Christianity is torture

Crucifixions vs. mediaeval tortures, who wins?

The other day I was watching a series on the Discovery Channel about various torture and execution devices from a number of different era.

The first featured ancient devices (including wicker men) but focused on crucifixion. The show mentioned that crucifixion was extra horrible and painful due, strangely, to the way the victims are stretched out on the crucifix, which causes compression of the diaphragm. This encouraged victims to try to push up with their legs and create room for their lungs to breathe, but that only put more pressure on the ankle nails; hence victims control their own intense pain. Pretty neat.

But the followup mediaeval show had much more crazy stuff, including iron maidens, racks, pears¹, and thumb/head screws. These are dementedly thoughtful and intentionally painful, and the show didn't even mention some of the even more painful methods.

Crucifixion does have advantages in that it is pretty much a 'fire and forget' device. That said, the extra effort the mediaeval devices required enabled executioners to play on the minds of their victims, letting them anticipate the agony, thus making the torture that much worse. This isn't to deny that crucufixion wasn't horribly painful - it certainly was - yet when you hear most Christians talk about it, crucifxion usually "the most horrible, painful punishment" that humans have ever devised. Why is it that so many Christians deny the even more painful later inventions?

I have two guesses:

1) Christians always like to make their god-related stuff superlative - God is unstoppable; omnipotent-scient-benevolent; loves us like a parent, but to a greater greater extent than any parent, etc. So they make it sound like Christ's crucifixion has to be the most painful thing ever.

2) They ignore the mediaeval execution devices because these were the creation of other Christians. So they are conveniently neglected.

I have a third guess that, depending on how you look at it, is either less or more charitable: they simply don't know much about mediaeval torture. Maybe they just aren't as twisted as guys like me, who love this stuff (and gave a speech about it during a grade 8 public speaking contest).

¹Sadly, the mediaeval pears are not thought to be able to break jaws or kill people; they are merely painful gagging devices.

In the news...

Sorry I haven't had a chance to continue the Alpha Course postings. The thing is, those require actual work to put together (not the least of which is deciphering my own crappy handwriting from the hurried notes I made in the course book during the sermons and discussions). And I have no time at all right now.

"What? King Aardvark is actually doing real work?!"

Shocking, I know.

Anyway, I'm going to post two quick links today of news articles that interest me. The first is about the rising atheist movement in Indonesia, of all places. In a country as fiercely Muslim as Indonesia, the few atheists are turning to the tools of the internet to find each other and communicate. Interesting stuff from my mom's home country (FYI: I believe my mom's parents followed traditional Chinese ancestor worship of some sort; they certainly aren't Muslims.) One thing the story notes is how "belief in "one God" is the first tenet of the official national ideology of Pancasila." The Indonesian political ideology of Pancasila is an interesting little history lesson. When Indonesia was first gaining independence from the Dutch, president Sukarno, the country's first leader, tried to come up with an ideological framework to base the new country on. It was four relatively straightforward items - just and civilized humanity, unity of the country, democracy based on the deliberations of representatives (though this one didn't work out so well for many decades), and social justice - plus a fifth, belief in "one God," I suppose as a homage to Indonesia's Muslim religious background. Sukarno did not originally considered it as quite as important as the other four. But Sukarno was a crafty little bugger when it came to politics; he knew that a strong and growing communist party was looking to gain a commanding political presence in Indonesian politics, so he needed the also strong Muslim party on his side. Hence throwing the bone of "One [surprisingly unspecified] God" as the most important of his 5 principals.

The second story is about a car thief in Nigeria who tried to escape capture by a group of vigilantes by using black magic to turn himself into a goat. Police, though disregarding the mystical as a source of evidence, do have the goat in custody.

World War Prophesy based on Hallucinogenic Ramblings

My wife has a hard time remembering stuff from history class - afterall, the last time she took history was over a decade ago - so she likes me to remind her about when major events happened and why they are important. On the weekend, I was reminding her about the world wars, namely when they took place and who the primary conbatants were, when she sullenly proclaimed, "There will be another world war eventually..." I steeled myself for what I figured she was going to say next, and I was right. "...At the End of Days," she eventually followed up with, fulfilling my little self-prophecy.

