Shortly before Biden's inauguration, Pastor Brandon Burden of the KingdomLife church — a boxy, largely windowless sanctuary in Frisco — mounted the pulpit and gave a stemwinder of a sermon that went viral.
Burden spoke in tongues and urged his flock of “warriors” to load their weapons and stock up on food and water as the transfer of power loomed. The emergency broadcast system might be tampered with, so if Trump “took over the country,” he could not tell them what to do, he said.
“We ain't going silently into the night. We ain't going down. This is Texas,” Burden preached.
Prophetic voices had decreed Trump would remain in office, he said.
“We have an executive order — not from Congress or D.C., but from the desk of the CEO of heaven, the boss of the planet,” Burden said. “He said from his desk in heaven, ‘This is my will. Trump will be in office for eight years.’ ”
The Book of Deuteronomy's biblical standard for prophets from Moses, speaking on behalf of God in chapter 18, verse 22, is that "When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the thing does not come about or come true, that is the thing which the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him." In verse 20, he says that "... the prophet who shall speak a word presumptuously in my name which I have not commanded him to speak, or which he shall speak in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die." In other words, any prophecy from God is guaranteed to be accurate, and any prophecy which is not from God but given in his name shall guarantee the death of the prophet.
False Prophet Pastor Burden's response to his failed prophecy was to delete his Twitter account (@KingdomLife_), though it's still linked from his church's website.
But no, the default position has to be nonbelief, not disbelief. To disbelieve in a proposition is to believe in the negation of the proposition, to believe that the original proposition is false. And Dillahunty already said that (a) we should proportion our belief to the evidence and that (b) the proposition in question is untestable, meaning there is no evidence for or against it.
The position he describes is logically inconsistent.
We know that there are untestable propositions that are true. We shouldn't believe that they are false simply because they are untestable. We should only believe they are false if we have good reasons to believe they are false; in the absence of that we should be agnostic.
(Added 5:36 p.m.: What are the implications for the above argument if it is the case that untestability does not entail lack of evidence or reasons? What about if we distinguish evidential from non-evidential reasons? And if we take the latter course, what does that say about proposition (a), above? Left as an exercise for commenters.)
My talk from January 19, 2013 to the National Capitol Area Skeptics is now online!
Thanks very much to the NCAS for professionally recording and editing this video.
I've included some notes and comments below.
0:50 & 42:29 "Advanced Teachings" available at all Advanced Orgs are
up to OT V.
Advanced Orgs can deliver through OT V; OT VI & VII can only be obtained at the Flag Service Organization
(FSO) in Clearwater, FL, and OT VIII can only be obtained on Scientology's cruise ship, the
Freewinds. See: http://www.xenu.net/archive/ot/
8:01 German U-boat -- I should have said Japanese submarine
9:14 Photo is often claimed to be from 1968 but is really from 1959-60,
so Cleve Backster probably wasn't the source of Hubbard's claim, as
I originally said in the talk (also see my previous blog post on this topic).
10:53 Aleister Crowley is pronounced "crow-lee," not "craugh-lee"
(I have apparently have not broken a bad habit of following
Ozzy Osbourne's pronunciation).
13:59 the Fraser Mansion, though referred to by Scientology as the
"founding church" from the 1970s to 2010, wasn't the original
building. The original building, at 1812 19th St. NW, is now a museum
called the L. Ron Hubbard House (though his house was across the
street), which the church acquired in 2004. The Fraser Mansion is
now Scientology's National Affairs Office.
14:11 The first use of the name "Church of Scientology" was by the
Church of Scientology founded in Camden, N.J. in Dec. 1953; the
first Church of Scientology corporation was in Los Angeles (Feb. 1954,
which became the Church of Scientology of California in 1956), the
Church of Scientology of Arizona was incorporated that same year.
Hubbard's organization while he lived in Phoenix was the Hubbard
Association of Scientologists, International (HASI), founded in
Sep. 1952. All HASI assets were folded into the Church of Scientology
of California in 1966.
31:07 "Division 20" should have been "Department 20."
32:43 "bad status" -- Scientology "conditions" are a scale, like the tone scale, that your "ethics"
are in, which are positive or negative. For each condition there is a "conditions formula" you
are supposed to apply to get to the next better condition. Those assigned to the RPF are put
in a condition of "liability" (the rag on arm mentioned is a sign of the condition of liability).
