Here’s an interesting one: Genesis chapter 30. If you think Darwin got inheritance wrong, try the Bible.

30:28 And he [Laban] said, Appoint me thy wages, and I will give it.

30:29 And he said unto him, Thou knowest how I have served thee, and how thy cattle was with me.

30:30 For it was little which thou hadst before I came, and it is now increased unto a multitude; and the LORD hath blessed thee since my coming: and now when shall I provide for mine own house also?

30:31 And he said, What shall I give thee? And Jacob said, Thou shalt not give me any thing: if thou wilt do this thing for me, I will again feed and keep thy flock.

30:32 I will pass through all thy flock to day, removing from thence all the speckled and spotted cattle, and all the brown cattle among the sheep, and the spotted and speckled among the goats: and of such shall be my hire.

30:33 So shall my righteousness answer for me in time to come, when it shall come for my hire before thy face: every one that is not speckled and spotted among the goats, and brown among the sheep, that shall be counted stolen with me.

30:34 And Laban said, Behold, I would it might be according to thy word.

30:35 And he removed that day the he goats that were ringstraked and spotted, and all the she goats that were speckled and spotted, and every one that had some white in it, and all the brown among the sheep, and gave them into the hand of his sons.

30:36 And he set three days’ journey betwixt himself and Jacob: and Jacob fed the rest of Laban’s flocks.

30:37 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.

30:38 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.

30:39 And the flocks conceived before the rods, and brought forth cattle ringstraked, speckled, and spotted.

30:40 And Jacob did separate the lambs, and set the faces of the flocks toward the ringstraked, and all the brown in the flock of Laban; and he put his own flocks by themselves, and put them not unto Laban’s cattle.

30:41 And it came to pass, whensoever the stronger cattle did conceive, that Jacob laid the rods before the eyes of the cattle in the gutters, that they might conceive among the rods.

30:42 But when the cattle were feeble, he put them not in: so the feebler were Laban’s, and the stronger Jacob’s.

30:43 And the man increased exceedingly, and had much cattle, and maidservants, and menservants, and camels, and asses.

So, I think the deal here is that Jacob makes some pact where he gets to take all of the stripey, speckled, and spotted cows, sheep, and goats, from this other dude Laban’s stock. He does this, leaving Laban with homogeneous flocks of plain individuals. He then attempts fraud by making Laban’s plain individuals mate while looking at stripey things, so that the offspring will be stripey, and Jacob can claim they are his own. And, hey, guys, it totally worked.

It’s not actually at all surprising that the offspring of two plain individuals turn out stripey, speckled, or spotty. That sort of thing is pretty normal. Traits can skip generations and reappear later for a variety of reasons. It could be that one or the other trait is linked to a dominant/recessive gene system; or that they are influenced by complicated combinations of genes, which are shuffled in each generation; or that they are capable of being thrown either way by developmental switches. Indeed, it’s possible even to speculate on reasons why the “feebleness” of cattle might be linked to the tendency to breed true for more traits.

So, assuming that the story has some basis in reality (lets pretend, anyway), Jacob probably just developed a superstition. A convenient myth to explain a mysterious natural phenomenon, while allowing him to believe that he had some influence over that phenomenon. Perhaps he noticed some stripey pattern in the landscape one day, noticed that there was mating going on in the vicinity of the stripes, and then noticed the stripey lambs being born. A meaningless correlation would then appear, superficially, to be a principle of inheritance. From there, the superstition would develop as the believer started counting hits, forgetting misses, and discovering his “ability” to select the stronger more desirable individuals as parents (or post-hoc reasoning that because it has sired a stripey calf, it must be a strong bull).

Alternatively, of course, Goddidit.

