Blogaround

1. Voyager 1 Is Back! NASA Spacecraft Safely Resumes All Science Observations (June 14, via) "After more than six months of long-distance troubleshooting—Voyager 1 is more than 15 billion miles from Earth, and any signal takes more than 22.5 hours to travel from our planet to the spacecraft—mission personnel have finally coaxed Voyager 1 to gather and send home data with all its remaining science instruments, according to a NASA statement." This is so cool!

2. Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic (June 14, via) What the actual ****?! 

If you followed my blog during zero-covid, you know I was really unhappy with how western news organizations were covering the situation in China. (See: WTF, CNN? and Wow, the Anti-China Bias in Western News Media.) This article is about a disinformation campaign that the US created in the Philippines, because China exported vaccines to the Philippines and other Asian countries. So, a different thing than what I was mad about, but it makes me wonder if the biased news reporting on China was more deliberate than I thought.

3. Environmental impact of LLMs (June 16) "This comparison is unimpressive on its face, because a bottle of water is very obviously not that much?"

Also from Siggy: Journal Club: Mental health bias on asexuality, non-monogamy, and BDSM (June 20) "This article summarizes prior research on mental health provider bias for three groups–aces, consensual non-monogamy (CNM) practitioners, and BDSM practitioners–and suggests avenues for future research."

4. US sues Adobe for hiding termination fees and making it difficult to cancel subscriptions (June 17, via) "The government says Adobe pushed consumers toward the 'annual paid monthly' subscription without informing them that canceling the plan in the first year would cost hundreds of dollars."

5. Thailand passes historic bill recognising marriage equality (June 18) Awesome!

6. China to include Australia in visa waiver programme, Premier Li Qiang says (June 18) Good news if you're Australian and want to visit China.

7. Gilead’s twice-yearly shot to prevent HIV succeeds in late-stage trial (June 20, via) "None of the roughly 2,000 women in the trial who received the lenacapavir shot contracted HIV." Great!

8. Maybe They Should Post The 10 Commandments In Mega-Churches? (June 20) [content note: child sexual abuse] "I’m not sure what even the slickest or sleaziest 'crisis management' firm can accomplish here."

9. Hey What If We Let People's Undocumented Husbands And Wives Stay In America? — Joe Biden (June 18) Support all immigrants!

10. Hundreds of Muslim pilgrims died in heat-stricken Hajj (June 21)

11. Pascal's Wager Triangle (June 17) "In contrast to Pascal's Wager Triangle, Pascal's Triangle Wager argues that maybe God wants you to draw a triangle of numbers where each one is the sum of the two numbers above it, so you probably should, just in case."

Kangaroos and Creationist Fan Theories

Kangaroo, with a baby kangaroo in its pouch. Image source.

Here's a fun video from Joel Duff: New Solution to the Marsupial Migration Problem? Divine Action vs Natural Laws. (Also, Duff's blog post, and the Slacktivist's post about it, The Long March Of The Koalas Revisited.) The video is 1 hour and 24 minutes long, and is probably only of interest to people who are obsessed with the details of young-earth creationism. I LOVED it, that's why I'm blogging about it here.

Basically, it's about this question: During the Flood, all of the land animals died, except for the ones on Noah's ark. [According to young-earth creationist ideology.] The bible says the ark eventually came to rest on Mount Ararat, and then from there all the animals dispersed. Now we see that Australia is home to many species of marsupials, while the rest of the world has placental mammals. How did this happen? Marsupials got off the ark and walked to Australia, and didn't stop anywhere along the way to establish populations in other places? All of the marsupial species walked from the Middle East to Australia, and none of the placentals did that? How on earth could that happen?

(Adding the caveat here that there are marsupial fossils in Antarctica, and also there are marsupials native to South America- so it's not *just* Australia. But mainly Australia.)

I used to be a young-earth creationist, and I don't remember ever hearing about this question back then. But wow, it's a good question! Why on earth is Australia full of marsupials, and other places aren't, if all the animals started out in the ark and dispersed from there?

