Some Shroud presentation notes

Earlier this week I had a pretty long post on The BEAST about a Shroud of Turin presentation I attended. Some of the details didn’t really fit with how I wanted to write the story, so I thought I’d add them here. This isn’t an admission of hiding facts which would have contradicted what I had to say about Russ Breault’s presentation. These are neutral omissions that just would have made the article too sprawling and rambling. Still they’re kind of interesting and I thought I should get them down somewhere and this is kind of the place for me for that sort of thing. So here we go:

The church this was held at had two flags on either side of its altar. One was a US flag and the other was a “Christian flag.” Now these are used by lots of Christian organizations, but they’re all pretty creepy. Here is is outside of the HQ of Focus on the Family:

And here it is at a Ku Klux Klan HQ:

There were ushers, but they didn’t… erm.. ush anyone. They just stood by the exits. One man was going to the bathroom towards the end of the event and an usher approached him and asked if he was leaving. I don’t know why, but it seemed ominous. Maybe that’s just my own paranoia though.

If Joe Nickell were there, he didn’t ask a question afterwards. I saw one person raising his hand after the Q&A ended, but I kind of doubt that was him since he’d have known to try to get his question out there quickly. Breault mentioned beforehand that his Q&A would have to be brief.

The pastor of the church’s name is Andrew Abraham. He shook my hand and told me God blessed me. He didn’t seem like an asshole.

Breault said that we were living in an age of skepticism. People seem to just lap that stuff up. I wish as many people showed up at skeptics’ conventions as they do to church on Sundays.

At one point Breault brought up a slide of the Pope holding that incense thing they use before Mass. Like a teacher in a classroom he said something like “And this represents… what?” and there was this really awkward pause because this is at a Protestant church and they wouldn’t be expected to know these things, apparently. A few people did and spoke up eventually.

One of Breault’s defenses against the Carbon-dating of the Shroud was that the scientists took a sample of it at a point where it had been handled. This is illustrated in the pic I have on The BEAST article where some Bishops are holding it. Breault used similar images to make this point. Then he made a few jokes about how scientists are stupid for choosing that sample. But during the Q&A it came to light that the scientists were following the Church’s protocol, since they owned the thing after all. Breault admitted this, therefore admitting that he was knowingly deceiving the audience by making it seem like this “error” – at least it was an error as he saw it – was the fault of the scientists and not the Church. I would speculate that the Church wanted to sample a part of the shroud which could be questionable so that they could always fall back on an excuse like the one Breault used to make it seem like it is at worst, still a mystery.

There were around 150 people there. Most of the pews were full. There were very few people under 40. I only saw one couple with children. I sat in the back corner in a ‘reserved’ section, but nobody seemed to care. They had water but nobody took any. It took place at 107 Smith Street in Tonawanda, NY, which is Immanuel Lutheran Church.

Breault was selling DVDs. He mentioned them once at the end, but didn’t cite them during the talk which would have been really annoying.

OK, that’s about it. Hopefully I’ll update this blog more often, but then again I always say that.

Josh’s Blasphemy Day playlist

‘5 Religious Organizations’ Updates

Last winter I wrote an article about five religious organizations you should hate. And since The BEAST is the one and only True News Source (peace ‘n blessings be upon Us), you may have missed some new developments for those groups. So here they are! But (spoiler alert) you should know that none of these updates should make any decent person stop hating them.

LOL WARREN JEFFS

Jeffs, seen here with one of his “child brides.”

In the section on the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), I referred to the “prophet” Warren Jeffs’s 10 years-to-life sentence for being an accomplice to rape. That sentence has since been overturned by the Utah Supreme Court on the grounds that the jury were given faulty instructions.

So his conviction was overturned on a technicality. That’s the bad news. The good news for those of us in the popular anti-child-fucking demographic is that there are plenty of other child-rape charges against Jeffs to go through, and the courts in Texas are dealing with that as I’m writing this. This past week he was found guilty on two charges of sexual assault against 12 and 15 year old girls. The sentencing phase is curently underway.