The main driving force for creationists is not science, but ethics. Their trump card is that “evolution is immoral”: they cite “might makes right” and eugenics, quote Darwin’s supposedly racist terminology in The Origin and Voyage, and put evolution at the centre of Nazi doctrine. Everything from school massacres to teenage pregnancy is blamed on “evolutionization”.^[1] It is not evolution that specifically bothers them; rather, evolution is a prominent representative of all things that aren’t biblically literal. In a world where the bible is not simple, straightforward and inerrant, ethics require rational thought and empirical facts. There are fuzzy lines between right and wrong, and tough choices where the lesser of two evils is difficult to determine. Creationists don’t care about the truth; rather, they are angry that evolution casts doubts on their book of simple rules.

The anti-abortion movement appears convinced that a massive international genocide is occurring. Their argument is that taking a life is murder, and life begins at conception. They are not using “life” in any scientific sense, nor expecting their argument to be taken as a scientific one. To try arguing the matter on scientific grounds is to throw your time away. Try a Socratic session of defining terms and you will be accused of dehumanising through language, in the mould of the Nazi holocaust. Arguments over when consciousness or pain detection begins to develop will persuade nobody, because they rely on the anti-abortionist admitting that life does not have solid boundaries, but has grey areas, in which difficult ethical decisions lie. The argument is not about when life begins, it is about simple rules.

G.K. Chesterton is oft quoted as saying something along the lines of “the problem with not believing in God is not that one believes in nothing, but that one will believe in anything.”^[2] I am not so pessimistic, but it does seem to be true that in the absence of God’s simple rules, people do their best to fill the vacuum. Take the organic food movement. Organic food is quickly rising in popularity in the United Kingdom because it markets itself as tastier and healthier, but most of all because it is ethical: good for the environment, and fair on the producers. Buyers of organic are making the simple rule “organic is ethical”, and delegating the difficult tasks to the producers and guardians of the organic brand. Technically, this may be classed as the fallacy of “appeal to authority”, but in practice it is reasonable, as none of us has time enough to investigate everything in depth ourselves, and so we must delegate at least some of the work to authorities. However, when delegating the task, most people assume that the producers and the guardians of the organic brand will be taking an empirical approach to deciding the most ethical growing practices, and the rules for producing the healthiest, tastiest and most environmentally friendly food. Sadly, they are not. The organic movement has written its own holy book of simple rules and superstition. The empirically determined healthiest and tastiest product is substituted with the most natural product. All chemical pesticides, herbicides, fertilisers and GM are out, while natural equivalents are in: a surrogate in place of improving biodiversity. Instead of developing sensible rules for the use of pharmaceuticals and antibiotics, which farming has traditionally grossly misused, the organic movement dispenses with them in favour of — don’t laugh, animal welfare is at stake here — homeopathy.

In last December’s leader criticising the organic and fair trade movements, The Economist miss the point. Instead of criticising those movements for judging their efficacy by surrogate outcomes and arbitrary rules, they simply list their own alternative surrogate outcomes and arbitrary rules. Both sides are merely providing just-so stories for why their farming methods are better, rather than looking at actual empirical measurements of the true results they want to achieve. Of course, The Economist is not even interested in the same results as the organic and fair trade movements: they are interested in the simple rule of a free market, no ifs and no buts.

Simple minds need simple rules; but intelligent rational people can easily find themselves seduced by them too, if they are not wary. Science has simple rules too, but of a different kind. Science has elegant equations and beautiful theories that make your heart race when their simplicity clicks. Witness Thomas Henry Huxley’s comments on closing The Origin of Species: “Why didn’t I think of that?” The most awesome aspect of evolution is that such simple rules produce the complex wonders of life. Life, when it becomes complex, no longer conforms to any one simple rule. Neither can our lives. In an episode of Father Ted, the senile old drunk Father Jack professes the least understanding, but provokes the most productive thought from others, with his mantra “that would be an ecumenical matter”. If you’re faced with difficult questions or fierce arguments, and in need of a simple rule, I offer you this: “that would be an empirical matter.” And from there, let the wonderful complexity blossom.

References

1. Tom DeLay, quoted in “Evolution Revolution”, PBS.org.
2. Though the American Chesterton Society have trouble verifying the source.

