"Jesus Was A Real Person"

... well... sort of.

Clearly the foundation of Christian thought is that Jesus was real and he brought in some new covenant or another, which made, for the first time, the meek more important than the rich and powerful... whilst telling everyone to hate their families and give away all their wealth.

They're the basics of what I've gleaned from the Christians and their New Testament. If I'm misrepresenting it it's probably on purpose.

The thing is though that Jesus was by no means the most caring and kind person in history, and on top of that he wasn't the most real... but there was someone who was.

His name wasn't even Jesus, it was Urukagina of Lagash, and he was around in the 24th Century BCE, not the 1st Century CE.

He was a Mesopotamian, who ruled under the divine authority of Ningursu (Ningirsu) , the god of Lagash, it could be argued that he was Ningursu's son, in the same way that the Emperor of Japan is regarded as a divine being. So we have yet another challenger to the moniker 'Son of God'.

Urukagina founded the earliest known formal Code of Laws, setting into law the sorts of things that Christians like to claim Jesus supported:-

Urukagina made certain that the meek inherited the Earth... or at least, he made sure that rich folk couldn't force them from their own land, or force them to sell it. Nor could the rich force the poor to sell any of their belongings, livestock or grain against their will. Also, when the rich did buy from the poor they could only do so if they paid in silver (cold hard cash), and not offer favours, future services, or any other form of promissory payments.

Urukagina also made widows and orphans exempt from taxes and cast the money-lenders from the temples... or, rather he protected the poor from exploitation by the priesthood, by ensuring that they did not have to pay any funeral costs... including the costs of any ritual offerings. The king also made certain that families who were enslaved by the rich through debt would be freed from this sort of bondage.

Urukagina also made laws banning corrupt practices by court and palace officials and he placed heavy limits on the use of capital punishment, favouring fines and incarceration over death penalties which he regarded as being ill-favoured by his god.

Altogether Urukagina was a kind and caring king whose actions set the tone for the more modern Jesus character, some 2300 years before Jesus was created; around the time that Moses was supposed to have been given the Ten Commandments by Yahweh... which he then dropped and broke so Yahweh was forced to create an entirely new set of stone tablets with noticeably different commandments on them.

It is therefore well known that these sorts of sweeping reforms were already possible, so the sorts of things Jesus did was in no way unique, or particularly special.

King Urukagina of Lagash... a.k.a. The Real Jesus, c.2360BCE

The Evolutionary Road to the Present and Beyond

WARNING: THIS IS A LONG POST. 

READ IT IN BITS, OR GET A COFFEE AND DIG IN!

I am frequently amused, and often appalled, at the Creationists who come on twitter claiming that "evolutionists" are living in a fantasy world if they believe we evolved from a common ancestor to monkeys. Let that sink in for a minute... Creationists, who believe that a magic sky-daddy poofed the universe and the Earth into existence at the same time and created every living thing on the Earth, including us, his special creation, believe that we live in a fantasy world.

Amazing!

We get everything from the classic line born out of sheer ignorance of the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, or TOE for short: "If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?"

Oh for flip's sake... really? Almost all bisections of the animal tree occur because of some sort of physical separation. So in our case the most likely scenario is that a large number of the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees got separated from the others in their group... we can speculate how to our heart's content... and their evolution, due to the change in their environment, possibly a once arboreal species now found itself on flat lands instead, came as a result of needing to adapt to the new conditions, or die.

This evolution took millions of years... as did the evolution of the rest of the species on the other side of the divide.

That ancestor is now extinct through necessity. A species cannot evolve en masse and keep the exact traits of its former self. That's just basic evolution 101.

 The other one they now seem to be focusing on is: "There is proof of microevolution and that fits in with our 'theory' of species being able to adapt, but no macroevolution has ever been observed so that cannot be true!"

These, and I'm struggling to not call them imbeciles, cannot [or will not] get their head around the fact that in science the terms macroevolution and microevolution simply have no weight at all. No true scientists use those words. Creationists should know this, because they send enough people on scholarships to proper university biology courses so that they can proclaim that an increasing number of evolutionary biologists [aka their plants] support Creationism. On those courses they are told that these terms are invalid.

On that last point they are correct, though as someone pointed out Pluto takes over 200 years to do one orbit of the Sun, but how can we prove that it does given that we live for a maximum of 120 years?

We extrapolate data from what we see in the laboratory, and these days we use DNA evidence to support the theory. We don't even need the 250,000 fossils we have to prove anything. The DNA supports our theory perfectly.

