Our daily universe: post-galaxy collision

Following is an image from the Hubble of two galaxies, presumably in a post-collision state. The upper galaxy, which resembles a rose bloom, is UGC 1810 and the “stem” is known as the UGC 1813 galaxy. Scientists believe the “stem” has already passed through the upper galaxy, thus creating a flower-like appearance. Of course, we’ll never see the end result of the space wreck because galaxies take an eon or so to reform after meeting other galaxies. Our own, in fact, is on a collision course with Andromeda, and they will meet in a few billion years. The two will eventually become one in another billion years or so. Here’s UGC 1810 and UGC 1813:

NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Kyl, man, myth, legend, strikes again, ctd

As I noted earlier this month, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Arizona) previously said 90 percent of Planned Parent’s services are related to abortion. The number is actually 3 percent, but Kyl isn’t one to let facts get in the way of a good rant on the floor of Congress. When Kyl’s office was told about the error and given the actual figure, the reply was that Kyl’s statement was not intended to be “factual.”

So, if the 90 percent claim wasn’t supposed to be “factual,” I can’t help but wonder what other parts of his speech were just flailing in the wind. Further, he doesn’t look as if he’s joking or exaggerating in the speech in question:

In a move of complete admission of guilt, the Kyl camp has removed the 90 percent comment from the official Congressional record, as reported by Politico:

Sen. Jon Kyl has quietly removed his infamous comment that 90 percent of Planned Parenthood’s business is abortion from the Congressional Record. Senators are allowed to revise and extend their comments in record and his statement now simply says: “If you want an abortion you go to Planned Parenthood and that is what Planned Parenthood does.” Kyl’s office could not be reached for comment.

While removing the comment from the official record may make Kyl seem less like a buffoon to whatever bookish types might go sifting through the Congressional scrolls years from now, Kyl best hope those researchers don’t have access to the Internet anymore in whatever form it may take in the future. Unfortunately for him, Kyl isn’t powerful enough to redact the comment from cyberspace, in which it will be swirling endlessly on Twitter, Facebook, Google and blogs like this one for years to come. And there’s quite a good chance that the Internet, in some form, will be here long after Kyl’s inane remarks become rhetorical relics.

Georgia takes Arizona’s lead on immigration

First published on Blogcritics.

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My home state, Georgia, falling in lockstep with Arizona and other states that have attempted to take a cavalier approach to the immigration delimma, recently passed its own law, and Gov. Nathan Deal subsequently told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he intends to sign the bill into law.

Proponents of the bill, which allows local and state law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of suspects, say the passage is a triumph in light of the federal government’s inadequate enforcement measures, while opponents claim the bill will put more burden on local businesses and will result in racial profiling.

Photo credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC - Ouafae Azhari (foreground) shouts out as other demonstrators protest Georgia House Bill 87 outside the Capitol on the final day of the 2011 legislative session.

Rep. Matt Ramsey, the Georgia House bill sponsor, had this to say after the bill’s passage:

It’s a great day for Georgia. We think we have done our job that our constituents asked us to do to address the costs and the social consequences that have been visited upon our state by the federal government’s failure to secure our nation’s borders.

The legislation would also require businesses of more than 10 employees to use the federal E-Verify system to check the status of hired employees.

Jann Moore, with the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce, said the plan would put undue pressure on businesses amid a still-struggling economic climate:

We’re coming out of [a] recession, and businesses are doing all they can do right now to stay afloat. To turn around and put the responsibility of another policy on business is the wrong thing to do. The timing could not be worse.

Parts of Arizona’s law have been put on hold because of federal challenges of constitutionality. Georgia’s version, which resembles Arizona’s Senate Bill, is one of a handful of state immigration laws that have passed nationwide. It could suffer the fate of Arizona’s since the constitution, opponent say, suggests that the federal government alone confers citizenship.

