It’s Super Tuesday! I’m voting for Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers, but I’m hoping I get to vote for Ms. Marvel/Kamala Khan once she’s old enough. But seriously, I can’t wait to be in an enclosed public space today filled with hundreds of people. Cough-cough.

Speaking of cough-cough, the Times looks at how places of worship are dealing with the coronavirus:

Instead of reaching across the pews to shake hands, they greeted each other with gentle bows. … [Religious leaders] have asked congregants to change some familiar practices: Please stop holding the hand of the person closest to you when it is time to recite the Lord’s Prayer in church. When you walk into synagogue and greet your friends, don’t do it with a hug or kiss on the cheek. Definitely don’t shake hands.

One synagogue tells its members, “At this time, we recommend that an ‘elbow bump’ may be a more appropriate way of offering a warm welcome while also staying healthy.”

The President of the United States thought that the flu vaccine could maybe stop the coronavirus and had to be corrected on live TV. He also seemed to think that vaccines “make you better,” rather than do, you know, what vaccines actually do.

Turns out you can get the coronavirus by being within six feet of someone. Time for me to make millions with my amazing new product, the ten-foot pole™.

What could have really set me up for life would have been to jump on the astrology app bandwagon. The ten biggest astrology apps made $40 million in 2019. I guess they knew that would happen, which just goes to show.

This is from last week, but I just saw it: Timothy Carney at the Washington Examiner looks at Bernie Sanders’ appeal to the Democratic Party’s nonreligious voters:

The socialist from Vermont, who promises a revolution right here on Earth, is the candidate of atheists, agnostics, and the unaffiliated. That’s a young, white demographic. …

… When Morning Consult polled primary voters in 2019, Sanders’s strongest group was atheists (30% backing Sanders), followed by agnostics and then those who declared their religion as “nothing in particular.” His 30% of the atheist vote has probably grown since Kamala Harris dropped out and Elizabeth Warren dropped in the polls. … Put another way: Sanders’s revolution is a worldly one.

Yesterday, Rich Lowry at the New York Post also focused on Sanders and godlessness (note it’s the conservative outlets that are particularly fixated on this):

Asked by Jimmy Kimmel whether he believes in God, he said, “I am what I am. And what I believe in, and what my spirituality is about, is that we’re all in this together.”

Functionally, this means his religion is indistinguishable from the vision of solidarity undergirding his socialist politics. …

… The nonreligious are Bernie’s base. … There is no rule that occupants of the White House have to be believers, or Thomas Jefferson never would have been president.

Daniel Schultz at Religion Dispatches explores how religious affiliation might affect the presidential race, including religious disaffiliation. Some of it is surprising. For example, look at Arizona:

Like Florida, Arizona has a high percentage of religiously unaffiliated citizens: nearly half say they belong to no faith, or are “nothing in particular.” Combined with a low approval among Catholics (36%), this leaves an opening for Democrats. If they’re smart, Democratic organizers will spend a lot of time organizing Latino Catholics and reminding the unaffiliated of Trump’s love for the authoritarian former Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Harvard Law Professor Adrian C. Vermeule apparently said last year that it makes sense to bar atheists from public office because they “can’t be trusted to keep an oath.” In the Harvard Crimson, UT Austin law professor Charles M. Silver unloads:

If Vermeule had said the same thing about laws in Southern states depriving African Americans of the right to hold public office and to serve on juries, the uproar would have been deafening. Harvard students would have overrun the Law School and demanded his resignation. Had he targeted Muslims, gay individuals, or Hispanic immigrants, the reaction would have been the same. But even at a university whose students detest bigotry and discrimination, a faculty member who accuses atheists of immorality bears no greater risk of being condemned than one who speaks out against, say, abusive husbands and neglectful parents. …

… Vermeule’s attack on atheists also implies that religious individuals can be trusted to uphold oaths. […] Republican officeholders typically wear their religious affiliations on their sleeves. Yet, instead of upholding the Constitution and judging President Donald Trump’s culpability objectively, as their oaths required, they frustrated the investigation, rigged the process in his favor, and ignored the evidence entirely. When push came to shove, their religious beliefs gave them no moral courage. The only exception was Senator Mitt Romney, who was pummeled by Trump and Fox News for allowing his religious convictions to influence his vote. Oh, the irony.

At The Tennessean, retired minister Buzz Thomas argues for nuance in the “religious liberty/right-to-discriminate” debate over things like the Tennessee adoption agency that wants to be able to discriminate because that’s what Jesus would want. Well, he calls it nuance, but he’s sort of both-sides-ing. I call it return to the status quo:

Tennesseans should not be forced to choose between religious liberty and civil rights. We deserve both.

Faith-based adoption agencies should be free to place children with families that share their religious beliefs. That includes not being forced to place children with families they believe are living a “sinful lifestyle.” But these agencies should not be permitted to force all Tennesseans to pay for these discriminatory practices. The Supreme Court has held that same-sex families are real families and entitled to the same rights and privileges as the rest of us. Unless that includes the right to raise children, it is a hollow privilege indeed.

The governor should be commended for allowing faith-based adoption agencies to protect the faith that gave birth to them. But if they wish to discriminate against same-sex couples, they should do it on their own debit card.

