Voltaire2
Voltaire2's JournalShithole crosses the Rubicon.
And by shithole I mean both the shithole in the white house and his use of the term shithole to refer to assorted countries filled with people he apparently hates.
And by "crosses the Rubicon" I mean that like his previous traversal of that metaphoric boundary with his defense of Nazis in Charlottesville, the shithole has put himself and his administration outside the limits of normality. He has instead put his administration over on the Overt Fascist side of the political equation.
This would be another moment when "Republicans with integrity", if there are any, could take a stand and put an end to the disintegration of the Republic. I do not think there are any such persons in leadership positions in Congress.
Its ok to use the shit word here.
Can we please stop with the disemvoweling already?
As a criminal prosecution looms, the Vatican takes control of Catholic movement in Peru
The Vatican has announced that it has taken control of the Sodalitium of Christian Life, a society of consecrated laypeople and priests. The group was founded in Peru in 1971 by a layperson, Luis Fernando Figari, who prosecutors in Peru are now seeking to detain. The move comes just days before Pope Francis begins a visit to Chile and Peru.
Members of the leadership in the society, known by its Latin acronym S.C.V., have been accused of authoritarian lifestyles and financial mismanagement. Its founder and other leaders have been accused of sexually abusing minors in the group. The S.C.V. includes about 20,000 members and is governed by a group of celibate laymen known as “sodalits.”
...
Some of Sodalitium's victims have denounced the Vatican's handling of the case, saying the six-year delay in taking any action and subsequently allowing Mr. Figari to live in retirement in Rome was anything but satisfactory.
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Mr. Figari was a charismatic intellectual, but he was also "narcissistic, paranoid, demeaning, vulgar, vindictive, manipulative, racist, sexist, elitist and obsessed with sexual issues and the sexual orientation of S.C.V. members," according to a 2017 investigative report commissioned by the society's new leadership.
The report, by two Americans and an Irish expert in abuse, found that Mr. Figari sodomized his recruits and forced them to fondle him and one another. He liked to watch them "experience pain, discomfort and fear" and humiliated them in front of others to enhance his control over them, the report found.
https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2018/01/10/criminal-prosecution-looms-vatican-takes-control-catholic-movement-peru
plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
Freedom From Religion Foundation to broadcast new, weekly talk show
The Freedom From Religion Foundation will broadcast a weekly television show beginning today.
“Freethought Matters” will be a half-hour talk show hosted by the foundation’s co-presidents, Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor, and featuring notable “freethinking celebrities,” Gaylor said.
CBS affiliate WISC-TV Channel 3 will air the program at 11 p.m. Sundays with photojournalist Chris Johnson as the first guest. Johnson recently produced the book and film “A Better Life: 100 Atheists Speak Out on Joy & Meaning in a World Without God.”
The Madison-based Freedom From Religion Foundation was founded in 1978 to promote the separation of church and state and to educate others on atheism, and Gaylor said the show will work toward the same goals.
http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/freedom-from-religion-foundation-to-broadcast-new-weekly-talk-show/article_2f2dcb4d-1848-5918-a762-56701e5533f2.html
Why Europes wars of religion put 40,000 witches to a terrible death
It was a terrifying phenomenon that continues to cast a shadow over certain parts of Europe even today. The great age of witch trials, which ran between 1550 and 1700, fascinates and repels in equal measure. Over the course of a century and a half, 80,000 people were tried for witchcraft and half of them were executed, often burned alive.
And then trials disappeared almost completely.
Their appearance was all the more strange because between 900 and 1400 the Christian authorities had refused to acknowledge that witches existed, let alone try someone for the crime of being one. This was despite the fact that belief in witches was common in medieval Europe, and in 1258 Pope Alexander IV had to issue a canon to prevent prosecutions.
But by 1550 Christian authorities had reversed their position, leading to a witch-hunt across Christendom. Many explanations have been advanced for what drove the phenomenon. Now new research suggests there is an economic explanation, one that has relevance to the modern day.
Economists Peter Leeson and Jacob Russ of George Mason University in Virginia argue that the trials reflected “non-price competition between the Catholic and Protestant churches for religious market share”.
As competing Catholic and Protestant churches vied to win over or retain their followers, they needed to make an impact – and witch trials were the battleground they chose. Or, as the two academics put it in their paper, to be published in the new edition of the Economic Journal: “Leveraging popular belief in witchcraft, witch-prosecutors advertised their confessional brands’ commitment and power to protect citizens from worldly manifestations of Satan’s evil.”
The Guardian
Faith in the existence of dark matter.
In 1933 Fritz Zwicky was studying a galactic cluster and observed that the rotational speed of galaxies in the cluster was impossible unless there existed a huge amount of unobserved mass in the cluster. He, following in the footsteps of Lord Kelvin 50 years earlier, called this unobserved mass "dark matter".
The Zwicky observations have been confirmed over and over again in other galactic clusters and in the late 70's Vera Rubin and Kent Ford published new observational results using spectrographic analysis to confirm that most galaxies must contain approximately 6 times as much "dark matter" as visible mass.
Over the last 40 years numerous experiments have been conducted to test the two main hypothesis about what sort of particle dark matter might be composed from, WIMPS and axions. All those experiments have failed to detect the existence of either particle.
Dark matter has never been directly observed. Astrophysicists do not know what dark matter is. They believe however, absent any direct evidence, that dark matter exists. They have it seems "a faith based belief in the existence of dark matter".
Physicists generally have enormous faith in the existence of this unobserved entity (some don't, there are alternative theories.) But their faith in the existence of dark matter is entirely different than faith in the existence of gods.
