I haven't died since my last post.

In August.

Of last year.

Nor was I raptured in October.  Harold Camping was wrong again.

I have, however, been a victim of a busy schedule and probably some degree of overall burnout.

Anyway, new year - new goals, which include more writing, less me (and possibly a new bike...), and a few other things that are long overdue.

Let's start with the first.

For Christmas, I found myself the owner of a new Kindle Fire.  I fully accept that the Fire is, out of the box, basically an Amazon Vending Machine.  I'm good with that.  It's got potential, and I like the form factor better than the iPad.

I'd gotten my mom the DVDs of the Swedish versions of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who Played with Fire, and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.  I'd watched them last year, and Mom had been reading the books, so we ended up more or less swapping.  (NB - I haven't seen the new American version of the first film, so any comparisons I make between the books and the films will refer to the Swedish productions.)

What I'd like to do here is capture some of my thoughts on the series without spoiling too many important plot points.  Thus this won't be a full-on review but rather some loosely connected thoughts and observations.  Bear with me while I try to re-engage the writing cogs.

I suspect that most people are familiar with the basic outline of the books - Swedish investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist finds himself drawn into an increasingly complex web of conspiracies when he's asked to help investigate a decades-old mystery and makes the acquaintance of hacker Lisbeth Salander and her aforementioned tattoo.

The first thing to note is that the original Swedish title of the book - Män som hatar kvinno - translates as Men Who Hate Women.  That proves to be the thread that ties the entire series together, and indeed the thread that has defined most of Salander's life.

(Larsson witnessed a rape when he was young, and never forgave himself for failing to help the victim.  The theme of the trilogy is derived from that event.)

In telling Salander's story of victimization - initially at the hands of her father and later at the hands of nearly every authority figure she encounters - Larsson also addresses issues of gender inequality in the workplace, in government, and in the perceptions of the population as a whole.

Lisbeth's brilliant intellect and single-minded thirst for revenge is set against her tiny, doll-like physique.  Her refusal to conform to social norms is used in the second and third books to attack her in the press and in the courtroom.¹

Annika, Blomkvist's sister (later Salander's lawyer) draws on similarities between her youthful behavior and Lisbeth's to point out the double standards at work. Erika Berger, Blomkvist's married lover (and a very shrewd businesswoman) finds herself under attack because of her sexual habits. Female police inspectors in the story are looked down on by their male counterparts.

An interesting thing to notice is that Blomkvist (in the books - they leave out most of this in the movies) is portrayed as quite the player.  During the course of the books, Blomkvist carries on extended affairs with:

• Erika Berger - his married lover who he has been with off and on for 20 year or so.
• Cecilia Vanger - a woman who he investigates in connection with a decades-old possible murder.
• Lisbeth Salander - who seduces him during the investigation of the Vanger case, and with whom he has a fairly lengthy relationship.
• Harriet Vanger - Cecilia's long-lost cousin.
• Monica Figuerola - a special police investigator helping to work out the conspiracy surrounding Salander's father.

I'm not sure if Blomkvist is written this way in order to serve as an example within the story of a man who can relate to women as equals, or if he's written as a typical Swedish male and I'm simply trying to view Swedish attitudes about sex through an American lens, or if there's something else going on.  The end result is that Blomkvist is clearly not a white-hat good guy, but is instead somewhat ethically suspect.  Ordinarily, I tend to like characters with some moral ambiguity, since it makes them more interesting, but I've got an issue with this sort of thing.²

There are a few other interesting characters spread across the books.  One of the most interesting, in my opinion, is Alexander Zalachenko.  Zalachenko, a Russian assassin who defects to Sweden in the 1970's, is Lisbeth's father.  The Swedish authorities recognize the value of the information Zalachenko can provide, and consequently give him a long leash, turning a blind eye to his violent habits and criminal endeavors.  After the fall of the Soviet Union, Zalachenko's value diminishes, but it's far too late to rein him in.  His activities form the nucleus of the conspiracies against Salander, but it's clear that the Swedish authorities who cleaned up after him and failed to control him are at least as culpable as he is.  What makes him interesting is that he's not just evil for the sake of being evil.  His actions seem consistent within the limits of his own self-interest.  He's aware enough to manipulate others into doing what he needs to be done, he thinks through the consequences of his actions, and he needs a motivation to do things beyond simply causing problems for a hero to solve.³

Overall, I enjoyed the books.  Having already seen the movies, I knew generally what to expect, but there was enough new and expanded material to keep me interested, especially the more detailed insight into Lisbeth's character.  The nuggets of Swedish political history that are sprinkled through the books give them some grounding in actual events, which is a nice touch.  Parts can be difficult to read - the assault on Salander in the first book, and some of the graphic descriptions of crimes throughout leave little to the imagination - but such scenes are important to advancing the plot.

As a set of interconnected mysteries, the books work very well, and I highly recommend them on the strength of that alone.  If you happen to find topics of social justice and the treatment of women in different layers of society are more your thing, you'll find a good helping of those in here, too.

-Jay
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¹In some ways reminiscent of the way women like Monica Lewinsky and Casey Anthony have been portrayed in the media. Guilt or innocence often seems secondary to digging up lurid personal details.

²I suppose it's worth mentioning that all of Blomkvist's liasons are consensual, and none of his partners have an expectation of long-term monogamy. Nevertheless, his characterization reminds me a bit too much of people who I know who think with their penises.

