Rick Perry: The Economic Crisis is God's Way of Bringing Us Back to Biblical Principles

Texas Governor and possible GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry has not been shy about his alignment with the Religious Right. And not just the 'mainstream' Religious Right hate groups like the Family Research Council. We're talking extreme Christocrats.

We also shouldn't forget last month when Perry issued a "Pray For Rain" proclamation. 

If his unapologetic mix of church and state weren't enough to scare you, then how about this? He has the words 'Liberty' and 'Freedom' emblazoned on his cowboy boots. Scared yet? Take a look at the following clip of Perry on James Robinson's Life Today television show, in which he states that the current economic crisis is God's way of making America return to biblical principles and free us from our slavery to the government.

We already had a president who made war decisions based on biblical prophecy. And that didn't work out too well.  

Atheist Converts After Mock Prayer 'Answered' By $1 Million Lottery Win

From The Christian Post:

A self-confessed atheist has become a believer after mocking God by sarcastically praying for his mother to win the lottery. However, his joke prayer was amazingly answered as the next day his mother won $1 million on the New York Lottery Sweet Million game.

According to the report, 28-year-old Sal Bentivegna, who did not believe in God, told his mother to pray to her god to ask "for a million dollars." His mother, Gloria, a Catholic, would not do any such thing.  Since his mother refused to, Sal mockingly 'prayed' the following: “God, I don’t know if you’re real or not, but if you are there, please let my mother win a million dollars.”

Guess what happened. You're right. Sal's mother won a million dollars the next day when she purchased a "Lotto Tree" at a church charity auction. One of the tickets on the tree was a million dollar winner.

He testified, “I can’t shrug off that Jesus had a hand in it.”

“No pun intended, but it was a Godsend,” he said.

Gloria Bentivegna, reflecting on what had happened, is thankful to God for her winnings, but even more thankful for her son’s conversion. She said: “'God performed two miracles, a true miracle.”

By winning New York’s Sweet Million game, Gloria Bentivegna will now receive $50,000 every year for the next 20 years.

The odds of winning the New York Lottery Sweet Million game is 1 in 3.8 million.  Two tickets would take it to 1 in 1.9 million.  I'm not sure how many tickets are on a "lottery tree," but regardless, those are considerable odds.

I am curious to know the odds that a Sweet Million player uttered a plea for divine intervention in the game, mockingly or not.  I would assume that a great many do. I am also curious to know the percentage of praying Sweet Million players who were 'denied' the money.  I would bet a million dollars that all of them, winner excluded, did not have their prayers answered in the form of $1 million.

A few things I do know: 1) Sal Bentivegna was not very good at being an atheist.  2) Pascal deserves a share of the winnings.

The Good News | 6.1.11

I spend a lot of time here pointing out the bad and the ugly that I feel compelled to initiate a periodic trumpeting of the good. Despite ongoing attempts to impede progress, nice things are happening everywhere.  Behold, the good news:

• President Obama has proclaimed June to be Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month (WhiteHouse.Gov)

• American Muslim clerics sign up for evolution (NewScientist)

• For the first time in history, the majority of Americans favor legal gay marriage (Gallup)

• A Florida transgender teen has been crowned prom queen (Proud Parenting)

• The Baltimore-Washington Conference of the United Methodist Church approved a groundbreaking same-sex marriage resolution (Washington Post)

• The Southern Poverty Law Center won a major victory on behalf of cheated farmworkers (SPLC)

• New stem cell implant holds hope for diabetics (KPBS) 

• The ACLU is suing batshit Florida Governor Rick Scott over the drug testing of state employees regardless of suspicion (Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

• The ACLU and PPFA have filed a lawsuit challenging South Dakota's completely insane abortion law (RH Reality Check)

• The Health and Human Services Department has told the state of Indiana that its Medicaid plan, which bans funding to Planned Parenthood, is illegal and must be changed. (Feministing)

• The kids are alright (ScienceBlogs)

Sarah Palin: 'I Love That Smell of the Emissions'

The International Energy Agency just released a report showing that greenhouse gas increased by a record amount last year. We had the highest carbon output in history. 

Faith Birol, the chief economist of the IEA stated, "Such warming would disrupt the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people across the planet, leading to widespread mass migration and conflict. That is a risk any sane person would seek to drastically reduce."

Birol stated that we could avoid catastrophe if governments heed the warning.

Enter Sarah Palin, possible GOP candidate for President of the United States, who is currently traveling around the country on a mysterious bus tour.  Her first stop was at a motorcycle rally in Washington, DC, where she stated to reporters, "I love that smell of the emissions!"

The Batshit Files: Post-Memorial Day Weekend News Roundup | 5.31.11

• A Vatican newspaper article says condom use may increase AIDS risk. I'm pretty sure someone also once died from being hit in the head with a life preserver while drowning. (Catholic News Service)

• A man who planned to kill Planned Parenthood doctor and clinic workers was arrested for accidentally shooting his gun in his hotel room. (Hatewatch)

• Bachmann: 'God called me to run for president.' The Lord smites in mysterious ways. (TPM)

•  Roger Ailes' bomb-proof office protects him from 'those gays.' (TPM)

• Christian community threatens violence against atheist student. (DailyKos)

• Where's The Birth Certificate? debuted at number 6 on the New York Times bestseller list (CNN)

• Ben Shapiro: Sesame Street has a liberal bias (Huffington Post)

'Children Full of Life': Lessons in Compassion

We keep hearing about the decline of empathy in America's youth.  Empathy is an evolved trait, and is not confined to humans, or even to primates.  Infants have been shown to exhibit empathic behavior.

