Another Catholic Cardinal - Another Catholic Abuse Scandal

Cardinal Donald Wuerl.

Donald Wuerl, DC archbishop, resigns over clerical sex abuse crisis - Vox

In what must be one of the slowest resignations on record, Pope Francis has belatedly accepted the resignation of the most senior American Catholic cleric to be embroiled in sexual abuse and cover-up scandals, Cardinal Wuerl, former Bishop then Archbishop of Pittsburgh, PA and later Archbishop of Washington DC.

Wuerl was accused in the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report into Catholic clerical sexual abuse in the state of being complicit in allowing sexual abuse of young seminarians and minors by Cardinal McCarrick to continue and of simply reshuffling priests accused of abuses to other parishes, where they could continue to abuse children and have access to vulnerable people in a congregation unaware of their predilections and past activities.

Lessons From Catalonia - Miraculous Lies

The Virgin of Montserrat (Mare de Déu de Montserrat)

The Virgin of Montserrat (Catalan: Mare de Déu de Montserrat), or the Black Madonna of Montserrat, is co-patron saint of Catalonia with St. George.

She is also an example of how legends are created out of whole cloth and then transmuted into sacred truths by the church and fed to the people to keep them in awe and in thrall to the church, its wondrous powers and its oneness with God.

Having just spent a few days in the beautiful city of Barcelona, in my humble opinion, one of the loveliest places in Europe, we decided to spend €35 each on a train ride to the sacred mountain of Montserrat for the pleasure of the ride up a steep mountain railway, the spectacle of the views and the interest of the geology - of which more later in another post. What we were least interested in was the monastery itself, which was fortunate because we arrived hungry and thirsty at about 3.45 pm with everything closing at 4 o'clock, with barely time for a snack and a drink at the cafe.

The story of how carved effigy came to be in the monastery atop Montserrat, north-west of Barcelona is interesting. According to legend, she was carved in Jerusalem by St Luke, who gave it to St. Peter to bring to Catalonia. In 718 she was moved to the site of an old Roman temple to Venus on Montserrat to be hidden from the invading 'Saracens' who were moving north from their stronghold in Andalucia up into south-west France.

Why Did God Wait?

Imagine, you're an omniscient, omnipotent deity and you've created humans who are going to behave badly and disobey you, but you love them and want to save them from the terrible punishment you've prepared for them for behaving the way you designed them.

Because you're omniscient, you know exactly what will save these creations and you desperately want to save them because you love them. You have always known this because you know all things.

The only thing that will save them is to have yourself manifest in human form and have yourself sacrificed as the ultimate blood sacrifice because everyone knows that blood sacrifices impress and satiate gods. It's the only thing that will work; there is no alternative. And you have always know this would be needed.

You even inspire the authorship of a book and in that book, according to some people, you include lots of hints and 'prophecies' about a 'Messiah' coming as a saviour. You even tell 'Isaiah' although you get the name of the 'Messiah' wrong.

But you still don't do anything even though you know what's needed and you've decided to do it. Instead, you wait about another 1000 years, allowing millions of people that you love above all else, to not be 'saved', and keeping them in complete darkness about the solution.

Then about 2020 years ago, for no apparent reason it should be at that precise moment, you decide to act and impregnate a virgin so you can be born and grow up as a human, then you get yourself 'executed' and pretend to be dead for 3 days.

And that does the trick. You can now 'save' people from yourself.

Some people apparently find this story convincing but they never think to ask why God waited so long. Why didn't God do this right away when it saw Adam and Eve begin to go wrong? Why didn't it do it after Noah and the animals got off the Ark?

And why did it tell humans that they needed to be saved and that it had provided this vital way, in a manner which took the best part of another 1800 years before everyone got to know about it, so allowing even more millions to not be 'saved'?

It's all rather odd. It really doesn't sound as though this god was really that bothered.

Can a Christian explain this apparent tardiness?

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Baby Beetles Evolve in 13 Generations

Sexton beetles, Nicrophorus vespilloides and larva

Credit: tomhouslay.com

Neglected baby beetles evolve greater self-reliance | Cambridge University Research News

How do you make your offspring grow big and strong?

If you are a sexton beetle, you feed them on dead mice, neglect them and let them fend for themselves. Well, not exactly their immediate offspring but the offspring of your 11 time great grandchildren who will evolve to be better at fending for themselves than those who are cared for, as this observed example of evolution in a laboratory shows.

Sexton beetles, Nicrophorus vespilloides, provide a useful service in the British countryside by burying the dead bodies of mice and other small vertebrates to create food for their offspring. They represent an intermediate level of parental care, between providing for all their needs and providing no care at all. Normally, the females remove the hair from the corpse and make cuts into the skin so their larvae can get into the body more easily. They will also bite off pieces of flesh and feed it to their larvae.

Fruitloops For Jesus

Pastor Paul Begley.
"They're out there you know! Coming to get us! Only Brett Kavanagh can save us!"

Paul Begley: Kavanaugh Allegations Represent 'The Darkest Hour in the Last 150 Years' | Right Wing Watch

A measure of their values and of their desperation to take over the American judiciary can be got from the hysterical response of fruitloop American Christians to the revelations about the character of their nominee for the vacant SCOTUS seat, the religious fundamentalist and right-wing political extremist, Brett Kavanaugh.

For example, here is fellow fruitloop, Pastor Paul Begley's hysterical outburst. Bear in mind that this is an adult speaking:

Catholic Abuse News - Why Francis and Benedict are Staying Silent

Why Francis and Benedict won't answer the accusations dividing their church - CNN

An intriguing insight into the Byzantine machinations in the highest echelons of the Catholic Church is beginning to emerge as the fall-out from the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report into Catholic clerical child abuse continues.