Evidently, I didn't do a good enough job steeling myself, for I blurted out something about not choosing to get my predictions of the future from the hallucinogenic ramblings of some guy almost 2000 years ago.

She then said that they weren't hallucinogenic, but I'm pretty sure she's never read Revelations. I know for a fact that neither her bible study group nor herself independently have gotten to the end of the bible yet. Independently, she's still halfway through the OT while her bible study started in the NT but is only in John. In fact, I'll go out on a limb and guess that her knowledge of Revelations comes from the Left Behind movie and maybe a church sermon or two.

For the record, Revelations contains mentions of:
- ...four living creatures, and they were covered with eyes, in front and in back. The first living creature was like a lion, the second was like an ox, the third had a face like a man, the fourth was like a flying eagle. Each of the four living creatures had six wings and was covered with eyes all around, even under his wings.
- ...locusts looked like horses prepared for battle. On their heads they wore something like crowns of gold, and their faces resembled human faces. Their hair was like women's hair, and their teeth were like lions' teeth. They had breastplates like breastplates of iron, and the sound of their wings was like the thundering of many horses and chariots rushing into battle.
- ...And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. He had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on his horns, and on each head a blasphemous name. The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion.

These among many, many other similar things. Hallucinogenic? You tell me.

By the way, a great (though not yet completed) fun resource for Revelations is Apocamon: The Final Judgement.

Jared Diamond's lack of respect for priests

I've just started reading Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, which is so far an outstanding book. Just a quick note: early on, Diamond is discussing the beginnings of food production and its repurcussions, including the establishment of chiefs, bureaucracy, scribes, artisans, and priests. The last one, priests, he does not justify as being to tend to the spiritual needs of the early villagers, rather, as he term it, "Stored food can also feed priests, who provide religious justification for wars of conquest...." Get that? Religion is just there so that the masses will support the greed of the powerful.

Evolution front and centre

On the msn.com homepage today, surprisingly the first feature was a Newsweek article on human evolution. Not much, just 5 pages recapping current molecular clock techniques and summarizing findings, but I still think it's amazing that they are candidly discussing the science and history without pandering to Christian fundies. I hope some fundies checking in for their daily gossip, fitness, and consumer guide stuff will be interested and click the link - if only to piss them off a little - but hopefully articles like this will get people to trust science rather than 2000+ year old books.

Surprise Trolling

Well, well, well, looks like I got my first anonymous drive-by trolling.

In fairness, he didn't just scream "UR GOING TO HELL!! PRAISE JEEBUS!!!" and run off, so I'll give him credit for that. He took serious offense at my screed against the Alpha Course Christmas dinner I went to in December - you see, he teaches, like, THREE Alpha Courses a year, so that makes him like an expert or something, even though the course leaders generally don't have any particular training (my apologies if you, dear anonymous, actually do have scholarly training in such matters). Unlike most trolls, he actually presented an argument, albeit an angry and sarcasm laced one. Unfortunately, he showed up a bit late to the post, ie. the post was in December and it's now February, so in order to address his comments (given here), I'll make a new post now.

In particular, he took much issue with my attack on a quote given in Alpha honcho Nicky Gumbel's Christmas lecture video. The quote was about there being as much evidence for the life and resurrection of Jesus as for any other event in human history, which I quickly demonstrated was a craptacularly false statement. How'd I do this? By contrasting the resurrection with another set of events: WW2. Specifically, I showed how contemporary documents from a variety of sources on many sides, combined with the testimony of still living people, video footage, official military records, etc. show much more proof than that which is available for the resurrection.

Now, how did he attack my argument? Here's how:

1) By stating that I didn't do my homework because there is extrabiblical evidence for Jesus, including the writings of Josephus, Tacitus, and Suetonius.

