Fake weeping Virgin Mary painting

I wish I had seen this before my Channel 3 News interview about a similar painting coming to Phoenix.

From Associated Press, September 19, 2007:

BLANCO, Texas -- Samuel A. Greene Jr., the founder of a monastery that closed amid scandal over the alleged sexual abuse of novice monks and a fraudulent weeping Virgin Mary painting, has died. He was 63.

Greene's death was being investigated as a suicide, but officials were waiting for autopsy results before ruling on the cause of death. Greene's body was found Monday morning in his home on the grounds of Christ of the Hills Monastery.

The monastery was allied with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia from 1991 to 1999, but the church broke ties with the monastery when allegations surfaced of indecency by Greene with a juvenile novice monk.

Greene, who founded the monastery in 1981, pleaded guilty in 2000 to indecency and was sentenced to 10 years probation. In 2006, Greene told his probation officer in a secretly taped interview that he had sexual contact with boys over a 30-year period starting in the 1970s.

Greene also reportedly confirmed that the monastery's weeping painting was fake. Authorities seized the icon, which was said to cry tears of myrrh, a sign of divine intervention. It had drawn thousands of visitors, and their donations, to the area.

The interview also prompted authorities to file child sexual assault and organized crime charges against Greene and four other monks in July 2006. Greene maintained his innocence and was released on his own recognizance because of health problems.

Greene was due Friday in court, where prosecutors planned to seek to have his probation revoked. Assistant District Attorney Cheryl Nelson said she would have asked the judge to sentence him to the maximum 20-year term on each of his nine indecency counts.

This obituary omits what Time magazine reported (I don't have the exact issue, but it was cut-and-pasted into the November 20, 2007 issue of Saucer Smear):

When the compound was closed, investigators found eyedroppers and bottles of rosewater used to fake the tears that prompted donations. Last year Greene confessed to the ruse, and his sexual relations with teenage students, to his probation officer.

It's interesting how AP omitted that information.

The Rise of Pentecostalism and the Economist Religion Wars issue

In 1901, Bible college students at Charles Fox Parham's Bethel Bible School in Topeka, Kansas prayed to be baptized by the Holy Spirit. At a New Year's Eve service that year, as Parham preached, Agnes Ozman began to speak in tongues, and Pentecostalism was born.

William J. Seymour, a one-eyed black minister, attended Parham's college in Houston, Texas, though he had to sit in another room across the hall and listen in, due to Texas race laws of the time. Seymour moved to Los Angeles, where he sparked the Azusa Street Revival in 1906.

Today there are over 400 million Pentecostals in the world, and it is the world's fastest-growing religious sect. The Mormons are lightweights by comparison, having only reached 13 million followers worldwide after nearly twice as long an existence. In Guatemala, Pentecostals have built a 12,000 seat church; in Lagos, one church supposedly has 2 million followers; and South Korea is home to five of the world's ten largest megachurches.

What makes Pentecostalism successful? It's not intellectual argument. Pentecostalism is what The Economist's recent special report on "The new wars of religion" refers to as a "hot" religion. It's not particularly concerned about doctrinal details (which is not to say it doesn't have them), but about religious experience and personal interaction and participation. The Yoido Full Gospel Church, the largest megachurch in South Korea, has 830,000 members (one in 20 Seoul residents is a member), holds seven Sunday services each of which has 12,000 people in the main auditorium and 20,000 watching on television in chapels in neighboring buildings. While you wait (and you will wait, especially if you want to attend one of the two services led by founder David Cho), you can listen to choirs sing, and sing along with the help of karaoke-style captions on TV screens. Translation is supplied to provide the services in English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, French, Indonesian, Malay, and Arabic.

The Yoido church, like many U.S. megachurches, works by organizing around many small groups. For Yoido, these are "home cells" of around a dozen people that meet in people's homes. Yoido has 68,000 female deacons and half as many male deacons, who may make 35 visits a week to parishioners. There's little hierarchy, and an emphasis on evangelizing, sending out missionaries, and producing more and more "home cells." And it's a methodology that appears to be winning the religious competition.

An earlier Economist story (from 2005, pay content) on the business practices of U.S. megachurches, likewise observed that they function by providing a diverse variety of services to lots of small niches, with groups for hikers, skateboarders, mountain bikers, book readers, and so forth, creating many small communities out of which a larger one is formed.