And it's becoming apparent why Pope Francis is under a self-imposed code of omerta concerning the allegations made by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò that both Pope Francis and his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, knew of the sexual abuses by disgraced Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick but allowed him to continue in his role as the senior American Catholic Cardinal.

Catholic Abuse News - The Vigilance of Bishop Timlin

Bishop James C. Timlin, Suffer little children.

Some Pa. Catholic priests impregnated the girls they abused,

Buried deep in the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report into Catholic child abuse in the state are some horrific stories that are only just coming to light.

One of them is the account of how a priest in Scranton diocese, Father Thomas D. Skotek, sexually abused a girl over a period of five years while serving as pastor of St. Casimir in Freeland, got her pregnant and arranged an abortion for her.

You might think those facts alone would be

Christians Tax-Free Lying for Jesus, Trump and the GOP

Pastor Terri Copeland Pearsons

Atheist Group Tells IRS to Investigate Church That Told Members to Vote for GOP | Hemant Mehta.

Eagle Mountain International Church's Terri Copeland Pearsons may have cost her father's money-making enterprise a hefty tax bill, if the Freedom From Religion Foundation's complaint to the IRS is upheld.

After turning the church into a political mouthpiece for Donald Trump and the GOP, in violation of the Johnson Amendment which removes the tax exempt, charitable status from churches that are openly partisan in their politics, Terri and her co-preacher Paula White, a 'spiritual advisor' to Donald Trump, boasted that since Trump became president they didn't need to bother about that because the Johnson Amendment has been abolished.

The only problem is, the Johnson Amendment has not been abolished and is still the law of the land. Trump promised to abolish it so the conservative Christian churches could have their greatest wish fulfilled so they could have the political power denied them by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. They would, of course, without exception, support extreme right GOP candidates who would naturally be in hock to them and effectively in the pockets of church leaders like Kenneth Copeland and his daughter Terri. To date, however, Trump has failed to keep that promise.

This Week's Accidental Evidence for Evolution

Octopus bimaculoides

Credit: Tom Kleindinst/Marine Biological Laboratory

Octopuses Given Mood Drug ‘Ecstasy’ Reveal Genetic Link to Evolution of Social Behaviors in Humans.

As I've pointed out many times, biologists these days don't set out to find evidence for evolution any more so than physicists set out to find evidence for the Laws of Thermodynamics nor do chemists set out to prove the Atomic Theory. It just happens, because the theories are true, that whatever they do confirms the underlying theories.

This week for example we have a couple of papers that yet again casually confirm that the TOE is true and the only way to make sense of what can be seen.

Catholic Abuse News - Campaign to Blame the Gays

Bishop Robert Morlino of Madison, Wisconsin. "It was the gays!"

Credit: CNS/Jason Studnicka

U.S. Bishops Blame The Gays For Priests Raping Children, Cite ‘Homosexual Subculture’ | Michael Stone

The current frantic campaign by Catholics to try to combine their need to dissociate themselves from the crimes of paedophile and sexually predatory Catholic clergy with their desire to victimise and demonise homosexuals, did not start with Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights; he was merely following the party line it seems.

It was the line also taken by Bishop Robert Morlino, Bishop of Madison, Wisconsin, last August when the Pennsylvania report detailing the abuse of over 1000 children by 300 Catholic priest in Pennsylvania was released. In a letter to his diocese Morlino said:

It is time to admit that there is a homosexual subculture within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church that is wreaking great devastation in the vineyard of the Lord...

New Book: A History of Ireland: How Religion Poisoned Everything

My new book, A History of Ireland: How Religion Poisoned Everything, is a bit of a departure for me, delving into other areas of interest - history and Ireland - and combining them into a coherent critique of religion and the harm it does.

Originally conceived many years ago as an objective background to the then prevalent 'troubles' in Northern Ireland, it quickly became inescapable that the underlying cause of them was religion. There are few if any other factors involved. There is no significant racial, linguistic or ethnic difference between what amounted to warring and mutually detesting communities.

The Catholics spoke English as did the Protestants, the 'Old English' had long been assimilated into the Catholic Irish community and the Protestants were mostly Scots whose divergence from the Celts of Ulster had been within the last 1500 years. Both communities now spoke predominantly English which had largely replaced a Goidelic Celtic language so similar and with such recent common origins that they amount to dialects of one another and are mutually intelligible.

The one major difference was religious, and yet the differences ran so deep that the two communities maintained a virtual apartheid; one faction seeing the other as a lesser people destined to be for ever ruled over by the other and that faction seeing the other as usurpers, occupying their ancestral homelands. A hatred that ran so deep that it became more important to avenge some half-legendary wrong done to grandparents than to ensure a peaceful future for grandchildren. A hatred that cost 3000 lives and gained not an inch of territory and not a single significant political concession.

Texas Mormons For Child Abuse

Sam Young - Excommunicated for defending children.

The Mormon Church Just Excommunicated a Man Who Was Trying to Protect Children | Hemant Mehta.

Like so many other Christian churches, the Mormons also have a problem with child abuse and, like other church authorities where the cat is out of the bag and the abuses they thought they were hiding from public view are now common knowledge, the Mormons are acting swiftly. They have taken decisive steps to ensure it carries on by excommunicating a member, Sam Young, who has been campaigning to stop it.

Phoenix Pastor Abusing Girls For Years

Jose Vicente Morales. Pastor of the Iglesia Cristiana Impacto de Fe, Poenix, Arizona

Phoenix pastor sentenced to prison for molesting underage girls.