I caught the last couple of minutes of Extreme Pilgrim (BBC 2, Friday 9pm) and was intrigued, so fired up the iPlayer to watch the whole thing. It’s Vicar of Dibley meets Ray Mears’ Extreme Survival, all done in the style of an American college student movie. The main character presenter is Peter Owen Jones, a Sussex parish priest who defies the law that Anglican priests may speak no louder than a whisper. His accent is very 1960s public-school, though it also reminded me a little of this Fry and Laurie sketch, which begins to make sense when you learn that before joining the priesthood he was in marketing. There is marvelous rhythm in the way he pronounces “Him-ah-lee-ahs”. It made for a slightly surreal programme when combined with the Alan Davies haircut and constant bewildered/stoned facial expressions.

Jones goes “seeking the spiritual enlightenment that Britain once had” in India. He joins some Sadus at the Kumbh Mela, the massive Hindu festival on the Ganges. The first half of the programme is given over to Jones getting stoned and staying up ’till five in the morning. I wonder what Stephen Green or Mary Whitehouse would make of nice Anglican vicars smoking weed on the BBC. After a wadge of notes has changed hands, the group sit around the camp fire talking of how we should not be seeking rewards in this life, and of how the modern world is too concerned with the economic at the expense of the spiritual. In a marvelous scene with a cross-legged old guru, subtitles pop up to say “give me a hundred rupees”; this is translated for Jones, however, as a stream of spiritual babble about giving up material possessions. Another marvelous scene shows Jones, having been fast-tracked into the job of a Sadu, dressed in the full orange robes and still looking rather spaced. He stands in silence for twenty seconds before wondering aloud “where am I?” When the festival is over Jones sets off for a cave in the mountains with the objective of “purifying your parts with austerity”. Fnarr fnarr.

It’s all very nice. We meet lots of amicable characters preaching peace and charity. But it’s the perfect advert for why peaceful, liberal, friendly, wishy-washy “spiritual” religion is not universally harmless. This is the eastern spiritual utopia that so many Westerners look to as the solution to the problems of our materialist lives in the West? A skeletal shaman runs back and forth across a busy road to kiss the tarmac: “he’s making the energy meet — that’s his philosophy.” In his mountain cave, Jones is visited by the village chief, who comes with offerings and a request for blessings of his daughter’s marriage. Jones is very upset one morning as he confesses to battering a scorpion with a saucepan: “I was a guest on his territory.” The programme closes with Jones observing that he is “a product of a society that values economic well-being as much as spiritual well-being.” Uhuh. And your society has running water, an absence of open-pit latrines in the street, and a distinct lack of amoebic dysentery. I would call that a good thing. And that is the problem with peaceful, liberal, friendly religion: to value “spiritual needs” means to value the next life and the invisible friend above the needs of real people in the one life that they get. A “philosophy” that values disease and starvation does not indicate a care for man’s real spiritual needs.

So while the programme ended up as Vicar of Dibley meets Ray Mears, deep down it was trying to combine the Jesus complex of the git-wizard David Blaine with the philosophical power of rocket scientologist Tom Cruise. The programme thinks that it is making a profound insight into society and nature (the same “profound insights” of stoned hippies everywhere), but utterly fails to make the case. Still, it makes for entertaining television.

I listened to a sermon^[1] by Ken Ham, creationist head of Answers in Genesis, the other day. I was erm … researching a role? Anyway, it was great fun. My knowledge of church services is limited to the Anglican tradition, and it was very educational to hear how things are done evangelical style. I won’t bother dissecting Ham’s argument bit by bit — though it’s worth mentioning the occasional bursts of outright Lying For Jesus, such as the claim that textbooks state that there are higher and lower races of man, or the conflation of species (of cats) with breeds (of dogs). You know, things so absurdly wrong and depressingly easy to fact-check. Rather, what really interested me was the way he wove two very different classes of (equally fallacious) arguments together. On the one had were his creative truth-claims in favour of biblical literacy and against the findings of science. On the other were arguments about perceived consequences that acceptance of evolution has for morality. Ham flickered back and forth between the two, ignoring the distinction. It’s an acceptable rhetorical technique, I suppose: mix claims about what is true with scare stories about what happens if you don’t believe it. I’m sure many of the arguments for atheism could even be charged with using this technique at times, and it’s a staple of politics and tabloid news. But I think that it says something very interesting about the motivation of creationists.