See: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/wakefield/us-11.html
41:07 PIs following the Broekers--mainly Pat Broeker; after one apparent attempt to leave (described
in Lawrence Wright's book, Going Clear), Annie Broeker remained in Scientology until her death.
Tony Ortega describes the testimony of the two PIs, who spoke out for one day before their
lawsuit with Scientology was settled: http://tonyortega.org/2012/11/29/scientologys-master-spies/
43:22 Lawrence Wright's book says that "Int Base" and "Gold Base" are two different bases at the same
location; "Int" being the international headquarters and "Gold" named after Golden Era Studios.
1:05:35 "dog was drowned" -- Judge Swearinger's dog, Duke, a miniature collie, drowned, it's not certain that it "was drowned."
1:07:10 "unable to attend uncle's funeral" -- Hubbard died on January 24, 1986;
the Challenger explosion was January 28, 1986.
1:17:43 St. Louis Ideal Org. The pictured Masonic Temple is not the St. Louis Ideal Org, which is still under construction. (Thanks to ThetanBait on YouTube for this correction.)
Narconon's drug purification program involves vitamin (esp. niacin) megadoses, but "injections" is not correct.
Now on YouTube, "In God We Teach," a documentary about Matt LaClair's exposure of his U.S. History teacher's proselytization in the public school classroom.
I recently had a few opportunities on a plane to catch up on some reading and podcasts. A few of the more interesting things I came across:
A bunch of interesting articles in The Economist for the past few weeks:
January 28-February 3, 2012:
"Saving Lives: Scattered Saviors" -- harnessing social media and mobile devices to deploy first aid faster than an ambulance can arrive (United Hatzalah in Israel believes it will be able to have first responders on the scene within 90 seconds).
"Biomimetics: Not a scratch" -- lessons from the microstructure of scorpion armor for reducing wear rates on aircraft engines and helicopter rotors.
Podcasts:
Philosophy Bites interview with Alain de Botton on Atheism 2.0: de Botton, author of Religion for Atheists, argues that there are good and useful components of religion which can be secularized, and that it is as legitimate to borrow things we like from religion while discarding what we don't as it is to prefer different kinds of art and music. (Also see the Token Skeptic interview with de Botton and watch his TED talk.) I think his picture of religion, like that of Scott Atran (In Gods We Trust) and Pascal Boyer (Religion Explained) makes more sense than the way some atheists talk about it as though fundamentalist religion is the essence of religion, and should be discarded completely (which doesn't seem likely to happen as long as we live in social communities).
Rationally Speaking interview with Joseph Heath: Heath, author of Economics without Illusions: Debunking the Myths of Modern Capitalism (Canadian title: Filthy Lucre: Economics for People who Hate Capitalism, which the publishers decided wouldn't sell in the U.S.), talks about misunderstandings of economics on both the right and the left. (Also see this BloggingHeads TV interview of Heath by Will Wilkinson, who writes: "The section on right-wing fallacies is largely on the money and a great challenge for rote libertarians and conservatives. The section of left-wing fallacies is terrific, and it would be terrific if more folks on the left were anywhere near as economically literate as Heath.") Heath's "Rationally Speaking pick" also sounds fascinating, Janos Kornai's The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism, which explains the creative but ultimately futile ways that human beings tried to replace markets with planning and design.)
The title of this post is the title of my multi-book review article in the current issue of Skeptic magazine, which is primarily about last year's Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion by Janet Reitman and The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion by Hugh Urban. It's a very long article for a book review in the magazine, running from pp. 18-27 with a couple of sidebars and a couple pages of footnotes. What I had in mind when I started writing it wasn't what I ended up with--my envisioned article would probably be more like a book that tells the story of Scientology's two wars with the Internet, which Reitman only devoted a few paragraphs to. (If that never happens, the best place to find the information in question is in the writings of Village Voice editor Tony Ortega, who has done more than anyone to cover those topics.) I also would have liked to have done a bit more analysis of Urban's book, which I think is a bit wishy-washy in places in the name of academic objectivity, and makes a few promises at the beginning that it fails to deliver on as though it were rushed to completion. But I think it came out OK, and I recommend Reitman's book as the best and most up-to-date single overview of Scientology and its history, and Urban's for its coverage of Scientology's battles with the IRS for religious tax exemption and its contribution to explaining what Hubbard was up to when he created Scientology. I think Hubbard died believing his own nonsense, because some Scientology doctrines literally became true for him--he was the one person in Scientology who really could dream things up and make them happen around him, through the efforts of his devotees.
