East northward to Europe and westward into Ethiopia. In 300 A.D. Emperor Constantine accepted Christianity and it beccame [sic] the religion of Europe. Rome soon became the seat of the faith. After several years of human failings, the church went through conflicts and quite a few unbiblical years — the crusades and the inquisition to name just two. Out of that came the Reformation — the reforming of the Church, sort of a back-to-basics Bible and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Out of the Reformation emerged a vision of law by Samuel Rutherford, called Lex is Rex, Law is King. From that, others devised a secular version that is used to help lay the foundation of government for a new land called America. Ninety-four percent of America's founding era documents mention the Bible; 34 percent quote the Bible directly. The idea of bringing unity to the universal is a particularly Biblical concept.

The freedoms we enjoy in this country to speak freely and to live freely are directly related to that man who died on a cross 2,000 years ago.

So, you see, Kathy Griffin, Jesus has everything to do with you winning that award.

Words fail me. This is unbelievably silly. Meaningless verbiage like "The idea of bringing unity to the universal is a particularly Biblical concept" aside, her point seems to be that our first amendment freedoms are somehow derived from the Bible, which in turn goes back to the Roman church, which in turn goes back to Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified two thousand years ago. Of course nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing Jesus said, or is alleged to have said for that matter, has any bearing on the concept of freedom of expression. Nor did that freedom have anything to do (as far as I can tell) with Kathy Griffin's winning of that award--unless the idea is that thanks to our laws discouraging censorship, nobody stopped her from using her talent for comedy as she saw fit. The statement that "Ninety-four percent of America's founding era documents mention the Bible; 34 percent quote the Bible directly" is a lie. (The correct information is that 34% quote from, allude to, or mention the Bible, and that three fourths of these references come from printed sermons, which one would expect to at least make some reference to the Bible. The 94% figure is simply made up of cobwebs and moonshine, as far as I can tell. It doesn't come from any peer-reviewed survey, anyway, and contradicts the 34% figure, which does.) And her simplistic account of the Reformation is beneath contempt.

All right, so maybe I've wandered from the point a bit, but fake history tends to irritate me.

So where does this leave us? William Donohue, it seems, would enforce "the right of Catholics--lay and clergy alike--to participate in American public life without defamation or discrimination" no matter how tasteless or offensive their remarks, while denying that same right to atheists. And presumably to anybody else whose observations run counter to his notions. A rational nation would ignore him and his bizarre little pressure group. Kowtowing to these extremists only encourages them.

Greg Laden, who apparently finds tasteless flaunting of random deities at inappropriate moments as irritating as I do, has a couple of practical suggestions here and here. For my part I don't expect to see Kathy Griffin apologize any time soon--she's got nothing to apologize for anyway. As for William Donohue, who ought to get down on his knees and beg her abjectly for forgiveness--well, I don't expect to see that either. At least not until pigs fly over the frozen pit of hell.

Quotation of the Day

"No quarter whatever should be given to the bigotry of people so unfit for social life as to insist not only that their own prejudices and superstitions should have the fullest toleration but that everybody else should be compelled to think and act as they do."

Bernard Shaw

Dubious Documents: The Case of Foersch's Letter from Java

In days gone by there used to be a game show in which the object was to beat the host, apparently some kind of idiot-savant, in knowledge of trivia. The host often seemed sharp enough when the subject was general history, state birds, and other such miscellanea, but if the subject was science, in any form, he was clearly out of his depth. One time the question came up, in effect, to name the naturalist who was Charles Darwin's grandfather. (There was more to it, actually, but I don't recall the details.) I thought it was simple. Even if you didn't remember the exact relationship, there is only one other famous Darwin in the sciences, and that of course is Erasmus Darwin, author of The Loves of the Plants and other poems. The contestants all blew it, including the idiot-savant after whom the show was named, and he sneered that he at any rate had never heard of the guy.

Well, I'd heard of him. Many times, actually. He was one of a number of people who could plainly see the fact of evolution in the fossil record, without being able to discern the mechanism behind it. He was a big fan of Linnaeus, and popularized his work by writing poetry about it. (This may seem unlikely, but poetry was big in the eighteenth century. For an even more improbable example, check out Dr. Thomas Mouffet's book, The silk-worm and his fly, written if I am not mistaken [and I probably am] in the previous century.) His poetry was significant enough to be parodied in the Anti-Jacobin in a work called The Loves of the Triangles. (Of course the reason for his being pilloried there will have been his political views--he was a buddy of Benjamin Franklin and a supporter of the democratic revolutions in the United States and France.)

One memorable passage from The Loves of the Plants reads:

Where seas of glass with gay reflections smile
Round the green coasts of Java’s palmy isle;
A spacious plain extends its upland scene,
Rocks rife on rocks, and fountains gum between;
Soft zephyrs blow, eternal summers reign,
And showers prolific bless the soil,—in vain!—
No spicy nutmeg scents the vernal gales,
Nor towering plaintain shades the mid-day vales;
No grassy mantle hides the sable hills,
No flowery chaplet crowns the trickling rills;
Nor tufted moss, nor leathery lichen creeps
In russet tapestry o’er the crumbling steeps.
—No step retreating, on the sand impress’d,
Invites the visit of a second guest;
No refluent fin the unpeopled stream divides,
No revolant pinion cleaves the airy tides;
Nor handed moles, nor beaked worms return,
That mining pass the irremeable bourn.—
Fierce in dread silence on the blasted heath
Fell Upas sits, the Hydra-Tree of death.
Lo; from one root, the envenom’d soil below,
A thousand vegetative serpents grow;
In shining rays the scaly monster spreads
O’er ten square leagues his far-diverging heads;
Or in one trunk entwists his tangled form,
Looks o’er the clouds, and hisses in the storm.
Steep’d in fell poison, as his sharp teeth part,
A thousand tongues in quick vibration dart;
Snatch the proud Eagle towering o’er the heath,
Or pounce the Lion, as he stalks beneath;
Or strew, as marshall’d hosts contend in vain,
With human skeletons the whiten’d plain.
Chain’d at his root two scion-demons dwell,
Breathe the faint hiss, or try the shriller yell;
Rise, fluttering in the air on callow wings,
And aim at insect-prey their little stings.
So Time’s strong arms with sweeping scythe erase
Art’s cumberous works, and empires, from their base:
While each young Hour its sickle fine employs,
And crops the sweet buds of domestic joys!

And, to support the story of fell Upas, the Hydra-Tree of death, the good doctor quoted from an article written by one N. P. Foersch, in the London Magazine for 1783 or 1784. (It was December 1783 in point of fact.) Foersch claimed to be a surgeon who in 1774 worked for the Dutch East-India company. While stationed at Java he had looked into the source of the poison that the locals used to tip their darts with. This virulent poison was derived from a tree called the Bohun-Upas. He wrote:

In the year 1774, I was stationed at Batavia, as a surgeon in the service of the Dutch East-India Company. During my residence there I received several different accounts of the Bohun-Upas, and the violent effects of its poison. They all then seemed incredible to me, but raised my curiosity in so high a degree, that I resolved to investigate this subject thoroughly, and to trust only to my own observations.

After taking care of necessary paperwork and getting a letter of introduction from one Malayan priest to another who lived near the tree itself, Foersch set out to examine it.

It is surrounded on all sides by a circle of high hills and mountains, and the country round it, to the distance of ten or twelve miles from the tree, is intirely [sic] barren. Not a tree, not a shrub, nor even the least plant or grass is to be seen. I have made the tour all around this dangerous spot, at about eighteen miles distant from the center, and I found the aspect of the country on all sides equally dreary. The easiest ascent of the hills, is from that part where the old ecclesiastic dwells.

