I’m a little late with this, because I’ve been busy. If you’re reading this today, December 15, please do me a favor and vote for the Bad Astronomy blog in the science category at the 2006 Weblog awards. Voting closes at the end of today.

Bad Astronomy is the work of Phil Plait. It’s the place I turn to every time I hear somebody say something crazy about astronomy. If you aren’t familiar with Bad Astronomy, go by, look around, and bookmark it. Then go over to the 2006 Weblog awards and vote for it. Please do so today!

I’m splitting this article into two parts, so you are more likely to be able to finish it before your boss comes back and sees that you aren’t working.

The National Geographic Channel ran a documentary a couple of months ago called Exodus Revealed. I’d been planning to write up my comments on this program for a while. I just needed to find the time. Meanwhile, it was sitting on my Tivo taking up valuable space. Well, you folks (and my Tivo) are in luck. Today I rewatched the show, took some notes, and will now bestow upon you my wisdom. I have several other programs burning a hole in my Tivo, so you can look forward to a few more reviews in the future.

The program was an attempt to see what evidence there is to support the Biblical story of Exodus. Did the events take place? If they did, how can they be explained? It was a pretty good documentary. They rerun it occasionally. I suggest you keep an eye out for it.

Before I address specific elements of the program, I should say that I don’t put much credence in stories. Much of what is in the Bible was just patched in from earlier myths. The material that is original with that book wasn’t written down immediately. It was retold and repeated hundreds or thousands of times, each retelling is an opportunity for errors, omissions, or embellishments to creep in. After they were written down, they went through numerous translations to end up in the form we have today. Taking these stories at face value is misguided at best.

There is some merit in finding ordinary explanations for the Biblical claims of miracles. Superstitious people can easily confuse a mundane but impressive natural event with divine activity. Once the seed of a miracle is planted, the story grows into the “gospel truth” we know and love today.

The Farting Bush

One of the first things the program tackles is the burning bush. Professor Colin J. Humphreys, Physicist at Cambridge University, speculates that the burning bush could have been an acacia that had the misfortune of growing on top of a natural gas leak. The leak eventually got ignited by lightning. Acacias become charcoal when burned, and they retain their shape. The bush could have stood in the burning gas vent for quite a while before eventually crumbling.

I’m not convinced by this, but it is more plausible than the Bible version. At least someone is thinking of rational possibilities.

The Top Ten Things God Does When He’s Pissed Off

Next, they tackled the 10 plagues. There are some interesting ideas here. Some of them make a lot of sense.

1. The water turned to blood. Maybe not as practical a miracle as turning water into wine. He could have killed everyone with cirrhosis. I guess God was saving the wine stunt for later.

Some people have speculated that this was a standard red tide. The problem with this idea is that red tide only occurs in salt water. Dr. John Marr, Medical Epidemiologist, argues instead that the water was infected with Physteria. These microorganisms can turn water red and kill fish.

2. Frogs. If the fish die, there’s nothing to eat the frogs, so you are quickly overrun.

3. Lice. All tiny, bloodsucking insects back then were called lice (today, they’re called lawyers). Professor Jeffrey A. Lockwood, Entomologist at the University of Wyoming, says these particular insects were probably the biting midge.

4. Flies. Lockwood argues that all of those dead fish and frogs were the perfect breeding ground for flies.

5. Livestock become deadstock. Lockwood says that the biting midge transmitted several diseases, which killed the livestock.

6. Boils. Several bacteria can cause this, and it’s spread by flies.

As you can see, these first six plagues are all related.

7. Hail. Just what it sounds like. Can happen to anybody.

8. Locusts. Very natural phenomenon. There would have been millions of them. They would have eaten everything in sight.

9. Darkness. Could have been a sandstorm that blocked the sun.

10. Smote the first born. I love that word. It’s archaically quaint. God is always going around smiting out of spite. The documentary presents two hypotheses for this one.