I also hoped to devote a bit more space to what I allude to in my first footnote, referencing John Searle's The Construction of Social Reality, pp. 90-93 and 117-119, about how institutions can quickly collapse when collective agreement about social facts is undermined, as seems to be happening at an accelerating pace within the Church of Scientology.
It's worth observing that Bayesian epistemology has some serious unresolved problems, including among them the problem of prior probabilities and the problem of considering new evidence to have a probability of 1 [in simple conditionalization]. The former problem is that the prior assessment of the probability of a hypothesis plays a huge factor in the outcome of whether a hypothesis is accepted, and whether that prior probability is based on subjective probability, "gut feel," old evidence, or arbitrarily selected to be 0.5 can produce different outcomes and doesn't necessarily lead to concurrence even over a large amount of agreement on evidence. So, for example, Stephen Unwin has argued using Bayes' theorem for the existence of God (starting with a prior probability of 0.5), and there was a lengthy debate between William Jefferys and York Dobyns in the Journal of Scientific Exploration about what the Bayesian approach yields regarding the reality of psi which didn't yield agreement. The latter problem, of new evidence, is that a Bayesian approach considers new evidence to have a probability of 1, but evidence can itself be uncertain.
And there are other problems as well--a Bayesian approach to epistemology seems to give special privilege to classical logic, not properly account for old evidence [(or its reduction in probability due to new evidence)] or the introduction of new theories, and not be a proper standard for judgment of rational belief change of human beings for the same reason on-the-spot act utilitarian calculations aren't a proper standard for human moral decision making--it's not a method that is practically psychologically realizable.
UPDATE (August 6, 2013): Just came across this paper by Brandon Fitelson (PDF) defending Bayesian epistemology against some of Pollock's critiques (in Pollock's Nomic Probability book, which I've read, and in his later Thinking About Acting, which I've not read). A critique of how Bayesianism (and not really Bayesian epistemology in the sense defended by Fitelson) is being used by skeptics is here.
Hubbard was likely inspired by Cleve Backster, who had made similar claims based on connecting plants to a polygraph starting in 1966. Backster published his claims in the Journal of Parapsychology in 1968, and his work was subsequently popularized in the 1973 book, The Secret Life of Plants.
I wonder, however, whether the inspiration for both of these crackpots came from a piece of fiction in the September 17, 1949 issue of The New Yorker--Roald Dahl's "The Sound Machine," which is reprinted in numerous short story collections, including his volume Someone Like You (1973). In this tale, a man named Klausner, obsessed with sounds beyond the ability of human beings to hear, builds a machine to convert higher pitches into human-audible sounds. He discovers, to his horror, that plants and trees shriek with pain when cut.
Does anyone know of any documented references from Hubbard or Backster to Dahl? Or is there another common ancestor I've missed?
UPDATE (6 February 2013): It looks like the Hubbard photo pre-dates Backster, and was likely taken in 1959 or 1960! It prompted a feature titled "PLANTS DO WORRY AND FEEL PAIN." in the December 18, 1959 Garden News.
UPDATE (10 February 2013): David Hambling's "The Secret Life of Plants" in the December 2012 issue of Fortean Times (p. 18) points out that Charles Darwin's 1880 The Power of Movement in Plants suggested that plants have something like a nervous system, and that Jagadish Chandra Bose published a 1907 paper on the electrophysiology of plants. He puts Backster before Hubbard, making the same mistake of dating Hubbard's claims by the Life magazine photo caption.
Backster, by the way, was inspired by Bose's work. He says that he started his work with plants on February 2, 1966, as reported in the introduction of his "Evidence of a Primary Perception in Plant Life,"International Journal of Parapsychology, Vol. X, No. 4, Winter 1968, pp. 329-348.
UPDATE (5 December 2022): Not sure how I missed including the Jack Handy "Deep Thoughts" that goes: "If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason."
Chris Mooney has a very interesting interview with anthropologist Scott Atran on the Point of Inquiry podcast, in which Atran argues that terrorism is not the product of top-down, radical religious extremist organizations recruiting the poor and ignorant, but of groups of educated (and often educated in secular institutions) individuals who become disaffected, isolated, and radicalized. Much U.S. counterterrorism and "homeland security" activity assumes the former and thus is attacking the wrong problem.
