Scientists: Biblical Plagues of Egypt Result of Natural Disasters

Most myths derive from some historical events in the distant past and are an attempt to explain the happenings observed by the uneducated without an understanding of the true cause. Of course tribal needs and desires for aggrandizement can also factor into the myths as time passes by. Now, scientists have laid out a totally natural explanation for the ten plagues alleged to have been leveled against Egypt for the purposes of forcing King Ramses to release the Israelites from bondage in Egypt as described in the Book of Exodus. I do not mean to disparage the Bible, but this latest scientific studies is yet more piece of evidence as to why the Bible cannot be interpreted literally. I subscribe to the Gospel message of Christ, but the Old Testament and the Epistles truly need to be read with caution. I'm sure these new theories will be most unwelcomed by creationists and far right fundamentalist Christians. Here are highlights from Timesonline:
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Researchers believe they have found evidence of real natural disasters on which the ten plagues of Egypt, which led to Moses freeing the Israelites from slavery in the Book of Exodus in the Bible, were based. But rather than explaining them as the wrathful act of a vengeful God, the scientists claim the plagues can be attributed to a chain of natural phenomena triggered by changes in the climate and environmental disasters that happened hundreds of miles away.
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They have compiled compelling evidence that offers new explanations for the Biblical plagues, which will be outlined in a new series to be broadcast on the National Geographical Channel on Easter Sunday.
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Archaeologists now widely believe the plagues occurred at an ancient city of Pi-Rameses on the Nile Delta, which was the capital of Egypt during the reign of Pharaoh Rameses the Second, who ruled between 1279BC and 1213BC. They found that Rameses reign coincided with a warm, wet climate, but then the climate switched to a dry period.
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Professor Augusto Magini, a paleoclimatologist at Heidelberg University's institute for environmental physics, said: "Pharaoh Rameses II reigned during a very favourable climatic period. "There was plenty of rain and his country flourished. However, this wet period only lasted a few decades. After Rameses' reign, the climate curve goes sharply downwards. "There is a dry period which would certainly have had serious consequences." The scientists believe this switch in the climate was the trigger for the first of the plagues.
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Dr Stephan Pflugmacher, a biologist at the Leibniz Institute for Water Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin . . . . said the bacterium, known as Burgundy Blood algae or Oscillatoria rubescens, is known to have existed 3,000 years ago and still causes similar effects today. He said: "It multiplies massively in slow-moving warm waters with high levels of nutrition. And as it dies, it stains the water red." The scientists also claim the arrival of this algae set in motion the events that led to the second, third and forth plagues – frogs, lice and flies. He said: "It multiplies massively in slow-moving warm waters with high levels of nutrition. And as it dies, it stains the water red." The scientists also claim the arrival of this algae set in motion the events that led to the second, third and forth plagues – frogs, lice and flies.
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Another major natural disaster more than 400 miles away is now also thought to be responsible for triggering the seventh, eighth and ninth plagues that bring hail, locusts and darkness to Egypt. One of the biggest volcanic eruptions in human history occurred when Thera, a volcano that was part of the Mediterranean islands of Santorini, just north of Crete, exploded around 3,500 year ago, spewing billions of tons of volcanic ash into the atmosphere.
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Nadine von Blohm, from the Institute for Atmospheric Physics in Germany, has been conducting experiments on how hailstorms form and believes that the volcanic ash could have clashed with thunderstorms above Egypt to produce dramatic hail storms.
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"The ash fall out caused weather anomalies, which translates into higher precipitations, higher humidity. And that's exactly what fosters the presence of the locusts." The volcanic ash could also have blocked out the sunlight causing the stories of a plague of darkness. Scientists have found pumice, stone made from cooled volcanic lava, during excavations of Egyptian ruins despite there not being any volcanoes in Egypt. Analysis of the rock shows that it came from the Santorini volcano, providing physical evidence that the ash fallout from the eruption at Santorini reached Egyptian shores.