Professor Martin J. Blaser, MD, Microbiologist at New York University, says that bubonic plague fits the description of the affliction. The Bible says that the Jews were nailed with this one at half the rate that the Egyptians were. Good old God! He’ll kill you in the process of saving you. Blaser discovered an ancient Jewish tradition that could actually explain why the Israelites had a lower death rate. They would clean out their grain stores annually. This minimized the rats and fleas. The Egyptians didn’t do this, so they could have had larger rat and flea populations living amongst them, which would lead to a higher exposure to the plague. As far as killing the first born, Blaser thinks that’s just a metaphor, meaning that it killed roughly one out of every four people.

Dr. John Marr has a different opinion. He says that grain that was saturated by hailstones and stored in the dark, would develop all sorts of nasty molds that could be highly toxic, leading to death with no visible cause. During famines, it was Egyptian tradition to give the first born a double serving of food, in the idea that at least one child would survive the famine and go on to perpetuate the species. Well, if one serving of mold isn’t quite enough to kill you off, two servings definitely would be. This is an elegant explanation for both the deaths and its specificity.

Or Not!

The above explanations are mold-free food for thought. But here’s something even more significant: Egyptian records make no mention of this series of plagues. The Egyptians were anal-retentive record keepers. Something as significant as a string of ten back-to-back plagues would certainly have been recorded, yet somehow the records make no reference to them.

For my money, that’s the strongest argument presented here. In other words, this part of the Exodus story is probably just a fanciful story that never happened.

Next: What happens when the Israelites get out of Dodge and Pharaoh tries to cut them off at the pass.

I just finished reading a novel, The Stupidest Angel, by Christopher Moore. It’s subtitled A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror.

For me, Christmas terror is having to put up with store decorations that show up in September (I’m talking to you, Costco and Best Buy!), listening to Bill O’Reilly’s endless bleating about a so-called “war” on Christmas, and not being able to find a parking space at the mall when all I want to do is run in and get some more black candles for that evening’s goat sacrifice. (Hmmm … goats bleat … O’Reilly bleats … I just had a brilliant idea!)

The book’s reviews were generally quite favorable, so I thought I’d take a chance on it. I found this book on my enabler’s website (Amazon). Yes, I have a book addiction. At least my addiction doesn’t cause hearing loss.

It’s a humorous novel. It’s not really laugh-out-loud funny anywhere, but it has a lot of amusing passages. I especially like the author’s many humorous descriptions and turns of phrase. Just one example:

Later, after church, they will try to coax Roberto into a box so they can later cook him and serve him with saimen noodles. Although he escapes, the incident traumatizes the young bat and he does not speak for years.

The story takes place in the days leading up to Christmas in a small coastal California town near Big Sur. A drunk Santa Claus impersonator gets himself killed. The perpetrator decides to conceal the crime with the help of an out-of-towner. The local cop then has to figure out what happened to Santa and who did it.

That summary leaves out all of the fun details. One of those details is the title character, an angel sent to Earth to perform a Christmas miracle. Since that angel isn’t the brightest halo on the cloud, mayhem and hilarity ensue. My only complaint about this character is that the author does a poor job of portraying him as actually stupid. To me, the angel comes across more as a George W. Bush bottom-of-the-class type, instead of a Forest Gump-like “special class” type.

One of my favorite characters is the dog, who thinks of his master solely as the “Food Guy”, and one of his friends as the “Emergency Backup Food Guy.”

Anyway, the book is not quite as funny as I had been hoping, based on the hype. I did like it, and I give it a qualified recommendation. Give it a try if you like to read Christmas stories about: a dysfunctional town, unique characters, a guy who wears a fruit bat for a hat, a fruit bat that may or may not talk, whacking Santa with a shovel, Kendra the Warrior Babe of the Outland, a cop who grows pot, a biologist who glues high-voltage electrodes to his scrotum, running a Volvo over an angel, and an angel who looks like a member of the trenchcoat mafia.

Oh yeah, and zombies. (“Brains!!!!”)

I came across a web site call the Skeptic Tank. The site has not been updated in four years. There is still some good stuff on there, but you have to search through a bunch to find it. I found this amusing definition of a fundie on that site:

Q: What in the world is a fundie?

