Cult News - Constantine I - The Not-So-Christian Self-Idolatrous Roman Polytheist

Constantine I, or Constantine the Great.
Roman emperor from 306 to 337 AD.

Cult Mentality: SLU Professor Makes Monumental Discovery in Italy : SLU

Tell me all about Constantine I of Rome. Constantine I, also known as Constantine the Great, was a Roman Emperor who ruled from 306 to 337 AD. He is often credited with being the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity and played a crucial role in the history of the Roman Empire, particularly in the transition from paganism to Christianity. Here are some key points about Constantine I:

1. Early Life: Constantine was born on February 27, around 272 AD, in Naissus (present-day Niš, Serbia). He was the son of Constantius Chlorus, who was a Roman army officer, and Helena, who is believed to be of humble origin.
2. Military Career: Constantine began his military career under the rule of Emperor Diocletian. He rose through the ranks and eventually became a military tribune.
3. Tetrarchy: The Roman Empire was divided into four parts (the Tetrarchy) by Emperor Diocletian to make governance more manageable. Constantine's father, Constantius Chlorus, was one of the Tetrarchs.
4. Rise to Power: After the death of his father in 306 AD, Constantine's troops proclaimed him emperor. This led to a series of civil wars as various claimants vied for power.
5. Battle of Milvian Bridge (312 AD): Constantine's most famous victory was at the Battle of Milvian Bridge against Maxentius. According to tradition, Constantine had a vision of a cross in the sky with the words "In hoc signo vinces" ("In this sign, you will conquer"). Constantine adopted the Christian symbol, the Chi-Rho, and won the battle.
6. Edict of Milan (313 AD): Constantine issued the Edict of Milan along with his co-emperor Licinius, granting religious tolerance to all religions in the Roman Empire, effectively ending the persecution of Christians.
7. Foundation of Constantinople: In 330 AD, Constantine inaugurated a new capital for the Roman Empire, which he called Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul). This city played a significant role in the history of the Byzantine Empire.
8. Council of Nicaea (325 AD): Constantine convened the First Council of Nicaea, which aimed to address theological disputes within Christianity. The council produced the Nicene Creed, a statement of Christian faith.
9. Christian Conversion: While Constantine is often considered the first Christian Roman Emperor, the exact nature and timing of his conversion remain debated among historians. Some suggest that he only converted on his deathbed, while others argue for an earlier and more gradual conversion.
10. Death: Constantine I died on May 22, 337 AD. He was baptized shortly before his death.

Constantine's reign marked a turning point in the history of the Roman Empire. His support for Christianity had a profound impact on the development of the religion and its eventual establishment as the dominant faith within the empire.

If he convened the Council of Nicea in 325 AD doesn't this suggest he had already converted to Christianity? Also, what is the connection with York, England?

The relationship between Constantine's conversion to Christianity and the convening of the Council of Nicaea is a matter of historical debate. While some sources suggest that Constantine may have converted to Christianity before the Council, the exact timing and nature of his conversion remain unclear. Some historians argue that his conversion was a gradual process, and he may have fully embraced Christianity closer to the end of his life.

Regarding the connection with York, England, Constantine the Great is associated with the city in the context of his proclaimed father, Constantius Chlorus. Constantius Chlorus, who was a co-emperor and the father of Constantine, died in York (then known as Eboracum) in 306 AD. After his death, Constantine was proclaimed emperor by his troops in York, marking an important point in the series of events that would eventually lead to his rise to power.

The historical records are not entirely clear about whether Constantine was present in York when he was proclaimed emperor. The primary sources that describe his elevation to emperor, such as the "Origo Constantini Imperatoris" and the "Panegyrici Latini," do not explicitly mention Constantine's physical presence in York at the time of his proclamation.

The general narrative is that Constantine was with his father, Constantius Chlorus, in Eboracum (modern-day York) when Constantius died in 306 AD. Following Constantius's death, the troops in York proclaimed Constantine as emperor. However, it's not explicitly stated whether Constantine was physically present in York during this proclamation or if he was elsewhere.

It's worth noting that Constantine's connection to York is more related to his father's activities and death in the region rather than significant events in Constantine's own life. Nevertheless, York acknowledges this historical connection, and there are some sites and monuments in the city that commemorate Constantine and his father.

The Roman emperor Constantine I, or Constantine the Great, is hailed by Christians as the first Christian emperor and the man who single-handedly converted the Roman Empire to Christianity. But the facts were as usual, different to the narrative promulgated by the Christian Churches.

Certainly, he was instrumental in turning what had been a minority cult into the official religion of the empire but it was Diocletian, some 70 years later who made it official and launched a vicious campaign of repression designed to eradicate all religions and all sects of Christianity which didn't conform to the State Dogma.

Constantine was, however, not so much a devout Christian as a man who liked to hedge his bets. He supported any and all religions of the empire, including the worship of himself as God-Emperor, and only accepted Christian baptism on his death bed. Evidently, he thought he had found favour with all the other gods of the Empire, but just wanted to make sure in case the Christians were right. A form of Pascale's Gambit that includes all the gods, just to be on the safe-side, because, as we all know, gods can easily be fooled by pretending to believe in them, even ones that claim to be the only god.

Now a team of archaeologists led by Professor Douglas Boin, Ph.D, of Saint Louis University, Missouri, USA have unearthed evidence that shows Constantine was as keen to promote non-Christian sects as to promote Christianity. The evidence is in the form of a temple to Constantine and his ancestors, the Flavian family in the hill town of Spello, about 20 miles from Assisi and about two and a half hours from Rome. The inhabitants had applied to be allowed to celebrate a pagan religious fezrival in Spello rather than travel all the way to another festival site. Building the temple was Constantine's condition for granting them their wish.

