I'm sensing an "F"

Curious how "read the spirit world" looks exactly the same as "making stuff up."

NZ Quake blamed on homosexuals

After every natural disaster, there never fails to emerge someone to declare that the deaths and destruction were sent by God as punishment, always against those whom the speaker doesn't like.  The recent earthquake in New Zealand is no exception.

At Christchurch Earthquake, the unnamed writer blames the February 22nd quake on homosexuals:

To the hundreds of thousands of people who suffered because of the Christchurch earthquake: Ask yourselves: "Was the profit from meals, accomodation and transport from 900 poofters and lesbians attending "Gay Ski Week" worth the $4 billion damage, worth the homes destroyed? Was it worth going to sleep night after night not knowing if the roof will come down on you by morning?" Chris Carter and Helen Clark's government got what they wanted -- 12 year olds on the streets as prostitutes, overseas trips, expensive liquor and credit card junkets, lesbians running loose on the South Island as if they own the place. But, looking at your ruined homes, at all the historic buildings destroyed, ask yourselves, "Did we get what we wanted in all this destruction?"

Let's step back and take a look at this line of argument. The writer is saying that God looked down on New Zealand and saw some people doing something he doesn't like. So he waves his fingers and causes a disaster, killing several people, but not necessarily the ones performing the hated behavior. God then relies on some other person to pronounce to the masses what the disaster really means. If there is a more error-prone method of conveying your desires, I don't know of any. Would any non-godlike person behave this way?

Suppose a man is hired as a security guard of an apartment building, and he learns that one of the tenants is behaving "immorally." Maybe the guy in 3-B is watching pornography, whatever. The guard then goes to the basement and lights some oily rags on fire, burning down the entire building, killing seven people--except the guy in 3-B! He gets away safely. Then the security guard's friends saunters along and tells the survivors, "If you hadn't allowed one of your own to watch porn, none of this would have happened. Are you happy now?!"

In what world would punishment like this make sense? If the author of this website is correct in that God really, really, hates homosexuals, then wouldn't it make more sense for God to punish the homosexual? Wouldn't it be more effective if, say, everytime two guys have sex with each other, their hearts immediately stop? If everytime a woman said for the first time, "I'm a lesbian" she fell over dead, wouldn't that do more to end homosexuality than just randomly sweeping buildings down in an earthquake sometime in the same year as a gay public event takes place?

Of course, when believers are harmed by natural disasters, then it's "God works in mysterious ways," and "God needed more angels so he called them home," and "God tests us with pain so that we don't become accustomed to this world."

For the New Zealand families grieving over their loss of loved ones, the author of this website owes them an extreme apology

Superstition in the Supreme Court

Sadly, one can graduate from law school while still believing in Satan.  No word yet on whether the belief in the Tooth Fairy, Cthulu, or leprechauns is required to pass the bar exam.

"What do you think about Satan?" That's not a typical question at the Supreme Court, but those words were indeed uttered by Justice Scalia on January 10. The question drew a near belly laugh from the packed gallery, leaving one to wonder whether the Devil has become nothing more than a joke in modern America...

As I bowed my head to pray, I asked the Almighty (who now is publicly replaced by silence if not yet laughter) to bind a Devil who seems to be quite actively at work (as evidenced by the actions of a deranged young atheist in Tuscon) even while the real possibility of his evil existence is ignored in the hearts of men and the halls of earthly power.

If Satan was a real evil entity, the United States government would have sold him weapons long ago.

Saddam Hussein: Superstitious ghoul

Saddam Hussein, in a bid for piety, gave his own blood for ink to transcribe a Qur'an.  Today, Iraqi leaders don't know what to do with the macabre book.

Perhaps the United States should revisit the policy of supporting twisted superstitious tin-pot dictators.

Science, in conjunction with superstition, works.

Another entry for "What's the harm?" with depressing familiarity.  Child gets sick, parents pray for child instead of seeking professional treatment, child dies.  In this case, the parents were charged with involuntary manslaughter, the same charge as if they had chosen to pray their child out of the street before it gets mowed down by a truck.