The gum of this tree is enormously valuable, as it is a deadly poison, but the danger involved in procuring it is so great that only criminals condemned to death are employed in the process.

After sentence is pronounced upon them by the judge, they are asked in court, whether they will die by the hands of the executioner, or whether they will go to the Upas tree for a box of poison? They commonly prefer the latter proposal, as there is not only some chance of preserving their lives, but also a certainty, in case of their safe return, that a provision will be made for them in future, by the Emperor. They are also permitted to ask a favour from the Emperor, which is generally of a trifling nature, and commonly granted. They are then provided with a silver or tortoiseshell box, in which they are to put the poisonous gum, and are properly instructed how to proceed while they are upon their dangerous expedition. Among other particulars, they are always told to attend to the direction of the winds; as they are to go towards the tree before the wind, so that the effluvia from the tree are always blown from them. They are told, likewise, to travel with the utmost dispatch, as that is the only method of insuring a safe return. …

When the hour of their departure arrives, the priest puts them on a long leather cap with two glasses before their eyes, which comes down as far as their breast, and also provides them with a pair of leather gloves. They are then conducted by the priest … about two miles on their journey. Here the priest repeats his instructions, and tells them where they are to look for the tree.

Foersch informs us that the priest told him he had sent more than seven hundred criminals off in this manner, and only about one tenth of them made it back safely with the poison. Documents he saw supported this claim. Although he had made efforts to get some hard data on the tree, the difficulties involved rendered this impossible.

This, however, is certain, though it may appear incredible, that from fifteen to eighteen miles round this tree, not only no human creature can exist; but that, in that space of ground, no living animal of any kind has ever been discovered. I have also been assured by several persons of veracity, that there are no fish in the waters, nor has any rat, mouse, or any other vermin been seen there; and when any birds fly so near this tree, that the effluvia reaches them they fall a sacrifice to the effects of the poison. This circumstance has been ascertained by different delinquents, who, in their return, have seen the birds drop down and have picked them up dead, and brought them to the old ecclesiastic.

There are several obvious problems with this account. The first, and greatest, difficulty is that there is no such tree. There is a tree called upas, and it is the source of a poison, but past that the account is clearly, well, wrong. The zone of death that surrounds it, the birds falling from the sky, the convicts sent out to fetch the poison--these are things that never were. The parts about the zone of death, the birds falling in mid-flight might have been suggested by phenomena that occur with carbon-dioxide-filled valleys resulting from volcanic activity, maybe. So the obvious question is, where did Foersch get these notions? Was he fooled by mendacious locals who stuffed him with wild tales? Or was he the hoaxer himself?

Sometimes the obvious question is the wrong one, and this is one of those cases. The relevant question is: was there ever an N. P. Foersch? And if not, what exactly are we looking at? The piece in The London Magazine may seem to be a straightforward article, but there are clues that it is something else altogether. Consider the magazine's introduction:

The following description of the Bohon Upas, or Poison-Tree, which grows in the island of Java, and renders it unwholesome by its noxious vapours, has been procured for the London Magazine, from Mr. Heydinger, who was employed to translate it from the original Dutch, by the author, Mr. Foersch, who, we are informed, is at present abroad, in the capacity of surgeon on board an English vessel.

This account, we must allow, appears so marvellous, that even the Credulous might be staggered. The readers of this narrative will probably think of the celebrated Psalmanazar, and his equally famous History of the Island of Formosa. But this narrative certainly merits attention and belief.

Now Psalmanazar was a celebrated fraud, a fake Formosan whose bogus account of the island fooled many in England in the eighteenth century. The reference to this as an account so marvelous that even the credulous might be staggered appears also to be a hint. My strong impression is that the editor means us to understand that this is a hoax, and nothing more. The fact that N. P. Foersch is otherwise unknown may also be a clue.

To put it as simply as possible, this letter is not a translation from the Dutch; N. P. Foersch never made any investigation of the upas tree, and indeed there is no reason to think that Foersch ever existed outside the imagination of the author. Far from being an account of a bizarre tree on an exotic island, this piece is a work of fiction, apparently inspired by various traveler's tales from the orient.

So who was the author? Whose fantasy was it that so captivated Erasmus Darwin's imagination?

There doesn't seem to be any hard evidence, but one name springs to mind for a hoax of this sort--George Steevens. Steevens was a great Shakespearean scholar, but he was also fond of hoaxes and practical jokes. One of his most celebrated hoaxes was his creation of the tombstone of Hardecanute, about which a paper was presented to the Society of Antiquaries in 1789. Another well-known deception was his discovery of a letter written by the Elizabethan playwright George Peele telling of his meeting with William Shakespeare and Henry (not Christopher) Marlowe. Of course any hoax of the time was likely to be attributed to him; some even suspected his involvement in the William Henry Ireland Shakespearean forgeries, and in Chatterton's Rowley poems. Isaac D'israeli wrote in Curiosities of Literature (1824):

If we possessed the secret history of the literary life of George Steevens, it would display an unparalleled series of arch deception, and malicious ingenuity. He has been happily characterized by Mr Gifford, as “the Puck of Commentators!” Steevens is a creature so spotted over with literary forgeries and adulterations, that any remarkable one about the time he flourished may be attributed to him.

He seems quite confident that Steevens was the author of the Foersch account:

The marvellous narrative of the upas-tree of Java, which Darwin adopted in his plan of “enlisting imagination under the banner of science,” appears to have been another forgery which amused our “Puck.” It was first given in the London Magazine, as an extract from a Dutch traveller, but the extract was never discovered in the original author, and “the effluvia of this noxious tree, which through a district of twelve or fourteen miles had killed all vegetation, and had spread the skeletons of men and animals, affording a scene of melancholy beyond what poets have described, or painter deimeated,” is perfectly chimerical. A splendid flim-flam!

Sidney Lee in the Dictionary of National Biography seems equally convinced. Conviction, however, is not evidence. Steevens was entirely capable of perpetrating such a fraud; that isn't quite the same thing as demonstrating that he actually did it. I'm inclined to think he did; the thing has the qualities of his dark and shadowed personality all over it. D'Israeli observes of his pranks:

They were the habits of a depraved mind, and there was a darkness in his character many shades deeper than belonged to Puck; even in the playfulness of his invention, there was usually a turn of personal malignity, and the real object was not so much to raise a laugh, as to “grin horribly a ghastly smile,” on the individual.

This piece, especially if his contemporary Erasmus Darwin was his intended victim, fits well with his psychology. It may well have been his most successful practical joke. Poems, operas, political metaphors, all drew from this malicious fantasy, long after the perpetrator had passed on. A splendid flim-flam indeed.

Quotation of the Day

"An atheist is just a fundamentalist who believes in one less god than the other." From Dave Away From Home.

Dennis James Kennedy (1930-2007) R.I.H.

Vibrations in the ether bring me glad tydings: Dennis James Kennedy no longer breathes and walks this earth among us. He has, as they say, gone on to his reward.

Charles Erskine Scott Wood, in Heavenly Discourse, revealed how such figures as Anthony Comstock and Teddy Roosevelt were received in heaven. When Billy Sunday, the first radiovangelist, showed up, St. Peter had to bleach him in a sulfurous pit to remove the stench.

In 1953, during the height of the McCarthy era, dance instructor Dennis J. Kennedy was inspired to wonder about his own potential reception in heaven by the question of a Philadelphia preacher: "Suppose that you were to die today and stand before God and he were to ask you, 'What right do you have to enter into my heaven?'—what would you say?" This improbable scenario apparently was the catalyst for the transformation of D J Kennedy, dance instructor, into D. James Kennedy, gay-basher, history-faker, and anti-science zealot.

