Good news this week, then, in the shape of the QS World University Rankings for 2010, which show that the top seventeen universities in the world are all in the US or the UK, and while the UK holds number one spot and four out of the top seven, the USA holds an impressive thirteen out of the top seventeen spots.

It’s pretty well established that the more intelligent and educated a person is, the less likely they are to believe in God. Here, have a graph:

IQ versus belief in God.

I wonder if Americans realise how enigmatic their country is to outsiders? For me, a secular European, there is just too much religious power there, but travel East and most Arab nationals would probably argue that the US is far to secular. Damned if they do, doomed if they don’t.

Back to the point then: Should the US seek to do as other nations have done and make the words “university” and “college” protected titles? Should they regulate who can and cannot give out degrees? Some states already do, for example the recent case of the Southern Baptist university in Texas which was denied the right to award an accredited MSc (for which I have been unable to find a link), but would it improve the education system in the US to do it nationally?

Most important of all: Could denying apologist institutions the ability to award unaccredited “degrees” force religious families to send their kids to institutions which teach facts instead of myths and so open their minds?

According to Spiegel Online, Pastor Terry Jones already has a history of inflammatory conduct – in Germany:

What is less well known is that the pastor led a charismatic evangelical church, the Christian Community of Cologne, in the western German city up until 2009. Last year, however, the members of the congregation kicked founder Jones out, because of his radicalism. One of the church’s current leaders, Stephan Baar, also told the German news agency DPA that there had been suspicions of financial irregularities in the church surrounding Jones.

A “climate of fear and control” had previously prevailed in the congregation, says one former member of the church who does not want to be named. Instead of free expression, “blind obedience” was demanded, he says.

So Germany is shipping these crazies to America? Talk about coal to Newcastle.

Apparently, Jones ran a successful Church in Cologne – which he believed was “a city of Hell that was founded by Nero’s mother.” He had a knack for seizing on popular social issues and working them into his church’s mission. By the end, its membership totaled 800-1000 members. But eventually it all got too much:

By the end of 2007, the community had had enough. Members confronted him and tried to change the direction of the church. But Terry Jones refused to make changes, they say. In the end, Jones, his wife and their fellow preachers were expelled from the church and he moved back to the US. “The community imploded,” says [Andrew] Schäfer. It only has some 80 active members today.

Andrew Schäfer is a “sect commissioner,” an official who monitors the actions of various churches in Germany. He concludes that Jones’ current actions are a reaction to his sudden loss of stature and power. That makes a great deal of sense.

The Smoking Gun has found a copy of the Dove World Outreach Academy Handbook. Hopefully this is a rough draft, because it contains the kind of spelling we associate with teapartyers, “The goal of the Academy is for each student to develop a stabile lifestyle of Discipline in order to become a strong apostolic Fife Fold Minister in our Apostolic Ministry System.”

Requirements include uniforms, showers that must be kept short (5-7 min), weekly weigh-ins to keep tabs on weight and no visits with outside family.

Shirley Phelps Roper, daughter of Fred Phelps and one of the leaders of Westboro, is irritated at Terry Jones and the media that’s sensationalizing him – and not her:

It’s that in 2008 she and her father’s Topeka flock set fire to a Quran in plain view on a Washington, D.C., street and nobody seemed to care.

“We did it a long time before this guy,” Phelps-Roper said by telephone from a street corner in downtown Chicago, scene of the latest Westboro picket — against Jews this time, not gays.

The difference could be that in 2008 many news media outlets had decided to ignore the group’s routine of spewing hatred at funerals of fallen American soldiers.

So when Fred Phelps, calling Muhammad a “pedophilic gigolo,” went online and invited people to attend the burning, most stayed away.

Brought to you by the same folks who gave us 7 Craziest Westboro Baptist Church Protests Ever. (…a vacuum cleaner store? really?)

During most of her 25 months as a student of self-improvement programs run by the Colonie-based NXIVM organization, Becca Friedman felt like she was in a dream, but, she said, it became a dreadful nightmare.