A St Louis University News release explains the find and its significance:

Creationism in Crisis - How New Genetic Information Arises Naturally

Top left: Bread Wheat, Triticum aestivum (hexaploid)
Bottom left: Arabica Coffee, Coffea arabica (tetraploid)

Top right: Strawberry, Fragaria x ananassa (Octoploid)
Bottom right: Coxes Orange Pippin, Malus domestica var (tetraploid)

The 'Christmas tree (Norwegian spruce) Picea abies
Seven times more DNA than a human.

It is a basic axiom of creationism that no new genetic information can arise in a species genome without the assistance of a magic designer. This is based on some half-baked interpretation of 'Shannon Information Theory' and misrepresentation of the second law of thermodynamics in which 'information' is confused with energy and a species genome with a closed system.

Try to get a creationist to explain the science behind that claim and you're likely to get nothing but rehearsed parrot squawks made in response to trigger words, if they don't run away hurling abuse and passive aggressive threats over their shoulder, or quickly change the subject. There will be no understanding of either information theory or thermodynamics.

The natural world is full of examples of how gene or even whole genome duplication creates redundant DNA and copies of genes than can mutate and be selected by natural selection to create new meaning in the genetic information. The Christmas tree, or Norwegian spruce, Picea abies, has about 29,000 functional genes (marginally more than a human) yet it has a genome seven times larger than the human genome, all packed into 12 chromosomes. The reason for this, according to a research team from Umeå universitet, Sweden, is because the mechanism for correcting duplication errors broke millions of years ago, so these duplications have been accumulating in the Picea abies genome ever since.

Creationists seem incapable of understanding the difference between information and the meaning in that information or how meaning is given by the environment. For example, a mutation which gave Streptococcus aureus resistance to the antibiotic, methicillin, would have had no meaning before medical science invented methicillin; now the same information makes MRSA an intractable condition and a highly successful pathogen. The point being that new meaning can arise without any change in the genome simply by a change in the environment, so evolution is not always dependent on change in genetic information.

Creationism in Crisis - The Difference Between What Creationists are Fooled With and the Truth About Evolution

Creationism in Crisis

The Difference Between What Creationists are Fooled With and the Truth About Evolution

Tree of Life poster">

Source: Etsy

Human evolution represented as a linear progression

Evolution doesn't proceed in a straight line – so why draw it that way?

Creationists in the social media tend to be one of two sorts:

• Fools who have been misled by the fallacies frauds promulgate to try to discredit the Theory of Evolution, often for political and/or financial gain. These tend to be scientifically illiterate, often willfully, so, and find learning and critical thinking difficult. They typically tend to think teleologically, like toddlers, so seek answers which involve agency. Nothing happens in their world unless it either wants to or something else tells it too.
• Frauds looking for scientifically illiterate, teleological thinkers to recruit for their cult by promulgating fallacies and disinformation about science in general and the Theory of Evolution in particular, to make their victims believe they know better than the experts.

Some examples of the fallacies used by the frauds to trick the fools are listed by AI's ChatGPT-3 language model, after a qualifying statement:

Creationism In Crisis - Ray Comfort's Deception Caught in a Venus Fly Traps

Ray 'Bananas' Comfort

Ray Comfort is an American multi-millionaire Televangelist, Creationist grifter who makes his money out of scientifically illiterate dupes in the Creationist cults, by posing as an expert scientist.

His latest piece of disinformation is his claim that the Venus flytrap, Dionaea muscipula, is an example of irreducible complexity because the trap mechanism could not have evolved. In the Creationist lexicon, ‘irreducible complexity’ is code for ‘the Christian god did it’, so the Bible is literal truth’.

Comfort has no qualifications in biology, or any science subject yet feels qualified to tell his marks that millions of working biomedical scientists have got things all wrong and he knows best. Posturing as an expert is a familiar Creationist tactic intended to deceive, or, as a Christian would put it, an example of bearing false witness. Nevertheless, he should be capable of even the most cursory of fact checking in the age of the Internet, but doesn't feel he needs to, as he knows his target marks never check what he says, so he'll probably get away with it. It’s the tactic of the snake oil salesman.

Had he bothered with fact-checking, however, he would have discovered the freely available scientific evidence that flatly contradicts and gives the lie to his claim. Not only is the evolutionary pathway of the Venus flytrap known, but it is a very nice example of Darwinian evolution.

But then Creationists cult leaders, like their members, have no interest in the truth. Their mission is to mislead those who eagerly send them money for disinformation that makes them feel important, with a special relationisp with the Creator of the Universe who made it all with them in mind.

And Comfort laughs all the way to the bank.

An earlier ploy by Comfort was to tell his followers that there is no gravity in space [sic], so this proves God wrote the Bible [sic]. A more famous one was to claim the banana is specially designed to fit in the hand as you eat it, knowing his cult won't understand the role of selective breeding in plant cultivation. As others have pointed out, it is equally well designed to fit in other orifices too.

How Creationists Lie To Us - Ray Comfort

Mind you, Comfort's own ignorance sometimes comes back to bite him, like the time he complained about the pain of an impacted wisdom tooth for which he needed surgery, not realising wisdom teeth and the problems we have with them is both evidence for evolution and against intelligent design, but then Comfort was blissfully ignorant of those things.

