The Grand Old Party; the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln and one of the two great parties of American democracy has degenerated to the point where this is almost considered mainstream. A fruitloop Christian Trumpanzee who has declared herself to be a prophetess, has ordered 100 million angels to protect the GOP National Congress. She has already given them their orders and placed them at strategic locations around the town.
Clearly, America's mental health services leave a great deal to be desired:
According to psychologists, obsessive homophobia is very often a sign of repressed homosexuality. Never was this better illustrated than in the once-popular 'gay conversion therapy' organizations which burgeoned in the USA, as the demand for LGBTQ rights grew. Now, having lost many of their leading advocates, these organizations are almost gone. Very many of their leading lights have come out as gay themselves and acknowledged the harm they did to others in their attempts to come to terms with their own latent homosexuality.
One such was Hope for Wholeness founder and head, McKrae Game, who stunned the movement last August by publically coming out and renouncing the 'therapy' as a fraud and the program as torture which did enormous harm to its victims - victims who were only made to feel in need of 'treatment' by the religion that them sold it regardless of the harm it was doing. Having defined a natural impulse was a 'sin' or mental illness, churches then sought to profit from selling a cure for an illness that didn't exist and which inflicted real mental illness on their victims to the extent that many committed suicide.
It was the realisation of the harm he was doing to his victims that finally drove McKrae Game to renounce his faith and the organization he founded and condemn it as 'false advertising'.
But McKrae Game was not the first. In 2014, nine founders and leaders of the most prominent gay torture organisations wrote an open letter, published online by the National Center for Lesbian Rights, calling for these 'conversion therapies' to be banned, declaring:
As former ex-gay leaders, having witnessed the incredible harm done to those who attempted to change their sexual orientation or gender identity, we join together in calling for a ban on conversion therapy. It is our firm belief that it is much more productive to support, counsel, and mentor LGBTQ individuals to embrace who they are in order to live happy, well-adjusted lives.
Now, having failed to appoint a successor to lead the Spartanburg, South Carolina-based Hope for Wholeness scam, the board have decided to throw in the towel and close down. Despite this, the organisation is still advertising its torture sessions to those who have been shamed by religion into believing they are ill with:
Hope for Wholeness exists so that those who struggle with homosexuality can find freedom to live according to God's design. Genesis 1:27 We accomplish this by not trying to "change" people, but instead walk beside them and encourage them on their journey to wholeness in Christ. We are all fallen, and walk together in our collective imperfection. We are not anti-gay or political in any way. Please do not hesitate to reach out to us for answering questions, help with resources, prayer, and encouragement. We ask for your support in our efforts to impacting those affected by homosexuality, same-sex attractions, and transgenderism, as well as opportunities to walk with those who do not struggle with these issues but share in similar sexual and relational brokenness.
Note the false claim "We are not anti-gay" in a paragraph that equates homosexuality with being abnormal (not designed by God) or incomplete ([lacking] wholeness in Christ) and talks of "those affected by homosexuality, same-sex attractions, and transgenderism"
Despite telling NBC:
It has been a tumultuous several years for us. We lost the founding director, searched for two years for his replacement, hired a new director and then lost that director as well,” the memo, which was signed by the group’s board, states. “After much prayer and discussion, we have made the difficult decision to dissolve the organization. This was not an easy decision. But we do believe it is the right decision.
The scam organization is still appealing for funds on its website and makes no mention of its impending closer. It is also unrepentant, pledging to donate its (undisclosed) assets to another gay-abuse organization, Abba's Delight, an affiliated organization, based in Louisville, Kentucky and having broadly similar aims and methods as Hope for Wholeness.
so long as there are victims to bully for money and so long as there are impressionable people who can be fooled into believing perfectly natural desires and feeling are 'sinful', there will be frauds stepping forward to take their money, with not a hint of conscience about the harm they are doing.
These repugnant charlatans hide behind Christianity and blame their behaviour on Bronze Age superstitions written in a 'holy' book. Tweet
Loving thy neighbour as thyself, which according to Matthew 22:37-40 is second only in importance to loving God, doesn't seem to extend to protecting thy neighbour against deadly viruses, if Pastor Michael Jacobsen, leader of Palermo Bible Family Church in Butte County, California is anything to go by, according to this report in Sacramento Bee.
Despite purporting to believe in a god who told people to do unto others what they would want others to do unto them, and despite Jesus allegedly making up a tale about a 'good' Samaritan to show you don't need to be Christian to be good, you just need empathy, and that anyone who needs your help is 'thy neighbour' whom you should love, religious people tend to be less caring and compassionate than Atheists, according to recent research. Their work is to be published in the Journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science on 12 July and builds on the same team's findings published last April in the same journal
In that paper, a research team reported finding that compassion is greater amongst less religious people, who so tend to be more generous. The team tested the hypothesis that, with fewer religious expectations of prosociality, less religious individuals’ levels of compassion will play a larger role in their prosocial tendencies. They found, as the results of three separate studies that:
Compassion was more critical to the generosity of less religious people.