(The fossil record adds another complication- because young-earth creationists believe that the overwhelming majority of the layers of fossils were deposited during the Flood. So, before the Flood, you have marsupials living in Australia- we know that's where they lived before the Flood, because we find fossils there deposited during the Flood. And then 2 of each "kind" of marsupial ["kind" has a specific meaning in young-earth creationism, it's similar to a genus or family- NOT a species] traveled from Australia to wherever Noah was. Then, the Flood came, and all the marsupials in Australia died. Then, after the Flood, the ones on Noah's ark came all the way back to Australia. That's a bit, uh, odd, right? Why do we see such continuity between the fossils found in a certain place, and the animal species that currently live in that place, if the Flood basically reset everything? After the Flood, the whole landscape of the earth would be completely different than before. So many layers of mud covering everything. Why would animals end up going back to the same places where they lived before the Flood?)

Thinking about it now, it feels to me like a case of "the writer of the 'Noah's ark' story just kind of glossed over the part." If you're going to have a global flood, it makes sense to say "Oh but what about the animals? Oh, we can save a male and female of each kind of animal, there ya go"- that's a first attempt to address the problem of how to save the animals, and the "Noah's ark" story doesn't go any deeper than that on this issue. (Maybe because it wasn't the point of the story!) But if you start to think about it, you realize the problem is MUCH more complicated than "save a male and female of each kind of animal." How do you gather the animals and get them all onto the ark? How do you feed them all during the Flood? How do you make sure that *none* of them die, and *all* of them reproduce? And how do they spread out to the whole world after the Flood, to the locations where we see these species of animals living today?

In Duff's video, he discusses a creationist article written by Graeme Taylor, Marsupials in Australia—an act of God?. (Duff does not believe in young-earth creationism, but he takes it extremely seriously, and his entire blog is about going through the little details of things found in the fossil record, etc, and asking whether it's possible to explain them from a young-earth perspective.) Taylor's article presents the idea that maybe God supernaturally directed all the marsupials to travel to Australia.

The way I see it, there are 4 possible young-earth creationist explanations for marsupials living in Australia:

1. Some natural explanation that makes you go "oh, that makes sense" for how all the marsupials would travel to Australia, while none of the placentals would. No one has come up with such an explanation.
2. The marsupials all just decided to cross mountain ranges and climb onto vegetation rafts that floated to Australia, for no real reason, just a wild coincidence. This is what most of the young-earth creationist scientists have been saying, and Taylor's article is challenging this and pointing out that it is very unrealistic.
3. The marsupials all decided to cross mountain ranges and climb onto vegetation rafts that floated to Australia, because God supernaturally made them want to do that. God intervened constantly during their journey, in small ways, to make sure they survived and arrived in Australia. This is the theory that Taylor presents in his article.
4. Maybe God just teleported them straight to Australia. There aren't any creationist scientists actually advocating this explanation, but Duff brings it up in his video and asks "why not?" If God was going to do a bunch of small miracles to help the marsupials along, all throughout their trip to Australia, why not just do one big miracle instead? Wouldn't that be easier?

Watching Duff's video, the thing that really strikes me is how, in Taylor's theory, God really really wants marsupials to live in Australia. God intervened in so many little ways, to make sure Australia's animals were different than animals you find elsewhere. This must have been really important to God, or else why would They go to all that effort, doing all those small miracles, overriding animals' instincts to not get on vegetation rafts floating out into the open ocean?

In explanations 1 and 2 (which I listed above), you don't have to believe that God really really wanted marsupials to live in Australia. In explanations 3 and 4, you do. And, like, why? Why was it so important to God that marsupials live in Australia, and not establish any other populations anywhere else along the way?

