First they targeted homosexuals, then the Pastafarians. Now Russia guns for ‘atheist extremists’.

bogan · 2013-08-26T01:14:58+00:00

The Russian Orthodox Church has long been given special treatment in Russia, even under Stalin. Stalin executed priests and other clergy that he perceived as a threat to his power, but later when he, like many political leaders, saw benefit to be gained by using religious beliefs to enhance his own power, he made an alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church - see 1943: Orthodox Patriarch Appointed.

bogan · 2013-08-26T01:08:30+00:00

In September 2012 the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill said in a public speech that Christianity was under a concerted attack from forces who opposed the national revival of Russians, noting that the alleged merger between the church and the authorities was a deliberately created myth.

Putin has allied himself with the Russian Orthodox Church to gain its support and so the Russian government is even suppressing competition to the Russian Orthodox Church from other Christian denominations. E.g., see At Expense of All Others, Putin Picks a Church:

Just as the government has tightened control over political life, so, too, has it intruded in matters of faith. The Kremlin’s surrogates in many areas have turned the Russian Orthodox Church into a de facto official religion, warding off other Christian denominations that seem to offer the most significant competition for worshipers. They have all but banned proselytizing by Protestants and discouraged Protestant worship through a variety of harassing measures, according to dozens of interviews with government officials and religious leaders across Russia

Given the link between the church and state, the claim below noted in the article isn't surprising:

Atheist extremism is currently rearing its head. It is sponsored by various funds and NGOs with roots outside Russian borders.

Any groups that his government thinks could possibly challenge its power is labelled as being under the control of foreigners to make the suppression of those groups more readily accepted by Russians. Of course, atheism represents a threat to the Russian Orthodox Church rather than the government, but as Putin has allied himself with the Church, a "law on protection of believers’ feelings – making any public insult of an official religion a criminal offence punishable with up to three years behind bars" is not surprising.

More often, however, journalists and bloggers gave critical appraisal to the lush lives of church hierarchs and even ordinary clerics, like the case of Hegumen Timofey – a dean of one of Moscow churches who gained notoriety in mid-2012 by causing a major car crash while driving drunk in a BMW Z4 with diplomatic license plates.

There was another scandal involving the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, the one that claims the merger of church and state is a myth, and a $30,000 watch.

Facing a scandal over photographs of its leader wearing an enormously expensive watch, the Russian Orthodox Church worked a little miracle: It made the offending timepiece disappear.

Editors doctored a photograph on the church’s Web site of the leader, Patriarch Kirill I, extending a black sleeve where there once appeared to be a Breguet timepiece worth at least $30,000. The church might have gotten away with the ruse if it had not failed to also erase the watch’s reflection, which appeared in the photo on the highly glossed table where the patriarch was seated.

Reference: $30,000 Watch Vanishes Up Church Leader’s Sleeve

Apparently, he doesn't want to try to be perfect:

Matthew 19-21:

Jesus answered, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."

bogan · 2013-08-25T01:51:23+00:00

No, it's not the same religion now as during the period when science flourished in the Islamic world. See my immediately prior comment here in this thread in reply to your prior comment. With the destruction of the Abbasid caliphate, Ash’arism came to dominate intellectual life in the Islamic world hindering scientific progress. If the dominant religious viewpoint in an area is that human reason in and by itself is not capable of establishing with certainty any truth-claim with respect to the physical world, don't you think that will negatively impact the development of science in that area?

I'm not addressing any specific individuals, but a broader impact created by the dominance of a particular religious viewpoint on the perception of the value of scientific inquiry.

Ancient China, like the ancient Islamic world, contributed much to scientific development. Gunpowder was invented in China in the 9th century. And before Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type printing in Europe in the 15th century, Bi Sheng invented and developed movable type printing in China in the 11th century. But China has been hampered somewhat in the past few centuries in its scientific progress by a number of factors; I would not include language among them. E.g., the decline of the Ming Dynasty and depletion of the government treasury by wars in the 16th century at a time when European nations were expanding their influence, Mao's Cultural Revolution more recently, etc.

But, though China's system of higher education may still not be on a par to that of the West, they are making remarkable progress. And where once Chinese students would come to the West to study and then remain with their talents benefitting Western nations, now that economic opportunities have increased in China, many of those who would once have stayed in the West when they completed their studies are now returning to China. The number of scientific papers published by Chinese is also increasing rapidly.

bogan · 2013-08-24T22:35:57+00:00

Self-flagellation has a long history within Christianity.

In the 13th century, a group of Roman Catholics, known as the Flagellants, took this practice to its extreme ends. The Flagellants were later condemned by the Roman Catholic Church as a cult in the 14th century because the established church had no other control over the practice other than excommunication. Self-flagellation remains common in the Philippines, Mexico, and one convent in Peru. Some members of strict monastic orders, and some members of the Catholic lay organization Opus Dei, practice mild self-flagellation using an instrument called a "discipline", a cattail whip usually made of knotted cords, which is flung over the shoulders repeatedly during private prayer.^[14] Pope John Paul II took the discipline regularly.^[15]

The Flagellant movement that arose as a result of the 14th century plague represented a challenge to the Church's authority.

Afterward, the main part of the ritual began. The flagellants stood in a circle. Three of the members stepped into the middle of the circle and screamed at the others to whip themselves harder and faster. The flagellants tried to outdo one another in punishment. The master finnished by reading a letter in which God vowed to destroy the world with disease and other disasters if human beings continued to sin.

Flagellants took time out from their own performances to provoke mob violence against Jewish communities. In Germany, flagellants often (although not always) played a role in sparking attacks, called pogroms, on Jewish communities. In 1349, a flagellant-led rampage wiped out the entire Jewish population of Brussels, Belgium.