I'm not sure if this will give Catholics any comfort, but it seems their priests are not the only ones who use the trusted access their position gives them to abuse minors and vulnerable adults.

51 year-old Jose Vicente Morales, pastor of the Iglesia Cristiana Impacto de Fe, a small, primarily Spanish-speaking church in Phoenix, Arizona, USA, was doing exactly that throughout the 1990 and again between 2007 and 2011.

He was sentenced to 12 year in prison followed by a life-time on probation by Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Warren Granville, last Monday, having been arrested in 2016. His offences came to light when one of his victims, then aged 17, began self-harming and told her mother that Morales had been sexually abusing her since the age of 12. Another victim gave evidence that he sexually abused her regularly when she was between the ages of 7 and 12. Her mother was also sexually abused Morales when she was a child.

Pando - Something for Creationists to Ponder

Pando, the Word’s Heaviest Organism, is an Ever-Growing Witness of an Ancient Earth – Naturalis Historia

What is the world's oldest living and almost certainly the heaviest organism?

No it's not the blue whale, a mere minnow by comparison, or 'Methuselah', the 4850 year-old bristlecone pine tree from California and nor is it General Sherman, the giant sequoia or redwood tree.

It is in fact, Pando, a clone of trembling aspen, Populus tremuloides, around Fish Lake in Central Utah, USA. It gets its name from the Spanish for 'I spread' because of the extensive spread of what has been shown to be a clone of all males trees (so they can only reproduce vegetatively, by root suckers). The total weight of this organism is estimated to be 13 million pounds (5900 metric tonnes).

Pope's Popularity Takes a Tumble

Pope Francis Favorability Down Sharply in U.S. | Gallop.

Although Pope Francis still maintains a positive approval rating amongst Americans, the 53% approval recorded by Gallop between 4-12 September this year masks what amounts to a major shift in perception of his 'approvability' by non-Catholic Americans.

Amongst this group his approval has fallen 18 percentage points in the month since the publication of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report, from 63% (and from a high of 72% recorded in February 2014), to the present low of 45%.

174 Million Year-Old Dinosaur Fossil Adds New Information

Artist's impression of dinosaur Lingwulong shenqi

Credit: Zhang Zongda

A new Middle Jurassic diplodocoid suggests an earlier dispersal and diversification of sauropod dinosaurs | Nature Communications

From this week's research papers we have a very nice example of how science is an ever developing picture of reality and a very nice example of a new species of dinosaur.

Despite the sensational headlines, this one doesn't really mean we have to forget everything we ever thought we knew; nor does it mean all the textbooks are going to need to be re-written. It means that what we thought we knew turns out to be not quite right and maybe a paragraph or two will need to be added or altered in the next edition of a book on the evolution of the sauropod dinosaurs.

Catholic Abuse News - Another Bishop Resigns

Bishop Michael J. Bransfield, under investigation

Pope accepts resignation of US bishop accused of sexual harassment | CatholicHerald.co.uk

Only hours after announcing an investigation into 'financial irregularities' (i.e fraud, embezzlement and money-laundering) in the running of the Sistine Chapel Choir, Pope Francis had to accept the resignation of yet another bishop involved in a sexual abuse scandal.

This time, as the self-inflicted implosion in the American Catholic Church gathers pace, the bishop to offer his resignation is Bishop Michael Bransfield of Wheeling-Charleston, West Virginia. In a slightly unusual and somewhat refreshing variation on the usual sexual abuse and coverup scandal, Bishop Bransfield's victims were adults whom he allegedly sexually harassed.

Discord in the Vatican as Sistine Choir is Investigated

Don Perosi with his scuola di canto (singschool) c. 1905.

Source: Wikipedia

Sistine Chapel Choir under investigation for money laundering | World news | The Guardian

"When sorrows come they come not single spies but in battalions." (Hamlet Act IV, Scene V)

"To be or not to be? That is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing, end them." (Hamlet Act III, Scene I)

"Get thee to a nunnery; why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?" (Hamlet Act III, Scene I)

As poor Pope Francis contemplates the advancing battalions of sorrows and tries to work out whether and how to take up arms against then or suffer yet more slings and arrows, taking himself off to a nunnery must seem like a tempting option.

This time, it's not yet another few hundred of his priests, bishops and cardinals exposed for routine abuse of another thousand or two children and concealing crimes from the law enforcement and child protection authorities; it's something much closer to home involving choir boys - in the Sistine Chapel Choir.

New Jersey Catholic Abuse Hotline Swamped

New Jersey Atorney General, Gurbir S. Grewal
"We're not going to protect those individuals who perpetrated these crimes any more."

New Jersey Priest Abuse Hotline Gets So Many Calls That People Can’t Get Through | David G. McAfee.

In a measure of the scale of the problem, the hotline established in New Jersey for reporting cases of Catholic priests abusing children and vulnerable adults was so overwhelmed with calls in the first few hours that people found it difficult to get through. Extra staff were brought in to cope.

According to this report, calls to the toll-free hotline number (855) 363-6548, are now being answered promptly.

The hotline was established by the office of Attorney General, Gurbir S. Grewal, who has set up a taskforce to investigate allegations of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in the state of New Jersey, following the shocking Pennsylvania Grand Jury report, which revealed abuse by predatory paedophile priests and routine cover-up on a massive scale in every diocese in the state.

Spokesperson for the New Jersey Criminal Justice Department, Peter Aseltine, acknowledged the problem and explained that some calls were reporting multiple instances of abuse.

I Learned Something New Today

Leo Behe

I learned something new today; something I should have known but which had obviously passed me by unnoticed.

