When last we heard from Rhawn Joseph, he was playing with photoshop and trying to sell off his online journal, the Journal of Cosmology. The Journal of Cosmology has been plugging away, claiming to have found bacteria in meteorites and then diatoms in meteorites — give them a blurry, vague photo of some shapeless blob, and they’ll claim it looks just like something biological on Earth. Either that, or they’ll photoshop my head on to it.

Rhawn Joseph’s latest struggle: he’s suing NASA for suppressing evidence of life on Mars. His evidence is this pair of photos taken by the Mars Opportunity rover, 12 days apart, and released by NASA.

Look! There’s a rock in the later picture that wasn’t there earlier! How did it get there? NASA’s explanations were first, speculation that it could be a meteorite, but now they seem to think that it was most likely flicked by the rover itself, as it was making a turn. That sounds reasonable to me.

But not to Rhawn Joseph! We’re missing the most obvious “fact” of all, that what appeared in the later photo was no rock at all, but a mushroom. He demands that NASA investigate thoroughly, using the power of a legal writ.

In Re RHAWN JOSEPH’S PETITION FOR A WRIT OF MANDAMUS COMPELLING NASA TO PERFORM A DUTY TO THOROUGHLY SCIENTIFICALLY EXAMINE AND INVESTIGATE A PUTATIVE BIOLOGICAL ORGANISM ON MARS IDENTIFIED/DISCOVERED BY PETITIONER AND REFERRED TO BY NASA AS: “UNLIKE ANYTHING WE HAVE SEEN BEFORE.”

How can you doubt it? He has since published his results in a “scientific journal” — his own online website — complete with side-by-side photos of the Martian Funny-Looking-Rock and earthly apothecia.

The “mysterious” bowl-like structure which appeared on Mars does not resemble a rock or a meteor, but a lichen fungus which on Earth is known as “Apothecia.” A magnification of the structure Sol 3540 reveals the presence of numerous “paraphyses” which are spore producing organs of Apothecium. On Earth Apothecia are commonly observed on rocks, tree limbs, or growing on the ground next to open road. Related species are known by a variety of names, such as Eastern Speckled Shield Lichen (Punctellia Bolliana). The term “shield lichen” is applied to a variety of foliose lichens. An important characteristic is their bowl-shaped growth with brown inner surfaces. These bowl shaped structures are “apothecia” and appear basically identical to the “mystery” structure depicted in Sol 3540 but which NASA wishes the public to believe is a rock or meteor which suddenly sprouted on this slab of Martian real estate.

In case you missed the similarity, here’s a photo of the Mars FLR with big red arrows and bold text pointing to the “paraphyses” — you know, just in case the visual similarity might not be as strong as Joseph claims.

Joseph says that if you “magnify” the image the similarities to the paraphyses of apothecia are even more apparent, which is kind of amusing: you can’t magnify the raw pixel data. All the information you get is right there. You can make it larger, but that’s not at all the same as increasing resolution.

I have used all the powers bestowed upon me with my Ph.D. to squint even harder than Rhawn Joseph at that rock, and I’m sorry, it’s a rock. It’s not a fungus or a lichen or a Happy Meal toy or Rhawn Joseph’s lost marbles, and if you look at the raw image rather than one that Joseph has pseudocolored to tint it green, it doesn’t look particularly biological.

Also, NASA already seems quite happy to investigate further.

Mr Squyres said scientists believe the rock, named "Pinnacle Island," got there when the aging rover did a pirouette turn in the dusty Martian soil and knocked loose a chunk of bedrock that rolled a short distance downhill.

"We think that in the process of that wheel moving across the ground, we kind of flicked it, kind of tiddly winked it out of the ground and it moved to the location where we see it," Mr Squyres said.

Still, scientists have not found the divet the rock would have left behind. They think it is hidden beneath one of the rover’s solar arrays.

The Opportunity team plans to manuever the robotic vehicle around a bit more to see if they can find the spot from which the rock emerged.