According to the 14th Amendment, Section 1, Clause 1:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

The key words here are “jurisdiction thereof.” Two relevent definitions of “jurisdiction” follow:

  1. the right, power, or authority to administer justice byhearing and determining controversies.
  2. power; authority; control: He has jurisdiction over allAmerican soldiers in the area.

The above clause does not say, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and the individual states, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” but that jurisdiction belongs to the United States as a whole, and while individual concerns about immigration are understood, states’ attempts to skirt federal law may present a dangerous precedent, not only because of the possibility of racial profiling by law enforcement officials, but because this could result in a hodgepodge of immigration laws across the nation.

Columnist Tom Crawford, with the Georgia Report, said that even if Deal signs the bill, the buck would stop there:

The U.S. Justice Department will challenge the law in federal court and have it set aside – just as they did with the Arizona law. That’s why all this talk about solving the immigration problem at the state level is a sham. This is the federal government’s problem and the blame for not resolving it must fall on the people elected to Congress.

In Georgia’s case, that would be Sens. Johnny Isakson and Saxby Chambliss. Both have taken a hard-line approach on the issue of immigration, and both voted “nay” to a reform bill in 2007. Chambliss’ recordIsakson’s record.

In addition to the legal questions of Georgia’s bill, implicit in the discussion is the perceived damage such legislation might do to the economy, which in Georgia is largely agricultural. Local growers have said they are worried that if the immigration bill actually goes into effect, many members of their current workforce will jump ship and local farms won’t have enough labor to pick crops and tend the fields. Outside of the Atlanta metro, the economic impact could be detrimental.

The gospel untruth

This article first published on Blogcritics.

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Since this is the time so many folks are interested in talking about the good news, let’s do just that.

With Easter right around the corner, believers will no doubt wax on about how the empty grave is proof that Jesus is Lord and how the New Testament authors provided firsthand, authoritative accounts of what happened around 33 A.D.

I would surely crash Blogcritics’ servers if I attempted to address all the problems with the Jesus accounts or with the gospel stories in general, but I will note a few of them here.

A former pastor of mine (I’m a former believer) once admitted that if it could be found that one part of the Bible was unauthentic or contradictory or inaccurate, that the entire thing must be tossed out. This errantness has been established so many times by so many authors over the years, I don’t feel the need to reinvent the wheel, except to say that the resurrection, Lazarus rising from the dead, and other miracles alleged to have happened in the Bible — miracles are unsurprisingly absent today — are violations of the laws of nature, as David Hume and many others have written, and that for some mysterious reason they only occur in the works of highly fearful and superstitious cultures. Had Christianity not taken hold in Palestine and regions of the Mediterranean in the first and second centuries and then promulgated by the Church, we would today view the Bible as we now view Homer and all of Greek and Roman mythology.

I will take the case of the virgin birth — which, oddly enough, gets nary a mention in two of the four New Testament gospels — the concept of which was nothing new to ancient literature. So much so that we should have been more surprised if Jesus was not born of a virgin, since so many of his godly predecessors apparently were. In case this is new to some readers, Christopher Hitchens provides a handy list:

“Now the birth of Jesus Christ was in this wise. When his mother, Mary, was espoused to Joseph, before they came together she was found with child of the Holy Ghost.” Yes (emphasis mine), and the Greek demigod Perseus was born when the god Jupiter visited the virgin Danaë as a shower of gold and got her with child. The god Buddha was born through an opening in his mother’s flank. Catlicus the serpent-skirted caught a little ball of feathers from the sky and hid it in her bosom, and the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli was thus conceived. The virgin Nana took a pomegranate from the tree watered by the blood of the slain Agdestris, and laid it in her bosom, and gave birth to the god Attis. The virgin daughter of a Mongol king awoke one night and found herself bathed in a great light, which caused her to give birth to Genghis Khan. Krishna was born of the virgin Devaka. Horus was born of the virgin Isis. Mercury was born of the virgin Maia. Romulus was born of the virgin Rhea Sylvia. — “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Further, as related to the gospel accounts, we have the problem of eyewitness testimony. We also have the problem of so few of such testimonies. If this was supposed to be the single biggest event in the history of the universe, why do we only have four accounts that betray themselves and each other? For instance, Matthew 2:1 suggests Jesus was born before 4 C.E. (“in the days of Herod”), while Luke 2:1-2 suggests he was born in 6 or 7 C.E. at the time of the Census of Quirinius. So much for inerrancy. It seems to me that the correct birth year, not to mention the exact day (forever lost to us), might have been an important detail to pinpoint for the most important individual ever to be born.