I often wonder how these people think, but then I read the webpages they point me to and realize that for the most part they don't think. They parrot off the stuff they hear at church, which is in turn parroting stuff that people like Ken Ham dream up between snorts of cocaine and threesomes with hookers in desert road motels. Perhaps I'm being too harsh there, but you know these people aren't straight arrows, and most of them aren't even happy about not being straight.

Think of a a hundred miles... what is a single mile made of? Yards and inches. And each inch is made up of sixteenths. So, we know that a sixteenth exists because we can see it. We know the inch exists, because we can see that too. But, imagine that the hundred miles ahead of us is over bumpy ground, so we lose sight of it every so often. Got it?

If you're happier you can use metric.

OK. So we can look down that road for maybe four hundred yards, then the road dips. We can see the equivalent of say, 2300 years of our history before the road dips for a while and pops up at about the 3500 year mark. This happens over and over along this road.

As an example. We get to see snippets of our past laid out on each of the sixteenths of the inches which make up this road. "Macroevolution" is the same as "microevolution" in the same way that this fictional road is the same as the sixteenths of inches which make it up. As each bit of the road comes into view we get a view of our past and we get to examine that to work out what could possibly have happened in the dips. In the past we had to dig up bits of that history and examine the finds. Such as dinosaurs and human settlements and geological samples. We would search caves, deserts, meadows and mountains trying to find examples of things lost to the earth over vast swathes of time. On that point, just as an aside, we do know how long it takes for earth to cover stuff, so we can roughly date a find according to how far down we had to dig for it.

I know I'm labouring that point a little but you know that not everyone gets this stuff the first time around.

It takes a great deal of skill to work out what we're seeing when we find a dinosaur fossil, or part thereof. It's not guesswork as some of the Creationists will tell you. It's careful examination, recreation and experimentation. As technology has improved we can now use computer data to recreate these creatures, based on careful anatomical examination. We use microscopes to determine all sorts of features unseen to our unaided eyes. Not one single scientist working today gets away with just guessing stuff.

Even Professor Richard Dawkins has to present his work to other scientists for them to hack it to bits when it deserves to be. Yet Creationists laugh at Dawkins for his proposition that there was once a collection of land masses known as Pangaea, and that through a process of separation and drifting the continents moved away from one another to where they are today.

I am really not sure how Creationists can justify their position on this idea of Pangaea, because we know that the continents are still moving today and we measure the distances between them occasionally to make doubly sure. If we work backwards from the now and use the rate and direction of the continents' drift to calculate the position of each in the distant past we get Pangaea. It's really that simple.

Also, another side note, doesn't the Bible refer to land being a single mass which was separated by rivers and oceans? Isn't that a vague reference to Pangaea?

So we're looking at this road and seeing bits of it, trying to work out how everything happened in the dips from the stuff we can see. When we don't know exactly we say things like "this may have happened", or "could" or "perhaps this", and this uncertainty, which is entirely valid and honest in the context of science, seems to set the Creationists on fire. They are satisfied that they have the answer and are arrogantly positive about it: "The evidence is in the book!" they say, demanding that we accept that the Bible is evidence rather than the claim which we all know is the case.

Look, I don't care if the Bible is a million years old, I don't care if it was written by gold-plated angelic goat herders using giant, jet-black heron feather quills and unicorn blood, on the skins of sacrificial eunuchs, there is absolutely nothing in the Bible which can be taken as prima facie evidence for anything. Nothing. The Bible is, and always will be, a claim that the stuff in it happened. Most of it is not supported by evidence of any sort.

Sorry to have to tell you Creationists, but despite what you've been told there are NO corroborative contemporary accounts of anything Jesus is said to have said, or done, and the fact remains that the Bible is now and forever a work of fiction.

That's not blasphemy... that's just a fact.

I'm not even sure that Creationists really understand some of the implications of some of the texts, but I'll deal with that another time. The purpose of this post is just to raise an analogy which explains why scientists have to use uncertain terms to describe past events and evolutionary processes.

Despite our uncertainty over many dips in the road to our past, we do now have a helping hand. We have a traveler which has been to mostly every part of that road and has now finally reached us. I'm not talking about the crocodile, which seems to have been around for a gazillion years. I'm talking about deoxyribonucleic acid [DNA].

DNA has been with organisms for a very long time. It has been handed the baton from RNA and run with it all the way through history. A really interesting part about DNA is that some of its constituent parts may have formed in Red Giant stars. This means that when Creationists are poking us for evidence of abiogenesis on Earth, they're ignoring the idea that we might well have come from outer space! Hee hee!