The lesson I take from this for the nonreligious is that a diversity of groups that cooperate with each other on common causes is far more likely to grow and have influence than individual groups that take a hard line on admissions requirements and require conformity to a narrow notion of what it is to be a freethinker or a skeptic, such as an adherence to scientism or atheism. The late Clark Adams of the Internet Infidels and Las Vegas Freethought Society was a strong proponent of cooperation between a broad set of secular groups as a way of strengthening their influence and being able to create organizations like the Secular Coalition for America. He was also a supporter of groups that engaged in social activities rather than intellectual navel-gazing, and promoted his views with humor and popular culture references more than with step-by-step argument.

If you've thought about starting a secular, freethought, or skeptical group around some interest of your own that's not currently served by an existing group, go for it. Meetup.com is a great way to get started or to find an existing group--you can find atheist groups, agnostic groups, deism groups, ex-Christian groups, Discordian groups, humanist groups, secular humanist groups, brights groups, skeptics' groups, separation of church and state groups, and many more.

"Surfer dude" comes up with unified theory

The Telegraph reports on a "surfer dude" (who happens to have a Ph.D. in theoretical physics. though he spends his time surfing and snowboarding) who has come up with a unified theory of everything that is getting some serious attention from other physicists.

(Via The Agitator.)

Prohibition creates profitable black markets

As this story from the Boulder Weekly shows. (This link is to a copy since the Boulder Weekly's website has a database issue at the moment.)

(Via The Agitator.)

Discovery Institute loses, gains a Fellow

When law professor (and President of the Evangelical Theological Society) Francis Beckwith converted from evangelical Christianity to Catholicism earlier this year, he made somewhat of a public splash. When he subsequently resigned as a Fellow of the Discovery Institute in July, neither DI nor Beckwith made any public comment. But law professor Peter Irons writes at Ed Brayton's Dispatches from the Culture Wars blog:

Beckwith, who is a recognized scholar on church-state issues, has made no public statement on the reasons for his resignation (and his private comments on those reasons, while revealing, are not for publication, at least now). After Beckwith resigned, the DI quietly removed his bio from its website, and he just disappeared into the ether.

Ed Brayton's blog post is reporting on the addition of a new Discovery Institute Fellow, movie reviewer and culture critic Michael Medved, an intellectual lightweight who believes in Sasquatch. (The link here also includes criticism of Medved for an article about American slavery, but I actually think Medved's article is better than the critique of it.)

As Irons notes in his comment, "In replacing Beckwith with Medved, the DI has traded intellectual substance for Hollywood glitz."

And Medved isn't even a good movie reviewer.

Discovery Institute steals content and presents it as their own

ERV has found that William Dembski (and apparently other DI fellows) have misappropriated a computer animated video of the cell from Harvard and XVIVO, replaced the narration with their own, and presented it as though it's their own work without giving credit to the original source.

Her blog shows the original video and a presentation of the video at a lecture by William Dembski.

The Discovery Institute really is shameless.

(Via Pharyngula.)

Earth setting as seen from lunar orbit

Some nice high-definition video images have been taken by the Japanese lunar orbiter "Kaguya," showing the earth setting behind the moon's surface.

John Allen Paulos comes out with an atheism book

John Allen Paulos, the mathematician and author of such excellent books as Innumeracy, A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market, and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (all three of which I recommend), has a new book coming out on January 3, 2008 titled Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up. Here's the review from Publishers Weekly:

Few of the recent books on atheism have been worth reading just for wit and style, but this is one of them: Paulos is truly funny. Despite the title, the Temple University math professor doesn't actually discuss mathematics much, which will be a relief to any numerically challenged readers who felt intimidated by his previous book Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences. In this short primer ("just the gist with an occasional jest") Paulos tackles 12 of the most common arguments for God, including the argument from design, the idea that a "moral universality" points to a creator God, the notion of first causes and the argument from coincidence, among others. Along the way, he intersperses irreverent and entertaining little chapterlets that contain his musings on various subjects, including a hilarious imagined IM exchange with God that slyly parodies Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations with God. "Why does solemnity tend to infect almost all discussions of religion?" Paulos asks, clearly bemoaning the dearth of humor. This little book goes a long way toward correcting the problem, and provides both atheists and religious apologists some digestible food for thought along the way. (Jan. 3)

I hope the IM exchange described is as witty and funny as Raymond Smullyan's dialogue with God, "Is God a Taoist?" (also found in his excellent book The Tao is Silent and in Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter's anthology, The Mind's I).