This most recent trial contained 100% of the FDA’s recommended annual allowance of WTF. In classic megalomaniac-on-trial fashion, Jeffs first fired his expensive, high-powered attorneys and opted to represent himself with the help of “God’s word.” Then he started interrupting the judge and threatening the court with “sickness and death” unless they would “cease this prosecution against my pure and holy way.” Jeffs claimed it wasn’t him saying this though. It was all just a message from Jesus, presumably so he wouldn’t have to take any responsibility for it.

Later the court heard audio clips of Jeffs explaining to a 14 year old girl how best to be raped by him, and then another audio file of the actual rape itself. Here is one of the files used in court where Jeffs explains the system of arranged “marriage” and child rape to a young girl. Jeffs never learned from Nixon to stop recording audio when you’re doing incredibly evil, illegal shit.

The prosecution also showed pictures of the beds Jeffs allegedly used to rape kids and had a former FLDS member testify on the system of arranged marriages within the cult. The witness testifying was actually one of Jeffs’s step-mothers (Warren’s father, Rulon, also held the same position in the church before he died in 2002). FLDS is very meticulous on book-keeping because they want to have records which match the records kept in heaven. The court gave Jeffs 30 minutes for a closing statement. He used all of it, mostly just to stand there in silence, but he reportedly said, “I am peace” at one time.

It is a good thing he reminded the court that he’s peace because he was immediately afterwards found not guilty. No, just kidding, he was found guilty on 2 counts of sexual assault. The sentencing phase is now underway, and Jeffs faces up to life in prison. [UPDATE: He got life in prison, LOL]

Lord’s Resistance Amy

Thomas Kwoyelo, a former senior commander of the Lord’s Resistance Army, is on trial in Gulu, which is in northern Uganda. He has 65 charges against him which apparently took almost two hours to read out. They’re all from the deplorable crimes committed by the LRA, which I wrote about in the original article.

One way in which Kwoyelo’s trial has been awesome came from when the convoy dropped him off for his trial. There was also a marching band (via) there. If only Warren Jeffs had thought to bring along the FLDS marching band.

Kwoyelo is the first defendant out of hopefully many others in a move by the Ugandan government to bring the LRA to justice. Kwoyelo had applied for amnesty under the controversial Ugandan Amnesty Act, but his application is still pending. There is apparently a lot of double-standards in how the Ugandan government has been prosecuting, or trying to prosecute, LRA members and how their judicial proceedings have related to international law and the International Criminal Court.

Aside from the amnesty controversy, Kwoyelo’s attorneys plan their defense to be that charges which are breaches of the Geneva Convention have not been formally filed, and that the proseuction had not yet fully disclosed their files on Kwoyelo – at least, not at the time of the Human Rights Watch report cited above. Both of these issues may have been resolved by now, but I can’t find any more recent update since the second hearing, which was supposed to be July 25.

The UN Security Council has released a statement harshly condemning the LRA’s violence across not only in Uganda, but also in the Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan. This is probably a positive development because the Ugandan government has a credibility problem in dealing with the LRA. They’ve granted amnesty to combatants who were higher in rank than Kwoyelo. Some spectators of the trial are suspicious of the government’s motives. They think that the trial is a PR move for the government to show off the efficacy of its new International Crimes Division. Even one mutilated LRA victim interviewed by a reporter said that the government should be concentrating on helping the war-torn regions of northern Uganda and that the trial will not do that.

The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice

“We wear the table cloths from Italian restaurants on our fucking heads.”

If you’ve made it this far, you might have expected that these updates are all going to be uplifting stories of assholes being brought to justice. Well, Saudi Arabia. That’s probably all I’ve got to say about those expectations.

The Saudi Arabian government’s reaction to the Arab Spring uprisings thruoghout the Middle East and beyond have been pretty much exactly what you’d expect. Back in March when it looked like Saudi Arabia might be the next country to really shake things up politically, the foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said that his family would “cut off any finger raised” against them. There were some protests afterwards, and things appear to have fizzled out since. So much for the hope of getting rid of one of the worst governments on the planet.

And my friends in the Religious Police have been adopting a similar ‘fuck you’ attitude towards the population it’s supposed to serve and protect. Only in their case, most of what they get involved in has this element of total goofiness in it because they’re so obsessed with these absurd superstitions.