Building blocks of DNA (adenine, guanine and related organic molecules) may have been formed extraterrestrially in outer space. Complex DNA and RNA organic compounds of life, including uracil,cytosine and thymine, have also been formed in the laboratory under conditions mimicking those found in outer space, using starting chemicals, such as pyrimidine, found in meteorites. Pyrimidine, like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), the most carbon-rich chemical found in the universe, may have been formed in red giants or in interstellar dust and gas clouds. - Wikipedia [DNA]

Now that we've unlocked the secrets of our own genome we can read the DNA strands with relative ease. To the point where we are now using our knowledge to modify babies DNA to make them immune to certain genetic diseases. Something God forgot to do.
In our DNA we can see markers which we see in other ape species on out side of the divide, but not in other apes from the other side. We can trace our retroviral markers and figure out what changes have been made to the genome to make us happen, and make chimps happen.

This is not guesswork, this is bona fide science using the tools now available to us. Tools which can now see the very building blocks of life in full colour. We can see inside crystals, and pick out previously invisible specks of evidence from all around the world. We now know there was never a global flood. The Noah story is just another myth, which another thing the Creationists cannot accept.
We weren't created as a separate species from the Earth and women aren't the product of a man's rib. For starters there's no way you'll get a an XY being by taking parts of an XX being. Perhaps the other way around could be argued, but not that. Also, why would God create a woman if his goal was to have Adam and his "companion" look after the Garden of Eden? Surely another man would have done just as well, if not better. Men have similar strength profiles, unless you're going to include bodybuilders, or the Basques. Two men could have happily kept that garden in tip top shape forever. A woman was in fact an unnecessary addition.

The whole Creation thing is a load of hooey. For starters there's two versions of it, which Creationists seem to purposely ignore, or claim that the two opposing timelines are versions of the same event. I'd not want one of them defending me in a court that's for sure, if they can't see basic facts like that.

Evolution is a progression, one sixteenth at a time, until we cover the 100s and 1000s of miles into the past. It's like when we look at a prairie rising up to become a tall hill. The upward sweep of the lowlands forces us to ask a question... where does the hill start and the prairie end? Likewise with evolution, when precisely does species A become species B and how? What were the changes and what was the final straw which prevented the two species from being able to interbreed?

Where does the hill begin? Where do humans fit in on the future of the evolutionary tree? What will we become? Will we create a technological supreme being as has been predicted? Will we eventually be ruled over by this TechnoGod? Will the science of the future create what the Creationists have been telling us is already real?

Who knows? We don't... but one thing is for certain, Creationists really have no idea at all.

You MUST Believe Me!

How often have we heard a believer trot out the old "I've had personal experience with God" as proof that they know the truth? They are so convinced of their experience that it is impossible, they say, for it to be anything else. Well, let me relay my experience to you for you to appraise; an experience which I can assure you is absolutely true...

When my first son was born, my partner and I took him home and we sat together on our sofa and we just snuggled up. It was the first time having a child felt real to both of us. It had been a bit of an ordeal. On the way to the hospital when my partner's waters broke my car was damaged by an automated car wash and I had to borrow an ambulance from my station, just to get us to the hospital for the actual delivery the next day. In the maternity ward the delivery hadn't gone well, and it was only my medical knowledge that saved him from being born very ill indeed... if at all. My partner and I were relaxing at home now for the first time in days.

As we sat there I noticed three figures enter the room. They were as real to me then as this computer is now. The first was a tall man in a black suit. He wore a black cape across his shoulders and a tall top-hat. He was obviously a military man, or had some sort of power and authority. He was very upright and "proper". The second was my grandmother. She'd been dead for a little while at this point. The third was a little lady about the same age as my Nan, with a roundish, playful-looking face.

The figures all looked at the baby and even the gentleman ventured to smile. I relayed what I was seeing to my other half, who clearly couldn't see them and she instantly recognized my description of the third lady as her grandmother, whom I'd never seen because she died a long time before we met. They each nodded at me as if to say well-done and they were gone in the blink of an eye.

I would normally write that sort of thing off as a hallucination if not for the connection to my partner's grandmother, and a little while later something else happened to confirm what I'd seen.
My partner and I were frequent visitors to the local spiritualist church. Although we were both atheists we were also pagans with a deep sense of spirit around us. I even went on a training course to become a medium and we frequently read tarot cards and attended circles and moots. We both still have our "magickal chests" full of candles, incense and other accoutrements.