It's not something I'm proud of; I should have known and I'm ashamed I didn't! I have learned my lesson, reflected on my failure and will try harder in future.

I learned that Michael J. Behe's son is an Atheist.

Michael J. Behe is of course the famous inventor of the notion of intelligent design for the Discovery Institute and notoriously pedals the idea relentlessly, pushing ideas that have been refuted and frequently making unsupported claims about science papers that the authors themselves refute. He is also notorious for what PZ Myers describes as the fireship for the creation industry, launched into the wind and causing court cases in which he is brought in as an expert witness for creationism to crash and burn.

Now it seems his son Leo doesn't believe a word of his claims either.

You can read his very thoughtful account of his journey from home-schooled indoctrinate Catholicism and Behe Snr's brand of creationism here. Below are just a few quotes to whet your appetites.

Catholic Abuse News - Now It's The Dutch

Dutch Catholic church accused of widespread sexual abuse cover-up | World news | The Guardian.

The standard techniques of cover-up and concealment of clerical abuse of children was used extensively in the Netherlands, so a report in today's, Guardian claims.

Quoting a report in National Catholic Reporter, the report says that:

Over the course of 65 years, 20 of 39 Dutch cardinals, bishops and their auxiliaries “covered up sexual abuse, allowing the perpetrators to cause many more victims. Four [of them] abused children and 16 others allowed the transfer of paedophile priests who could have caused new victims in other parishes".

Catholic Abuse News - Germans Do it Too

Cardinal Reinhard Marx
Working with PR advisers on best way to present the report.

Catholic Church in Germany: Study Counts 3677 Abuse Victims - SPIEGEL ONLINE

It might be some consolation to Catholics in the USA, Australia, Ireland, Chile, Mexico, etc, to know that their children are not the only ones at risk from predatory Catholic priests. According to a report in Spiegel Online (which suffers slightly from Google Translate), German children also are, and have been since at least 1946.

According to a confidential report leaked to Der Spiegel, between 1946 and 2014, 3677 mostly male children were molested by 1670 Catholic priests and the figure could be double that. More than half of the victims were aged 13 or less; one in six were raped and three quarters of them were in a church or pastoral relationship with their abuser.

Evolution of Social Insects

Ooceraea biroi clonal raider ants with larvae.

Photo: Romain Libbrecht

A study of ants provides information on the evolution of social insects.

Far from the forlorn claims of creationist that the Theory of Evolution is a theory in crisis, as this recent paper shows, other than citing magic (which by making anything possible, makes any claim meaningless and useless), evolution is the only way to make sense of the natural world.

This example comes from the insect world and in particular the world of eusocial species of the insect sub-order, hymenoptera. It explains how some species of the bees, wasps and ants for colonies in which one female, or sometimes a small number of females, are the reproducing members of the colony while the vast bulk of the colony are sterile worker females.

Why this system arose is easy to explain in evolutionary terms - it gives more descendants. What has been harder to explain is just how this system arose. As the press release from Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany explained:

"Satan Is Revealing Bishops' Crimes" - Pope Francis

"[The great accuser] seeks to reveal sins, which people can see, in order to scandalize the people."

Satan is attacking bishops; they must fight with prayer, pope says

In an astonishing statement in his morning homily last Tuesday, Pope Francis let slip his real attitude towards the deluge of child abuse and cover-up scandals now engulfing the Catholic Church worldwide. He blamed Satan, not for tempting the priests and bishop, but for revealing their crimes!

According to Catholic News:

In these times, Pope Francis said, it seems like the devil, "the great accuser, has been let loose and he's got it in for the bishops. True, there are, we are all sinners, we bishops."

The great accuser "seeks to reveal sins, which people can see, in order to scandalize the people" of God, he said in his homily during morning Mass at Domus Sanctae Marthae.

[My emphasis]

Source

New Structure Evolved in Just 36 Years!

Italian Wall Lizard, Podarcis sicula

Rapid large-scale evolutionary divergence in morphology and performance associated with exploitation of a different dietary resource | PNAS

It's another one of those 'non-existent' things that creationists must dread being shown.

No. This time it's not yet another of those 'missing' transitional fossils or intermediate forms. This time it's yet another example of something else 'impossible' and 'never observed'. It's yet another example of observed rapid evolution, including the evolution of new structures.

Catholic Cardinal Warns Church Victims To Keep Quiet - Or Else!

New Cardinal Sergio Obeso Rivera, retired archbishop of Xalapa, Mexico, greets cardinals during a consistory at which Pope Francis created 14 new cardinals in St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican June 28.

Credit: CNS photo/Paul Haring.

New cardinal: Abuse victims should be ‘ashamed’ to speak due to their own failings | News | LifeSite

You know, sometimes I worry that this blog is turning into a blog devoted to stories about yet another Catholic paedophile sexual abuse scandal and not the blog devoted to science and Atheism that I originally intended.

I sometime wonder if I could should ask the Pope to try to put a hold on these revelations, so we are not getting the several a day in the current torrent.

Then I realise that that's exactly what his cardinals and bishops have been trying to do for years now. In fact, it was Pope Francis' predecessor's job to try to keep the lid on them before he himself became Pope Benedict XIV and was accountable to Pope John Paul II, as his 'enforcer'.

Church of England Hits a New Low

The Anglican Church has been abandonned by the British

Church of England numbers at record low | NatCen Social Research

The latest British Social Attitudes Survey makes grim reading for the Church of England and hold few crumbs of comfort for leaders of other religions.

