Amazing Grace, Christians, and slavery

Ed Babinski, in a lengthy post at Debunking Christianity, points out that several early abolitionists were denounced as atheists and infidels because of their attacks on the slave trade, that William Lloyd Garrison's first anti-slavery speech in Boston was in "the infidel hall owned by Abner Kneeland ... who had been sent to jail for blasphemy" because "every Christian sect had in turn refused ... Garrison the use of [their] buildings," and that Pastor John Newton, the author of the song "Amazing Grace," was a slave trader for years after his conversion to Christianity, contrary to the story Arlo Guthrie has told on stage:

"Editor's Bookshelf: Amazing Myths, How Strange the Sound: An interview with Steve Turner, the author of Amazing Grace: The Story of America's Most Beloved Song" by David Neff, Christianity Today, March 31, 2003)

John Newton was a pastor and author of "Amazing Grace" and "Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken."...

INTERVIEWER: What mythology did you yourself hold that you discovered was wrong when you did your research?

TURNER: I think I just knew the basic skeleton of this story. I knew Newton was a slave trader, I knew that he had been in a storm, and I knew he'd written a song. I didn't really know the sequence in which that happened. Arlo Guthrie tells the story on stage that Newton was transporting slaves and the storm hit the boat, he was converted on the spot, changed his mind about slavery, took the slaves back to Africa, released them, came back to England, and wrote the song. That would be nice. That would be the way we'd like to write the story. But the fact is that he took years and years before he came to the abolition position. And he never captained a slave ship until after he became a Christian. All his life as a slave captain was actually post-conversion.

The majority of Christians were in favor of the slave trade. The ship owner that he worked for had a pew in the church in Liverpool. It was not uncommon at all for prominent Anglicans to also be involved in the slave trade. And it made me wonder, what things are we involved in that we think are fine but in centuries to come people will think, How could they possibly have done that? [...]

Newton's tender ship captain's letters that he sent home to his beloved Mary showed complete lack of concern for the African families he was breaking up. A telling passage from one letter cites "the three greatest blessings of which human nature is capable" as "religion, liberty, and love." But referring to those he had helped to enslave, he wrote, "I believe... that they have no words among them expressive of these engaging ideas: from
whence I infer that the ideas themselves have no place in their minds."

When it came to denouncing the slave trade, Newton would not commit himself publicly until the mid-1780s—nearly 30 years after the issue was first broached in Parliament, 20 years after the Countess of Huntingdon began campaigning for equal treatment of the races, and 14 years after John Wesley wrote his Thoughts on Slavery.

Ed has much more at Debunking Christianity.

Phoenix Foreclosure Update

As someone who skews heavily Extropian, I tend to be very optimistic about the future. This, in spite of being brought up by a paranoid (though otherwise intelligent) guy who always seemed convinced that a catastrophic economic collapse was imminent. In the '80s it was hyperinflation and thermonuclear war. In the '90s it was Bankruptcy 1995, followed by Y2k. Nowadays it's global warming (somehow we've managed to skirt around the issue of Peak Oil). All the parental paranoia helped to cultivate in me a healthy skepticism (though it got to me just enough to unfortunately keep me out of the stock market for far longer than I should have been).

So, my optimistic/skeptical attitude has been keeping me up-beat about the real estate market in Phoenix - at least until recently. Given the way things have been going - neatly summarized by the two graphs on the right - a combination of factors now have me a little worried about

the next year or so, at least.

As I have argued elsewhere, Phoenix housing prices are too high. There's no reason to buy houses when you can rent them for a lot cheaper (and you thus can't make any money with them as investment properties, either). As you can see from the Appreciation graph above, even though houses are overpriced, as of the last data point on the graph we were still seeing a 10% appreciation over last year. Even the quarter-over-quarter line is still in the positive. I have to believe that we're going to be seeing a strong reversal of that trend in the coming months--or else we'll see whatever drove that crazy spike (in the second graph above) manifesting itself in some other area of the economy.

Then there are those pesky notices of foreclosure [in the graph below, the blue line is monthly notices, while the orange line is the yearly moving average].

In spite of the fact that, according to some analysts, we haven't seen most of the interest-only ARMs kick into their higher payments, yet, we're already seeing an alarming uptick in notices of foreclosure (an indicator of people who've already been in serious financial difficulty for at least 5-6 months). February saw a total of 1577 trustee sale notices filed. That's off a bit from January's 1623, but when you consider that January had 21 business days for recording documents, against only 19 for February, there really was no slow down at all.

In fact, as you can see from this graph,


February 2007 had the highest average daily recordings (83/day) of all months for which I have data. It beat out January of '03 by 0.24 recordings/day. If the trend continues then this month should see over 1900! This may be good news for all the mythical short sale foreclosure investors, but it's bad news for pretty much everybody else.