As to why it is such an unusual color [it's a darker red than the surface], Mr Squyres said it may be that humans are witnessing a surface that has not been exposed in a very, very long time.

"It appears that it may have flipped itself upside down," he said.

"If that is the case, what we are seeing is we are seeing the surface, the underside of a rock, that hasn’t seen the Martian atmosphere for perhaps billions of years."

Already, an analysis of the rock with the Opportunity’s spectrometer has shown a "strange composition, different from anything we have seen before," he told reporters.

The rock has a lot of sulphur, along with very high concentrations of manganese and magnesium.

"We are still working this out. We are making measurements right now. This is an ongoing story of discovery," he said.

Ah, but I think you see the real problem: NASA has used data from other instruments on the rover to come to a conclusion that differs from Rhawn Joseph’s far-fetched speculation of Martian mushrooms.

Why a band of American heathens is fighting to protect atheists — and ...
Religion News Service
Back in 2012, we learned of this case in Indonesia where a young man had been arrested for posting on Facebook that he was an atheist along with cartoons and criticisms of Islam. CFI has been represented at the United Nations since 2006, so we spend a ...

and more »

ibtimes

American Atheists' Super Bowl Billboard Makes Fun of 'Hail Mary' Prayer
Christian Post
Managing Director Amanda Knief noted that people of all religions, as well as atheists, come together during the Super Bowl, and noted that the organization, one of the biggest secular ones in the country, is excited to be part of the event. The ...
Atheists mock “Hail Mary” in Super Bowl billboardPatheos (blog)

all 2 news articles »

Christian Post
Atheist Lawmaker Introduces Bill Ending Church Property Tax Exemption; Says ...
Christian Post
State Senator Ernie Chambers (D-Omaha), an atheist, said at a Nebraska Revenue Committee meeting last week that he believes his new bill, Legislative Bill 675, will help ease the tax rates of Nebraska citizens by requiring churches and religious ...

and more »

Faith Swap: Christian and atheist exchange lives for one month
ChristianToday
Premier Christian Radio has organised a unique experiment that allows two friends to find out just that; an atheist and a Christian have swapped their religious daily commitments for a month. This January, comedians Simon Capes and Bentley Browning ...

This is a bad week for me, encumbered with a lot of search committee work, a genetics exam, and agonizing distractions like Chris Hedges. Also, I hear the speech was really long. So I’ve completely skipped it, and instead trust Charles Pierce’s digest. I guess it was competent, had a few moments of clarity and passion, and neatly avoided some of the more unpleasant aspects of the Obama presidency, like drone strikes, the growing police state and violations of privacy, and pipelines exploding to my north. As was expected.

Actually, I thought the most interesting fact of the whole evening of political hoo-ha was the number 4. The Republicans put up four loons to reply to the president’s remarks. Not one unified front, but four.

I don’t need to listen to them to see the signs that the Republican party is breaking apart right now.

My delightful evening of fun and intellectual stimulation continues shortly, with a guest lecture on my campus from Chris Hedges, who threatens to berate atheists with his typical ignorance. I’m hoping for full-bore hand-waving purple-faced screaming, but otherwise, it’s going to be a failure of a night.

I’ll try to live-blog it, if he says anything interesting.

His introduction is all about his Harvard Divinity School professor’s experiences in Nazi Germany, and how Christianity was coopted by fascists, which led to his book, Christian Fascists, and his concern with the origins of totalitarianism. He also talks about how megachurches absorb people into the fold, and the nonsense at the Creation Museum.

Then he debated Harris and Hitchens. He was upset and angry at how Dawkins and Dennett and Harris and Hitchens replicated the authority structures of the Christian Right. What?

7:45. Suddenly we’re talking about genocide in Serbia. Where’s the connection to the atheists?