A: A member of a conservative religious movement that believes in Biblical inerrancy. This movement had its roots in the nineteenth-century orthodox reaction to the higher (historico-literary) criticism of the Bible that originated among European theologians and was accepted by American “modernists”. Fundamentalism owes its name to the “Five Fundamentals”, a list of five beliefs that the Presbyterian General Assembly drew up in 1910 as being essential to the Christian faith. Among those fundamentals was the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.

Fundies (scientifically: Homo nesciens idiotus) come in two varieties; (about more later) but are united by the belief that each and every word (“jot and tittle”) of the Holy Writ (at least, their latest authorized version) is unequivocally true. When they find a text convenient to an argument, it is quotable as the ultimate truth. But when confronted with an apparent contradiction, however rational and logical, they sail away upon the wings of a symbol, an analogy of hidden or recondite significance.

Although two separate and distinct “kinds” of fundies exist, (H.n.i. var. ruralensis and H.n.i. var. urbanensis), they can be typically identified by their ubiquitous possession of a heavily thumped (but seldom read) Bible; an almost cataleptic and unquestioned adherence to dated dogma and the extraordinarily annoying ability of being able to interject their own personal version of ethics and morality into almost any subject, no matter how abstruse. As a group, they are exasperatingly uni-dimensional.

H.n.i. var. ruralensis can be typified as a backwoods rustic living among the ‘possums, ‘coons, ‘dillos, and magnolias, [and] who is functionally illiterate. Though some may become transplanted to more municipal settings; they stubbornly adhere to old habits: mouth breathing, barefootedness, and brainless Bible-based bleating.

A macroevolutionary jump (although most would argue that it is really a regressive event) is responsible for the other variety: H.n.i. var. urbanensis. They arose from their humbler cousins in the deep, dark, dank backwoods but have evolved to exploit the trophism of bright lights, television cameras, teleprompters, and wireless communication. Basically, a member of this group can be described as a country bumpkin of the wacko-right turned religious zealot, and usually named Billy, Jimmy, Oral, or some other familiar sobriquet. They drape the mantle of Christian piety around their shoulders (which they carefully interweave with the American flag), and stomping off on a witch hunt; ferret out “fellow travelers”, “one- worlders”, that archenemy of all right-thinking people: the “secular humanist” and other assorted bogeymen. With a primitive view of this world and a psychedelic view of the next, they harangue lost sinners (and those with the ability to think for themselves) in an impassioned and declamatory style to “REPENT!” and be born again. Ranting and raving; and spouting smoke, fury, fire, brimstone, and stained-glass blather; they pace whatever stage they can usurp like a whirling dervish with a caffeine addiction. The venue may change, but the song always remains the same.

Usually, such narrowly unspecialized organisms as the ones cited above represent an evolutionary dead-end. In these cases, though, it is more of a U-turn.

Fundie pinhead Dennis Prager, who is upset at Keith Ellison swearing his oath of office on the Koran, has come out with another column, in which he gloats about how right he is (both senses of the word) and how wrong the Left is for defending the First Amendment.

I wonder if this guy really believes this stuff, or if he just writes it for the publicity. When fundies write articles that whip their sheeple into a frenzy, it’s always good for a bump in donations. It also gets traffic to their web sites and snags a few more zombie followers.

Well, Prager has gotten himself a giant puddle of publicity, and he’s wallowing in it. Let’s look at his latest effort of self-aggrandizement.

[T]here was widespread coverage on left-wing blogs, which, with no exception I could find, distorted what I said, charging my column and me with, for example, racism (see below), when race plays no role at all in this issue or in my column.

I haven’t read a lot of the other blogs, so I can’t attest for them. I suspect that you didn’t look very hard, if you couldn’t find one that didn’t “distort” what you said.

For the record, because I deem this a significant statement about most of the Left, I found virtually no left-wing blog that was not filled with obscenity-laced descriptions of me.

I haven’t surveyed the blogosphere, and I don’t doubt that there were a lot of wickedly-profane (and wickedly-funny) comments about you, but there was no profanity in mine.