Life behind the customer service counter at Wal-Mart

Behind the Counter is a blog of entertaining horror stories from an experienced customer service rep at Wal-Mart. If you've enjoyed similar IT or ISP tech support stories of bad customers, you'll enjoy this blog as well.

AiG Museum asks for special police powers

The Answers in Genesis Museum is asking the governor of Kentucky to grant it special police powers so that "their 10- to 20-person security team can gain access to better training and equipment to ensure they can handle the crowds and traffic anticipated when the facility
opens May 28" according to the Cincinatti Post.

"The goal is not to become an armed encampment or anything like that," says AiG Museum Security Director Jeffrey Hawkins.

James Cameron backing documentary that claims remains of Jesus found

On Time magazine's Middle East blog, it's reported that James Cameron is producing a documentary directed by Simcha Jacobovici which "make[s] the start[l]ing claim that Jesus wasn't resurrected --the cornerstone of Christian faith-- and that his burial cave was discovered near Jerusalem. And, get this, Jesus sired a son with Mary Magdelene."

The blog claims that 27 years ago, while a new industrial park was being built in Jerusalem, a 2,000-year-old cave with ten caskets was discovered, and the names on the ten tombs included "Jesua, son of Joseph, Mary, Mary, Mathew, Jofa and Judah, son of Jesua" and that "film-makers Cameron and Jacobovici claim to have amassed evidence through DNA tests, archeological evidence and Biblical studies, that the 10 coffins belong to Jesus and his family."

It's not clear how DNA evidence could show anything about remains belonging to Jesus (as opposed to relationship between the individual remains), but the comments on the Time blog entry make it clear that we are in for some entertainment in the form of hysterical reactions to the documentary.

UPDATE (February 25, 2007): There's a bit more information at YNetNews.

UPDATE (February 27, 2007): And better coverage at CNN, where experts point out these claims were previously made back in 1996.

UPDATE (March 6, 2007): The Jacobovici/Cameron documentary claims that the James ossuary with the faked "brother of Jesus" inscription was the missing 10th ossuary from the site they claim to be the Jesus tomb. This, however, is definitely not the case, since the person who catalogued the ossuaries at the time of the original find says that the 10th ossuary was a plain, blank ossuary with no inscription at all.

Also, P.Z. Myers watched the documentary so that you don't have to...

UPDATE (April 12, 2007): The Jerusalem Post reports that scholars in the documentary are backing away from their statements made therein...

Recording proves Paszkiewicz denied making comments

When Matt LaClair spoke before the Kearny board of education earlier this week, he gave the board a CD recording of his initial meeting with David Paszkiewicz and Kearny High School principal Al Somma, in which Paszkiewicz denied making the statements that LaClair attributed to him. LaClair had also recorded those, and proved to Somma that Paszkiewicz had lied when he denied making the statements.

This recording now proves to everyone other than LaClair, Somma, and Paszkiewicz that Paszkiewicz actually made the denials.

The recording of the meeting is available via the website of The Observer editor Kevin Canessa.

Canessa also has photos of the board meeting, where Paszkiewicz supporters in the audience held up signs to prevent camera crews from recording the statement made by Paul LaClair, Matthew's father.

Return of the Phoenix Lights

The Phoenix Lights have returned, appearing on February 6 and 22. Oddly enough, both times happened to coincide with Air Force training with flares.

UPDATE (February 25, 2007):
The Arizona Republic continues to present the Phoenix lights as something mysterious, with extraterrestrial visitors being given equal weight to the flare explanation. Commenters on this news story are touting "image expert" Jim Dilettoso in an attempt to discount flares.

The Phoenix New Times, by contrast, has been more skeptical, and exposed Dilettoso's lack of qualifications.

2006 AAAS Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility

Congratulations to Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, and to eight teachers from Dover, Pennsylvania who refused to read the anti-evolution disclaimer mandated by the Dover Area School Board that was the subject of last year's Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Board trial: Brian Bahn, Vickie Davis, Robert Eshbach, Bertha Spahr, Robert Linker, Jennifer Miller, Leslie Prall, and David Taylor.

They are the 2006 recipients of the Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Conservapedia

The blogosphere has been making fun of absurdities at Conservapedia, Andrew Schlafly's attempt to create a conservative-oriented version of Wikipedia. Orac points out that Conservapeia promotes the anti-vaccination Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (Schlafly is their legal counsel). Mark Chu-Carroll points out that even math has a liberal bias, according to Conservapedia. P.Z. Myers looks at some of Conservapedia's coverage of evolution.

Perhaps most entertaining is Jon Swift's coverage of Conservapedia, which contains links to many of the Science Bloggers' commentaries.

Matthew LaClair on Anderson Cooper tonight

Matthew LaClair will appear tonight on Anderson Cooper's show on CNN, 10 p.m. EST.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, Matthew was bumped from the show.