He also argues that reason and rationalism are the wrong tools for attacking religion, defends a view of religion as a natural by-product of the sorts of minds we've evolved to have (very similar to Pascal Boyer's account, which I think is largely correct), and throws in a few digs at the new atheists for making claims about religion that are contrary to empirical evidence.
Some of the commenters at the Point of Inquiry/Center for Inquiry forums site seem to be under the misapprehension that Atran is a post-modernist. I don't see it--he's not making the argument that reason doesn't work to find out things about the world, he's making the argument that the tools of science and reason are human constructions that work well at finding things out about the world, but not so much for persuading people of things, or as the basis for long-term institutions for the sort of creatures we are. Atran shows up in the comments to elaborate on his positions and respond to criticism.
My compliments to Chris Mooney for having consistently high-quality, interesting guests who are not the same voices we always hear at skeptical conferences.
Jeff Hawkins was a Scientologist and member of the Sea Org from 1967 to 2005. He was responsible for 1980s marketing campaigns that brought L. Ron Hubbard's book Dianetics back to the New York Times bestseller lists. Beginning in 2008, he wrote a book-length series of blog posts about his experiences which has led to many further defections from the Church of Scientology. The blog posts have been edited into a hardback book, one of several by long-time high-ranking recent defectors (others include Nancy Many's My Billion-Year Contract, Marc Headley's Blown For Good, and Amy Scobee's Abuse at the Top).
I've read the first few chapters at his blog--it's quite well-written and the comments from others who have shared some of his experiences are fascinating.
Below these two videos is a post I made (perhaps to the Kate Bush fans' "love-hounds" mailing list, I don't recall) back in 1986 regarding a 1985 Christian "rock music seminar" about alleged Satanic backwards messages in rock music. I was familiar with the claims of supposed "backwards masking" where the sounds of ordinary lyrics were interpreted to have different messages when reversed, as well as actual examples of recordings that were put into songs in reverse. The former seemed to me to be examples of subjective validation, and I tested it myself by closing my eyes and covering my ears when the presenter gave their claims about what we were supposed to hear prior to playing the samples. Subsequently, this became one of the first tests the Phoenix Skeptics conducted as a student group at Arizona State University in October 1985. We invited the speaker to give his demonstrations before our group, but required him to play the samples first without explanation and have everyone write down what they heard. The result was that on the first pass, those unfamiliar with the samples had a wide variety of responses; on a second pass, once the expectation was set, everybody heard what they were supposed to hear.
It's interesting that this demonstration, the key example of which was a sample from Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven," made a comeback two decades later--being used by skeptics to show the power of suggestion and expectation, as these two videos from Simon Singh and Michael Shermer demonstrate.
Simon Singh, 2006:
Michael Shermer, 2006 TED Talk:
Date: Wed, 5 Feb 86 15:35 MST
From: "James J. Lippard"
Subject: Christian Death/rock seminar
Reply-To: Lippard@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA
Yes, I've heard of Christian Death, though I haven't heard much by them. That
reminds me of an article I wrote in October for ASU's "Campus Weekly"
(alternative campus newspaper) about a rock seminar I went to, and here it is.
The article was never printed, as the newspaper folded. (Note: There was
originally an additional paragraph about a fourth type of backwards
message--the kind that's at the end of the first side of "The Dreaming".)
Druids were Satanists.
Van Morrison reads Celtic literature.
Therefore, Van Morrison's music is evil.
I had hoped this kind of feeble guilt-by-association reasoning applied to
rock music by religious fanatics had died off. No such luck. The above was
typical of the reasoning presented at a seminar on rock music on October 21 by
Christian Life. Not only is the first premise false, the conclusion is a non
sequitur.
Things looked promising enough at first. A quote from the Confucian
philosopher Mencius about how the multitudes "act without clear understanding"
was projected on the large screen in Neeb Hall before the presentation began.
When the show finally started, the speaker gave some facts about the size of
the music industry and its influence on society.
For a while things were rational. Since the seminar was focusing on the
seamy side of rock, it seemed reasonable to show slides of Lou Reed shooting
heroin on stage, Sid Vicious, Kiss, and so forth. Still, the impression was
given that this was representative of the majority of rock music. Obscure
groups such as Demon, Lucifer's Friend, and the Flesh Eaters say nothing about
rock in general.