2) By claiming that comparing WW2 to Jesus is unfair, since there are people around today who fought in WW2 (he knows 2 personally). The balance is so great, I could equally dismiss Caesar's conquest of Gaul, for example. Also, that by my arguments I'm dumber than CS Lewis.

3) By comparing the weight of evidence between, again, Caesar's Gallic Conquest and the events in the New Testament (NT) and stating that I should have an open mind for something that has over 5000 surviving early Greek copies.

Let's look at these:

1) Okay, okay, I'll admit it. I didn't do my homework. I knew Tacitus and Josephus existed and wrote about Jesus (I'd never heard about Suetonius). In fact, I've never read any of their works, relying purely on secondary sources talking about them. In fact, ditto goes for Caesar's conquest diaries. It's not important for my argument anyway, because I was specifically talking about primary accounts of history in my comparison. Josephus (37 AD-100 AD) was born about when Jesus was to have died and his account of the life and resurrection of Jesus repeats only what he has heard about Christ from Christians. Tacitus (56 AD - 117 AD) was even later, and only mentions Christ as founder of the Christian sect, put to death by Pilate. Suetonius (~69/75 AD - >130 AD) made an ambiguous statement about a Chrestus (probably not Christ) in Rome around 49 AD. Big whoop. None of these are contemporary accounts that corroborate the existence of Jesus. If I wanted to go into full time bible scholarship I probably should read the real accounts, but I'm an engineer, so screw it. I've got more important things to do.

2) It is true that comparing WW2 to the ressurection is like comparing apples to oranges. That was the point. One is well supported, the other is not. Sorry if I threw you by choosing an event that still has eyewitnesses, or even video footage and photographs. The quote from the Alpha video didn't have that whole "No events that still have witnesses" disclaimer when it made its boast about the evidence for Jesus. Also, C.S. Lewis's arguments are generally unconvincing; a guy doing a PhD in theology dropped by and agreed with me ;-)

Ok, to make it fair, fast forward 100 years so as to take away all eyewitness accounts of WW2. Is there still proof? You betcha. A whole lot. And that's the point: in regards to the quote, all the WW2 evidence does outweigh by far the evidence for Jesus. The balance of evidence for WW2 does not mean that Jesus is false; that's not the point. My argument deals with debunking the dumbass Alpha quote, that Jesus is not as well supported as the Alpha guy says, nothing more.

3) Now, on to the other point regarding the historicity of the NT compared to other historic documents. It's funny he mentions Caesar's Gallic War. I remember the first document my wife received from her Alpha Course: a handout photocopied from the course manual talking about the historicity of Jesus. It included a handy table that I fortuitously recalled seeing (speaking of that, if I were religious, I would use that freak remembrance as evidence for God's work in my life; however, seeing as this special occurence is helping me attack religion, I'll put it down as a fluke). As I said, funny he would mention that if he wasn't just regurgitating his Alpha course. Anyway, here it is, sorry for the formatting:

Work, When Written, Earliest Copies, Time Span (yrs), No of Copies

Herodotus, 488-428 BC, 900 AD, 1300, 8
Thucydides, 460-400 BC, 900 AD, 1300, 8
Tacitus, 100 AD, 1100 AD, 1000, 20
Caesar's Gallic War, 58-50 BC, 900 AD, 950, 9-10
Livy's Roman History, 59 BC - 17AD, 900 AD, 950, 20
New Testament, 40-100AD, 130 AD in part 250 AD full, 300, 5000 Greek 10000 Latin, 9300 other

Now, at first glance, I'll admit I was impressed, but something was wrong with this that I couldn't quite put my finger on. Then it hit me: it doesn't matter how many copies exist, how early the copies were made, etc. All that matters is if we can take the writing inside as accurate. No one is disputing that the New Testament was written (I think those numbers above prove very well that it was) but it was written starting at least 6 years after the events described (according to the above table) by people who weren't firsthand witnesses. Likewise, we don't doubt Herodotus wrote his histories, but that doesn't mean the contents are true. In fact, we now think that a substantial portion of his accounts were credulous BS.