The newspaper report also throws up a poll, and the choices are telling:

Do you believe in the power of prayer to heal?
* Yes
* Yes, but in conjunction with medicine
* No
* Don't know

"Yes, but in conjunction with medicine."  Standard cop-out for those who want to cover all their bases, which curiously shows a lack of faith.  "Yes prayer works, BUT, you also have to employ professionals because God's not *quite* powerful enough to heal on his own without a lot of human help." 

In other news, prayer plus aspirin cures headaches.

Bomb-sniffing dowsers are junk

The Iraqi Interior Ministry inspector general finally admitted that the ADE-651 bomb-sniffing dowsing devices don't work.

The ADE-651 was sold as a hand-held wand that supposedly swiveled when in the presence of dynamite or other explosives.  But like water-dowsing the device is nothing but a scam.  ATSC, a British company that manufactured the ADE-651, won million-dollar contracts selling the device to the Iraqi Interior Ministry for as much as $60,000 apiece.  U.S. military officials called the device a scam for years, and the British government has jailed the ATSC Chief Jim McCormick for fraud and has banned the company from exporting more.

Initially, Interior Minister Jawad Bolani defended the wands, saying it had saved countless lives.  But people actually using the device knew better.  Iraqi policeman Mahammed Shaker said he knew they were a scam: ""They don't achieve anything. It's all a show for the public."  The Iraqi Ministry's inspector general, Aqeel Al Turaihi reported that "many lives have been lost due to the wands utter ineffectiveness."

However, despite the criticisms, the lack of results, and the tragedy of the situation, the ADE-651 units have not been pulled from checkpoints across Iraq, and the official who signed the $85 million no-bid contract has been granted immunity.

U.S. Lt. Col Dennis Yates was very critical of ATSC's McCormick and his worthless device: "This piece of junk did, in fact, significantly contribute to an unknown -- and pathetically large -- loss of innocent lives. The guy who bought it should rot in one of the stinking jails that dot Baghdad."

Free Will in Heaven

I've been involved in a long discusson online with an apologetic Christian. I can't precisely define why I do so--there's almost zero chance that either one of us is going to change our position, and the board is peopled primarily with atheists and agnostics, so I can't even count on planting seeds in lurkers' minds. But I still think it's fun.

Like most online discussions, the topic drifts--nature of the beast. You start off talking about last night's episode of Glee, and before long you've covered the viability of a crewed mission to Mars, Baltic state economics, and why do your fingers feel funny when you break off a nail?

In this case, the apologist--whom I'll call Sam--found himself trapped in a corner defending why God doesn't do more to make absolutely clear that he exists and that we'd better pay close attention to what he has to say to us. Of course, he hauled out that old chestnut, "God doesn't want robots." The idea being, God wants us to love him freely, not under compulsion or because it's patently obvious that he exists. For some reason, our love is worth more if there's a chance that we're just spitting in the wind. There has to be risk, after all, or else it's cheap.

While on the surface that might sound good, I wouldn't want to enter into a human relationship on those terms. I wouldn't want to be standing at the altar, watching my bride come down the aisle, and think to myself, "I wonder if she *really* loves me. This whole thing could be just a setup."

Anyway, back to God not wanting robots. Conceivably, God could make things much easier if he just programmed us to always obey, to love him on faith, and to never commit a sin, but according to Sam, that would be bad. Parents prefer children, not robots, so we have to have the freedom to reject God. Of course, anyone who says that has never seen someone on their hands and knees gently encouraging her roomba to get itself unstuck from under the dining room table.

I then asked Sam a question, which drifted the thread in another direction: "Will believers have free will in Heaven?"

It's a simple yes-or-no question, but oh my the backflips Sam went through to avoid the implications. Here's the situation as I see it:

If the answer is No, future residents will not have free will in Heaven, then conceivably Heaven will remain a sinless existence forever, as we've been promised. But that wouldn't work, because then we would be the very robots that Sam asserts would be so bad here on Earth. You would have a hard time convincing anyone that its bad to be a robot for eighty years, but good to be a robot for eighty trillion years (and counting).