Although it's unclear what could account for a decline, Sarah Konrath of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor theorizes that increased isolation in recent decades has played a significant role.  It's not that we are no longer "hard-wired" for empathy, but that it is more fluid than we had perhaps believed.  This is not necessarily bad news.  It means that, although we can become less empathic through increased isolation, we can encourage and nurture empathy to create a more empathic society.

Enter homeroom teacher Toshiro Kanamori and his 4th grade class in a primary school in Kanazawa, northwest of Tokyo. He, and his class, are the subject of an award-winning documentary entitled Children Full of Life. The film was released in 2003, but I was only recently made aware of it, and I think it deserves much wider circulation. Thankfully, for those like myself who missed this gem, the film can be viewed online in full.

The film should serve as an example to parents and educators everywhere. It is a powerful reminder that happiness is an important part of living a successful life. And in order for us to live happy, successful lives, especially in our modern and increasingly isolated society, we must learn the importance of compassion, openness, and communication.

From the NHK Japan Prize Jury Comments:

This is a simple story, well told, that captures the essence of education. The program is an intimate portrait of a teacher and his classroom which subtlety presents a path for all educators who face the challenge of preparing students for life. Unobtrusively capturing extraordinary moments of drama and emotion inside a single Japanese classroom, the documentary demonstrates how individual teachers occasionally exhibit remarkable powers to shape the future of their students.

The documentary elicits tears of laughter and sadness as students and viewers discover the value of sharing powerful emotions, giving meaning to the life and death issues that arise in the classroom. Incidents of bullying, language instruction and outdoor activities are all opportunities to educate in this “School of Life”. Never preachy nor pedantic, the documentary reduces the myriad issues in education to a simple message - learning to care.

It is a powerful and inspiring piece of work.  It underscores the important role our educators play in our children's lives.  It urges us to address the changing educational needs of children in our rapidly evolving and increasingly complex societies.

Part 1 below (each successive part can be accessed at the end of each part):

What Does Science Have To Say About Life After Death?

Physicist and cosmologist Sean M. Carroll sure did step in it. Hot on the heels of Stephen Hawking's assertion that heaven (or any afterlife, for that matter) was "a fairy story for people afraid of the dark," Carroll has published a Scientific American piece entitled Physics and the Immortality of the Soul, that is quite clear on what physics has to say on the topic. And for such a nice guy, he certainly doesn't sugar-coat it.

Now there are many who, like Stephen Jay Gould, assert that there are things on which science and religion do not overlap. Many cite this non-overlapping magisteria when arguing the existence of God, the afterlife, or souls. However, we can't discount the degree of improbability of life after death given the laws of physics.

Carroll explains:

Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood, and there's no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die. If you claim that some form of soul persists beyond death, what particles is that soul made of? What forces are holding it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter?

Everything we know about quantum field theory (QFT) says that there aren't any sensible answers to these questions. Of course, everything we know about quantum field theory could be wrong. Also, the Moon could be made of green cheese.

Among advocates for life after death, nobody even tries to sit down and do the hard work of explaining how the basic physics of atoms and electrons would have to be altered in order for this to be true. If we tried, the fundamental absurdity of the task would quickly become evident.

Further on:

Very roughly speaking, when most people think about an immaterial soul that persists after death, they have in mind some sort of blob of spirit energy that takes up residence near our brain, and drives around our body like a soccer mom driving an SUV. The questions are these: what form does that spirit energy take, and how does it interact with our ordinary atoms? Not only is new physics required, but dramatically new physics. Within QFT, there can't be a new collection of "spirit particles" and "spirit forces" that interact with our regular atoms, because we would have detected them in existing experiments. Ockham's razor is not on your side here, since you have to posit a completely new realm of reality obeying very different rules than the ones we know.

Carroll then goes into The Dirac Equation and demonstrates, as simply as a particle physicist can, that it requires an amazing amount of metaphysical shoehorning and the chucking out of everything we know to put any credence in the afterlife concept.

There's no reason to be agnostic about ideas that are dramatically incompatible with everything we know about modern science. Once we get over any reluctance to face reality on this issue, we can get down to the much more interesting questions of how human beings and consciousness really work.

I'm reminded of Carl Sagan's feelings on the afterlife:

I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking. The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.

If we think about where the concept of the afterlife originated, we must look to our ancestors -- ancestors who, if they were lucky, lived only a fraction of the time we will live.   These ancestors had only a fraction of the knowledge we now have at our fingertips -- knowledge of the interconnectedness of all living things, knowledge of the world, and of the cosmos.  Perhaps, as our knowledge and our lifespans continue to increase, we will find (as we are beginning to see in modern European secular societies), that we do not need the promise of an afterlife.  Isn't this life more than enough?