Now it comes to the other unsettling part: the huge number of copies of the NT. As the Alpha book suggests, the other entries are considered history, while the bible has skeptics. Alpha presents the huge number of copies suggesting that, if eight copies is history, we'd be foolish to not consider 24300 copies as even better history. I have another query: why does the bible have so many copies when the real histories have so few? Something is amiss, and it's because the NT is pushing a religious agenda, not content to let the facts speak for themselves. In other words, the NT has so many copies because it is not history.

My troll also makes a few other arguments:

He writes, "Anyhow, if the Christians did do a sharp pen job on the New Testament they sure did a crap job. It makes all the apostles look like morons for half the time." But it's not that surprising. Arthur Conan Doyle made Dr. Watson into a complete dolt half the time as well, and he's supposed to be a doctor, not some illiterate fisherman. Why do it? To make your hero smarter and even more impressive, probably.

He classily finishes off with "You however look like your wife has pissed you off, you started popping the happy pills then started typing out of your arsehole!" Thanks for veiling the vulgarity. Now, normally I do get a teenie bit cheesed at my wife when dragged to a church thing, but I do appreciate that, rightly or wrongly, she is concerned about my welfare and, hell, there was food so I wasn't complaining. I was just getting at the arguments presented. You could deal with my arguments instead of strawmen, if you please. Either that or a little reading comprehension would be appreciated.

Did Jesus exist? And, if so, was he resurrected? I say a definite no on the second, but I really don't know for the first. It wouldn't surprise me either way if he was a real itinerant radical rabbi or if he was fictional character, or even if he was parts of both: a real rabbi with fables superimposed. Kinda like Davy Crockett, without the rabbi part.

Please see this FAQ on the historicity of Jesus from Internet Infidels for more.

Darwin "Go ahead, make my" Day

Today, February 12, 2007, is the 198th birthday of one Mr. Charles Darwin - Darwin Day. You may know him as a pioneering biologist, father of our current understanding of evolution and much beat upon whipping boy of religious nutjobs. All in all, he's handled all the abuse rather well, so today is a day we celebrate the great man.

But did you know that Darwin was a cold, calculating mass murderer?

Well, not exactly, but one thing that amazed me was, for someone so interested in studying wildlife, he certainly blew away a lot of it. Darwin was an avid hunter, spending the last few days in England before the Beagle voyage hunting partridges with his uncle. His first specimen recovered on the Beagle came when the ship was waiting in quarantine off the coast of the island of Tenerife, where he took his pistols on deck and blew away a black-backed gull to get at its stomach contents, eventually preserving a cuttlefish from the endeavor. During the Beagle's voyage, he enjoyed hunting a variety of new and exotic species, often revelling in discovering how each tasted (apparently, the dome-backed Galapagos tortoises tasted better than the saddle-backed ones). Oftentimes this was for survival - the ship needed meat for the crew - however, the impression was definitely gained that, while appreciating the beauty of life, he also appreciated being able to just up and whack it as well.

Darwin hunted rheas in Patagonia; slaughtered countless boobies and noddies on St. Paul's Rock; shot a large lizard in Bahia; shot bearded monkeys, a crotophaga, and some parrots and toucans in Rio; a condor near Port St. Julian; capybara in Montevideo; and various birds on the Galapagos, just to name a few.

Darwin was an interesting fellow. In addition to filling all manner of beasties full of lead, as a youth he also spent much time examining and collecting wildlife of all sorts. At 16, he took a microscope off with him to medical school - not for classes or labs, but for fun. During university he collected beetles. At 17, he was playing with cuttlefish. He would grab and torture sea mice just to see how they reacted. At 18, he was seriously studying zoophytes.

In fact, his somewhat sadistic bent resulted in this essay from the Institute for Creation Research (as loathe as I am to link to them). It is kinda funny. (They quickly go from the defensible position that Darwin was a little too gun-happy, even for his era, to the weird position that his eagerness to hunt things directly resulted in his theory of natural selection.)

