How Creationists Lie To Us - 6

Number 5 in a series looking at the treasure trove of creationist fallacies and astoundingly bad 'science' called It's A Young World After All, written by assistant professor of psychology, Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD. (Yes I know I've called it number 6. That's because I had already written How Creationists Lie To Us about another piece of creationist deception.)

Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD. has never presented a paper on biology, cosmology or physics to an audience of professional scientists nor has he ever published a peer-reviewed paper on any of these subjects.

Here I look at Chapter 5. If nothing else, it shows the danger of relying on a single source for your information and accepting it uncritically if it agrees with your desired conclusion.

Chapter 5 - Pour Me A Rock.

Ackerman's 'argument' is that:

Recent-creationists also believe the impact craters were formed early in the moon's existence, but they believe that this was only a few thousand years ago. Thus we have two opposing views about the same phenomenon. Most scientists believe the craters to be at least three billion years old, while a few believe them to be only a few thousand. Is there a way to test and see which view is correct?

Geophysicist and astronomer Harold Slusher of the University of Texas at El Paso, along with Glenn Morton and Richard Mandock, have worked on this problem and discovered a simple and seemingly decisive solution. They have done so by considering the flow rates (viscosity) of the lunar rock material that forms the moon craters. If the moon were covered with water, impact craters would last only a few seconds. If it were made of honey, craters would last just a bit longer. Since the moon is covered with rock, impact craters last a much longer time, but how long depends upon the kind of rock and its viscosity or rate of flow.

The rocks brought back from the moon by our Apollo astronauts have been carefully studied and found to be virtually identical with a kind of earth rock called basalt. The discovery that the moon's surface is made up of basalt-type rock rules out the possibility that lunar craters are more than a few thousand years old! The viscosity or flow-rate value used by scientists is on the order of a hundred million times too low (the higher the value, the slower the flow rate) for the craters to have lasted three or four billion years. Even if the lunar surface were made of granite, the viscosity value of that granite would be ten million times too low to hold the crater shape for three billion years. If the lunar surface were made of the same rock material as the earth's mantle, the viscosity value would be too low by a factor of one hundred thousand.

Hmm... Well, you have to admit that would be something of a problem for scientists who think the earth is 4.5 billion years old!

If only it were true!

Unfortunately Ackerman seems unaware that the 'research' upon which his entire argument is based is fatally flawed. As you can read here:

In a paper published in a young-Earth journal (Creation Research Society Quarterly, v.20, pp.105-108 (Sept 1983)), former young-Earth advocate Glenn R. Morton attempted to calculate the time it would take for lunar craters to be erased by the slow flow of rock.

The central parameter in the calculation is the viscosity of the rock (its resistance to flow). As a rock's temperature approaches its melting point, its viscosity becomes low enough (although still a trillion trillion times higher than that of honey) for some flow to be observed over long time periods. This phenomenon allows, for example, convection in the Earth's mantle, which is crucial to Plate Tectonics, and in turn to many geophysical processes.

Viscous flow can also be observed in many other solids, from glass to Silly Putty, but always at temperatures that are rather close to the melting point of the solid. Morton attempted to apply this process to rocks on the surface of the Moon. However, by failing to understand viscosity's extreme dependence on temperature, he grossly underestimated the viscosities of lunar rocks. Morton assumed that the viscosity of the Moon's surface rocks would be comparable to the highest measured rock viscosities (those of Earth's mantle). However, since a rock's viscosity increases exponentially as its temperature falls (and the Earth's mantle is very hot while the Moon is very cold), the viscosities of moon rocks are exponentially higher than the viscosities in Earth's mantle.

In fact, moon rock viscosities are so high that they are practically infinite, meaning that no flow will occur (i.e., rocks are more likely to break or fracture than to flow). Since the flow of rock is basically impossible at the temperatures that exist on the Moon's surface, there will be no relaxation of lunar craters, and thus no problem with the age of the Moon.

So, if only these scientists had done the job properly they would have shown that the moon isn't young; it's er... old. Makes you wonder how they got it passed the peer-review process.

But what's this? Former young-Earth advocate Glenn R. Morton?

Yep! The creation scientist (did Ackerman just forget to mention that the 'science' he relied on was carried out by young-Earth creationists?) Glenn R. Morton deconverted from young-Earth creationism when he realised there was no data supporting it and all the data points to an Earth as old as real scientists accept. You can read about his change of mind in his article entitled Why I Left Young-Earth Creationism.

There was no peer-review process of course. So long as it reached the 'right' conclusion and it conformed with the Creationists' Oath to never reach a conclusion that doesn't support a literal interpretation of Genesis from the Christian Bible, it was accepted.

Ackerman has fallen into the trap of believing your own propaganda. It must be a bit disconcerting to find that the scientist whom you've just relied on for your argument doesn't believe it himself.

No, don't laugh. It's not nice.

Instead, read Dr Ackerman's confident conclusion:

Thus the physical evidence is loud and clear to the effect that the craters of the moon cannot be as old as evolutionists claim. In fact, the data indicate that the craters must be only a few thousand years old.

Hmm... as loud and clear as total silence in an unlit coal cellar, eh?

Now you can laugh.

"Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!"
- Sir Walter Scott.

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How Creationists Lie To Us - 5

Chapter 4 of Dr Paul D. Ackerman's creationist book, It's A Young World After All, is yet another fine example of how creation 'scientists' mislead their customers with frankly bad science.

Once again I'll leave it to the reader to decide if this is deliberate or merely a consequence of Ackerman's ignorance of the subject upon which he confidently expounds. Should we expect an assistant professor of psychology to know any more about biology and cosmology than this? Would we expect an author to research the subject before he puts pen to paper and writes what is passed off as an authoritative book of science?

It's not at all unusual for the creation 'science' industry to put up someone with a title like 'doctor' or with PhD after his name as an expert scientist, even though the doctorate may have nothing to do with the discipline in which he is being presented as an expert. Simply posing as a scientist is quite sufficient for the creation 'science' industry and it customers it seems.

Enough of that. Now for Chapter 4.

Chapter 4 - Of Smoldering Embers.

