Religion in USA - The Decline Accelerates

In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace | Pew Research Center

This Pew Research survey passed under my radar last December, but it shows just how far the growing rejection of religion in the USA has progressed as the USA catches up with Europe in its rejection of organised religious superstition in favour of secularism and rational thought.

As usual with these surveys, the news is relentlessly dreadful for organised religions, with few if any crumbs of comfort, other than that the religiously affiliated are still an absolute majority, albeit a majority which will inevitably disappear within a generation.

The religious landscape of the United States continues to change at a rapid clip. In Pew Research Center telephone surveys conducted in 2018 and 2019, 65% of American adults describe themselves as Christians when asked about their religion, down 12 percentage points over the past decade. Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated share of the population, consisting of people who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” now stands at 26%, up from 17% in 2009.

Catholic Child Abuse News - Duluth Bishop-Elect Resigns

Father Michel J. Mulloy

Father Michel J. Mulloy Resigns Weeks Before Becoming Bishop of Duluth - The New York Times

The person chosen by Pope Francis to become Bishop of Duluth, Minnesota, Father Michel J. Mulloy, has resigned before taking up the post, amid allegations that he sexually abused a minor in Rapid City, in the early 1980s.

Father Mulloy, a South Dakota native, was ordained in 1979, according to a post on the website of the Diocese of Sioux Falls announcing his appointment as a bishop. His first assignment was at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Rapid City from 1979 to 1981. He was then assigned to Christ the King Parish in Sioux Falls and held positions at several other parishes in South Dakota during the 1980s.

How the Frontier Mentality Evolved

Man in a cowboy hat atop Humphreys Peak in Arizona, US

Credit: Todd Diemer

‘Wild West’ mentality lingers in US mountain regions | University of Cambridge

The American 'Frontier' mentality, closely associated with fundamentalist religiosity and Creationism, evolved by a classic Darwinian 'advancing wave' process, according to research by a team from Cambridge University and published yesterday in Nature Human Behaviour.

The team were looking specifically at a possible correlation between a personality type that fits with 'frontier settlement theory' and topography (elevation in relation to the surrounding region).

Catholic Abuse News - Pope Ratzinger's German Connection

Msg Christoph Kühn

Msg Christoph Kühn,
Sexual predator and friend of Pope Benedict XVI

Homosexual abuse scandal and cover-up during Benedict’s pontificate shakes Vatican  | News | LifeSite

Another scandal of sexual predation amongst senior Catholic priests is breaking - this time centered around a German priest and favourite of Pope Benedict XVI and involving forced sex with junior priests, inside the Vatican itself!

According to this report in LifeSite News, Monsignor Florian Kolfhaus and a second man – a former priest - both allege that then-senior official in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, Monsignor Christoph Kühn, violently compelled them into sexual masochistic acts.

According to LifeSite:

Kolfhaus first lodged a complaint against Kühn at the Vatican in 2006. He testifies that his abuse took place inside the offices of the Secretariat of State, as well as inside the Casa Santa Marta, a residence for Vatican prelates.

But it appears no formal investigation was launched until 2019, in spite of the fact that the Report of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, Delegate for the Pontifical Representations, was presented to the Superiors of the Secretariat of State on July 3, 2006.

The other priest has since become laicized and is now a practicing homosexual and LGBT activist. He has given his testimony for the Kolfhaus complaint that is currently underway in Germany.

Christian Fruitloops for Racism

Bishop Aubrey Shines

Clergy of Color tell Nike: ‘Stop supporting anti-Christian BLM’ | Barry Duke

A small bunch of extreme right clergy, calling themselves the Conservative Clergy of Color, which would probably be more accurate if spelled with capital 'K's, has intervened in the Black Lives Matter campaign, on the side of those who argue that black lives don't matter.

It started when, in a rare display of unity of cause in the highly competative trainer and sportswear industry, Nike and Adidas put their differences aside and came out in suport of the BLM campaign. Adidas then followed up with a heart emoji and by posting Nike's video on their Instagram story.

Malevolent Designer News - How Dodder Eavesdrops on its Host

Dodder, Cuscuta australis, on a soybean host plant: The parasite is flowering and has already produced seed capsules. It uses its host’s flowering signal for flower formation.

Photo credit: Jingxiong Zhang,
Kunming Institute of Botany,
Chinese Academy of Sciences

Dodder uses the flowering signal of its host plant to flower | Max Planck Institute
for Chemical Ecology.