The evil this man did lives on. The good, if any, appears to have died long ago. I spent some time scanning the obituaries for positive things to say about this Christ-monger, and all I could find were:

He was kind to a Baptist teenager... (Albert Mohler, Jr.)

and

Dr. Kennedy lived modestly and was never tainted by moral or financial scandal. (Washington Post)

On the other hand the work he did in promoting false stereotypes of gays and lesbians, in supporting putting AIDS victims in concentration camps, in opposing scientific research towards cures for certain diseases on lame theological grounds, in rewriting American history to support the Christian America lie, in rewriting biology, geology, and physics to support the crazy notions known as "Young Earth Creationism"--well, if Satan is truly the father of lies, then we know whose side "Dr." Dennis James Kennedy was on. And indeed, from The Daily Pulp, we learn:

According to sources close to the prince of darkness, the late Rev. D. James Kennedy, of Coral Ridge Power Hour fame, has been assigned a key position in hell.

"He's going to make a great addition and we've already made room for him," one of Satan's lieutenants reported to the Pulp. "The hard part was figuring out where to put the little devil. We considered the eighth circle with the frauds. I mean, c'mon, Kennedy was a "man of God"? Would Jesus sponsor a hate festival? As we say down in these parts, hell no. Then there's the fourth circle, for the materialists. Have you seen that gaudy palace he built on Federal Highway? Plus, he loved the rich and never gave two snots about the poor. But we decided he'd make a better addition to the fifth circle, where he'll fight with other wrathful hatemongers on the river Styx."

I suppose the excuse that might be made for him was that he was doing what was right in his own mind. It's a pretty poor excuse, if you ask me.

Can You Say "Frivolous Lawsuit"?

Many years ago certain people who have adopted an anti-science agenda under the pretext of religion set out to teach their children garbage instead of science. (They also substituted fairy-tales about the past for the study of history, which was of more immediate interest to me, but let's stick for the moment to the science.) At the time I commented that this was all very well and good, but what on earth were they going to do when their kids grew up and wanted to attend college? Colleges would expect them to actually know science and history, rather than garbage and fairy-tales. All I could think of at the time was that they would have to go to places like Liberty or Bob Jones, where their notions might pass.

Turns out that there is a second possibility. The parents who had so badly mis-educated their children might sue colleges to try to get special privileges for their offspring. Other people's kids might have to actually master Biology or learn American History, but not their precious little angels. They should get a free pass, because their religion forbids them to come to grips with reality. Instead of hard biology, what about substituting Fun and Frolic among the Flood Fossils? Instead of learning the facts of American History, what about singing "God Bless America" and have done with it? And instead of ancient history, what about a little group discussion on What the Bible means to me? This is horseshit.

Yes, in the most frivolous of frivolous lawsuits, various parents who insulated their children from too-harsh realities of science and history are actually suing the University of California to try to force it to recognize Bob Jones foolishness as the equivalent of a real course. Their excuses are idiotic. You can't judge a course by the quality of the textbook chosen, for example. Substituting horseshit for information constitutes only adding religious content to a standard course. (By the way, in my book at least, a "history" course that adds a clutch of outrageous lies a la David Barton [for example] to otherwise true information ceases at that point to be a history course, unless of course the instructor is teaching his students how to evaluate fake history or something of the sort.) The courses in question are clearly not teaching science but religion. They should therefore not qualify as science courses, no matter how their parents choose to spin it. Teaching anti-science is not teaching science. Parents may have a constitutional right to bamboozle their children, but that doesn't give their children any rights to special privileges as opposed to other people's children who actually worked for their place in college. In my view not only should this case be settled in favor of the University of California, but these ignorant and arrogant parents should have to pick up their court costs. To quote from The Questionable Authority : "Viewpoint Discrimination" and the California Creationism Case.: "If they want their students to be credited as having taken biology, they need to teach biology. If they want to continue to exercise their right to deceive and mislead their children, they need to be willing to accept the consequences of that act." Damn right.

Dubious Documents: The Case of the Vanishing Letter

Baylor University is a Baptist institution located in Waco Texas. From Wikipedia I learn that the university is working on an ambitious program to, among other things, "Establish an environment where learning can flourish," "Develop a world-class faculty," "Attract and support a top-tier student body," "Provide outstanding academic facilities," and "Achieve a two-billion dollar endowment." Under these circumstances it is easy to understand why they would prefer not to have tools and cranks hanging around their campus. Therefore Baylor University's decision to distance itself from an "Evolutionary Informatics Laboratory" run by notorious IDian William Dembski in association with Robert Marks, a professor of engineering should not be a surprise to anybody. If it really did make such a decision.

Somebody at Uncommon Descent claims to have received a communication from John Lilley, president of Baylor University. The text given there reads:

The removal of Prof. Robert Marks' so-called "lab" on the Baylor server is entirely consistent with Baylor's stance on academic freedom. Prof. Marks was hired to do research and obtain grants for work in engineering, not to devote the bulk of his time to work in religion. I am not moved by Prof. Marks' protestations that he is working in the field of intelligent design and that this work falls under his job description. Judge John E. Jones III ruled decisively in Kitzmiller v. Dover that intelligent design is religion, and that's good enough for me. We have a religious studies program here at Baylor as well as a seminary. Unfortunately, Prof. Marks is not qualified to serve in either of these programs otherwise I would recommend his transfer.

In any case, academic freedom does not warrant the toleration of labs and groups willy-nilly. Surely you would not object if I took measures similar to those I took with Prof. Marks' lab if a Baylor history professor proposed to start a "holocaust reexamination group" or a physics professor here proposed to found a "zodiac and astrology lab." Academic freedom comes to an end where reason and common sense give way to ignorance and nonsense. I plan to issue an official statement concerning Baylor's stance on intelligent design in coming months. The short of it is that ID is not welcome here in Waco and professors who want to work in this area can do so on their own time.

Thank you for your concerns. I hope that we can put this matter to rest quickly and that Prof. Marks can get back to being a productive member of the Baylor community.

The communication is signed "JL."

The thing that struck me immediately about it was the tone. I'm sorry, but this thing just didn't read to me like the work of a university president. It's not that all university presidents write alike--but they usually withdraw quietly under a cloud of unctuousness, rather than to strike a combative note, at least in issues like this. Phrases like "so-called 'lab,'" "that's good enough for me," "willy-nilly," and "ID is not welcome here" don't ring true to me. Of course JL could be a different breed of university president. I decided to check him out.

Here is a sample of John Lilley's prose, taken from the Baylor University website:

The Board of Regents bestowed a great honor, a challenge and an opportunity in its invitation for me to serve as Baylor's 13th president. After more than 25 years of leading universities in Pennsylvania and Nevada, it is a great privilege to return to the institution that had such a transforming effect on my life.

I look forward to serving alongside the more than 1,800 faculty and staff who have invested themselves in this great university. It is apparent to me that everyone associated with Baylor wants it to be in the ranks of America's top universities.

To accomplish that, we need to be intentional about our mission as a Christian university in the historic Baptist tradition, and we need to provide inspiring teaching/mentorship while increasing our research and creative endeavors. These are goals that have been consistently embraced by the Board of Regents, the Faculty Senate, the Staff Council, Student Government and many other Baylor constituents.

In the weeks since my election as president, I have spent many hours meeting with regents, administrative leaders, faculty, staff, students and alumni leaders. The primary purpose of these meetings has been to listen. One of the things I have heard is that the natural disagreements in our academic life need to be spoken in a more respectful manner, one that is consistent with the Christian community of which we are a part.