Ham’s argument from consequences comes down to this: if the bible is literally true, God determines morality. If evolution is true, morality is based on man’s fallible word. And you know what? He’s right. The bible is wrong about an awful lot of things (sometimes it’s just asking too much to believe that it was intended as allegory), and God does not determine morality. To paraphrase HectorAvalos : it is not sufficient to demonstrate that the bible gets one fact right in order to demonstrate that it is is useful, relevant, ethical, or the revealed word of God. But one inaccuracy is all that it takes to prove that it isfallible and questionable.^[2] Ham therefore believes that it is his duty to defend every word of the bible as the truth. Only that with “save their souls.” The end goal of promoting creationism is not to have everybody believe in creation, but to fight the rise of the “pagans.” (Lol.) Ham believes that if people are taught that it doesn’t really matter how God made the world, they will question whether he made it at all. If people are taught that it doesn’t really matter whether everything in the first book of the bible happened, they will question whether the events of the Gospels really happened. And you know what? I can’t argue against that. Our only difference is that Ham believes that this is a bad thing.

The tactic of mixing truth with consequences is something that has been inherited by the intelligent design movement. Take the Wedge document, the DiscoveryInstitute’s 1998 manifesto (leaked, and now subject to desperate attempts at distancing and damage control from the Disco Inst.). The document makes vague appeals to science here and promises research programmes there, but it is primarily concerned with the perceived effects of “scientific materialism”. Socialism is the preferred bogeyman of the Disco Institute, though the link between evolution and socialism never seems far from confused. Or, of course, we have Ben Stein in theater(s) (for one week only) rather offensively lying for Jesus about racism and playing games with the holocaust.^[3] School shootings, abortion, homosexuality, and all the other traditional demons are these days the responsibility of “evolutionization”.^[4]

Claims about the truth and claims about consequences are not the same thing, and I’d be rather offended if somebody gave a lecture or made a film mixing the two so thoroughly and expected me not to notice.

References

1. Available here
2. From his Minnesota atheists lecture, if I recall correctly
3. In Expelled
4. Attributed to Tom DeLay, 1999. “U.S. Republican politician blames the Columbine shootings on “evolutionization“.

At the weekend around 12,000 people marched through London in protest against the policies of the Pope.  A photo essay on cotch dot net explains why we were there.

I found on the iPlayer the latest in BBC2′s series of Darwin documentaries, Did Darwin Kill God? This is theologian Conor Cunningham’s attempt reconcile science and religion, and show that their differences are all just a misunderstanding deliberately promoted by 20th century American christian fundamentalists, and 21st century atheist fundamentalists.We could play count the mistakes, but I’ll try to keep it to the most illustrative examples. Firstly, Cunningham wants to show that Darwin himself has nothing to say on science versus religion. In correcting the simplistic idea that Darwin lost his religion entirely because of evolution, Cunningham suggests that Darwin instead lost his religion entirely because of the personal tragedy of his daughter’s death. Uh. I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than either of those. And it’s true that Darwin did, for various reasons, generally try to keep quiet about God and religion, but he knew his work did have a bearing on the field, and, for example, made quips about a loving creator god and the design of parasitic Ichneumonid wasps.