If the answer is Yes, Heaven's citizenry will indeed have free will, then it seems all but certain that Heaven will eventually descend into the sinful hellhole that is Earth. Of course, when I call Earth a sinful hellhole, I am employing the perspective of the evangelical Christian, not my own. Sin is a religious construct created to coerce and control believers. For some, the very existence of say, homosexuals, or rock music, or even hatless women in church is one more sign of the depravity to which this world has fallen simply because some guy and his wife ate a piece of fruit. That doesn't mean that, from my non-religious perspective, there is no injustice in this world, of course. But from the point of view of evangelical conservative creationist Christians, the existence in our world of cancer, thistles, even entropy itself, is all due to one man (Adam) who used his free will to disobey God.

So it stands to reason that, if two free-willed human beings living in Paradise can't keep from mucking things up for everyone, what possible chance will there be that the same thing won't happen with the millions of believers in Heaven? Sooner or later, someone's bound to do their own thing, and if Earth is any example, the rest of Heaven's residents will have to suffer the consequences. Except in Heaven's case, it will be infintely worse, since no one will die, putting their sinfulness to an end. It's one thing to live in a world in which Hitler is able to do his worst; imagine him letting loose forever.

Sam, of course, objected to this line of reasoning mightily. Even though I asked a Yes/No question--"Will believers have free will in Heaven?"--he couldn't just leave it at that. His first loophole was that the reason Adam and Eve used their free will for evil was because Satan was tempting them. Satan won't be in Heaven after the Rapture and Tribulation and all that, so it won't be a problem. Heaven will only be populated by people who have complete free will but never choose evil--they will WANT to be there, and they won't possibly WANT to sin.

Naturally, I had problems with that answer. First off, Genesis doesn't record that it was Satan in the Garden of Eden talking to Eve--it was merely a serpent. A walking, talking serpent. Taking this passage at face value (as evangelicals constantly urge us to do) Satan isn't anywhere on the scene. Christians have deduced that Satan took the form of the serpent in order to mess around with Jehovah's biology experiment. I suppose that's entirely possible when dealing with myth and allegory. But it makes God's curse on the Serpent for sticking his blunt nose where its not wanted a little tepid. Jehovah curses the serpent that he can't walk around anymore but has to crawl on his belly. And that should be a problem for an interdimensional being that can assume the shape of a non-existent animal--how? What happened, the serpent slithered away, then poofed to wherever Satan lives as he's waiting for Armageddon to spin up? You call that a curse?

Anyway, I didn't bring that up to Sam, because that was a side issue--the problems of taking myths literally--and not germane to the discussion. In response to Sam's defense of No Satan, No Sin, I came back with a two-pronged response. First, if Satan tempts others to sin, who tempted Satan to sin? According to the story gleaned out of The Book of Revelations, Ezekiel, but mostly Paradise Lost, Lucifer was the most perfect angel living in Heaven before God created the universe. Lucifer decided after who knows how long that he's tired of being number two, and so he convinces one-third of all the angels in Heaven to rebel against God. This results in a war in Heaven, which Lucifer naturally loses. He and his army are tossed out of Heaven; Lucifer takes on the name of Satan, the angels become demons, and they plan their next escapade to be launched from--well, wherever it is that's not Heaven and not Earth. I suppose it could be Hell, but it can't be all that bad if Satan is then free to play dice with God over the fate of Job, and to have philisophical discussions with Jesus in the wilderness. At any rate, Lucifer was a free-willed angel with no Satan around to tempt him to choose evil, and yet he chose evil. So why won't future Heaven residents do the same?

The second prong of my response to Sam's explanation of Satan, is that if all it takes to make a paradise with free-willed humans living in perfect harmony and no sin is for Satan to be removed from the picture, then why didn't God remove Satan from the Garden of Eden? Why did God allow Satan access in the form of a walking serpent or whatever in the first place? Already in history (and given the mythology, I use 'history' in the loosest sense of the word) we've had two scenarios in which perfect beings with free will chose to commit sin, so what's to keep the same thing from happening in the future?