Now he says that like like the Christian Right, atheists can only argue against a caricature of religion: they haven’t studied theology! They have gods of reason and science. And this meme stuff is an example of the misuse of science, reflecting the desire of atheists to engineer ideas, and control the way people think.

He really doesn’t like Sam Harris, quoting him on torture and nuking Islamists. I know this would surprise Hedges, but there are an awful lot of atheists who dislike Harris’s ideas, too.

But no: both atheists and the Christian Right embrace the dehumanization of Muslims. We do? I keep hearing things that I reject, being told that this is what I believe to be a New Atheist.

Weird. Now we’re being told of the bizarre practices of Christian Right anti-abortion activists. What drives people into these movements is despair. Relevance? I don’t know. It seems he doesn’t have enough horrible stories about totalitarian atheists so he has to drag in tales of the religious to tar us with their sins.

The New Atheists misuse Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution. It’s not a theory about politics or culture, and Dawkins and EO Wilson abuse it to make false claims about society. What? The Dawkins who has said that selection is an inappropriate ideal for human behavior? Freakish. And now he has brought up Social Darwinism. He’s sounding a bit like the loons at the Discovery Institute.

The New Atheists believe that evolution is linear and directed towards a goal and that we believe in using it to justify genocide.

Religion is not irrational, but it is non-rational. Jebus, Hedges, focus. Make an argument and back it up. This is rambling nonsense.

8:05. My brain hurts. This is stupid. Now he’s chewing out science for fracking and global warming and pollution, and blames it on the corporate state. Fine. Do atheists align with the corporate state? Does any of this have anything to do with his thesis?

New Atheists see evil as something outside themselves that must be eradicated and that evil is largely Muslim.

Fundamentalists readily embrace violence, just like Sam Harris, therefore atheists are fundamentalists. How can I possibly defeat such lucid logic?

8:15. I don’t much like Sam Harris. Harris rather detests me. It’s getting a bit old hearing some horrible thing Harris said being pinned on atheists, including me, as a class…by a guy who’s berating atheists for demonizing groups of people.

We seem to be closing with some babble about transcendance and the struggle with the irrational and the need for the sacred, whatever the hell that is. And we get to the heart of his problem: atheists are knocking down his cherished presumptions, and replacing then with squalid monuments to ourselves…which is a form of idolatry.

8:20. He’s blathering incoherently through the Q&anp;A now. This talk has been such a mess of misconceptions and rambling nonsense that I can’t even think of a question. It’s the same feeling I get when I’m at a creationist talk: it’s wrong from word one, so where do you start?

There were two places where Hedges totally lost me with his bullshit false equivalencies. Well, more than two — but these were the big ones.

• Just as the Christian fascists abuse the bible, the atheists abuse evolution. Dawkins argues for a linear, progressive, utopian version of evolution. Total crap. Dawkins has been quite clear that natural selection is a “clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel” process, and not at all desirable as a model for human relations. Hedges argument relied entirely on misrepresenting what atheist evolutionists have said.

• Christian fascists have totalitarian authority structures, just like the New Atheists. I just wanted to ask, what authority structures in atheism? He spent a lot of time railing against Dawkins and Hitchens and Harris; one of those three is dead, and the other two are single individuals who’ve written books. I remember attending a Hitchens lecture in which he presented his odious anti-Muslim views, and the audience booed him. These guys are not our rulers. Hedges has simply inflated his animus against a few individuals into a broad brush characterization of every atheist.

It was infuriating.

Which of these things is not like the others?

1. The North Star, the abolitionist newspaper established by Frederick Douglass?

2. The North Star STEM Alliance, an undergraduate organization that gives minorities research opportunities?

3. The North Star, Polaris, an important navigational guide in the Northern Hemisphere?

4. The Morris Northstar, a right wing newspaper run by wackaloons at the University of Minnesota Morris who hate equal opportunity laws?

It’s (d). It’s an embarrassment.