Unintelligently Designed Teeth Cause Ray Discomfort

Dionaea muscipula trap mechanism

By Mnolf - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Anyway, back to the Venus flytrap; the following is the result of a few minutes search on Google - something Comfort can rely on his dupes not doing. It reveals a fascinating story of gradual evolution of the 'snap-trap' mechanism, including repurposing pre-existing structure which originally had an unrelated function.

The evolution of carnivory in plants is a specialised form of foliar feeding where the plant derives nutrients through its leaves in addition to any it obtains through its roots. It generally occurs in conditions where the soil is deficient in nutrients, such as in acidic bogs where water soluble nutrients, especially nitrates, leach out of the soil. It is believed to have occurred independently six times in the angiosperms, based on extant species, and possibly more in carnivorous lineages now extinct.

But it's not the evolution of carnivory itself that Comfort is trying to fool his marks with, but the 'snap-trap' mechanism which captures the prey.

How does the Venus flytrap work? | University of Tasmania

As Comfort could have discovered in just a few minutes had he bothered to, the evolution of this mechanism probably occurred in a common ancestor of Dionaea and the closely related, Aldrovanda. Two studies in 2002 and 2003 and a further study in 2009, have shed light on how this occurred:

Creationism in Crisis - Transitional Forms in Recent Human Evolution

Comparing the Boxgrove and Atapuerca (Sima de los Huesos) human fossils: Do they represent distinct paleodemes? - Journal of Human Evolution

Figure 1. A) Location map and B) chronology of key European Middle Pleistocene hominin samples relative to the benthic foraminiferal oxygen isotopic stratigraphy (Lisiecki and Raymo, 2005).

One of the difficulties with palaeontology is fitting individual fossils into a taxonomic system that was designed for classifying contemporaneous organisms. This difficulty is inevitable given that species change over time as they evolve so it is not a flaw in the theory but a confirmation of it, rather like the problem of deciding exactly where one colour changes into another in a rainbow is not a flaw in the theory of why sunlight can be split into different colours but a confirmation of the theory.

Where do the colours change?

Just such a problem was illustrated by a paper published recently by a team of paleoanthropologists from England and Spain, led by Lucile Crété of the Centre for Human Evolution Research (CHER), The Natural History Museum, London, UK.

The team set out to decide whether hominin fossils from Boxgrove in West Sussex, England were of the same paleodeme as those found at the Sima de los Huesos (Pit of Bones) at Atapuerca, Castile and León, Spain.

Creationism in Crisis - Evolutionary Palaeontologist, Svante Pääbo, Wins Nobel Prize for Medicine

Svante Pääbo

Sweden's Pääbo wins Nobel Medicine Prize for sequencing Neanderthal DNA

This is the sort of news that the leading frauds in the Creationist cults must be dreading, if they still have an hope of convincing their dupes that the Theory of Evolution is a theory in crisis, about to be overthrown and replaced by religious superstition. It is the news that leading evolutionary palaeontologist and geneticist, Professor Svante Pääbo, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany has been awarded a Nobel Prize for his work in the field of human evolution.

Far from being a theory in crisis, the Theory of Evolution is very much mainstream biomedical science, to the extent that the work Pääbo and his team are doing is central to our understanding of our recent history and how we relate to the archaic hominins that were our direct ancestors and the direct ancestors of other species of the Homo genus.

One of Pääbo's first major contributions to evolutionary biology was in sequencing Neanderthal genomes, then discovering that modern non-African Homo sapiens have at various times in recent history, had a significant ingression of Neanderthal DNA due to interbreeding between the two species. This horizontal gene transfer meant anatomically modern hominins acquired genes that had evolved in Neanderthals over a period of some 250,000 years, giving us significant adaptations to the cold, cloudy northern climates in Eurasia. Today, modern non-African humans have 2-4% Neanderthal DNA, most of it acquired about 40,000-60,000 years ago when the two species co-existed in Eurasia.

Human Evolution - Sex With Neanderthals
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More Evidence For a Human Ring Species
Evolution News - Women with Neanderthal Genes are More Fertile
Ancient Teeth Show Human Roots

Pääbo and his team then succeeded in sequencing the genome of a previously unknown hominin from a finger bone found in the Denisova Cave in Siberia and showed that this was a third distinct species of hominin, the Denisovans, who coexisted with Neanderthals, with whom they interbred extensively, and with H. sapiens with whom they also interbred. This led to the discovery that south East Asian and Melanesian people today have a significant proportion of Denisovan DNA, indicating frequent interbreeding as Homo sapiens spread out of Africa across central, southern and south-eastern Asia and into Indonesia, New Guinea and Australia.

There is also a mysterious fourth hominin whose DNA has been found in Neanderthals and some Homo sapiens. Neanderthals and Denisovans were the descendants of an earlier migration out of Africa of an archaic hominin, probably H. erectus. H. sapiens are almost certainly the descendants of those H. erectus who stayed in Africa.
What this tells us is that for much of recent human history, we have co-existed with several other hominin species whose evolutionary divergence from us and each other was not sufficiently advanced to prevent interbreeding, probably because for most of the 250,000 years that Neanderthals had lived in Eurasia, during which the ancestors of H. sapiens lived in Africa, interbreeding was a rare event so there was no evolutionary pressure to either reintegrate into a single species or to establish barriers to hybridization.

Having said that, though, there is a recent explanation for the disappearance of Neanderthals which suggests that they were never exterminated but simply merged into the growing population of H. sapiens which quickly outnumbered them, to the extent that there is now more Neanderthal DNA in the world than there ever was prior to 40,000 years ago.