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A Study of the Absurd: Ken Cuccinelli

As even casual readers have no doubt figured out, I view Virginia's new Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli, as form of cancerous growth on the state. The question is one of how much damage he will be able to inflict on Virginia before he leaves office. While he's a darling among the insane tea party set, demographic growth in Virginia is in regions where Cuccinelli's extremism will be less likely to resonate, hence his political future is questionable in the longer term. Indeed, but for the success of Bob McDonnell's dishonest campaign in which he pretended to be a moderate and the debacle of the Creigh Deeds campaign, the Cooch might well not have been elected to the office of Attorney General. Something that Cuccinelli in his delusions of grandeur doesn't seem to grasp. Slate has a piece that looks at Cuccinelli's questionable legal quest to challenge health care reform, not to mention his larger agenda of turning Virginia back to a time which can best be described as a time when every white man had the right to own a black man and women and gays knew their place. Here are some highlights from Slate:
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Virginia's attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli II, is a man in a big, big hurry. . . His claim is that a federal statute is stepping all over a new Virginia law. But he knows he can't readily overcome the U.S. Constitution's supremacy clause, which expressly states that federal law shall be the "supreme Law of the Land."
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Virginia's Cuccinelli's legal claim, however, has come in for some extra-special scorn from legal scholars on both the right and the left. In a conference call with reporters this week, Erwin Chemerinsky—dean of the UC-Irvine School of Law—reiterated that as with the battle over desegregation in the '50s and '60s, "states can't just block the implementation of federal laws." Doug Kendall, founder of the Constitutional Accountability Center, says that of the two suits, "the Virginia law suit is even more problematic because the Virginia statute at the center of their suit is a ham-fisted attempt at nullification." . . . Not to mention that conservatives ranging from President Reagan's solicitor general, Charles Fried, to former federal appeals court judge Michael McConnell have blasted state laws that attempt to opt out of the health-reform law as legally "meaningless," "preposterous," and "absurd." As Fried told NPR's Nina Totenberg this week, it was earlier attempts at "so-called nullification" that led to the Civil War.
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So what do we make of Ken Cuccinelli, . . ? Cuccinelli has already enraged some Virginians by filing a lawsuit asking the EPA to reconsider regulating emissions. He also bolstered his image as the lawyer with the itchiest trigger finger in America by writing a letter directing all Virginia universities to remove language related to sexual orientation from their anti-discrimination policies. Following a massive campus backlash, Gov. Bob McDonnell issued a nonbiding "executive directive" to the state workforce reminding them that discriminating based on sexual orientation could get you fired. Cuccinelli either embarrassed his boss into offering a full-throated defense of gay rights in Virginia or is positioning himself as the wacky Tea Party foil to the governor's kinder, gentler conservative.
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Just as he wishes climate science to be untrue, he crosses his fingers and dreams that a state nullification statute will undo a federal law. It's bad enough when TV pundits proclaim that what case law and the Constitution say doesn't matter; the only important thing is what the public wants. But when attorneys general start to offer up such arguments in legal pleadings, it transcends legal activism and starts to look like pure ideological yearning. And that's a particularly cynical enterprise for someone who preaches fidelity to the law and constitution as written.

Italian Catholic Bishop: Gays Shouldn’t be Given Funerals

One has to wonder whether the Catholic Church hierarchy can get any more tone deaf - particularly with the exploding sex abuse scandal in Europe increasingly directly implicating Pap Ratzi more with each passing day. About the only things that has not happened - at least not yet - is for allegations to arise that Ratzinger was a predator himself. But that did not stop Italian Bishop Francesco Nolè from the city of Tursi (pictured at left) from further underscoring the Church's hypocrisy by stating that homosexuals should not receive communion or be given funerals. My question for the gay hating bishop is this: then what is the Church going to do with bishops, cardinals and Popes that enabled and covered up the sexual abuse of thousands and thousands of children and youths? No communion for them and no funerals? It would seem a fitting punishment, would it not (excluding extended jail time, of course)? Nolè's statement shows that the Church hierarchy is utterly obsessed with things sexual and gay sex in particular. As experience has shown, typically its the self-hating closet cases that make such remarks, so one cannot help but wonder about the good bishop's own sexual identity issues. Here are highlights from Pink Paper.com:
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The bishop of the city of Tursi has declared homosexuals should not receive communion or be given funerals.
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In an interview published last Friday on pontifex.roma.it, a website created to ‘prove and defend Christianity’, Bishop Francesco Nolè declared that ‘irregulars’ such as criminals and homosexuals should not be given communions or funerals. This, he said, is not to be seen as discrimination, but rather as ‘healthy medicine’ for those close to the person: “Our behaviour, which could be perceived as mean or cruel, in the long-run often heals and evangelises.”
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He added: “We must have the courage and tact, perhaps first informing the individual, or the families if he has passed, that it’s not possible to administer a communion or funeral. We would perhaps pray for his soul, which must be done.”
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He went on to say: “The church, with its eternal obsession with compassion, is or has already succumbed. Homosexual couples or those who are divorced and re-married are being called ‘irregulars’ instead of ‘public sinners’, and so the concept of sin itself goes down the drain.
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“Nothing surprises me anymore. Homosexuality, which is a disease, has become something normal. They sprout like poisonous mushrooms, and instead of feeling shame they celebrate this plague and the church itself minimalises these sins. Homosexuality itself is not a sin, you can’t punish a sufferer. But it becomes one when the abomination is practised. It’s disgraceful.”
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No sir, what's disgraceful is hypocrites like yourself and the damage you do to others as a result of your own f*cked up psychological problems.