Aside from the immaturity and loathing of higher civilization that such public use of curse words reveal, the fury and hate render the leftist charge that it is the Right that is hate-filled one of the most obvious expressions of psychological projection I have seen in my lifetime.

What a whopper! Let’s pick that one apart piece by piece.

Aside from the immaturity and loathing of higher civilization that such public use of curse words reveal…

I’ll give you “immaturity”. There are more mature ways to make a point. Of course, when you’re dealing with somebody whose moral development stopped at the simplistic level of behaving “properly” (10 Commandments) just to avoid punishment (God’s wrath), maybe they felt they had to talk down to your level.

I hardly think that letting out the occasional blue streak reveals a “loathing of higher civilization”. That’s a bit of a stretch. Typical of fundies. They tie everything they don’t like to the decline of civilization.

How about this, Dennis? Why don’t you go back to school and learn proper English? You said “…use of curse words reveal…”. The verb goes with “use”, not “words”, dumbass! (Whoops! I just brought down Western Civilization! Sorry! I’ll say “retarded fundie moron” next time.) The sentence is supposed to read “…use of curse words reveals…”. Tell you what. If you ever get yourself elected to public office, we’ll let you swear your oath of office on an English grammar book.

…the fury and hate render the leftist charge that it is the Right that is hate-filled one of the most obvious expressions of psychological projection I have seen in my lifetime.

Whoa, big fella! Break that sentence down into several smaller ones. When you go back to school, your teacher will show you how.

Any hate that came your way is a result of your very specific actions. Hate may be warranted in such situations. Right-wing hate from people like you is typically directed at entire classes of people, most of whom have done nothing, directly or indirectly, against you. You have generalized, free-floating hate. Your non-specific spite is directed at groups of people just because they exist. Since you enjoy hating so much, why don’t you redirect your hate toward the people who are actively trying to infringe on other people’s rights? Oh, wait. That would be you.

Clearly, many Americans, including some conservatives and libertarians, have no problem with the idea that for the first time in American history, a person elected to Congress has rejected the Bible for another religious text when taking his oath of office.

I love your use of loaded language, Dennis. Ellison didn’t “reject the Bible”! He just has a different religion!

[H]ere are my responses to the most frequently offered objections to my piece:

Well this ought to be fun.

Accusation: I am advocating something unconstitutional by demanding that the Bible be included in oaths of office.

Response: I never even hinted that there should be a religious test.

You most certainly did! By forcing people to swear on your holy book, you are excluding everybody whose religion prevents them from swearing allegiance to a different religion.

The idea is particularly laughable in my case since I am not now, nor ever have been, a Christian. I am a Jew….

Oh my gawd!! You rejected the New Testament! You rejected the Bible!

Many office holders who do not believe in the Bible at all or who reject some part have nevertheless used the Bible at their swearing-in.

We’ve always done it that way! By that logic, we should have never ended segregation.

A tiny number of Jews have used only the Old Testament. As a religious Jew, I of course understand their decision, but I disagree with it.

I see. You can understand that, but you can’t understand Keith Ellison using his holy book? (See? I told you this Prager guy was an idiot! It’s easy for me to make fun of him and call him a fundie pinhead just because I disagree with him, but come on! This is flat-out proof that there are more California condors in the world than there are brain cells in this guy’s head.)(So you don’t have to look it up, there are 299 condors left.)

You don’t have to be Christian to acknowledge that the Bible is the source of America’s values.

What? Since when? How about never! It certainly is one source of values, even a very important one, but it is not the only source.

We don’t get inalienable rights from the Constitution; we get them from God. Which is exactly what the signers of the Declaration of Independence wrote: We are endowed with inalienable rights by our Creator, not by government and not by any man-made document.

Actually, they didn’t write that last phrase. You stuck that on there yourself. What were you saying about other people distorting what you wrote?

A few points:
(1) It says “Creator”, not “God”. It was deliberately vague, in order to be inclusive.
(2) The Declaration of Independence is not the law of the land. The Constitution is. The Constitution says nothing about God.
(3) “Getting inalienable rights from God” is an unsupported premise. Please provide evidence to support this claim.