Human Evolution News - We have More Neanderthal DNA Now Than They Ever Had

When Homo sapiens came out of Africa, the period of co-existence was too short for barriers to hybridization to evolve, so for much of our recent history, the Homo complex of species behaved very much like a ring species of incompletely speciated regionals species and subspecies.

Ring species

Creationist frauds now have the task of explaining to their credulous dupes why, if the TOE is a theory in crisis, one of its main exponents, whose work only makes any sense in the context of evolving hominin species, has been awarded the most prestigious prize in science - a Nobel Prize. We can now expect a proliferation of childish conspiracy theories as they seek to cope with the cognitive dissonance.

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Space News - First Exoplanet Photo. No Life Yet, But It's Only a Matter of Time

NASA/ESA/CSA, A Carter (UCSC), the ERS 1386 team, and A. Pagan (STScI)

The Webb telescope has released its very first exoplanet image – here's what we can learn from it

NASA's James Webb Space telescope, which is performing much better than expectations, has just produced the first image of an exoplanet. The planet, HIP 65426b, is a gas giant rather like Jupiter, orbiting HIP 65426. It's presence had been inferred from data in 2017.

As a gas giant, it is not suitable for living organisms to have evolved but, with so many exoplanets being discovered, with over 5,000 discovered so far, and so many stars with potential planetary systems, it can't now be long before signs of life are detected on one or more of them.

When that happens, of course, it will destroy any remaining arguments from Creationists that the probability of a self-replicating molecule arising by chance is too small to be credible as an explanation for how life got going on Earth. It will show that, if the conditions are right, chemistry and physics alone are quite capable of producing that and the probability of a planet with those conditions being discovered, increases with every new exoplanet discovered.

The chances of finding such a planet are greater the closer the planetary system is to Earth for the simple reason that telescopes such as the James Webb, see distant objects as they were when the light left them, so a planet say, 10 billion lightyears away, will appear as it was 10 billion years ago. We know it took the Universe 10-11 billion years to give rise to Earth before life could get going some 500 million years later, so distant object may not have had time when we are seeing them, to have reached that stage. Closer objects will have had more time.

The image from the James Webb Space Telescope, and its significance is explained in an open access article in The Conversation by Professor Jonti Horner, Professor (Astrophysics), University of Southern Queensland, Australia. The article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original article can be read here.

Evolution News - How Australia and New Guinea Got Their Diverse Populations of Rodents

A hopping mouse of the Notomys genus. Hopping mice have evolved highly efficient kidneys to deal with the low water environments of Australia’s deserts.

Credit: David Paul/Museums Victoria

'Impressive rafting skills': the 8-million-year old origin story of how rodents colonised Australia

I've remarked before about how well the Theory of Evolution as an explanation for the biodiversity in animals, plants and fungi we see all around us, consistently meshes with other strands of science. For example, plate tectonic and the timing of the splits and collisions of land masses that have occurred exactly coincides with the deduced evolutionary divergence in major branches of the tree of life, so explaining the relationships between species on unconnected land masses such as Africa and South America or Europe and North America.

Here we have an account of the colonisation of Australia and New Guinea and neighbouring islands by rodents, and their evolutionary diversification, that exactly meshes with the rise and fall of sea level during cycles of glaciation and glacial regression, and with known periods of mountain building in New Guinea that transformed it from a group of small islands into a single large mountainous island.

The study, led by Dr. Emily Roycroft, a postdoctoral research fellow with the Australian National University's Division of Ecology and Evolution, Research School of Biology, Acton, ACT, Australia, and Pierre-Henri Fabre, of the Institut des Sciences de l’Evolution, Université de Montpellier, Montpellier, France, with colleagues from the Australian National University, and the Science Department, Museums Victoria, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, is published in the journal,Current Biology. Sadly, the main body of the paper is behind a paywall, despite the journals claimed support for open access publishing. However the abstract is available here.

Lead author, Dr Emily Roycroft has also written about their research in the open access online magazine The Conversation which, if you want factual, objective analysis of news, is well worth reading. Her article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistence. The original article can be read here.

Creationism In Crisis - More Bad News for Creationists as Scientists Use the TOE to Work Out How Mucus Evolved

The evolution of mucus: How did we get all this slime? - University at Buffalo

Fig. 1. Novel and previously known mucin genes in select mammalian species.
Phylogeny on the left represents the relationship between the species analyzed here [human (hg38), mouse (mm10), cow (bosTau9), and ferret (musFur1)]. Schematic karyotypes show the chromosomes in each species that harbor mucin genes. Mucin gene locations are indicated on each chromosome. Ancestral mucin genes that are orthologous in the four genomes are indicated in blue fonts. Lineage-specific mucins are indicated in green fonts. Mucin genes found within the SCPP gene family, all of which, except for MUC7, are lineage-specific are indicated in pink fonts. Note: Some of the orthologous genes carry different names in different species. For example, rodent Muc3 is orthologous to human MUC17. For those genes, we indicated in parentheses following the official gene annotation the name of the likely human ortholog based on sequence similarity and synteny. In ferrets, the “S” proceeding the putative chromosome number indicates on which Hi-C scaffold the mucin genes were found.

Source: Pajic, Petar; Shen, Shichen; Qu, Jun; May, et. al., 2022

Possibly not the most fascinating of subjects, especially if you're a Creationist fraud trying to convince your dupes that the theory of evolution is a theory in crisis due to not being able to explain stuff like the evolution of proteins, but scientists at the University of Buffalo, New York, USA, have worked out how the various forms of mucus, or slime, evolved.

