And now . . . this - Mar. 10/14

Leave the planet. Take the cannoli.

Sicilian amateur scientists have launched a model cannolo, a cream-stuffed pastry roll symbolic of the Italian island, into the stratosphere, capturing bizarre images of the dessert flying far above the earth.

[Full Story]

Then, after that teaser, Yahoo didn't see fit to provide any of these pictures. Here is one, from another story on the site:

Doesn't it look delicious? Unfortunately:

As a real cannolo would be unlikely to survive the voyage, the group made a model of the cherry-studded pastry with a polymer clay material hardened in an oven.

Numerous Sicilian men then remarked that their wives must make cannoli out of the same material. (Ow! Hey!)

"Sicily has always been a place of negative connotations, mafia and unemployment. We wanted to lift up Sicily in our own way," said filmmaker Fabio Leone, 34, who recorded the project with Antonella Barbera, 38.

This is not helpful, of course, because it only reminds us that in the Godfather trilogy, cannoli were involved in two Mafia murders.

Boom

I've often planned to take on the bodily-autonomy argument for abortion rights (aka the "violinist argument" formulated by Judith Jarvis Thomson) as a blog project. I may still do so, but not too soon. It would seem too much like getting on the bandwagon, after Matt Walsh blew it out of the water.

Read. Learn.

I Am Afraid of This Indisputable, Pro-Choice Argument

F5 #4: Writer's block

Yes, not only am I late, I'm so late (How late was he?) that I'm writing the last post of February a week into March.

Well, I began this year's F⁵ theme, pet hates, with good intentions: spend the month when I'm most personal on the blog talking about things I dislike, rather than things I like. I had a pretty good idea what I wanted to say for the first three weeks of February. But I never came up with a fourth topic. My most hated books, music, or movies? Wouldn't know; never had to read, listen to, or watch them. I don't waste time disliking what I don't have to be exposed to.

Which leads me to believe that I'm a lot less cynical or curmudgeonly than I thought. In that case, perhaps I'll just voluntarily close the series off a little early this year, and start thinking about next time. No one's keeping score, right?

On the other hand: I really, really hate not knowing what to say.

F5 #3: Can't we all just get along?

I come to this week's F⁵ installment with six words on my mind: "Judge not, lest ye be judged." All of us are both capable and guilty of doing very irritating things, and I'm sure that if someone else were writing up this blog post, I'd see myself as, in part, the object of their ire. (Let's get pet peeve #1 out of the way: procrastinators. Though it's back-dated on the blog, I'm writing my obligatory February Friday post on Saturday afternoon.)

We have etiquette for a reason. It helps us get along with each other in company. Some past societies have taken the rules of etiquette to a ridiculous extreme, but the point was the same: the art of courtesy and politeness makes our social interactions go a lot more smoothly.

F5 #2: Are you gonna eat that? ('Cause I'm not.)

Today is, of course, Valentine's day. Legends about who exactly St. Valentine (or Valentinus) was, are many and conflicting. Some say that he was a priest who refused to stop marrying Christians. Others say he was martyred for attempting to convert the Roman emperor Claudius. I choose to believe that, given the choice between dying for his faith at the hands of the Romans, and facing his girlfriend after he failed to get dinner reservations, he chose the easy way out.

So, in honour of the hardest day of the year to eat out, I present my second pet hate of 2014: the three foods on my "do not serve" list. Note that this isn't quite an absolute list: while under no circumstances would I ever voluntarily serve these abominations to myself, I'm too polite to refuse them if I'm served them as a guest. Usually. And I probably won't look happy.

There was a time when men were kind

This week, I met one of my personal milestones: after two and a half years, I finally completed the Victor Hugo novel of 1862, Les Misérables.

In a certain sense, it was actually the second time I'd read the novel. I spent a week in hospital in 1996 with a knee injury, and found an abridged edition in the library. At around 4-500 pages, it was certainly the right length for my stay (and literally the only book in the entire library that I was remotely interested in). And I certainly fell in love with the story.

F5 the Sixth: #1: English as she is spoke

Here we go again. Four Fridays of February means four further F⁵s: Four February Fridays of Fabulous Frivolity.

And, one major headache. This is the sixth time that I have done this blog tradition, in which I extol the virtues of my loves, likes, favourites, guilty pleasures, and bad habits. Over the years I've covered such eclectic topics as shaving habits, preferred aftershaves, fountain pens, Godzilla, Doctor Who, wine, spicy foods, Arnold Schwarzenegger, William Shakespeare, Buffalo wings, 80s pop music, James Bond, coffee, and comic books. That's a somewhat fair snapshot of the simple pleasures I enjoy, so it's actually getting harder to come up with new ideas, unless you want to read me extolling the virtues of, say, tasty ice water, or why spiral-bound books are better than Cerlox.

So I thought that this year I'd do something different this year, and talk about my favourite pet hates. I don't mean the things that I genuinely and deeply loathe, like abortion or Scientology^TM. Rather, I mean pet peeves, or severe annoyances: the things that bug me to no end.

Being a writer by profession, I thought I'd start off with bad writing.

Perry Noble on abortion: Swing and a miss

Pastor Perry Noble of the South Carolina megachurch NewSpring is no stranger to intemperate and ill-advised remarks. This Monday, he did it again, with a blog post criticizing a planned boycott of Girl Scout cookies by some pro-life Christians, because of a supposed connection between the Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA) and Planned Parenthood (PP), the largest provider of abortions in the U.S.