The most recent British Social Attitudes survey reveals that the number of Brits who identify as Church of England has more than halved since 2002, falling from 31% to 14%.The sharpest decline happened among 45 to 54 year olds (35% in 2002 vs 11% in 2017). The proportion of people who describe themselves as Roman Catholic (8%), belonging to ‘other Christian affiliations’ (10%) and ‘of non-Christian faiths’ (8%) have remained fairly stable. 52% of people now say they have no religion, compared with 41% in 2002. Men are more inclined to say they follow no religion than women (57% compared with 48%).

Source

New York Catholics Under Investigation

Source

NY attorney general subpoenas state's Catholic dioceses in connection with sex abuse investigation - CNN

Following the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report into Catholic clerical sexual abuse of minors, which revealed a horrific catalogue of abuse by some 300 priests of over 1000 children over 70 years, New York Attorney General Barbara D. Underwood has announced a state-wide investigation and issued subpoenas against all eight Catholic diocese.

The investigation is to be conducted by the Charities Department because churches are registered charities in New York.

DNA Is Showing Ashkenazi Origins

Khazar Khaganate, 650–850

Ashkenazic Jews' mysterious origins unravelled by scientists thanks to ancient DNA

An item of news out today falls into three main categories I normally write about in this blog - anthropology, religion and politics.

It is news that Eran Elhaik, a lecturer in population, medical and evolutionary genomics at the University of Sheffield, UK, has written an article in the The Conversation on the origins of the Ashkenazi Jews. The Conversation describes itself as combining journalistic flair with academic rigour.

Firstly, I have to admit to some trepidation in tackling this subject, not so much because the political question of the State of Israel, it's legitimacy and its policies towards the Palestinian Arabs have been the subject of a summer-long controversy in the UK about where criticism of the Israeli government becomes antisemitic, but because of the vicious campaign of abuse I was subjected to some 25 years ago when I raised the subject of the origins of the Ashkenazim in an old CompuServe debate forum. I was accused of being a racist, a Fascist apologist, a Holocaust denier and worse, and even received veiled threats of violence.

The question I had raised was that raised by Arthur Koestler in his book The Thirteenth Tribe. Koestler had argued that the Ashkenazim were actually Turkic people from Central Asia who had settled near the Black Sea in the Early Middle Ages and had founded a state known as Khazaria, converted to Judaism, adopted Yiddish, a language with very many Low German and Slavonic words (but with few if any Hebrew words) with a Slavonic grammar. When Khazaria was overthrown and absorbed into Russia, the Ashkenazim had migrated into Eastern and Central Europe, especially Poland, Ukraine and Germany. Koestler, of German Jewish origins himself, was subjected to abuse and vilification at the time.

The reason this is a political issue with perceived overtones of antisemitism is because it questions the legitimacy of the claim by European Jews to a 'God-given' historical homeland in Palestine, from which they traditionally believe they were expelled by the Romans in or around 66 CE following the Jewish Revolt. Quite why is is perceived as racist is beyond me. One Rabbi with whom I had previously been on very friendly online terms, could not explain how suggesting that the Ashkenazim could be Turkic, not Hebrew was racist unless one assumes the Turks are inferior people - which is itself racist, and nonsensical.

The strength of feelings and emotions that colour and cloud the debate can be see in the comments to Eran Elhaik's article.

Given that background, it is interesting that this open access article in The Conversation gives considerable support to Koestler's proposition, based on genetic analysis.

...recent DNA analysis of Ashkenazic Jews – a Jewish ethnic group – revealed that their maternal line is European¹. It has also been found that their DNA only has 3% ancient ancestry² which links them with the Eastern Mediterranean (also known as the Middle East) – namely Israel, Lebanon, parts of Syria, and western Jordan. This is the part of the world Jewish people are said to have originally come from – according to the Old Testament. But 3% is a minuscule amount, and similar to what modern Europeans as a whole share with Neanderthals. So given that the genetic ancestry link is so low, Ashkenazic Jews most recent ancestors must be from elsewhere.

To understand why this is the case, we need to go back in time, to look at where these other ancestors came from. It starts in Persia (modern-day Iran) during the sixth century. This is where most of the world’s Jews were living at this time³.

The tolerance of the Persians encouraged the Jews to adopt Persian names, words, traditions, and religious practices, and climb up the social ladder gaining a monopoly on trade⁴. They also converted other people⁵ who were living along the Black Sea, to their Jewish faith. This helped to expand their global network⁶.

Among these converts were the Alans (Iranian nomadic pastoral people), Greeks, and Slavs who resided along the southern shores of the Black Sea. Upon conversion, they translated the Old Testament into Greek, built synagogues, and continued expanding the Jewish trade network.

DNA of Yiddish speakers could have originated from four ancient villages in northwest Turkey.

These Jews adopted the name Ashkenaz, and the DNA of Ashkenazic Jews can be traced to “Ancient Ashkenaz”⁴ – an intersection of trade routes in eastern Turkey.

We now know that at the time these Jews adopted the name Ashkenaz, they also acquired unique Asian mutations⁷ on their Y chromosome. This is where another important group of people in our story come into play – and they are called the Gok-Turks.

During the sixth century⁸, these nomadic people were ruled by a Siberian Turkic tribe called the Ashina. They were forced by the Chinese Tang Empire – who were in power in China at the time – to migrate westwards toward the Black Sea.

Thanks to their organisational and military skills, the Ashina united many tribes in this area – and a new empire called the “Khazar Khaganate” was born. Offering freedom of worship and taxing trade, these people quickly rose to power.

The Asian group of these DNA mutations⁹, found in Ashkenazic Jews, likely originated from the Ashina elite and other Khazar clans, who converted from Shamanism to Judaism. This means that the Ashina and core Khazar clans were absorbed by the Ashkenazic Jews.

