Slain in the Spirit?

Does prayer work? Ask the people in Waco, Texas where their pastor was electrocuted when he grabbed a microphone while standing in the baptismal:

“At first there was definitely confusion just because everyone was trying to figure out what was going on,” the Rev Ben Dudley, the community pastor of the church, said after he saw his colleague die. “Everyone just immediately started praying.”

Looks like it did a lot of good, too. The guy is still dead. So dead, in fact, that somebody had to throw in one of those sappy “it’s what he would have wanted” lines:

“I don’t know how, when, why, where or what’s going to happen, but we will continue as a church in the community because that is what Kyle would have wanted.”

Nobody better say anything like that after I die. When I’m gone, my wishes and desires go with me. If you want to pick up some torch I dropped, do it on your own.

An Unconnected Patchwork of Shapes and Movements?

I’m told that yesterday’s “Get Fuzzy” strip includes a monologue by Bucky that sounds a lot like something I would say. See for yourself.

Game Over, For Real

From Incheon, Haven of Civilization—Maybe this kind of behavior should merit a Darwin Award. These people neglected their 4-month-old daughter to play a video game for five hours and—oops!—she died.

The couple told police, “We were thinking of playing for just an hour or two and returning home like usual, but the game took longer that day.”

Excellent child-rearing skills. Poor kid. Unfortunately, this makes sense, though, and now that I think about it I’m surprised it hasn’t happened more often. Since the age of the average video game player has risen to coincide with the age of the average parents of infants, it seems like this kind of negligence would happen all the time—like people who leave their infants to cook to death in hot cars while they go shopping.

Anyway, like I said, Darwin Award. If you leave a 4-month-old home alone for five hours, you’re probably not the kind of person with strong survival and reproduction instincts who oughta be making more, if you catch my drift.

(Also, in case you’re wondering why the article linked above contains the mildly humorous construction “a 29-year-old man husband,” I think it’s because the story has been translated from Korean. I wish I understood Asian languages and why translating them into English so often seems to result in unintentional humor.)

And now for something completely the same.

Here is an excellent little article that compares Michael Behe’s recent testimony in the trial over “intelligent design” with a classic Monty Python sketch. Unfortunately, having read hundreds of pages of unedited transcripts of Behe’s testimony, I can attest that the humorous characterization of his words, which may seem unfair on its face, is actually pretty accurate. You might disagree, I don’t know. Read it yourself, if you want.

“I’ll Protect You, Fair Maiden!” Or Not.

Mr. Sulu is gay. Who’da thunk it? Now that famous bare-chested fencing scene in “The Naked Time” takes on a whole new shade of meaning.

(Extra points if you can explain the title of this entry.)

“I’ll Protect You, Fair Maiden!” Or Not.

Mr. Sulu is gay. Who’da thunk it? Now that famous bare-chested fencing scene in “The Naked Time” takes on a whole new shade of meaning.

(Extra points if you can explain the title of this entry.)

Senior Law Day

This morning I volunteered as a helper for Senior Law Day at my law school, San Joaquin College of Law. For three hours, I hung around room 203 and assisted each of the presenters with paper distribution, technology, turning lights on and off, writing web sites on the board, etc. It was a pretty fascinating morning. The first presenter in my room owns a residential home care business; she talked about issues relating to elder care. The second presenter was a lawyer who talked about MediCal and estate recovery. The third one was an officer from the City of Clovis police department, and he talked about identity theft. The idea was to give senior citizens an opportunity to keep themselves informed about legal issues that they’re likely to confront. As far as I’m concerned, though, we oughta have these kinds of things for every age level. Now I just need to find the right person to bring this up to . . .

Dead Bodies and Pretty Girls

I am reading Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers for my book discussion group. (The blurb at the bottom of the cover, from Entertainment Weekly, calls it “One of the funniest and most unusual books of the year. . . . Gross, educational, and unexpectedly sidesplitting.” One suspects that last adjective is an allusion to vivisection, but hopes not.) Oddly, perhaps, after a hundred pages I found myself with a compulsion to try a Google image search for the word “cadaver.” One gets what one asks for. (Or should I say, “One gets that for which one asks”?)

At any rate, I managed to find many interesting pictures, including several with groups of smiling medical students gathered smiling around their cadavers, names listed in the caption by front and back rows, excluding the silent, sheet-draped cadaver. Weird. But my favorite picture is this one. (Don’t click unless you want to see part of a human body without any skin on it.)