One thing that’s awesome about the Religious Police is that they have an Anti-Witchcraft Unit. Wait, no, not awesome, I meant “pitiful and sad.” Last month the Anti-Witchcraft Unit received word that someone had found a decapitated wolf’s head wrapped up in women’s lingerie . If you’re a normal person, you might hear about that and think it’s the inevitable product of pent-up psycho-sexual frustration resulting from such a stifling and oppressive society. Sure, whoever did it is sick and needs help, but when you set up a society like Saudi Arabia, you’re kind of asking for a higher proportion of people who are not quite right in the head.

You’ll be surprised to learn that that is not at all how the Religious Police saw the matter! They immediately identified it as some sort of witchcraft, kind of like how they do with everything that’s not Wahhabi. Would they be able to break the spell? It turns out they did! Which should be pretty easy when the whole thing’s made up to begin with.

Speaking of women’s lingerie, there is also some conflict between the Kingdom and their Religious Police. The Kingdom is replacing all of the male salesmen at lingerie shops with women in order to reduce female unemployment, and the Religious Police and their advocates are pretty upset about that. They would like the lingerie shops to set up dividers to make sure men buying lingerie for one or several of their wives aren’t intermingling with the women working there.

And lastly, in surprisingly non-lingerie related Saudi news, a man going on a picnic with some friends was possessed by ghosts! At least, that’s what his friends said. And since they said so, that proves it’s true, so the Religious Police read the Koran at him and burned some incense. Somehow, this forced the ghost to leave the man’s body via his hand.

That is all for now.

What if everyone forgot about the National Day of Prayer, like almost everyone does every year?

They don’t really answer that question in this commercial, but the vague response seems to be this: Terrible things would happen, that’s what! OMG OMG WTF Be afraid!

This idea of the Christian God being like an abusive stepdad who threatens to kill his family if they don’t buy him a nice tie for Father’s Day definitely has its biblical basis. Some of the more modern Christians try to frame this as if God’s usually protecting us, and that when horrible things happen that’s just the physical world attacking us for being sinful and it happens as a result of God’s inaction. But then there’s Isaiah 45:7:

I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.

I still don’t get why people who believe in gods never seem to consider the possibility that God’s as petulant and childish as he appears to be in the Bible. If a real person made these kinds of threats, they’d probably be locked away. But when it’s an imaginary deity, suddenly they deserve worship. It makes no sense at all.

That last sentence was brought to you by Captain Obvious.

Ken Ham will have a completely normal replica of Solomon’s Temple not like that weird one you have

Like I said before, I really feel sorry for whoever works at the People For the American Way whose job it is to watch and listen to all those hours and hours of Christian broadcasting to try to find the oasis of awesomeness in the middle of the desert of praisin’ the loard.

This time we’ve got Mark Looy on a Christian television show. Looy’s a cofounder of Answers in Genesis, who built the Creationist “Museum” in Petersburg, KY.  They’re also building a replica of Noah’s Ark, down to the last cubit and “kind,” with taxpayer funding. The host of the show asked Looy what’s next, and he said they were thinking of re-creating Solomon’s Temple. He added:

“but it’s not going to be some kind of secular temple where all sorts of weird religious ceremonies are held.”

That word, secular, I don’t think it means what Looy thinks it means. But if that’s not where they plan to hold their weird religious ceremonies, then where will Answers in Genesis have their weird religious ceremonies? Having been there, I’d have to say that just walking through the Creationist “Museum” seemed a lot like a weird religious ceremony.

But that’s not all! They also plan on building a replica of the Tower of Babel. This on its own is awesome if you know the story of it, but if you don’t, here it is: Back in the day, people wanted to make their own stairway to heaven, so they decided to build a huge tower. It was basically the space elevator of the Bronze Age. This made God real mad because as you know if you’ve read the Old Testament, God has serious insecurity issues and doesn’t want to share his position with anybody. So he fucked with everybody’s minds and made them all speak different languages. Unable to communicate, they were not able to finish building the tower.