³Writing convincing villains is hard.  Too often you end up with a 2-dimensional character that exists solely for the purpose of doing bad things.  Like Darth Vader.  He was nothing but a glorified errand boy.  When George Lucas tried to give Vader some depth in the prequel trilogy, all he really succeeded in doing was establishing that Vader was a whiny, arrogant errand boy.  Or consider the typical characterization of the devil, who seems to turn up for no reason other than to function as an agent of evil.  That's a topic for another day.

So it looks like the Montreal authorities are finally taking Dennis Markuze, AKA David Mabus, seriously enough to act.  (Thanks, Greg Laden.)

Markuze has spent the last several years spamming the inboxes and comment threads of various and sundry scientists and bloggers.  He tends to target skeptical, scientific, and atheist folks, although he's not above assuming guilt by association and firing off some of his well-written and insightful prose verbal effluvia to anyone he finds interacting with his usual targets.

A typical Mabus missive might contain death threats, links to sites he thinks are somehow relevant, healthy doses of vulgarity and profanity, and possibly some random sprinkles of batshit crazy raving.  He generally confines himself to cyber-threats, but on at least one occasion he's turned up at a skeptical conference in person.  There's quite a bit of concern that he might eventually act on one of his threats.

One of his more >ahem< interesting threats was that he was going to crawl out of the TV and kill my associate Skippy, rather like the evil ghost girl from Ringu.

I'd have paid good coin to see David Mabus crawl out of a TV...

As it is, that didn't happen.

Mabus is often characterized as a crazy extreme Christian, but I think it's probably more accurate to say that he's a guy with some serious issues who happens to be a Christian.

I hope that the authorities in Montreal are able to build a solid case against DM.  He clearly needs some help before he harms someone.  There should be no shortage of evidence against him, as many folks have forwarded his messages to the police.  (ObDisclosure - my comment and email filters don't let much of his material through.  I kept a couple of emails for a while, but deleted them a while ago.)

I'm sure there will be more news to follow as the folks up north conduct their investigation.

-Jay

0700 - Woke up.  Not surprising.  Checked news out of Australia, since it's already 2100 in Sydney.  No reports of anything unusual.  Harold Camping's website is taking too long to respond, so Firefox craps out.

0800 - Still here.  News media still hasn't reported anything interesting.  Maybe they're keeping things quiet to head off a panic.  Wondering whether I should bother cutting the grass this evening.  Camping's website still fails to load.  Probably because a bunch of other skeptical yahoos got up before I did and are overloading their servers.  Getting ready to run some errands.

0808 - Heard a loud thump upstairs.  Just the cat jumping off the bathroom counter.  Whew!

0900 - Dropped the elder child off at school for an activity.  The doors we were told would be open were locked, causing momentary concern.  Turns out we needed to go to the other side of the building.

1005 - Camping's site still won't load.  I wonder if he's checking his math yet...

1150 - Rapture or not, I need some lunch. Nobody at Panera seems worried. Harold Camping, are you out there? You need to explain what's (not) going on!

1250 - Surely all of the roadkill possums and raccoons I've seen today are a sign of something...

1501 - As commenter Skippy points out, at least one of Camping's sites is up, but it's conspicuously void of any useful information.   I'm thinking that perhaps there were some misunderstandings about Camping's true message.  Perhaps he wasn't talking about the Rapture at all.  Perhaps he was talking about something else...

Save The Date! The Raptor Returns! May 21, 2011

And honestly, using packs of these critters to cull the wicked would probably make a pretty convincing statement...

1800 - Nothing. Not a bloody thing. Just a bit overcast. And now word is starting to get out that Camping and his organization are gearing up to admit failure, or may have already. That's in contrast to their earlier absolute certainty.

A key lesson here: in the long history of human endeavor, no activity has such a spectacularly consistent record of total failure as end-of-the-world prediction.

Another important lesson: think very carefully before you pin your plans to the speculations and claims of doomsayers like Harold Camping. Ask yourself - is it more likely that he finally got it right, or that he's just using Stupid Math Tricks to support his claims.

-Jay

Harold Camping, circa 2008

Earlier this month, followers of Camping put a couple of billboards similar to this one on the main road I drive to get to work.  This is one of them:

May 21 - It's Getting Close

Camping is a kook.  There's really no more polite way of saying it.  He previously predicted that the end of the world would occur on September 6, 1994, which it clearly didn't.  Camping's excuse,  presumably given on September 7, 1994, was that he'd made a math error.  I suspect he'll have a similar excuse on May 22.

Here, from Wikipedia, is a version of Camping's "proof":

1. According to Camping, the number five equals "atonement", the number ten equals "completeness", and the number seventeen equals "heaven".
2. Christ is said to have hung on the cross on April 1, 33 AD. The time between April 1, 33 AD and April 1, 2011 is 1,978 years.
3. If 1,978 is multiplied by 365.2422 days (the number of days in a solar year, not to be confused with the lunar year), the result is 722,449.
4. The time between April 1 and May 21st is 51 days.
5. 51 added to 722,449 is 722,500.
6. (5 x 10 x 17)² or (atonement x completeness x heaven)² also equals 722,500.