Over the next few weeks, I will be asking the university community to help in identifying the specific objectives that will allow us to achieve the two goals mentioned above. This process will allow all of us to help set priorities for strengthening current programs and for creating new programs and for the allocation and reallocation of resources and space. That collaboration can build consensus if we are successful in communicating more effectively.

I am eager to engage more of you in the days ahead as we work together to make stronger this university which all of us serve and so dearly love.

Now that's what a university president writes like. I particularly invite your attention to the part where he comments on the need to deal with "natural disagreements in our academic life ... in a more respectful manner, one that is consistent with the Christian community of which we are a part." Come on--does that really sound at all like the guy that wrote the letter Uncommon Descent claimed to have received?

I'd got this far in looking things over when I had to deal with the real world. It's my sister-in-law's birthday, and cake and ice-cream were in order up the street at my brother's house. Before I left I checked Uncommon Descent again, finding now that they were now claiming that this letter was a parody. When I got back home, bloated on pound cake and appetizers, the letter had vanished completely. Fortunately PZ Myers had noted the letter, and his post sent me to this link at Panda's Thumb, where a screen-shot preserves the letter in all its glory. Otherwise I might have started wondering if I had imagined the whole thing.

Now, I know something about parody, at least enough to recognize a parody when I see it. Whatever this letter was supposed to be, it was not a parody. Compare the styles of the two documents quoted above. Is there any similarity? If the author of the first thought he was anywhere close to parodying the author of the second item, he was kidding himself.

Whatever the intentions of the author, what the first is is a common, or garden, fake. There is no element of humor, satire, or exaggeration in it. The only purpose I can see is to stir IDians up against John Lilley in particular, and Baylor University in general. If it was intended as a joke of some kind, apologies are in order. If not--well, then, words fail me.

Dubious Documents: The Case of Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger

Samuel Clemens died in 1910, but his greatest creation, the humorist Mark Twain, continued to live on--after a fashion. Stories, articles, and fragments continued to appear over the decades, and even the comic lecturer was briefly reborn in the impersonation of Hal Holbrook. Now any time an author doesn't see his work through the press there are likely to be significant difficulties with the text. (This is one reason why editing Ben Jonson is in many respects easier than editing Shakespeare.) When a work is put out posthumously those difficulties are easily compounded.

In Mark Twain's case there have been some, shall we say, curious decisions made in his posthumous publications. His autobiography has been published twice, for example, in versions completely different from one another and both almost certainly different from anything the author would have approved. (Twain's notions were fantastic and unwieldy anyway, more like a posthumous blog than anything conventionally publishable.) Letters from the Earth was spliced together out of two related manuscripts. But I don't think there is anything comparable to the shenanigans surrounding the 1916 publication of supposed Mark Twain original story, The Mysterious Stranger.

The story is set in Austria, 1590. The main character and narrator is a boy named Theodor Fischer. He and his two friends run into an angel--a being from heaven who has come to visit their small town. The central plot concerns a struggle between a local priest fallen on bad times--Father Peter--and a powerful astrologer whom everyone is afraid of. "Every one knew he could foretell wars and famines, though that was not so hard, for there was always a war and generally a famine somewhere. But he could also read any man's life through the stars in a big book he had, and find lost property, and every one in the village except Father Peter stood in awe of him." As a result of this conflict Father Peter has lost his position (a certain Father Adolf has taken his place) and is suspected of unorthodox views--specifically that God would find a way to save all people, regardless of their sins. When the angel helps Father Peter out by allowing him to find a pouch full of gold coins (which the angel had miraculously created) the astrologer seizes the opportunity to destroy Father Peter once and for all by testifying that the coins were his, and Father Peter had robbed him. By the end of the story the astrologer is defeated, Father Peter is vindicated, and he lives happily ever after--but not in the way we expect. At the moment of triumph the angel strikes Father Peter with insanity. Father Peter believes he is the Emperor--and is now perfectly happy.

A good part of the interest of the story however lies in the angel. Not only does he intervene at various key points in the plot, but he engages in various miraculous activities--creating and then destroying an entire village of miniature people, for example. He comes to the small Austrian village with a distinctly other-worldly view, and his actions do not have the consequences imagined by the three boys whom he befriends. We learn interesting bits of information about the celestial world--for example, this angel is named Satan, after his uncle--the very Satan who had rebelled against God.

The ending of the piece is disquieting. As the narrator gets older, he sees the angel less and less. Finally Satan announces that he will not return again. He tells the narrator that heaven and hell, mankind and the universe, everything there is--doesn't exist. "'It is true, that which I have revealed to you: there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream--a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought--a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!' He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true."

Some critics objected to the ending, as being out of key with the rest of the book. Another thesis held that Mark Twain had redeemed himself with this last book, finally managing to get out of the tangle of dead ends, false starts, and unpublishable scraps to put it all together again one last time. What the ending meant, exactly, was less clear. At least one reader, as I know from a marginal notation in a library book, concluded that Satan, true to form, was assuring the narrator eternal happiness by striking him mad too. Like Father Peter.

As far as I know nobody (publicly) questioned the story from the time of its publication in 1916 (just in time for the Christmas trade) until 1963, when John Tuckey published his now-classic Mark Twain and Little Satan. His re-examination of the manuscript--or rather manuscripts--showed that the book was a fraud. Oh, it was substantially Samuel Clemens' work all right--but it had been altered in some very questionable ways.

First, Clemens never wrote a piece called The Mysterious Stranger. This is something of a quibble, as I'll show in a moment, but it is symptomatic of the larger problem. The bulk of the book was taken from a piece actually called The Chronicle of Young Satan--and it was never finished. The ending was taken from a substantially different piece--No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger--also about a supernatural figure, and originally supposed to incorporate the story of Father Peter--but that idea was quickly dropped. Instead the action takes place in a print shop, and the plot involves an attempt to ruin the kindly print-shop owner. (Complicating things further Clemens made at least two other attempts--both using Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn--to explore this material.)

Although both Young Satan and No. 44 involve a supernatural figure, there are substantial differences between them. Satan is explicitly described as an angel; No. 44 remains mysterious to the end, until he finally reveals himself as nothing but a figment of the narrator's imagination--like the entire universe. Satan is not an actor, as such, in the main story-line; 44 is, in that it is the printer's decision to take 44 on as an apprentice that leads to the strike that is at the center of the plot. And on a more trivial note, Young Satan is set in 1702, while No. 44 is set in 1490.

So what happened? Whose idea was it to split up and rejoin the narratives in this manner?

Well, the man responsible for this bit of editorial vandalism was Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain's literary executor and biographer. However, Paine tells the story a bit differently. According to his own account the ending turned up separately, in a pile of papers, and to his delight he realized that it was the conclusion to the Young Satan version of the manuscript. it was the discovery of the ending, he said, that allowed the publication of The Mysterious Stranger.

Well, we now know that it was not the ending to the Young Satan narrative, but rather to the No. 44 narrative. So is there any chance that Paine was mistaken? That it was editorial incompetence rather than malfeasance?

The short answer is, no. Clemens wrote the final chapter out of sequence, and it may well have been separate from the rest of the manuscript, but the characters address each other as "44" and "August"--the names of the characters in No. 44--and not as "Satan" and "Theodor" as they are made to do in the published Mysterious Stranger. Paine in other words had to change the names (and did in fact do so) to make this ending fit with the Young Satan narrative that he was having published. He then misrepresented the facts in order to make it appear that the story was in fact what Clemens had written, rather than a patchwork from two different pieces.

It could be argued that by doing this Paine rescued an otherwise unpublishable Mark Twain piece and so made it available to a public that--let's face it--has little interest in a story without an ending. But was it really necessary to engage in out-and-out fakery? Could he not have said openly that this was a posthumous collaboration?

