Religion

In a press release yesterday that cites an article I co-authored in Skeptic magazine, a group referring to itself as “Anonymous” has announced that it has declared war against Scientology. The stated justification for the “war” is the Church of Scientology’s attempts to keep a video of Tom Cruise off the net. That video, which is still viewable at Gawker.com, was made for a Scientology awards ceremony. The longer video from which it was taken is also now viewable there. Gawker.com responded to a cease and desist letter with a refusal to remove the video, which it considers to be fair use for news and comment, but I’m not so sure that it has a good legal case for putting up more than short excerpts. (In case you’re wondering about all the Scientology jargon in the Tom Cruise video, MTV has done a good job of explaining it. Actor Jerry O’Connell has also put out a good parody.) The “war,” which is described at another site under the name “Project Chanology” (a reference to 4chan, a popular message board, where most posts are made by people who don’t login and are thus attributed to “Anonymous”), calls for denial of service attacks over the Internet, prank phone calls, spam emails, and personal visits involving vandalism and harassment. Apparently Scientology’s main website was down due to denial of service for at least part of the day yesterday. The press release cites a number of web pages for further information about Scientology, the second of which is the article “Scientology v. the Internet: Free Speech & Copyright Infringement on the Information Super-Highway” which Jeff Jacobsen and I wrote for Skeptic magazine in 1995 after Scientology effectively declared war on the Internet. (A much lesser-known sequel to that article, published only on the web, is “Scientology v. the Internet: An Update and Response to Leisa Goodman.") I completely disagree with the tactics being used here–Scientology has as much right to free speech and protection of their copyrights as anyone else, though I also condemn Scientology’s habitual misuse of copyright to try to suppress fair use of information. To the extent this is a prank designed to get media attention, well done. To the extent it gets taken seriously, though, it’s something that may not end well. Read the material, watch the videos, have a laugh, and tell others about the absurdity and abuses of Scientology. But please, don’t launch attacks on their websites, harass individuals, or engage in vandalism. “Anonymous” previously received coverage for attacks on MySpace accounts on Fox 11 in Los Angeles on July 26, 2007. BTW, the press release gets its facts wrong when it claims that the alt.religion.scientology Usenet newsgroup was “shut down.” Scientology attorney Helena Kobrin issued an rmgroup message, but almost all news servers ignored it. The accurate facts may be found in Jeff’s and my Skeptic article. UPDATE: Wikinews and Xenu.net have more. ...

Back in 1999, a bunch of billboards popped up around Phoenix that had white letters on a black background and were signed by God. One I took a bad photo of said “You think it’s hot here? –God.” They’re back. There’s now one near Kat’s workplace that says “Life is short. Eternity isn’t. –God.” These come from a group that calls itself GodSpeaks, which doesn’t actually pay for or put up the billboards, they just help interested groups in doing it locally. I’d like to see someone make one of those sign generators for these billboards, so I can make some parodies, which these are just asking for. These billboards aren’t as lighthearted as some of the church marquee signs (like this one, for example, which suggests a God who has mellowed considerably from the one who sent the plagues of the Exodus). Here are some ideas for better content: Stop putting words in my mouth. –God If I existed, I’d communicate directly to all people in their own languages in a miraculous manner rather than through billboards put up by people pretending to be me, just as parents pretend to be Santa Claus. – God Please post further suggestions in the comments. (And if somebody writes or finds a billboard photo generator, please let me know.) ...

William Lane Craig has given his account of the Roy Varghese book written for Antony Flew in an audio blog, which Richard Carrier ably dissects. Craig seems not to be interested in actually examining any of the evidence in any depth. (Carrier’s blog also had a more detailed post in response to Mark Oppenheimer’s article in the New York Times Magazine last November, which agreed with Oppenheimer’s analysis but provided further background detail, and he has added a 27 December 2007 update to his article on the Secular Web, “Antony Flew Considers God… Sort Of.") ...

John Lynch has looked up the backgrounds of the 300 signatories to the Discovery Institute’s “Dissent from Darwinism” statement who signed in 2004 (it’s now up to 700, which he plans to also examine). He reports on the backgrounds of the individuals who signed, finding that “Chemists, physicists, engineers, bench jockeys, doctors and mathematicians account for over 200 of the 300 signatories” but only five organismal biologists. He also notes that there’s also at least one soccer coach and a home-schooling mom in the list. The comments are worth reading as well. UPDATE (January 27, 2008): John Lynch has a further post on this statement, and commenter Ken, below, points to his analysis of the religious beliefs of signers at his Open Parachute blog. UPDATE (May 14, 2008): A YouTube video documents further Discovery Institute deception with regard to this list. ...