This isn't so much a proof as it is Camping pulling some numbers out of his ass and fiddling with them until he comes up with a date that he thinks fits.  Where did he get the idea that "atonement x completeness x heaven" is the key to anything?  Why square the product of those numbers?  What about the numbers 7 and 12?  You can't swing a dead cat in the Bible and not hit the numbers 7 and 12 somewhere.   Given a little time and creativity, I have no doubt that Camping (or some other enterprising doomsayer) could come up with a superficially interesting "proof" to peg Judgment Day at just about any date they wanted to.  (Really, anyone who tries to extract a hard date for the end of the world out of the Bible is pulling numbers out of thin air.  No human endeavor has such a consistent history of spectacular and invariable failure as Bible-based end-times prediction.  Refer to the books by Johnathan Kirsch and Sharan Newman that I linked to here.)

Some writers have compared Camping to a cult leader, in that he's telling his followers to abandon their existing churches and join his movement.  I can see some validity in the comparison, and in clips of his sermons and radio call-in show, he comes across as very authoritarian and refuses to acknowledge that he might be wrong.  The few comments I've read from his followers suggest that they've bought into his claims completely, and have internalized the view that if they're still here on May 22, it's because they weren't good enough, not because Camping is a batshit-crazy lunatic, and that sort of blind devotion to the leader's pronouncements is a common feature in cults.

What's not clear at all is how those people will respond when they are here on May 22 and nothing magical has happened.  Maybe they'll all re-set and get ready for October 21.  Maybe they'll realize that Camping is just a religiously deluded old man and try to regain something of their previous lives.  Or maybe not.

I sincerely hope they don't do anything rash.

-Jay

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¹Camping predicts Judgment Day for May 21, 2011, and the actual end of the world on October 21, 2011.  Not that the distinction makes Camping's ravings any more credible, but I wanted to point it out in the interest of accuracy.

Legislators tried to get a similar bill, SB 142, passed last year - I wrote about that one here and here.

The summary of this year's bill follows:

AN ACT relating to Bible literacy courses in the public schools.
Create a new section of KRS Chapter 156 to require the Kentucky Board of Education to promulgate administrative regulations to establish an elective social studies course on the Hebrew Scriptures, Old Testament of the Bible, the New Testament, or a combination of the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament of the Bible; require that the course provide students knowledge of biblical content, characters, poetry, and narratives that are prerequisites to understanding contemporary society and culture, including literature, art, music, mores, oratory, and public policy; permit students to use various translations of the Bible for the course; amend KRS 158.197 to permit a school council to offer an elective social studies course on the Hebrew Scriptures, Old Testament of the Bible, the New Testament, or a combination of the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament of the Bible.

Compare this to the summary description of SB 142 from 2010:

AN ACT relating to Bible literacy courses in the public schools.
Create a new section of KRS Chapter 156 to require the Kentucky Board of Education to promulgate administrative regulations to establish an elective social studies course on the Hebrew Scriptures, Old Testament of the Bible, the New Testament, or a combination of the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament of the Bible; require that the course provide students knowledge of biblical content, characters, poetry, and narratives that are prerequisites to understanding contemporary society and culture, including literature, art, music, mores, oratory, and public policy; permit students to use various translations of the Bible for the course; amend KRS 158.197 to permit a school council to offer an elective social studies course on the Hebrew Scriptures, Old Testament of the Bible, the New Testament, or a combination of the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament of the Bible.

Jenkies!  It's exactly the same!

Jenkies!

What happens when we get into the bills themselves?  (SB 56, 2011 is here, SB 142, 2010 is here.)

If you compare them side by side, they're identical, apart from the date, bill number, and sponsors.

Consequently, the concerns I had last year about this time still stand.  I'll include them here, and elaborate on some of them (elaborations denoted by bracketed italics).

1. Right out of the gate, there's a problem with defining what we're talking about when we say "The Bible".  Not only are there many different translations (e.g. NRSV, KJV, NIV, The Message), but there are multiple canons - Catholic Bibles have books that Protestant Bibles don't, Eastern Orthodox Bibles have yet a different canon, and the Tanakh has a different structure than the Christian Old Testament.  Additionally, English translation of the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts necessarily introduce subtle changes in meaning which can affect interpretation.  And then there are the issues with textual transmission in general.  [Discussions of the Bible need to acknowledge that there has been a considerable amount of tinkering with the text down through the centuries.  Some of this tinkering was likely by well-meaning individuals who sought to clarify points in the transmitted text.  On the other hand, some of this tinkering was very likely with the intent to advance agendas or favor one orthodoxy over another.  A truly objective course on the Bible would need to acknowledge these issues and not ignore them or gloss over them.]
2. Students of different backgrounds would necessarily bring different assumptions, presuppositions, and theologies to the class.  Teaching around those differences would be difficult, particularly if the teacher isn't knowledgeable about them and skilled at recognizing his or her own biases.   [ A teacher who cannot disengage from his or her own biases and preconceptions will have a very difficult time engaging with opinions and scholarship that disagree with their beliefs.  Do the sponsors of the bill really expect the people teaching these classes to compare the Genesis creation myths with the other creation myths, or to compare the stories of Noah's flood with the Epic of Gilgamesh?]
3. While the bill states that courses must maintain religious neutrality, it's difficult to understand how a course on the Bible can be religiously neutral.  Will there be a section on the Qu'ran?  The Book of Mormon?  The Śruti?  Dianetics? [It also occurs to me that in order to truly maintain religious neutrality, we have to revisit point 1, above.  Because the proposed legislation does not require a specific version of the Bible to be used in class, there will be different versions in play.  The Biblical influence on some issues is different depending on which translation one uses.  For example, translating a word as "kill" vice "murder" is significant.]
4. Specifically, what "knowledge of biblical content, characters, poetry, and narratives"  are prerequisites "to understanding contemporary society and culture, including literature, art, music, mores, oratory, and public policy"?  This looks suspiciously like code for a broad conservative Christian agenda, and not a non-sectarian discussion of the Bible's influence on modern society.  There are other, arguably more fundamental, "prerequisites" to understanding modern arts, culture, and policy besides the Bible, including ancient Greek literature, politics and mythology, the works of Shakespeare, and human sexuality.  [Further, the Bible (particularly - but not exclusively - the Old Testament) is rife with stories of genocide, incest, sexual manipulation, revenge, and feeding children to bears, all done by, directly or indirectly at the command of, or in the name of God.  Somehow I don't see this course covering material like the story in Genesis where Lot's daughters get him drunk, sleep with him, and become pregnant by him...]
   
