How Science Works - Settling Small Differences Over the Age of the Universe

A portion of a new picture of the oldest light in the universe taken by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope. This part covers a section of the sky 50 times the moon’s width, representing a region of space 20 billion light-years across. The light, emitted just 380,000 years after the Big Bang, varies in polarization (represented here by redder or bluer colors). Astrophysicists used the spacing between these variations to calculate a new estimate for the universe’s age.

Credit: ACT Collaboration

New View of Nature’s Oldest Light Adds Twist to Debate Over Universe’s Age | Cornell University College of Arts and Sciences Cornell Arts & Sciences

For the last year or so, debate has raged in the Astrophysics community over the real age of the Universe, although 'raged' may be an overstatement in the sense in which it is normally used.

As always, 'raging' debate in science is conducted in quiet, polite, considerate and respectful terms and normally centres around the finer details of statistical analysis, data collection and accuracy, etc, and rarely around personality, since ad hominems have no place in rational, dispassionate debate in which facts are neutral and opinion is led by evidence.

The problem was that there were two methods for calculating the age of the universe based on how we calculate the speed at which galaxies are moving away from one another to calculate the rate of expansion of the Universe - a quantity called the Hubble Constant - and disagreement centred around how accurately we measured that constant.

Bringing Christianity Into Disrepute - Really?

Pastor Penuel Mnguni of the End Times Disciples Ministries

'Snake Pastor' feeds dog meat to congregants for communion | News24.

In a slight variation on the Catholic tradition of feeding congregants on pieces of wafer and telling them it's really a piece of real Jesus, a South African pastor has come up with a slightly more nutritious alternative. He feeds them pieces of dog. Admittedly dog meat he has turned into a tasty stew.

In fact, it's so tasty so he says, that it simply must be Jesus.

He has also been known to feed them snake, hair, cockroaches and rat.

Pastor Penuel Mnguni of the End Times Disciples Ministries explained:

[I]t is not what goes through the mouth that disqualifies us and defile us but what comes out of the mouth – The heart matters most than what decomposes (Food we eat) (sic). Christianity has shifted so much from time to time, however at End Times Disciples Ministries the move of God has been seen as many peoples faiths has also been challenged. From changing a snake to chocolate – to partaking octopus and frogs – a dog stew was prepared for the Church to partake as Holy Communion.

Lessons From Goa - Saint Francis Xavier

Basilica of Bon Jesus (Good Jesus)
Old Goa, Near Panjim

Body of Saint Francis Xavier in a silver casket of Basilica of Bom Jésus in Goa.

source: Wikipedia

While on a recent vacation in Goa, India we were treated to a guided tour of some of the historic places, including the UNESCO World heritage church of Bom Jésus (Good Jesus in Portuguese - is there a bad one?).

This church is notable mostly because it contains the remains of St Francis Xavier, co-founder of the Jesuits with St Ignatius Loyola.

The body of St Francis is allegedly incorruptible. Our guide assured us that it is exactly as St Francis was in life, despite being buried and exhumed multiple times before being placed in the air-tight silver casket. Curiously, given the importance of such miracles, this incorruptibility of St Francis' body is tantalisingly displayed through little windows showing selected body-parts barely visible from ground level as the casket is mounted some twenty feet up in an elaborate shrine, richly endowed with gold, silver and precious stones, presumably in tribute to his vow of poverty. Who wants to look directly at a rotting corpse?

What can be seen of the body suggests, if the legend of incorruptibility is true, that St Francis had the appearance of a blackened and desiccated corpse in life, which is curious because a statue of St Francis, which our guide assured us was a miraculously accurate statue, perfect in every details, shows him to be on the short side but otherwise a perfectly normal European, albeit with a rather strange posture.

Rwanda Football Moves to Outlaw Witchcraft - Seriously!

Witchcraft!

FERWAFA sets tough measures to curb ‘witchcraft in sports’ - The New Times | Rwanda

The Rwandan Football Federation (FERWAFA) has acted decisively to clean up the game following a serious spell-casting incidents in a league match which rocked the Rwanda football world a week ago.