Sunday Male Beauty

The Rage Is Not About Health Care

Frank Rich has another bang up column in the New York Times that looks at the rage and insanity that is embodied in the tea party crowd and the unhinged leadership of the Republican Party. Health Care reform may be the current target of these elements that want to drag the USA back into the 1950's or earlier, but the real rage stems from the fact that the nation and the world are moving on and changing and these people cannot tolerate the change overtaking their small minded views. As Rich notes, it is also ironic that the teapartiers consistently accuse others of engaging in behavior and conduct that more aptly describes their own. But then ignorance and a total absence of actual history are essential for these individuals to hold onto their misguided beliefs. Objective fact is the enemy they seem to fear most. That and the changing racial mix of the USA's population and the fact that whites are no longer the only ones "running the plantation." Here are some column highlights:
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THERE were times when last Sunday’s great G.O.P. health care implosion threatened to bring the thrill back to reality television. On ABC’s “This Week,” a frothing and filibustering Karl Rove all but lost it in a debate with the Obama strategist David Plouffe. A few hours later, the perennially copper-faced Republican leader John Boehner revved up his “Hell no, you can’t!” incantation in the House chamber . . . Boehner, having previously likened the health care bill to Armageddon, was now so apoplectic you had to wonder if he had just discovered one of its more obscure revenue-generating provisions, a tax on indoor tanning salons.
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But the laughs evaporated soon enough. There’s nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. And as the week dragged on, and reports of death threats and vandalism stretched from Arizona to Kansas to upstate New York, the F.B.I. and the local police had to get into the act to protect members of Congress and their families. How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht.
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No less curious is how disproportionate this red-hot anger is to its proximate cause. . . . As no less a conservative authority than The Wall Street Journal editorial page observed last week, the bill’s prototype is the health care legislation Mitt Romney signed into law in Massachusetts. It contains what used to be considered Republican ideas.
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To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill, you have to look a year before Medicare, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both laws passed by similar majorities in Congress; the Civil Rights Act received even more votes in the Senate (73) than Medicare (70). But it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance. The apocalyptic predictions then, like those about health care now, were all framed in constitutional pieties, of course.
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But the explanation is plain: the health care bill is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It’s merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964. In fact, the current surge of anger — and the accompanying rise in right-wing extremism — predates the entire health care debate. The first signs were the shrieks of “traitor” and “off with his head” at Palin rallies as Obama’s election became more likely in October 2008.
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The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. . . . The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.
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[N]o Republican or conservative leader of stature has taken on Palin, Perry, Boehner or any of the others who have been stoking these fires for a good 17 months now. Last week McCain even endorsed Palin’s “reload” rhetoric. Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.