Apparently the writers of the seminar were aware of this, because it then
shifted to analyzing album covers of fairly popular groups. But this analysis
was taken to a ridiculous extreme, pulling interpretations out of a hat. If
an album cover had a cross on it, it was automatically blasphemous. Any other
religious symbols on an album along with a cross were putting down
Christianity by calling it "just another religion."
Other symbols also drew criticism. From the following Bible verse, Luke
10:18, it was concluded that lightning bolts are a demonic symbol:
And He said to them, "I was watching Satan fall from heaven
like lightning."
Since all lightning bolts are evil, the lightning bolts in the logos of
Kiss and AC/DC show that they are in league with the devil. Interestingly, on
the backs of many electrical appliances is a symbol which serves as a warning
of potential shock hazard--a yellow triangle containing a lightning bolt
exactly like the one in AC/DC's logo. Surely this is a more obvious source
than the Bible for AC/DC's lightning bolt, given the electrical symbolism in
their name and many of their album titles.
As the Jesuits knew, if you teach a child your ways early, he will likely
follow them for the rest of his life. But to conclude from this that Led
Zeppelin is trying to influence children because there are children on the
cover of their _Houses of the Holy_ album is absurd.
In the interest of "fair play", quotes from several artists denying any
involvement with the occult were given. But these were shrugged off,
including the disclaimer at the beginning of Michael Jackson's _Thriller_
video which says, in part, "this film in no way endorses belief in the
occult." Michael Jackson is a devout Seventh Day Adventist, so I seriously
doubt he had any more intent in promoting the occult through _Thriller_ than
the creators of Caspar the Friendly Ghost.
Finally, the seminar got to its most entertaining subject: backwards
messages on rock albums. There are several types of messages commonly
referred to as "backmasking," most of which were covered. The first is a
message recorded normally, then placed on an album in reverse. The example
given was from ELO's Face the Music album, which says "The music is
reversible, but time is not. Turn back, turn back..." There is little doubt
about the content of such messages.
The second type of backwards message is where words are sung backwards,
phonetically. On Black Oak Arkansas' live album _Raunch and Roll_, there is
no question about what they are trying to do when the singer shouts "Natas!"
The conference speaker seemed to imply that this message was unintentional,
however, when he gave an example of a song by Christian Death. The words are
sung backwards (as seen on the lyrics sheet), but pronounced in reverse
letter-by-letter rather than phonetically. He seemed surprised that this
resulted in nonsense when reversed.
The third type of backwards message is where a perfectly ordinary record
album is played in reverse to produce gibberish and creative imaginations
supply the translations for supposed messages. According to the speaker, this
must occur in one of three ways. Either they are intentional, accidental, or
spiritual. They can't be intentional, because creating such a message is
unimaginably complex. They can't be accidental, otherwise we would hear
messages saying such things as "God is love" or "the elephant is on the back
burner" as often as we hear messages about Satan. Therefore, the messages
must be spiritual (i.e., Satan caused them to occur).
This completely ignores what has already been well-established as the
source of these messages. Someone person plays his records backwards,
listening for evil messages, and hears something that sounds like the word
"Satan". He then tells his friends to listen for the message, and plays it
for them. Since they have been told what to hear, their mind fills in the
difference between the noises on the album and the alleged message.
This explanation was mentioned, but was dismissed out of hand because, the
speaker claimed, the backwards messages are as clear as most rock lyrics are
forwards. He played the first message, in Queen's "Another One Bites the
Dust", without telling the audience what to hear. I heard no message, but he
told us that we clearly heard "start to smoke marijuana". When the tape was
played again, I could hear it.
The rest of the messages of this type played at the seminar were
accompanied by text on the movie screen telling the audience what to listen
for. I closed my eyes to ignore the hints, and was unable to hear anything
but gibberish. The same method was used and the same results obtained by
several other audience members I questioned after the presentation.
In addition, an anti-rock program aired a few years ago on the Trinity
Broadcasting Network stated that there were several messages on Led Zeppelin's
"Stairway to Heaven", including "here's to my sweet Satan" and "there is power
in Satan". The rock conference, on the other hand, combined these two into
one large message which began "my sweet Satan" and ended "whose power is in
Satan". Having heard the TBN version first, those were what I heard when they
were played at the conference. If the words "there is" can be mistaken for
"whose", isn't it possible that the same is true for the rest of these
messages?