And guess what! The Theory of Evolution was absolutely essential to understanding the process!

And even worse for creationist frauds who are trying to convince their dupes that the second law of thermodynamics somehow means that no new information can arise without the assistance of a magic creator, is the news that this evolution involved examples of gene doubling where a mistake in replication - a mutation - has provided the process of evolution with genetic 'information' that can be changed without harming the carrier of that mutation. In other words, mutation followed by natural selection has increased the amount of information in the genome by perfectly natural processes, with no need to include magic or a magic creator in the explanation.

The News release by Charlotte Hsu, from the University of Buffalo explains how the scientists made this discovery:

Science News - How We Know What Happened Millions of Years Ago.

Skull of Afropithecus turkanensis

Ken Ham, along with other Creationists frauds, have managed to convince their child-like followers that asking "Where you there?" of scientists who try to talk about the past, and particularly how the Universe, Earth and life on Earth came to be as they are, is some sort of rational rebuttal of the claim. The idea seems to be that we can only ever know anything happened if we were actually there to see it. If that were true, of course, forensic science would be useless and no criminal could ever be convicted by a jury unless all 12 of them witnessed the crime.

The tactic depends on Creationists not realising that deductive logic and objective analysis of the evidence is a perfectly valid way to determine what happened. Ask a Creationist who is trying out that fallacy, how they can be certain their great grandparents had sex if they weren't there to witness it, and they usually withdraw from the conversation, often hurling abuse and threats as they do so. Of course, theirs, their parents and their grandparents existence are all evidence that their great grandparents got close at least ones.

That was a long-winded introduction to a piece of research published recently in PNAS that reports how an international collaboration of scientists have shown how fossil teeth of pre-human African apes can be analysed to determine the climate changes that may have driven theirs, and eventually our, evolution.
The account of how they did this and its significance is explained in an article in The Conversation by Tanya M. Smith, Professor in the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution & Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University, Australia, and Daniel Green, a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Climate School, Columbia University, New York.

The article is reproduced here, reformatted for stylistic consistency, under a Creative Commons licence. The original article can be read here:

Evolution News - Evolution is Occurring Faster Than Previously Thought

Rhesus Macaque, Macaca mulatta

Photo: Timothy Gonsalves, CC BY-SA 4.0,via Wikimedia Commons

Wild animals evolving much faster than previously thought - ANU

The precondition for Darwinian evolution is genetic difference between individuals in a population. This is the 'fuel' which drives evolution in an environment in which certain genetic variations are more advantageous than others, so the amount of this variation in any given population, is the main determinant of the rate of evolution.

In order to quantify the amount of this 'fuel of evolution', an international team led by Dr Timothée Bonnet from the Australian National University (ANU) spent three years trawling through reams of data, after which they were able to quantify how much species change occurred due to genetic changes caused by natural selection.   It turned out to be about two to four times what was previously thought and evolution can go much faster than Darwin originally thought.

The Australian Nation University news release explains:

Catholic Fraud News - Cardinal Becciu's Defence Team Accuse Pope Francis of Breaking the Vatican Laws!

Cardinal Angelo Becciu talking to journalists during a news conference in Rome. Defence lawyers are questioning the legitimacy of the Vatican tribunal where 10 people are on trial, including Becciu, on finance-related charges, arguing their clients can’t get a fair trial in an absolute monarchy where the pope has already intervened in the case and where prosecutors have failed to turn over key pieces of evidence.

Credit: AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia

Cardinal Becciu laments 'humiliation' after police raids tied to Vatican financial trial

Using a form of reasoning of which any Byzantine lawyer would be proud, the defence team for Enrico Crasso, one of those charged alongside (former) Cardinal Angelo Becciu with embezzlement, have petitioned the Vatican judges hearing the case against him to rule that the trial should be stopped and all charges rescinded because Pope Francis violated the Vatican's own legal system.

Their argument is that in exercising his right, as absolute ruler and head of the Vatican City state to issue four 'resctipta' to firstly allow the case to be brought against Becciu and to give prosecutors leeway in their treatment of witnesses and the defendants, to circumvent the archaic and convoluted procedures behind which the defendants in the case were hiding, Pope Francis has violated the Vatican's Legal system, so a fair trial under that system is now impossible. In effect, so the argument goes, Pope Francis has reduced the Vatican City to a lawless state.

Readers of this blog may remember how (former) Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, number three in the Vatican as Chief of Staff of the Vatican's Secretariate of State, was summarily sacked (or in Vatican terms, 'resigned his rights as a cardinal') and accused of embezzling Vatican funds in connection with a $225 million property deal in London in 2014.

As I reported at the time:

It's a Miracle! Not a Single Red Face as Lourdes Reopens After Closing for the Coronavirus Pandemic!

[left caption]

[Right caption/credit]

The shrine to Bernadette Soubirous, Lourdes, France

Lourdes resurrected: grotto reopens to pilgrims after two year Covid closure

Without the slightest sign of irony, the Catholic Church in France has re-opened the Lourdes faith-healing scam in the Hautes-Pyrénées region, which had been closed because of the Coronavirus pandemic. Lourdes, it may be remembered, sells quack cures for all manner of afflictions and illnesses, but is powerless to prevent people catching COVID-19, apparently.

The grotto was officially reopened on February 11, on the anniversary of the date in 1858 on which a young peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, or Sobirós, in the local language, Occitan, then spoken in the Languedoc region of France, whom many townspeople, including her own father, thought was mentally disturbed, claimed to have seen a vison of the Virgin Mary.

