Over here of the David Klinghoffer of the Discovery Institute (an essentially Christian organization that promotes intelligent design and other religious objectives in public life) posts in his Kingdom of Priests column that gay marriage existed in ancient Canaan. He cites an ancient text called the Sifra that comments on the Book of Leviticus. Mr. Klinghoffer writes:
An ancient Biblical tradition, a midrash, relates that the Canaanites wrote marriage contracts between man and man and woman and woman, and that this was one reason the land "vomited" them up in favor of the Israelites who took their place. The historicity of this isn't the point. It's the moral that matters, having to do with the social impact of being libertarian about marriage combinations
Then here, he adds Egyptians into the gay marriage mix:
Some context: Leviticus 18 records the forbidden sexual relationships, including homosexual intercourse (v. 22). The list is prefaced with the statement, "Do not perform the practice of the land of Egypt in which you dwelled; and do not perform the practice of the land of Canaan to which I bring you, and do not follow their decrees" (18:3).
Sifra explains there about those "decrees": "And what did they do? A man would marry a man, and a woman would marry a woman."
The end of the chapter in the Bible warns, "[T]he inhabitants of the land who are before you committed all these abominations, and the land became contaminated. Let not the land disgorge you for having contaminated it, as it disgorged the nation that was before you" (v. 27-28).
It sounds like such things were also done in Egypt, but it was the decrees of Canaan sanctioning same-sex marriage and similar relationships that resulted in the Canaanites losing their land and dying out as a people.
Please note that the Egyptians were neither vomited from their land nor died out. Also please note that David Klinghoffer is not a liberal, anti-Christian fellow making the case that gay marriage existed in ancient times. As I noted in an earlier post, Theodosian Code, Roman legal text from the year 342 also strongly suggests that gay marriage existed in ancient Rome. And here is what Klinghoffer learns from this:
First, the institution of marriage is very ancient, and that by itself tells us something. A profound wisdom accumulates over the millennia, as generations discover the kind of institutions best suited for human beings. For thousands of years and across a multitude of cultures, people have agreed that marriage means the union of man with woman.
But according to Kilnghoffer’s own research, people did not agree. According to him, the Egyptians and the Canaanites did not agree. Further, if the Hebrews needed a law to stop Jews from engaging in same sex marriage, then not all of the Jews agreed. Why would you need to tell people not to do something if everyone has already agreed that they didn’t want to do it? He continues:
This consensus is enshrined in religious beliefs, revered by Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus alike. You can think of these beliefs as God-given, but you don't have to. You also can think of them as human discoveries.
Or we could think of this as laws reflecting personal bias. Let’s ignore for a second that Hindus have performed marriages between people and animals and between people and plants and note that the “consensus” Kilnghoffer refers to is just the majority agreeing that they are correct and that the tiny minority is wrong. The majority deciding they are better than the minority is hardly a “human discovery.” If history teaches us anything, it is when the majority realizes that it is in the wrong that true discovery takes place. Deciding that “most of us are like this; therefore, this is the way everyone should be” is a bias, not a discovery. The assumption that the way of the majority is the only correct way prevents discovery.
You want to know how you can tell that Kilnghoffer isn’t really serious about this “discovery” business? Read this:
Third, the integrity of moral tradition as a whole is at stake. Apart from its impact on family life, government endorsement of gay marriage undercuts other, seemingly unrelated beliefs about right and wrong, because those beliefs derive from the same authoritative source. It calls into question the whole authority and structure of traditional morality. Our confidence in this tradition gives us strength to face moral challenges in every area of life. Government-imposed gay marriage makes it harder for us all to be as good as we would wish.
You can tell because although he seemed to be suggesting that he likes “discovery,” he then says we shouldn’t shake our confidence in “beliefs” derived from an “authoritative source” or from “tradition.” Saying that we must keep our beliefs in traditions based on authoritative sources is the opposite of espousing discovery as a value. Kilnghoffer clearly does not believe that Jews, Christians, and Muslims came to anti-gay marriage stance via discovery. He clearly believes they came to it via “the same authoritative source,” i.e. the Books of Moses. Although Kilnghoffer would like to see as if he is arguing on a rational basis by implying that he believes that societies discovered that gay marriage was bad because they tried it out and found that it didn’t work for them, he knows very well that they come to this conclusion from reading and citing from the very same authoritative source that he cites.