If that’s too crass of a way to put it for you, I’ll put the King James version of the story here:

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.
And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

The lesson I derive from this story as a secular humanist is that we all ought to start learning as many languages as we can. That way we re-build this thing and send a few guys with names like Igor the Unreasonable up the elevator in the Babel Tower (which is what it would be called nowadays) up to heaven so they can teach this God character a lesson he won’t soon forget. We have to show this God person he can’t keep pushing us around with earthquakes and tsunamis and stuff like that.

But as Christians, the lesson the AIG people should learn is that we shouldn’t want anything like a Tower of Babel built ever again because it would offend God. We should be fighting each other so we don’t threaten God’s power. There’s another problem for God’s omnipotence, but it’s not really dealt with very well in the Bible. And Answers in Genesis definitely won’t be exploring that question very deeply in any of their new theme park rides.

Updates!

There are a few updates on groups from my 5 Religious Organizations You Should Hate article.

Appolonia Mathia, a reporter who covered the massacres of the Lord’s Resistance Army, died in a motorcycle accident.  She was with her son at the time of the accident and he is apparently still in a coma.

And in slightly more upbeat news, a relative by marriage of Bal Thackeray and fellow member of the Sri Ram Sena is huffing and puffing over a model’s proposal to appear naked for the Indian cricket team if they won the Cricket World Cup against Pakistan.

“We are totally against such vulgarity and obscenity,” fumes Shalini Thackeray of the right wing Maharashtra Navnirman Sena. Shiv Sena says it will handle things ‘their way’ if the government doesn’t step in to stop such gimmicks.

Poonam Pandey, the model in question, responds:

“I don’t care if people have a problem. I am one of the most downloaded models online. I don’t need to do this for publicity. I am doing what I want to do.”

And an update from that update is that India did win the Cricket World Cup. Pandey is calling for patience and assures everyone that she intends to fulfill her promise.

OK, and this is the last one. Remember when the former first lady of Japan did all that crazytalk about eating the Sun and traveling to other planets on flying saucers? Well a Christian Dominionist named C Peter Wagner is saying that that kind of thing is the reason for the Sendai earthquake. This guy is very upset with what he believes is a pagan stronghold on Japan, which prevents God’s love from stopping tectonic plates from killing lots of people. Specifically, he thinks that the Japanese head of state fucks a Sun Goddess. Literally.

So this not the kind of Christian who thinks that witchcraft, casting spells, demons, and that sort of thing are bad because they aren’t real and merely distract attention from the theology he happens to prefer. He really thinks all that stuff has real, empirical effects on the physical world. Which I would think makes him a lot closer to a pagan or demon worshipper than the mostly secular people he’s projecting that belief onto.

Repent Amarillo guy will run for mayor of some town

Hey, remember those distinguished gentlemen from Amarillo, Texas who like to execute Santa Claus in effigy and harass patrons of swingers’ clubs? Their leader is running for mayor of Amarillo. Here is a video of him in what looks like a church, announcing his candidacy:

At the 1:47 mark, you can hear him say this (emphasis mine, factual and grammatical errors his):

“It is time that Christians rise up and start taking responsibility of their civic duties seriously and start running for office.”

Yes, the time has come for Christians to start running for office. They must start doing this. For too long, only non-Christians have been running for office.

He prefaces all this with a long reading from Romans 13, which I initially thought was the one the KKK likes so much. But after checking back to where I heard that, it turns out it was actually the 12th chapter of Romans. So it’s totally different! Oh, except he has the exact same “Christian flag” as the “Grand Wizard” of the Klan in the Safran video.

KKK Grand Wizard Chris Johnson showing off their Christian flag

David Grisham of Repent Amarillo announcing his mayoral candidacy

I don’t think this means Grisham is a secret Klansman, or even that he’s necessarily racist. The Christian flag seems more like a dog whistle than the established flag of any particular Christian extremist organization. If you go to the Focus on the Family HQ in Colorado Springs, you will see it there also:

According to Wikipedia, it was first designed in early 20th century Brooklyn, probably by Satanic hipsters trying to be ironic. So again, Grisham’s not necessarily a Klansman just because he and the KKK share a flag, just like he’s probably not a communist just because he seems to strongly imply in his campaign video that he’s going to try to use government power to shut down what I’m sure is Amarillo’s totally happening bar scene. But still, very creepy, especially if he ends up winning.

