I’m leading off with this because it’s so cool: Researchers have found a whole crap-ton of liquid water on Mars. Loren Grush at The Verge reports:
It’s possible this aquifer stays a liquid all year round, which is good news for habitability “It constitutes the closest thing to a habitat we’ve found on Mars,” says [lead researcher Roberto] Orosei. “It’s the only known place on Mars where a terrestrial microorganism, at least the tough ones, could possibly survive. Though we don’t know for sure.”
A federal court tells the Chino Valley Unified School District board of education to cut it out with opening meetings with Christian prayers. AP reports:
The 9th Circuit panel said some faiths were not represented on a list the board used to select the religious leader for the prayer. Agnostics and atheists were also not acknowledged, the court said.
“Instead, the prayers frequently advanced religion in general and Christianity in particular,” judges M. Margaret McKeown, Kim McLane Wardlaw and Wiley Y. Daniel said.
A new paper in the journal Secularism & Nonreligion by Kenan Sevinç, Thomas J. Coleman III, and Ralph W. Hood Jr. explores how concepts relating to nonbelief can significantly differ between Christian and Muslim cultures.
In his Ask the Atheist column, Jim Underdown answers the question we’ve all been asking ourselves, but have been afraid to say out loud: Is Jim a god??? He says:
What kind of crappy, low-rent god would live in this body?
Jim. Jim, Jim, Jim. Have you learned nothing from the mistakes of Ray Stantz?
Kenny Biddle looks into the weirdly popular “ghost crash” videos, you know, when a car crashes into an invisible car, because that’s obviously a thing that happens.
In Indonesia, Martinus Gulo, a Christian, allegedly said some unkind things about the Prophet Muhammad on Facebook. So of course he must be imprisoned and fined. AFP reports:
“Finding the defendant guilty of misusing information by offending believers through his Facebook account, I sentence him to four years,” said presiding judge Saidin Bagariang. Gulo was convicted under Indonesia’s electronic information and transactions law, which makes it a crime to spread “hatred or animosity” against an individual or group based on their race or religion.
How much would you pay for a Bible that had been on the Moon? Bidding on Edgar Mitchell’s teeny-tiny Bible (“Its print is so small that one needs a microscope to read it”) starts at $50,000.
In a big ol’ New York Times feature about Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, we learn that the company now has a fact-checker. That’s like David Brooks hiring a moral superiority checker.
In another big ol’ feature, NYT profiles Baba Ramdev, the yogi (and billionaire) who is sort of the Indian-Hindu equivalent to Billy Graham, and key to Narendra Modi’s rise. Robert F. Worth writes:
Ramdev is the perfect messenger for a rising middle class that is hungry for religious assertion and fed up with the socialist, rationalist legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first post-independence leader.
KLAS in Las Vegas reports on the efforts to keep the government’s study of UFOs going, talking to former senator Harry Reid and Luis Elizondo, who was part of the original program. He says:
It’s about changing the paradigm in which our government can finally take this issue seriously without worrying about their political survival, right, allowing Congress to have a conversation in open or closed session saying, all right guys, gals, what do we do about this?
Amanda Kooser at CNET brings ghost-hunters into her house to see if it’s haunted and OMG YOU GUYS IT TOTALLY IS CUZ THERE WAS A BLIP ON A VIDEO. I mean what are the chances?!?!?!
Bishop Ambrosios of Kalavryta of the Greek Orthodox Church wants his people to know that wildfires that have wrought death and destruction in Greece are to be blamed on the atheism of the Prime Minister. Oh, and of course the gays and nakedness and whatnot. But don’t worry, he’s just expressing “his personal opinion.”
Oh hey, more revelations from Christianity: Matthew Cserhati in the San Antonio Express-News informs us that science is actually from the Bible:
Science has its origin within the Christian church, with the command from God to “be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Genesis 1:28). In order to subdue nature, one must understand it — hence the biblical injunction to pursue science.
WOW. I mean, like, wow.
Jamie Jensen and Seth Bybee discuss their study on why people (like Mr. Cserhati) reject evolution:
There is not a deficit in an underlying ability to reason that causes religious people to reject evolution. Our data clearly shows that individuals can be highly adept at scientific reasoning and still reject evolution (most likely on religious grounds). Our data also shows that one can be severely lacking in scientific reasoning ability and still accept evolution. It appears from this study that worldview (or religion), not intelligence, is the main driver of this decision.
Quote of the Day
Some more Seneca for you, from his letters to Lucilius, on my favorite/least-favorite topic, death:
For every day a little of our life is taken from us; even when we are growing, our life is on the wane. We lose our childhood, then our boyhood, and then our youth. Counting even yesterday, all past time is lost time; the very day which we are now spending is shared between ourselves and death. It is not the last drop that empties the water-clock, but all that which previously has flowed out; similarly, the final hour when we cease to exist does not of itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death-process. We reach death at that moment, but we have been a long time on the way.
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