Christian Hate News - Pastor Greg Locke Says Children With Autism are Possessed by Demons.

Pastor Greg Locke, Global Vision Bible Church, Tennessee.
"Autistic children are possessed by evil demons"

Greg Locke Says Autistic Children Are Demonized: ‘Ain’t No Such Diagnosis in the Bible’

Preacher of hate, Talibangelical Pastor Greg Locke of the Global Vision Bible Church in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, USA has turned his hate from face masks, social distancing, anti-COVID vaccines and people who didn't vote for Donald Trump, to autistic children.

Failing to find any mention of autism in the Bible, he has concluded that autistic children must be possessed by evil demons. There is no mention of cancer, diabetes, sickle-cell syndrome, cerebral palsy, Alzheimer’s dementia, viruses or bacteria in the Bible either, but Locke seems blissfully unaware that when he tells us the Bible disagrees with science, he is telling us the Bible is wrong. This is something we have known for hundreds of years of course, ever since the scientific method gave us the tool to discover the truth and we discovered the truth was very different to what the Bible said.

Unintelligent Design News - What on Earth is This Complex System For?

Lizard beetles, Doubledaya bucculenta, plant a fungal garden inside dead bamboo stems to feed developing larvae.

Credit: Wataru Toki

Nagoya University Research Achievements

The thing about good design is that the thing designed should have a clear purpose. Simply making things that don't do anything except make copies of themselves is not the act of an intelligent designer, and there are some complex systems and processes in nature that should leave any intelligent [sic] design advocate scratching their head and wondering what on Earth the purpose of this is and why does it need to be so complicated?

Of course, nothing in the living world has any ultimate purpose other than making copies of itself (which is just one of the ways we know it isn't intelligently designed). So, Creationists go on to make up all manner of reasons, or assert that it's not given to us to understand the purpose of their putative magic creator, which illustrates the utter uselessness of ID as an alternative scientific hypothesis!

So it would be interesting to hear what Creationists think the purpose of this fungus-farming beetle and its bizarre reproductive system is for, and why it needs to be so complicated?

Briefly, Japanese Lizard beetles, Doubledaya bucculenta, farm yeast inside bamboo stems for their developing larvae to eat. The larvae feed on yeast injected from their mothers' abdomens into the bamboo stems they are growing in. The female beetle has a special structure in her abdomen in which to keep the fungus, which she then injects into dead bamboo shoots along with her eggs. The bamboo supplies the fungus (a type of yeast, Wickerhamomyces anomalus) with nutrients and the growing beetle larvae eat the fungus.

Now, that might seem like a sensible arrangement as the beetle larvae live safe inside the hard bamboo and get a self-renewing food supply and the fungus gets somewhere safe in which to live and reproduce, albeit at a cost. However, two Japanese scientists from Nagoya University have made a surprising discovery. Unlike most fungal-insect symbiotic relationships where the fungus breaks down large and otherwise indigestible polysaccharide molecules such as the cellulose and lignin of which the bamboo is composed, W. anomalus digests small molecules such as glucose and fructose, which the beetle larvae could do for themselves.

This was a real surprise. While yeast can indeed decompose those indigestible components, our analysis shows the yeast actually grows on small molecule monosaccharides.

Bamboo is not only a farm for the yeast but also a house for the larvae. So the larvae can live in a strong house safely because the house is not decomposed by the food.

Wataru Toki.
Graduate School of Bioagricultural Sciences
Nagoya University, Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya, Aichi, Japan

And that's not all. The same scientists also found that the fungus could digest cellulose, etc, since it has the necessary enzymes, but does not do so.

What the scientists propose is that this evolved to prevent the fungus from digesting the bamboo which protects both it and the beetle larvae, the adults of which it needs to perpetuate itself.

So, we have a fungus provided for the larvae to eat, but they do so by digesting the same sugars that the larvae could digest themselves without all the intermediate machinery the fungus uses, and this is all to prevent the yeast digesting the plant it and the larvae are housed in. Any sane designer who ended up with a beetle needing somewhere safe to lay its eggs, so its larvae were protected and fed, would have just created the larvae to eat the glucose and fructose the fungus eats and cut out the middleman. The larvae's inability to digest the structural polysaccharides would have prevent it from destroying its protective housing.

And that would be assuming there was some purpose for these beetles beyond making more lizard beetles.

The scientist's findings were published in Scientific Reports last September:

Abstract
Symbiotic fungi of wood-inhabiting insects are often considered to aid wood digestion of host insects when the associated fungi can assimilate wood-associated indigestible materials. In most cases, however, the components of wood that are utilized by fungal symbionts remain poorly understood. The lizard beetle Doubledaya bucculenta (Coleoptera, Erotylidae, Languriinae) farms the symbiotic yeast Wickerhamomyces anomalus inside the cavity of host bamboo internodes, which serves as food for larvae. To determine the carbon sources of the internodes serving as nutritional substrates for W. anomalus, we used ion exchange chromatography measurements to analyze free and structural sugar compositions in fresh pith (FP), yeast-cultured pith (YP), and larva-reared pith (LP) of internodes. Glucose and fructose were the major free sugars in FP and markedly decreased in YP and LP. For structural sugars, no sugar significantly decreased in YP or LP compared with FP. Carbon assimilation tests showed that W. anomalus assimilated glucose, mannose, fructose, and sucrose strongly, xylose and cellobiose moderately, and xylan weakly. Elemental analysis revealed that the compositions of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen were not significantly different among tissue types. These results suggest that W. anomalus does not consume bamboo-associated indigestible sugars but most free sugars, mainly glucose and fructose, in the pith. Our findings suggest that a symbiont’s abilities may not always benefit its host in nature.