It was also around this time that the Jewish elite adopted many Slavic customs. And based on my previous research, I would suggest that Yiddish was developed as a secret language to assist in trade⁴.

What happened next was that the Jewish empire began to collapse. By the tenth century, the Jews on the Black Sea migrated to Ukraine and Italy. Yiddish became the lingua franca of these Ashkenazic Jews and absorbed German words while maintaining the Slavic grammar¹⁰. And as global trade moved to the hands of the Italians, Dutch and English, the Jews were pushed aside.

What this all shows is that by using modern genetic technology – that enables scientists to track the past of modern-day people – a new appreciation for Jewish ancestry can be discovered.

It has meant a greater understanding of the journeys these people took to arrive in Europe. It has also allowed for increased knowledge as to the significant role the Ashina and the Khazar clans – from which some of the real Jewish patriarchs actually came from – played.

Eran Elhaik;
Ashkenazic Jews’ mysterious origins unravelled by scientists thanks to ancient DNA
The Conversation September 5, 2018

Copyright: © 2018 The Author
Published Open Access
Reprinted under the terms of a Creative Commons licence.

Genetic evidence is providing the definitive answer to these questions of origins, not cultural tradition and myths. Many of the facts such as the linguistic mixture of Slavonic and Low German and absence of Hebrew in Yiddish, and the distribution of the Ashkenazim (and the Sephardim) across Europe are meshing with the emerging genetic evidence of a Turkic and Persian component.

That this subject is even controversial when there is objective evidence on which to decide differences of opinion highlights the problems that arise when religion and politics enter the fray and objectivity is waved aside when it conflicts with dogma and vested interests. The argument then becomes not what is right but what is convenient and fits with a desired narrative.

References:

1. Costa, M.D., Pereira, J.B., Pala, M., Fernandes, V., Olivieri, A., Achilli, A., Perego, U.A., Rychkov, S., Naumova, O., Hatina, J., et al. (2013).
   A substantial prehistoric european ancestry amongst ashkenazi maternal lineages.
   Nature Communications 4. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms3543
2. Das, R., Wexler, P., Pirooznia, M., & Elhaik, E. (2017).
   The origins of Ashkenaz, Ashkenazic Jews, and Yiddish.
   Frontiers in Genetics, 8 (JUN). https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2017.00087
3. Shlomo Sand, The Origin of the Jewish People, Verso, 2010 ISBN 978-1844676231
4. Elhaik, Eran; Uncovering ancient Ashkenaz – the birthplace of Yiddish speakers, The Conversation.
5. Das, R., Wexler, P., Pirooznia, M., & Elhaik, E. (2016).
   Localizing Ashkenazic Jews to primeval villages in the ancient Iranian lands of Ashkenaz.
   Genome Biology and Evolution, 8(4), 1132–1149. https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evw046.
6. Rabinowitz, Louis Isaac; Jewish Merchant Adventures: A Study of the Radanites (1948).
7. Balanovsky, O., Gurianov, V., Zaporozhchenko, V., Balaganskaya, O., Urasin, V., Zhabagin, M., Grugni, V., Canada, R., Al-Zahery, N., Raveane, A., et al. (2017).
   Phylogeography of human Y-chromosome haplogroup Q3-L275 from an academic/citizen science collaboration.
   BMC Evolutionary Biology 17, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12862-016-0870-2
8. Golden, Peter B.; Turks and Khazars. Ashgate/Variorum, 2010
9. Rootsi, S., Behar, D.M., Järve, M., Lin, A.A., Myres, N.M., Passarelli, B., Poznik, G.D., Tzur, S., Sahakyan, H., Pathak, A.K., et al. (2013).
   Phylogenetic applications of whole y-chromosome sequences and the near eastern origin of ashkenazi levites.
   Nature Communications 4. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms3928
10. Wexler, Paul; The Ashkenazic Jews: A Slavo-Turkic People in Search of a Jewish Identity, Slavica Publishers, 1993 ISBN: 978-0893572419

The Catholic Church Lied to Cheat Its Victims

St Patrick's Church, Sydney.
Lots of money; empty pews.

Catholic Church's massive wealth revealed

While panic and hysteria are the order of the day for the Catholic Church in the USA things are little better in Australia where the trial of Cardinal Pell is eagerly awaited by everyone everyone who isn't a Catholic under holy orders.

It has now been revealed after a detailed investigation by the Sydney Morning Herald that the church lied to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse to conceal the true scale of its assets in an attempt to avoid paying adequate compensation to its victims. They had claimed that increasing the payments would put a strain on church finances, necessitating cuts to their social programs.

Pope Francis to Protect the Guilty?

Cardinal Wuerl. About to flee the USA rather than face arrest as a leader of a crime syndicate.

Breaking News Exclusive: Wuerl Bombshell.

The tidal wave set in motion by the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report into Catholic clerical sexual abuses and institutional, systematic cover-ups, continues to spread waves through the Catholic world, and, if reports are to be believed, panic and division in the Vatican.

Church Militant, the online Catholic News site which is normally very protective of the Catholic Church, although no lover of the supposedly reformist Pope Francis, is making a sensational claim, citing Vatican sources, which if true will implicate the Pope himself in the ultimate cover-up - effectively giving protection and immunity from prosecution to a Cardinal named in the Grand Jury report - Cardinal Donald Wuerl.

Building Life's Building Blocks

Researchers have designed a synthetic small protein that wraps around a metal core composed of iron and sulfur. This protein can be repeatedly charged and discharged, allowing it to shuttle electrons within a cell. Such peptides may have existed at the dawn of life, moving electrons in early metabolic cycles.