Again, the short answer is no. The reason: Frederick Duneka, an editor at Harper and Brothers. Clemens wrote of him:

Mr. Duneka seems to do four-fifths of the editing of everything that comes to Harper & Brothers for publication, and he certainly has a good literary instinct and judgement as long as his religion does not get into his way.

Duneka was a Roman Catholic. And he had a problem with this particular story. This problem led to the most egregious editorial meddling with the text.

You see, in The Chronicle of Young Satan there was no astrologer. (As a matter of fact, there was no astrologer in any of these stories, though a magician character in No. 44 may have provided Paine with the inspiration.) Instead, Father Peter's enemy throughout was rival priest Father Adolf, a drunken profane fool whose claim to fame was once having thrown an ink bottle at Satan. When Duneka had taken a look at the story during Twain's lifetime, he had been horrified. Clemens wrote in 1906:

Last summer, Mr. Duneka wanted to look at one of these stories, a story whose scene is laid in the Middle Ages, and in it he found a drunken and profane Catholic priest--a spectacle which was as common in Europe four hundred years ago as Dunekas are in hell to-day. Of course it made him shudder, and he wanted that priest reformed or left out.

Paine contradicted this account--but his editorial labors included reforming Father Adolf to near non-existence, and heaping his sins onto the head of the unfortunate astrologer. (Duneka apparently had no qualms about denigrating other peoples' beliefs, just so long as his own were let alone.) This went way past cobbling together texts into outright forgery--passages, including the one about the astrologer quoted above, have no connection with anything Clemens actually wrote. Further, there is no way that Clemens would have approved this alteration. It materially weakens the story, deprives us of a wonderful character, and falsifies his views. This piece of meddling makes the spliced-on ending look like a harmless prank by comparison.

Further, the mischief didn't stop with its publication. Paine and Duneka's editorial interference has affected the interpretation of the story to this day. There is, for instance, not a hint in the text of No. 44 that the magician character there is a fraud--but the baleful influence of the imaginary astrologer has affected the understanding of Balthasar Hoffman to this day (does anybody else recall Hermann Munster as Hoffman in the 1982 made-for-tv movie?). By the same token, the mixing of manuscripts has caused many to suppose that 44 and Satan are much the same figure, even though nowhere does the text suggest that 44 is an angel (as Satan is). And, as if to prove my point, when I dropped by imdb.com just now to check the date of the movie I find that the user comments complain that the writers have altered the original story:

But it would have been better if the screenplay had stuck closer to the original fragments. The fragments themselves were published in 1917 [sic] for the first time.

Another observes:

The script doesn't even follow the plot of the original story. So it should be looked at as a fabricated Twain story.

Actually, of course, the 1916 version is the "fabricated" story. Paine and Duneka are long gone, but the mischief they did continues. It might have been defensible if they had stated honestly up front what they were up to--that this book was frankly a posthumous collaboration, and that Twain's text had been altered. Not all the alterations were as injurious as these two, and many people have enjoyed this version. (I did myself, till I read the true text when it published in 1969.) But passing it off as a genuine Mark Twain work--especially considering the hack-work they actually did--that's not forgivable.

Take Down

Kevin Beck and assorted commentators take down anti-gay agitator Judy Paris in the comment thread at Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge : Surprise, surprise: A Groksucker poops on her keyboard. The classic moment: If Judy Paris can't fall back on random Bible quotations, well she just won't play. Check it out.

Alberto Gonzales: Poor Steward or Traitor Among Traitors

William Rivers Pitt writes at Truthout:

Alberto Gonzales is a traitor. That is the only word to explain it.

He is not the only one; there are many more traitors like him in the Bush administration, criminals joined in an act of treason so vast and comprehensive that it beggars comparison. Nothing quite like this has ever before been attempted in America, and if they are allowed to succeed, there will be nothing of what defines America left to be seen.

Gonzales and his Bush administration collaborators have committed their treason against the rule of law itself, a crime so absolute that it is technically not illegal. There is no code, ordinance or law specifically forbidding the total ruination of all our rights and protections; the act is neither felony nor misdemeanor, because nobody ever considered the black-letter necessity of making it illegal to destroy the rule of law.

But there is no America without that rule of law - no rights, no protections, no Constitution; there is nothing, and if you destroy the rule of law, you destroy the idea that is America itself. The only word for a crime like that is treason, and those who would dare commit it are traitors. Gonzales and his Bush administration collaborators have done more than dare. They have been pursuing it, with deliberation and intent, throughout each moment of their tenure.

"[T]hroughout each moment of their tenure." This, to me, is a key point. We keep hearing the nauseous refrain, Nine eleven changed everything. If I object that Alberto Gonzales was instrumental in providing the "legal" pretext for using torture, the Bush-clones come back with Nine Eleven Changed Everything. But what "President" Bush and his gang were up to--subverting the rule of law and placing a veil of absolute secrecy between them and the people--started before the events of 11 September. From the moment Bush seized power he and his gang of merry men and women have done everything possible to subvert the rule of law in this once-great nation. Now, back to Pitt:

Their treason is not in the actual crimes they have committed, but in the way they have chosen to avoid accountability for them. Their treason is not their refusal to obey the Freedom of Information Act, but in their insistence that they are above the application of that law. Their treason is not in their refusal to obey subpoenas from Congress, but in their claim that they are above the laws behind those subpoenas. Their treason is not that they fired United States attorneys and then refused to come clean about it, but that they decimated the impartiality of the Department of Justice and turned the rule of law into another partisan weapon. Their treason is not the NSA surveillance of Americans, but their steadfast refusal to submit to the governing laws and the requirement of oversight.

When George W. Bush asserted a claim of Executive Privilege that made him and his administration immune to all laws and oversight, that was an act of treason because it shattered the rule of law. When Dick Cheney asserted that the Office of the Vice President was not part of the Executive Branch, because he did not want to obey the laws requiring him to hand over official documents to the Archives, that was an act of treason because it shattered the rule of law. When Alberto Gonzales chose to surrender the independence of the Department of Justice so he could protect those assertions, that was an act of treason because it shattered the rule of law.

Now here again the defenders of the Idiot in Chief chime in. But FDR (or Kennedy or Clinton) did exactly the same thing. What about when FDR ordered Nazi sympathizers tortured, or Kennedy refused to obey the Congressional subpoena to explain the Bay of Pigs fiasco, or when Clinton declined to step down after being impeached? (See, I can make up imaginary events with the best of them.) My answer: so what? Is your point (as hall-monitors used to say, albeit more crudely, in my day) that since others were doing wrong, that makes it right? Try that in court some time! (Yes, I know I got caught selling crack, but everybody else was doing it. Why pick on me?) Is your point that past mistakes made while the country was in a state of national crisis (Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, FDR's internment of American citizens of Japanese descent) justify repeating those mistakes now, when no similar crisis exists? The old saw about not learning from history comes to mind here. And if your point is that past abuses of power by people who managed to escape any consequences for them justify future abuses of power, I would say that you, Mr. Strawman, are part of the problem. A big part of the problem.

Oh, yeah, and if your point was a narrow partisan one, then shame on you. As a Republican, I am not surprised when the opposition behaves in a disgusting fashion. I expect better from my party. (And now I hear my father remark, "You can expect anything you like. That doesn't mean you're going to get it.") Back to Pitt:

Americans have only the rights they are able to protect and defend. Our rights are nothing more than ideas; only theory and argument on parchment all too easily burned to ashes. The power of those rights is only found in our collective submission to the rule of law, and submission to that rule of law is all that stands between our freedoms and the conflagration of tyranny. Without the rule of law, there is no America.