While there have been no direct observations of dark matter, as noted earlier "dark matter" itself is just a placeholder for a problem with repeatedly confirmed observational data. There is plenty of indirect evidence. Something is causing the observed problem, one set of theoretical explanations assume the existence of large quantities of mass from an unknown new type of particle.
Research institutes across the planet invest resources into the search for dark matter based entirely on faith that this research, even if it, as it has so far done, fails to find any evidence for the constituent particle or particles. Their research is probing into one of the great mysteries in human knowledge, it is research into the boundaries of the unknown. It is part of the great project of the enlightenment to understand the universe we inhabit.
While faith in the existence of dark matter is pervasive among astrophysicists, this belief is not "unshakable". In fact, quite the opposite. If one of the alternative theories, for example that galactic clusters contain enormous numbers of very small black holes, proves valid, the search for dark matter particles would likely come to an end. Unlike irrational faith, scientific faith is based on theory, observation experimentation and analysis. New evidence can obsolete current knowledge.
I think we need better advocates for gods here.
The Year of Love Jihad in India
more about the status of religious tolerance in Kerala
In 2011, when Akhila Ashokan was eighteen, she left her home in T. V. Puram, a village in Kerala, for college in Salem, a busy town seven hours to the east. Her father, K. M. Ashokan, was an ex-military man; her mother, Ponnamma, a practicing Hindu. In Salem, Akhila studied homeopathy, boarding with five women, including two Muslim sisters, Jaseena and Faseena, with whom she studied, cooked, and talked. Akhila watched them pray. Soon after—it is unclear when, exactly—Akhila started to read books and watch videos that helped her understand Islam. Feeling the stirrings of a new faith, she began to pray. In 2015, she decided to call herself Aasiya.
To her father, Akhila seemed a changed person in November, 2015, when she returned home for a funeral. She was quiet and reserved, reluctant to join in the rituals. After the funeral, Aasiya resolved to declare her new faith, and returned to school wearing a hijab. Her mother, when she heard of the conversion, told Aasiya that her father had broken his leg and asked her to come home to see him. But Aasiya, wise to the extravagant emotional blackmail of Indian parents, refused. She began a residential program for new converts at Sathya Sarani, a religious institute in Kerala; took yet another name, Hadiya; and registered a profile on waytonikah.com, a Muslim matrimonial site, where she noticed a man, bearded and lean, who worked at a pharmacy in Muscat, Oman. Shafin Jahan played goalkeeper for the F.C. Kerala soccer team, had a sweet smile, quoted Shakespeare, and hashtagged all his posts on Instagram. She met him, and then his family. Jahan’s Instagram went from pictures of food and football to photos of open skies and sunsets.
Even before Hadiya and Jahan got married, last December, Ashokan had taken his concerns to court, arguing that the people behind his daughter’s conversion had “unlimited resources in finances as well as manpower” and were enabling “illegal and forceful conversions.” His counsel argued that Hadiya, then twenty-four, was in “a vulnerable position from which she is necessary [sic] to be rescued and handed over to the petitioner.” Ashokan was convinced that Jahan, who had ties to the radical-Muslim Popular Front of India political party, was sent to disappear his daughter, and was backed by a shadowy organization with links to the Islamic State. (“I can’t have a terrorist in my family,” he said.) The judgment from the Kerala High Court, which came in the last week of May this year, sided with Ashokan. “In the first place, it is not normal for a young girl in her early 20s, pursuing a professional course, to abandon her studies and to set out in pursuit of learning an alien faith and religion,” the judges wrote. They were clearly unimpressed by Hadiya, a “gullible” and “ordinary girl of moderate intellectual capacity,” who had “apparently memorized” Arabic verses. Hadiya’s five-month marriage to Jahan was annulled; Hadiya was put in the care of her parents.
The New Yorker
"Active shooter" - we are having yet another of our entirely preventable episodes of gun violence.
The phrase bothers me. But really it fits. The rest of the gun nuts with their arsenals are just "inactive shooters".
All Paths Lead to Magical Thinking
In recent years, psychologists have come to understand religion and paranormal belief as resulting, in most people, from simple errors in reasoning. You believe in God or astrology or a purpose in life because you apply ideas about people—that they have thoughts and intentions—to the natural world. Some display this tendency more than others, but it’s there in everyone, even atheistic heathens like me. What has not been clarified is exactly how the various cognitive biases interact to produce specific ideas about the supernatural—until now.
In the November 2013 issue of Cognition, Aiyana Willard and Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia report on the relative influence of three cognitive tendencies on three types of supernatural belief, as well as the role of cultural influence.
Several studies show that people who think more intuitively are also more susceptible to magical thinking. One intuition that’s been proposed as a foundation for religious thought is Cartesian mind-body dualism, the idea that a mind can exist independently of a body. (See chapter 5 of my book, The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: “The Soul Lives On.”) This proposition allows for souls, ghosts, spirits, and Gods, all made of disembodied mind-stuff. Explanations for dualism include belief in free will and the mutual inhibition of brain areas responsible for pondering feelings and physics.
Another psychological process related to mysticism is anthropomorphism, the tendency to apply human-like traits to non-human entities or concepts. (See chapter 6 of my book: “The World is Alive.”) God or the Universe is hearing your prayers. Your laptop meant to crash during your presentation. Your dog understands you. Anthropomorphism can be motivated by loneliness or the need to predict and control our environment. It’s a form of pattern-seeking in which the pattern is another coherent mind.
A third process involved in magical thinking is teleological reasoning, seeing a purpose (telos, Greek for end) in objects or events. (See chapter 7: “Everything Happens for a Reason.”) Many things have a purpose (chairs, weddings). Many don’t (the Grand Canyon, hurricanes), but we sometimes feel like they do. Again, searching for purposes is a way to understand and ultimately control the world around us.
More here: Psychology Today
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