Increased generosity among less religious individuals but not among more religious individuals
Feelings of compassion predicted increased generosity across a variety of economic tasks for less religious individuals but not among more religious individuals.
In the first study, Saslow and her colleagues analyzed data from a national survey of more than 1,300 American adults taken in 2004. They found that compassionate attitudes were linked with how many generous behaviors a person was likely to report. But this link was strongest in people who were atheists or only slightly religious, compared with people who were more strongly religious.
In a second experiment, 101 adults were shown either a neutral video or an emotional video about children in poverty. They were then given 10 fake dollars and told they could give as much as they liked to a stranger. Those who were less religious gave more when they saw the emotional video first.
"The compassion-inducing video had a big effect on their generosity," Willer said. "But it did not significantly change the generosity of more religious participants."
Finally, a sample of more than 200 college students reported their current level of compassion and then played economic games in which they were given money to share or withhold from a stranger. Those who were the least religious but most momentarily compassionate shared the most.
Experiments such as this give the lie to the frequent claims of religious frauds that, because Atheist allegedly have no moral compass or 'objective' moral values, they are incapable of acting morally.
In fact, those claims are only ever made by religious fundamentalists whose 'objective' morality seems not to tell them that bearing false witness such as this is wrong because it encourages hate towards those who tend to be the most compassionate and so do the most good in society, often to mitigate some of the harm done by religions.
False witnessing against Atheists by religious frauds is probably a terror management strategy designed to cope with their fear that Atheists are right, and they are wasting their life hoping for something better later. Tweet
Atheists, on the other hand, are living for life, not waiting for death, so get on with creating a better world for the one life we have.
It makes a pleasant change to be able to write about something that isn't related to covidiot religious fundamentalists doing their bit to spread the Covid-19 virus, debunking creationist frauds with facts as revealed by science or to Catholic priests abusing children for recreation.
One of creationism's favourite arguments from ignorant incredulity - how the bombardier beetle's explosion couldn't have evolved - has now been refuted and the gap closed. No gods or magic were involved.
A team from Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, has worked out how the beetle concocts the chemical cocktail that it uses as a deadly defence mechanism and discovered how it had evolved.
One of the more idiotic and demonstrably false claims by intelligent [sic] design creationists is that the human eye is so perfectly designed that it must have been intelligently designed by magic. This claim is even hilariously repeated by spectacle-wearing Ken Ham of the disinformation site, Answers in Genesis, blissfully oblivious of the contradiction his vision-correcting spectacles betray.
However, a few minutes studying vision in other vertebrates will show that the human eye is actually fairly ordinary and unremarkable as vertebrate eyes go. It lacks the visual acuity of an eagle's eye for example, and now, as this study shows, we can see (sorry!) our eyes lack the colour vision of birds; in this case a broad-tailed hummingbirds, Selasphorus platycercus.
Not wearing face-covering dramatically increases the risk of catching Covid-19, according to research led by a Texas A&M University professor. This has special significance as countries emerge from the drastic lock-downs imposed in the early stages of the pandemic, if a more serious second peak is to be avoided.
The team, which included Nobel Laureate Professor Mario Molina of University of California San Diego, found that face covering reduced the number of infections by 78,000 in Italy and by 66,000 in New York, according to a paper by Renyi Zhang, Texas A&M Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Sciences and the Harold J. Haynes Chair in the College of Geosciences, and colleagues from the University of Texas, the University of California-San Diego and the California Institute of Technology.
In another astonishing example of the danger religious superstition poses in a Covid-19-infected world, a Muslim cleric, Mufti Nashtar Farooqi, in Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh, India, has declared alcohol-based hand-cleanser 'haraam' (evil, banned) and therefore prohibited to Muslims. In particular they should not bring it into or use it in a mosque because it is ‘napaak’ (impure). He gets this from a passage in the Qur'an which forbids the drinking of alcoholic beverages - as though people drink the hand-cleanser - and his seminary, Ala Hazrat Dargah, has issued a fatwa against them
Tissue sections of mouse lungs, after infection with influenza. The image on the left is the control and the image on the right is from mice without receptors for interferon lambda. The lungs where interferon lambda signalling is blocked (right) shows improved epithelial cell growth and differentiation (in red).
More evidence of just how malevolent and exquisitely nasty or grossly incompetent any intelligent designer who designed both the mammalian immune system and Covid-19 would need to be to design this most nasty of viruses.
A team of researchers at the Francis Crick Institute have discovered that the proteins, type I and III interferons, our immune systems produce to combat the virus, make it more difficult for your body to repair the damage to your lungs later on. This in turn means the virus can do even more damage.