Violence at an Indonesian blasphemy trial

This article from the Jakarta Post is very short and concise, but it has an M Night Shayamalan-ish twist. Here’s the lede:

Violence broke out on Tuesday at a blasphemy trial in Temanggung, Central Java, immediately after prosecutors read out a five-year prison sentence demand for defendant Antonius Richmond Bawengan.

I was kind of hoping that this would mean the people watching the trial started attacking the prosecutors for suggesting such an absurd sentence for this “crime.” But here’s the twist:

Trial spectators suddenly attacked the defendant, prosecutors and judges, while a group of people outside the courtroom broke windows and set parked cars on fire, kompas.com reported Tuesday.

The fact that they attacked everyone instead of just one or the other side leads me to believe that they probably thought that five years in prison was too lenient of a sentence. Which is just so crazy that it makes me want to lie down for a while to let this headache pass.

Of course, it could just as easily be that the spectators weren’t a uniform group all sharing the same opinion. It was probably just a heated environment, which tends to happen when the government panders to idiots by keeping and enforcing ridiculous laws.

Uganda facepalm

Last Friday, Rachel Maddow had a segment on the opposition to all the anti-gay sentiment in Uganda, centering around the recent murder of gay rights activist David Kato. A bishop there spoke at his funeral, and Maddow played an excerpt of the video. Here is part of the transcript:

I’m not lgbt but I know people that are lgbt and I respect them for what they are and I believe they are going to heaven. They are going to heaven. If they don’t believe, that’s another matter about you if you are a believer, don’t be discouraged.

Even the more liberal, ecumenical religious leaders who lean more towards universalism than their fundamentalist counterparts in Uganda can’t seem to help bashing non-believers. They can respect the LGBT community for what they are, but they can’t respect the freethought community for what they are.

James Dobson wants guys to be more “aggressive” with his daughter

Why hello there, zombie-lady.

Richard Land is this radio talk show guy who went and had James Dobson of Focus on the Family on. Some poor intern at People For the American Way listens to all of these shows and excerpts the really funny parts. Just recently, they found this:

Land: You know, it’s true because boys have learned – first of all, they’re not encouraged to be aggressive; they’re encouraged to be passive and be perpetual boys – and so they’ve learned, in a culture that is training women to be sexually aggressive, to just stand and wait.
It’s why so many of our young people aren’t getting married – I know girls like this, women like this in the twenties and thirties who desperately want to get married.
Dobson: I have one of them. I have a daughter who is the catch of the century – I mean she is a wonderful, beautiful girl and she loves people, she loves the Lord and there are no guys out there.
I mean there are very few that are not tainted by the sitcom kind of attitude toward men where they’re just fools …
Land: They’re adolescents. They’re middle-aged adolescents. I have a daughter as well who would very much like to be married.

OK, I get the hint! I will aggressively date both of your daughters! Finding James Dobson’s daughter’s picture (above) was easy, but I have to say that maybe the fact that I found it at a website called LadiesEncounter.com has something to do with the fact that she’s not married. Her name is Danae, and here is a short description of the lecture or whatever she gave for that group:

Cups are made of fine china, stoneware, ceramics, plastic or paper…it’s what’s inside them that counts.  Danae Dobson, Christian author and speaker, spoke about what spills out of our cups in her lesson “Don’t Bump My Cup.”  She revealed how situations from receiving a harsh word to a crisis reveal what is inside of a person.

She sounds very fascinating! I would love to spend an evening with her discussing how we are all just like little cups. Awesome!

Anyway, I learned that Land was referring to one of his two daughters, and I don’t know which one it was and I’m not even sure if the people with the corresponding names are his daughters, so I’ll just lay off them, I guess. Even I’m not that mean.

Killing dogs for God in South Carolina

So in South Carolina, this kid brought his devil-worshipping dog to his aunt’s house, where she then did the responsible thing and made sure it couldn’t harm any children. At least that’s one way of putting it.