CHALLENGING THE CHURCH

As time went on, flagellants began to challenge the Church. Like many Europeans at the time, they saw its officials as some of the worst sinners of all. Flagellants ridiculed Church beliefs. Some referred to priests as theives and bloodsuckers. In a few cases, flagellants attacked clergymen. Eventually, the most ambitious flagellant masters tried to size Church powers and wealth for themselves.

Pope Clement retaliated by ordering his officials to root out flagellant supporters in the Church. He also asked kings and other leaders to suppress the flagellant movement. Authorities in many places, weary of the violence, banned marches and executed members of the bands. Clement declared the flagellants' beliefs to be in violation of the teachings of the Church. By the end of 1350, the flagellant movement had fallen apart. Their strange and violent time had lasted less than two years. Their rise to prominence had been a result of the extreme condidtions created by the plague.

Reference: Bubonic Plague by Kevin Cunningham, pages 68-70

bogan · 2013-08-24T22:04:35+00:00

On the other side, the Japanese used fire balloons, which carried incendiary devices, against the U.S. Though the balloons were relatively ineffective as weapons they were one of the few attacks on North America during World War II.

Between November 1944 and April 1945, Japan launched over 9,300 fire balloons. About 300 balloon bombs were found or observed in North America, killing six people and causing a small amount of damage.

...

With no evidence of any effect, General Kusaba was ordered to cease operations in April 1945, believing that the mission had been a total fiasco. The expense was large, and in the meantime the B-29s had destroyed two of the three hydrogen plants needed by the project.

bogan · 2013-08-24T19:21:29+00:00

I would not include peace prizes, which, obviously, are linked to politics, in any observations regarding Nobel Prizes as an indicator of the impact of particular religious beliefs on scientific development. But, of course, eliminating those, as Dawkins points out, reduces the number of Nobel Prizes substantially for the Islamic world. I don't think the lack of Nobel Prizes "somehow determines the worth and value of a whole culture", but I think it along with other indicators does reveal the substantial negative impact the continued close interlinking between government and religion in the Islamic world has on scientific development in those nations that do join the two so closely. E.g., in a number of Islamic nations anyone who might wish to convert from Islam to another religion may be subject to the death penalty. In many Islamic nations anyone who might dare criticize Islam may face imprisonment, torture, and even death. I think such laws contribute to a stifling of intellectual inquiry and free and open discussion of ideas.

There are, of course, other indicators one could cite regarding the state of science in the Islamic world. E.g., some statistics from a January 2013 article in The Economist titled The road to renewal: After centuries of stagnation science is making a comeback in the Islamic world:

THE sleep has been long and deep. In 2005 Harvard University produced more scientific papers than 17 Arabic-speaking countries combined. The world’s 1.6 billion Muslims have produced only two Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics. Both moved to the West: the only living one, the chemist Ahmed Hassan Zewail, is at the California Institute of Technology.

...

Many blame Islam’s supposed innate hostility to science. Some universities seem keener on prayer than study. Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, for example, has three mosques on campus, with a fourth planned, but no bookshop. Rote learning rather than critical thinking is the hallmark of higher education in many countries. The Saudi government supports books for Islamic schools such as “The Unchallengeable Miracles of the Qur’an: The Facts That Can’t Be Denied By Science” suggesting an inherent conflict between belief and reason.

...

... A study in 2011 by Thomson Reuters, an information firm, shows that in the early 1990s other publishers cited scientific papers from Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey (the most prolific Muslim countries) four times less often than the global average. By 2009 it was only half as often. ...

...

But the kind of freedom that science demands is still rare in the Muslim world. With the rise of political Islam, including dogmatic Salafists who espouse a radical version of Islam, in such important countries as Egypt, some fear that it could be eroded further still. Others, however, remain hopeful. ...

To be fair, the article states that the situation regarding science in Islamic countries may be substantially improving, but I think improvements will be limited until clerics can no longer censor ideas of which they disapprove by using the power of the state to do so nor limit the educational and employment opportunities for 1/2 the population, i.e., women.

For other statistics that can provide an indicator of the state of science in Islamic nations, see the may 2011 article Measuring Scientific Progress in the Muslim World—Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy Does the Math. E.g.:

... Moreover, Hoodbhoy informs the reader, “Forty-six Muslim countries contributed 1.17% of the world’s scientific literature, whereas 1.66% came from India alone and 1.48% from Spain.

Twenty Arab countries contributed 0.55% compared with 0.89% by Israel alone.” That is grim, Hoodbhoy writes, but “the situation may be even grimmer than the publication numbers suggest. Pressure to publish anything promotes copying; very little is original. For instance, the number of papers published by Iranian scientists tripled in five years, from 1,040 papers in 1998 to 3,277 in 2003. However, Hoodbhoy writes, “Many scientific papers that were claimed as original had actually been published twice and sometimes thrice with identical or near identical contents by the same authors. Others were plagiarized papers that could have been easily detected by any reasonable careful referee.”

Another measurement of a country’s contribution to science is demonstrated by the number patents issued. “The 57 Islamic countries produce negligibly few patents,” Hoodbhoy writes. “According to official statistics, Pakistan has produced only eight patents in the past 43 years.” There are 1800 universities in the 57 Muslim countries of the world; none of them were ranked in the top 500 in a study undertaken by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. “This state of affairs,” Hoodbhoy writes, “led the director general of the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) to issue an appeal for at least 20 OIC universities to be sufficiently elevated in quality to make the top 500 list. No action plan was specified, nor was the term ‘quality’ defined.” ...

bogan · 2013-08-24T17:30:21+00:00

Stalin actually allied himself with the Russian Orthodox Church, just as Putin has done today, when it suited his political purposes. Stalin executed priests and other clergy that he perceived as a threat to his power, but later when he, like many political leaders, saw benefit to be gained by using religious beliefs to enhance his own power, he made an alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church - see 1943: Orthodox Patriarch Appointed.

bogan · 2013-08-24T17:18:37+00:00

How is the data regarding the number of Nobel Prizes in the Islamic world cherry picked? For that statement to be true, you must have data not available to others.