That is the treason of Alberto Gonzales, and the treason of the Bush administration entire. They have attacked and undercut the rule of law by refusing to submit to it, and in doing so have brought us to the edge of appalling infamy. Theirs is a crime without peer, and we will be fortunate beyond measure if we are able to recover from it.

The fact that Alberto Gonzales has left is meaningless in the main, because the treason he participated in continues in his absence. If the damage is to be repaired, he must be replaced by someone who will submit to the main imperative, someone who will submit to the rule of law, someone with real independence and unbending respect for the idea that is America. Gonzales must not be replaced by another crony or yes-man, because Americans have only those rights we can protect and defend, and another traitor in that lofty post is no protection at all.

Gonzales was more than a poor steward of this trust. He was a traitor among traitors. If the rule of law is to stand, the treason he helped commit must be ended, and a patriot must take his place.

Now wouldn't that be something.

Fake History: The Unbelievable Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall

One of the most distasteful things about the Littleton Colorado school shootings was the way so many of the townsfolk used their fifteen minutes of fame to pimp for their religion. As I watched the coverage--so long ago now--I had to keep reminding myself that grief and shock do strange things to people, and that I should give them the benefit of the doubt. But I have to admit that the relentless and inappropriate plugging of their religion by students, parents, and various authorities, turned my stomach.

Even as the information about the event was coming in it was possible to filter out some of the noise. The killers were said to be gay--but people who knew them contradicted this factoid. They were said to be members of a group called "The Trenchcoat Mafia"--but actual members (as well as other students) set this record straight. The killers were said to have gone to the school library hunting for "jocks" (high school must have changed a lot since my day), they were said to have targeted blacks, Christians, or people who had picked on them. Everything I heard on that day made Littleton Colorado sound like a radically dysfunctional community, and the high school desperately in need of a major overhaul.

Perhaps the most distasteful episode was the vandalism of two of the memorial crosses donated by a local carpenter. Even in grief petty oneupmanship--my sorrow is better than your sorrow--seemed to be the order of the day.

Among the people who seemed more concerned with making social or religious statements than in dealing with the loss were some who claimed to be relatives of one of the victims, Cassie Bernall. One woman--I don't remember now if or how she was related--claimed that one of the killers had placed his gun to Cassie Bernall's head and asked her, "Do you believe in God?" The young woman is said to have replied, "Yes, I believe in God--" at which point the killer is supposed to have fired, killing her instantly. The woman who was narrating this commented that she didn't know if she herself would have had the faith that Cassie had, and so on and so forth. As I said, I had to remind myself that grief makes people do peculiar things.

While some in the Littleton community were spinning this event to glorify their cult, there was at least one person who knew absolutely that this never happened. Emily Wyant was hiding under a desk with Cassie Bernall, and her story is very different, according to Salon.

As the Rocky Mountain News reported Sept. 24, Wyant and Bernall were studying alone together in the back of the library. After the gunmen rushed in, the girls crouched beneath a table together, and Cassie began praying aloud: "Dear God. Dear God. Why is this happening? I just want to go home." Dylan Klebold suddenly slammed his hand on the table, yelled "Peekaboo," and looked underneath. He shot Cassie without exchanging a word. Wyant's mother confirmed that the Rocky Mountain News correctly reported the details of her daughter's account.

So where did this Christian martyrdom story come from? Well the exchange of words came from another moment in the library:

[Valeen] Schnurr was down on her hands and knees bleeding, already hit by 34 shotgun pellets, when one of the killers approached her. She was saying, "Oh, my God, oh, my God, don't let me die," and he asked her if she believed in God. She said yes; he asked why. "Because I believe and my parents brought me up that way," she said. He reloaded, but didn't shoot again. She crawled away.

Oh, that's very different, as Gilda Radner's Emily Litella character used to observe.

It's not as if the events weren't already horrific and senseless enough without somebody deciding to cash in on them to make a point for their particular religious notions.

Oh, sure, but isn't this is a matter of what Bokonin calls foma, harmless untruths that do nobody any harm. Hmm. What about Valeen Schnurr? I have no idea how she felt about this fake martyrdom story, but it was this young woman who, in shock and pain, bleeding from being hit by thirty-four shotgun pellets, who actually said that she believed in God, not knowing whether her answer might save or condemn her. That took guts. Of course she survived, since the psychopathic killer who faced her apparently found her answer acceptable. Or maybe he got distracted. The thing is that she wasn't a dead Christian martyr, but a living girl who went through hell on one all-too-memorable day. How did she feel having a bit of her life appropriated and used by others? Did she feel that her veracity was being called into question? I don't know, but the implication is there anyway.

And more to the point, what about Emily Wyant? She watched her friend blown away by a madman, heard other people make up stories that she knew weren't true, and was even urged by some of the people closest to her to keep quiet about it. After all Cassie's family was putting out a book. This piece of fake history was energizing youth Christian movements all over the country. What the hell could she have thought of the morals and sense of the adult community surrounding her? Even when she told her story to the local newspaper, to set the story straight, what happened? Nothing. The paper claimed that the matter was too sensitive to publish, whatever that means. It wasn't until an internet publication, Salon, carried some of the facts, that the local papers decided to reveal what they had known all along.

Okay, but finally things came out all right, didn't they? The truth came out, the fake story revealed for what it was, and it no longer has the power to harm anybody. Correct? Think again:

The two young men sauntered through the school halls. One wore a t-shirt with the inscription "Natural Selection." Approaching a blonde-haired junior, Eric asked her, "Do you believe in God?" Cassie Bernall's simple yet courageous reply, "Yes," was her last. Her killers continued their rampage of Columbine High.

This piece of unadulterated crap is the opening of a prize-winning but badly-researched essay by one Karin Hutson, "Evolution of Ethics: How Evolution Undermines Morality 101." Replete with irrelevant Bible quotations and a bibliography whose only respectable contributor is John Horgan (who finds himself in company with the likes of Ken (Tyrannosaurs ate coconuts) Ham, Chuck (Watergate) Colson, and the whole crowd of Answers in Genesis liars), this piece of idiocy slanders generations of scientists and researchers without giving a single piece of evidence to make the case. Of course the "prize" in this case is a scholarship to Liberty University, so Karin probably deserves it. I personally hope that she wakes up soon, and realizes that the people who are bamboozling her are not her friends. But maybe she doesn't care. What's a whopper or two matter if the cause is lofty enough, right? Of course she and the people who gave her this "prize" end up looking like first-class idiots--but then, they're probably used to that.

This piece is also being posted at Fake History.

Adnan Oktar is a First-Class Idiot

Actually I don't know and I don't care who Adnan Oktar is. It is enough for me that he is an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier, and a Creationist. That makes him a first-class idiot in the books of any rational person. For all I know he may well be an extortionist, blackmailer, rapist, and pedophile, as charged on various websites. His actions show that he's got something to hide, anyway. But fundamentally I don't care. This Oktar guy is nothing to me. I've never said anything about him in the past, and I don't intend to comment on him in the future, unless he does something idiotic enough to draw my attention.

So my question is, why did this clown have the Turkish government block access to my Fake History site (on Wordpress) in Turkey? It isn't even in Turkish, for god's sake.

Although I have yet to receive a personal reply (and don't expect one) from the Turkish government, the idiots responsible have issued a press release on the subject:

The reason of this suspention, is that the limitlessly enable to illegal publications of the mentioned blog service, not taking to notice about the suspention of the applications and ignoring the judgements that are given by the Turkish courts related to the suspention of known sub-sites. The free and uncontrolled opportunities provided by the mentioned service are directed baleful people to this service and in a short time wordpress.com is returned to the voice and publication center of separatist-disastrous ideologies, private hostilities, illegal targets.