Why do I like that picture? Look at the details. First, most of the living humans in the picture are attractive young ladies. (It’s hard to go wrong with that kind of thing.) Second, notice how someone has scrawled on the white board in the background, “Welcome to your body.” Third, for some reason I find it quite funny that one of the girls in the picture is wearing a Spam t-shirt. Seems ironic, considering what’s on the table in front of her. Fourth, another of the girls is wearing a shirt that says, “We Have Issues.” Indeed. There’s a flippin’ cadaver on the table in front of you, and it has no skin. For most people, that would be a pretty big issue.

Anyway, just thought I’d share that. Are you sufficiently grossed out? One can only hope.

Holy Moly

And here is another reason to put no stock in the Catholic church . . .

On Monday, lawyers for the Holy See and [Archbishop William] Levada filed a motion in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Oregon arguing, among other things, that Levada shouldn’t have to testify about the Vatican’s policies because he enjoys immunity as an official of a foreign state – the Holy See – and because the Vatican’s own laws and confidentiality oaths prevent it.

Sorry, but religions who pretend they’re nations and enforce confidentiality oaths when lawyers come sniffing around are about as high in my book as corporations who pretend they’re nations and destroy documents when lawyers come sniffing around (or Presidents who refuse to provide documents regarding their military service, Supreme Court nominees, or anything else that actually matters when anybody comes sniffing around). But maybe it’s even worse for religions, because while corporations are at least straightforward about the reason for their existence—they want to increase profits, religions are nothing but cloak and dagger, bob and weave, bait and switch when it comes to what they’re really about—infecting the world with their mind-numbing memeplex.

Force-Feeding the Manufactured Controversy

The defense is making its case in the “intelligent design” trial (Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District) in Pennsylvania. Here’s an account of something one of the recent witnesses said, from MSNBC:

Lawyers for the Dover Area School Board called Steve Fuller, a sociology professor at the University of Warwick, England, as an expert witness Monday morning. He tried to bolster the school board’s contention that intelligent design, which holds that life on Earth was the product of an unidentified intelligent force, is a scientific concept.

Fuller said minority views can sometimes have a difficult time getting a toehold in the scientific community, but students might be inspired to develop intelligent design as future scientists if they hear about the concept in school.

And another version, from the York Daily Record:

Testifying on behalf of the Dover Area School District in U.S. Middle District Court, philosophy of science expert Steve Fuller said intelligent design “can’t spontaneously generate a following” because the scientific community shuts the door on radical views.

A sociology professor from the University of Warwick in England, Fuller said, “How do you expect any minority view to get a toe hold in science? You basically get new recruits.”

Huh? No, that’s not how scientific theories take hold. That’s how religions take hold. It’s why all the fastest growing religions (e.g., Islam, Roman Catholicism, Mormonism) include missionary zeal and directives to reproduce prolifically—both time-tested ways to “get new recruits.”

On the other hand, scientific theories take hold because they have explanatory power. People didn’t latch onto gravity and cell theory because those ideas had been implanted in their impressionable, adolescent minds, but because those theories helped make more sense of the world. Intelligent design does anything but make more sense of the world. Rather, it looks at complicated stuff (specifically, allegedly “irreducibly complex” stuff), which we know is complicated because we haven’t figured out how it works or where it came from, and then infers a causal relationship between the complicated stuff and an unrelated, pre-existing theological concept—some “intelligent designer,” an entity that thinks sufficiently like human beings to make stuff they’ll recognize as being “designed” according to their standards, but sufficiently unlike human beings to make stuff that they can’t figure out. Yeah, that’s about the size of it.

(Oh, but wait, I’m sorry. Dr. Behe says I can’t say things like “[Intelligent design] looks at complicated stuff,” because theories don’t do things. Yes, yes whatever. It’s called grammatical shorthand, Professor. Let’s just rephrase it: People who use the alleged theory of “intelligent design” look at complicated stuff and, using their “theory,” infer a causal relationship between a theological concept (the intelligent designer) and a cognitive classification (the “irreducibly complex” stuff). Okay? Is that better? See how much more scientific it sounds now? Yeah, I thought you did.)

At any rate, it’s interesting to note that this Steve Fuller fellow is not a biologist or a chemist or a pedagogist, but a sociologist. So, yes, in some sense, he probably has a pretty good idea of how to get ideas spread around—how to make memes and memeplexes take hold in a population, in other words—but he apparently has no idea how to differentiate between biology (which uses the scientific method) and philosophy (which pulls things out of its hat—oh, I’m sorry, infers things out of its hat) and which subject would be appropriate in which high school curriculum.

Yes, this idea of “intelligent design” should show up in school; it should be in the history, philosophy, rhetoric, and comparative religion classes mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act.

Oh, wait. That’s right. Those subjects aren’t mandated, because those are subjects that would teach kids how to think, and the last thing we want in America is kids who know how to think. After all, what would we do if somebody with half a brain made it into the White House? The world may never know.