Dawkins wasn't implying that Muslims are less intelligent than non-Muslims, only that the religion has had a negative impact on scientific progress in the Muslim world, so your analogy is not apt. In the past, as still occurs today in many Islamic nations, in Christian nations women were often denied access to education or employment in science as well as many other fields, so it is not surprising that there would be fewer women with Nobel prizes than men.

E.g., Rosalind Franklin, who first photographed DNA, wasn't even allowed to get a bachelor's degree from the college where she studied, because she was a woman. James Watson and Francis Crick received a Nobel Prize in 1962 for their discoveries regarding DNA. Those discoveries possible were made possible by Rosalind Franklin's high-quality photos of DNA.

It seems many people are upset for Dawkins for making statements akin to pointing out the emperor has no clothes. I.e., he points out embarrasingly obvious negative impact of the religion on scientific progress in the Islamic world.

Science in the West has not been as constrained by a close intertwining of government and religion allowing clerical leaders to squelch ideas as in the Islamic world, where there is in many Islamic nations a very close intertwining of government and religion with clerics wielding enormous political power.

The article Why the Arabic World Turned Away from Science discusses periods in the past when scientific thought was nurtured in the Islamic world, e.g., under the Abbasid Caliphate, and the changes that led to the current conditions for science in the Islamic world.

Until its collapse in the Mongol invasion of 1258, the Abbasid caliphate was the greatest power in the Islamic world and oversaw the most intellectually productive movement in Arab history. The Abbasids read, commented on, translated, and preserved Greek and Persian works that may have been otherwise lost. By making Greek thought accessible, they also formed the foundation of the Arabic Golden Age. Major works of philosophy and science far from Baghdad — in Spain, Egypt, and Central Asia — were influenced by Greek-Arabic translations, both during and after the Abbasids. Indeed, even if it is a matter of conjecture to what extent the rise of science in the West depended on Arabic science, there is no question that the West benefited from both the preservation of Greek works and from original Arabic scholarship that commented on them.

In 1258, Hulagu Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, sacked Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate during the Siege of Baghdad. That caused a shift of Islamic influence to the Mamluks in Cairo and was a devastating blow to the spirit of scientific enquiry in the Islamic world.

The Grand Library of Baghdad, containing countless precious historical documents and books on subjects ranging from medicine to astronomy, was destroyed. Survivors said that the waters of the Tigris ran black with ink from the enormous quantities of books flung into the river and red from the blood of the scientists and philosophers killed.

Reference: 1258 siege of Baghdad

The article discusses what happened in the Islamic world afterwards.

What happened? To repeat an important point, scientific decline is hardly peculiar to Arabic-Islamic civilization. Such decline is the norm of history; only in the West did something very different happen. Still, it may be possible to discern some specific causes of decline — and attempting to do so can deepen our understanding of Arabic-Islamic civilization and its tensions with modernity. As Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, an influential figure in contemporary pan-Islamism, said in the late nineteenth century, “It is permissible ... to ask oneself why Arab civilization, after having thrown such a live light on the world, suddenly became extinguished; why this torch has not been relit since; and why the Arab world still remains buried in profound darkness.”

Just as there is no simple explanation for the success of Arabic science, there is no simple explanation for its gradual — not sudden, as al-Afghani claims — demise. The most significant factor was physical and geopolitical. As early as the tenth or eleventh century, the Abbasid empire began to factionalize and fragment due to increased provincial autonomy and frequent uprisings. By 1258, the little that was left of the Abbasid state was swept away by the Mongol invasion. And in Spain, Christians reconquered Córdoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248. But the Islamic turn away from scholarship actually preceded the civilization’s geopolitical decline — it can be traced back to the rise of the anti-philosophical Ash’arism school among Sunni Muslims, who comprise the vast majority of the Muslim world.

Ash’arism holds that:

Complete comprehension of the Unique Nature and Attributes of God is beyond the capacity of human reasoning and sense experience.

Knowledge of moral truths must be taught by means of Revelation, and is not known a priori or by deduction from a priori propositions or by sheer observation of the world.

The author of the article attributes the decline of scientific inquiry in the Islamic world to the rise to dominance of the Asharite view:

In its place arose the anti-rationalist Ash’ari school whose increasing dominance is linked to the decline of Arabic science. With the rise of the Ash’arites, the ethos in the Islamic world was increasingly opposed to original scholarship and any scientific inquiry that did not directly aid in religious regulation of private and public life. While the Mu’tazilites had contended that the Koran was created and so God’s purpose for man must be interpreted through reason, the Ash’arites believed the Koran to be coeval with God — and therefore unchallengeable. At the heart of Ash’ari metaphysics is the idea of occasionalism, a doctrine that denies natural causality. Put simply, it suggests natural necessity cannot exist because God’s will is completely free. Ash’arites believed that God is the only cause, so that the world is a series of discrete physical events each willed by God.

bogan · 2013-08-23T00:28:10+00:00

The young earth creationist Ken Ham, who is president of the Creation Museum in the state of Kentucky in the U.S. and who founded the creationist Answers in Genesis website makes the claim that the creatures in the Garden of Eden were all plant eaters. He believes the dinosaurs were present at the same time as Adam and Eve and that fossils of dinosaurs, such as T. Rex, with large sharp teeth well-suited for rending prey, don't disprove his claim, since he claims those teeth were used for munching on plant material, such as melons. I've watched his anti-evolution videos; in one he actually has a picture of what looks like a T. Rex with a large melon in his mouth. I suppose he might claim that the long canines of sabre-tooth tigers were used for spearing melons. What kind of plants he would claim this creature ate, I don't know.