Ackerman sets the scene with:

Imagine that you are hiking in a remote wilderness area seldom visited by man. You are making your way through winding forest trails to a secluded cabin owned by a friend back in the city. He has volunteered his cabin as a much-needed vacation spot, assuring you that it is locked up securely and has not been occupied since his last visit over a year ago. You arrive at the cabin, unlock the door, and enter. Although the cabin appears totally empty, on the table in front of you is an ashtray containing a lighted cigar, and the fireplace reveals still-smoldering remnants of an earlier fire.

The simplest and most logical assessment of this situation would be to conclude that your friend is quite mistaken about no one living in his cabin. Someone has most certainly been here, and quite recently at that.

Okay so far. You'd obviously need to be a little slow on the uptake to think a cigar could burn for over a year, unless it was a really big cigar.

Io

Having so set us up, he continues:

Do you remember the news coverage of the two Jupiter explorations by our Voyager space probes in 1979? Among the spectacular scenes of the planet and accompanying satellites was a most amazing sight—a volcano erupting on one of the moons of Jupiter, Io, at the very moment one of the Voyager's television cameras was trained on the satellite during the fly-by. Why was this event the cause of such excitement on the part of the NASA scientists? In their view the moons of Jupiter were formed at the same time as the planet itself and are about 4.5 billion years old. Small bodies such as this particular satellite would be expected to lose the interior heat and dynamism that produces volcanic activity relatively quickly and thus would be expected to have long since become cold and inactive. The occurrence of a volcano, however, tells us that the object is still hot and geologically active in its interior.

After explaining that this was initially a problem for science, and of course neglecting to explain that it is a problem no longer, he delivers what is supposed to be his killer, knock-down argument (worth emphasising, this, because of what it shows of the nature of creation 'science' and the technique used to fool the gullible and ignorant):

How can a moon of Jupiter be so old and still so hot and active? How can a cigar burn for a year? The problem is the same, and so is the solution, however unthinkable to evolutionist scientists. Maybe Io, just like the smoldering cigar, is not so old after all.

But is it the same problem?

A burning cigar is a combustion process requiring fuel (the cigar), air (or more specifically, oxygen) and heat. Chemically, it's a process of destructive oxidation of organic matter. Once lit, the process of oxidation becomes self-sustaining when the exothermic reaction produces enough heat to keep it going. So long as there is fuel (cigar) left and a supply of oxygen the combustion will continue. When the fuel or oxygen is used up, or the reaction fails to produce enough heat to sustain itself, the process stops. The fuel will have been turned into gasses, smoke and ash or into a partly burned cigar.

The processes involved in generating geothermal heat such as in earth's core or, in this case in Io orbiting Jupiter, is not a combustion process. The problem is emphatically not the same one, to say otherwise is, not to put too fine a point on it, a lie. Whether this lie is deliberate or the result of ignorance I'll leave to you to decide. Ackerman seem not to be entirely ignorant of some of the science involved though, because earlier he had said:

Scientists have puzzled over the problem posed by the geologically active Io and have offered some possible solutions, the most favored of which is some form of gravitational "pumping" by Jupiter and its other moons"

only to wave it aside without further ado.

The crass, schoolboy howler of assuming a celestial body such as Io is hot because it is burning is almost beyond parody. If Ackerman expected his readers to fall for it then maybe that tells us something of his regard for them and their credulous naivety.

But, even if we forgive Ackerman this blunder and enter his fantasy world in which celestial bodies actually burn like cigars, there still remains one more failure of basic joined-up thinking. In fact it's so blindingly obvious you've probably got there ahead of me. If Io is still burning because it was set on fire during some recent creation event, why isn't our moon also still burning? Why have Mars and Venus 'gone out'? Why did creation 'scientists' need proper scientists to go to Jupiter to find this 'smoldering ember'?

Looks like Dr Ackerman's evidence has just vanished in a puff of cigar smoke!

Ackerman's second schoolboy howler is of course, trying to move from the particular to the general. The fact that Io is different should have been a clue. Io is different because it's situation is unique in the solar system. To draw any fundamental conclusions from it is fundamentally unscientific. It would be like trying to draw a fundamental conclusion about all creation 'scientists' based on an examination of Dr Paul D. Ackerman's writing. Not only invalid but a disservice to other creation 'scientists' who are probably perfectly capable of discrediting themselves.

Ackerman raises a couple of other points in this chapter which can also be quickly and easily debunked.

Short-lived U-236 and Th-230 isotopes found in lunar materials are taken as testimony for youth. If the moon were of great age, the short-lived isotopes would have long since decayed and thus be presently absent. Yet they are not absent, they are in relative abundance. Thus, according to this method, the age of the moon should be spoken of in terms of thousands of years, not millions or billions."

This is a good example of how creation 'scientists' take a truism and either deliberately or through ignorance draw a false conclusion from it. It works especially well on ignorant people over-eager to take whatever one of their 'scientists' says on faith and who lack the necessary critical thinking skills or motivation to see through the subterfuge.

It is perfectly true to say that there should be no trace of the original 'primordial' supply of these isotopes after 4.5 billion years. However, like the janitor's dust in the preceding chapter, they are being continually replaced. Both Thorium 230 and Uranium 236 are produced by the natural radioactive decay of Uranium 238 and the half-life of U-238 is just under 4.5 billion years. U-236 and Th-230 are both of recent origin and are continually replaced. Hence, they are not evidence of a young earth. (See this article on EvoWiki for details)

Saturn's Rings

The last claim made in this chapter concerns Saturn's rings. Ackerman says:

The same situation pertains to our discoveries about the rings of Saturn. Scientists were totally flabbergasted by the appearance of turbulence and instability in these rings. Rings that have stayed in place for 4.5 billion years should be in a very stable condition. Signs of instability and bizarre temporary physical conditions are extremely perplexing and seem to violate known and fully confirmed basic laws of physics. If, on the other hand, the rings are only a few thousand years old, there is no difficulty with known physical laws—just as a cigar that smolders for three or four minutes presents no contradictions to known physical laws.