In a nutshell, what can God do in Heaven that he can't do on Earth? If there really is some third answer to my Yes/No question, if there really is some way that God can set things up so that people can be not robots, and can have the ability to choose evil but never ever ever do so, then why didn't God just create that situation to begin with? Why did God make Earth, let humans muck it up with sin, kill himself so that a select few can end up in Heaven where everything is perfect forever, when he could have skipped several painful steps and just created people in Heaven?  That way, no one has to die, and even more importantly no one has to live in Hell forever because they didn't or wouldn't love an invisible God without hesitation. Wouldn't that have been the wiser choice, the more compassionate option, the more humane decision?

Those who stump for Heaven strike me as retirement village salespeople. They have a brochure that spells out how wonderful the amenities of your future retirement home will be, how you'll never want for anything, how you'll earn your life's reward wrapped in luxury and comfort. All you have to do is start making payments toward your future condo today, and keep making payments every month and every year until you retire. But no, you can't visit the village yet--only retirees are allowed inside the gated community. And you'll find no shortage of glowing endorsements from people who are already in the process of making their payments about how much they are looking forward to their future life of ease, but frustratingly, no one has ever seemed to be able to report from the inside. No one who actually lives there right now can tell you what it's like inside. In fact, and this is a little bit creepy, once a person checks into his retirement condo, he's never heard from again!

What further complicates the issue is that the architect of these retirement villages--the one who built them from the ground up, and who will be taking your monthly payments and using it to stock your spot with amenities--that guy turns out to be the same guy who built your house! And as you know perfectly well, your house sucks! It was built with shoddy construction techniques, fails electrical code in such a way that if you aren't always careful, you could kill yourself just turning on a light switch. Your house is drafty, leaks, has a suspicious-looking mold in several corners, and is infested with vermin. In fact, your dissatisfaction with your house is the biggest reason why you're even considering plunking down the cold cash for a spot in the retirement village in the first place--you can hardly wait to live in a home where the plumbing actually works as its supposed to.

So if the same builder who screwed up your house so badly is the guy in charge of your final destination, wouldn't you find that a little disquieting? If he couldn't build a decent house, what makes him qualified to build a decent retirement condo?

Oh, don't worry, says the salesman, the guy convincing you to get out your checkbook and sign the paperwork. There's a perfectly good reason why the builder wasn't able to build your home to perfect satisfaction--it's all the brother-in-law's fault. You see, the builder has this brother-in-law . . . . doesn't everybody? . . . who kept hanging around the building site when your home was being constructed. It was that guy--not the builder--who messed everything up. That guy was the one distracting the contstruction crew, and stealing tools, and swapping Grade A lumber with inferior grade particle board. If your house isn't satisfactory, then you can blame the brother-in-law. But he's not allowed on the construction site of your retirement village. Therefore, you can be certain that your retirement condo will be absolutely perfect, just like your home would have been if the brother-in-law hadn't been allowed to hang around. How many bedrooms can we put you down for?

Prediction of the Future is Tough

The Web comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (or simply SMBC) has a new comic that amused me:



After reading this, it occurred to me that the same formula could perhaps be applied to those who have predicted the exact date of the Rapture.  Has there been an individual who calculated the date that Jesus would return who was A) over 50 years old and B) calculated the date more than 50 years in the future?  Wikipedia has pages listing Unfulfilled Predictions of the Second Coming, as well as Unfulfilled Religious Prophecies in general. 

What strikes me as truly interesting is that religious believers point to fulfilled prophecies in the past as proof that their religion is backed by supernatural forces.  But when a prophecy in the present fails to pan out, the religion continues on.  Sometimes the expected prophecy is adjusted to another future date.  Sometimes the prophecy is re-interpreted to mean something else.  Other times it is concluded that the prophet was simply wrong but the religion remains true.

10-year-old girl burnt and abused in exorcism

In Malaysia last month, a young girl finds herself the victim of superstition and abuse:

A 10-year-old girl who was bound, beaten and burnt for a month as part of an exorcism ritual escaped on Monday after picking the lock on the chain around her ankle.

The unnamed girl was left in care of a relative after her father passed away. Perhaps the relative (also unidentified) resented the extra mouth to feed. A local medium told him that the girl was an unlucky omen for the family. So naturally he began to torture her:

Initially, she was deprived of food, given only rice laced with turmeric powder and chilli.