Hiroko Tabuchi at the New York Times exposes the efforts of Trump Interior Department appointee Indur M. Goklany to change the way the agency talks about climate science. Or, rather, doesn’t:

The wording, known internally as the “Goks uncertainty language” based on Mr. Goklany’s nickname, inaccurately claims that there is a lack of consensus among scientists that the earth is warming. In Interior Department emails to scientists, Mr. Goklany pushed misleading interpretations of climate science, saying it “may be overestimating the rate of global warming, for whatever reason;” climate modeling has largely predicted global warming accurately. The final language states inaccurately that some studies have found the earth to be warming, while others have not.

He also instructed department scientists to add that rising carbon dioxide — the main force driving global warming — is beneficial because it “may increase plant water use efficiency” and “lengthen the agricultural growing season.” Both assertions misrepresent the scientific consensus that, overall, climate change will result in severe disruptions to global agriculture and significant reductions in crop yields.

Florida Politics reports on the push for legislation to require kids to have a “moment of silence” in schools:

Senate Democratic Leader Audrey Gibson questioned the role of the teacher to “encourage” moments of silence. [Bill sponsor Sen. Dennis] Baxley defended the provision noting it was just a way to “protect the teacher from separation of church and state issues.”

Yeah, church-state separation is not something to need to protect people from.

Luke Douglas of the Secular Coalition for Arizona writes in the Arizona Capitol Times makes the case against prayer at legislative sessions:

Even when done constitutionally, public prayer often tends to polarize. It places our public policy makers in the position of arbitrating whose faith can be heard and whose cannot. …

… Either way, the sheer controversy that surrounds public prayer and the petty theatrics it seems to attract testify to the fact that Arizona can do better. Arizona’s humanists and atheists will show up and speak up for equal representation as long as our government opens official meetings with prayer, but we could all get along a lot better if we cut out the prayer and got down to business instead.

The Revealer does a special issue focused on religion and sexual abuse outside of the Catholic Church, with, for example, this piece on the weirdness around guru-disciple relationships.

In an excerpt from her book They Are Already Here published in Popular Science, Sarah Scoles visits Area 51, guided by a fellow named Arnu who has been poking around at the site’s mysteries for decades:

I know from our prior emails that Arnu doesn’t ride the alien train. Sure, creepy stuff happens here. Sure, there are strange lights, technologies we can barely fathom. But they don’t require invocation of the extraterrestrial: They’re just the government, doing things the world isn’t privy to—the growing up of projects perhaps born classified, just like it always has here. … Talking to Arnu feels like seeing a therapist who understands, even when you don’t, that your problems are all because of your mom.

This dude in Greenville, South Carolina went over to an elementary school playground and started yelling at the kids, “Space is fake! You’re not on a spinning ball!” Greenville News reports:

A teacher on the elementary school’s playground can be seen ushering students away from the fence as the man, wearing a blue sweatshirt with “FLAT EARTH” emblazoned across the front, yells, “Listen, guys, they’re going to teach you you live on a spinning ball — that doesn’t make it true. It’s not real. The floor is not moving a thousand miles an hour.” …

In the video, before Thompson walks away, he says, “I’m gonna flat-smack them” — a phrase he said means to challenge the concept of a spherical Earth to people who are not familiar with the Flat Earth movement.

A guy in North Carolina who lives in a house shaped like a UFO posts a timelapse video of lights streaking across the Milky Way background. At least he’s not saying it’s aliens:

Snyder told McClatchy News on Monday that he has yet to get a sound explanation or even a good guess. … “I think it’s someone illegally flying a drone at night, but it’s anyone’s guess,” Snyder said in a Facebook post. “It wasn’t a plane, it moved in way too (of a) chaotic pattern to be a plane.”

A married couple, both doctors, are charged with a scheme to evade income taxes by having patients pay them through the purchase of gold and silver coins. Oh wait, did I say doctors? I should clarify. They run an “alternative medicine clinic.” Now it makes way more sense.

Good lord, the word “cowpathy” is being used unironically. At The Hindu, Shubashree Desikan addresses pseudoscientific claims about India’s special cows and their special pee:

Rather than glorify cow excreta and urine, a more scientifically valid enterprise would be to have the Ministry of Ayush undertake a serious review of ayurvedic texts and subject them to a scientific scrutiny. Many concepts may get falsified, but a true science should not be afraid of falsification.

So I attended the Actors Studio Drama School back in 2000-2001, and the guy who accepted me into the school was James Lipton, yeah, the guy who hosts the show Inside the Actors Studio. (“That was a HELL of an audition, Paul.” He also really liked my Kermit the Frog impression.) Well, he just died, 93 years old. In the Post‘s obit, they note that despite the famous “pearly gates” question he always asked, the guy was also an atheist:

Lipton, an atheist, handed a few of his famous blue note cards over to the anchor and, after years of fans wondering, finally revealed to the public what he would want God to say to him upon arriving at heaven’s pearly gates.

“You see, Jim? You were wrong. I exist,” Lipton said, waiting a beat. “But you may come in anyway.”

I didn’t know him well by any means. I left the school after my first year for REASONS, but I was always very grateful to him.

Linking to a story or webpage does not imply endorsement by Paul or CFI. Not every use of quotation marks is ironic or sarcastic, but it often is.