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.

How to distinguishing between Is and Ought when arguing with irrational people

One of the awesome philosophical concepts David Hume articulated was the Is-Ought Distinction (or the Is-Ought Problem). It’s very similar to the naturalistic fallacy and it tries to deal with how we can derive how individuals and societies ought to act from objective, verifiable facts. Can we proceed directly from what is to what ought to be? Hume didn’t think so.

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.
-A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)

Now in this context, Hume is criticizing those who try to derive the ‘ought’ from what someone believes is the ‘is’ of God. So the position he’s taking down is something like this: “Since God is X, we ought to do things that comply with X-ness.” Let’s say that’s the position of moral philosopher A. Then moral philosopher B comes around and says that A is wrong about what God is. B has a different idea of God with different focuses on different aspects of a God. And the moral/ethical philosophical discussion is framed around the question of What God is.

So Hume sees this and sees a badly neglected gap. Even if A or B are right about what God is, neither of them have justified that that observation leads to anything morally good. Why should a quality of a deity be something we want to emulate? How do we even know if that is good or not? Nobody seemed to be discussing that. Put this way, it’s very similar to the Euthyphro Dilemma:

“Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?”
-Euthyphro, Plato

Now you can extend the Is-Ought Problem beyond just the Is of God (which is kind of a waste of time for nonbelievers like me) when people try to derive policy from history or observations of nature. The problem becomes less of one in these instances because, unlike God, nature and history are about empirical facts which can be verified or falsified. You still have the gap between what Is and what Ought to be (a problem completely lost on some creationists), but at least the Is can be checked independently of subjective theistic assumptions about the supernatural.

Now you have someone like Glennifer Beck saying that because Congress printed official, government-approved Bibles in the early period of American history (that’s the Is part), we therefore ought to not worry so much about that silly old separation of church and state thing anymore.

A secularist who doesn’t know his history might be tempted to argue along similar lines as Hume above; i.e. that just because it was the case that the government approved official Bibles for use in schools, it does not follow that we ought to revive that practice. But someone who made that argument would be missing a much better point, which is that even the initial Is claim of Beck’s argument is just factually wrong.

That’s part of a video series by Chris Rodda, who’s a Senior Research Director for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. She’s been going after the factual errors and misrepresentations made on the nature of secularism and America by people like David Barton and Beck. They’re very effective in how they just deal with the actual history without getting caught up in how to solve Hume’s Is-Ought Problem.

See, someone can say that we ought to have, say a public education system that hands out Bibles and whatnot, and then I can say why I think that’s a bad idea. But then we’re just arguing for subjective positions on an Ought issue. But when Beck claims that we ought to imitate history and then proceeds to misrepresent it, Rodda’s corrections of those misrepresentations cut the argument down to nothing. Here’s her unfortunately HuffPo-y RSS feed, and here’s some other of her great counterpoints to pseudohistory:

Our Constitution is not based on the book of Deuteronomy

And the newest one just out today about Barton’s claims of Founders who went to “seminaries.”

Jews and Freemasons force Catholic priests to rape kids

I’ve really got to make a big caveat here because the original source I’m getting this from is in Italian. Since I don’t speak it, and haven’t even needed to speak Spanish since 2001, I’m at the mercy of Google Translate. So it’s possible that, like most things I say, all of this is completely wrong. The difference here is that it wouldn’t be entirely my own fault. So there.

There’s this retired bishop named Giacomo Babini who decided to speak out against all this hoopla over priests raping kids and whatnot. Babini is even more old-school than the standard Catholic kid-rape apologist, deviating from the “It’s all teh ghey’s fault” line in favor of a conspiracy theory defense about the Jews and the Freemasons:

Last week, retired Bishop Giacomo Babini of the Italian town of Grosseto told the Catholic Pontifex website that the Catholic pedophile scandal is being orchestrated by the “eternal enemies of Catholicism, namely the freemasons and the Jews, whose mutual entanglements are not always easy to see through… I think that it is primarily a Zionist attack, in view of its power and refinement. They do not want the church, they are its natural enemies. Deep down, historically speaking, the Jews are God-killers.”