And even if you're fine with claiming "God just really really wanted Australia to be *different* and have marsupials," there's another problem, which Duff points out: What about the dinosaurs? Young-earth creationists believe that dinosaurs were on Noah's ark, but they all died out very soon afterward. Why? Wasn't the point of Noah's ark to save every kind of animal? Why would God do the work to ensure that 2 of every kind of dinosaur got on the ark, and then just let them die out anyway right after? If God is so invested in marsupials living in Australia, willing to do all these tiny little miracles to guide them on their journey and make sure they survive, then it must also be true that dinosaurs went extinct because God just really really wanted them to go extinct. What? What was the point of bringing them on the ark then? Is God just really bad at planning?

Actually, this question isn't just about obscure creationist fan theories. It's also about how God intervenes in the world now. Plenty of people claim that God healed them from this or that sickness- and what they mean is, God guided them to find doctors who were able to help them, etc. We don't have evidence of God doing *obvious* miracles (like my "explanation 4" above), like growing back amputated limbs.

When people pray and ask God for help, they expect that God will answer that prayer by doing a series of little, subtle "miracles", each of which is unremarkable by itself, but they add up to the result that God wanted. God causes you to be late for work because of traffic one day, and that causes you to meet someone who has some important effect on your life, and so on. People don't expect that they pray and then God answers with some glowing magic like in a Disney princess movie. But, why not? Wouldn't it be easier for God to just do 1 big miracle instead of a bunch of complicated small miracles?

And Duff brings this up in his video too. He says it's not just about Noah's ark, but it's about the nature of how God intervenes in the world, and all theists (including himself) have to think about this question. Yeah... I'm a Christian, so I have to think about this too.

Personally, my answer is that God does NOT intervene in the world. And the biggest reason that I believe this, is the existence of systemic racism and other systemic injustice. If I believe that God is doing all these little tiny things to help me because They have this elaborate plan and They really want me to get this or that job and meet this or that person, then I also have to believe that God really really wants black people to get denied mortgages, and not believed by their doctors, and pulled over by cops for no real reason, and sent to jail for drug use at higher rates than white people who are doing the same things. WTF? Why would God want that??? Not cool! So I just can't believe God intervenes at all. How could it be the case that "God has a plan" and God is always doing these intricate little actions to influence people and carry out the plan, and it adds up to a world with systemic injustice? WTF? 

(Which is basically the problem of evil.)

It's the same as the situation with the marsupials and the dinosaurs. If you believe God really wanted the marsupials to live in Australia, and did miracles to make sure this would happen, then you also have to believe God really wanted the dinosaurs to die.

In conclusion: I loved the video, and it's so delightful to imagine creationists doing the math about how far a kangaroo can hop in a day, and all of the other weird implications of this fan theory. But it goes deeper than that; it's about our beliefs about how God acts in the world now. Does God do big or small miracles? Does God avoid big obvious miracles because They want to allow people to not believe in Them? (This is the reasoning I have ALWAYS heard from Christians, but I don't buy it.) Does God have a specific "plan for your life"?

---

Related:

I used to be a young-earth creationist 

I Didn't Like the Ocean in "Moana" Because it was Too Much Like God

I Would Love to Know If God Intervened to Stop Covid From Spreading in Churches 

My Racist Personal Relationship with God

Does God Use Miracles To Take Sides?

Blogaround

1. 40-year ban on gay clergy struck down (May 1) "Without debate, General Conference has removed The United Methodist Church’s ban on the ordination of clergy who are 'self-avowed practicing homosexuals' — a prohibition that dates to 1984." Good news!

2. The Protest Derangement Class: A Response to John McWhorter (April 30) "We're back to just calling loud people violent. I truly don't understand how one person can milk a truly meaningless talking point for this long. I don't know how to keep responding to it, it's too dumb." (18-minute video)

3. How a beloved worship song became the theme song of Christian nationalism (May 1, via) The song is "How Great Is Our God" (youtube link) and I actually still really like this song, even though I'm ex-evangelical and I don't go to church. But yeah really gross to find out Christian nationalists are using this song.