Creation Ministries International has published a new web page summarizing their dispute with Answers in Genesis, much of which is already familiar to readers of this blog. The summary includes an update of events immediately preceding and subsequent to the attempt at arbitration in Hawaii that occurred last August, and links to supporting documents, several of which are newly made public. New in this report are two interesting emails from Philip Bell, former deputy CEO of AiG-UK, about what was going on inside AiG after the split from CMI. Bell resigned from AiG in June 2006 and is now head of CMI-UK. The first email is quoted in a letter from Carl Wieland to a CMI supporter in Australia who asked why CMI needed to take legal action against AiG, which includes these two paragraphs: ...

Dlisted has the scoop on Andrew Morton’s book on Tom Cruise, to be released on January 15. I would surmise that it will not be published in the UK, which has much stricter libel laws. Cruise was threatening to sue Morton for this book back in February 2006, before he had even started writing it, because Morton hired gay porn star turned private investigator Paul Baressi, whose allegations of a gay affair with John Travolta were published in the National Enquirer, only to retract them after being sued by Travolta. Photos of Travolta kissing a man on the steps of his private plane during the production of “Hairspray” were widely published in 2006. L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology consider homosexuality to be a perversion which falls at 1.1 on the tone scale, between fear and anger. UPDATE (January 12, 2007): Slate reads Morton’s book so you don’t have to, and reveals that the Tom Cruise of Morton’s book is strictly heterosexual. ...

Octavia, a New Zealand atheist who was formerly an administrator at IIDB until the recent controversies there, has followed through with her proposed creation of a community newsletter for participants of the proliferating atheist and freethought message boards, called Nexus and hosted at the Nontheist Nexus. I’ve just started looking at the first issue, and I went directly to the article “Atheist Cop,” which was a fascinating read. There’s also an excerpt from Thomas Paine’s “Age of Reason,” some nicely done artwork, some stills from a film being made by one of the board members, an account of a scientist who spent eight months at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, “Sarpedon’s Weird Science” with links to interesting recent articles about undersea life, a couple of reviews of “The Golden Compass,” a few holiday recipes, and more. It looks like a great start, and I look forward to reading the rest of this issue and more in the future. ...

Today I’ve read a few interesting commentaries on the role that certain fundamentalist Christian teachings (specifically a doctrine known as “legalism”) have had in producing the outcomes of Andrea Yates murdering her children and Matthew Murray killing several people in Colorado. Murray, who was raised in an ultra-fundamentalist home and home schooled, was in an environment based on the teachings of Bill Gothard, whose “seven basic life principles” may be found here. The obedience to authority component is one which has led to some problems, such as a sex scandal within Gothard’s organization. (An online forum for discussing Bill Gothard’s teachings, open to both supporters and critics, may be found here.) Gothard has other teachings beyond his seven principles, some of which are enumerated by a commenter at Midwest Christian Outreach: ...

Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars points out allegations from a neo-Nazi that Ron Paul has regularly met with a variety of white supremacists at a Thai restaurant in D.C. Others have pointed out that Paul campaign expenditures have included expenses at that restaurant and that he has spoken to some questionable groups. I’ve also updated this blog’s post on “Ron Paul, religious kook” to point out his recent statement that he doesn’t accept the reality of evolution. UPDATE: The alleged campaign expenditure link to Wednesday restaurant meetings with white supremacist groups has been conclusively refuted at the Irregular Times blog, which goes through the expenditures in detail and shows that while Ron Paul has spent money for meetings at the Tara Thai restaurant in D.C. (which is right around the corner from an office he rents in D.C.), none of those expenditures have occurred on a Wednesday. The source of the allegations, Bill White of the American National Socialist Workers Party, is not a particularly credible source, as has been remarked repeatedly in the comments at Ed Brayton’s blog (first link above). However, Paul has definitely taken contributions from and posed for photographs with at least one white supremacist, Don Black, who runs the Stormfront website. ...

In a September 2007 talk, Dembski used an over-dubbed version of a computer animation of the inner workings of the cell that he took from Harvard and XVIVO, which he subsequently claimed he had downloaded from the Internet in a form that didn’t have the credits (e.g., from YouTube). Peter Irons has now shown that the content of Dembski’s latest book, Design of Life, shows that his explanation is a lie. That book includes a reference to the same video, with a link to its original location, marked as “last accessed” on January 25, 2007. Since he knew where the video came from in January 2007, he also already knew in September 2007. ERV points out the details of Dembski’s deception. (Via Pharyngula.) UPDATE (December 31, 2007): There is an entertaining exchange of letters between Peter Irons, Bill Dembski, and Dembski’s attorney John Gilmore posted at Pharyngula. ...