5. Biblical "literacy" and "history" imply more than simply knowledge of the content of the Bible, which is what is called out in the summary.  While the text of the law itself specifies that students shall be familiarized with "(t)he history of the Hebrew Scriptures or New Testament" and "(t)he literary style and structure of the Hebrew Scriptures or New Testament", I seriously doubt that these concepts can be properly addressed within the context of a one or two semester elective. [I cynically wonder if the "history of the Hebrew Scriptures or New Testament" actually means "history as viewed through the lens of the Hebrew Scriptures or New Testament" rather than the history of how and why the material came to be written...]
6. Conspicuously absent from the bill are any specific references to the socio-political context during the periods of authorship of the various Biblical books, which have tremendous bearing on their content.  I do not think it is possible to adequately discuss the influence of the Bible on modern socio-political topics without discussing the contexts in which the Biblical books were written. [Consider, for example, the Book of Revelation.  It was written to and for people in a very specific set of circumstances, but it's significance has been horribly overemphasized by modern interpretations.  While it's true that Revelation has influenced the modern world, much of that influence has more to do with what more modern readers assume it means than what the original author intended his contemporaries to learn from it.]

In the end, I suspect what would likely happen is that courses offered under this law would end up being taught by and filled by people jumping at the chance to turn them into state-sanctioned Bible "study" sessions which are long on Bible and short on anything resembling actual study, and that would probably be more about the people in the class affirming their own beliefs rather than trying to learn anything new.

I've said before that I'm completely in favor of people learning about the Bible and its history and background, but if all you do in a Bible study is look at the material in terms of what the leader thinks God was trying to say and ignore what the humans who actually wrote it were trying to say to their contemporaries, you've missed the point.

-Jay

Paul Haggis is the screenwriter behind films like Million Dollar Baby and Crash.  The New Yorker has a lengthy new article discussing Haggis' departure from the Church of Scientology.  I'm not going to get into an exhaustive review of the article - it's very long but worth the read if you're interested in this sort of thing.  Instead I'll hit some of what I think are the high points.

For many years, he was a very active member of the Church of Scientology, the space-opera cult-cum-religion founded by the late L. Ron Hubbard.  In 2009, Haggis left the church in a principled stand against Scientology's support of California's Proposition 8 (sanctioning marriage only between a man and a woman), walking out on an organization that had been a very significant (possibly the most significant) institution in his life for around 35 years.

That takes chutzpah, as anyone who has ever acted on a crisis of faith can confirm.  (Revealingly, Haggis' letter of resignation mentions his exploration of perspectives outside of Scientology.)

The article describes Haggis' initial association with the church - it mirrors the initial association of many people with many churches: some trouble in his past, a vague feeling of aimlessness, a desire to improve one's life.  His involvement started in the mid-1970's, a time when Scientology was aggressively recruiting young celebrities like John Travolta and Kirstie Alley¹.  (Celebrity recruitment has long been a staple of Scientology.  Considering how the advertising industry courts celebrity, it's difficult to fault them for that...)

The article mentions how many of the celebrities in the church credit Scientology with their successes (failures, I suppose, aren't the failure of the belief system but rather failures of the individual, like the lady in my last post claiming that if she was here after May 21, 2011, it was because she wasn't worthy of being saved and not because her belief system is wrong), and the price (in "donations") to achieve the highest levels within the church could be as high as half a million dollars.

Much is made about the, well, weirdness of Scientology's upper level teachings, which Haggis appears to have obtained.  I'll not go into that here, but a brief Google search on "Scientology space opera" should get the interested reader everything they can stomach on the matter.

There is then some discussion on how Haggis' daughters were steeped in Scientology and Scientology-related institutions (such as schools using Hubbard's study methods).  In ordinary private schools, they felt out-of-place.  I suspect this is not totally unlike the experience of anyone from a strict religious upbringing who suddenly finds herself in a less restrictive environment.  At least one of the daughters drifted away from Scientology as she discovered other worldviews².

The article also touches on some of the questions regarding L. Ron Hubbard's career and the development of Scientology out of his original work with Dianetics.  There are some interesting disagreements between Scientologists and outside researchers, particularly in regard to the claims surrounding Hubbard's career in the U.S. Navy.

There was a time, not too many years ago, where my interest in articles like this would have been driven entirely by the opportunity to watch a group that most people would regard as fringe get exposed to the harsh light of day.  While there's still some entertainment value in that, my focus has changed somewhat.