Toki, W., Aoki, D.
Nutritional resources of the yeast symbiont cultivated by the lizard beetle Doubledaya bucculenta in bamboos.
Scientific Reports 11, 19208 (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-98733-y

Copyright: © 2021 The authors. Published by Springer Nature Ltd.
Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

It would be hard to think of a better example of a system which violates all the principle of good design. Firstly we have no clear purpose; secondly, we have needless complexity and thirdly, we have prolific waste in that an intermediate of that complexity in the larvae’s food chain is inevitably wasteful and many more beetles could be produced without it.

And then, of course, the inexplicable stupidity of using a fungus with all the enzymes needed to digest cellulose, then not using them because doing so would destroy the entire system!
There are very many more of these examples in my book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax, but few of them are so starkly examples of the sort of stupidity in design that can only come from an unintelligent, undirected, mindless, natural process such as evolution by natural selection, so it is hard to think of a system which doesn't refute the notion of intelligent design quite so comprehensively.

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Fleecing the Suckers - Kat Kerr Shows How Easy it is to Fleece Trump-Supporting Talibangelical Christians

Kat Kerr
Talibangelical Christian False Prophetess

“Prophetess”: God’s Moving Me Into a Mansion So I Can “Infiltrate” the Wealthy | Hemant Mehta | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

The notorious false prophetess, Kat Kerr, has boasted to her credulous supporters about what she is doing with all the tax-free money they give her - she is buying a mansion in an exclusive, gated community in Florida.

True to form however, she fooled them some more by telling them God had told her to buy it so he could use her to 'infiltrate her into the circle of the wealthy and the rich'! Well, that's her story and she's sticking to it. And why not? She knows full well that anyone who thinks Donald Trump was a competent president, let alone a good one worth re-electing, will probably believe anything. After all, experience must tell her that no matter how preposterous her claims, her simpleton victims will continue to pay good money just to hear it.

Trumpanzee Talibangelical 'Prophets' are Becoming Even More Confused

Talibangelical false prophets.
Left: Nathan French of Nathan French Ministries
Right: Robin Bullock of Youth Force Ministries Church International Inc.

'Donald Trump, Call Me': Robin Bullock Says Trump Must Listen to the Prophets, Not His Political Advisers | Right Wing Watch

'Prophet' Nathan French Says God Must Restore Trump to Office to Silence Those 'Trying to Discredit the Prophetic Community' | Right Wing Watch

Judging by two recent items in Right Wing Watch, American Talibangelical, Trumpanzee 'Prophets of God' are becoming increasingly confused by their long litany of abject failures about what exactly God it trying to tell them. Firstly, to a man (or woman) they prophesied that their idol, Donald Trump, would win last November by a landslide, claiming God himself had assured them he would arrange it.

Then, when that prophesy proved false they searched around for ever-more creative and unlikely ways to explain their failure as a success, claiming the landslide would all be revealed once Trump had been returned to the Oval Office - which God had assured them was imminent - with an ever-shifting deadline - Before inauguration day, before February, by April, er… June… or July… At least one announced that God had told him Trump had secretly declared a state of emergency and declared martial law, so a military government, answerable to Trump, was now running the USA. They would soon be releasing the evidence of electoral fraud and arresting Biden and his fellow 'conspirators', including Hilary Clinton and Barak Obama! None of that was true either.

God's promise of electoral victory had turned instead into God's promise of a military coup to overturn the result that God had proved powerless to deliver, if we are to believe God's (false) prophets.

But with the anniversary of Biden's victory come and gone, and not a single successful attempt to prove electoral fraud in court, no attempt to find any evidence being successful, and no sign of the prophesied military coup or the arrest of leading Democrats, they have some explaining still to do.

One of the leading loons, Nathan French of Nathan French Ministries, is beginning to realise that his continuing failures is damaging him and his fellow frauds and threatening their tax-free income streams. He has even started demanding that Trump be reinstated to save their reputations because people are understandably losing faith in prophets who continue to prove themselves to be frauds.

Appearing on the ElijahStreams You Tube channel, he told host Steve Schultz:

If somebody gives a word that, ‘Hey, on this date, this person is going to be in office,’ and it doesn’t come to pass, then it was a false word. It wasn’t true. But if they give that word and the date that they gave hasn’t yet come to pass, you can’t call him a liar or [say] that they were wrong because the time hasn’t happened yet. If somebody doesn’t give a date and God gives a word and speaks through the voice of his prophets—which he’s doing on the Earth right now because there’s still prophets today. … There’s a whole bunch of people on the planet that don’t believe that there are still prophets on the Earth. And so they scripturally are trying to resolve that, and they’re teaching people that prophets no longer exist.

At least he got that part right. False prophets are of course, people like Nathan French who make prophesies that don't come true. The clue is in the name 'false prophet'. Had Nathan French not been a false prophet, Trump would have been restored to the White House last April.

Robin Bullock, on the other hand, is still prophesying a reversal of last November's result. The problem is that Trump is listening to his political advisers and not to Robin Bullock. He told the extreme conservative program, Flyover Conservatives:

[God said, Trump was] anointed from the day you were born to be president.

Get in touch with me, and I can tell you some of these things. Donald Trump, call me. Call me. … Listen to the prophets. Don’t let them tell you to not listen to the prophets. … I heard these people talking, and they told the president—I’m talking about President Trump. The president. I’m not talking about the jackal who barks over the desk of the Oval Office. I’m talking about the president—I was listening to this conversation and they said, ‘Don’t listen to the prophets.'