UPDATE (January 14, 2008): Jim Holt reviews Paulos' book for the New York Times.

Guantanamo Bay operations manual leaked to Internet

The unclassified, for official use only, operations manual for U.S. soldiers stationed at Guantanamo Bay has been leaked to the Internet on the Wikileaks.org website, which is being crushed by traffic at the moment.

The manual allegedly contradicts U.S. military claims that the International Committee of the Red Cross has not been denied access to some parts of the facility at Guantanamo.

The manual unsurprisingly prohibits soldiers from subjecting prisoners to "abuse, or any form of corporal punishment," since specific interrogation procedures are no doubt covered in separate classified documents. Still, it's a good thing to see in writing.

A Reuters story at Yahoo has more specifics, and I'm sure we'll see mirrored copies of the document appearing elsewhere to reduce the load on Wikileaks.org.

Creation Ministries explains settlement breakdown

Creation Ministries International has put up a web page explaining the breakdown in settlement talks with Answers in Genesis:

Unfortunately, the actions of AiG-US since the ‘Hawaii handshake settlement’ have meant that, barring a near-miraculous change of heart on their part, the situation appears to have broken down once more.

The terms of settlement were, in the understanding of all parties present, effectively finalized and agreed upon in Hawaii in mid-August (see two ‘stop press’ announcements below) by duly authorized and empowered representatives of the ministries—even though Ken Ham was not present, although we had been led to believe that he would be.

The only thing left was to discuss the details of how to commit the handshake agreement to writing. Both sides agreed to reconvene in Hawaii 60 days later (at the latest), if absolutely necessary, if we failed to finish the process of committing it to writing.

The page goes on to explain that this has not happened, because AiG waited until after the 60 days was over to respond to CMI's written proposal based on the verbal agreement, and AiG's response was to invent an entirely new agreement which omitted conditions that had been verbally agreed to and inserted new conditions which had not been agreed to.

CMI proposed that they move forward by meeting again in person in a neutral country (such as Singapore or New Zealand) with an independent Christian arbitrator and hammering out an agreement in writing. AiG's lawyers responded with a rejection.

At the same time, John Mackay's mailing list in Australia has been ratcheting up the assault on the alleged "spiritual problems" of CMI, which CMI has responded to by sending out this email:

From: CMI INFObytes
Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2007 7:53 AM
Subject: Serious slander issue against CMI

Serious slander issue against CMI

A short time ago, we were in receipt of a very vicious document circulating from a professing Christian ministry (which not many are aware is operated by an unrepentant church excommunicant) that made astonishing allegations against CMI-Australia and in particular its Managing Director, Dr Carl Wieland.

We did not react at the time, because the vendetta has been in operation for some 20 years now, and we assumed that surely people would have sufficient discernment to contact us to check the veracity of these allegations. However, we are concerned that some might think there might be some substance to the allegations, without understanding that they are clearly designed to undermine the confidence of the Christian public, and to thus attack CMI's ability to do outreach.

We have prepared a written response which makes it plain that these are falsehoods, documentable as such by eyewitness testimony. In it we have challenged the perpetrators to 'front up' and make these claims openly in a proper Christian forum, instead of by slanderous gossip techniques.

If you know of any person who has been in receipt of this particular 'spiritual-sounding' slander, or if your church leaders have heard these unfortunate allegations, please encourage them to email us at [mail at creation.NOSPAMinfo -- edited to prevent spam harvesting -jjl] and request our response to the article in question. If after reading that response, they have any further questions, we will be pleased to answer them. It is a real pity that we cannot just continue our ministry in peace and safety without such distractions.

If you are unaware of any such contemplated move against CMI in your circles, please just pray for this situation in general terms. Your ongoing support of the outreach is much appreciated.

Yours in Christ,

Gary Bates
Head of Ministry, CMI-Australia

It will be interesting to see if AiG makes any public comment.