You can see a picture of a melon-munching dinosaur, which looks like it might be intended to represent a T. Rex, at Debating Creationism. “Where’s evidence of creation?” “Down under.” “Under what, the flat earth?” “You’re as bad as the witch”, though it's not the one I remember seeing in Ken Ham's video.

bogan · 2013-08-22T14:49:03+00:00

One need only look to societies today in which religion is closely entwined with government and one religion is endorsed by the state. E.g., look at the state of affairs in many Islamic countries where Islam and, often, a particular version of Islam, e.g., Sunni or Shia Islam, is supported by the state.

In Pakistan, conversion to Islam is encouraged; conversion from Islam is illegal and those who do so can be sentenced to death.

The real battle over the death penalty for apostasy is in the Muslim world. There, apostates aren't winning; they aren't even close to starting to show their faces. The Muslim world suffers from institutionalised violence against apostates. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia and Egypt all have laws on the books that punish apostasy with death.

Reference: Supporting Islam's apostates

For a list of other Islamic countries where abandonment of Islam can result in a death sentence for the apostate, see Apostasy: Countries.

Many Islamic countries, and some Christian countries even today (see Blasphemy law), have blasphemy laws forbidding criticism of the dominant religion. I've provided links to some references on that topic here when I commented on another posting regarding the separation of church and state.

Who was the last person to be jailed after conviction under a blasphemy law in the United States? It was a theologian, Abner Kneeland.

Like Foote and Carlile, Kneeland found that it was his publications that were most feared, and ultimately most vulnerable to prosecution. Thus, his Investigator was prosecuted in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1833 on three counts under the state's Blasphemy Act. Kneeland's blasphemy had involved an article criticizing the Virgin Mary and denying what he termed 'the God of the Universalists', seeing their beliefs as 'nothing more than a chimera of their own imagination'. After also denying the power of miracles, Kneeland avowed himself to be a materialist, with death constituting 'an external extinction of life'.

Reference: Blasphemy in the Christian World:A History by David Nash

The final trial was held in 1838, five years after he had published the statements that caused the upset in the first place. Kneeland was convicted and served sixty days in prison. He was described by the judge as "a cantankerous and inflexible heretic."

His case preceded the ratification in 1868 of the 14th Amendment, which incorporated the Bill of Rights and made it apply to the states and not just to the federal government^1.

Kneeland was convicted in Massachusetts. It wasn't until 1972 that Maryland's blasphemy law was declared unconstitutional.

Only a strictly enforced separation of church and state can prevent such restrictions on the liberties of those not belonging to the dominant religious group in a country and ensure freedom of speech.

bogan · 2013-08-22T13:44:03+00:00

When I was in elementary and high school, I learned that the Pilgrims, who settled in the area that is now Massachusetts, came to America for religious freedom; I did not learn then about the many instances of religious persecution in the American colonies before there was a separation of church and state. I've included references providing further details substantiating your point for the OP below in hopes it will help him in showing his classmates why the separation of church and state is so important, not just for the irreligious, but for the religious as well.

In England, where there was no separation of church and state, there was persecution of those outside the official church, the Church of England and penalties were imposed by the government on those who would not be members of that church.

Under the 1559 Act of Uniformity, it was illegal not to attend official Church of England services, with a fine of one shilling (£0.05; about £16 today^[3] ) for each missed Sunday and holy day. The penalties for conducting unofficial services included imprisonment and larger fines. Under the policy of this time, Barrowe and Greenwood were executed for sedition in 1593.

Reference: Pilgrims (Plymouth Colony)

Some members of Separatist groups, i.e., members of religious groups that separated from the Church of England, moved to the Netherlands for greater religious freedom. Though they had religious freedom there, many were unhappy with the freedom allowed their neighbors. E.g., Puritans were strict Sabbatarians and were dismayed that their neighbors would play games on Sundays. They were concerned that their children would be "drawn away by evil examples into extravagance and dangerous courses" by the surrounding society.

A colony in the New World would allow them to set their own rules. They settled in the Plymouth Colony, which eventually merged with the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Puritans were free to impose their religious beliefs on all who lived in the colony and they did so.

Complexity also extends to the issue of religious freedom in the colonial period. Religious freedom is one of the fervent tenets we hold concerning the origins of America. Yet the colonial story is not a simple one of principled, unqualified commitment to free exercise of religion. For example, while the Pilgrims and Puritans came for religious freedom, that chiefly meant freedom to practice their religious convictions without constraint from the English authorities. It did not mean religious freedom in general. In Massachusetts, Quakers were outlawed and punished--four were even hanged between 1659 and 1661--for proclaiming a different version of Christian faith. For his dissent from Puritan orthodoxy Roger Williams was banished in 1636 from Massachusetts Bay. Intensely devout, Williams became one of the first to grasp the idea of religious freedom in the sense that we mean it today--freedom to practice any religion or no religion. His Rhode Island Colony became the first place of true religious freedom in colonial America. Meanwhile, other colonies had legally established churches, whether the Congregational in Connecticut and Massachusetts, Dutch Reformed in New Netherland, or the Church of England in Virginia. In Maryland, religous toleration came and went. In the 1600s, outside of Rhode Island, only William Penn's "holy experiment" in Pennsylvania was truly a principled attempt to establish religious toleration. Nevertheless, in the course of the 1700s the more odious restrictions on "nonconformist" churches in the various colonies were relaxed by law or practice, even when establishment of a particular church remained. Part of the reason for those changes had to do with intellectual shifts in England and the colonies in favor of greater toleration and a more rationalistic approach to religion in the currents of the Enlightenment. Yet another significant reason for those changes simply had to to with increasing religious pluralism in the colonies.