Worryingly, it is not just his history of science that is oversimplified so far as to be plain wrong: his characterisation of his own field looks no better. He seems to think that throughout history creationism was an obscure aberration, taken seriously only by the eccentric fringes of theology — you know, like James Ussher, mere Primate of All Ireland, or theologian William Paley. Real members of the One True Faith followed the “mainstream” teachings of Augustine, and took Genesis as allegory. I am not, and have no interest in being, a theologian. I don’t know enough about the subject to be able to say whose ideas have attracted the largest following throughout history. But I am slightly concerned. In my experience, a theologian placing an idea on the fringe means that modern European academic theologians don’t take it seriously, but that it has probably been the dominant dogma of their church and its laity for most of its history.

Meanwhile, Cunningham’s idea that American creationism was invented during the Scopes trial as a reaction to eugenics is an entirely new one to me, along with the ideas that American creationism was all old-earth creationism until the 1960s, and that young-earth creationism was invented as a reaction to sixties liberalisation of values. Biblicalliteralists are indeed motivated by perceived threats to their moral systems, but I think you’ll find that the history of the movement is a bit more complicated than that — to the extent that Cunningham’s version of history is just plain wrong.

The best part of the programme though, is Cunningham’s attempt to characterise the state of current thinking in evolutionary biology, and show how “ultra-Darwinists” are discredited. Perhaps if I knew as much history and theology as I do biology my jaw would have dropped as far in those sections as it did in this one. The dropped jaw soon turned to laughing out loud, though, when I realised that the work was merely one of incompetence rather than deliberate misinformation. I’ll skip over his bizarre attempt to introduce the selfish gene theory and how the human genome project has disproved it (!), and move on to the part that really had me rolling on the floor: one of the most fantastically absurd non-sequiturs I’ve ever heard.

The topic was memetics: the idea that ideas are replicating units that evolve as they spread from one mind to another. Memetics was originally just a thought experiment about hypothetical units of evolution analogous to genes, but was fleshed out, for example by Daniel Dennett and Sue Blackmore. Now, Sue Blackmore is great, but if Cunningham really knew the state of evolutionary thinking, he would know that she does not really represent even “ultra-Darwinists”. But Cunningham drags her to Salisbury so that they can do an interview in the station car park. Brilliantly, he discovers a fatal flaw in the theory of memes — one that he seems to think somehow has important consequences for the credibility of Richard Dawkins and the God hypothesis: if memes are true, evolution is itself a meme!

… so what?

Well, think about it. If evolution is a meme, it’s just a parasite in our mind, and not true! Memes destroy the truth of evolution!

Uhm. But-

Ultra-Darwinists have never been able to answer this problem!

Oh … kay.

Cunningham clearly really does truly believe that his brain has just done something brilliant. I suspect he is correct in stating that “ultra-Darwinists” have never been able to answer the “problem”, since I have difficulty believing that anyone would ever before have managed to think of it and say it out loud before noticing what an utterly and humiliatingly ridiculous thing it would be to say.

As an aside, it is interesting to consider truth and memes. Under the theory of memetics, the idea that truth is of value would itself be a meme (and a very meritorious one). In the Selfish Gene, Dawkins talks about the need for genes to cooperate, or to put it another way, selfish genes have to be able to survive in an environment that contains many other selfish genes. Analogously, memes have to survive in an environment of other memes. Scientists, for example, host a series of memes for methods of filtering the non-true memes that might be trying to infect them. Skepticism, rationalism, logic, reason, and empiricism are memes that are also meme filters. But many people do not host them. Others fail to recognise the truth in a meme because it conflicts with false memes that they are already hosting. Some people do not even host the truth-valuing meme.

–

Cunningham’s thesis — and, it would appear from the website, the thesis of the executive producer of the BBC2 Darwin season — is that creationists and “ultra-Darwinists” are extremists: two different kinds of fundamentalists abusing Darwin to promote their sinister agenda. Richard Dawkins, for example is an extremist because he believes that there is no need for God. (Not because he believes that religion is a bad thing: merely believing that there is no need for God is enough to get you branded an extremist.)