Image: Vikas Nanda
Source: Rutgers Today

Rutgers Scientists Identify Protein that May Have Existed When Life Began | Rutgers Today

Researchers at Rutgers University have found perhaps the only hard evidence that simple protein catalysts may have existed when life began.

It has long been postulated that life may have begun on iron and sulphur-containing rocks in sea water and that these metals, bound to short peptide chains could have acted as catalysts for simple metabolic processes, long before RNA, DNA and bigger, more complex proteins evolved.

The team used computer modelling to design a short, 12-amino acid peptide for testing. This one had just two different amino acid from the 20 of which larger proteins are made. Being short and simple, it could easily have arisen spontaneously and the metal cluster at the heart of the catalyst are similar to those found in in the oceans on early Earth when life arose.

More Transitional Fossil News!

Credit: Eva Hoffman / The University of Texas at Austin.

Mammal Forerunner that Reproduced Like a Reptile Sheds Light on Brain Evolution | UT News | The University of Texas at Austin.

More transitional fossils again this week, creationists. That 'non-existent' pile of 'non-existent' evidence just keeps getting bigger and bigger!

This time it's the discovery of a unique set of a female and her newborn young of a species of very early proto-mammal which still had some of the characteristics of their reptilian ancestor, one of which was the size of the litter. The adult female was found with 38 babies - more than double the average litter size of any living mammal. This is the only known example of fossils of the babies of a mammal precursor.

The discovery was made in Arizona about 18 years ago by Professor Timothy Rowe of the University of Texas Jackson School of Geosciences, but he didn't realised then what exactly he had discovered, thinking it was a single specimen of the beagle-sized long-extinct herbivore, Kayentatherium wellesi that coexisted with dinosaurs and lived about 165 million years ago. Kayentatherium wellesi had several features in common with modern mammals and probably had hair.

Then in 2009, Sebastian Egberts, a fossil preparator at the Jackson School spotted a tiny molar-like tooth that suggested there may be babies in the rock as well as an adult. But it wasn't until the advent of modern High-Resolution X-ray Computed Tomography, combined with image-processing technology that lead author, Eva Hoffman, a graduate student at Jackson School was able to examine the fossil-bearing rock to reveal just what Rowe had found.

In addition to the very large litter size, the skulls showed that Kayentatherium wellesi had a very small brain for a mammal and more typical of a reptile. Together with the large litter size, this suggests that part of the evolutionary trade-off for the relatively large mammalian brain was a reduction in litter size. Growing a large brain places a high energy burden on the female, whether the babies develop internally or in an egg. Within a few million years, the early mammals had larger brains and smaller litters.

Because of this large brain, mammal young typically have a bulbous head and a foreshortened (neotenous) face that develops into the adult face as the young grows (the human head and face is an exaggerated version of this neoteny which is retained into adulthood). Kayentatherium wellesi had no sign of this; the babies having a miniature version of the mother's skull.

It is not clear whether the babies were newly hatched or were near to hatching.

Hofmann's, and Rowe's findings are published today in Nature:

Abstract
Transformations in morphology, physiology and behaviour along the mammalian stem lineage were accompanied by profound modifications to reproduction and growth, including the emergence of a reproductive strategy characterized by high maternal investment in a small number of offspring^1,2 and heterochronic changes in early cranial development associated with the enlargement of the brain³. Because direct fossil evidence of these transitions is lacking, the timing and sequence of these modifications are unknown. Here we present what is, to our knowledge, the first fossil record of pre- or near-hatching young of any non-mammalian synapsid. A large clutch of well-preserved perinates of the tritylodontid Kayentatherium wellesi (Cynodontia, Mammaliamorpha) was found with a presumed maternal skeleton in Early Jurassic sediments of the Kayenta Formation. The single clutch comprises at least 38 individuals, well outside the range of litter sizes documented in extant mammals. This discovery confirms that production of high numbers of offspring represents the ancestral condition for amniotes, and also constrains the timing of a reduction in clutch size along the mammalian stem. Although tiny, the perinates have an overall skull shape that is similar to that of adults, with no allometric lengthening of the face during ontogeny. The only positive allometries are associated with the bones that support the masticatory musculature. Kayentatherium diverged just before a hypothesized pulse of brain expansion that reorganized cranial architecture at the base of Mammaliaformes^4,5,6. The association of a high number of offspring and largely isometric cranial growth in Kayentatherium is consistent with a scenario in which encephalization—and attendant shifts in metabolism and development^7,8—drove later changes to mammalian reproduction.

Hoffman, E. A. & Rowe, T. B.
Jurassic stem-mammal perinates and the origin of mammalian reproduction and growth.
Nature (2018). doi:10.1038/s41586-018-0441-3

Copyright © 2018 Springer Nature
Reprinted with kind permission under licence #4418800310084

So, these fossils show clear signs of transition from the reptile ancestors of these mammaliform reptiles to the mammals they would soon become. As good an example of a transitional species between two different orders of amniotes as one could wish for; and so another fossil for creationists to have to perform intellectual somersaults over so they can continue to believe the dogma rather than the evidence.

A Sting in the Tail for Creationism

Illustration of a female Xenomorphia resurrecta ovipositing into a puparium.

Parasitoid biology preserved in mineralized fossils | Nature Communications.

The nasty designer has been at it for years!

It's been at it for tens of millions of years in fact; way before there were humans or anything like humans - which is a bit of a problem for creationists who kneejerk 'The Fall' as the excuse for why their putative intelligent designer designed such nasty little things as parasitic wasps which eat their hosts alive, killing them only when they've finished with them.