Marine Corps Idiocy on DADT Repeal

As discussions about ending the religious based discrimination in the military posing under the name of Don't Ask Don't Tell continues, the homophobic Marine Commandant General James Conway (pictured at right) has stated that he'd build separate quarters for gays since some bigots might not want to share quarters with gays. Taking this bigotry to its logical conclusion, I guess Conway would, therefore, need to also build separate quarters for blacks, Hispanics, Jews, - the list goes on and on - so that no Marine Corp. member has to share quarters with their particular form of bigotry dislikes. Of course, a proposal like that pertaining to black troops would end Conway's career. And I guess Conway is willing to allow service members dispensation from following orders and conduct requirements - at least when gays are involved. Not surprisingly, The Palm Center has a pointed response to this asinine proposal. Here are some highlights from the Palm Center response:
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Military experts today expressed concern about Marine Commandant General James Conway’s remarks that he would build new quarters so as not to force gays and straights to room together. Many said his stated rationale could cause the very problems he seeks to prevent. Gen. Conway, who previously expressed resistance to lifting the ban on openly gay service, offered his remarks yesterday in an interview with Military.com. He said that “I would not ask our Marines to live with someone who is homosexual if we can possibly avoid it. And to me that means we have to build BEQs [bachelor enlisted quarters] and have single rooms.”
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Richard H. Kohn, a prominent military historian who was faculty at the Army and National War Colleges, and was Chief of Air Force History for the U.S. Air Force, said that "segregating Marines, as Gen. Conway envisions, might undermine the very cohesion he and other opponents of change say they are trying to protect.”
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Retired Marine General Carl Mundy, one of Conway's predecessors as Commandant of the U.S Marine Corps, opposes openly gay service, but recently said that if repeal is going to happen, “the easiest way to deal with it is to make it as simple as possible. The last thing you even want to think about is creating separate facilities or separate groups or separate meeting places or having four kinds of showers — one of straight women, lesbians, straight men and gay men. That would be absolutely disastrous in the armed forces. It would destroy any sense of cohesion or teamwork or good order and discipline.”
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[F]ormer Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John Shalikashvili, said mixed messages from leadership could be toxic, and that it was crucial for top leaders to communicate consistent signals that the force is capable of carrying out new orders. “Given the inevitability of change,” he wrote, “it will be important for senior leaders to send clear signals of support to the rank and file. Every general officer knows that mixed signals undermine leadership.
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According to Retired Rear Admiral Al Steinman, formerly the top-ranked doctor in the Coast Guard, existing rules and regulations regarding “incompatible” roommates already allow unit commanders to deal with problems between roommates, gay or straight. “There is no need to create special regulations that apply only because gay Marines are allowed to be honest about who they are,” said Steinman. He added that “there are already known gay Marines serving in both theaters of war, with the knowledge of their peers and sometimes even of their commands.
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Nathaniel Frank, Senior Research Fellow at the Palm Center, said Conway’s plan is inconsistent with research on gays in the military. “Decades of research, including all of the conclusions of the 1993 RAND study, shows that separating gays and straights is a bad idea,” he said.

The Closet, Forced Celibacy and Damaged Psyches

A reader left the typical excuse being put forward by defenders of the Roman Catholic Church: Anglicans and other denominations have had sexual abuse problems - he cites a situation in Canada - and therefore, those of us "Protestants" who criticize the Catholic Church are hypocrites. First, as a former life long Catholic who was sickened by the Catholic Church's systematic cover up of sexual abuse, I believe I have more than some "Protestant" perspective - particularly having been an altar boy for 10 years and, hence, with an understanding of the Church's extremely warped attitude toward sex in general. I have NEVER said that other denominations are guilt free on this issue - indeed I have gone after the Southern Baptist Convention numerous times for its continued pretense that there is no child sexual abuse problem amongst its pastors.
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The difference that sets the Catholic Church apart from all other denominations are (1) the literally world wide scope of the problem and (2) the mandates from the Vatican not to report abuse and try to cover it all up to protect the Church's reputation. I have yet to see any reports that other denominations have had such centralized top down mandates to cover up abuse. Thus there is a HUGE distinction between relatively localized problems in scattered places involving other denominations and the global scope of the Catholic Church's problems, including Vatican directives threatening those who did not cover up abuse with excommunication.

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The other factors that makes the Catholic Church unique is it's forced celibacy requirement for priests - at least in the Roman Rite Church - and its obsession with sex being something foul and dirty. I am not aware of any study that has looked at the issue, but if married eastern rite Catholic clergy do not have the same magnitude of sexual abuse of children and youths, then that would be telling as well on the impact of compulsory celibacy.