You can read about Saturn and it's rings here. Maybe we should just credit Ackerman with complete ignorance of chaos theory and have done with it. There is, of course, no problem at all with finding emergent order in chaos. In fact, it would be astonishing if we did not do so. His point here is the equivalent of claiming earth's weather system should be entirely ordered and free from turbulence and chaos. We know the weather is chaotic and hard to forecast with much certainty and yet we can see structures like tornadoes, hurricanes, cyclones, clouds and cloud patterns, jet streams, etc emerging from it.

A Hurricane emerging from the chaos of Earth's weather system.

Here is a good article debunking Ackerman's claim. I'll just give one quote from it:

The Voyager visits to Saturn in 1980 and 1981 discovered amongst other things, the shepherd satellites embedded in the ring system (similar satellites were also found by Voyager at Uranus). Those satellites confine the much smaller ring particles, extending the possible dynamic lifetime of Saturn's rings much farther back than 100 million years, probably as far back as the 4.5 billion year age of the solar system.

What this chapter does illustrate is the crying need for peer review of these books to avoid these crass 'errors' getting into print. It's probably not too hard to work out why creation 'science' books are never peer reviewed. Words like 'balderdash', 'rubbish', 'the author appears to be ignorant of his subject - reject', etc, must be disheartening and would reduce the stock of merchandise for sale to virtually zero.

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How Creationists Lie To Us - 4

Dr Paul D. Ackerman's creationist book,It's A Young World After All, is turning out to be a real little goldmine of examples of creationists' fallacies and how creationists, either through ignorance or deliberation, mislead and misinform their credulous customers.

I've dealt with the first two chapter in earlier blogs here and here. Today I'll look at Chapter 3. It's probably worth reminding ourselves again that Dr Paul D. Ackerman is not a research scientist and has never published peer-reviewed papers on biology, physics or cosmology. He is an assistant professor of psychology. His field of expertise is the human mind and how it can be manipulated.

Chapter 3 - The Solar Janitor.

Apparently feeling very please with himself for his 'brilliant' first two chapters where he inadvertently proved that earth is very old and showed us how creation 'scientists' misrepresent the science, Ackerman ploughs on with his clock theme. Here he uses the little-known Poynting-Robertson effect and, as we've come to expect now, misrepresents the science. Again, the reason for this - ignorance or deliberation - is left for the reader to judge.

Here he is in full flight:

In the past, when almost all scientists believed that evolution was true, they had no choice on the age issue. A dedicated evolutionist cannot be open-minded on this question, because evolution absolutely requires vast amounts of time. Thus, for evolutionist scientists the question has never really been "How old is the universe?" but rather "How is the universe old?" Since they "knew" it was old, clocks had to be found and interpreted according to this "known" antiquity.

Ackerman correctly states that It turns out that the slowing effect of Poynting-Robertson is directly related to the mass of the object being considered. He uses the analogy of a 'janitor' sweeping up dust and reasons that we could tell the time from the amount of dust remaining if we knew when the janitor started work. Yes indeed we could - if only the dust wasn't constantly being replaced.

Radiation from the Sun (S) and thermal radiation from a particle seen
(a) from an observer moving with the particle and
(b) from an observer at rest with respect to the Sun.

Briefly, the Poynting-Robertson (P-R) effect is the tendency of particles orbiting the sun to have a slowly decaying orbit and so spiral into the sun. It is due to the fact that photons radiate directly outwards from the sun but, because of their motion in orbit, particles strike them at a slight angle, so they exert a slight drag. In terms of quantum mechanics, a photon absorbed by a particle gives the particle a slight increase in mass so, to conserve angular momentum, the particle needs to move into a lower orbit.

Photons of course travel at the velocity of light - 186,000 miles per second - and have almost zero mass. A particle in orbit travels very much more slowly than this - in the order of thousands of miles an hour, so the P-R effect is most noticeable for very small particles and varies greatly depending on the particle's velocity. The P-R effect also diminishes the further away from the sun you get. Particles of a few microns in diameter (that is, having a radius of a few millionths of a meter) take a few thousand years to decay from as far away as earth is from the sun to evaporation point.

However, the P-R effect is not the only influence on the orbit of particles like meteors. Radiation pressure also impinges on the orbit of small particles and is much greater than the P-R effect. Particles of about half a micron are actually pushed away from the sun.

Image of comet Holmes from the 3.6-meter Canada-France-Hawaii telescope on Mauna Kea showing the large expanding dust coma. On the left, a 'raw' image is shown, in which the brightness reflects the distribution of dust in the coma of the comet (the nucleus is in the bright, point-like region to the upper left of center). On the right is shown the same image after application of the Laplacian spatial filter, to emphasize fine structures. The white/black circular objects are background stars enhanced by the Laplacian filter.

Ackerman is also assuming that all orbiting dust particles were present at the creation of the universe, so his 'clock' was started at that point in time. We know, of course, that this is simply not true. Particles can be 'placed' in orbit in at least two other ways. They can be knocked off the surface of bodies like the moon and Mars by impact of large meteors and, much more importantly, they can also be deposited by comets. In fact most people will be familiar with the periodic meteor showers when earth's orbit passes through the remains of a comet 'tail'. Each comet will deposit a new batch of dust particles of varying size and shape every time it comes in close enough to the sun to produce a 'tail'. That is precisely what the 'tail' is. For those few people who don't know what comets are, here is an article about them.

Ackerman either doesn't know this or hopes you won't. If you did know it - and now you do - you would know that Ackerman's P-R 'clock' is being continually re-set. It's as though someone is adding more sand to the top of the egg-timer.

It is hard to credit Ackerman with ignorance on the matter of cometary re-seeding however, because he gives the game away somewhat with:

When the earth passes through one of these meteor streams, it produces the popular spectacle of a meteor shower. Of relevance to the issue of time and Poynting-Robertson is that individual chunks of material in a meteor stream vary greatly in mass. Some chunks are small, some large, and some in between. Whipple calculated that over time the various pieces of material in a given stream would be sorted out according to size by the Poynting-Robertson effect. Initially all sizes of debris would be jumbled together in the stream. But, as time went by, the smaller objects would be pulled more quickly toward the sun, with the larger objects lagging behind. After a while the meteor stream would be nicely and neatly sorted. Furthermore, the degree of the sorting and the amount of separation between objects of different sizes would provide a clock for measuring the age of the meteor stream.