We can also tell that Kilnghoffer is anti-discovery and pro-authority by noting that he doesn’t really believe that we’ve discovered new things about morality through the ages. He suggests that morals were discovered thousands of years ago and no knew discoveries have been made since. In no other field of study would one suggest that the researchers of ancient times discovered everything there was to discover and no knew discoveries of today were valid. Kilnghoffer appears to believe that the ancient Hebrews -- who bought and sold their wives and children, who kidnapped people who they conquered and forced them to be their sex slaves, who had multiple wives, who forced guys to marry their dead brothers’ wives, who had children with their slaves, who sold their slaves’ children -- figured out all the morality of marriage and the family and anything new like same sex marriage is silly because it runs counter the wisdom that ancient people figured out through their numerous marriage experiments. He seems to believe that unlike physics, music, dance, psychology, medicine, architecture, engineering, sociology, etc. etc. etc. everything that would ever be discovered about marriage was discovered thousands upon thousands of years ago. He does not believe that we’ve accumulated any wisdom on marriage since the ancient times that would add anything new to the field of study.
What he doesn’t explain, and none of the people who argue against gay marriage with the “accumulated wisdom of the ages” argument is why allowing gay marriage isn’t a response to our accumulated knowledge of marriage instead of a rejection of it. The Bible doesn’t say, “We tried gay marriage for a few decades, but we discovered that the birth rate so dropped significantly that we had negative population growth and the divorce rate among straight couples tripled.” If it did, then going forward with gay marriage would in fact be a rejection of accumulated wisdom on the subject. But there is no indication that the Bible’s negative statements on homosexuality are based on the discovery of social organ. Instead, we are told that the reason the Hebrews were opposed to homosexuality that they read that a guy wrote that some other invisible, magical guy said that homosexuals should be executed. This tells us that only wasn’t the Hebrew aversion based on an experiment in gay marriage, but that an experiment couldn’t possibly have been conducted because the participants would have been murdered before they could test the results.
Kilnghoffer suggests that because societies before us didn’t have gay marriage, our creation of gay marriage is a rejection of their accumulated knowledge on marriage. His logic would suggest that the launch of a rocket to the moon was not the product of accumulated knowledge but a rejection of that knowledge because the people before never launched rockets to the moon. Accumulating knowledge on a topic frequently allows you or even compels you to do things that people in the past could not or would not do.
All in all, Kilnghoffer’s thoughts on this subject are just a mishmash of inconsistent babblings that sprang from a belief that gay marriage was bad instead of any substantive research.
A German teen was hit on his hand by a meteorite!
That’s a favorite origin story in the Legion of Super Heroes. Meteor powers work into the origin of the original Colossal Boy, Satan Girl, and (my favorite) Fire Lad of the Legion of Substitute Heroes. What I love about Fire Lad’s origin is that he’s wearing a flame themed outfit and hairdo when he encountered the meteorite that gave him dragon-like breath. The Chlorophyll Kid was wearing a plant themed green outfit as a toddler when he fell into the vat of super fertilizer that gave him his plant growing powers.
Clearly, the trick to getting super powers is half being subjected to a strange occurrence and half wearing the right clothes. So far, there is no indication that Gerrit Blank has gained super powers from his run-in with the meteorite. If only Gerrit had been wearing the right Underoos the world would be a lot more interesting.
In this weird rambling discussion with Camille Paglia, the noted thinker says that she thinks the “Heather has two mommies” idea was created for parents, but telling a kid that both of the people raising him are his mothers would be needlessly confusing for the kid and subject him to teasing when he’s an adolescent. Ms. Paglia notes that she has adopted the son of her (now ex-) lesbian partner. “He’s my adopted son,” she says. But she thinks it would be confusing for her son to call her his mother. Am I the only one who thinks that’s more confusing?
And I don’t understand why saying “These are my two mommies” would subject a child to ridicule but saying “This is my mommy and the other woman is my co-parent who is not my mother” would allow the child to be accepted unconditionally. Surely, it is the fact that they are lesbians, not mommies, that will spark the teasing. It is homophobia, not mommyphobia, that people get teased about.