Not content with designing a parasitic plant that steals nutrients and water from its host, Creationism's putative intelligent [sic] designer has designed dodder to steal their hormones too!

To the embarrassment of creationists this redesign appears to have involved a loss of genetic information too - something they say can't result in an increase in information or be beneficial to the organism. The latest dictat from the Discovery Institute, following the abysmal failure of the Intelligent Design hoax, is that all genetic change must be presented as 'genetic entropy' and 'devolution' from an initial perfect creation, so it can be presented as consistent with the Bible and Michael J. Behe's latest book.

Another Missing Link is Good News and Bad News for Creationists

The enzyme rubisco is found in all plants and other photosynthesizing organisms. It plays a key role in fixing carbon from the air and has helped shape life on Earth. Now researchers at UC Davis, UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab have identified a new version of rubisco from environmental microorganisms dating back billions of years.

Credit: Getty Images

Study Finds Missing Link in the Evolutionary History of Carbon-Fixing Protein Rubisco | UC Davis.

Scientists at University of California, Davis have discovered another of these 'missing link' things that keep turning out to be not missing at all, but just not found until now. And it's good news and bad news for Creationists.

The good news is that it lets their putative creator god off the hook for designing what must be one of the worst examples of inept design in all of nature - the ubiquitous enzyme, found in all photosynthetic organisms, form I RuBisCo. The bad news is that it shows how form I RubisCo is the result of an evolutionary process and of course, it's another one of those pesky 'missing links' that are not supposed to be there if creationist dogma is correct.

Malevolent Designer News - Making Zika Even Worse

A child participating in a longitudinal cohort study of mosquito-borne illness in Managua, Nicaragua, submits an annual blood sample. In a new study, the research team reports that children who have antibodies to the Zika virus are more susceptible to getting sick with dengue.

Photo: by Paolo Harris Paz

Prior Zika virus infection increases risk of severe dengue disease | Berkeley News

Exciting news today for advocates of Intelligent [sic] design, from the University of California, Berkeley! Researchers there, led by Leah C. Katzelnick have discovered that people who have had the Zika Virus (ZIKV) and developed immunity to it, are more vulnerable to developing dengue disease later on. Dengue is caused by a viruses which are closely related to ZIKV.

This finding came from examining two cohorts of Nicaraguan children who lived through the Zikavirus epidemic of 2016 and a dengue epidemic of 2019. It conformed what had long been suspected - that some antibodies to ZIKV interact with the dengue virus to make the infection worse. The team's findings were published a couple of days ago in Science, regrettably behind a paywall. However, the Berkeley News article by Kara Manke has the details:

Covidiots - We've Got'em Too

Pastor David Hathaway. Self-proclaimed evangelist, faith-healer and fantatical Europhobe.

UK evangelist: ‘Only prayer can deliver us from the Covid-19 crisis’ | Barry Duke

Just to show that America is not the only country to have Covidiot Christian fruitloops, self-proclaimed evangelist, faith-healer and fanatical Brexiteer, David Hathaway of the UK, has announced that it's not medical science that will finally defeat the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, but magic spells!

Appropriately, this piece of covidiocy comes soon after news that the term 'covidiot' has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary.

He has launched a petition to instruct PM Boris Johnson to hold a national day of prayer to cure Covid-19. In his petition he claims it was prayer, not the flotilla of little ships, that rescued 300,000 stranded soldiers off the Dunkirk beach, and it was prayer, not the British, Commonwealth and Polish airmen who beat the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain and it was prayer, not the sacrifice of millions of young men in the killing fields of Europe that defeated Germany in WWI.

After that repugnant dismissal of the sacrifice of so many innocent young lives, is it any wonder that Hathaway has no qualms about minimising the efforts of medical science and the health services? It goes without saying, that it is not the medical staff of the NHS who are treating victims of the virus, but God who is saving them because of his prayers.

And it won't be the efforts of millions of scientists which eventually defeats Covid-19 but Hathaway's prayers!

Bad News for Creationism - Another 'Missing' Fossil Found

Left: Artist's impression of Gyaltsenglossus senis. Right: The fossil as it appears in the Burgess shale.

Illustration: Emily S. Damstra
Both images © Royal Ontario Museum

A Bizarre Half Billion-Year Old Worm with Tentacles Solves Evolutionary Mystery | Royal Ontario Museum

You know all those 'missing links' that much of creationism is based on but which turn up regularly in the fossil record?

Well, science has only gone and found yet another one!