4. China launches historic mission to retrieve samples from far side of the moon (May 4) Cool!

5. Alphabetical Cartogram (May 1) Very useful map from xkcd.

6. Man or Bear Discourse Might Feel Familiar to Atheists (May 4) "Being calm, rational people, the atheist community received this message thoughtfully, in its intended spirit, and took Rebecca's words into consideration during future interactions with-- I'M KIDDING, obviously that's not what happened at all." (12-minute video)

7. No, Paul Won’t Teach Seminaries of the Future through the Miracle of AI (April 29) "It’s Paul plus an imaginative recreations of what Paul might be like. If we take that part out, we just have the letters, and ChatGPT is not necessary for an encounter with Paul. If we add it in, we’re not engaging with Paul anymore."

8. The Supreme Court is breaking America’s faith in the law (April 29) "I truly believed that at least seven members of the court would take the potential failure of democracy as a proposition seriously enough that the partisan valence of this case went away. That didn’t happen."

9. Mr. Yuk (April 30) "He saw first-hand the impact of the lack of information on poisonings and decided to do something about it. He started collecting information on poisonous substances and filling it on these little index cards. He ended up accumulating information on roughly 9000 different substances, and by the 1950s he was the go-to poison expert."

10. All the time (May 6) "Holiness was distinct from goodness, distinct from love, or mercy, or justice, or patience, or presence. And it often seems to be — for my dad as for so many of his fellow Calvinist believers — something almost opposed to those other attributes."

11. Is China Ready for Hospice Care? (May 1) "Questions like how to broach the topic, with whom, and how to hold family meetings are all issues that require a soft touch. If family members are concealing a condition from the patient — a not uncommon practice in China — it is even more difficult to have these conversations."

12. 'Dance Your Ph.D.' winner on science, art, and embracing his identity (May 4, via) "'It means the time I did my kangaroo research,' says Menário Costa. 'But [it] also means the first time I lived as a gay man. It's the first time I lived as an immigrant, five years without going home. The time of reconnection to myself, of exploring my sexuality, of bridging these beautiful communit[ies].'"

13. Our Campus. Our Crisis. Inside the encampments and crackdowns that shook American politics. A report by the staff of the Columbia Daily Spectator. (May 4, via) "We had been briefed on what to do if we got swept by the police. The plan was to form two concentric circles: people of color on the inside, white people on the outside. We were informed that it’s harder for cops to arrest you if you’re sitting. So the plan was, once we knew cops were coming, to sit in your circle."

Blogaround

1. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, South African anti-apartheid leader, dies at 90 (posted December 26)

2. A couple of the replies on this Twitter thread- yes, this is so real. 

When I was a new mom at the ripe age of 22, I was terrified to love my baby too much else God would take her away. Because that's what he does to everything you might love more than him.

— Darcy, Sage Millenial 💗💜💙 (@Dragonfly_Darcy) December 28, 2021

You are definitely not the only one. The proof is the horrified look on my therapists face when I told her about sitting up at night watching my newborn sleep and begging god not to take him away from me, because technically god had that right and surely I didn’t deserve him.

— Em *only intersectional feminism pls* (@life_she_wrote) December 28, 2021

Personally I didn't experience this specific fear because fortunately I was way way out of evangelicalism by the time my baby was born. I wrote about it here: I'm SO HAPPY I Won't Be Praying During Childbirth.

3. And somewhat related: The Strange Sad Story of Olive Heiligenthal (posted 2020) [content note: child death] This happened 2 years ago, and I don't think I blogged about it back then, because it's just so sad. I have nothing but sympathy for the parents. If it was my child, I'd do anything, of course I would do anything, I would sell myself to any god or devil- even the kind of devil who judges your worthiness for miracles by how many people get emotionally worked-up at a big worship event and how far and wide your grief gets spread on the internet to be mocked.