Using careful photographic techniques to examine meteors burning up in the earth's atmosphere during a number of meteor showers, Whipple and his research team found no dispersion whatsoever in any of the meteor streams studied. Whipple concluded that the meteor streams studied must be quite recent in their origin.

Absolutely correct. Meteor streams are quite recent in their origins. The P-R effect will have dealt with the dust from very much earlier ones. People can sometimes see them being formed with the naked eye and astronomers with telescopes frequently do. No one claims they are as old as the solar system. Unfortunately, Ackerman seems to have chosen yet another clock which doesn't work.

Even a blind watchmaker could probably do better than this.

Ignorance or a wilful attempt at deception? The choice is yours.

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How Creationists Lie To Us - 3

Well, in an earlier blog today I wondered if it would be worth reading any more of Dr Paul D. Ackerman's on-line creationist book It's A Young World After All. I'm pleased to say it was, if for no other reason than it's given me material for another blog exposing creation 'science' and how creation 'scientists' mislead their target readership either from ignorance of the subject upon which they pretend to be expertly commenting, or by deliberation. I'll leave the readers to make up their own minds.

It might be worth recapping at this point that Dr Paul D. Ackerman is not an academic scientist at all but an assistant professor of psychology. This may shed some light on his book.

Let's look at the second chapter which is mercifully very short.

Chapter 2 - "Fossil" Meteorites

Almost laughably, given that he shot himself in the foot in his first chapter on moon dust, as I explained in my earlier blog, and ended up producing evidence for an old earth, not a young one, when he admitted the error in the data, he never-the-less starts Chapter 2 with

There is another impressive timepiece that works on exactly the same principle as the cosmic-dust clock and thus provides an important verification of a recent creation.

And, just as with his moon dust nonsense, of course, it also does nothing of the sort. The problem here though is he just doesn't know enough about the subject - geology - and so lays another egg and in so doing, draws attention to an outstanding example of the straw man fallacy and an illustration of how creation 'scientists' make liberal use of this intellectually dishonest device.

Firstly he introduces us to the idea of meteorites by explaining that they are:

...tiny cosmic-dust particles but with larger chunks of space material

and that

On a clear night these meteors are often visible as they streak across the sky. Most often such meteors are fairly small and completely burn up and disintegrate in the atmosphere before reaching the ground. However, some of them are able to survive long enough to reach the earth's surface, where they impact with tremendous force. Such bodies are then called meteorites, and they are recognizable not so much by their appearance but most importantly by their high nickel content.

Ackerman very cleverly introduced the notion of the rain gauge and how it could, if rainfall was absolutely constant, be used as a sort of clock if we know exactly the amount of rain which falls in every unit of time.

He then compares meteorites with raindrops and concludes that geological strata should act like a sort of rain gauge clock, so, by counting the number of meteorites in every unit of the geological column we should be able to tell the age of the earth. He asserts, without apparently seeing the need to justify it, that:

With the passage of vast amounts of evolutionary time, these accumulating meteorites would be incorporated into the geologic column, and there should be many of them contained in the rock layers today. Paleontologists and other scientists doing research in the geologic rock layers should frequently encounter meteorites.

One wonders if he actually knows what the land surface area of earth is, and just how many meteorites reach it in any given year.

Apart from this obvious piece of wishful thinking, if that's all it was, there are also three essential pieces of information missing:

1. He does not tell us how many meteorites on average each year we should expect to find per unit area of the earth's surface. Does he not know? How good would his rain gauge clock be if you didn't know the rate of rainfall and whether it is constant or not?
2. He neglects to mention that earth recycles it's surface over a very log geological time scale by subduction of the ocean floor at the edges of tectonic plates, volcanic action, mountain building and ice, water and wind erosion which moves the surface of the land masses eventually into the oceanic basins where it is eventually subducted into the underlying magma - the equivalent of his rain gauge clock having a leak.
3. He neglects to mention that the geological column is not built up at a constant rate over the surface of the earth - the equivalent of his rain gauge clock randomly changing shape.

Whether he neglects to mention these things through ignorance of them or because he doesn't want his readers to know about them, I'll leave you to decide.

Ackerman then concludes with an outstanding example of the straw man fallacy:

The evolution model predicts a high number of meteorites, which should turn up fairly often in geological research.

Except that it doesn't of course. Ackerman has merely set up a preposterously infantile strawman 'theory' of his own creation to throw his stones at. What he calls the 'evolution model' includes the science of plate tectonics, of land-mass formation, of a variable-rate accumulation of the geological column and constant erosion and recycling of the surface. He either doesn't know it, or he wants you to ignore all of that and believe his absurd version of the science.

He then says:

Recent-creationists, by contrast, expect a very small number of meteorites in the geologic column.

So why not tell us how many exactly and give us the results of the experiments which were designed to falsify this prediction? This is the classic creationist tactic of setting up a ludicrous and easily dismantled strawman parody of the real science and presenting his preferred notion as the only reasonable alternative. And of course, no results of any experiments which he just wants you to assume have been carried out and validate his notion.

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How Creationists Lie To Us - 2

Surface of the moon showing the first footprints

If you have a few minutes to spare it's always worth going to www.creationism.org to see what creationists are comforting themselves with these days or selling to their credulous customers.

For example, I just found their on-line version of a Creationist book by one Dr Paul D. Ackerman entitled It's A Young World After All. This book is cited by creationism.org as evidence that dinosaurs could not have gone extinct 65 million years ago but instead co-existed with humans until very recently.

Turning excitedly to this book to see this 'evidence' I found:

Chapter 1 - Moon Dust And The Question of Time

The most famous argument that creationists have raised for a recent creation has to do with the amount of dust on the moon's surface—the so-called moon-dust evidence.... A grasp of the moon-dust argument will not only provide the basis for a suspicion that things may not be so old after all, but will also prepare the reader to more readily understand the more technical evidences and arguments to follow.

So, the first paragraph of Chapter 1 sets the scene...

Pots And Kettles

Lord Carey, Former Archbishop of Canterbury

An article in today's Guardian Lord Carey is a bigger problem for British Christians than any secularist, by M.J. Robbins, prompted me to read the report on Lord Carey's whinge about Christian 'persecution' in Britain in yesterday's Daily Telegraph (a right-wing newspaper which used to be regarded as little more that the house journal of the Conservative Party).