This one, which the scientists have named Gyaltsenglossus senis (pronounced Gen-zay-gloss-us senis), turned up in the Burgess shales in the Canadian Rockies, famous for containing the soft-bodied 'Cambrian Explosion' fossils. It closes a gap in the record between two main branches of a group known as the hemichordates, exactly as predicted by the TOE. It was discovered by scientists from at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and the University of Montreal. The team published their work recently in Current Biology, sadly behind an expensive paywall. However the Royal Ontario Museum press release gives the details and explains the significance of this find:

Talibangelical News: "Vote Trump or Else..."

Jim Bakker, dog-whistle signals

Televangelist Jim Bakker: If Trump Loses, “We’re Gonna Have a Revolution” | Hemant Mehta | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

A note of desperation is creeping into Talibangelical Christian extreme right circles as the polls are increasingly predicting a Biden win in November, reversing all the progress they have made towards their dream of a Christian Taliban-style fundamentalist theocracy in America.

Talibangelical News - God's GOP Nut Jobs

Jo Rae Perkins, God's GOP Candidate

GOP Senate Candidate: Years Ago, in a Hotel Room, God Told Me to Run for Office | Hemant Mehta | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

Few people illustrate the penetration of the extreme, Talibangelical Christian takeover of the once respectable Republican Party than Jo Rae Perkins, the no-hope GOP candidate for rock-solid Democrat Oregon - Merkley.

Perkins is a fully signed-up "QAnon" conspiracy theorist nutter - as are a growing number of GOP politicians, and apparently, hears voices in her head. She claims God came into her hotel room one evening, after a business dinner (some dinner!), and told her he wanted her to become a Senator. Apart from her own conceit and self-proclaimed special, personal relationship with God, there appears to be no reason in her record for God to want her in the Senate particularly.

Consternation and Shock as Detroit Priest Casts the Wrong Magic Spell

Rev. Matthew Hood. The wrong magic spells!

Invalid baptism of Dearborn priest results in invalid sacraments

LOL! You couldn't make this up!

30 years ago Matthew Hood was baptised into the Catholic Church and, having graduated from the Sacred Heart Major Seminary in 2017, subsequently became an ordained Catholic priest, empowered to carry out the rituals of baptism and marriage. Since July he has been serving as an associate pastor of St. Lawrence Parish in Utica and at Divine Child in Dearborn since 2017.

But there was a hitch!

Christian Hypocrisy News - The Falwells and Sex With a Pool Boy

Jerry Falwell Jr.

Business partner of Falwells says he had affair with the power couple

According to Reuters, 29 year-old Giancarlo Granda is claiming he had a sexual relationship with Jerry Falwell Jr. and his wife Becki. Jerry Jr., is the son of the late prominent, influential evangelical Christian, Jerry Falwell and was formerly president of Liberty University, an evangelical Bible college highly influential in conservative Christian circles. He is also a close ally of Donald Trump.

The scandal reveals the stinking hypocrisy festering at the heart of American evangelical Christianity in it's cosy alliance with the extreme Republican right in American politics, where any pretense of sexual morality or financial probity has been abandoned.

Grand Canyon Footprints Refute YEC Claim

Manakacha Trackway

Photo credit: Stephen Rowland

Cliff Collapse Reveals 313-million-year-old Fossil Footprints in Grand Canyon National Park - Grand Canyon National Park (U.S. National Park Service)

Another terrible day for creationists as another dogma collapses like a house built by fools on sand.

Their problem is that new evidence, revealed by chance by the collapse of a cliff in the Grand Canyon, proves beyond doubt that their notion of the Grand Canyon being built by rushing flood-waters during Noah's Flood, is wrong and geologists are right. The strata revealed by the canyon are not the result of sediment deposited by this supposed flood and nor was the canyon formed by a raging torrent as ther flood water 'ran off' (presumably over the edge of the flat Earth!).

Dead Bishop Refutes The Fall!

Bishop Peder Jensen Winstrup of Lund (30 April 1605 – 28 December 1679)

Remains of 17th Century Bishop Support Neolithic Emergence of Tuberculosis | Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History

Ask a creationist to explain parasitic organisms such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis that causes tuberculosis and they almost invariably blame the Bronze Age myth of 'The Fall' when, so they claim, 'sin' entered the world and everything began to go down-hill from then on.