Jews can kill gods? And that’s a matter of history? Really?

Oh, but wait – he’s not done yet:

“The Holocaust was a shame for all of humanity,” the good bishop told the world, “but now we have to look at it without rhetoric and with open eyes. Don’t believe that Hitler was merely crazy. The truth is that the Nazis’ criminal fury was provoked by the Jews’ economic embezzlement, by which they choked the German economy.”

Wow. Didn’t this start off being about kid-rape? How did it veer so quickly into conspiracy theories about Jews and Freemasons and Nazis in the 1930s? I wish I could just start rambling made up bullshit about history whenever I’m accused of a crime.

We Are Embezzling Your Donations For College Money

We Are Change is this group of 9/11 “truthers.” I’m not very inclined to say nice things about people with beliefs like that, but to their credit elements within this organization are calling bullshit on their leader, Luke Rudkowski of WAC-NY. It turns out that Luke was embezzling donations to the organization in order to pay for his tuition at Brooklyn College, which as the whistleblowers point out, “IS NOT WE ARE CHANGE BUSINESS!”

I will not argue the point that getting an education is not really the business of groups like this. In fact it’s pretty inconsistent with their teachings, since public schools are part of the big bad guvment, and they’re all out to get you and force you to believe in their lies by indoctrinating you, etc… Not to mention that public schools are supposed to teach critical thinking, among other things, and this is also incompatible with their beliefs for reasons which should be pretty obvious.

What’s kind of funny about this is that if the shoe were on the other foot, this is exactly the kind of thing that “truthers” would use to paint their picture of a 9/11 “inside job.” Since they don’t have evidence, they need to put little pieces of corruption, incompetence, and anomalies together in order to gradually compel people into adopting their view of What Really Happened.

Now just in order to piss of those people who get here by searching for that guy’s name, here is a picture of what really *did* happen. There are lots of eyewitnesses and lawn care engineers who will testify to this:

Pat Buchanan’s Nazi apologetics

One thing I should just make clear right away: The title of this post is not a hyperbole. I never much liked the Bush=Hitler thing I saw over the past five or six years of the previous administration, and the comparisons that come up now from the extreme right wing and the Lyndon LaRouche cult are just plain absurd. So I’m not just carelessly tossing around a phrase like “Nazi apologetics” with only superficial support.

There’s no need to take my word for it though. Check out his column on MSNBC.com which marks the 70th anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

Jamison Foser at Media Matters provides some context from Buchanan’s history of sympathy for the Nazis, as has Zachary Roth at Talking Points Memo.

Buchanan: "John Cleese started WWII"

I’ll have to quote a bit at length to get into the context of where Buchanan’s argument falls apart:

On Sept. 1, 1939, 70 years ago, the German Army crossed the Polish frontier. On Sept. 3, Britain declared war.

Six years later, 50 million Christians and Jews had perished. Britain was broken and bankrupt, Germany a smoldering ruin. Europe had served as the site of the most murderous combat known to man, and civilians had suffered worse horrors than the soldiers.

By May 1945, Red Army hordes occupied all the great capitals of Central Europe: Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Berlin. A hundred million Christians were under the heel of the most barbarous tyranny in history: the Bolshevik regime of the greatest terrorist of them all, Joseph Stalin.

What cause could justify such sacrifices? The German-Polish war had come out of a quarrel over a town the size of Ocean City, Md., in summer. Danzig, 95 percent German, had been severed from Germany at Versailles in violation of Woodrow Wilson’s principle of self-determination. Even British leaders thought Danzig should be returned.

It might be almost understandable for a columnist to take the German invasion of Poland as merely a result of “a quarrel over a town the size of Ocean City, Md. in summer” as the events were actually unfolding 70 years ago. But now we have the benefit of hindsight, as historians have for over half a century now. We have the Nazi internal records and transcripts of Hitler’s speeches and lots of other lines of evidence which converge on an explanation for the Nazi invasion of Poland being the first step of a psychopath’s strategy to conquer the world. I can’t believe something like that even needs to be pointed out anymore. Then Buchanan goes on to claim that the Holocaust was really all the Allies’ fault. What a douchebag.