I just got back from the campus police, where I was read my Miranda rights and recorded giving a statement, because the Geiger cranks have apparently made a formal complaint, accusing me of stealing their rags and adding a new charge, that I’d vandalized the latest edition, scribbling an “str” on the cover to change “right-to-life” to “right-to-strife”. So I also had to leave a handwriting sample.

It’s gone well past ridiculous. Singling me out as a scapegoat (I am not alone in my contempt for their awful paper), making baseless criminal accusations, wasting the time of the university police and lawyers…this is now in the territory of harassment.

Dan Phelps, president of the Kentucky Paleontological Society, will participate in an “extended interview” with Terry Mortenson of Answers in Genesis. The participants will discuss the question, “Is teaching creationism harmful to children, society?” at 11:00 a.m., Eastern Standard Time, Thursday, January 30, on WEKU of Richmond, Kentucky. It looks like you can get it streaming. I will refrain from noting that modern journalism thinks there are two sides to every question, even when there... Matt Young http://www.mines.edu/~mmyoung

Two creationist camps, both alike in dignity, in fair America, where we lay our scene, from ancient grudge break to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. Not that they were ever very civil to begin with.

The Discovery Institute snipes at Answers in Genesis, suggesting that the Nye-Ham debate is going to humiliate the science side and also clarify the difference between Intelligent Design creationism and Overtly Religious creationism; Ken Ham fires back at the Discovery Institute, arguing that ID fails to lead people to the One True God.

This can only end in blood, we hope. Or poison.

Yeden.deviantart.com

This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly.

Status: Heavily Moderated; Previous thread

Man, that guy was ahead of the curve on everything. Here he is singing about a woman’s place.

Watch this video for a rather nauseating perspective on American gun culture. Whatever you do, though, don’t think about the fact that the dorks so earnestly firing their weapons in this video are showing you their “O” face, as I did — it just makes it even more icky.

So what sells this ammo is its viciousness? Sweet.

Of course, if you read the source I got it from, a military guy criticizing the dumb people who will buy this crap, you’ll also realize that its claims about the properties of their bullet are physically contradictory and obviously false. But that doesn’t matter if your market is gun-fondling idiots!

Atheist Bill Maher Criticized for Calling God 'Psychopathic Mass Murderer'
Christian Post
Atheist and comedian Bill Maher recently made the shocking comment that there is "no more psychopathic mass murderer than God." Maher, who is known by many to make intentionally controversial comments relating to religion, received criticism on social ...

You're Not Agnostic, You're An Atheist
Huffington Post
It isn't surprising that young adults in my generation have their questions about God, especially when you consider Pew's study results are showing 38 percent of atheists are aged 18-29. But what does surprise me is how stumped the self-proclaimed ...

Atheists Seeking Followers
Huffington Post
Additionally, just before the Christmas holiday, a congregation of atheist announced their presence in Nashville. This worldwide group, founded in London, has established a small community in Nashville that gathers weekly for fellowship, lectures and ...
The a-wordDuke Chronicle

all 3 news articles »

An atheist photographer focuses on faith
CNN (blog)
But I do know this: Even an ardent atheist can look at a house of worship and see the signs of an invisible human longing that is common to us all, believer and unbeliever alike. Mark Schacter is a photographer based in Ottawa, Canada. Mark's newest ...

Pete Seeger has died. No, I said that wrong — read that amazing obituary, and you realize that Pete Seeger has lived.

Just for the contrast, the NY Times also has an interview with the odious Tom Perkins, who is now equating the 1% with the people who are creative…while flaunting a $300,000+ watch.

I look at Seeger. I look at Perkins. I look at Seeger again.

And I wonder, who is going to kill fascism now?

Dharma Forest

An atheist's love letter to religion
Miami Student
“The Book of Mormon” manages to satirize, offend, evoke laughter, make powerful statements on religion and be heartwarming and irreverent simultaneously. The show brings in an average of $19.5 million every month, making it the most successful musical ...

and more »