We know this because of the the work of a large team of specialists working on a project coordinated by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany, led by Thomas van de Kamp. Their findings were published yesterday in Nature Communications, along with some clever animations.

Caca Papa Francis!

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò.

Photo: Edward Pentin

Ex-Nuncio Accuses Pope Francis of Failing to Act on McCarrick’s Abuse | Catholic Register.

Apparently, following his ignominious dressing down by Leo Varadkar, the Pope is reported to have met some of the abuse victims and described those who facilitated and covered up the abuses what was widely reported in the respectable press as 'filth' or 'excrement'. However, the adjective he actually used was rather more succinct and, shall we say, earthy.

Speaking in his native Argentinian Spanish tongue he called them 'caca' which directly translates into English as 'shits'.

This is a rather unfortunate piece of timing because the whole expanding coverup crisis currently engulfing the Catholic Church just encircled Pope Francis himself! The caca has just hit the fan big time.

The Pope Gets a Lesson in Morality

Taoiseach Leo Varadakar welcomes Pope Francis ahead of his speech in St Patrick's Hall at Dublin Castle, Dublin

Photo: Yui Mok/PA Wire

In an astonishingly frank yet polite speech to Pope Francis in Dublin Castle, the Irish Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, marked a turning point in the history of the Irish Republic and its relationship with the Catholic Church - and he told the Pope why.

He started the speech by acknowledging the good that the Catholic Church did in Ireland - schools, hospitals, welfare - filling the holes in what the State provided to the people after independence, although he politely sidestepped the fact that the Church clung tenaciously to their control of these institutions and resisted any state involvement, which is why those 'holes' existed in the first place.

According to the transcript of his speech in the Indepenent.ie, reproduced in full below, he then reminded the Pope that the State had now taken on those functions because Ireland is a different place and a different society to that at its founding in 1922.

Holy Father, on behalf of the Irish people, I want to greet you using one of the oldest blessings we use to welcome a special guest to Ireland - cead mile failte - one hundred thousand welcomes.

Oleg the Priest Cleans Up

After Pride parade, priest cleanses route with holy water | News | LifeSite

After witnessing a gay pride parade through the streets of Odessa, on the Black Sea coast of Ukraine, Eastern Orthodox priest, Fr. Oleg Mokryak, head of the Missionary Department for the Diocese of Odessa sprang into immediate action to save his beloved city and its people.

Making sure his hair was correctly brided and his beard was in order, he donned his best black dress and white smock with the magic symbols on; put on his special hat, filled a red plastic bucket with some water that he had cast spells over and, with about a hundred followers and guarded by some 800 police just in case the spells, beard, symbols and magic water didn't keep the hostile crowds away, strode along Seaside Boulevarde bravely sprinkling it with the magic water using a washing up mop.

Australia is Abandoning Creationism.

Data source: Archer, M, et al.

Thirty two years of continuous assessment reveal first year university biology students in Australia are rapidly abandoning beliefs in theistic involvement in human origins | Evolution: Education and Outreach.

In 1987, Ken Ham moved from Australia to the USA having realised there was a more lucrative market for creationist anti-science disinformation there than in Australia. America's loss was Australia's gain as this heartwarming survey shows.

Evidence comes from a study by researchers from the University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia, published a few days ago in Evolution: Education and Outreach.

It shows that in the 32 years since Ham left Australia, belief in Young Earth Creationism (YECism) amongst Australian first-year university biology student has fallen from 10.0% to 3.6% (peaking at a high of 17.3% in 1988). Over the same time, belief in non-theistic evolution has risen from 25.1% to 62.2% and in theistic evolution has halved from 50.0% to 25.2%. In other words there has been a massive move away from the belief that somehow a god was involved in 'creating' humans towards acceptance of the scientific, evolutionary explanation.

The trends themselves are changing unfavourably for religion; increasing for belief in non-theistic evolution and decreasing rapidly for belief in YECism. These trends have been changing more quickly since the early 2000s.

The combined average change in support for theistic evolution of both sorts was -1.0 percentage points per year while the average annual increase for non-theistic evolution was +1.2%. In the last ten years these average annual change became -1.65% and +1.76% respectively. Over the period there was no evidence of a significant change in the proportions of 'Undecided', averaging 8.6%.

And This Week's 'Non-existent' Transitional Fossil Is...

230 million year-old Eorhynchochelys sinensis from Guizhou, China.

Photo Credit: Xiao-Chun Wu

230-million-year-old turtle fossil deepens mystery of reptile's origins | Nature.

This weeks 'non-existent' transitional fossil is... a turtle without a shell!

This 230 million year-old specimen of a stem turtle comes from Guizhou province of south west China was more than 2 metres long. It shows the rib cage expanding but there are no signs of a shell. And it has a beak.

It provides us with an illustration of how science proceeds and how new information can cause us to revise and re-assess what we thought we already knew and how it can even cloud the issue rather than clarify it.

What 'Kind' of Human is a Hybrid Human?

The fragment of bone from Denisova Cave seen from different angles.

Source: Brown, S. et al/CC BY 4.0

The genome of the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father | Nature

The ever-developing story of the Homo sapiens who left Africa and migrated eventually to all parts of the world except Antarctica, just took another twist.

Geneticists at the Department of Evolutionary Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany have shown that the greater than 50,000 year-old fragment of bone recovered from Denisova Cave in Siberia is of a female who died aged about 13 whose father was a Denisovan and whose mother was a Neanderthal. This fragment of bone had earlier been shown to be hominin by analysis of the fibrous structural protein, collagen and the mitochondrial DNA. The team who did this analysis had nicknamed her 'Denny'.