I will state outright that the Turkish government should reconsider its foolish and dangerous decision. For it to take such a serious step for so light and frivolous a reason--and at that, at the behest of someone who appears to be a leader of a criminal cult--makes me doubt that Turkey is ready to take its rightful place in the modern world. Does it really want to be counted with the Chinese, the Pakistanis, or the Thais, as opponents of free speech?

For anybody who wonders what the charges against Adnan Oktar are check out this site. If you're interested in his crackpot views, this is a good place to start.

A New Omphalos?

In my wanderings today on the internets, I stumbled upon a fellow named Herman Cummings, who describes himself as "the foremost terrestrial authority on the book of Genesis", adding "Until you can disprove that claim, accept it as fact." With that comment, I was again transported into the wonderful world of Fads and Fallacies, Martin Gardner's hilarious account of cranks, crackpots, and fringe figures who seem to have stepped out of the pages of L. Frank Baum. Who can forget the Nephew of God? The Hungry Tiger? Or Alfred Lawson, the inventor of Lawsonomy? (His University of Lawsonomy used to graduate "Knowledgians" after a suitable course of study.) The "foremost terrestrial authority on the book of Genesis. Until you can disprove that claim, accept it as fact." With that self-description alone Herman Cummings has earned a place in that pantheon.

You may recall him as one of the sideshow acts at the Selman v. Cobb County School District circus (see If You Litigate, They Will Come at The Panda's Thumb). If so, you're doing better than I did. When I ran into the phrases "Observations of Moses" and "Biblical Reality", the name Herman Cummings meant nothing to me. It was only after googling the name that fragments began to come back to me.

What caught my attention was that Herman Cummings had published a book. Its title: Moses Didn't Write About Creation! (The exclamation point is his.) This is promising; an exclamation point following a simple declarative statement sounds like classic crackpottery, though it would have been more promising still if it had been and exclamation point following a command, or a statement with the word "you" in it. But still--promising indeed.

So comes the next test--is the book put out by a small sectarian or fringe publishing house? Or is it (even better) self-published? Let's see ... the book appears to have been published 6 August 2007 by PublishAmerica. Score! PublishAmerica is a modern-day version of the old vanity press--a POD or Publish On Demand press. We will print no book before its time. Nothing comes off the presses, so to speak, until it's been bought and paid for. Something like that, anyway.

So what is the point of his book? The title strikes no exceptional note--Moses didn't write about creation. So what? I, for one, never said that he did. (I never said that Prometheus wrote about the art of arson either.) Fortunately Cummings has been promoting his forthcoming book. What does he have to say about it?

The book promotes "Biblical Reality", which states that Genesis, written by Moses, was never about Creation (Week). Moses had written down (perhaps by one or more designated scribes) what God had revealed to him while he was with God on Mt. Sinai in 1598 BC. Creationism and theology have mistakenly believed that Moses was writing about how our Earth & universe were created, but not so. God revealed to Moses seven defined geological ages of the historical past to Moses. Even Moses didn't understand what he saw, but he just had it written down for later generations to learn and perhaps someday understand. That final understanding would not occur until December 1993, being about 3,604 years later. How timeless is the Word of God?

Timeless indeed. So what is Cummings getting at here? Is he pushing the idea that the "days" of Genesis represent lengthy periods of unknown duration. Not at all. It is true, we find out, that God created the earth and the universe in six days, but the six days described in the opening of Genesis are not those particular six days.

Our creation occurred 4.57 billion years ago (according to the science of geology), completing in six days (Exodus 20:11), with God "resting" on the seventh day of a 168 hour week. But God did not reveal that week to Moses. God revealed only one day from Creation Week, and one day each from the first week of the six following geological ages of mankind. The seven days which were revealed to Moses (aka "the Observations of Moses") were not revealed in chronological order, but in what's called "Biblical Order", which any theologian or "bible scholar" worth their salt should be able to ascertain.

In a later post he explains further:

The “six days of Moses” in Genesis chapter one are actually six consecutive (12 hour) days in 1598 BC that God revealed to Moses (on Mt. Sinai) from the ancient past. Each day was from the first week of each of seven different geological eras in “biblical order”. The only day of Creation Week which Moses saw was the “Fourth Day”. Creation Week was 168 hours, in 4.6 Billion BC, according to the geologist.

If I am not mistaken our writer is adopting the old notion that the "days" of Genesis were the days of Yahweh's revelation to Moses rather than the actual days of creation. Except that he has a new twist--each account was of a single day, and each of these days was taken from the first week of a different geological period. Why, I can't imagine. I suppose he explains things somewhere in his book, but don't expect me to be reading it too soon. Life is short, and the explanations of scripturologists are long indeed.

Herman Cummings has thoughtfully placed the first chapter of his book online for us, along with a set of comments here, and from them we learn a few further items from his repertoire. The universe, for instances, is three days younger than the earth. Oh, yes, and why does he accept the evidence of geology for the age of the earth but not the evidence of astrophysics for the age of the universe?

How can we possibly know what the make-up of a star is? [he asks rhetorically.] Have we sent a probe into the center of our Sun? ... If pretending to know the composition of planets, stars, and comets isn’t bad enough, many scientists also claim to know the ages of celestial objects. This is what I mean by “crossing the line”. ... We can examine the Earth, since we live on it. We have examined material brought back from the Moon, in such wise as we have visited it on several occasions. I accept the findings of the geologist that the Earth and Moon are close to 4.6 billion Earth years old.

It is reasonable to assume that the Sun is about the same age as the Earth, the Moon, and the other planets in our planetary (solar) system. But that is as far as the scientist can legitimately go. Only the theologian has a ‘license’ to go farther. ...Presently, the farthest galaxy that we can now observe is roughly 12 billion light years away from Earth. So it is assumed that it would initially take at least 12 billion years for the light that emanates from that galaxy to reach our planet. Since the scientist allows 3 billion years for that galaxy to evolve into it’s [sic] present observable state, we now have the universe being 15 billion (3 billion + 12 billion) years old. See how conveniently that fits into the “model” of the Big Bang?

If our universe (and galaxy) is 15 to 17 billion Earth years old, why is our Sun and solar system only 5 (or 4.6) billion years old? Also, what was happening during those missing 10 billion years??

There. I hope that's clear to everyone. I have to admit that I never thought of those ten billion years as missing, and more than I thought of the ten "lost" tribes as missing. And as I learned centuries ago (probably from Asimov's Intelligent Man's Guide to Science or Ley's Watchers of the Skies) exactly how we can determine the composition of a distant star I don't find his question on the subject particularly relevant. Offhand I would suggest that he find an introductory textbook on astronomy and read it, but he probably has his own explanations for the unreliability of starlight.

Herman Cummings' problem with science, however, doesn't stop there. According to his definition a theory is "a guess about the unknown, using scientific jargon." This is his own definition, supposedly boiled down from "a speculative idea that implies considerable evidence in support of a formulated general principle in an attempt to explain the operation of certain phenomena." Setting aside for the moment the accuracy of this definition, how on earth did Cummings get to "a guess about the unknown, using scientific jargon"? What happened to "considerable evidence"? "general principle"? and "explain[ing] the operation of certain phenomena"? Maybe he has some kind of explanation for this somewhere in the rest of his book, but as far as I can tell this is nothing but plain or garden pig-ignorance.

Fake History: The Replacement of Ringo Starr

It was forty-five years ago today that Ringo Starr first appeared with the Beatles at the Cavern Club. He was a replacement for Pete Best, one of history’s best-known also-rans, and it is said there were shouts of “Pete Best forever; Ringo never,” as the band played. But in point of fact it was to be Ringo Starr, not Pete Best, who made history as the drummer for the Fab Four.