[T]he very fact that it is a ceremony makes my point far more forcefully. Obviously, Mr. Ellison will have already been officially sworn in. Therefore, the use of the Koran has absolutely nothing to do with taking an oath on the book he holds sacred.

Yes, it does. You swear on your holy book. Whether it is ceremonial or not is irrelevant. Are you trying to say that it is OK to swear on the Bible and then break that oath, because it was only a ceremony and not real? OK, then. Let’s have everyone swear on The Pet Goat. It’s just a ceremony, after all. It doesn’t count.

It is used entirely to send a message to the American people.

No, it’s not. It’s used to show how important the oath is.

Accusation: My column and/or I are racist, bigoted and Islamophobic.

I think racist is too strong, and probably too hard to prove. You don’t want an entire class of people to have the right to do something. That does make you a bigot. You seem to be afraid of the Koran, which suggests that you are Islamophobic. Phobic is probably way too strong a term. “Islamo-nervous” might be more accurate.

“Bigoted”: Bigoted against whom? Against non-Christians? I am a non-Christian. Am I bigoted against myself as a Jew?

No, you idiot! Against Muslims! Geeeeeezzzzz what a retard!

[N]either I nor tens of millions of other Americans will watch in silence as the Bible is replaced with another religious text for the first time since George Washington brought a Bible to his swearing-in.

Ahh! That’s your problem! You Judeo-Christians have had a stranglehold on our government since the beginning. Now that one Koran has appeared on Capitol Hill, you view it as the leak in the dam. Yes, one day, maybe the Pledge of Allegiance will indeed have “under God” removed. But rather than simply deleting the phrase, it will be replaced with “under Allah”.

Now aren’t you beginning to understand the importance of the separation of church and state?

Retarded fundie moron!

By now, I’m sure you know about Keith Ellison, the first openly-Muslim candidate elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. His religion should merely be an historical footnote, if it is remembered at all. It probably shouldn’t be remembered, because it is a non-event. It’s just a reflection of the religious diversity that makes this country great. Conservatives are always telling us that this is the greatest country in the world, after all. Isn’t this an example of why?

In these bleak days since 9/11, when America seems determined to turn its back on the principles that made it great, I am proud to see that a predominantly non-Muslim district could look beyond the easy stereotyping and vote for the man they truly thought was best qualified. There is hope for this country yet. We aren’t all a horde of babbling, reactionary, hate-spewing ignoramuses.

Well, not all of us, anyway.

You’ve probably heard that Ellison wants to swear his oath of office on the Koran instead of the Bible. This is another non-event.

Well, not to all of us, anyway.

When this story broke a few days ago, several micro-brained fundie leaders pounced on it, eager to grab headlines across the country, so their equally micro-brained followers could see what wonderful defenders of Christianity they are.

What I would truly love to know is how many Americans are genuinely disturbed by Ellison exercising his First Amendment right to freedom of religion. Is the controversy of these last few days just a couple of fundie pinheads with a national audience? Just a few obnoxious “defenders of this ‘Christian Nation’” beating their chests in a puffed-up threat gesture, just like the primate ancestors that they vehemently deny they have?

I’d like to think that the village idiot is not representative of the rest of the town’s residents.

One particularly loud idiot is Dennis Prager, of World Nut Daily. He has written a ridiculous diatribe wherein he somehow attempts to make the case that Ellison should not be allowed to swear an oath on his (Ellison’s) holy book. Instead, Ellison should have to swear an oath on Prager’s holy book (the Bible). Only in Fundie-land does that even remotely sound logical.

Rather than take the time myself to rip Prager a new one, I would instead like to direct your attention to Fundie Watch. You’ll recognize the name from my Blogroll. It’s one of the anti-fundie blogs that I recommend you visit on a regular basis. The Watcher takes great delight in shredding fundie nonsense, and I take great delight in reading it. So please, go over there now and read it.