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Andrew Sullivan had a post late last week that in my view did a great analysis of the havoc that the closet and celibacy works on priests, especially those recruited into high school seminaries. Here are highlights:
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What's fascinating in the steady onslaught of new incidences of previous cover-ups of child rape and molestation in the Catholic hierarchy is the notion that the hierarchs tended to see child rape as a sin rather than a crime. . . How could that be, one asks? Well: imagine you are a young gay Catholic teen coming into his sexuality and utterly convinced that it's vile and evil. What do you do? I can tell you from my own experience. You bury it. But of course, you can't bury it. So you objectify sex; and masturbate. You cannot have sexual or even emotional contact with a teenage girl, because it is simply impossible, and you certainly cannot have sex with another teenage boy or you will burn in hell for ever ... so you have sex with images in your own head. Your sex life becomes completely solitary.
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Now suppose your powers of suppression and attachment to religious authority are also strong - perhaps stronger because you feel so adrift you need something solid to cling onto in your psyche. And you know you cannot marry a woman. But you want to have status and cover as a single man. If this is the 1950s and 1960s, it's into the Church you go. You think it will cure you. In fact, it only makes you sicker because your denial is buttressed by their collective denial. And the whole thing becomes one big and deepening spiral of lies and corruption.
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Many of these tormented men have arrested sexual and emotional development. They have never had a sexual or intimate relationship with any other human being. Sex for them is an abstraction, a sin, not an interaction with an equal. And their sexuality has been frozen at the first real moment of internal terror: their early teens. So they tend to be attracted still to those who are in their own stage of development: teenage boys. And in their new positions, they are given total access to these kids who revere them for their power.
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And they know that many around them have the same patterns, and so a truly sick subculture perpetuates this. In the end, it is all about themselves and their pathologies, how to express them and how to hide them. As social sexual tolerance advances, and as fewer straight men are prepared to give up sex for life to become priests, the proportion of screwed up pastors increases. In this self-protective environment, these priests do not even see the children as fellow humans. They remain like those solitary abstract images in their heads. So they cannot fully grasp the enormity of the crime they are committing and see it merely as another part of the vortex of their sexual sin.
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These men are too objectively disordered to run a church. They bask in self-denial, while they wage a culture war against gay men who have actually dealt with their sexuality, who have owned it, and celebrated it and even found ways to channel it into adult relationships and even civil marriage.
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Andrew's analysis is, in my opinion, point on and demonstrates the results of the Church's condemnation of all things sexual and the demand that priests live in an emotional void in terms of relationships. Experts such as the following have previously focused on portion of it and the fact that the Church, unwittingly, has created its own problem:
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Many of the priests who have been accused of abuse attended seminaries at a time when sex was barely discussed in class. . . . some priests suffer from stunted sexual development - that their sexual feelings stopped changing when they entered the worlds of the seminary and the priesthood, or even before, so they act as if they were adolescents themselves.

"If you're exploring your sexuality and your sexuality is homosexual, where are you going to find a partner? You're going to find a partner with someone in your emotional age range," Demarest said. "This is where these guys are mentally and emotionally. I'm not a bang-on-the-drum antigay person, but people need to stop dancing around this issue."
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"There is no evidence that an adult gay male is any more likely to seek out a boy for sexual activities than would there be a likelihood of an adult heterosexual man seeking out a little girl for sexual activities," said Berlin, who, along with Finkelhor, . . . . In the general public, the majority of adolescent sex abuse cases involve female victims. So why do boys seem to be victimized more frequently than girls by priests? Specialists say the answer is probably in part access: until recently, only boys were altar servers, for example.
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And part of the answer may lie in the culture of the priesthood. "The priesthood is a homosocial culture - all the values within the culture are male, and the reason there has been such a tolerance across the board of sexual activity by priests or bishops is because there is a boys-will-be-boys atmosphere," said A.W. Richard Sipe, a psychotherapist and former priest. "It's kind of a spiritual fraternity - like a college fraternity, but with a spiritual aura around it." When you're young and vulnerable, being too close to that fraternity can sometimes be dangerous.

Hampton Pride and Diversity Event - Update

Some time ago I put up a post about a Pride and Diversity Event to take place in Millpoint Park on June 19, 2010. There have been some organizational changes, but the event is still on for that date and place. Taking the helm of organizing the event are St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Hampton and Unitarian Universalist congregation in Williamsburg. These non-profit, gay supportive organizations will be giving all net proceeds derived from the event to local charities. In addition to food, wine, beer and vendors, organizations and businesses that want to promote themselves can secure a booth for $50.00. For more information contact St. Marks at (757) 826-3515 0r go to the church's website: http:stmarkshampton.org. As I said previously, this event will be the kick off for a week long Pride theme that will culminate with HP Pride's "Out in the Park" on June 27, 2010 at Chesapeake City Park off of Greenbrier Parkway in Chesapeake.

Saturday Male Beauty