On one occasion I went to the church and was singled out by a medium on stage. He went on to describe, exactly, the man who had come into our lounge when my son was brought home. His description of the man was perfect and he explained that he was a distant uncle, an ex-military sort, who had had money and land to his name. He explained that I was under the man's wing somewhat and he was very close to us as a family at all times.

Well, that confirmed it. I had definitely seen what I saw. Right?

Perhaps you're not yet convinced.

When my son was a year old he could already walk and read quite well and could hold a fairly adult conversation with us. One night he called us through the monitor to ask if we could get rid of the "dark man in the tall hat". We asked if the man was being naughty and he replied that the man was actually telling him jokes, which is why he couldn't get off to sleep. So I called through the monitor to ask the man to leave. A short while later my son called again to say that the man wanted to let me know he was very proud to be related to my son, but that he had now gone.

My eldest son only saw him once more but that time he asked him to leave himself and the man obliged.

Still not convinced?

Well, how about this. My youngest son, who was spookily born three years, three months and three days after my eldest, also called one night when he was around the same age as my eldest son had been, complaining that a "dark-man with a tall hat" had been keeping him awake. I went into his room and my son told me the man was there by the light-fitting in the centre of the room. I turned to that point, thanked the man for being there and asked if he would in future refrain from making himself visible to my kids. My son told me that the man had raised his arm in acknowledgment and disappeared into the "light in the ceiling".

So, I saw the man, a medium saw the man and both my kids saw the same man. Clearly the spirit does exist. Right?

I mean, that is very strong evidence, you have to agree.

Well... maybe not.

The way I see it is this. I'm a huge Sherlock Holmes fan. I could quite easily sit through a whole series of Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke playing the fabulous Sherlock and Watson, one episode after the next. There's Mr Brett, taken from us far too soon, strutting purposefully across the street in his black suit, shoulder cape and tall black top-hat, cutting people down with his wit and razor-sharp observations. Those little dramatic touches sprinkled into an already flawless performance. It sends shivers down my spine. Brett WAS Sherlock and no matter who comes after him he will always be Sherlock Holmes, Master Detective!

Wait... how did I describe Mr Brett?

Now you see where I'm going. I am a great fan of the TV series, which I watch whenever I get a chance. I've undoubtedly watched it with both my boys and what more striking a figure is there than Sherlock? Well... for a child whose dad also likes Thomas the Tank Engine (for the animation... ahem) possibly the Fat Controller, Sir Topham Hatt? Or, his more humorous and playful brother the Thin Controller, Sir Lowham Hatt?

How can the imagination of two little boys escape the idea of a man in a dark suit with a tall hat, when their father has presented them with such strong images of three men wearing just those clothes?

As for the medium, well, you've heard of cold-reading, right? It's not too far a reach to think that a man who wears black clothes, which I most often do, would associate with another man wearing dark clothes and giving him a top-hat and a cape for good measure adds just a whiff of authenticity doesn't it? A happy coincidence.

But, what about the fact that I saw them too?

I mentioned that my partner and I had been through a somewhat stressful experience. Not only was it our first child, but we were on our own, and there had been problems with my car and the delivery itself, so sleep wasn't a priority for either of us. I think that when we both sat there together I simply fell asleep. If only for a short while. In that time my mind drew up an image of the three together... my hero, my grandmother and of course an approximation of what I imagined my partner's grandmother would look like. Her face was easily placed in the dream, since her photo was on the wall in my partner's parents' house.

It all fits very easily into line when you work it all out, but just imagine what I'd make of all that "personal experience" if I wasn't firm in my belief that there is a rational explanation for everything if you care to take the time to look. Eye-witness testimony has been rejected as bona fide evidence in most Western courts. The FBI have openly stated that this form of testimony is almost worthless and the Dancing Gorilla Experiment goes a long way to explaining why.

What we see and what we think we are seeing are often two very different things. Our brains are extremely good at filling in the blanks, especially retroactively. If you don't believe me, try watching a good magic show sometime.

I take every account of "personal experience" with a massive pinch of salt. It's not that I believe the person is lying, but rather they are reading far to much into what they saw, or think they saw. Take for instance the condition known as pareidolia, which is where a person sees human faces in inanimate objects, such as houses, trees, rocks, lichen formations and the like. Jesus on toast or in clouds is a great example, as is reading tea-leaves. There is an audible version too where voices are heard in random white noise, or sentences appear in music when it is played in reverse. Pareidolia is a form of apophenia, which is described as seeing connections without prompting and ascribing to those connections an abnormal meaningfulness.