Then, she was chained and beaten up. This allegedly went on for a month until Monday morning when she managed to pick the lock and freed herself.

The relative and his wife told the girl that this was all for her own good.

At the time of the report, she was receiving medical care in a hospital, and the relative was under arrest. The girl testified that she would rather be put in foster care than go back to her relative's home.

No word on whether the fraudulent medium will receive any charges as well.

Just one more entry against the line, "What's the harm?"

Witch: "Your rules don't apply to me."

Add one more account to "What's the harm?"

A Geelong, Australian woman is stopped by a traffic officer for using a cell phone while driving. Nothing out of the ordinary here. Until the officer asked for her ID:

"When asked to produce her driver's licence, De Avalon replied that she did not have one," Sen-Constable Lamb said. "When asked why not, she said, 'I'm a being from another world and don't require one.' When asked to state her name and address De Avalon replied, 'I have a universal name that is not recognised here'."

Eilish De Avalon claims to be a witch, and feels that traffic laws don't apply to her. Ordinarily, this would be laughed off as she's taken away to receive mental health counseling, but in this case, the story took a dangerous turn:

"De Avalon began to wind her window up and Sen-Const Logan reached through in an attempt to remove the keys from her ignition. She continued to wind the window up pinning the officer's right arm to the door frame. She then drove off dragging him along with her."

The officer was dragged beside the car, which reached speeds up to 60 km/hour before he could get the keys. He received injuries to his arm and chest and will need surgery to repair the damage, and of course he's lucky he wasn't killed.

Her sentencing will occur on August 6th.

Rapists' conviction overturned

In 2002 three Vietnamese men were convicted of raping an 18-year-old woman in Hanoi and were sent to prison for 11 to 16 years. The grandmother of one of the men contacted a doctor, Pham Thi Hong, insisting that her grandson was innocent, and asked could the good doctor do anything to help.

It turned out she could. Dr. Hong examined all three men and determined that there was no way the three men could have raped that woman* because they had never had sex. Police officials agreed with her, and the trio was released after nearly a decade in jail.

And exactly how did Dr. Hong determine the three men were virgins? By looking at the back of their ears, of course.

She said examination of a pressure point beneath the convict's ear showed a small capillary was unbroken, which Vietnamese traditional medicine holds to mean that he was a virgin. Hong then examined the other two men. "I recognised these three men had never had sex with women," Hong said.

Dr. Hong is a acupuncturist at a hospital in Hanoi. Exactly what a tiny blood vessel has to do with sexual intercourse is unexplained, except that it's "tradition." Apparently she observed these unbroken capillaries with her naked eye, an even more impressive feat than her radical conclusions.

* Error: I originally typed the word 'women'

Father testifies he hoped God would heal his child

It's a heart-breaking story. An eleven-year old girl is dying of diabetes. Her father doesn't take her to a doctor or a hospital. Instead, he prays for her and asks his God to heal her.

The girl dies in her home, surrounded by her father and other people praying for her. In the end, she couldn't walk, speak or even eat.

Dale Neumann, 47, has been charged with second-degree reckless homicide, and recently testified on his behalf in court in Wasau, Wisconsin. When asked why he didn't seek medical help for his child, Neumann told jurors:

"I can't do that because Biblically, I cannot find that is the way people are healed."

Source: MSNBC.com

Neumann is partially correct. In the New Testament, many people are healed through divine providence, be it Jesus or the apostles. There's almost no mention whatsoever of medical science in the New Testament, primitive as it must have been.

In three gospels, Jesus cites the often-quoted phrase, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick." (Matthew 9:12; Mark 2:17; Luke 5:31) What's more, the quote was in response to criticisms that Jesus was spending too much time with sinful people, whereas Jesus replied that who better needs to experience God than those farthest from him. So this line can best be seen as an analogy to make a spiritual point, rather than a piece of advice to those wondering what to do with a sick child. At any rate, this one sentence must have been thin gruel compared to the numerous fantastical accounts of Jesus touching people and having them rise off of their sickbeds, or even from their graves.