Cunningham is showing us the two unreasonable, frightening, even dangerous extremes, and telling us that the truth lies in the middle — bang on the spot where Darwin and the Bible are both right, in their own ways. This is apparently the reasonable position. Life on earth evolves, and Christ died on the cross for our sins and rose from the dead. That’s the reasonable, moderate, non-extremist middle ground position to hold.

Perhaps next the Beeb could help us reach a nice reasonable and moderate middle-ground position between those extremists who either demand that pi is ~3.14159 or that it is exactly 3.

–

Comments on the original post:

Wow, a slow news day, eh? The BBC, shunning predictable Chinese military aggression, another turn of the tides in Iraq, and yet more boring news about the economy, lead with “Brown criticised over embryo bill“. Somebody at BBC News is clearly a fan of Cardinal Keith O’Brien. ‘Keith who?’ I hear you ask. What do you mean you’ve never heard of the leader of the Roman Catholic church in Scotland? The big news is that O’Brien is making a fuss over the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. The bill, currently in parliament, will, amongst other things, make it easier for researchers to develop methods of growing tissues and organs that are genetically identical to those who require transplants or grafts, and is likely to help solve the problem of transplant rejection and the need for immunosuppressive drugs after transplants. Then there’s cancer, Alzheimer’s, HIV, blah, blah. This is, I’m sure you’ll agree, a terrible thing. I couldn’t put it better than O’Brien himself:

“This Bill represents a monstrous attack on human rights, human dignity and human life.”

The reason, of course, is that this bill enables the use of hybrid embryos. Putting little bits of reprogrammed adult human DNA into animal zygote cells. This presents all sorts of obvious problems for the Roman Catholic Church. It suggests the clearly impossible: that humans are animals, evolved like all other animals, and following the same developmental rules as our neighbours. The Cardinal is, I am sure, confident that hybrid embryos will never work, because of the obvious fact that cows, pigs and mice are not created in God’s image. That’s elementary stuff. Comes right at the beginning, in Genesis 1:27. It’s almost embarrassing that these biologists don’t know that.

Then there is the problem that this bill mentions embryology. The Roman Catholic church has, for the past few decades, tried to convince the world that it knows all about embryology. And don’t they just. Is it not the case that human embryos are human beings? Is it not so that fertilised eggs can think and feel, recite their twelve times tables, and lead missions into pagan lands? O’Brien is privileged with an intimate knowledge of God’s colossal mind, and he knows that God loves zygotes. So of course the Roman Catholic church must oppose a bill that makes such absurd claims as development being mind bogglingly complicated, life having fuzzy boundaries, or that you are infinitely more valuable and important than the half dozen skin cells that have fallen off your right index finger during your current browsing session.

Of course, it’s not just the mind of God that O’Brien knows intimately. God knows what you and I think, and he has spilled the beans to O’Brien:

“I can say that the government has no mandate for these changes: they were not in any election manifesto, nor do they enjoy widespread public support.”

Yes of course. Who is better placed to judge the beliefs, feelings and fears of the public on this matter than Cardinal Keith O’Brien? And he’s the perfect candidate to head this “single permanent national bioethics commission” that he proposes, too, what with his deep knowledge of developmental biology and reproductive medicine, and his profound understanding of the national mood. Not to mention that direct line to God. You couldn’t find a more representative candidate in the land.

Indeed, people were talking of nothing but the Human Fertilisation and Embryology bill on the crowded train home yesterday, and I can tell you, they’re not too happy about the army of monsters that are coming our way. “Haven’t these scientists ever heard of zombies,” one of them asked? Another was concerned that the convergence of reprogrammed human nuclear DNA with bovine mitochondrial DNA within the same cell membrane could just be the final straw that breaks the camel’s back and leads God to break his promise never again to commit genocide by flooding the earth. One gabbling mouthbreather even pointed out that such an untested and unprecedented confluence of incompatible nucleotide sequences could, for all he knew, flip the earth’s magnetic poles and precipitate the fiery conclusion of the universe.