Humans are hard-wired to ascribe connections to things and draw conclusions from minimum data. We hear a rustle in the bushes and we know an agent is at work, moving around. Ignoring it is foolish, so our primary response is to escape the scene quickly. Experience then kicks in and informs our secondary senses and we realize that the noise is a small bird, not a large ravenous lion. The people running away at that point would all swear it was a lion. A really big one with sharp teeth and, if they were fans of Sherlock Holmes, wearing a black cape and top-hat.

Another thing we're really, really good at is role-playing. How often have you been on your way to a meeting, or a job interview, and have played out how it should go in your head? You set the scene, you form the people in your mind. You know what the person on the end of the phone looks like, despite never having seen her face. You know everything about her. You imagine what you'd say, how she'd react to it and you imagine her giving you the job on the spot. Then you get there and it's a completely different set up and the tall brunette you imagined was a shortish redhead. Then you made that joke which in your head was knock-em-dead funny and it bombed. You didn't get the job.

What it boils down to is this... credulity is not a virtue, and relying on your own "personal experience" to distinguish truth from fantasy isn't a good idea either. Be careful when you accept a person's testimony for an event... especially your own!

"The Bible is True"... but which version?

As a part-time hobby I like to discuss ideas with the Jehovah's Witnesses [J-Dubs] which blight the streets of my home town every week. I only do it every now and then because some of them have banned me from visiting their stall after being unable to properly answer my questions. I'll explain why this week I even got one of them to ask me "What's the purpose of your coming here today telling us this? What difference does it make to you what our beliefs are?" Let the fact that this comment came from a Jehovah's Witness, famed for going door-to-door peddling their crap, who at the time was sitting behind a desk in a pagoda full of Witness literature and with signs outside proclaiming God to be this and that wonderful thing, sink in for a moment... yes.. indeed!

The reason I annoyed them this week was because I approached them with the topic of "Versions of the Bible"; my pitch being that for every line in the Bible which can be interpreted two or more ways there forms a pathway which leads to a new version of the doctrine. It's not as sketchy as it sounds.

For instance, if you believe that the account of The Creation [A] is true, as they do, then that's one version. If you don't then that's another. If you then consider the comment made by God prior to the Flood in which mankind is limited to 120 years [B] and think that this is a countdown to destruction, as the J-Dubs do, then that's another factor to consider, as is the idea that the 120 years is a literal age-limit set on each of us.

Putting them together we get four different versions of the story:

God created the Heavens and the Earth in six literal days and gave Mankind 120 years to shape up = AaBa
God created the Heavens and the Earth in six literal days and limited Mankind to lifespans of 120 years = AaBb
The story that God created the Heavens and the Earth in six literal days is an allegory but he did give Mankind 120 years to shape up = AbBa
The story that God created the Heavens and the Earth in six literal days is an allegory but he did limit Mankind to 120 year lifespans = AbBb

So we have the four versions... Of course there are other versions of each of these but I'm trying to keep this simple for now.

Out of two lines of text we can derive FOUR different versions of the Bible. I told this to the male J-Dub but got the standard "They're not versions, they are just different opinions." Well, I'd love to know what a version is if not a different opinion on the text. Clearly whether one has the opinion that God did create the Earth etc. in six days, or not, informs your practice of your faith. It informs your reading of other texts too. So how you interpret that one line does make a big difference.

As it is with other lines, and events.

Take for instance the event in the Bible when God supposedly appeared to Moses on a hill top [C]. The story says he appeared to Moses in a pillar of smoke. Now then, some interpret that as Moses having an actual visit from God manifesting as a pillar of smoke [a]. Others say that the fire and smoke was to cover God's face from Moses and so God appeared more as a man than the smoke itself [b]. Does this not fundamentally change your view on what your God is, or can be?

I personally think it was a charlatan's trick and Moses was making the whole thing up, making use of rudimentary pyrotechnic skills he'd learnt from other charlatans descended from Abraham. who you'll remember pulled a similar trick earlier on. However, we're talking about other people's interpretations here so mine do not matter.

So... should we add this event to the narrative? With the Creation [A], the 120 years comment [B] and the new Moses smoke trick [C] what combinations are now available?

AaBaCa
AaBaCb
AaBbCa
AaBbCb
AbBaCa
AbBaCb
AbBbCa
AbBbCb

That's eight versions from three events, using only two possible versions of each story.