But the Lord said, ‘Don’t listen to your advisers about that because they have their own agenda in mind, and it does not include you. Operate in the power of God, and let him pave your way. [Take] one step toward your position, and God will open the way all the way back. After I gave a word similar to that, a very important person called me and said, ‘You have no idea how right you are.’ He said, ‘I know one of his close advisers, and they told him, “Don’t run in 2024. Don’t run again. You’ll mess it up for all of us.”‘ I heard the conversation. I heard them talking. And I’m going to tell the president something: Donald John Trump, you were anointed from the day you were born to be president, and you were brought on the scene for such a time as this.

From that forlorn please, it looks like even Bullock has now accepted that Biden is there until at least November 2024 and that his 'prophesy' of Trump's restoration will only come true if he stands and wins in a rerun against Biden. No coup, no revealed evidence of electoral fraud, no heavenly intervention to reverse a democratic vote… nothing. Just the normal operation of the democratic process he so despises when it doesn't produce the result he feels entitled to.

Just imagine if these frauds ever gained the political power they came close to obtaining under Trump's corrupt and incompetent leadership!

How Trump's Team Concocted the Big Lie

Trump's lawyer, Rudi Giuliani
"Created the Dominion conspiracy lie out of whole cloth"

Rachel Maddow Reads Damning Giuliani Testimony Showing Roots Of Election Conspiracy | HuffPost UK

Trump's big lie team made a major tactical blunder when they falsely claimed that Dominion, who supplied voting machines, conspired to steal the election for Biden. What they failed to take into account was that Dominion would sue. The result of this is that it gives the Dominion legal team the right to discover the evidence on which the claim was based.

It turns out that not only was there no such evidence, but, questioned under oath, Trump's lawyer and former New York mayor, Rudolph "Rudi" Giuliani admitted he couldn't even remember where he saw the allegation that he went public with, or even where he was at the time or exactly when he heard them (court papers exhibit J-1, transcription pp 34-36), and that the claim of a witness was almost certainly made up. He thought he might have seen it on Facebook! But he wasn't even sure of that and anyway he was too busy to check!

In other words, the entire claim was an invention.

A Meteor Strike in Bronze Age Jordan Destroyed a Large City - And Any Claim That The Bible is Literal History.

Location of Tall el-Hammam. (a) Photo of the southern Levant, looking north, showing the Dead Sea, the site location (TeH), and nearby countries. The Dead Sea Rift, the fault line marking a major tectonic plate boundary, runs through the area. Source of base image: NASA, Space Shuttle. “The Sinai Peninsula and the Dead Sea Rift”. Photo: sts109-708-024, taken 12/16/2009. From the NASA Langley Research Center Atmospheric Science Data Center (nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/astronauts_eyes/sts109-708-024.html). Modified by the authors using Adobe Photoshop CC2014 (adobe.com/products/photoshop.html). (b) West-southwest-facing view of the upper tall showing locations of the palace and temple behind the curve of the upper tall. The Dead Sea is in the background to the left.

An Ancient Disaster | The UCSB Current

From the Middle East, archaeologists bring us evidence that, although a couple of Bible tales may have their origins in a real event which could have lingered in the folk memories of the ancient Canaanites, the truth was very different to the highly embroidered stories these memories were subsequently woven into.

The evidence is that the large Late Bronze age city, now known as Tall el-Hammam, in the Jordan Valley, north of the Dead Sea, was suddenly destroyed by the air-burst of a meteorite larger than that responsible for the Tanguska incident in Siberia in 1908, which was estimated to have been the equivalent of an explosion and heat-wave about 1000 times more powerful than the atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

This explosion occurred in about 1650 BCE and, according to the authors of a paper published, open access, in Scientific Reports, could have been the origin of both the myths of Sodom and Gomorrah and the destruction of Jericho (identified as Tell es-Sultan, near to Tall el-Hammam) by an Israelite army led by Joshua.

For Bible literalists wishing to use this as evidence that the Bible is real history, these two mythological events allegedly occurred many years apart and not contemporaneously. The tale in Genesis of the destruction of the 'cities of the plain' and the survival of Lot and his daughters with whom he fathered two sons is, according to Israeli archaeologists, Finkelstein and Silberman, in The Bible Unearthed, probably a propaganda story written to discredit two rival Canaanite tribes to Israel, in Moab and Ammon, as the descendants of the children of drunken debauchery and incest. The story of the breaching of the (non-existent) walls of Jericho and its sack by Joshua's mob came much later, in Joshua, at the end of the supposed exodus from Egypt and the mythical entry into the 'Promised Land' by the Israelites.

Creationism's Favourite Felon is Back Behind Bars.

Mr Kent Hovind. Back in prison, this time for assaulting his ex-girlfriend.

Creationist Kent Hovind Sentenced to 30 Days in Jail for Domestic Violence | Hemant Mehta | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

Creationism's favourite criminal, Mr Kent Hovind, is back in prison. Let's try to help him be a better person.

To anyone familiar with Hovind's distain for the law of the land, believing he makes his own laws because he has a close personal relationship with God, this will come as no surprise, since Hovind pushes a relentlessly literal interpretation of the Bible and the Bible positively commands behaviour which might have been acceptable in a brutal, Late Bronze/Early Iron Age tribal society but which is, following the European Enlightenment and the incorporation of Humanism into Christianity, now regarded as criminal in most civilised societies.