My Comments

If you read the comments on his post, you’ll see that I made one over there too. I thought I made a few good points, if I do say so myself. Just for fun (or laziness, what do you expect from free entertainment?), I’ve decided to reprint part of my comments here as well. To quote me:

Watcher, excellent post. I’ve been mulling this topic over all weekend, trying to come up with a post for my own blog. You’ve done a more thorough trouncing of this guy than I could.

And how come his argument is basically that he finds it “hard to imagine?”

You’ve hit one of the core problems with fundies. They’re imagination-impaired. They can’t wrap their puny brains around big concepts. That’s why they can’t accept the fact of evolution. They can’t imagine anything that isn’t spelled out for them in the Bible. In fact, many fundies have trouble with any form of imagination (e.g., they’re afraid of Harry Potter, the Teletubbies, SpongeBob, etc.). What a scary little world they must live in.

Tell me, Dennis, do you base all your theories on what’s hard for you to imagine, or do you accidentally let some facts slip in once in a while?

Heavens no! If he let any facts slip in, they’d have to take away his fundie-card!

I’ve always been troubled by this whole swearing on the Bible thing. Where did that come from? I suspect it’s an ancient custom that got carried into the U.S. Congress by momentum instead of thought.

Presumably, the idea is that if you swear an oath to God, you quiver in your boots about breaking the oath. Hellfire and eternal damnation are supposed to be too high a price to pay for a minor benefit today. Apparently that doesn’t work. All you have to do is look at all of the conservative, God-fearing Republicans who have completely savaged their oath of office lately.

If you put your hand on any text, it should be the Constitution. That is, after all, what you are swearing to uphold and protect.

(One of the other commenters, a fellow named Harry Sufehmi, said this):

I thought there’s a separation between state and religion in America? Perhaps I’m wrong

Anyway, in Indonesia, THE country of MUSLIMS EXTREMISTS, there’s no problem whatsoever if Christian statesmen choose to swear their oath under the Bible. Or Buddhist or others under their own holy book. Not even one [person] will complain. Not even one [person] will [THINK] “Hell, this is an outrage!”

You can imagine our surprise to read the news that [in] America—the country of freedom, where state is separated from religion—there’s an UPROAR when a statesman wishes to swear his oath under his own holy book.

After a stunned silence, there [was] hysterical laughter all around.

America, don’t allow this to happen. It’s making you the joke of the world

(To which I wrote):

Harry Sufehmi, I’m sorry to disappoint you. America has some stellar founding principles, but they’re only as good as the people who implement them. Unfortunately, America was founded primarily by religious nut-jobs who were so extreme they got booted out of Europe.

Those people are still with us today, and they are making things unpleasant for the rest of us.

It may be an historical accident that we ended up with such a great Constitution. We had just thrown off the shackles of tyranny, so we wrote a document that was designed to prevent a new tyranny from forming in its place. I think the only reason it was ratified is that everyone was terrified that the horrible experience that they had just gone through would be repeated.

In the 18th century, we went through a horrible experience and quickly ratified laws out of fear. By luck or intellect (take your pick), they were great laws. In the 21st century, we went through a horrible experience (9/11) and quickly ratified laws out of fear. Sadly, contemporary American citizens are not in the same league as our forbears. Where they granted themselves freedom, we willfully surrendered it.

Happy holidays! Please don’t attack me for saying “holidays” instead of “Christmas”! There are other holidays this time of year, you know. For example, Kwanzaa.

In the spirit of Kwanzaa, I found the following: “A Charlie Brown Kwanzaa”. This thing is hysterical! The audio isn’t work-safe (it’s extremely profane), but if you wear headphones, your boss will simply think that you’re goofing off in a G-rated manner.

You can find several other holiday specials over at Most Offensive Video. Most of them are re-dubbed Charlie Browns, but there is also a remake of Rudolph. Go check it out! You know you want to!

If you are running a standards-based browser (e.g., Firefox) you should see Charlie Brown and his Kwanzaa pals below. If you are running a non-standard browser (e.g., Internet Explorer), well, just go over to Most Offensive Video and watch it there.