Apparently, they can live with the idea that there is some other creator creating nasty things that their 'omnipotent', omnibenevolent god is powerless to control . But contradictory and mutually-exclusive beliefs rarely cause creationists a problem that a wave of the hand and a blind eye can't solve.

This however, is a little more of a problem for them. Scientists examining the long-dead body of the former Bishop Peder Jensen Winstrup of Lund, Sweden, have found evidence of tuberculosis and (more importantly) shown that the organism was around in the Neolithic - way before the supposed 'Fall'!

The Bible, for instance, clearly refers to Adam toiling in fields, which places the myth firmly in a society which had invented agriculture - unknown in the Neolithic. There is certainly no suggestion that Adam & Eve used stone tools.

Science Refutes Creationism Without Even Trying - Again!

Australian lungfish, Neoceratodus forsteri

Photo credit: Mitch Ames - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
Source:Wikipedia

Lungfish fins reveal how limbs evolved | News in detail | Current announcements | News and media | University | University of Konstanz.

Once again, science has managed to comprehensively refute creationism and confirm evolution without even trying!

This time, they showed how the tetrapod limb evolved out of the fin of an ancestor of the Australian lungfish, Neoceratodus forsteri.

We know from fossils such as Tiktaalik that tetrapods first emerged from water as air-breathing, lobe-finned fish, but the evidence that the archetypal terrestrial vertebrate limb, with five digits, evolved from the fin of a lobe-finned fish was difficult to find. Now, an international team of researchers from the University of Konstanz (Germany), Macquarie University in Sydney (Australia) and the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn in Naples (Italy) have shown that the embryo of the Australian lungfish, a descendant of the Sarcopterygian group of lobe-finned fish that closely resembles the fish that were around when the transition from aquatic to terrestrial vertebrates occurred, already has a 'hand' that goes on to develop into a fin.

The team published their findings in Science Advances a couple of days ago:

Early Humans Used Fire and Made Grass Beds 200,000 Years Ago

Border Cave, South Africa

2020-08 - 200 000 years ago, humans preferred to kip cozy - Wits University

Here's the sort of problem for Young Earth Creationists that they have to dismiss every day in order to avoid changing their minds.

Despite their belief in the recent origins of humans and their belief in the childish tale of Noah's Ark and a global flood, there is evidence from South Africa that humans lived in a cave and used grass as bedding, and this evidence was not washed away in a catastrophic flood which, if it was anything like the one YECs believe in, would have scoured the cave clean of this evidence.

Jesus Army Cult of Sexual, Physical and Psychological Abuse.

Left to right, Mike Farrant, Huw Lewis, Ian Callard, John Campbell and Mick Haines.
The 'Apostolic Five'.

Jesus Army abuse 'covered-up by church leaders', report claims - BBC News

The Northampton-based, child-abusing Jesus Army that I wrote about in May, 2019, is in the news again.

According to this BBC report, the five surviving members of the now-disbanded Jesus Army cult were found to have colluded with sexual offenders by the way they handled complaints. This was the finding of an inquiry commissioned by the cult itself in 2017 when it decided to disband after a haemorrhage of members due to a deluge of complaints of sexual, physical and psychological abuse by the cult's leaders.

Ten people from the cult have since been convicted of sex offences.

Beneficial Mutations - Another Creationist Howler

Male brown howler, Alouatta guariba clamitans

Photo credit: Ilaria Agostini

Mutations may have saved brown howlers from yellow fever virus | @theU

Until 2007 El Parque El Piñalito in the Misiones province in northeastern Argentina, had low density, but healthy populations of two howler monkeys - the brown, Alouatta guariba clamitans, and the black and gold, A. caraya. Then they both started to die and by 2009 they were almost extinct.

The cause was the yellow fever virus, transmitted by mosquitoes. Yellow fever was introduced by slave traders from Africa to South and Central America. Increased logging and habitat destruction has also brought the howler monkeys into closer proximity to humans, increasing the risk of howler monkeys catching the virus from humans.

Ilaria Agostini, who has been studying the monkeys since 2005 also noticed that a few brown howlers had survived, seemingly resistant to the virus. In 2014 Nicole Torosi, postdoctoral researcher at Rutgers University and then a doctoral student at the University of Utah joined Ilaria Agostini to search for surviving Howlers. They found nine brown howlers and two black and gold howlers.

Black and Gold Howlers, A. caraya

Torisini and colleagues then sequenced the DNA from the livers of specimens which died of yellow fever, and from the faeces of the survivors, to look for genetic differences that might have helped the browns survive better than the black and gold howlers.