Scientology is more interesting now not for the bizarre space-opera claims that underpin its belief system, but for the opportunity to watch a religion sprout from the ground up.  Hubbard was nothing if not a prolific writer.   The huge volume of his work that has been both published and leaked over the years documents his early elaboration of Dianetics and his subsequent embellishment of it to create Scientology.

What's also interesting is that many of the behaviors that Scientology (as an organization) is alleged to engage in are more extreme, but recognizable, versions of behaviors that many more mainstream religions engage in.  The "disconnection" policy that frequently gets mentioned in articles about Scientology isn't much different from concepts of disfellowshipping, excommunication, or shunning that turn up in various Christian denominations.   The rigid, hierarchical command structure within Scientology isn't much different from the medieval structure that we see within the Catholic church³.  The tendency to treat Hubbard's writings as infallible and inerrant, despite the overwhelming amount of disconfirming knowledge available is no less puzzling than the insistence by many Christians that the Bible is likewise infallible and inerrant despite massive amounts of evidence to the contrary.

This brings me around to my closing question:

Why is it so easy for us, sitting outside of a group like Scientology, to identify so many flaws, inconsistencies, and outright falsehoods within that group, while it is so difficult for us to see the flaws, inconsistencies, and falsehoods within our own worldviews?

-Jay
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¹What's interesting to me at this point in the story isn't so much that Haggis fell in with Scientology, but rather that you could replace the word "Scientology" with the name of just about any religion without any loss of generality.  Scientology leverages many (most?) of the same recruiting techniques that many of what we usually consider mainstream churches use to get people in the door, although where other groups may have some subtlety, the Scientology approach is more akin to getting hit over the head with a frozen ham.

²This is interesting not because a Scientologist left the "faith", but because someone was exposed to different worldviews and altered their own because of things they didn't know before. Beautiful.

³I'm nominally Catholic, but I think there are numerous malignancies within the church as an institution. That's not a topic I'm going to hit here beyond saying that I think that the vast majority of good that comes out the church comes from the people working in the individual parishes, and not from the upper levels of the hierarchy.

I watched 2012 a couple of weeks back.

I don't have a good explanation of why I felt the need to burn 158 minutes of my life that I won't get back watching a movie that, according to my daughter, makes little children cry because of its badness.

But, nevertheless, I watched it.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around a literally Earth-shattering event in 2012 that wipes out the vast majority of the population as the Earth's crust reshapes and devastating tsunamis wipe most of the world clean.  The world leaders, who knew this was coming, sort of prepared by building several large ships (arks, in a very ham-handed attempt to echo the Genesis flood narrative) that a few hundred thousand people could fit on.  Things go awry when things start falling apart several months ahead of the December 21 date "predicted" by the Mayans¹.

It's easy to watch a movie like 2012 and mock the absurdity of it, but in doing so, we often forget that the world is littered with failed end-of-the-world prophecies and predictions.

By way of example, there is currently a movement in the U.S. that claims that the end of the world will start on May 21, 2011.

The group behind this nonsense, Family Radio Worldwide (led by 89-year-old Harold Camping),  follows in the long and ignoble tradition of trying to guess when the world will end based on clues in the Bible.  There have been many attempts to do this - hundreds if not thousands - and they've all failed miserably².

There's a basic pattern at work in such guesses:

1. Start with the presupposition that the Bible is completely true and accurate.
2. Assign some world event to an event supposedly predicted in the Bible.
3. Play some complicated games with numbers and dates to come up with a date that the world will end.  Or that Christ will return.
4. When the predicted date passes without incident, punt.

Now, most people of a skeptical nature will dismiss the presupposition in Step 1 out of hand, at which point the whole enterprise comes crashing down.  There are simply too many wild inaccuracies in the Bible to seriously entertain notions of inerrancy and infallibility.  For example, let's briefly consider the Biblical claim of Genesis 30:37-39 (KJV), wherein we're supposed to accept that having goats mate in sight of streaked rods will result in streaked offspring:

³⁷ And Jacob took him rods of green poplar, and of the hazel and chesnut tree; and pilled white strakes in them, and made the white appear which was in the rods.

³⁸ And he set the rods which he had pilled before the flocks in the gutters in the watering troughs when the flocks came to drink, that they should conceive when they came to drink.

³⁹ And the flocks conceived before the rods, and brought forth cattle ringstraked, speckled, and spotted.

No.  Just...no.  We've got a very good understanding of how things like coat patterns in goats work, and it has nothing to do with showing streaked sticks to other goats.  As trivial of an example as this is, it stands to demonstrate that the Bible does contain mistakes and falsehoods.  If you're someone who thinks that Biblical inerrancy is a reasonable proposition, I strongly encourage you to try to step outside of your own worldview long enough to spend some time seriously looking into the matter.  The Skeptic's Annotated Bible makes for a good starting point for this³.

The second and third steps work together.  In more recent times, the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948 serves as the anchor for the calendrical sleight of hand.  Typically, whoever is trying to figure out the date of the end of the world grabs an assortment of events and durations from the Bible and shuffles them around until a date pops out.  More often than not, that date is not too terribly far out from when the "prophet" makes his prediction.  (In other words, they don't come up with dates ten thousand years in the future or five hundred years in the past.)  In modern times, they'll usually tie the date in with elements of Rapture⁴ theology, although that hasn't always been the case.  The problem here, of course, is that given some creativity, selective reading of the Bible,  and a little ambiguity in historical dates (owing, for example, to different calendar schemes), a clever "prophet" can manipulate his "prediction" to fall on just about any date he wants.   It's not terribly unlike when a stage magician presents the audience with a card trick that relies on a forced card rather than a truly random selection.