Oh wait, have I got that right? Now I think about it, perhaps Britain is not the reactionary backwater that O’Brien thinks it is. Perhaps the senile and simple individuals who pray for the souls of cells do not make more than an entertaining but tiny minority of people in this country. Perhaps, just maybe, O’Brien’s series of non-sequiturs have led him to a confused and offensively hyperbolic fantasy about morality that he is pretending is representative of a universal hallucination of the British public. Sure, this bill does not have widespread popular support. But that is because parliamentary bills get only widespread popular obliviousness and apathy. The cardinal is dreaming if he believes that there is widespread popular opposition to it.

How about a front page science story that doesn’t give 99% of the coverage to absurd ideas?

I’m watching Peter Owen Jones’ Around The World In Eighty Faiths. You might recall Owen Jones as the public school hippy ex-ad man anglican vicar from Extreme Pilgrimage.

This time ’round, Owen Jones is on a world tour, looking at the beliefs and rituals of eighty different faiths. It’s fascinating. The beliefs held by these eighty faiths are not in any way compatible with each other, and Owen Jones acknowledges this by not attempting to conjure those pitiful explanations for why they are, in-fact, all the same belief. He’s very respectful of the beliefs as they are described to him. For much of the series, he whispers as though it is an Attenborough documentary, and he must not disturb the wildlife in its natural habitat. He stands at a short distance watching in awe of the rituals. Clearly profound things are up.

But when he goes to Moscow to meet the Russian Orthodox Christians, a brief and sudden angry streak displays itself. He is disgusted with what atheism — not communism, atheism — did to the Russian Orthodox religion under the Soviet regime. But, to tick off another of his eighty faiths, he goes to observe some atheists performing their ritual in a dusty old meeting room. He wants to know “what contemporary atheism has to offer.” What a fascinating way to approach the issue. Not whether an idea is right or wrong; what it has to offer.

Later he visits Damanhur, a “spiritualist” commune in northern Italy. Here he learns about spherocells and environmental transformers, and concludes that there is much creative energy in the vicinity. Hey, in Damanhur, you don’t even need to be sentient to get creative: “Plants can modulate sounds. By making them listen to classical music, they learn to use it better. There is an interaction between our thoughts and the vegetable’s.” To prove the point, Owen Jones strokes a leaf to help the plant with its latest composition.

“Most religions have some wacky stuff in them. We’ve just become socialised into believing that ‘there are some people who believe this, and that’s OK.’ Is that OK? I mean, I think that’s OK.”

Sure, Pete. If you think that truth doesn’t matter.

“He gets some very good replies from some terribly soft targets.” She’s thinking particularly of creationist-sympathising US Senator Mark Pryor (D-AK).

She goes on, “… but the most revealing moment is when Maher faces down a priest at the Vatican and says, ‘what about hell, what about sin, what about, you know, the evils of temptation?’, and the priest says: ‘yeah, what about them?’ and kinda shrugs off this simplistic attitude that Mayer has.”

And that’s the problem with the film: Maher is attacking “the wrong target.” What on earth attracts Maher to the simplistic belief of Mark Pryor, a mere everyday US Senator over the sophisticated religion of everyone’s favourite heavyweight Latinist Father Reginald Foster? What has Pryor got to offer the world? What influence does he have over anything? Who cares if some boring politician in the upper chamber of the legislature of some great world superpower might be sympathetic towards ridiculous religious views? What matters is that Vatican astronomer Father GeorgeCoyne softly dismisses those ridiculous religious views as being no longer relevant to the modern church. I mean, do try to keep up, atheists.

And I mean, so what if some soft target like The Pope makes some sort of batshit insane remark about condoms that defies basic anatomy and psychology, spits in the face of everyone who gives a crap about basic standards of truth-telling, and adds further insult the injury of millions of devastated lives? Why attack a soft target like him? What harm could his remarks possibly do?

This is a repost for archival of an item first published on the old blog a year ago.