“It felt like a very safe, very safe environment,” she said. “It did not end well.”

[...]

“Yeah, I think it’s a cult,” Friedman said at the dinner table of the modest home she shares with her family and a few pets not far from the funky downtown of Woodstock. “I definitely acknowledge there are good parts to it. … You have to have a good hook. They had me hooked but not enough.”

The organization that Friedman is talking about is called NXIVM (usually pronounced “nexium”), a self-help, self-esteem and executive development organization based here in Albany. Anybody who’s been paying attention realizes that there is a tremendous amount of crap that gets sold under the labels of self-help and management training. Still, I wanted to keep an open mind, so I visited the NXIVM site to see how they described themselves:

NXIVM is a new ethical understanding that allows us to build an internal civilization and have it manifest in the external world. It allows us to explore our most fundamental nature and to begin to redirect our power of creation, a power that we all possess in a very human sense. It is a place where humanity can rise to its noble possibility.

…aaaand my mind just closed.

Cult-watcher Rick Ross maintains a roundup of news articles about NXIVM. Reading through, it seems that NXIVM is headed by long-haired guru Keith Raniere (above), who goes by the name “Vanguard.” The organization is bankrolled by Sara and Claire Bronfman, heirs to the Seagram’s Liquor fortune, a pair of rich sisters seeking spiritual fulfillment with daddy’s money. Much of that money goes to folks like Roger Stone, a Republican political consultant, in order to defend the group’s abysmal reputation and smear its enemies.

If I were to post this as fiction, you folks would accuse me of writing tired cliches.

It’s hard to be sure of anything beyond the basics. Rumors and counter rumors are all over the place. From here, NXIVM seems like a low rent Scientology, though perhaps without the science-fiction novel at its core. According to one rumor, the biggest stars they’ve managed to attract are Allison Mack and Kristin Laura Kreuk: Chloe and Lana, respectively, from Smallville. Not Travolta or Will Smith, but they probably have much stronger draw among the young female demographic.

The U.S. commander in Afghanistan on Monday criticized a Florida church’s plan to burn copies of the Quran on September 11, warning the demonstration “could cause significant problems” for American troops overseas.

“It could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort in Afghanistan,”

With all due respect to the General, I think drawing attention to Terry Jones and his ministry only compounds the problem. The actions of a small church in Florida, which had less than 50 members before this mess started, are hardly newsworthy. Like Westboro Baptist, this church seems to want to profit by creating a media storm.

Sadly, the General is not in the habit of consulting with anonymous atheist bloggers before issuing a press release (… the fool). So we do what we can. For example, we point and laugh:

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You know, when you’re interviewing avowed Reconstructionists like Gary North, I don’t know that we have much to talk about. And if you’re going to call public schools “Marxist,” I think it proves that your own education is lacking.

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One of the major early arguments–framed in the Bible as a dispute between Peter and Paul–was whether this new movement was still Jewish, or whether it should expand to encompass Hellenic peoples and practices (and thus necessarily lose much of its Jewish character). As is perhaps obvious, the argument resolved in shedding most of Christianity’s Jewish roots and embracing Greek and Roman thought, culture, and customs.  In so doing, the early religion broadened its reach beyond an insular minority, utilizing and adapting prevailing philosophies and religious symbols, in essence assimilating itself to the dominant culture.

The second argument does not directly play out in the Bible, but traces of its effects can be found in later arguments over the canon. Early on, there was a tension between those who called themselves Gnostic Christians, who believed that the most important duty of a Christian was to contemplate the mysteries of the divine and understand them thoroughly (and intellectually, in specific), and those who for lack of a better word I’ll call “Soterioriffic” Christians, who believed that understanding was far less important than faith and belief in the salvific power of Jesus and the religious practice in general.

While there is plenty of textual evidence that Jesus at least cared about understanding on some level (he often expresses frustration with the apostles being thick-headed), this argument settled out against the Gnostics in favor of a Christianity that was primarily concerned with being saved. This had the effect of making the religion much more accessible to the lower classes and slaves, who tended to have less education than the higher classes. Removing understanding of philosophy as a prerequisite for being Christian went a long way towards making the new religion take off in its Hellenic habitat.