Step four is an interesting one.  Invariably, the date of the end comes and goes without event.  This would lead a normal, rational person to conclude that the "prophet" was wrong, assuming there was any reason to think otherwise in the first place.  However, what often happens is that the "prophet" preempts such a conclusion by claiming that, for example, God has responded to the prayers of the faithful and spared the world.  Or, perhaps, a previously undetected error in calculations revealed that the "prophet" was off by a year or so. Family Radio Worldwide has convinced their believers of a somewhat different possibility:

If May 21 passes and I'm still here, that means I wasn't saved. Does that mean God's word is inaccurate or untrue? Not at all.

-Allison Warden, 29 year-old follower of Harold Camping

That's an interesting new twist.  So the end times will start but she just wasn't good enough?  This, I suspect, is an extension of the horrible notion that all humans are pretty much worthless and vile creatures with no measure of value apart from how Christian they claim to be⁵.  It would be instructive to follow up with this group and see how they explain the fact that none of their membership vanishes mysteriously on May 21.  I wouldn't be surprised to see them claim that some of their number have disappeared, but won't really be able to back that up.

I'm not sure why people like Harold Camping want to set a date for the end of the world.  Maybe it's because they sincerely believe in what they're doing.  Maybe they're in it for the notoriety.  Maybe they're just kooks.  But people have been predicting the end of the world for thousands of years, and they've always failed.

What I am quite confident of is that on May 22, 2011, the world will still be here.

(If you're interested in some ways that the world might really end, I have to throw a plug out for Death from the Skies! by the ever-awesome Phil Plait.  Phil's just cool.  Read his book.  Twice.)

-Jay
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¹I'm not going to spend much time on the Mayan prediction business.  It's basically equivalent to saying that the world will end on December 31^st because that's the last day on the calendar.

²There are several good books on the subject of End of the World prophecies. Two that I recommend are Johnathan Kirsch's A History of the End of the World and Sharan Newman's The Real History of the End of the World: Apocalyptic Predictions from Revelation and Nostradamus to Y2K and 2012.

³Through the years, I've engaged with numerous people who claim to know the Bible very well, and who claim to hold it in very high regard.  It often becomes quickly apparent that they've never actually read it, and that they know very little of the history behind it.

⁴The Rapture, in my opinion, is one of the best examples to be found of what happens when people run amok with the Bible and fail to treat it as the human-created collection of literature that it is.

⁵Different churches use different terms, but the point of the argument is that one must accept that God, who on one hand is supposed to be kind and loving and protecting is also so petty and tyrannical that He would make every human live under threat of eternal punishment because of the actions of two people (ignoring for the moment that Adam and Eve were purely mythical people) that He had to have been able to anticipate.  Those two character traits are totally incompatible, and I personally cannot do anything other than categorically reject a doctrine that would require me to believe this.

The short version of the story is that a cult-like group called Cadets for Christ, led by a couple named Don and Anna Warrick, are entrenched at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, CO.   Cadets for Christ is part of the "Shepherding Movement".   Cadets who join Cadets for Christ, according to Chris Rodda writing at The Huffington Post:

...are separated from their families and anything else that might interfere with their brainwashing. In the shepherding movement, the female is the "sheep" and the male is the "shepherd," and a woman's sole purpose in life is to be a good wife and mother, subordinating herself to her male shepherd.

The name most closely associated with this situation is that of Lauren Baas, a 2010 Academy graduate, who has become estranged from her family due to the influence of Cadets for Christ.  The quick version of her story is that she went to the USAFA with the goal of becoming a pilot in the Air Force, got involved with Cadets for Christ, was placed into an arranged engagement to her "shepherd", and has basically given up all of her dreams to be a sheep.  (The photo below, of a cookbook given to Ms. Baas, is rather chilling.  Her last name is a pure coincidence.)

Cookbook belonging to Lauren Baas, via Chris Rodda at the Huffington Post

The Baas family, in an effort to call attention to the situation at USAFA, wrote a "holiday letter" to the Warricks.  Their pain is heartbreaking.  An excerpt from the letter, again via Chris Rodda at The Huffington Post, is below.  The letter in its entirety can be read here.

Did you ever have the guts to ask Lauren about her career goals before squelching them? From birth she was a very determined individual. As parents, we taught her to work hard and be persistent in any endeavor she chose to undertake. She completed elementary and high school with great pride and high academic achievement. Her next goal was to graduate from the United States Air Force Academy and become a USAF pilot. Of course, being a female, you made sure that goal was extinguished. In your words, she is the sheep and her career is to follow the male shepherd. HOW DARE YOU PLAY GOD!!!

Did you know that Lauren never experienced the thrill of dating someone? Growing up, she was always quiet, shy and spoke of getting her feet on the ground before entering the dating arena. Of course, you instructed her that God sent a USAFA Cadet over two years her junior, to be her life long partner. They never had the opportunity to date, as it would interfere with their "Bible study." Five months into their relationship you were shoving "Biblical" marriage preparation materials down their throats!!! Don't tell us that you had no part in orchestrating their engagement. YOUR SELFISH GOAL WAS TO PERPETUATE THE FUNDAMENTALIST EVANGELICAL MISSION!!!