Lord Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury and senior cleric of the Anglican 'Communion', sits by right in the unelected senior house of the bicameral British Parliament, as do several other bishops of the Anglican Church, of which the British Head Of State is also titular head. [Correction: Carey now sits in the HOL as an unelected Life Peer, not as a 'Lord Spiritual'. A life peerage is normally given to a former bishop on retirement.]

The British Head of State must, by law, be a baptised Anglican Christian and may not marry a Roman Catholic. English and Welsh marriage laws are based on Christianity and marriage in a Christian Church is recognised as a legal marriage, unlike marriage by the traditions and rites of many other religions. Our state-run schools are legally obliged to have a period of collective worship of "Wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian nature". The 'coronation' of our head of state takes place in an Anglican Cathedral and is a Christian ceremony in which the Archbishop of Canterbury ceremonially 'anoints' the monarch with sacred oil and the 'laying on of hands'. The monarch is required to take a Christian oath.

The UK parliament starts each daily session with Christian prayers and the law was recently changed to empower local authorities in England and Wales to include prayers in the order of business. This change was made by an Anglican Christian government minister without reference to the elected parliament when a court found that a local authority had exceeded its powers when it included prayers on the council meeting agenda. Non-believers who refuse to attend these prayers can now be recorded as 'late' for the meeting and these periods of 'lateness' can be published without explaining that the only agenda item missed was the prayers.

Apparently, in Lord Carey's view, "Christians are being 'persecuted' by courts and 'driven underground' in the same way that homosexuals once were" and, Lord Carey says, "worshippers are being 'vilified' by the state, treated as 'bigots' and sacked simply for expressing their beliefs."

What he neglects to say is that 'expressing their beliefs' means vilifying homosexuals and/or denying them the right to goods and services or otherwise persecuting them. It means making it difficult or uncomfortable to work alongside them as they express their bigotry or seek to deny non-Christians the same entitlement to fair treatment in provision of public services as Christians. He also neglects to say that when homosexuality was an offence and homosexuals were persecuted and driven underground, this was with the enthusiastic endorsement of the established church and that it was Carey's predecessors who led the vigorous opposition to it being decriminalised.

Carey complains that "in 'case after case' British courts have failed to protect Christian values." By this he means that British courts have upheld the principle that even Christians have to obey the law. In a give-away statement he says, "Courts in Britain have consistently applied equality law to discriminate against Christians". This is true of course. Equality means everyone is equal; that Christians are not entitled to special privilege and dispensation from the need to treat everyone equally even when they aren't Christians and even when they don't accept Christian dogma or concede to Christians the right to dictate their behaviour and legislate against them.

It might have escaped Carey's notice but British courts also discriminate against other criminals and deny the right of discontented youths to riot and loot shops; of dangerous drivers to drive dangerously; of sadists to hurt people for fun and of bank robbers to rob banks with impunity. As a civilised country, Britain has a system of laws and legal enforcement to constrain and deter antisocial behaviour and to apply appropriate sanctions to people who transgress them. Our legal system is based on the idea of equality before the law.

What Carey is complaining about is that even Christians who get paid to conduct civil marriages should be required to provide them for everyone; that Christians who get paid to arrange adoptions should provide the service equally to everyone; that Christians who run boarding houses and hotels should not discriminate against those who disagree with them.

Carey goes on to say "It affects the moral and ethical compass of the United Kingdom. Christians are excluded from many sectors of employment simply because of their beliefs; beliefs which are not contrary to the public good."

And of course what Carey is claiming here is the right for Christians to determine 'the public good'. Not our elected parliament; not our government which is accountable to our parliament; not the people themselves through their elected representatives and not the courts of law. Carey wants this power reserved for Christians and to deny them the right to dictate 'the public good' to us is discriminating against their right to tell us what to do and to decide what is good for us!

I hope he's right about the moral compass. A 'moral compass' which points back to the brutal, misogynistic Bronze Age needs 'affecting'. It needs re-focussing and, if it can't be, it's needs binning altogether. As increasingly secular Europe rejects the primitive bigotry of Christianity so we are changing our laws in favour of more civilised humanist ones. Christians are not entitled to dispensation from obeying the law. We rightly no longer stone people to death for blasphemy or burn them for heresy. We no longer kill people for having extra-marital sex or wearing mixed-fibre clothing; we no longer require attendance at church on Sunday or have compulsory tithes and we no longer expect to be ruled and governed by Christian clerics.

We have civilised and democratised our society despite the opposition of Christian Churches and we will continue so to do. The church needs to recognise that it's days are done; that it can no longer demand privilege and be allowed to operate outside the law.

Christians are more than welcome to share our secular society with us provided they comply with our civilised standards of behaviour. They are going to have to get used to the idea that they are no longer in charge and they are not even a majority; that membership of their dwindling little mutual support society is no longer a short-cut to the power and privilege they would like to reserve for themselves.

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Take Away The God You First Thought Of.

Hey! I can almost see a wood through these trees!

Here's a neat little trick. It's just like the one religious apologists often play on their audience:

Think of a number, any number. Don't tell me.... (Keep it small to make it easy for yourself in a moment)

Double it.

Now add 10 to the answer.

Now halve the result.

And take away the number you first thought of.

Now, you're probably wondering how I know the result was 5. (If it's not, go back and check your math because you've made a mistake.)

You see the trick here is to be in control of your thoughts. I told you what to think and what to do, so I controlled your conclusion. In fact I started with the answer and worked back from there.

When religious apologists and theologians try to construct a seemingly logical argument for their particular god - any god, it works for them all - they start off with the conclusion that their god exists and work backwards from there.

They then construct an argument about, say, the origin of the universe, or life on earth, or human morals, or the laws of physics - almost anything will do but if it's something really hard which only people who've bothered to learn about will understand, so much the better because that makes it easier to bamboozle you - and include their god in the explanation.

Then they tell you this is the only way to explain whatever it is, and, because their explanation has their god in it, it must prove their god exists. It's called circular reasoning - a logical fallacy - but apologists normally use these tricks.