Even the transcriber of the backwards messages had problems coming up with
words to fit the message. The slide for Rush's live version of "Anthem"
played backwards read:
Oh, Satan, you--you are the one who is shining, walls of Satan,
walls of (sacrifice?) I know.
As any ventriloquist knows, many sounds can be mistaken for many other
sounds. An m for an n, a t for a d, a c, a z, or a th for an s. Given that
the most frequent letters in the English language are ETAOINSHRDLU, it is no
surprise that something sounding like "Satan" is quite common.
With enough effort, evil symbolism and backwards messages can be found
anywhere. Try visiting a record store and finding satanic symbols on
Christian album covers, or listening to some Christian albums backwards. I'm
sure much can be found with little difficulty.
It is true that most rock is not Christian. It is even true that much of
it conflicts with the Christian faith in some way. But to bury these points
in a mire of fuzzy logic and fanaticism by engaging in a witch hunt is
counter-productive. Before the conference, I commented to a friend that if
"Stairway to Heaven" was played backwards, the presenters would have destroyed
any credibility they had. That, unfortunately, was the case.
Jim (Lippard at MIT-MULTICS.ARPA)
The assets of Premise Media, including rights to "Expelled," are going up for auction. The Talk Origins Foundation plans to bid for the film, which includes production materials. Their stated plan seems to be just to determine what interesting information might be in the production materials or raw footage and make that known, not, as I've suggested, make an "MST3K"-style version, or a version that points out and corrects the errors.
UPDATE (June 28, 2011): The winning bid for "Expelled" was $201,000. My guess is that the film would only be worth that much to somebody who plans to promote it as-is without any significant re-editing, and thinks they can extract at least that much value out of it--perhaps via charitable deduction by giving it to a creationist organization. There was a bidding war at the end between two bidders that drove the price up this morning from $43,000 (last night's high bid) to $201,000, which caused the bid to be extended 10 minutes beyond it's scheduled end time in one or two minute extension increments. It was at $122,000 at the original auction end time, so that last $79,000 increase occurred in the last 10 minutes.
Premise Media Holdings LP is in bankruptcy, and its assets are going up for auction online between June 23 and 28. Those assets include the film "Expelled." Perhaps a few of us should get together and buy it, and reissue it in a "Mystery Science Theatre 3000" format?
UPDATE: As Damian Howard and Bob Vogel pointed out on Facebook, this adds financial bankruptcy to the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the film.
On May 22, 2011, we will either see that many Christians have disappeared and we've been left behind, or that the claims of billboards like this are completely false. If any individual or group of Camping followers have a strong belief that the former is the case, I challenge you to sign an agreement to transfer to me $100,000, effective May 22, 2011, in return for one of two things. In the case that you have, in fact, been raptured, I promise to use those funds to evangelize in support of your beliefs to try to save as many of those left behind as possible. In the far more likely case that you remain behind, I promise not to engage in public ridicule and humiliation of your nonsense for a year. So it's a win-win. Any takers?
UPDATE (May 20, 2011): Via Tom McIver: "Camping has a very idiosyncratic scheme: basically amillennial, and a hybrid of his own Bible numerology and a variant of the World Week (world lasts 6,000 yrs after Creation) framework. Camping puts Creation at 11,013 BC, Flood at 6,000 + 23 yrs later at 4,990 BC, Christ's birth 7 BC, and end of Church Age / beginning of Tribulation 13,000 yrs after Creation. 7,000 yrs after Flood (13,000 + 23 yrs after Creation) is 2011. 1988--13,000 yrs after Creation--was beginning of Tribulation (and also the year Camping left the established church, deciding it was heretical and that all churches had been taken over by Antichrist). 2011 is 23 yrs after 1988 (previously, Camping had predicted a shorter Tribulation ending in 1994). May 21 is Rapture and Judgment Day, world is destroyed Oct 21." And: "Camping also made much of 1948 (founding of Israel), with next Jubilee supposedly 1994. He has much more numerology as well. Interestingly, he doesn't focus on political leaders or natural disasters (although I think the news reports of catastrophes and wars has increased his following)."
After witnessing the despicable pseudo-historian David Barton on "The Daily Show," inadequately rebutted by Jon Stewart, author Chris Rodda decided to take action. She's giving away her book, Liars for Jesus, which carefully documents the historical revisionism of Barton and others, online as a PDF.