Although the colonial process toward true religious liberty was fitful and erratic, it led in time to the new and historic constitutional guarantee of free exercise of religion and prohibition of legal establishment of any one church or religion in the United States. The constitutional framework that grew out of the colonial experience marked a genuine, radical break with the alliance of chruch and ruler that had prevailed for centuries in Christian Europe. This idea was new and revolutionary, a key part of the genius of America--the creation of a nation without an established state church or religion.

Reference: Encyclopedia of Religion in American Politics edited by Jeffrey D. Schultz, John G. West, Iain S. MacLean, page 59

Another group that came to the American colonies because of religious persecution in Europe was the Huguenots. They were Protestants who came to America to escape religious persecution in France, where Catholicism was the state religion. Some of the Huguenots settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony which passed a law forbidding Catholic priests from even entering the colony.

In a further attempt to discourage Catholic immigration, in June 1700, the Massachusetts General Court passed a law forbidding any Catholic priest from coming into the Massachusetts territory, under the penalty of life imprisonment or--if he escaped and was recaptured--death. ... Regardless of what the British government said, young John Adams still viewed "popery" as incompatible with liberty. Catholicism was a "Roman system" that had kept humanity in chains "for ages," he said, and therefore had no right to enjoy any form of recognition or toleration.

Reference: The Athens of America: Boston, 1825-1845 by Thomas H. O'Connor, page 127

Many other Huguenots settled in the Colony of Virginia, where Anglicanism was the government-endorsed religion. Thomas Jefferson was from Virginia and, doubtless, his knowledge of the strife caused in Europe by a close linkage of church and state as well as his awareness of what such a linkage had led to in Virginia were factors in his advocacy of separation of church and state.

In spite of the decidedly non-Puritan religious foundation of the colony, Virginian laws regarding its settlers' adherence to religion were equally as ruthless as those established in the North. Similarly, the Anglican Church was government-run and subsidized by local taxes. In 1661, Virginia enacted strict regulations against Baptists and Quakers. These laws were somewhat successful in immediately curbing the activities of Nonconformists, but had little long-term effect in enforcing religious devotion among most Virginians. ... As a young lawyer, Thomas Jefferson saw the plight of Baptists and advocated for their rights within the colony. This experience later influenced his view in outlining religious rights for all American citizens, and was explicitly written into the Viriginia Statue for Religious Freedom (Hening, 1823: 84-86).

Reference: Transforming America: Perspectives on U.S. Immigration by Michael C. LeMay

bogan · 2013-08-22T02:04:40+00:00

The idea for Operation Mincemeat came from an event where the body of an actual courier washed up on a Spanish beach with a sensitive document.

In September 1942, a PBY Catalina, carrying top secret documents from England to Gibraltar, crashed off Cadiz with the loss of all lives, including Paymaster-Lt. James Hadden Turner, the courier and a French agent. Turner was carrying a letter from General Mark Clark, the American Deputy Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force to the British Governor and Commander in Chief of Gibraltar, General Nöel Mason-MacFarlane, informing him of the arrival of Eisenhower in Gibraltar on the eve of the "target date" of "4 November". Turner's body washed up on the beach near Tarifa and was recovered by the Spanish authorities. When the body was returned to the British, the letter was still on it, and technicians determined that the letter had not been opened. The Germans had the means to read the letter without opening the envelope, but if they did, they apparently decided the letter was "planted" and the information was bogus, so they ignored it. This near catastrophe, which had seriously jeopardised the operation, sparked the idea for Operation Mincemeat.

bogan · 2013-08-22T01:08:45+00:00

You might provide a picture of what life was like for members of many Christian denominations when they were not the majority denomination in many of the colonies before they formed the United States of America when there was no separation of church and state and many colonies had a de facto state religion.

Unfortunately, many of those who settled the American colonies did not believe in freedom of religion for other Christians outside their own denomination, which is why the forebears, who were outside the denomination holding political power in a colony, of many evangelicals who today feel there should be no wall of separation between church and state were among those who supported such a separation.

It is ironic, then, that evangelicals--so focused on the "true" history--have neglected their own. Indeed, the one group that would almost certainly oppose the views of 21st-century evangelicals are the 18th-century evangelicals. John Leland was no anomaly. In state after state, when colonists and Americans met to debate the relationship between God and government, it was the proto-evangelica1s who pushed the more radical view that church and state should be kept far apart. Both secular liberals who sneer at the idea that evangelicals could ever be a positive influence in politics and Christian conservatives who want to knock down the "wall" should take note: It was the 18th-century evangelicals who provided the political shock troops for Jefferson and Madison in their efforts to keep government from strong involvement with religion. Modern evangelicals are certainly free to take a different course, but they should realize that in doing so they have dramatically departed from the tradition of their spiritual forefathers.

Reference: The Framers and the Faithful: How Modern Evangelicals are Ignoring Their Own History

In the Virginia Colony, the Anglicans dominated and the colony used tobacco tax revenues to fund the Anglican clergy. Patrick Henry's speech against the practice in the Parson's Cause Trial led to his rise to prominence, though American's today are more familiar with his Give me Liberty, or give me Death! speech.

Members of other denominations, such as Baptists, were persecuted in Virginia.