The Bible is beginning to look like those old Steve Jackson books I used to read as a kid, where I got to pick my own story through the book. only this time instead of only my character dying the Bible wipes out over 2 million!

How about we add the parable of the "Water into Wine" [D]? Either Jesus really did make wine out of water [a], or it is a narrative explanation of the Jewish rite of passage [b].

I won't bore you with the details but that makes 16 possible versions.

Then what if we add the Raising of Lazarus [E], the 100 Zombie Saints [F] and on and on back and forth throughout the texts of the Old and New Testaments... how many versions of one book can there be, each with a unique narrative through the text?

At no point have I touched on how many printed versions there are, but if you even take one fundamental narrative, that of the idea that sin leads to an eternity in Hell, and you realize that the original Old Testament didn't feature Hell at all, and that even some versions of the New Testament lack that idea, you now see how utterly incompatible these books are from one simple change in dynamic.

So when I ask you which version of the Bible you trust to be the whole truth I'm not talking about the KJV, or the NIV or the YLT or KJV2000, I'm talking about all these little ideas and events and how you the reader, the believer, chose to form your ideas about what you believe. If as a conservative estimate we suggest that there are 100 lines in the Bible which can be taken two ways each, the total number of possible pathways through the Bible is 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376.

Of course this is a rather facetious way of looking at it, but I think that if Christians are going to go down the line of saying that "The Bible is true" as so many insist on doing, I think we do get to ask "which version"... because I do not see that it is such a stupid question after all.

Vaccine Nuts

I have been moved to write a short post about the ridiculous  anti-vax movement and its claims by a conversation I've had over the last 24 hours with someone on twitter.

I decided to pop over to the sites the chap pointed me to. I don't recommend you visit it because it really is full of nonsense and half-truths, but I thought I'd be able to put to bed some of the psuedoscience contained therein.

The first site is: http://www.whale.to/vaccines/rubella4.html which is a link I clicked on from a few hundred on the main page of this idiotic collection.*

The page lists a few dozen medical studies which investigate illnesses which have appeared to affect people since they were vaccinated against measles/rubella.

The study I have chosen is right up near the top of the list and it concerns the incidence of Immune (form. Idiopathic) Thrombocytopenia Purpura associated with rubella vaccination. The link to the study is broken and PubMed cites, but no longer features, the article itself. However other studies do mention a possible link with the vaccine and ITP, so I thought it was worth giving a little bit of information regarding the condition itself.

ITP is an autoimmune condition which affects around 2 to 5 children out of around 100,000 in any given population, most commonly in pre-school. Its clinical features are a lowered platlet count, a purple or red rash (purpura), significant bruising and persistent nosebleeds. ITP affects children around two or three weeks following a viral infection and in most cases the affects naturally subside within a few weeks to at most six months, less with appropriate treatment. In very rare cases the condition becomes a lifelong problem necessitating frequent blood tests and ongoing review. Patients who suffer ITP in adulthood are often advised to follow a balanced diet and avoid contact sports. Women may find that their menstruation is heavier than average.

Look out for signs of:

A nosebleed which will not stop despite pinching the nose after 30 minutes.
Prolonged bleeding from the gums.
Blood in the poo (stools) or urine.
A heavy blow to the head, especially if the child is unwell afterwards in any way.
Persistent or severe headache.
Sickness (vomiting).
Unexplained drowsiness.

And avoid taking aspirin or ibuprofen.

That's the illness, so on to the problem. The articles I read do mention an association with vaccination with a live vaccine. And this is the source of the confusion.

So, What is a live vaccine?

A live vaccine, most commonly for measles, or rubella, is created by passing a live virus through a nun-human cell culture. We use chicken chicks most often because the virus remains intact, yet loses its ability to infect humans after a relatively few passes through live cell cultures. The advantage here being that our immune responses are triggered by the virus, but it cannot infect us at all.
This immune response is the cause of the ITP problem.

So, is my child at risk of developing ITP from a live rubella vaccine?

The short answer is yes. But, you might be asking why I'd say that if I'm pro-vaccination. Well, it's because I'm an honest chap. Your child is at risk of having an autoimmune response to the rubella vaccine. However, I have as much chance of Kelly Brook suddenly awakening from a dream and declaring her undying love for me by having a sky-writer fly over my house. It could happen, but it's extremely unlikely.

Far more likely is that your child gets infected by the real rubella infection and dies from it.