But, as dear old William of Occam explained, unless a step adds anything essential to an argument it should be pared away with his trusty razor, because the chances are that the least complicated argument is the one most likely to be true. So, fitting a god somewhere in an explanation simply because you want it to be there adds nothing to the explanation and just complicates it unnecessarily. In fact, it adds an almost infinitely complicated step and turns what may well have been a perfectly satisfactory, uncomplicated one into an infinitely complex one.

Of course, religious apologists and theologians dance around the fact that any explanation with a god in it needs to explain the god - what it does, how it did it, where it came from and, most importantly, why the explanation won't work without it.

There's the explanation. It has my god in it. QED. My god exists (and if you can't understand my very clever argument, you're too stupid to - isn't that right very clever audience? [Applause]). Copies of my books are available in the foyer.

Nice work if you can get it.

Of course, their explanation is no different in principle from drawing a picture of a god on a piece of paper and then telling you the picture proves the god exists. But you'd never fall for that one would you... unless the 'picture' is drawn in words in a book.

If only they would take away the god they first thought of they, and you, would see that the answer is zero. They haven't proved a god exists; they've only proved they can fit a god into their explanation... and fool people with it.

By the way, if you're still wondering how I knew what you were thinking, the answer is always half the number you told them to add halfway through the trick. What they start with is irrelevant. I didn't know what you were thinking. I made you think what I was thinking. I could just have told you to divide 10 by 2 but you'd have seen through that trick. See if you can spot these tricks the next time you see a religious apologist fleecing his victims earning his living by helping believers cope with the cognitive dissonance reality keeps causing.

Do you want to buy a bridge? I have a photograph of it to prove it's mine.

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Religion: An Abdication Of Moral Responsibility.

Artist's impression - Australopithecus africanus with child

Jose Garcia and Joannes-Boyau

Artist's impression Australopithecus africanus

Zdenek Burian/Getty Images

Why are the religious right so keen to persuade us that morality comes from gods?

I've already written in Xeno's Religious Paradox about how this notion is simply untenable and leads to conclusions not supported by reality. The plain fact of the matter is that human morality is more of an argument against gods than it is for them.

Let's go back to the plains of East Africa to the early childhood of mankind; to a time when our ancestors had moved out of the forests (or maybe due to climate change, the forests had moved away from our ancestors).

Suspended By Twitter

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Come And Watch David Barton Lying For Jesus

When you know you need to lie for your faith, you know your faith is a lie.

Here's an example of someone using people's ignorance both of the Bible and of the American Constitution in order to lay claim to the Constitution for the Christian right and so subvert the very Constitution he claims to be Christian.

David Barton makes two very precise and specific claims which we can check.

• "Article 3 Section 1 (The Treason Clause) - a direct quote out of the Bible" (but he gives no Bible reference).
• "Article 2 - the President has to be a native born - that is Deuteronomy 17:15 verbatim".

Let's check:

Why Should I Not Be An Atheist?

Okay, here's your big chance. Tell me why I should not be an Atheist.

You see, I'm an Atheist because I have no reason not to be. Atheism is simply the default state in the absence of any reason to believe in a god. From the time at the age of nine, when I realised there was no more reason to believe in the locally popular god than there was to believe in any other god, I realised I had no reason to believe in the locally popular god either. Being an Atheist wasn't a conscious decision; being an Atheist is simply the consequence of not having any reason not to be one.

Now, you can change all that. All you have to do is to tell me what it is that convinces you that there is a god and what convinces you that it is your particular god. This has to be something I can verify for myself so don't just expect me to take your word for it. I never took the word of my parent's, my grandfather, my uncles and aunts, the local vicar, the headmaster of my school, my close Muslim friend, my Christian fundamentalist work colleague or of my devoutly Catholic assistant when I was a departmental manager, so I won't take your word for it either.

Just a few things to remember, though:

Memories Of The Alhambra

The second in a series looking at some of my favourite music and showing how they represent a hybridization of different cultures resulting in a thing of great beauty.

Here I look at a wonderful piece of classical Spanish music written in 1896 for the guitar by Francisco Tárrega called Recuerdos de la Alhambra (Memories of the Alhambra). This, more than any other piece of music, is the one I want played at the celebration of my life after it has ended and my body have been suitably recycled.

This music was inspired by the Moorish Alhambra Palace in Grenada, Spain. If you have never been there, go. It is one of the world's most beautiful and tranquil places, spoiled only slightly by a lumpen and ugly Christian building plonked triumphantly in the middle of the gardens by the conquering Catholic King Carlos V as a act of pure vandalism.

It Could Never Happen To Us - Zombies Controlled By A Parasite.

The fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis has a macabre life-cycle. It infects carpenter ants and takes over their brains, controlling their behaviour so that they leave the colony and find a leaf at the right height, temperature and humidity in the forest canopy. There they crawl round to the under-side and bite into the central vein. Then they are killed by the fungus which has been consuming their body.

The fungus then sprouts a fruiting body from the head of the ant and releases spores which fall to the forest floor to infect other foraging ants. The bite mark on leaves heals to leave a characteristic dumbbell-shaped mark on the underside of the leaf. These characteristic marks have been found on 28 million-year old fossil leaves from Germany, so this parasite had evolved at least 28 million years ago, even before the Himalayan Mountains had formed.

It's not just fungi that can perform this trick either. A parasitic flatworm called Dicrocoelium dendriticum does a similar thing. I'll let Oatmeal explain it.

The video on the left shows this behaviour in the unfortunate ants.

So, that's fungi and flatworms which can perform this trick. How about other classes of parasite?

Here we have a genus of barnacles, Sacculina, consisting of nine species, which take over the bodies of crabs and use them not to produce more crabs, but to produce more barnacles. Male crabs are even 'turned into' females by these parasites. The infected crabs go through the same motions they would perform when laying eggs to ensure their widest possible distribution, except that they don't lay eggs; they 'lay' barnacle lava.

Now, I'm not going to ask the obvious question here about why any compassionate intelligent designer would go to the trouble of creating these parasites which seem to serve no useful purpose other than to create more copies of themselves, and which give nothing back to the hosts they mercilessly parasitise. That would be too easy a point to score.