This brings up other questions. If God was all-powerful and omniscient, how could he allow his word to get edited and redacted from and added to such that it’s probably a distant cousin from the original text? If God was all-powerful, couldn’t he have assured that a perfect, truly inerrant word could pass through the generations? What’s more, if he was all-powerful, couldn’t he have written the entire thing himself without all the errors and then passed it down to each generation? Why depend on “inspired” humans to write it when he apparently created us with deep flaws? Is all of this not within the purview of the Christian god? That he supposedly depended on cursed humans to write and spread his word — We are cursed, according to doctrine — speaks volumes to the illogicalness of these texts. If he could not have written the entire Bible himself and seen that it was past down to every generation in its perfect form, he’s not all-everything and not that dissimilar to the other god relics that have been hewn from the mind of man.

But back to eyewitness testimony. If I found that I woke up one morning with an angel of the Lord in my presence, I would conclude I was either dreaming or under a delusion. And anyone with whom I shared this news would likely say the same thing. We know from studies that modern eyewitness testimony is far from reliable. How much more so is eyewitness testimony from accounts of incredible, science-defying claims from 2,000 years ago? Fantastic claims require fantastic evidence, evidence on which the Bible barely scratches the surface. In order to establish the validity of claims of the miraculous, the proof would have to be stupendous, indeed. Gravity and evolution are scientific theories that are backed by reems of evidence, but the evidence needed to establish the truthfulness of gravity and evolution pales in comparison to the evidence needed to support claims of someone coming back to life or rising from the dead, since this has never been observed. Ever. Except, again, in the claims of the authors of highly fearful, highly superstitious ancient texts.

Hume makes the point in “Of Miracles:”

… no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish … [Responding to a claim that someone was brought back to life, Hume weighs] the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.

In other words, if Jesus not rising from the dead would be more miraculous than if Jesus did rise from the dead, only then could we accept the claim in question. Thus, by Hume’s logic, Jesus rising from the dead is obviously more miraculous than the alternative. As we know, people, in fact, don’t rise from the dead hundreds or thousands of times every single day.

Finally, the text of the Bible has been studied and scrutinized by many biblical scholars. One of them is John Dominic Crossan, who, in his book, “The Historical Jesus,” establishes a system by which he categorizes into strata each of the canonical and gnostic gospels and other presumably Christian texts of the time. The first stratum includes works that were written between 30-60 C.E. None of the canonical gospels fall into this stratum. The second includes works written from 60-80 C.E. The Gospel of Mark, obviously, is the earliest of the gospels, and it falls here, written by the late 70s. The third stratum includes works penned between 80-120 C.E., while the fourth stratum, presumably texts that are less authentic and even more embellished and “reconstructed” from earlier works than works in the earlier strata, dates from 120-150 C.E.

Crossan makes the case that the gospels currently in our possession today are reconstructions from earlier texts, and the second, third, and fourth gospels are reconstructions from the earlier ones, while Mark itself is an edit or an addition to the Secret Gospel of Mark. Perhaps the earliest of them all, the Sayings Gospel Q, is currently “embedded,” as Crossan termed it, within Matthew and Luke. Written by the late 50s, by Crossan’s estimation, Q contains no passion or resurrection story.