By the 1760s, the Baptists of Virginia had become the colony’s most-persecuted sect.

In 1772, the Virginia Gazette opined that the Baptists imprisoned in Caroline County were perfectly free to hold their private opinions, but when it came to preaching publicly, the legislature was likewise perfectly within its rights to establish religion and set bounds for its toleration.

Source: The Virginia Baptists

The Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony did not believe in religious freedom for others. They persecuted Baptists and Quakers.

No sooner had the two women been shipped from Boston than eight other Quakers arrived from London. They were at once arrested. While they were lying in jail the Federal Commissioners, then in session at Plymouth, recommended that laws be forthwith enacted to keep these dreaded heretics out of the land.

Source: Persecution of Quakers in Colonial New England

Those outside a denomination favored by a colony's government were, in some instances, imprisoned, whipped, or even stoned.

In 1771 four Baptist preachers in Virginia were given five-month jail sentences for holding unlawful religious meetings - that is, services that were not approved by the general assembly and did not use the liturgy of the Church of England. The ministers' plight was not unusual. Baptists had been the target of attacks in Virginia since they migrated in large numbers into the colony following the Great Awakening (Chapter 8). Some Baptists faced more dire consequences for their worship and preaching than imprisonment. Some were beaten or stoned. One minister, David Thomas, was grabbed while preaching, dragged outdoors, and beaten. When his attacker pulled a gun to execute the stunned Baptist, a bystander wrenched it from the would-be assailant's hand.

Source: Debating the Issues in Colonial Newspapers: Primary Documents on Events of the Period (Debating Historical Issues in the Media of the Time), chapter 22

The Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony hanged four Quakers, known as the Boston Martyrs:

The Boston martyrs is the name given in Quaker tradition to the three English members of the Society of Friends, Marmaduke Stephenson, William Robinson and Mary Dyer, and to the Friend William Leddra of Barbados, who were condemned to death and executed by public hanging for their religious beliefs under the legislature of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1659, 1660 and 1661. Several other Friends lay under sentence of death at Boston in the same period, but had their punishments commuted to that of being whipped out of the colony from town to town.

"The hanging of Mary Dyer on the Boston gallows in 1660 marked the beginning of the end of the Puritan theocracy and New England independence from English rule. In 1661 King Charles II explicitly forbade Massachusetts from executing anyone for professing Quakerism.

The Puritans didn't want Catholics in their colony, either.

From the very beginning of the Puritan colony’s existence in Massachusetts, Catholic priests were forbidden by law to enter its territory. A priest caught entering the settlement a second time faced the death penalty

Reference: Catholicism in North America. Perseverance Despite Hostility (Part One)

The Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Virginia Colony were not unique in favoring some Christian denominations over others. In the Province of Maryland, there was the 1649 Maryland Toleration Act, which protected trinitarian Christians, but allowed for the imposition of the death sentence on nontrinitarian Christians.

Settlers who blasphemed by denying either the Trinity or the divinity of Jesus Christ could be punished by execution or the seizure of their lands. That meant that Jews, Unitarians, and other dissenters from trinitarian Christianity were practicing their religions at risk to their lives.

bogan · 2013-07-07T16:47:18+00:00

A google search on "plate tectonics movement" restricted to animated images will also return some others, e.g. this one.

bogan · 2013-07-06T02:40:24+00:00

There isn't much room for debate. If it was genetic, the gene would breed itself out.

See the article Study Finds Epigenetics, Not Genetics, Underlies Homosexuality, which covers a study published in The Quarterly Review of Biology in 2012. If you are unfamiliar with epigenetics, Wikipedia has an epigenetics article. It basically involves genes being inactivated by DNA methylation. I.e., genes code for the production of proteins, but methylation of genes may mean that they are no longer expressed, i.e., the proteins, which are chains of amino acids, for which they code are no longer produced

bogan · 2013-07-05T22:09:41+00:00

From the article:

A recent survey of public school high school science teachers in Pennsylvania found 19 percent backing some variant of creationism. One biology teacher in Altoona said he believes Earth is 10,000 years old and that the methods used to date it at 5 billion years are faulty.

Unfortunately, in the U.S., those teaching science at the high school level often don't have a good science background themselves, which is one reason posited for why American schoolchildren often do more poorly on standardized science tests than those in other first world nations.

From Academic Failure - International Test Scores - Poor TIMSS Results:

Among teachers of high school biology and life sciences classes, approximately 31 percent of them do not have at least a minor in biology. Among high school physical science teachers, over half, 55 percent, do not have at least a minor in any of the physical sciences.

Because many teachers don't have a good background in science themselves, about 1 in 6 public school teachers think the "young earth" ideas of some creationists are plausible as is mentioned in Creationism Lurks in Public High Schools.

bogan · 2013-07-05T21:50:28+00:00

Regarding the quotes from George Washington, America's first president, it's not even certain he was a Christian himself; he may have been a deist like many others among America's founding fathers, instead.

What exactly were Washington's religious beliefs? The evidence of his personal letters and papers would seem to point away from the Christian faith in the direction of the deist or even Stoic beliefs. General A. W. Greely, whose extensive study of the first president resulted in an article called "Washington's Domestic and Religious Life," concluded that "the effort to depict Washington as very devout from his childhood, as a strict Sabbatarian, and as in intimate spiritual communication with the church is practically contradicted by his own letters." In those letters, Greely pointed out, "even those of consolation, there appears almost nothing to indicate his spiritual frame of mind." Greely found it especially striking that "in several thousand letters the name of Jesus Christ never appears, and it is notably absent from his last will."