What I'm going to speculate on is whether another form of parasite can take over its hosts brain and use it not for the benefit of the host but for the benefit of the parasite. Could it happen to us? Remember, when considering organisms like parasites we are thinking about collections of replicators called genes which act together to build a machine for replicating themselves. This machine is the object we think of as an organism.

But why should this principle be confined to the objects produced by genes to replicate themselves? Why should it not also apply to other replicators like the memes which build cultures? Memes are units of cultural inheritance just as genes are units of genetic inheritance. Our cultures are meme machines built by memes to replicate memes. Through a combination of meme-gene coevolution we have arrived at where we are today - a cultural, civilised, ape with culturally evolved ethics and morals which enable us to work cooperatively together, at least within our local grouping.

What if a parasite could evolve the ability to take over this meme machine to produce more copies of itself by controlling the behaviour, beliefs, attitudes and even the ethics and morality of its hosts, not for the benefit of its hosts but for its own selfish ends? Indeed, in a Darwinian competitive environment where the only relevant test of fitness is the ability to produce the most copies, how else could such a parasite evolve? It is bound to evolve in a way which makes it better at controlling its host.

Apart from the possibility that the parasite has taken over even the rational thought processes of its victims, making them distrust evidence and even being afraid to consider it, it's hard to see why we don't regard religion as an example of just such a parasite. A combination of fear of a watching invisible thug and the hope of life after death for those afraid of it, seems to have done the trick. Protection from a non-existent threat and a promise which can never be delivered. Some reward for using our body and mind and taking away our freedom and independence, eh?

Yes, it could happen to us and very probably has.

The question now is whether we can rid ourselves of this malignant parasite and protect our children against infection by it. Probably the hardest part will be convincing its victims that they have been infected because, to them, just like the ants and crabs, it must feel entirely normal, otherwise the parasite wouldn't be in control.

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Simple Gifts

It might surprise readers of this blog and my followers on Twitter, but one of my favourite pieces of music, amongst many, is Aaron Copeland's arrangement of 'Simple Gifts', 'Variations on a Shaker Melody' from his score for Martha Graham's ballet, 'Appalachian Spring'.

As an aside: it's amusing that the title to the ballet was decided on after he wrote the score. It was taken from a poem by Hart Crane yet many people say how well it evokes the spirit of Spring in the Appalachian Mountains. This is even more amusing when you realise that the term 'Appalachian Spring' in Crane's poem referred to a water source, not the season.

Ah well! Such is the nature of human perception.

Anyway, what I was intending to talk about is the beautiful simplicity in Shaker artefacts and how they came about. To me, 'Simple Gifts' somehow captures this both in its words and in the beautiful simplicity of the tune. The words and music were written by Elder Joseph Brackett (1797-1882).

The basic philosophy is that a thing made with love is a thing of beauty and needs no adornment. The beauty lies in the application of skill and the fitness of form. The lily needs no gilding. Of course, the belief that skill is a gift from God is central to this philosophy but that's not what I'm talking about here.

What I'm talking about is the idea of simplicity itself and how this came into Christianity. The truth may surprise many Christians. It came from Islam.

The Old Testament forbids the making of graven images in the second of the so-called 'Ten Commandments'. This expressly forbids the making of "any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth" (Exodus 20:1-17). This is normally completely ignore by even the most fundamentalist of Christians unless it suits them to condemn some image or other. However, the same proscription is found in Islam, where it is taken very seriously.

Islamic cultures tend to be free of figurative art, using only abstract designs and only occasionally plant-based designs and then in a highly stylised form. Wonderful buildings like the Sultan Ahmed Mosque (The Blue Mosque) in Istanbul and the Alhambra in Grenada, Spain are decorated entirely in abstract designs or Koranic verses.

Contrast this to the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the former Byzantine Orthodox Christian Church of Saint Sophia which stands opposite the Sultan Ahmed Mosque and was decorated in images and icons of saints which were plastered over when it became a Mosque but have since been uncovered and restored as a museum.

Still today Orthodox Churches of both Greek and Russian traditions are richly adorned with icons and statues as are to a lesser extent Catholic Churches. However, there was a period when the Catholic Church became Iconoclastic and some see this as the fundamental difference between Roman and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Iconoclasm - the act of breaking or destroying icons - was influenced by Islam when it became the dominant force throughout the Middle East including former Christian strongholds like Damascus, Jerusalem, Alexandria and then Constantinople.

As the Catholic Encyclopedia admits, in an article on iconoclasm on the question of Islamic influence, "It is true that, in a sense, the Khalifa at Damascus began the whole disturbance, and that the Iconoclast emperors were warmly applauded and encouraged in their campaign by their rivals at Damascus." So, influenced by Islam, the Catholic Church briefly became Iconoclastic and a movement against icons entered Western Christianity.

Later, following the Protestant Reformation, with its fundamentalist offshoots like Calvinism, this move against graven images in churches was taken to extremes, emphasising as it does a fundamental difference between Protestantism and Catholicism, so that in England and Calvinist Scotland, especially following the Parliamentarian victory in the civil war, led by the Protestant Puritan Oliver Cromwell, almost all churches were stripped bare of any adornment with even crucifixes, stone crosses and stained-glass windows being destroyed in an iconoclastic fervour.

This resulted in the stark simplicity now found in most English country churches with bare stone or plastered and white-washed walls and bare or brown wood. The same can be found in Methodist and Baptist chapels. Ornamentation is normally now only found in minster churches and cathedrals and nothing on the scale of even the smaller Catholic and Orthodox churches where, to someone like me, brought up in the austere Protestant tradition, the churches appear vulgar and almost obscenely ostentatious. To a secular humanist though, this reaction has nothing to do with blasphemy and blind obedience to the capricious whim of gods, but to the thought of the good that could have been done had the money spent on this ornamentation been spent where it could have done something useful.

And of course, this austerity and stark yet beautiful simplicity reached its most developed and purest form in the Shaker tradition of simplicity of form, in furniture and buildings and in tunes like Simple Gifts, an example of evolution of culture through cross-fertilisation.