The point of all this is simply to say that Mark informed the other three gospels, while earlier, now lost texts informed Mark. That is to say further that the probability of the current gospels being true to the letter must be exceedingly small given what we know about eyewitness testimony and the construction of the New Testament itself. As Crossan concludes:

… there is only reconstruction. … If you cannot believe in something produced by reconstruction, you may have nothing left to believe in.

It is, of course, within one’s right to believe something based on scant evidence and from a book steeped in contradictions, faulty science and math, bare bones textual evidence and stunningly primitive ethical codes. Some happily do, and all the better for them.

But even a cursory look at the case for the gospels reminds the rest of us that while Easter eggs, candy, and springtime offer nice pleasantries this time of year, the religious element ever behind the upcoming holiday was built, glorified and crowned on a now teetering house of cards.

Belated thoughts on the Civil War sesquicentennial

This was first published on Blogcritics.

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Within the Veil was he born, said I; and there within shall he live, — a Negro and a Negro’s son. Holding in that little head — ah, bitterly! — the unbowed pride of a hunted race, clinging with that tiny dimpled hand — ah, wearily! — to a hope not hopeless but unhopeful, and seeing with those bright wondering eyes that peer into my soul a land whose freedom is to us a mockery and whose liberty is a lie. — W.E.B. Dubois, “The Souls of Black Folk”

***

I realize I’m a few days late posting anything on this, but Tuesday was a 12-hour war of attrition at work, and I didn’t get around to writing anything until today.

Nevertheless, for anyone who may have been living under a rock for the past couple weeks, Tuesday marked the 150th anniversary of the start of the [[American Civil War]]. On April 12, 1861, the confederate shots bombarded [[Fort Sumter]] off the coast of Charleston, S.C. Nearly four years to the day and 500,000 dead troops later, Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865. Four years and two days after the start of the war, Lincoln was shot by the firebrand, John Wilkes Booth, at [[Ford’s Theatre]] in Washington.

As an original resident of [[South Carolina]], the first state to secede from the Union, I am interested in examining both the causes of the Civil War and the effects from the fallout. My Civil War professor at Clemson University, Paul Anderson, supplied me and my fellow history students with this pithy summation of the root causes of the War Between the States:

Both slavery and anti-slavery caused the Civil War.

Credit: Library of Congress photo collection - Morris Island, South Carolina. Battery Weed. Five 10-inch siege mortars.

Southern aristocrats and politicians, of course, were fighting for the extension of slavery into the territories and for the continuation of slavery in the South, the South’s economy being almost exclusively dependent on the peculiar institution. That’s not to say that the North didn’t have a stake in the preservation of slavery. It was both a purchaser of Southern goods and an implicit participant in the slave trade, as slaves would often be brought to America on Northern ships. I’m sure Northern ship owners profited mightily from this enterprise.

But the South seceded for another reason: to protect the aristocratic way of life, as Anderson notes in this op-ed piece for The State. They were also interested in preserving

the unique aristocratic tone of the state’s politics and culture.

Against that backdrop, the loss of Charleston signaled the immediate end of the slaveholding Confederacy, but it also ushered in a second kind of civil war, an internal struggle between the antique ethic and a newer, empowered force of democracy.

Many Southerners today talk a lot about the issue of states’ rights and how the start of the Civil War was, in part, fueled by the federal government encroaching on state sovereignty. While states’ rights was on the minds of Southern leaders, they were thinking of states’ rights to preserve slavery and fight for its extension into the territories. There was simply no other main cause of the war. All other purported “causes” dreamed up by Southerners today attempting to soften the legacy of their ancestors are subsets of the main cause. Lincoln’s first inaugural address, which was devoted almost entirely to the issue of slavery, makes this abundantly clear:

One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute.

Southern leaders prior to the war and afterward, shook in their trousers at the thought of four million black people previously subjugated by rich whites. Thus, in the aftermath of the Civil War, a “new kind of civil war” commenced, as Anderson puts it, between the struggle mentioned above. South Carolina’s 1895 constitution signaled the

shotgun wedding of democracy and white supremacy.