There's a lot of wrong going on here - a climate at USAFA that fosters religious intolerance, a lack of scrutiny of religious groups that are allowed to operate on campus, a particular group using classic cult techniques to isolate and control its members, families being broken apart by the activities of the aforementioned group.

The fact that this is happening at a military academy is unsettling, but when we move beyond that, the situation is one that's not uncommon on college campuses around the country.

It's not hard to see why.

Young adults starting college are often finding their first real taste of responsibility.  They're away - possibly thousands of miles away - from home, they don't know very many people, they're seeking their own identity yet looking for some familiarity.  There are clubs and groups of all sorts, and many students find their way to Bible/religious study groups.  More than likely, they'll end up in one that's fairly congruent with whatever faith they grew up in - Catholics tend to find Catholic groups, different sorts of Protestant Christians will tend to find groups with similar views, and so forth.

Some, like Lauren Baas (raised Catholic), end up in groups that are radically different.  Indeed, Ms. Baas' parents indicate that Cadets for Christ actively led her to reject her Catholicism¹:

Do not attempt to trivialize these circumstances with the rationalization that we are merely a family that cannot accept the fact that their daughter has "chosen" to change religions and marry outside the Catholic faith. YOU KNOW, AS WELL AS WE, THIS STATEMENT IS SO FAR FROM THE TRUTH!!! You have taken Lauren's mind and soul and twisted it to your fundamentalist Christian liking. She was brainwashed to believe she was "unenlightened" and an "unsaved fool" in the Catholic faith. She now lives in fear of God and feels "shameful" if she does not continually stand guard against "ungodly people."

(From the Baas family's letter to the Warricks)

Had Ms. Baas simply decided to marry a non-Catholic, I suspect there wouldn't be much of an issue.  Had she decided, on her own, to leave the Catholic church and join a different one, the situation would be different.  In this case, though, it appears that she was intimidated and coerced² into rejecting her previous beliefs and manipulated into an engagement  - things that the "old" Lauren wouldn't have done.

It's reasonable to ask how a group can steer someone away from their worldview and into something so completely different.  It's fairly straightforward - surprisingly so - but it can be difficult to spot if you're in the middle of it.  I'd venture to say that Cadets for Christ uses some of these techniques on new members:

1. Love bombing - new members are made the focus of attention with an ulterior motive of drawing them deeper into the group.  They might be flattered or they might find that the group pays a lot of attention to anything they have to say.  In short, the group welcomes them with open arms and makes them feel special.   Of course, not every group that warmly welcomes new members is trying to brainwash them.  It can be very difficult to distinguish between a group that is engaging in love-bombing its members and a group that is genuinely friendly and welcoming until one tries to leave the group.
2. Controlling activities and contacts - the new members are presented with group-related activities that start to occupy all of their free time.  They may be strongly encouraged to spend leisure time with other members of the group.  Members might be encouraged or pressured to date within the group, or to invite their external friends to join.  Members might explicitly be discouraged from spending time in non-group activities or with non-group associates.  In extreme cases, members might end up leaving existing jobs to go to work within the group.  The end result of all of this is that a member is eventually steered to a point where nearly all of his or her interactions are with group adherents.
3. Controlling information - members are shielded from exposure to information contrary to the group's ideology, or are bombarded with information that agrees with the group.  They're encouraged to reject disconfirming information and look for data that supports what they already consider to be true.  Negative information may be portrayed as dangerous³.
4. Authoritarian leadership - the leadership of the group is seen as inviolate and inerrant.  When the leadership starts making important personal decisions for the group members, such as who they will marry, it's a very loud alarm that things are seriously wrong.

That's really about all it takes, and the Baas letter strongly suggests that Lauren was subjected to just these sorts of things as a member of Cadets for Christ.

Looking at the situation, it's very disquieting that the USAFA has allowed (and continues to allow) Cadets for Christ to operate on campus.  The dual messages being sent are that the Academy condones the theology that Cadets for Christ espouses and endorses the techniques they bring to bear on their members.  Neither of these messages is appropriate for a Service Academy.  It's very disquieting, based on the articles linked above, that the leadership at USAFA when confronted with evidence of unconstitutional proselytizing by Cadets for Christ has deliberately failed to act appropriately on it.

And it's very disquieting that at least one family has lost a daughter.

-Jay
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¹I am categorically not attempting to stake out a position that people should always and forever remain within whatever faith tradition they were raised in.  As people grow and learn and experience new things, their beliefs often change.  If your beliefs at age 30 are essentially the same as they were at age 10, you're doing life wrong.

²Threatening someone with eternal punishment in Hell as a consequence of not accepting a particular system of beliefs is every bit as coercive as forcing conversions at the point of a sword or at the end of a gun.

³Stop and think for a few moments about how often this occurs in daily life. Most often when this happens, someone is trying to sell you something. Nobody ever sold a car by saying "Go try the dealer down the street. Their prices are better and they sell better cars." It would be a rare pastor indeed who closed a sermon with "...and you should really read Ehrman's God's Problem for an interesting and insightful take on the problem of evil."   You'll probably never hear a politician say "The problems we're facing aren't really the fault of any one individual or administration.  They're the culmination of many decisions made by many individuals and administrations over the  last several decades and it's going to take a long time, a lot of cooperation, a lot of money, and a lot of work to fix them."