First,Noble prefaces his remarks by affirming that he is indeed "unapologetically pro-life" and that denying that human life begins with conception is "nothing more than intellectual dishonesty." I commend him for doing so, because if that affirmation were not there, I would have no idea he was pro-life from his unfortunately muddy thinking

Thank you for calling and sharing, and shall we take our next false prophet, please? (Harold Camping, 1921-2013)

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
- T. S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"

Harold Camping, the discredited former radio preacher who doubled down on a false end-of-the-world prediction and lost, is dead.

[T]he California preacher who used his evangelical radio ministry and thousands of billboards to broadcast the end of the world and then gave up public prophecy when his date-specific doomsdays did not come to pass, has died at age 92.

Family Radio Network marketing manager Nina Romero said Harold Camping, a retired civil engineer who built a worldwide following for the nonprofit, Oakland-based ministry he founded in 1958, died at his home on Sunday. She said he had been hospitalized after falling.

[Full Story]

Most people's knowledge of Harold Camping and his nonsense probably doesn't go back much farther than 2010 or 2011, when his infamous prediction of the end of the world on May 21, 2011 became international news. As many date-setters are wont to do, when that prediction failed, he "discovered" an error in his calculations, and revised his prognostication for October 21 the same year. And yet, here we all still are.

I first became aware of Camping when I chanced to tune in Family Radio on my shortwave in 1992 or 1993. I listened to his "Open Forum" call-in show every now and then. Apart from hyper-Calvinist leanings and a tendency to prefer "spiritual" interpretations of the Bible to straighter literal ones, he was a voice of relative sanity on the madness that is Christian shortwave radio. However, he had recently published two books, Are You Ready? and 1994? in which he predicted the end of the world on or about September 6, 1994. This subject began to dominate his airtime. When the 1994 prediction also failed, declared an error in his calculations and revised it for one year later. (Two years later, I was still finding the odd copy of 1994? on Christian bookstore shelves!)

Camping's tendency toward allegorical theology and date-setting went back years earlier, though. In his 1970 book The Biblical Calendar of History, Camping asserted that the world was created in 11,013 BC, based on an unorthodox reading of the genealogy of Noah (which I discussed here). Camping subsequently claimed that exactly 13,000 years later, on May 21, 1988, the Church age came to an end. The Holy Spirit had departed all organized Christian churches, which were thereafter under God's wrath. Coincidentally—or perhaps not—this was about the same time that Camping was removed from teaching Sunday school at his Christian Reformed church because of his increasingly eccentric theology. He left that church altogether a few months later. Camping encouraged his listeners to leave their churches and form loose fellowships in which they listen to Family Radio instead (from which he also expelled all programming that supported the continuation of the church). In the early 2000s, between failed Rapture predictions, this was the teaching that Camping was most notorious for.

And then, some time in 2009, it came out that Camping was doing it again: he had announced that the end of the world would occur on May 21, 2011. This date is very significant because it comes exactly 23 years after May 21, 1988, as well as exactly 722,500 days after the Crucifixion on April 1, AD 33. 722,500 is the square of 5 × 10 × 17, which are (according to Camping) "enormously significant spiritual numbers." No, I don't get it either.

Predictably, as was the case in 1995, 1994, and 1988 (which, I have come to understand, was yet another possible date for the Rapture, if only Camping hadn't discovered it years after the fact), nothing happened. Camping had unambiguously left himself no way to weasel out of this prediction when it failed again, and so he became a laughingstock, both in the church and out. It didn't make matters much better when he tried to weasel out of it anyway, claiming that the May 21 event was "spiritual" and that the really-and-for-true end of the world was on October 21. Well, that wasn't true either. In the meantime, he also suffered a stroke that effectively ended his public ministry.

After October 21, 2011, Camping finally clued in that something was fundamentally wrong with his methods, and issued an apology before disappearing into a well-deserved obscurity. On the occasion of his death, however, Family Radio's note whitewashes the fact that he (and they) swindled his followers out of millions of dollars used to promote the apocalypse that never was. Many of these people sold possessions, quit their jobs, or went on the road for the sake of promoting Camping's message. I wonder where they ended up?

There's a reason that James said teachers needed to be careful about their teaching because they would incur a stricter judgment (Jas. 3:1). Harold Camping did not fight the good fight, and he abandoned the faith years ago for all manner of apostasy: for example, annihilationism, modalism, adoptionism, and hyper-Calvinism. His doctrine and date-setting led many Christians to follow him into the ditch, and drove Family Radio, a once-legitimate Christian ministry, into the ground. They still want to eulogize him. I think I'll take the advice of the Who, instead: let's forget him, better still.

Evil, therefore no God?

The next post in the Canadian Apologetics Coalition's "Contending for God" series is up.

Today, Colleen Hinkkala argues that God exists because objective morality does. This is the classic "argument from morality":

When we concede to [the] fact that true evil does exist, we are saying that evil is not just an idea, preference or type of event, but rather a real, objective phenomenon that is not based on emotion or choice. Something is evil (for example, pedophilia) whether Bob believes it to be so or not, and should therefore "ought not be." It is at this point that we give up our position when arguing against Gods existence in light of the obvious and present evil in the world, for you cannot have anything objective in a purely relative world.

What do I mean by relative world? If evolutionary theory is correct, morality is left up to each of us, and because we have markedly different thoughts and feelings about right and wrong, morality can change and become relative to the person, situation and context. The problem is, Bob and I do not agree on the rightness or wrongness of pedophilia. So who decides if it is right or wrong? Can it be both right and wrong at the same time? To a logical person, this makes no sense . . . of course something cannot be truly good and evil and the same time, but this is exactly what moral relativism (and consequently atheism) requires.

[Read Evil Exists, Therefore God Doesn't?]

Two more to go!