And a new kind of subjugation, then, persisted for another 100 years following the end of the war in the form of the [[Black Codes]] and [[Jim Crow]]. It’s a sad commentary that we, as a nation, took so long to recognize the true liberty of four million other human beings who played no small part — mostly against their will and without compensation — in helping build the economic foundation of our-still young country in the 19th century. The 150th anniversary should be as much about honoring their legacy as remembering the half million people who died for their respective causes.

The real (Nathan) Deal

Here is an article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in which Gov. Nathan Deal said he intends to sign Georgia’s new anti-immigration bill once it reaches his desk.

In the article, he addresses various business groups, who raise obvious concerns about how the bill would add extra burdens to them if enacted. Here is “Deal Real” himself:

I understand their concerns. I would hope that they would channel those concerns to the level of government that can do something about it, which is the federal government.

The level of government that can do something about it?

Then why the heck is Georgia passing its own immigration bill if the federal government is the level of government that can do something about it? Is he admitting the federal government should be in control of this issue? If so, he is right. If not, his state, like Arizona, most likely has a huge legal battle ahead of it.

Only one of two options is possible: either he has unknowingly confessed that Georgia has entirely overstepped its bounds on the illegal immigration issue and that it was a federal concern all along or he, and everyone who voted in favor of the Georgia immigration bill, has the IQ of an adorable panda bear. Judge for yourself.

Our daily universe: Sun’s spiral loops

I know this might be a rudimentary or obvious thing to say, but every time I look at the evening sun as it’s cascading down toward the horizon (or more precisely, as my location on Earth is rotating away from its light), I am amazed. This ball of hot plasma is not a mere 1 million miles away. Or 10 million. Or 50 million. It’s 93 million miles away from Earth. To put that into perspective, our planet’s circumference is almost 25,000 miles. To go an equivalent of 1 million miles into space, one would have to travel around Earth 40 times. To go an equivalent of 10 million miles into space, one would have to travel around Earth 400 times. To go an equivalent of 93 million miles, one would have to travel around Earth 3,720 times.

Yet, the sun still has the capacity to hurt my eyes at that distance just by peering into its hot gaze. What if we were just 5 million miles closer? Or 1 million? It’s devastatingly clear how impish we are, and how fragile, in comparison to everything else beyond our Goldilocks region.

That said, here’s NASA video of some magnetic loops coming off the Sun’s surface from Universe Today:

Book review: ‘Middlemarch’

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is party dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

***

Known as one of, if not the greatest British novels of the 19th century, “Middlemarch” by [[George Eliot]], which was the pen name of Mary Anne Evans, is one of those novels that, if you love literature or study it beyond college, you have to read almost on principle alone. I had not read much, if any, of Eliot prior to this year, but the idea to familiarize myself with “Middlemarch” came to me while listening to the audio book of “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” by [[Christopher Hitchens]]. One of the “new atheists,” as they are called these days, Hitchens used a different method in writing his book than some of his fellow nonbelieving authors by referencing or quoting various authors such as [[Joseph Conrad]], [[Salman Rushdie]], Eliot and others.

His reference to “Middlemarch” is helpful in understanding the novel itself. He opens “God Is Not Great” by mentioning one of his former teachers, Mrs. Watts, who, in her quaint way, attempted to teach young Hitchens and the other children in her class about nature and how God was at the center of it all:

However, there came a day when poor, dear Mrs. Watts overreached herself. Seeking ambitiously to fuse her two roles as nature instructor and Bible teacher, she said, “So you see, children, how powerful and generous God is. He has made all the trees and grass to be green, which is exactly the color that is most restful to our eyes. Imagine if instead, the vegetation was all purple, or orange, how awful that would be.”