Unless you live in a cave, you're aware of the TSA's new airport security screening procedures.

In a nutshell, depending on what airport you're going through, you might be subjected to a full-body scan and/o an "enhanced" pat-down.

The scans are of two types - Backscatter X-ray and Millimeter Wave scans.  Both of these techniques work because the energy in the scan passes through fabric and reflects off of skin.  The resulting images are rather like this:

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TSA-Released Sample of a Backscatter X-Ray Image

Images from millimeter-wave scans are somewhat less distinct, but even so, I can understand why folks are upset about this.  (Personally, while I'm not thrilled about the scans, if the image above is as detailed as it gets, and if there are reasonable controls on the images, and if they weren't being used as a first layer of security on adults only, then I could probably live with them.)

Refusing the scan triggers the enhanced pat-down, which is gut-wrenchingly described here (women, when you read this, put yourself in the author's position.  Men, imagine this being told to you by a woman you're close to, and remember that you, too, will likely have to go through a similar experience.):

Erin's Story.  (Link via Amy)

One of the aspects to this that doesn't seem to get enough attention is that kids will be put through this as well.  Consider that we've spent decades telling our children not to let strangers touch them, but now they may not be able to avoid that:

Advice from Sarina Behar Natkin about how to prepare your kids for a possible security pat-down.  (Also via Amy)

And for survivors of rape or other sexual abuse, the experience may simply be unendurable:

Bug_girl at Skepchick has some thoughts, and Jezebel's Irin Carmon has some additional words on the matter.

Finally, MSNBC reports that a U.S. Airways flight attendant and cancer survivor was forced to show her breast prosthesis to a TSA agent during a security screening.

Incredibly, a number of news outlets are reporting the results of a CBS survey as showing that 81% of survey respondents support the enhanced security measures.

Only, they don't.

The 81% number from CBS Survey is in response to the following question: "Should Airports Use Full-Body X-Ray Machines?"

I suspect the survey numbers would have reflected a much lower level of approval to the following proposition:  "Should TSA Agents Touch Travelers' (Including Minors) Genitalia As Part Of Security Pat-Downs?"

A big problem is that TSA appears to function primarily in a reactive mode - Richard Reid tries to light his shoes so everyone has to send their shoes through the scanner.  Someone loads their underwear up with explosives, so TSA has to perform panty-checks.  I'd wager that nobody will be carrying toner cartridges onto planes for a while.  I shudder to think about what happens when someone gets taken off a plane with explosives hidden internally, since at that point you're basically up to full body-cavity searches.

The fact of the matter is that there are only a limited number of things you can do with a plane.  The most relevant are:

1. You can try to hijack it and crash it into something, but after 9/11, I think that's fairly unlikely to happen.  I believe that locked cockpits and a generation of passengers who watched the Towers fall have cut that option out.
2. You can blow it up.  Preventing this is, at the heart, an explosives detection problem and not an identify-the-bad-guys problem.  Better cargo screening (including carry-on cargo) is a huge part of the solution.  Better techniques to detect explosive signatures on clothing and hands is another.

Pawing up under the skirts of female travelers and groping their breasts isn't going to improve security.  Nor is juggling the testicles of male travelers.  Nor will traumatizing children, cancer survivors, and rape victims.  Those will, however, push the Bad Guys to figure out better ways to hide things.

Brilliant.

-Jay

Yes, none other than Sarah Palin.

Two years after she first achieved national recognition as John McCain's perplexing choice of running-mate, Palin still manages to keep her name in the news.

I remain puzzled.

PalinWorld is just weird.

On one hand, there is the whole circus side-show vibe that follows Sarah's ex-future(x2) son-in-law, Levi Johnston.

What a Tool...

It's not enough that he did the whole Playgirl thing, but now he's running for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska.  Wasilla, of course, is where Sarah started out her illustrious political career.  Yeah, OK, Levi.  Hope that works out for ya.

On the other hand, you've got daughter Bristol landing a spot on Dancing With the Stars, which I guess is OK, but it's kind of surreal.  I have a hard time deciding what I think of Bristol.  At one point, I thought she might be the only person in the whole Palin-palooza circus that had any sense about her, but her brief re-engagement to Johnston, discussions of a reality TV show, and apparent desire to remain in the public eye have me questioning that.

And finally, on the other other hand, you've got Sarah, the matriarch of the clan, and the subject of the article I linked to above.

The Vanity Fair piece is sourced from a lot of people who didn't want to be identified for fear of reprisal, and it's got something of a hit-piece feel to it, but nevertheless it has an internal consistency that lends it some credibility.

The thrust of the article is that the well-maintained public image of Palin that we saw in the '08 campaign and that we see now is little more than a distorted reflection of the reality.  According to the sources of the article, most of what we think we know about Sarah Palin, from her family relationships to her public piety is fabricated.

I wasn't particularly surprised to read that she's got a vindictive streak to her, or that she and her husband fight a lot, but I was surprised to read that she may have accepted the VP nomination without much (if any) discussion with her family.

There's also some discussion that suggests that she may not be as religiously conservative as she seems, although I'm not really convinced of that - she speaks the language of ultra-conservative Christianity far too fluently to be putting on a facade.

Anyway, it's an article worth reading whether you think that Sarah Palin is a genius or a vapid twit.  Check it out.

-Jay