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One Step At A Time

Were Jews ever really slaves in Egypt, or is Passover a myth? - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News

Reading the above excellent article by Josh Mintz who describes himself as a Jewish World Blogger, it reminded me of a metaphor Richard Dawkins used in one of his books concerning his disagreement with Stephen Jay Gould about Gould's Punctuated Equilibrium theory of how evolution progresses.

As this article points out, there is absolutely no archaeological evidence to support the story of the escape of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt and, more relevantly for Dawkins' metaphor, none at all to support the story that they wandered about in Sinai, taking forty years to cross it to reach 'the promised land'.

So, what has this got to do with Gould's 'Punctuated Equilibrium'?

Gould had suggested, following his study of the Burgess Shale fossils, that evolution did not proceed by a gradual accumulation of small changes over a long time but that species had long periods of stasis, followed by periods of rapid - in geological time almost instantaneous - change. He called this 'Punctuated Equilibrium' and relied almost entirely on fossil evidence to support it.

The fossil record is inevitably rarely better than a series of randomly spaced snap-shots of the organism's evolutionary history and in any case, there is nothing in Darwinian evolutionary theory which requires a species to evolve at a constant rate. Indeed, if the environment remains unchanged for a long period there is nothing to drive evolutionary change apart from genetic drift. (I have previously blogged in Show Me The Transitional Forms on how the fossil record can give a misleading picture of evolution.)

Dawkins illustrated this with the biblical story of the Hebrews wandering about in Sinai and taking forty years to cross it. Supposing there had been some archaeological evidence that they had camped over-night or for a few days, built camp-fires and cooked food (so leaving wood ash and maybe the bones of the animals they had eaten) and buried their dead. What would archaeologists make of these finds, scattered as they would have been with several miles between them and not even progressing in any particular direction?

Supposing they had found these artefacts and had been able to date them accurately. Would any rational archaeologist suggest that they proved the Hebrews stood still for a long time and then jumped in one huge stride to the next camp-site? Would they conclude that they had proved that the Hebrews had not walked across Sinai one step at a time but had used some other novel form of locomotion involving flight or teleportation?

Of course not. Mind you, that would explain why they walked for 40 years yet had no obvious material or opportunity to make new shoes to replace old, worn-out ones, but that's another matter.

Why then conclude from a snap-shot of evidence of a species evolution that it had not progressed one step at a time but had used some other form of evolution? With no obvious mechanism by which this could be accomplished, and when the Darwinian idea of accumulating small change is perfectly adequate, why insert a hypothetical mechanism for what appeared to be nothing more than a desire to come up with a different theory of evolution?

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What? No Afterlife? Is God A Nihilist?

Browsing my trusty KJV Bible today I came across the following astonishing passages - well, astonishing that is to anyone who believes that the god of the Bible gives their life purpose and reason and promises an eternity in Heaven (or Hell):

So I reflected on all this and concluded that the righteous and the wise and what they do are in God’s hands, but no one knows whether love or hate awaits them.

All share a common destiny—the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean, those who offer sacrifices and those who do not.

As it is with the good, so with the sinful; as it is with those who take oaths, so with those who are afraid to take them.

This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun: The same destiny overtakes all. The hearts of people, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live, and afterward they join the dead. Anyone who is among the living has hope — even a live dog is better off than a dead lion!

For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even their name is forgotten.

Ecclesiastes 9:1-5:

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Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.

And doth thou open thine eyes upon such an one, and bringest me into judgment with thee? Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one.

Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months are with thee, thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass; Turn from him, that he may rest, till he shall accomplish, as an hireling, his day. For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; Yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant.

But man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up: So man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep.

Job 14:1-12:

Blimey! So God tells us in his inerrant book that there is no afterlife and it doesn't matter what you do in life, it'll all count for nothing in the end! No purpose and no meaning to life whatsoever. What a forlornly depressing thought, unless you find a purpose for it yourself and so give your own life meaning...

It's a pig. In a poke! On my life! Would I lie to you?

Talk about Nihilism.

Where on earth did all the later stuff about Heaven and Hell and having a grandstand seat to watch everyone who disagrees with you suffering in eternal agony for that heinous crime come from? Surely it can't have been made up to give sanctimoniously self-righteous people something to look forward to, or so preachers could pretend to be selling us something useful, like a pig in a poke, could it?

Mind you, it was a master stroke any snake-oil salesman would have been proud of: it'll only work after you're dead - when it'll be too late to come looking for me, even if you are aware of the con, which you won't be, according to Ecclesiastes 9:5.

Still, at least the Bible has nailed that lie and agrees with Atheists, eh?

So, it looks like the only thing left is to do what Atheists and Humanists advocate - enjoy life, live it to the full and try to leave earth a little better than the way you found it. No ambition could be more noble and worthwhile than that modest ambition.

It's probably easy to work out why this is never taught in Sunday-school or preached about from any pulpit.

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How? A Simple Easter Question For True Christians.

Christian god being sacrificed to itself

As Christians in the West celebrate the execution of an incarnation of their god in a strange fusion of the Jewish Passover and various Middle Eastern and European pagan spring/fertility festivals which they call Easter, something which is celebrated on a different date in the Eastern version of the Christian superstitious cult, it's maybe worth asking them once again a simple question to which they never seem to be able to give an answer.

The sacrifice of this legendary incarnation of their god was supposedly an act of atonement for something some legendary remote ancestors supposedly did, and for which their god had arbitrarily and apparently capriciously, and against any notion of natural justice, decreed us all to be responsible.

The legend goes that, although believed to be omnipotent, the Christian god lacked the power to remove this designation of guilt until it was empowered to so do by a blood sacrifice of an innocent human being. The problem was, having decreed us all to be guilty, the only way this god could think of to get an innocent human being to sacrifice to itself was to pretend to be one and have itself symbolically sacrificed because none of the humans measured up, by definition.

So the Christian festival of Easter is the celebration of this god having itself, as a simulacrum of a human being, sacrificed to itself, so it could acquire the power to remove this assigned guilt from us. Since this is perhaps the central tenet of the Christian superstition, I can't see this being a question any true Christian will have any problem answering.

The question is: how? How did this blood sacrifice empower an already all-powerful god and why was it unable to remove the arbitrary designation of guilt which it had itself imposed, without one.

(Note. An assertion that it did does not explain how it did it.)