An emergency meeting between the executive committee of the Association and all First Division football club presidents was call following the match in Huye stadium between Mukura Victory Sports and Rayon Sport. The game saw clashes on the pitch with Mukura players accusing a Rayon player, striker Moussa Camara, of gaining an unfair advantage and scoring a goal using witchcraft. The meeting decided unanimously that henceforth:

Kamikaze Confirmation

Kamikaze (divine wind), Issho Yada

How a typhoon sank Kublai Khan | Science | The Guardian:

Why do so many Americans believe in the Judeo-Christian god compared to most Western European countries?

Although religious affiliation and belief in any god are both falling in the USA according to recent research, America still lags about a generation behind Western Europe in its rejection of religion. Percentage figures of 80% plus for belief in god and in the upper 60s for the importance of religion in their lives are typically returned for US surveys while the equivalent in UK, France, Holland and even formerly staunchly Catholic Ireland and Spain are typically under 50% and 30% respectively.

The Power Of Magical Thinking

Believing What We Do Not Believe: Acquiescence to Superstitious Beliefs and Other Powerful Intuitions | PsycNET

How do religious people manage to hold two mutually exclusive view simultaneously?

How for example, does someone like Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project and passionate advocate for evolution on an old Earth in an older Universe, whose entire academic career depended on his understanding and acceptance of the role of DNA in evolution, still manage to believe he needs to beg forgiveness because he inherited the 'sin' of a founding pair of humans who were made by magic a few thousand years ago?

Everyone Needs Their Mummy!

Mummified remains of Britons were preserved by smoking or being placed in peat bogs – a different process to those of ancient Egyptians.

Photograph: Keystone-ZUMA/Rex Features
Source: The Guardian

Mummification was commonplace in Bronze Age Britain | News - University of Seffield.

Need a favour? In dispute with your neighbour over land? Want to adjust the world a little in your favour? No problem; just tell your mummy!

News today that the practice of worshipping bits of old dead patriarch or matriarch which I wrote about a few days ago in the context of the Catholic Church and it's obsession with the body parts of dead 'saints', may predate Christianity by many thousands of years and is just another pagan tradition which was incorporated into Christianity.

Victims of Religion in Poland

30–39 year old female with a sickle placed across her neck.

PLOS ONE: Apotropaic Practices and the Undead: A Biogeochemical Assessment of Deviant Burials in Post-Medieval Poland

Ignorant superstitions are often a cause as well as an effect of religious bigotry. These can and often do provide an excuse for human rights abuses and victimisation of people who are a little bit different to the cultural norm, whether in personality, physical or mental disability or even race, skin colour or ethnic origin.

Eastern Europe, and Poland in particular, has a long history of superstitious belief in 'unclean' spirits re-entering a dead body and reanimating it. This superstition, underpinned by the religious idea of a soul or some form of magical other being who lives in our bodies and gives it 'life' is not, as some might think, a biblical or Quranic idea but one which was known to the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans.

Frankly Bonkers Francis

Guardian Angel; Bernhard Plockhorst (1825–1907)

Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

I believe in angels, says Pope Francis – and they help you make right decisions | World news | The Guardian

Good news for angels!

Pope Francis has decreed that they now exist again and, according to Catholic dogma, because the Pope once infallibly declared himself to be infallible, this means that, even if they didn't exist before, they do now, just as we know that barnacle geese (Branta leucopsis) became fish that hatch out of barnacles in the Middle Ages and have now turned back into perfectly respectable geese, because the Pope said so.

Likewise, limbo existed as somewhere for the souls of dead babies to go to until it was abolished by papal decree by Pope Benedict XVI in April 2007. Apparently, the souls of dead babies can now go straight to heaven despite being sinners who have never been saved by 'accepting Jesus'. Before the 12th-Century dead babies when straight to Hell to teach them a lesson for being born sinners, according to Augustine of Hippo. After that, because that didn't seem very fair, the Pope had decreed limbo into existence as a sort of half-way house.

Now, despite his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI having come out against the existence of angels,

A Handy Piece Of Superstition

Witchcraft Trade, Skin Cancer Pose Serious Threats to Albinos in Tanzania: Scientific American

A charming account of the effects of religion, this time in Tanzania, is brought to us this week by Scientific American. As though being born with the genetic mutation which causes albinism wasn't bad enough, sufferers have to put up with living in a religious society where local superstitions hold that the body-parts of albinos have magical properties which can lead to power and wealth.