Rodda depends on income from her book, but felt it was important enough to give it away. I suspect she'll see an increase in sales along with the free distribution.
John Lynch and I have co-authored a review of the Creation Ministries International film on Darwin which will be appearing in vol. 30 of Reports of the National Center for Science Education and which may be found on their website.
I gave a little more background on the film here. John Lynch has said more about it here, here, here, and here, mostly about the deception used to get interviews by prominent historians.
Former Arizona state legislator Pamela Gorman, or someone claiming to be her, took issue with the following passage in her Wikipedia entry:
Also in 2005, Gorman was one of several Arizona legislators who supported parental rights legislation which was also supported by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights. She attended the grand opening of the Church of Scientology's "Psychiatry: An Industry of Death" exhibition in Los Angeles in December 2005 at the request of Robin Read, President of the National Federation for Women Legislators.
The edit, which was described as "clarification of falsehoods entered about me and other organizations" and came from Cox Communications Phoenix IP 68.231.27.68, added the following right after that text:
It was a quick visit which did not include any meals or other "fluff." The goal of the trip was to determine what the Citizen's Commission on Human Rights was about, as they were becoming heavily involved in NFWL. The cost of the roundtrip flight for the small group to tour the museum was reported by CCHR, according to Arizona disclosure laws. Gorman's political enemies have tried for years to make a leap from her touring a museum as a favor to the president of her professional organization to her actually being a Scientologist. Further attempts to alter this page with falsehoods of this nature may be met with legal action.
It's good that Gorman was willing to give a bit more context, but it should be noted that this was not simple "parental rights legislation which was also supported by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights," it was a bill that was at least partly written by CCHR. As the Arizona Republic reported at the time, the original text required not only parental consent before mental health evaluations by schools, it required that parents read CCHR anti-psychiatry propaganda before signing a consent form:
Another bill introduced this year would have required written consent from parents for any mental-health screenings in schools. The bill was similar to other measures passed in previous years and vetoed by the governor. Sponsored by Sen. Karen Johnson, a member of the commission's international advisory group, the bill had a bipartisan group of 36 co-sponsors. Still, it failed by a tie vote in the Education Committee, in part because of testimony of mental-health advocates.
The original text of the bill would have required parents to sign a lengthy consent form that contained paragraph after paragraph of negative information about psychiatric practices.
Information about CCHR is easy to come by on the Internet (e.g., at Wikipedia or xenu.net), so it's unclear why Gorman needed to accept a round trip flight to Los Angeles on the CCHR's dime to find out "what the Citizen's Commission on Human Rights was about," or why she sponsored their bill.
Please don't misunderstand me. Siggie is a member of our family and we love him dearly. And despite his anarchistic nature, I have finally taught him to obey a few simple commands. However, we had some classic battles before he reluctantly yielded to my authority.
The greatest confrontation occurred a few years ago when I had been in Miami for a three-day conference. I returned to observe that Siggie had become boss of the house while I was gone. But I didn't realize until later that evening just how strongly he felt about his new position as Captain.
At eleven o'clock that night, I told Siggie to go get into his bed, which is a permanent enclosure in the family room. For six years I had given him that order at the end of each day, and for six years Siggie had obeyed.
On this occasion, however, he refused to budge. You see, he was in the bathroom, seated comfortably on the furry lid of the toilet seat. That is his favorite spot in the house, because it allows him to bask in the warmth of a nearby electric heater...
When I told Sigmund to leave his warm seat and go to bed, he flattened his ears and slowly turned his head toward me. He deliberately braced himself by placing one paw on the edge of the furry lid, then hunched his shoulders, raised his lips to reveal the molars on both sides, and uttered his most threatening growl. That was Siggie's way of saying. "Get lost!"
I had seen this defiant mood before, and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The ONLY way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me "reason" with Mr. Freud.
What developed next is impossible to describe. That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt. I am embarrassed by the memory of the entire scene. Inch by inch I moved him toward the family room and his bed. As a final desperate maneuver, Siggie backed into the corner for one last snarling stand. I eventually got him to bed, only because I outweighed him 200 to 12!
Thankfully, most of us today recognize that abusing animals is a sign of psychopathy.
UPDATED: To lengthen quote and correct source book title, as per Snopes. The original 1978 hardcover version of the book is available for $0.01 on Amazon.com Marketplace.
, which carefully documents the historical revisionism of Barton and others, online as a PDF.
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