On the other hand, the Gospel of Mark tells a story of a woman "subject to bleeding for twelve years." (5:25) Mark tells us that she had "suffered a great deal" when visiting the doctors, who had taken all the money she had and yet had gotten worse, but she was instantly healed when touching Jesus' cloak. Not exactly a ringing endorsement for the power of medical science, and this makes it understandable why Neumann may have been skeptical of doctors.

Of course, this still goes on today. Never mind what inefficiencies the sick undergo when dealing with insurance companies, it is still common for someone today to spend themselves into bankruptcy without ever receiving a cure. Medical science has significantly improved in the last two thousand years, but what we don't know about the human body can still leave the best of medical science baffled.

But Neumann's daughter sufferered from diabetes, not some exotic tropical disease that no one has heard of. She suffered from a treatable disease and could have lived a long, full life under medical supervision. Instead, her parents just wanted to pray for her, even as she declined in health. Neumann's wife Leilani was tried separately and found guilty, and now faces up to 25 years in prison.

Side note: According to Colossians 4:14, the apostle Luke was a doctor, and in his gospel he also recounts the story of the sick woman healed by touching Jesus' cloak (8:40-48). For some reason, though, Doctor Luke omits the line that the doctors had bled the woman dry of all her money. In a nice example of closing ranks, Luke simply states, "No one could heal her."

*************************

Update: As expected, Neumann was found guilty of second-degree reckless homicide. He'll be sentenced along with his wife in October.

The Sex Lives of Shamans

Last month I wrote about a pastor who was indicted for attempting to rape out a lesbian demon. Is this some modern perversion of religion, a diseased mutation descended from the purity of old-time paganism, when man lived close to nature and shamans worked selflessly to connect their people to God?

No.

Robert Wright, author of the recently-published book The Evolution of God writes:

What I do doubt is that these earnest, selfless spiritual leaders were any more common in the heyday of shamanism than today, or that the spiritual quest was any less corrupted by manipulation and outright charlatanism than today, or that there was a coherent philosophy of shamanism that makes more sense than the average religion of today.

Source: Slate.com

While it's difficult to study the writings of prehistorical societies to examine their religious beliefs (since by definition, they don't have any writings--that's why they're called prehistorical), anthropologists have done the next best thing. They've studied current hunter-gatherer societies that haven't been influenced by the modern world to examine how we might have lived before the rise of Western modernity.

What they've discovered is that shamans do what they do primarily for money and sex.

In exchange for treating a patient, a shaman might receive yams (in Micronesia), sleds and harnesses (among the Eastern Eskimo), beads and coconuts (the Mentawai of Sumatra), tobacco (the Ojibwa of northeastern North America), or slaves (the Haida of western Canada)...

[A]mong some Eskimos, "A forceful shaman of established reputation may denounce a member of his group as guilty of an act repulsive to animals or spirits, and on his own authority he may command penance. … An apparently common atonement is for the shaman to direct an allegedly erring woman to have intercourse with him (his supernatural power counteracts the effects of her sinning)."

Despite other observations of outright fakery and extortion, Wright observes that not all shamanism is bad. Natural Selection has made us to be "self-absorbed, with a wary sense of separation from most of humanity. And it's true that various shamanic techniques—fasting, for example—can improve things in this regard." But don't be fooled into thinking to today's neo-pagan shamanism can lead us back to a golden age of spirituality. That age never existed.

In fact, one could perhaps formulate a rule regarding the shaman and his people: The more superstitious the group, the more likely they will be hoodwinked by their shaman . . . and be compelled to have sex with him.

African albinos killed in the name of superstition

Boston.com's The Big Picture features a set of heartbreaking pictures of sub-Saharan African albinos.  These white-skinned Africans have long faced discrimination because of their appearance, but lately they've been hunted by monsters:

Albinos in Tanzania are increasingly targeted by those who would kill them for their body organs, limbs and even hair to be used in luck potions by others seeking wealth and good fortune in business and professional circles. According to local residents, witch doctors use the organs and bones in concoctions to divine for diamonds in the soil, while fishermen have been known to weave albino hair into their nets hoping for a big catch on Lake Victoria. More than 50 albinos have been killed in Tanzania and neighboring Burundi in the past year

Much like rhinos are captured to have their horns cut off so that poachers won't kill them for their horn's non-existent healing powers, these unfortunate people are hidden by humanitarians to protect them from superstitious murderers.