"We haven’t taken this to its ultimate conclusion. You got polygamy out there. How can we rule that polygamy is illegal when you say that homosexual marriage is legal. What is it about polygamy that’s different? Well, polygamy was outlawed because it was considered immoral according to biblical standards. But if we take biblical standards away in homosexuality, what about the other? And what about bestiality and ultimately what about child molestation and pedophilia? How can we criminalize these things and at the same time have constitutional amendments allowing same-sex marriage among homosexuals. You mark my words, this is just the beginning in a long downward slide in relation to all the things that we consider to be abhorrent."
Hey, Pat Robertson is lying about the Bible! That’s gotta be a sin, right? Let’s take a look at the lies!
First, polygamy was not outlawed because it was considered immoral by biblical standards. There is not one sentence in the Bible condemning polygamy. While the Bible has rules for everything from planting crops to what clothes to wear and rules on marriage, nowhere does God or a Prophet or Jesus or an Apostle ever say anything like “Thou shall not take more than one wife.” Never. Several heroes of the Bible had multiple wives, David & Solomon, for instance. In fact, in 2 Samuel 12:8, we are told that God gave David his wives. If it is a sin to have multiple wives, why would God give multiple wives to David? The arguments that Christians use to say that the Bible is against polygamy (an argument they made only after polygamy went out of style) are:
1. The Bible frequently speaks of a husband and wife without using the plural, which doesn’t really say much given that it also frequently refers to husbands with multiple wives.
2. Multiple wives are sometimes shown as causing problems in Biblical stories; however, they aren’t always. For instance, the first mention of polygamy is in Genesis 4:19: “Lamech married two women.” And that’s about it. No suggestion that anything was done wrong or that any problems arose from this polygamous marriage.
3. In the New Testament, 1 Timothy 3:2, 12 and Titus 1:6 give “the husband of one wife” in a list of qualifications for spiritual leadership. But it doesn’t say that having more than one wife is a sin. Still some have read this to mean the following:
While these qualifications are specifically for positions of spiritual leadership, they should apply equally to all Christians. Should not all Christians be “above reproach ... temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money” (1 Timothy 3:2-4)? If we are called to be holy (1 Peter 1:16), and if these standards are holy for elders and deacons, then they are holy for all.
That doesn’t really hold water. Both St. Paul (I Cor. 7: 1-11) and Jesus said it was better not to marry at all (Matt 19: 10-12)! So the idea that the Bible can be seen as anti-polygamy from 1 Timothy 3:2, 12 and Titus 1:6 doesn’t really hold water unless we also say the Bible is anti-marriage because of I Cor. 7: 1-11 and Matt 19: 10-12!
In short, the arguments are bullshit.
The second lie is that there is some biblical law against child molestation and pedophilia. Again, there is not one sentence in the Bible saying that children should not be one’s sex partners. Nowhere does the Bible set a minimum age for sex or a biological minimum (i.e. after puberty). As for “molestation,” let’s note that the Bible had no problem with selling children into sexual slavery (Ex. 25: 2-11) and Moses (Num. 31) had no problem telling his soldiers to kill all their male captives (i.e. little boys) and non-virgin women while handing over the virgin girls over to them as sex slaves. Interesting fun fact: Moses was prevented from entering into the Promised Land as a punishment from God because Moses hit a rock to make water come out of it instead of speaking to the rock as God commanded, not because he order the murder of innocent women and boys or handed virgin girls over to their families’ murderers as sex slaves. Yeah, I’m guessing that the prevention of the molestation of children was not the highest priority of the Bible.
So let’s recap. The Bible had no problem with polygamy or child molestation or pedophilia. It is kind of anti-marriage if Jesus and St. Paul are to be taken at their word. But Pat Robertson suggests that if you take biblical principles out of marriage, people will be screwing goats. And that, dear reader, is why Pat Robertson is a lying fear-monger.
Oh, all right, this isn’t really news but it was news to me.
There is a fire pit from Apokolips on earth!
Well, not quite, but it’s not far from it.