Another way of putting it would be that some crazy lady tortured and killed her nephew’s dog because it chewed on her Bible. From CBS:

A Spartanburg County woman has been charged with felony animal cruelty, accused of hanging her nephew’s pit bull with an electrical cord and burning its body after the dog chewed on her Bible, authorities said Monday.
When questioned by police and animal control officers, Miriam Smith told them the female dog named “Diamond” was a “devil dog” and she feared it might harm neighborhood children…

In case you were wondering, the article does have a picture of what a chewed up Bible might look like. And you should know that this is not the actress Miriam Smith who appeared in films like Capote and television shows like The X Files. I’m sure she would never do such a thing.

But this Miriam Smith apparently would and did. She called the pet a “devil dog.” I would bet that she used “devil” as an adjective a lot. And the problem is that nobody ever questioned her on it. She’d make some offhand comment about how this dog or that cat or the palmetto tree over there is possessed by the devil, and nobody would say something like,”Hey, what the hell are you talking about? You don’t seriously believe in demon possessions, do you?” Or, if they did, she just shrugged them off as just another demonic possession to be hanged and burned later.

But just maybe if enough people did respond that way instead of “respecting her beliefs” and saying nothing, as if it’s normal to believe in devils and demons in 2011 (and yes I do see the irony in referring to a Jesus-based dating system), then maybe Miriam Smith would’ve felt just a little bit less comfortable with the idea that her beliefs were acceptable, and tragedies like these could be avoided.

Nobody who reads this should be allowed to vote

Let’s all listen to this nice young man explain why only “virtuous” people should be allowed to vote, if we’re even going to bother with that old voting thing anymore. If we keep letting just anybody vote, we’re all going to die of cancer. Or something.

5 Religious Organizations You Should Hate

It’s a list. You love lists.

A common response to criticisms of religion is that its adherents can sometimes do good things, even if it’s for irrational reasons. That’s fair enough, but at the same time it’s useful to remember that while some good can be mixed in with the bad, sometimes religions create institutions of pure evil. Here are a few of them:

Pakistani politician assassinated by his own bodyguard over blasphemy

Salman Taseer was the governor of Pakistan’s most populous state from 2008 until he was shot and killed today. The main suspect is Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, an elite security guard who police say was angry at Taseer over his opposition to Pakistan’s anti-blasphemy legislation. Here is the law in question from Pakistan’s criminal code:

Whoever, with the deliberate intention of wounding the religious feelings of any person, utters any word or makes any sound in the hearing of that person or makes any gesture in the sight of that person or places any object in the sight of that person, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to one year, or with fine, or with both.
-§ 298

§ 298 then elaborates into some of the details, and there’s also more in § 295. The punishments vary from a fine up to death. It’s strange that there’s such a wide range since none of the specifics seem like they should be crimes at all: drawing Mohammed or defaming him, proselytizing for the wrong version of Islam, defiling the Qu’ran, stuff like that.

The death penalty associated with blasphemy in Pakistan has never actually been carried out. So when ignorant people like Qadri get worked up over efforts to reform these kinds of backwoods laws, they’re not necessarily looking for the government to actually execute people accused blasphemers because, after all, they never did. What they get out of it is a society where vigilantism and witch hunts are within social norms. You won’t automatically attract ridicule by making an offhand comment about how the Ahmadiyya should be persecuted because the law and the government are on your side, after all. But if they’re not, then it’s just that much more difficult to popularize an intolerant point of view.

Jesus gets an IQ test

The Annals of Improbable Research (the people who do the Ig Nobel Awards) were apparently browsing the Angelfire archives and stumbled across this guy who has calculated Jesus’ IQ, and it’s 300! Or maybe 450. It’s somewhere between those two, and this Bob person gives his calculations a little more wiggle room by qualifying them as “within this author’s ability to reasonably measure.”

And it’s a good thing Bob made sure he limited his Jesus IQ test to what’s within reason. You wouldn’t want irresponsible people to measure Jesus’ IQ in an unreasonable way. Sure, maybe there’s no evidence Jesus even knew how to read or write and maybe all of the main historical data on Jesus was second or third hand hearsay written by mostly anonymous sources who use a lot of mythical elements in their contradicting accounts of Jesus, but it’s important to stay within the bounds of reason, for example by claiming he had an IQ of around 400.