Now the firing of Pete Best is one of the most controversial events of early Beatles history. This piece isn’t about that as such, however, but about another short-lived Beatles drummer, Andy White. Specifically, how and why did it happen that Andy White, rather than Ringo Starr (or for that matter Pete Best), came to play the drums on two early Beatles tracks.

The official version of events rests on the highest authority—the actual accounts of the two people most directly involved. Ringo Starr and George Martin together tell the story something like this: When the Beatles auditioned for George Martin on 6 June 1962, the A&R man was not particularly happy with Pete Best’s drumming. He took their manager, Brian Epstein, aside, and told him in effect: I don’t care what you do with the group as performers, but Pete Best’s drumming is not up to speed for recording purposes, and I’m going to bring in a session drummer for the actual sessions.

Well, goes the story, this was the last straw for the rest of the band. Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison got together and decided to replace their weakest link with the strongest drummer in the Liverpool band scene—one Richard Starkey, alias Ringo Starr. Their manager was given the unenviable task of firing Pete Best, and it was the new improved group that presented itself for their first EMI recording session in September.

The trouble was that George Martin had already booked session drummer Andy White to sit in for Pete, and he’d never even met Ringo Starr, let alone auditioned him. When Ringo Starr showed up, expecting to play, George Martin wasn’t about to chance it. He gave Best’s replacement a tambourine to bang on, and it was in this manner that their first EMI release, “Love Me Do,” was recorded.

Later on, of course, Ringo Starr showed that he could handle the drumming on his own, and when the time came to re-record “Love Me Do” for the album there was no need to bring in a session drummer. And all was sweetness and light from then on, or whatever.

Now this is the version told on The Beatles Anthology, and in various older reference sources. There was some confusion about the exact date of the Andy White recording session—was it 4 September or 11 September?—and certain other details were puzzling. As Allen Weiner put it in his 1986 book, The Beatles: A Recording History, “No two accounts of this recording session seem to agree, including those of Ringo, George Martin, and EMI.” One of the most obvious discrepancies is that the “Love Me Do” take that appears on the single is the one with Ringo Starr drumming, contrary at least to Starr’s own recollection, while Andy White drums on the album take.

It is probably true that George Martin’s lack of enthusiasm for Pete Best gave the other Beatles the impetus for firing their long-time drummer. As Best tells it (Beatle! The Pete Best Story) he first heard a rumor that he was leaving the Beatles for Lee Curtis and the All-Stars in mid-June, not long after the audition session at EMI. Brian Epstein denied that the Beatles were thinking of replacing him, but under the circumstances it seems likely that the idea was at least in the air at that point. The ball didn’t drop until two months later, in mid-August, when Brian Epstein told Pete Best he’d been fired.

And so it was the new line-up that came to London on 4 September 1962 for their first recording session. But—contrary to the story—there was no session drummer waiting in the wings. The plan, apparently, was to do the recording with the new drummer—or, at any rate, that’s what actually happened. Here’s Mersey Beat’s contemporary account:

It was a long and hard afternoon’s work. Six numbers were considered and eventually two were selected for the actual recording session in the evening. The work was relieved when one of London’s best known photographers, Dezo Hoffman arrived to take numerous photographs—you will see the excellent results in Mersey Beat soon.

EMI’s session records show that the two songs picked were “Love Me Do” and “How Do You Do It”. The recording of the latter—a Mitch Murray song especially selected by George Martin as a potential hit—seems to have gone fairly well. “Love Me Do” was another matter. Again from Mersey Beat:

Everyone was anxious to attain a perfect sound which would reproduce The Beatles’ unique qualities exactly. The backing … was “taken” no less than 15 times—John’s mouth (on harmonica) was numb with playing and the atmosphere was tense.

Another (later) Mersey Beat article gives at least part of the reason for the tense atmosphere:

…George Martin wanted him [Ringo Starr] to do some intricate drumming effects. He was naturally nervous—it was the first time he’d recorded, unlike the rest of the boys—and it took quite a bit of time.

Reverting to the previous article:

When the vocals had been recorded and the session ended (at midnight) everyone was so dazed and tired that it wasn’t really known how good or bad was the result.

The piece goes on to say that Brian Epstein and George Martin listened to the takes the next day and were extremely pleased. Probably the idea was to release a single with Mitch Murray’s “How Do You Do It” as the A-side and Lennon-McCartney’s “Love Me Do” as the B-side. Bassist Johnny Spence (of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates), however, was noncommittal. “Could it be better?” he asked. John Lennon and Paul McCartney, at least, were quite convinced that it could. They were adamantly opposed to putting out “How Do You Do It” rather than one of their own originals, for one thing. And it would appear from events that George Martin was far from satisfied with the recording of “Love Me Do,” especially if it were going out as the A-side.

A new session was booked for the next week, and on 11 September the Beatles again assembled at Abbey Road for a recording session. This time they were going to take another stab at “Love Me Do,” and record another Lennon-McCartney original, “P.S. I Love You.” And this time there would be another drummer present—session drummer Andy White.

Now this is key to understanding events. George Martin did not bring in the session drummer on account of Pete Best’s inadequate drumming, no matter what the authorities say. On 4 September he was perfectly willing to use Ringo Starr as drummer. It was only after that disastrous session that he brought in a replacement. In other words, Andy White never was a replacement for Pete Best. Andy White was specifically brought in to replace Ringo Starr. No wonder Ringo Starr thought “that’s the end. They’re doing a Pete Best on me.” (Hunter Davies, The Beatles, p. 163)

This fact explains a lot of the early confusion, especially about recording dates. It was obviously a lot more palatable to blame the Andy White replacement on Best’s drumming than Starr’s. Best was a nobody, a has-been, while Ringo Starr was—well, Ringo Starr. For the new story to be true, it was necessary to suppress the 4 September recording session. The story only worked if George Martin had never had a chance to appraise Ringo Starr’s drumming. The result was fake history, and fake history at its most devious. Nobody really had a vested interest—except maybe Pete Best—in correcting the story with the facts, and even now that the studio records are widely available, it is still possible for George Martin and Ringo Starr to relate their version of the story without blushing. But there it is.

Quotation of the Day

"The indefensible has always been the unquestionable. That which is defensible can withstand questioning. " Comment #24, posted by: Sebastian | August 15, 2007 01:39 PM Pharyngula: What will you do to oppose the dark?

Boredom Starts Here

As I start out, I'm assuming this will be another typical nothing rant of the sort that comes when I feel the need to let off steam but without having anything to say. I keep starting these things, but for some reason even when I have a powerful idea to express I end up frivoling it away in a sea of trivia. I have a post I'm trying to put together on the legendary Upas tree of Java, and another about the equally legendary first recording sessions with Ringo Starr, but I can't get fired up about them. I went back to check on something in Notes and Queries at books.google.com, only to find that they have suddenly been pulled for some unfathomable reason. (These are nineteenth century articles, so it can't be a copyright issue.) I'm actually going to have to do this the old fashioned way, and look up the articles in a library. Ha. Unbelievable.

I'm bored, damn it, bored out of my mind. So many things I'd like to say something meaningful about, but the words won't come. The passing of Lee Hazlewood (Some velvet morning when I'm straight...), the probable extinction of the Yangtze River Dolphin, those trapped (or are they dead?) miners in Utah, 1934's reclaiming of the hottest year in the US banner, and the disappearance of the George Polk documents. These are all important, damn it, but I don't know what to say about any of them. Maybe later.