The young Hitchens thought this was nonsense, of course:

I was frankly appalled by what she said. My little anklestrap sandals curled with embarrassment for her. At the age of nine I had not even a conception of the argument from design, or of Darwinianevolution as its rival, or of the relationship between photosynthesis and chlorophyll. The secrets of the genome were as hidden from me as they were, at that time, to everyone else. I had not then visited scenes of nature where almost everything was hideously indifferent or hostile to human life, if not life itself. I simply knew, almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong in just two sentences. The  eyes were adjusted to nature, and not the other way about.

Though terribly wrong on science, Mrs. Watts represented just the sort of character about which Eliot is speaking in the quote at the top of this post. As Hitchens said, she was a “good, sincere, simple woman, of stable and decent faith.” But nevertheless, like the central figure in “Middlemarch,” Dorothea, was mostly silenced by the engines of society and culture in the 19th century to living “faithfully a hidden life” and ultimately resting in “unvisited tombs.”

The novel’s subtitle, “A Study of Provincial Life,” suggests that Eliot, unlike some of her contemporaries, will leave the fancy drawing rooms of the aristocrats, kings and nobles and tell the stories of a few small town residents. And this town is Middlemarch.

Though the plot weaves through rural England, it is epic in nature, spanning more than 85 chapters and is divided into eight books of about 100 pages each (I would not recommend the “Barnes and Noble classics” edition of the work because it contains numerous typos). The main characters are Dorothea Brooke (later Dorothea Casaubon); Lydgate, a young and budding physician with notions of bringing some reforms to health care; Fred Vincy, who is a bit listless and peripatetic through most of the work; Rosamond, Lydgate’s wife; and Will Ladislaw, the nephew of Dorothea’s first husband who does not have much social or economic clout. Readers are also introduced to numerous minor figures.

While many novels in Eliot’s day opened with two people meeting and culminating in a marriage near the end, “Middlemarch” begins with marriage as its starting point and investigates the tensions and troubles often brought on by real family life. For instance, Lydgate, being a young practicing doctor in a small town, eventually gets into some debt and must find a way to come up with $1,000 pounds to pay it off. This financial burden causes tension between himself and Rosamond. Dorothea, in marrying the much older, Casaubon, initially thought she could learn from the studious old man and be an able and helpful mate in his studies. She subsequently learns, however, that his labor is futile and will come to nothing, and he was rather cold in his relations with her throughout their marriage. He eventually dies of heart failure, and Dorothea is left a very young widow until late in the novel.

The finale seemed rather dreary and ambiguous to me, and we are left a touch unsatisfied because, while the novel centers around failed or less-than-satisfying marriages, the two people who would have been a perfect match — I won’t say which two — are only friends throughout and a relationship never consummates. While that scenario would have created a happier ending, I personally favor the way Eliot chose to end the book because it shows that, just like life, we humans don’t always get storybook endings. Many situations in life are chaotic, nonsensical or cruel. Romeo and Juliet don’t live happily ever after. Most marriages, nay, most relationships, fail or grow stale. And this is where Eliot leaves us in Middlemarch.

Lydgate dies in his 50s, and he and Rosamond, while they remained married, had an up-and-down kind of relationship. And Dorothea, the heroin, becomes like Mrs. Watts. She eventually, and happily, marries Will Ladislaw, convincing him that she doesn’t care about his lack of money or social clout. Dorothea, an intelligent character with philanthropic ideas early in the novel, largely abandons her personal aspirations and lives the rest of her life in Will’s shadow after he takes a job in the public sphere working for political reform. This is semi-tragic to me because the reader recognizes the untapped potential in a female character like Dorothea, but Eliot, we can only suppose, attempted to create a realistic picture of 19th century small town life in England, not an idealistic one. I will echo something one of my friends noted: I’m not sure she did her gender any favors in that regard. Nevertheless, if “Middlemarch” had contained one strong, independent female, it would have been Dorothea, but even she, with all that potential, faithfully resigns herself to the hidden life.

[Rating: 3.5]