In another reminder of the danger of religion and the stupidity it can encourage, an Indian Muslim 'Godman' or Aslam, who claimed to be able to cure Covid-19 with a kiss, has died in Madhya Pradesh’s Nayapura district or Ratlam. Amongst the people who visited him for his magical 'cure' 19 have now tested positive for the virus. The district of Ratlam has now become an Covid-19 hotspot.
29 Other faith healers offering similar magical cures, which includes drinking water the 'faith healer' has blown into, have now been put into government quarantine facilities while tests are carried out on them and their clients.
The extent to which American talibangelical Christianity has taken over Christian fundamentalism and how desperate it is for Trump and his GOP colleagues to continue in government, can be seen in the ravings of right-wing extremist, pastor Robert Henderson of Robert Henderson Ministries.
Henderson, who appears to believe he has a direct line to God, nevertheless feels God needs his help, especially for a little amnesia problem. He has taken to wearing a shirt made from the US flag as a reminder to God that he is under instructions from Henderson to ensure Trump wins the forthcoming presidential election for a second time.
In a paper published in PLOS Computational Biology a couple of days ago, Lauren White of the University of Maryland's National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, Annapolis, MD, and colleagues have shown how a solution to the problem of parasitic infections, can create an opportunity for parasites to spread infections in a classic twist of an arms race.
Animals are liable to pass infections between them by physical contact, so one solution to this problem is for some species to be solitary and live within a territory. However, this solution only works if individuals are able to signal the borders of territories to other members of their species. Unlike birds, which often use song or calls, many species use scent markings placed at strategic positions.
The Discovery Institute's plan to subvert the US Constitution and teach creationism at public expense in US public schools is failing badly, according to a recent report published in Evolution: Education Outreach. The proportion of science teachers teaching creationism as valid science in US public schools fell from 32% in 2007 to just 18% in 2017.
Astonishingly, in 2007, two years after a federal court ruled in Kitzmiller vs Dover District, that 'Intelligent design', like its predecessor, 'Creation Science' lacked any scientific merit as was nothing more than fundamentalist, Bible literalist religion dressed up to look like science, American public schools were in breach of the 'Establishment Clause' by allowing creationism to be taught in science class. Only just over half of teachers (51%) were teaching evolution unequivocably as factual.
Anyone who spends any time talking to religious fundamentalist on social media will be acutely aware of how quickly the conversations turns to abuse and threats of violence, especially towards those who challenge and dispute the claims of religious fundamentalist. Questioning their beliefs or presenting opposing arguments that threaten to undermine them, seem to provoke aggression instead of reflection and honest consideration.
Entering the strange world of intelligent [sic] design we find numerous examples, like Covid-19, of the sheer malevolence of any intelligence that could design such things.
Take for example, this recently discovered mechanism whereby the Meningococcal bacteria cause life-threatening meningitis and meningococcal septicaemia. It was discovered by research groups led by the Würzburg University scientists Christoph Schoen and Jörg Vogel and published in the journal Nature Communications a few days ago.
Some 35,000 years before the origin myths in the Bible were being invented by Bronze Age Canaanite hill farmers, the ancestors of Native Americans were living in the Lake Baikal area of Siberia, and even dying of plague.
This was the conclusion of a massive study led by the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
Illustration of one of the early settlers in the Caribbean. The Caribbean Sea served as a kind of ‘aquatic highway’ that connected the islands with the mainland.
According to a new study by an international team of researchers from the Caribbean, Europe and North America, led by Cosimo Posth, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, humans were busy populating the Caribbean islands from North and South America at around the time the Bronze Age pastoralists who wrote the Bible were recording their origin myths. These myths include that of a global mass genocide and repopulation of a sterile world from 8 survivors, just a few thousand years ago.
Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, founder of the extreme homophobic Traditional Values Coalition, has died, aged 85. Few in the LGBTQ community will mourn his passing.
Preacher of hate, Rev. Sheldon has dedicated his life to promoting the bullying, alienation, demonization and stigmatising of homosexuals, based entirely on a passage in the Christian Bible that appears to forbid a man "laying with another man as with a woman" (something a gay man does not do, of course, unless anal sex with a women was the norm in Biblical times).
Maps showing inherited genetic component from hunter-gatherer (blue) and Anatolian Neolithic (orange) populations along time slices. The expansion of the Anatolian component carried by Neolithic migrants and the differences in proportions observed regionally and chronologically illustrate the diversity of processes at work during the Neolithic expansion in Europe.
A team of French and German scientists have worked out how modern Europeans are derived from two different waves of migration by two different routes, as Neolithic farmers replaced the earlier hunter-gatherer people, but the degree of admixing varied widely, suggesting a complex relationship between the two neolithic groups.
The Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History press release explains:
Analyzing the first archaeogenetic data from the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in Western Europe, a team of French and German researchers documents levels of admixture between expanding early Neolithic farmers and local hunter-gatherers seen nowhere else in Europe.