Christianity could have easily developed in each case in a different way, either as a Jewish sect or a mystery cult (or both), but I am given to doubt whether such a Christianity would have survived to the present day in any form other than a historical or marginal curiosity.  Making the strategically superior choice each time pretty much guaranteed the survival of a robust Christianity (one with which we struggle to this very day).

I think the lessons from this have applicability in other social movements. Take environmentalism, for instance; there are many issues that fall under the umbrella of concern for human impact on the environment, from species loss to air and water quality to biome depletion. However, most of those issues have taken a back seat, having been overshadowed by Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).  Looking back at the strategic lessons of early Christianity, this choice of emphasis seems to me unwise.

Unlike most environmental issues of note, AGW is fairly abstract; it is not clear immediately upon finding out what it is why people in general should be concerned by it. Dead animals or toxic fumes or trees getting cut down are concrete, easy to understand topics, whereas in order to fully grasp the threat of AGW, it takes some effort to get educated on the issue. Even worse, in order to actually judge the merits of the arguments for AGW and possible response measures requires significant education in climatology. As the Gnostics found, the higher the education requirements for participating in the movement, the more difficulty one will have in convincing others of the urgency or necessity of one’s objective.

The other strategic error in my mind is that environmentalists chose to double-down on AGW long before there was decent evidence to show that they were right; in the intervening period, there were many good faith reasons to doubt the conclusion, leading to many reasonably concluding that the threat from AGW was overblown, opening the movement to charges that its stridency was driven by an agenda darker than simply preserving the climate equilibrium for human habitation. Had the movement instead focused on an area where the science was immediately more solid, such as ocean acidification, they could have taken aim at the same fossil fuel emissions from a stronger scientific footing.

Right now, despite easy targets and easy appeals, environmentalists struggle with their agenda by emphasizing difficult arguments and abstract problems. Meanwhile, Christianity, having made effective strategic choices, is still going strong. Decisions about what to emphasize and how accessible to make a movement can be the difference between success and failure.

The Stone

The Bat Creek Stone was discovered in 1889 in a burial mound at the confluence of the Bat Creek and Little Tennessee River. It was discovered by John Emmert, a semi-trained archaeologist working for the Smithsonian. Emmert claimed to have found the Stone along with some copper bracelets, wood fragments and skeletons in the mound. Later tests would date the wood fragments to the first CE.

The most notable feature of the Stone was the eight characters engraved upon it. Emmert claimed that these were Cherokee. This caused some obvious problems, since the Cherokee alphabet was only created by Sequoyah around 1828, and the mound was clearly much older than that.

Emmert’s superior at the Smithsonian, Dr. Cyrus Thomas, already believed that the mounds had been created by the Cherokee or their ancestors. Thomas was willing to argue that the symbols used in the Cherokee language were actually a great deal older than previously thought. He later seemed to abandon this argument, and may have decided that the Stone was a forgery.

Despite the initial flurry this generated, the Stone seemed to disappear off the radar. It continued to attract very little attention up until the 1970s. That’s when Dr. Cyrus Gordon (yes, another Cyrus), a professor of Mediterranean Studies, claimed that when you inverted the stone it became clear that the characters were actually Hebrew. He admitted that three of the characters were problematic, but suggested that the stone might read “for the Jews.”

The Current Debate

Gordon was a proponent of a very old idea: that the Old World and the New World had been in contact after the migration of the Native Americans and before Columbus. He suggested that the Stone proved that people had migrated to America during the Roman Empire. Most other proponents of the theory have different ideas, and the stone is frequently mentioned by people who argue that it shows a connection between ancient Jews and modern Native Americans. You can imagine the connections with the Lost Tribes of Israel or Mormon pseudo-history.