Derweze underground is rich in natural gas. In 1971, during a drilling, geologists accidentally found an underground cavern filled with natural gas. The ground on which the drilling rig was placed collapsed, leaving a large gaping hole exposed with a diameter of about 50-100 meters. To avoid poisonous gases coming out of the hole, it was decided to let the gases burn. As of 2009, gases in the underground cavern are still burning without interruption. Locals have named the cavern The Door to Hell.
So there is a rational explanation for the place, but don’t you half wish there wasn’t? If the dolphin’s foiling a pirates was the comic booky thing I’ve ever seen, this eternal fire pit is the most comic booky place. Of course, if this place was out of a comic book, we’d be seeing demons climbing out of it or our heroes being thrown into so maybe it’s all for the best.
Hey, look at this CristianNewsWire and Robert Peters, President, Morality in Media:
Connecting the Dots: The Link Between Gay Marriage and Mass Murders
It most certainly is not my intention to blame the epidemic of mass murders on the gay rights movement! It is my intention to point out that the success of the sexual revolution is inversely proportional to the decline in morality; and it is the decline of morality (and the faith that so often under girds it) that is the underlying cause of our modern day epidemic of mass murders.
OK, now let’s look at a couple of myths.
Myth #1: The United States is becoming less and less moral.
Bullshit. First of all let’s note that expanding rights for women and racial minorities has been taken place at the same time as the expansion of rights for gay people. Does anyone one want to come out and say our more racist/sexist society of the past was more moral than the one we have now?
Second, if the US were becoming less moral and more likely to become murders, certainly, we’d see a rise in crime in general and murder specifically while the gay rights movement has been growing. So let’s take a look at the truth from the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics:
Those charts don’t suggest that the US has become more criminal, less moral lately do they? If anything, one would have to say that the US has become more moral lately. So if Robert Peters wants to connect the dots, shouldn’t he be finding that gay marriage and gay rights have increased morality and decreased crime?
Myth #2: Christianity makes people more moral.
You can see in this entry of my blog that religion does not seem to be connected to morality in the US. There we found that when compared to the least religious states in the US, the most religious states in the US:
rape was 2.3% more frequent.
robbery was 13.3% more frequent.
violent crime was 16.0% more frequent.
property crime was 22.8% more frequent.
murder was a whopping 27.9% more frequent.
And the trend continues throughout the world. Below is an excerpt from a Slate article by Steve Chapman entitled Praise the Lord, Pass the Ammo:
The United States is the most religious of all the industrialized nations. Forty-four percent of Americans attend church once a week, compared with 27 percent in Britain, 21 percent in France, 16 percent in Australia, and 4 percent in Sweden. Yet violent crime is not less common in the United States--it's more common. The murder rate here is six times higher than the rate in Britain, seven times higher than in France, five times higher than in Australia, and five times higher than in Sweden. Japan, where Christianity has almost no adherents, has less violent crime than almost any country. There are a few advanced nations that have high rates of church attendance and low rates of violent crime--Ireland, Italy, and Belgium--but they're the exceptions.
Within the 50 states, there is no evidence that a God-fearing populace equals a law-abiding populace. The Bible Belt has more than its share of both praying and killing. Louisiana has the highest churchgoing rate in the country, but its murder rate is more than twice the national average. The same pattern generally holds in the rest of the South. Tom DeLay's Bible-toting state of Texas has a murder rate triple that of Massachusetts, which is "ungodly" enough to have elected two openly gay members of Congress. New York, the very symbol of godless depravity, is perfectly average when it comes to extralegal slaughter. In Washington state, where Sunday morning slugabeds are more common than anywhere else in America, murder is 38 percent less common.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that Christianity causes crime. I’m just saying there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that it prevents crime. And let’s go further and say that there doesn’t appear to be any connection between adding gay marriage to a society and an increase in murder.
What we might be able to find is a connection between irrationally fearing gays and being willing to lie about them.
A woman dropping off churchgoers at a nursing home on Sunday was shot by an arrow in the Bronx! Really! An arrow in 21st century New York!
How the hell does something like that happen? One of the answers below is the real one!
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It was bound to happen once Bullseye became the new Hawkeye.
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Some dick was showing off with his friends and shot the arrow through his fence and didn’t bother to see what happened with it even after hearing the woman he shot screaming.