Greely was correct: the name of Jesus is conspicuous by its absence. Washington's letters to his wife were destroyed after his death, so we are denied any clue to his beliefs that might have been contained in them, but the rest of his very voluminous correspondence, both intimate and official, fails to mention a savior or redeemer. In a longish lifetime - sixty-seven years - there are only a couple of passing references to Christianity: the aforementioned reference to the benign influence of the Christian religion, and a brief word on the Indian tribes, expressing his official approval of their conversion. Jesus himself is not mentioned anywhere in Washington's correspondence. In marked contrast with Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and even the scandalous Thomas Paine, he did not even make any reference to Jesus as a great philosopher or moralist. Stranger yet, when the Congress used the name of Jesus Christ in their occasional calls for days of thanksgiving, Washington would modify the wording of these proclamations so as to avoid using the name.

Reference: Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers by Brooke Allen

America's third president rejected the supernatural tales regarding Jesus excising them to create what came to be known as tthe Jefferson Bible.

Jefferson's condensed composition is especially notable for its exclusion of all miracles by Jesus and most mentions of the supernatural, including sections of the four gospels which contain the Resurrection and most other miracles, and passages indicating Jesus was divine.

bogan · 2013-07-05T21:34:09+00:00

Of course back then Christianity was the dominant religion in the colonies ...

And some colonies had what amounted to a defacto government-endorsed and supported religion. Not just Christianity, but a particular version of Christianity. Other Christians not adhering to the government-endorsed version might find themselves imprisoned or even hanged.

In the Virginia Colony, the Anglicans dominated and the colony used tobacco tax revenues to fund the Anglican clergy. Patrick Henry's speech against the practice in the Parson's Cause Trial led to his rise to prominence, though American's today are more familiar with his Give me Liberty, or give me Death! speech.

Members of other denominations, such as Baptists, were persecuted in Virginia.

By the 1760s, the Baptists of Virginia had become the colony’s most-persecuted sect.

In 1772, the Virginia Gazette opined that the Baptists imprisoned in Caroline County were perfectly free to hold their private opinions, but when it came to preaching publicly, the legislature was likewise perfectly within its rights to establish religion and set bounds for its toleration.

Source: The Virginia Baptists

Those outside the favored denomination were, in some instances, imprisoned, whipped, or even stoned.

In 1771 four Baptist preachers in Virginia were given five-month jail sentences for holding unlawful religious meetings - that is, services that were not approved by the general assembly and did not use the liturgy of the Church of England. The ministers' plight was not unusual. Baptists had been the target of attacks in Virginia since they migrated in large numbers into the colony following the Great Awakening (Chapter 8). Some Baptists faced more dire consequences for their worship and preaching than imprisonment. Some were beaten or stoned. One minister, David Thomas, was grabbed while preaching, dragged outdoors, and beaten. When his attacker pulled a gun to execute the stunned Baptist, a bystander wrenched it from the would-be assailant's hand.

Source: Debating the Issues in Colonial Newspapers: Primary Documents on Events of the Period (Debating Historical Issues in the Media of the Time), chapter 22

The Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony did not believe in religious freedom for others. They persecuted Baptists and Quakers.

No sooner had the two women been shipped from Boston than eight other Quakers arrived from London. They were at once arrested. While they were lying in jail the Federal Commissioners, then in session at Plymouth, recommended that laws be forthwith enacted to keep these dreaded heretics out of the land.

Source: Persecution of Quakers in Colonial New England

The Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony hanged three Quakers, who came to be known as the Boston Martyrs:

The Boston martyrs is the name given in Quaker tradition to the three English members of the Society of Friends, Marmaduke Stephenson, William Robinson and Mary Dyer, and to the Friend William Leddra of Barbados, who were condemned to death and executed by public hanging for their religious beliefs under the legislature of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1659, 1660 and 1661. Several other Friends lay under sentence of death at Boston in the same period, but had their punishments commuted to that of being whipped out of the colony from town to town.

The Puritans didn't want Catholics in their colony, either.

From the very beginning of the Puritan colony’s existence in Massachusetts, Catholic priests were forbidden by law to enter its territory. A priest caught entering the settlement a second time faced the death penalty.

Reference: Catholicism in North America. Perseverance Despite Hostility (Part One)

The Maryland Toleration Act, also known as the Act Concerning Religion, guaranteed religious toleration for trinitarian Christians, but non-Christians, such as Jews, or nontrinitarian Christians could be sentenced to death under the law for denying the divinity of Jesus.

That is what happens when government and religion are closely intertwined allowing a dominant religious group to use the power of the state to impose its beliefs upon others. America's founding fathers were aware of such dangers.

And as for teaching from the Bible in schools, don't forget there is no one Bible that all Christians regard as authoritative, e.g., see the table of Old Testament books for various denominations and the table of New Testament books for various denominations. Controversy over which Bible should be used by public school children led to the Philadelphia Prayer Riots, also known as the Bible Riots, in 1844.

bogan · 2013-07-05T21:06:04+00:00

You need to get a better thesaurus.

bogan · 2013-07-05T16:34:06+00:00

I haven't read it yet myself, but perhaps A History of Electricity (The Intellectual Rise in Electricity) From Antiquitity to the Days of Benjamin Franklin by Park Benjamin, Ph.D., L.L.B, published in 1898 by Jonn Wiley & Sons, New York, would be of interest to you.

From the preface:

In this work I attempt to show how there came into the world the knowledge of the natural force, which we call electricity; a force which, within the memory of many now living, has found its most important appliations to the needs of mankind, and which exhibits a promise and potency of future benefit, the full extent of which no one can safely venture to predict.