You see the way rubella works is that between two to three weeks after infection the patient (often a child) starts to develop a pink or red rash which typically spreads downward from the head. Rarely the child will develop symptoms of arthritis, or encephalitis (swelling in the brain) and in very rare cases the child might die.

However the symptoms in children are more often than not very mild, so the real risk is from Congenital Rubella Syndrome... that's when the unborn baby of an unvaccinated mother is infected in utero and develops serious, often life-changing and life-threatening conditions as a result. Rubella vaccination is not indicated for women who are already pregnant, or who intend to become pregnant within four weeks’ time, although CRS has never been reported to be caused by the vaccine.

From 1964-1965, before the development of a vaccine against the disease, a rubella epidemic swept the United States. During that short period there were 12.5 million cases of rubella.

20,000 children were born with CRS:

11,000 were born deaf
3,500 born blind
1,800 born mentally retarded
with 2,100 neonatal deaths

And more than 11,000 abortions occurred as a result of CRS during that time – some a spontaneous result of rubella infection in the mother, and others performed surgically after women were informed of the serious risks of rubella exposure during their pregnancy.

Following an intensive vaccination program rubella was declared to have been eliminated from the USA in 2004, and from the rest of the Americas in 2009.

So, why all the fuss? Why are we vaccinating against an illness which is known to no longer be relevant? Well, you see, there are a number of people who still do not vaccinate their children, or themselves, and because of the herd immunity generated by the millions of others who do, they remain safe... until of course they come into contact with other children who have the illness. Then the trouble starts.

In Europe in 2010, there were 30,367 cases reported with 21 confirmed measles-related deaths. Of those cases 21,864 occurred in Bulgaria, with 17 deaths.

Here we have to compare a small sample of clinical trials indicating that between 2 to 5 out of every 100,000 children can get ITP, with a minute number of people going on to die from the disease with an even smaller number getting it as a result of a measles vaccination, with a recent known sample of 30,367 people being diagnosed with measles across 32 countries resulting in 88 serious complications requiring hospital treatment and one death.

So... and I'm no mathematician here but I'll give it a go... that's a 0.00005% chance of developing a mild rash from the vaccine, or a 0.00077% chance of dying from the illness that the vaccine prevents.

That means that on my very un-scientific poll:

YOU ARE SIXTEEN TIMES MORE LIKELY TO DIE OF THE DISEASE THAN SUFFER SOME VERY MILD  SYMPTOMS FROM THE VACCINATION!

Another uncomfortable fact is that in ALL the recent outbreaks across the globe, in the USA, Israel, The Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, The Netherlands, Bulgaria, Japan, the UK, France and Romania occurred in communities where people were against vaccination, for religious reasons, or simply through stupidity.

So the message... and I want to make this abundantly clear... is no matter what you've been told about vaccinations, from whatever dubious half-truth spilling, short-sighted, dumb-ass, no-good, un-patriotic website that you've chosen to get your information...

ANTI-VAXXERS... YOU ARE WRONG!

Vaccines are safe.
Vaccines save lives.
And the next life you save by getting yourself and your children vaccinated might well be your own!




*I'm not going to endorse that page by making it a hyperlink on my blog... not in a million years!

Deliver Us From Evil

When Christians pray I wonder what they think they're doing. The New Testament clearly states that Jesus wanted his followers to avoid synagogues (and by extension churches and chapels) and praying in public. More specifically he said to pray alone, in a closet and to only use the prayer commonly known as The Lord's Prayer.

I wonder if any one of the mumblers have ever stopped to examine that prayer. For me it's a list of requests, or even demands, made to their god. So let's see what you think.

The common Lord's Prayer goes like this:

Our Father, which art in Heaven

Hallowed be thy name

Thy kingdom come

Thy will be done In Earth

As it is in Heaven

Give us this day our daily bread

And forgive us our trespasses

As we forgive those who trespass against us

Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from Evil

For thine is the kingdom

The power and the glory

For ever and ever

Amen

I apologize to every non-believer who just read that, because as we know God sees and hears everything, even if you don't say it out loud. :)

Which brings me to my first point about prayer. Why would an eternal, benevolent being who is all-knowing and all-seeing need anyone to pray to them. The idea Christians (and all theists) have about their god is that he (it's always a he) can see and hear everything we say and do at all times. There's no thought we can hide from him and nothing we want, hope for, dream about or need is missed by this ever present CCTV-wielding god. So why are they bothering to pray at all?