For those who would ask, "What's the harm?" in allowing people their religious nonsense, I suggest you pray to whatever God you worship that someone doesn't come to believe that your body parts have magical properties.

Genie sued for theft, harassment

In Saudi Arabia, a family is taking a genie (or 'djinni') to court, claiming the invisible spirit has thrown rocks at them when leaving the house and has stolen cellphones.

Genies are mentioned in the Koran ("I created the jinn and humankind only that they might worship Me." 51:56), so per Islamic tradition they must be real, although the BBC correspondent reports that belief in genies predates Islam.

According to Sheikh Amr Al Salmi who is presiding over the case, "We have to verify the truthfulness of this case despite the difficulty of doing so."

Good luck with that.

Psychics Interview dead Michael Jackson

The afterlife is proving to be as hectic for pop star Michael Jackson as the real world, according to Canadian news source Palluxo. The singer has apparently relaxed the media silence that he maintained toward the end of his natural life, and is now more than happy to conduct interviews.

Reportedly, popular psychic James Van Praagh interviewed Michael Jackson shortly after the pop star's death last week.

"Where are you located now, Michael" asked Van Praagh. "I am surrounded by happiness. I never felt more happier," said Jackson.

Van Praagh failed to provide any evidence that it was indeed the media sensation he was speaking with, and not the English journalist Michael Jackson, who wrote several notable books on whiskey.

Palluxo also reported that "More answers from dead Michael Jackson will be revealed on upcoming Oprah Show," which gives me an idea how Van Praagh was able to nail an exclusive interview with Jackson.

Not to be outdone, another popular psychic Sylvia Browne rushed to confirm that she too had conducted an interview with the singer, only with physical confirmation:

"I asked him to identify himself by moving my desk. The desk started trembling, then it moved a feet (sic) or two away from me. He wrote his name on my desk," she said. "This was Michael's sign of life."

What more evidence could anyone need?

Luckily for her fans, Sylvia Browne will have more information on an upcoming Montel Williams show.

No death in the Garden of Eden?

I have often heard Christians assert that the Garden of Eden was a paradise in which no death ever occurred. 

God's original creation was "very good". without blemish, death and suffering. Even the animals did not eat each other, they were all vegetatians (sic). Something happened to change all that and it was sin. After that the Lord cursed the universe but gave a way for man to be restored to him.

They cite sources such as Genesis 1:29-30, in which God gives the newly-created Adam and Eve and all animals "every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed" for food.  Lions, wolves, bats, sharks, alligators, eagles--all of them were strictly herbivorous.

While this might appear at first glance to an idealistic paradise, more investigation reveals this scenario is rife with problems.

The first problem with this scenario is that predators certainly look as if they were designed to catch and eat prey. What with the claws, the fangs, the forward-facing vision to track movement, the variation of hide coloring to conceal themselves, the digestive tracts suitable for consumption of flesh, hair and bone--all of those features are absolutely unnecessary for animals hunting plants. No cheetah needed to sprint up to 70 miles per hour to catch a bush.

So perhaps God created these creatures with useless features that not only would not help them consume plants but in fact would hinder them from doing so. It's hard to survive if your teeth can't properly chew cellulose and it passes right through you. This would be a colossal example of bad design. Or, perhaps God repurposed a large swath of the animal kingdom (and plants--think of venus flytraps and other plants that feed on insects) to be carnivorous after Adam and Eve's fall. Essentially this would mean that God took a lion with flat, plant-grinding teeth and performed divine dentistry to give it sharp incisors, along with a meat-preferring digestive system as well as the natural desire to consume meat to begin with. If that's the case, then I'd have to say that a plant-eating lion could hardly be called a lion in the first place.