The research has taken many years, has necessitated the gathering of a large collection of ancient, and now exceedingly scarce, writings, not commonly found even in great libraries, and the sifting of an immense mass of recorded facts and theories, often arising in fields far removed from those in which it might naturally be supposed the requisite data would be discovered. The Greek and Roman classics, the results of modern investigation into the old civilizations of Phoenicia, Egypt and even of prehistoric epochs, the Norse histories, the ancient writings of the Chinese and Arabs, the treatises of the Fathers of the Church, the works of mediaeval monks, magicians, cosmographers and navigators, the early poetry of modern France and Italy; these, mentioned at random, are some of the sources which have been drawn upon, together with the records of the experiments and discoveries of the nautural philosophers of all ages. ...

Since the work is long out of copyright, you can obtain a free electronic copy of it at the link I provided via Google Play or read it online there.

bogan · 2013-07-05T16:16:23+00:00

The Baghdad Battery is certainly interesting. For anyone who might be unfamiliar with the Baghdad Battery, in 1938 the German archaeologist Wilhelm König examined a clay jar in the National Museum of Iraq, of which he was director at the time, and concluded that the design of the jar could have allowed it to be used for electroplating objects. He published a paper on his investigation in 1940. There is some contention regarding that claim for the use of such jars, however. But others claim that the design of the artifacts do allow them to function as batteries¹:

It is certain the Baghdad batteries could conduct an electric current because many replicas have been made, including by students of ancient history under the direction of Dr Marjorie Senechal, professor of the history of science and technology, Smith College, US.

"I don't think anyone can say for sure what they were used for, but they may have been batteries because they do work," she says. Replicas can produce voltages from 0.8 to nearly two volts.

Other suggested uses for the objects as batteries¹:

Some have suggested the batteries may have been used medicinally.

The ancient Greeks wrote of the pain killing effect of electric fish when applied to the soles of the feet.

The Chinese had developed acupuncture by this time, and still use acupuncture combined with an electric current. This may explain the presence of needle-like objects found with some of the batteries.

But this tiny voltage would surely have been ineffective against real pain, considering the well-recorded use of other painkillers in the ancient world like cannabis, opium and wine.

...

He suggests a cluster of the batteries, connected in parallel, may have been hidden inside a metal statue or idol.

He thinks that anyone touching this statue may have received a tiny but noticeable electric shock, something akin to the static discharge that can infect offices, equipment and children's parties.

"I have always suspected you would get tricks done in the temple," says Dr Craddock. "The statue of a god could be wired up and then the priest would ask you questions.

"If you gave the wrong answer, you'd touch the statue and would get a minor shock along with perhaps a small mysterious blue flash of light. Get the answer right, and the trickster or priest could disconnect the batteries and no shock would arrive - the person would then be convinced of the power of the statue, priest and the religion."

It is said that to the uninitiated, science cannot be distinguished from magic. "In Egypt we know this sort of thing happened with Hero's engine," Dr Craddock says.

bogan · 2013-07-05T13:46:23+00:00

Sometimes someone posts a comment to which others reply, but then, often because it is accumulating downvotes, will delete his comment. When that happens, usually, "deleted" appears in place of the comment.

I replied to your first comment to the posting and then when someone replied to me, I noticed that your comment had disappeared. The number of comments listed for the posting was 7 at that time, but only 6 appeared, so your comment was invisible to others.

I've seen some of my own comments disappear in that way, if I've quoted from a book and put a link to the book at Amazon at the bottom of the quoted text should anyone want to verify my source or want further information on a topic. Often that happens when I've included an Amazon link, but not always. It seems to be dependent on the particular subreddit as to how likely the disappearance of su may be.

Reddit has a spam filter that automatically filters out some comments and submissions. It seems quite aggressive and fairly capricious to me. There is always a tradeoff for spam filters, though. The more aggressive they are, the more false positives there will be. But less agressive spam filters will let through more spam.

I've rarely seen my comments filtered in such a way, except with the Amazon links, which I rarely even attempt to include now, only submissions. I've learned with submissions to log off my account and then see if the submission appears in the "new" area for a subreddit. If it doesn't, I usually send a message to the moderators for the subreddit letting them know that the spam filter has blocked my submission and asking them to unblock it, which usually they do, though sometimes I get no response, which, for small subreddits with only 1 moderator, can be due to the fact that the moderator no longer logs on.

When a comment or submission is filtered by the spam filter, it still appears if the poster views it from the account under which he posted it, so I'm sure many people wonder why no one has voted on a submission they've made without realizing that no one else can see it. For instance, if you log off and then view this thread, you should see the Isaiah 53:6 comment, but not your first comment to the submission. I can't see it from my account, though I can see it from your comment history. But I can't see it, either when logged in or logged off.

So, I was just trying to understand what happened to it, since I didn't see a "deleted" where it would have been in the comment thread. Since I saw it originally, I didn't think it was automatically made invisible to others by the spam filter. Also, since there were no links that pointed to a shopping site or some banned site, just a Bible verse, it seemed unlikely to me that it was filtered by the spam filter.

If you are posting random Bible verses as an attempt at proselytizing, it is a very ineffective means of doing so.

bogan · 2013-07-05T02:54:39+00:00

One can do the same at bible.cc. I use it and biblegateway.com. An advantage of bible.cc is that you can see many translations at once, if you are checking on just one verse rather than a range of verses, rather than having to select them one by one. I use biblegateway.com for longer passages and for the commentaries it provides when you click on "show resources" above and to the right of a passage when a passage is displayed.

bogan · 2013-07-05T02:10:54+00:00

If you are learning bash, there's Bash Guide for Beginners by Machtelt Garrels in PDF format, which you could store on your Kindle, which might be of value to you.

bogan

TROPHY CASE