Christian apologists will tell you that they are doing it to become closer to god, yet their god is inside their head, so how exactly do they think they can get closer? Another apologetic is that they get to show thanks, or increase their connection to their god, or even move one step closer to Heaven. Their god knows if they are thankful without them having to say so. Arguably their staying verbally silent cuts down on the amount of work their god needs to do, so staying schtum would be better. Again, they can't get any more connected to a god who is always hovering around. The getting closer to Heaven is a bit of a doosie. God's Will is paramount, he chooses who goes to Heaven and who doesn't, and has decided this long before the person was ever born... so a few mumbled words saying thanks for a nice meal, which farmers, retailers and cooks provided, or their favourite team winning a game/match/test isn't going to do anything to change that.

So why pray? It's totally pointless... unless of course the pray-er doesn't trust their god's power, or abilities.

Anyhoo... back to the Lord's Prayer itself.

It starts with a fairly standard 'you're god and you're awesome' sort of schtick but then the next few lines are quite telling.

"Thy kingdom come
Thy Will be done on Earth 
As it is in Heaven"

These lines assume that God's kingdom on Earth is on its way and what he wants will happen here as it has always been done in Heaven. What would be his purpose of creating a new kingdom on Earth when he already has the perfect set up in Heaven? Is it something to do with the Nephilim? Is it about the angels wanting to have sex with mortals all the time? Does god have to keep them apart, just in case?

"Give us this day our daily bread"

Provide for us... give us food every day. The presumption here is that it goes beyond bread; perhaps into money, fame or success. At any rate, this is the first request/demand.

"And forgive us our trespasses
As we forgive those who trespass against us"

We are good people. We're tolerant and forgiving, so we'd like you (god) to be forgiving of our sins, mistakes and crimes. So what's the suggestion here? I would like to think that it reminds the person to be more like their god, and be good to others, but I think on face value it is a request that the god be as good as the person. The basis of the Christian faith is that you should accept Jesus as your saviour or you'll burn in a fiery lake, so since that's the only real qualification set out by the Bible for guaranteed entry into Heaven (or God's new Earthly Kingdom away from rutting angel types) anything else we do is irrelevant*.

An important note is that the original lines from Matthew 6:9-13 state "And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors", but this must have been inconvenient to a church which preached that Christians owe an eternal debt to their Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

"Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from Evil"

I believe this is a demand which has more to it than meets the eye. God is being asked to lead people away from the evil of temptation, but this reveals a lack of dedication to the cause. It places the emphasis on their god to lead them away from situations they themselves should be avoiding. This is a prayer which abdicates the person from their responsibilities. If they don't sin then everything is copacetic, but if they do then God clearly didn't want to lead them away from it and so, by extension, he wanted them to do it.

What if the line is a darker one, which the early Church fathers were using, by placing these words into the mouth of Jesus, to disguise the real character of their god? The Bible makes it perfectly clear to us that God created evil before he created mankind and the whole Garden of Evil... sorry Eden... thing was a set-up to make us feel that we're to blame for his anger at God's own failings.

I'll explain.

The tree which Adam and Eve were warned not to eat from was called "The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil" which immediately raises the question, how could anyone be aware of something which didn't exist at the time? So, evil preceded mankind, or at the very least was created at the same time. An obvious point to anyone who bothers to read between the lines. Apart from this, God states that he created evil, but the common consensus is that he created it after the Fall, so it was man's fault. If read the way I've stated it though a case could be made for the events in the Garden to be part of God's plan, which makes the Fall an pre-meditated excuse to put mankind in the firing line.  If the serpent in the story was Satan, as some have suggested, we see from later on in the book that Satan was in God's employ which places his sudden appearance in the Garden in a whole different light.

So, this line could clearly be a request to God to stop him using us for the Evil he intends to commit. Could it be an admission that God's default is to put us in harm's way? Is it a line born of the fear that it is God's intention to direct us to sin?

The last lines of this prayer are yet more praise and 'aren't you wonderful' nonsense before the traditional ending borrowed from paganism's ritual "If it is willed to be."

So, in my view, this prayer is a solid request to provide for the person saying the prayer. It's a prayer which stems from a fear of an unknown future and it smacks of resentment born of knowing that we're better than the god who controls us.

So the next time you speak that prayer, or hear someone else speak it you should be suspicious. Be suspicious of your, or their, motives for wanting to say it. Firstly it shows a lack of faith in their god and secondly I believe it begs God to prevent them from turning out just like Him.

At the very least it should give you pause for thought.





* see my future post on the human soul (link to be provided later)