The debate has continued, most prominently in the pages of the Biblical Archeology Review, where Huston McCullough argued for its authenticity. One of the best responses to Gordon was an article by Robert C. Mainfort and Mary L. Kwas in the The Tennessee Anthropologist, available online here.

In order to understand the symbols, the authors contacted Frank Moore Cross, at that point the Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages at Harvard. Dr. Cross is famous for his work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, being one of only two Americans on the scroll-publishing team.

Cross’ verdict is pretty damning: of the eight characters on the stone, six cannot be identified as paleo-Hebrew script. Faced with that, the most probable conclusion is that the Stone is a fabrication, rather than evidence of Hebrew contact with the New World or the preexistence of the Cherokee alphabet. Since there are no photographs or reports from the dig, it is impossible to say with any certainty that the stone wasn’t placed by Emmert or someone else at the time.

Conclusions

There’s a fair bit of speculation as to why a forgery would be created. Mainfort and Kwas suggest that Emmert was trying to gain support from his boss, who believed that the mounds were the work of the ancestors of the Cherokee. Another theory has it that Luther Meade Blackman, a Union veteran and local stone cutter, was trying to set Emmert, a former Confederate soldier, up to be fired by planting a fake stone.

I don’t know how much this kind of speculation is going to gain us. My inclination is to rest on Cross’ statements about the stone. It’s a forgery, and finding out who created it and why is less important than making sure its nature is understood.

But let’s set its nature aside for the moment, and look at the arguments that it’s used for. Let’s assume that it does, as Gordon suggests, read “for the Jews.” What does that tell us?

Not nearly as much as many pseudo-archeologists would often like. It would presumably show some contact between the Middle East and North America, but contact does not equal influence. Consider the Maine Penny(above). While its exact provenance is still unknown, it seems likely to be a real Norwegian silver penny. But no one is going to suggest that it proves the Natives Americans are really descendants of Vikings. At most, it’s a sign that the Vikings who may have briefly settled in Vinland might have traded south farther than expected.

“And don’t tell me God works in mysterious ways,” Yossarian continued, hurtling on over her objection. “There’s nothing so mysterious about it. He’s not working at all. He’s playing. Or else, He’s forgotten all about us. That’s the kind of God you people talk about — a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a supreme being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when he robbed old people of their power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?”

“Pain?” Lieutenant Schiesskopf’s wife pounced upon the word victoriously. “Pain is a useful symptom. Pain is a warning to us about bodily dangers.”

“And who created the dangers?” Yossarian demanded. He laughed caustically. “Oh, He was really being charitable to us when He gave us pain! Why couldn’t He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of His celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person’s forehead? Any jukebox manufacturer worth his salt could have done that. Why couldn’t He?”

“People would certainly look silly walking around with red neon tubes in the middle of their foreheads.”

“They certainly look beautiful now writhing in agony or stupified with morphine, don’t they? What a colossal, immortal blunderer! When you consider the opportunity and power he had to really do a job, and then look at the stupid ugly little mess He made of it instead, His sheer incompetence is almost staggering. It’s obvious. He never met a payroll. Why, no self-respecting businessman would hire a bungler like Him as even a shipping clerk!”

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Our doorstep is dirty. Clearly.

And you gotta love the nutjobs defending that Obama is a racist. Sheesh.

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At certain points, all the kids are turned outside to play. They play games that involve a lot of screaming, throwing rocks and slamming doors. One parent bought their kid a vuvuzela. There will be a reckoning.

Not being parents ourselves, we seem to lack the ability to block this out. We haven’t gotten numb to things like the scratches on the sides of our cars from careless kids on bicycles. We spent years trying to keep quiet so that we wouldn’t wake the baby upstairs. Now that baby is a healthy child who like to run, jump and drop things. And move furniture, as near as we can tell.

Anyway, it’s time to move. But it got me thinking about a question that our friend Ty asked on the forum: do we owe it to the world to have children? My wife and I are fairly stable and reasonably prosperous (though a lot of that is because we don’t have kids) We could probably raise a healthy child. Do we owe it to the world to try?

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