What's more, the introduction of death would also require the creation of an entire group of creatures we call scavengers. Vultures, hyenas, even many bacteria feed off dead flesh. But according to the Creaion myth, they were not a part of the original six-day creation. They would have had to be created after the Fall, even though Genesis is clear that after six days God rested from creation. According to Hugh Ross, who sees Genesis as an uncannily accurate scientific treatise, we are still in this seventh day, which is why Ross asserts no new species are evolving today. (He's wrong about that, of course, but he needs it to be true for his premise to hold up.)

But we know what happens in situations today when predators are removed from an ecosystem--the herbivores overpopulate, consume all the food supply, then begin a massive starve-off.

And yet, according to the story, death hadn't entered the world, meaning no rabbits were starving to death for lack of greenery. So the only way that I can imagine this scenario panning out is for plant-eaters to not reproduce. At all. Despite God's command to increase and multiply, no animals or plants could reproduce. They certainly don't need to, since they aren't dying, and if they did, they would multiply unchecked. So again we have the same problem as the predators, in that every single species is equipped with organs and hormones and sexual characteristics with absolutely no purpose. The male peacock's beautiful plumage is completely pointless, because no female peacock will ever select a male for mating. No plant ever blooms, no tree ever launches seed pods. Even worse, no tree ever bears fruit either, since within each fruit is the seeds of future generations. And yet every single living creature is dependent on the plants bearing fruit for food--an unsolvable conundrum.

So either God created reproduction ahead of time for no reason, or he re-created all of creation after the Fall. Neither scenario is satisfying.

In a world without death, there can be no birth, either. Just unending, unchanging, static existence--as stagnant as a dank pool of brackish water. Certainly not the paradise we've imagined Eden to be.

All of these problems are what to be expected in a world with no death. I'm just an ordinary guy--I'm sure a trained biologist could come up with even more problems. These are the logical conclusions of holding to a primitive myth. Now there is no doubt that the idea of no pain, sorrow, and death is a compelling one. I completely understand the desire to believe that "Once upon a time nothing ever died." But like all fairy tales, they reveal our innermost desires and dreams and fears, but we must be very careful not to take them literally.

Pastor indicted for raping out a lesbian demon

In September 2006, 65-year-old Leonard Ray Owens was indicted by a Tarrant County, Texas grand jury for raping a church member in an exorcism.

Owens, a self-anointed prophet, told investigators that the 22-year-old woman had a sex spirit and a lesbian demon that needed to cast out but that he denied any sexual contact.  According to the woman, on two separate occasions Owens raped her in his home while trying to exorcise the demon, pinning the woman down and shouting, "Loose her in the name of Jesus!"  Afterwards Owens told her to wash her face and read Psalm 105:15: "Do my prophets no harm."

Other church members reported saying the the pastor's indictment "would not disrupt the church."

The case was later thrown out by prosecutors due to inconsistencies in witnesses.

Psychic fails to predict swindle

Psychics often claim to see the future and identify key events in people's lives through their access to spiritual or supernatural visions.  But then the Rutland Herald Online news from Vermont reported this last week:

The former bookkeeper of an internationally known psychic from Dorset has agreed to plead guilty in court to federal felony charges levied against her by prosecutors who say she executed a scheme to swindle roughly $200,000.

Rosemary Altea has appeared on several programs including Larry King Live and The Oprah Winfrey Show promoting her psychic skills and selling books, and was exposed on Penn & Teller's Bullshit for seeding the audience with people she knew in order to perform cold readings.

Too bad her psychic skills couldn't reveal the six-figure swindle.

Biblical Prophecy as Public Policy

In yet another response to the question, "What's the harm?" when people believe in superstition, a new book published in France last March claims that France's President Jacques Chirac was "disturbed" by ex-president George W. Bush.  In 2003, when he was seeking allies to invade Iraq, Bush claimed that prophetic characters Gog and Magaog from the Book of Revelation were raging in the Middle East:

In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:

"And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them."

Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:

"This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a New Age begins".

Thus, thousands of American and allied soldiers were killed in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed, and countless Christian Iraqis were displaced from their homeland, all because one man thought God instructed him to wage war against obscure Biblical characters--characters of which even devout Christians disagree on their true meaning?  When a Muslim man kills in the name of his religion, Christians denounce both the man and the religion.  But when a Christian man does the equivalent, where is the outrage, particularly among American Conservative Christians?