I've been reading two books recently about Charles Darwin's life and adventures on the way to coming up with the theory of evolution through natural selection. The first is Fossils, Finches, and Feugians by Richard Darwin Keynes, about Darwin's time on the Beagle, and the second is Darwin and the Barnacle, about his zoological pursuits that helped come up with the common descent part, specifically the 8 or so years in which he became the world leader in barnacle research.

Dubious enjoyment of killing aside - society has changed such that gratuitous animal killings are no longer acceptable - these books give a sense of what's missing in our education and childhoods today. We're missing that hands on element - science is taught purely out of textbooks these days. How many of us as kids were encouraged to run around and torture little animals to see for ourselves how they worked? Darwin did a lot of it. Some kids still do it today but it's getting more rare; my niece will chase after little snakes, and it's a wonder to behold, but it's not too common. Inquisitiveness like that, like what Darwin showed, is the greatest gift a person can have.

Links: Darwin's account of the Voyage of the Beagle.

Getting Medieval

I haven't been following the whole religion/atheism thing or even much science in recent weeks/months. For the past little while, I've been indulging in one of my other nerdly loves: medieval history.

In the past little while, I've read Terry Jones' Medieval Lives (debunking the myths surrounding our view of the Middle Ages), Norman Cantor's The Last Knight (looks at late Medieval society using John of Gaunt as a reference), and I'm just finishing Brian Clegg's The First Scientist (about pioneering friar Roger Bacon). On the side, I'm reading the large and very general Ancient History by J.M. Roberts. I also got a book on Medieval military techniques for my birthday, and I know that I'm getting a book on the Normans for Christmas.

It's been nice to get away from the constant onslaught of religiosity that I get when I go to church with my wife or even talk to her at home. I get enough of the religion-bashing content from Pharyngula. Even reading Carnival of the Godless has become a chore of late, so a little history is a good diversion.

But even then I cannot escape. The Ancient History book contains chapters on whatever religions make a historical impact. Both Terry Jones' book and Norman Cantor's book contain some reference to the church and religion. It makes sense: religion was a huge factor in the lives of Europeans. One could say that without Christianity there would be no Europe. But in these books it was a small part.

Not so for The First Scientist. Like CotG, this book has been a chore. That's what happens when the subject is a friar and works for the pope. It's been an interesting, though frustrating, read; it really makes you wonder how much the church held back intellectual development.

For those who don't know (and I'm sure most don't), Roger Bacon (no relation to Francis Bacon) was an Oxford-trained scholar back in the 1200's. He was deeply interested in the natural world and was arguably the first to combine purely theoretical natural philosophy (a la Aristotle) with the demand for experimental proof - hence the title "the first scientist." Among his topics of study were optics, cartography, astronomy, alchemy, and languages. However, early in his work, political turmoil resulted in the loss of his funding as his family lost their wealth. Always a deeply religious man, he joined the friary as a way to continue his studies, and even arranged a deal to produce a scientific treatise for the pope. Unfortunately for him, the pope he was working for died and the one who replaced him instilled a culture that allowed no dissent from accepted theology; no challenging authority was tolerated. Bacon, always a disturber, was locked away for over 10 years, though this was probably over his religious rather than scientific views. He was eventually released but did not accomplish much else before his death.

His life story just makes me angry.

In a more free intellectual time, Bacon himself might have sparked a scientific revolution 400 years earlier than what actually occured. He was not a very good scientist, and, although he advocated empiricism, he himself was a poor experimenter; nevertheless, his works show a new way of thinking and a new way of skepticism that could have led the way to real scientific discovery had the culture of the time not been rooted in mysticism and religion.

As for Bacon, that mystical and religious culture perverted his memory into that of a magician and alchemist. It was not until the dawning of the scientific revolution that some scholars looked back on Bacon's works and said, "Hey! This guy was on the right track 400 years ago."