4. Covid Diary: The world envies us (posted December 31) Here's a blogger in Australia talking about what the pandemic has been like there.

5. I'm a church pastor and here's the truth about my late-term abortion (posted 2016) "In those moments, Trump, who has never been pregnant and presumably has navigated this far in his life without undertaking any difficult, gut-wrenching, gray-area decisions, used my own pain — deep, deep pain — to advance his political agenda."

6. NASA’s Webb Telescope Reaches Major Milestone as Mirror Unfolds (posted January 9)

7. Grieving Extinct Species on All Saints Day (posted November 2) "A congregation could specifically lift up the names of the species that have gone extinct in their state and/or country. They could display pictures of them, light candles, and toll the bell to remember their passing." I really love this idea. I believe in a God who cares about animal species going extinct, and I believe that is something worth mourning. But also I can't imagine how any kind of remembrance for extinct species could actually happen in an actual church service- every time I try to picture it, I picture the congregation laughing, like it's a joke, like "can you believe they're having us talk about extinct animals in church? what a bunch of hippy nonsense LOLLLLL"... I would be really interested in going to a church where this kind of service could really happen without everyone laughing at it.

8. Bambi: cute, lovable, vulnerable ... or a dark parable of antisemitic terror? (posted December 25) "There is a sense at the end that Bambi and all the other wild animals in the forest are merely 'born to be killed'. They know they will be hunted – and they know they will die. 'The major theme throughout is: you don’t have a choice.'"

9. Also a lot of people have COVID. Seth Myers. Whoopi Goldberg. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Stay safe everyone, get your vaccines and boosters, and also let's work on building a society that protects those who are most at-risk from COVID.

Blogaround

A cat peeking out of a box that's wrapped in Christmas wrapping paper. Image source.

1. Wil Wheaton Wears ‘Star Trek’ Uniform To ‘Star Wars’ FOR REAL (posted December 15)

2. Women often can't avoid men who sexually harass them — and men are using it against them (posted December 13) [content note: descriptions of sexual harassment] "Women who are subjected to unwanted sexual advances in the workplace say they can't afford to burn bridges and often wind up leaving a trail of friendly messages behind them — continued contact that men later produce as evidence to dispute their accounts and cast doubt on their credibility."

3. Conservative Evangelicals Have Shown Me Who They Really Are (posted December 14) "Like conservatism in general, American evangelism often centered around the individual — an individual conversion experience; an individual, personal relationship with Jesus Christ; individual sin; individual repentance. Racism, then, was always a personal failing, and one that, by and large, didn’t seem to matter in comparison to the horror of abortion or the perceived impending threat of same-sex marriage. Addressing racism was just never a priority in the churches we attended, or on the radio, or in the Christian music we listened to. That there could be a form of Christian faith that recognized these injustices never occurred to me."

4. Red and Yellow, Black and White: Evangelicals Miss a Wakeup Call on Race (posted December 14) "The campaign demonstrated no understanding of why people were upset, only a tone deaf insistence that using racial slurs was okay because Moore was quoting from a popular evangelical song."

5. When You Don’t Know What You Believe at Christmas (posted December 11) "I know that I have spent nearly a month holding virtual space for stories of abuse within churches, my own included, and the very churches implicated in these many threads are as we speak greening the vestibule and practicing their carols and preparing for Christmas pageants that tell a story that is, at its heart, about believing women."

6. Some notes and rules for a Christmas music playlist (posted December 15) "We will know the proper balance has been restored when it’s routine for someone to hear a song by, perhaps, the Clash or Bob Marley, and say, 'Hey, this sounds kind of ‘brought down the powerful from their thrones-ish,’ is this a Christmas song?'"

7. Two Couples Have Exchanged Vows in Australia's First Same-Sex Weddings (posted December 17) Hooray!

8. Perfect Number Watches VeggieTales "Josh and the Big Wall" (posted December 20) The "lesson" in this VeggieTales movie is EXTREMELY BAD.