People born with albinism make little or no melanin - the pigment responsible for skin colour. This makes them especially susceptible to skin cancer from which melanin protects us by acting as a natural barrier to harmful solar radiation. Albinos frequently also have defective vision and hearing and most rarely live beyond the age of fifty, with skin cancer being the number one cause in Tanzania.

Another cause of early death is religious superstition. Since the year 2000 some seventy-two Tanzanian albinos have been murdered for their body-parts, many in childhood. Only five prosecutions for murder have been successful. Another superstition is that albinos don't die but simply disappear so the authorities often don't pay much attention when they do, in fact, disappear. I wonder which witch doctor invented that handy piece of superstition.

It is believed that the body-parts have much greater power if they are from children and especially if the person screams when their parts are being cut off, so many children are 'harvested' whilst still alive. A complete human being is said to be worth some $250,000 on the open market.

The situation remains particularly dire in part of the northern part of the country. Near Lake Victoria fishermen are known to weave albinos’ hair into their fishing nets in the hopes of improving their catches. Witchcraft beliefs are more entrenched in that part of the country, making individuals with albinism particularly susceptible to attacks. “When I was growing up it was not like this. It was just stigma, but not people coming to cut bodies,” says Zihada Msembo, 60, a leader of the Tanzania Albino Society, during an interview elsewhere in the country. In the past five years, she says, the attacks in Tanzania have gotten worse. But what has prompted the new attacks remains unknown. Whereas the attacks are most prevalent in the so-called “Lake Zone,” Nsebo says that “people travel to hunt for albinos” throughout the country.

Dina Fine Maron; Witchcraft Trade, Skin Cancer Pose Serious Threats to Albinos in Tanzania;
Scientific American 11 October 2013

Isn't it just great the way religion increases human kindness and fellowship and heightens sensitivity to suffering, whilst reducing greed and selfishness, unlike atheistic science.

And it's soo reassuring to know that a kindly and benevolent god is watching over humanity to make sure nothing like this happens, isn't it... well, at least making sure it only happens in far-away unimportant countries, to far-away unimportant people.

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Top 10 Reasons to Take Pascal's Wager

Blaise Pascal (1623-1672)

Pascal's Wager (or Gambit) basically argues that, since you have nothing to lose and everything to gain from believing in God (Pascal never specified which one), your safest bet is to believe.

Here are the top ten reasons you should play Pascal's Gambit:

1. Gods are not really all-knowing and don't know what you are thinking, so they won't realise you are just pretending.
2. Someone told you Pascal's Gambit is a good idea and you just can't be bothered to think through the consequences of it.
3. The Gambit works on any god, so you don't need to bother which is the real one or even if any of them are. Just talk about 'God' and it'll think you're talking about it.
4. The Gambit works best on gods which admire dishonesty so chose one which has shown itself to be dishonest and proud of it.
5. The less intelligent the god the better the Gambit works, so it's best to chose a really thick god although playing the Gambit in the first place shows you think none of them are too bright.
6. The Gambit assumes you can put one over on the god in question, so chose a god who doesn't mind you thinking you are smarter than it is, or one which is too stupid to realise that you think you are.

All A Matter Of Ancestor Worship

Ancestor worship in Vietnam

As children we look up to the adults in our society. We think they are full of wisdom and know just about everything. I still remember the shock I felt when my primary school teacher was wrong about something I knew about. How could she not know that there was a bird called a Great Tit? What had gone wrong with the world when she crossed out the word 'Great' in red ink and wrote 'small' over it? These things can shatter the cosy world of certainties for an eight year old. Teachers were teachers because they knew everything, weren't they? How else did they become teachers?

A History Of Bizarre Belief

Disbelief in evolution is but one of a long line of religiously inspired disbelief in scientific ideas and principle now taken for granted by anyone with even a rudimentary education and normal intellectual faculties.

There is a very familiar pattern of fallacious arguments attempting to prove a primitive religious notion from a holy book associated with each one. The holy text is always asserted to be correct and all the contrary evidence is dismissed as false, misleading, or deliberately falsified by evil scientists or thinkers to entice you away from your faith.

Leading proponents of it have invariably had a vested, often pecuniary interest in promulgating it, just as with creationism.

The Flat Earth.

Flat Earth Drawn by Orlando Ferguson 1893. Note the biblical references.