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Oops! Roy “Speedy” Harper's aim is off for ... umm ... some reason.
You can probably guess which is the real answer, but if you’re anything like me, you had a more colorful (green? red?) answer in mind when you first saw the story.
An enormous pod of Dolphins foiled the plot of Somali pirates, and it isn’t the plot of an Aquaman comic! Are you kidding me? Seriously, this is the most comic booky thing I’ve ever read. I can hear Aquaman saying, “See? I told you I wasn’t useless!”
Thousands of dolphins block Somali pirates
BEIJING, April 14 (Xinhuanet) -- Thousands of dolphins blocked the suspected Somali pirate ships when they were trying to attack Chinese merchant ships passing the Gulf of Aden, the China Radio International reported on Monday.
The Chinese merchant ships escorted by a China's fleet sailed on the Gulf of Aden when they met some suspected pirate ships. Thousands of dolphins suddenly leaped out of water between pirates and merchants when the pirate ships headed for the China's.
The suspected pirates ships stopped and then turned away. The pirates could only lament their littleness befor the vast number of dolphins. The spectacular scene continued for a while.
China initiated its three-ship escort task force on Dec. 26 last year after the United Nations Security Council called on countries to patrol gulf and waters off Somalia, one of the world's busiest marine routes, where surging piracy endangered intercontinental shipping.
China's first fleet has escorted 206 vessels, including 29 foreign merchant vessels, and successfully rescued three foreign merchant ships from pirate attacks.
About 20 percent of Chinese merchant ships passing through the waters off Somalia were attacked by pirates from January to November in 2008, before the task force was deployed.
A total of seven ships, either owned by China or carrying Chinese cargo and crew, were hijacked.
Tianyu No. 8, a Chinese fishing vessel with 16 Chinese and eight foreign sailors aboard, was captured by Somali pirates on Nov. 14 and released in early February.
The second fleet of Chinese escort ships arrived at the Gulf of Aden on Monday to replace the first fleet.
(Xinhua and Cri contributed to the story)
Remember that scene in the Swamp Thing where our hero caused that tomato from that crook's sandwich to sprout inside of him, killing him in a really disgusting manner? You do if you read it! Creepy!
Yeah, well some guy in Russia has a spruce sprouting from his lungs. Really!
Russian doctors find tree growing in man's lung
MOSCOW, April 13 (RIA Novosti) - Surgeons in Russia's Urals Region were staggered to find a 5-centimeter high spruce growing inside a man's lung, the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily reported on Monday.
The discovery was made while Artyom Sidorkin, 28, from the Urals city of Izhevsk, was undergoing surgery.
Sidorkin had complained of extreme pain in his chest and had been coughing up blood, doctors suspected cancer.
"I blinked three times and thought I was seeing things," Izhevsk surgeon Vladimir Kamashev told the paper.
Medical staff believe Sidorkin had somehow inhaled a seed, which later sprouted inside his lung. The spruce, which was touching the man's capillaries and causing severe pain, was removed.
"It was very painful. But to be honest I did not feel any foreign object inside me," Sidorkin said.
Boy, but does this sound like a comic book origin:
By Clara Moskowitz
updated 10:34 a.m. CT, Wed., March. 18, 2009
A small bat that was spotted blasting off with the space shuttle Sunday and clinging to the back side of Discovery's external fuel tank apparently held on throughout the launch.
NASA hoped the bat would fly away before the spacecraft's Sunday evening liftoff, but photos from the launch now show the bat holding on for dear life throughout the fiery ride.
"He did change the direction he was pointing from time to time throughout countdown but ultimately never flew away," states a NASA memo obtained by SPACE.com. "Infrared imagery shows he was alive and not frozen like many would think ... Liftoff imagery analysis confirmed that he held on until at least the vehicle cleared [the] tower before we lost sight of him."
You can see the rest of the story here.
In real life, it poor thing probably was incinerated after falling through the shuttle’s exhaust, but a comic book reality, I think we can assume that one of the following would have happened:
It would become a humanoid bat.
It would cosmically fuse with the rocket to become a mechanical missile bat.
It would become gigantic bat beast that would attack Tokyo.
But the poor thing is probably dead, which is why comic book reality is better … so long as you wouldn’t miss Tokyo.
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