Philip Pullman Book Denies Jesus Was Son Of God
Philip Pullman, the children’s author, is set to cause controversy with a new book – called The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ – denying that Jesus was the son of God.
The book which is due to be published at Easter next year, argues that St Paul came up with the ”story” that Jesus had a divine link.
Pullman has previously ruffled feathers in religious circles with the trilogy His Dark Materials, interpreted by some groups as being anti-Christian.
He said: ”By the time the gospels were being written, Paul had already begun to transform the story of Jesus into something altogether new and extraordinary, and some of his version influenced what the gospel writers put in theirs.
”Paul was a literary and imaginative genius of the first order who has probably had more influence on the history of the world than any other human being, Jesus certainly included. I believe this is a pity.”
Pullman told The Times newspaper that the idea of Jesus being the son of God came from Paul’s ”fervid imagination”.
He went on: ”The story I tell comes out of the tension within the dual nature of Jesus Christ, but what I do with it is my responsibility alone. Parts of it read like a novel, parts like a history, and parts like a fairy tale; I wanted it to be like that because it is, among other things, a story about how stories become stories.”
His Dark Materials, which includes the book Northern Lights on which the film The Golden Compass was based, attracted criticism for promoting atheism.
The movie was also blasted by the Vatican for portraying a world without God.
Telegraph (thanks, Kirsty)
New Species Of Giant Woolly Rat Discovered By BBC Film Crew
A BBC film crew recording a programme in an extinct volcano in Papua New Guinea has discovered a new species of giant woolly rat, a frog with fangs, and around 40 other exotic creatures unknown to science.
Dr George McGavin and his team of biologists were stunned to spot a new species of frog within a minute of setting foot from their helicopter on the rim of the crater of Mount Bosavi.
“It was mind-blowing,” said Dr McGavin, the head scientist of the BBC Natural History unit. “Allen Allison, a specialist in amphibians, said, ‘I think that’s one there over by your foot’. I nearly trod on it.”
The woolly rat, which measures nearly 3ft (82cm) in length and weighs more than 3lb (1.5kg), was captured on film in an infrared camera trap set up on the densely wooded slopes.
Provisionally named the Bosavi woolly rat, it is thought to live only in the crater and nowhere else in the world. It has no fear of humans.
“I had a cat and it was about the same size as this rat,” said Gordon Buchanan, the cameraman who first observed the creature.
Times Online (thanks, Kirsty)
Time In A Bottle: Scientists Watch Evolution Unfold
A 21-year Michigan State University experiment that distills the essence of evolution in laboratory flasks not only demonstrates natural selection at work, but could lead to biotechnology and medical research advances, researchers said.
Charles Darwin’s seminal Origin of Species first laid out the case for evolution exactly 150 years ago. Now, MSU professor Richard Lenski and colleagues document the process in their analysis of 40,000 generations of bacteria, published this week in the international science journal Nature.
Lenski, Hannah Professor of Microbial Ecology at MSU, started growing cultures of fast-reproducing, single-celled E. coli bacteria in 1988. If a genetic mutation gives a cell an advantage in competition for food, he reasoned, it should dominate the entire culture. While Darwin’s theory of natural selection is supported by other studies, it has never before been studied for so many cycles and in such detail.
The Bloop
IN THE summer of 1997, an array of underwater microphones, or hydrophones, owned by the US government picked up a strange sound. For a minute, it rose rapidly in frequency; then it disappeared. The hydrophones, a relic of cold-war submarine tracking, picked up this signal again and again during those summer months, then it was never heard again. No one knows what made the sound, now known as “The Bloop” (hear it at www.thebloop.notlong.com).
It’s not the only mysterious sound heard in the ocean. In May 1997, hydrophones picked up the “Slowdown” sound. Over the course of about 7 minutes, it slowly dropped in pitch, rather like the sound of an aeroplane flying past (www.theslowdown.notlong.com). Its origin has been only loosely pinned down: it seems to have originated from somewhere off the west coast of South America, and could be heard from 2000 kilometres away.
So what’s behind the strange noises? The Bloop sounds like it might have been created by an animal, but it is far louder than any whale song, so a marine creature that made it would either be bigger than any whale, or a much more efficient producer of sound. The most popular speculation about Slowdown is that it was caused by the break-up of Antarctic ice – which means it might give an indication of climate change.
New Scientist (thanks, Fosca)
TV Boss Set To Drop A File-Sharing Bomb On Digital Britain
The Commissioning Editor for Education at the UK’s Channel 4 will publish an essay tomorrow that is guaranteed to cause controversy. Noting that people will never go back to paying for music, Alice Taylor vehemently opposes plans to disconnect Internet users on a simple accusation, labeling the entities calling for it as “dying behemoths”.
For years now we have heard the loud voices of those representing the movie, music and TV industries as they call for tougher and tougher legislation in order to force people to consume media, their way. These entities really believe that the file-sharing genie can be somehow squeezed back into the bottle by the use of overwhelming force. The battle lines have been drawn but make no mistake, these tactics will not win this war – the Internet and empowerment of the individual has put an end to all that.
Considering the aggressiveness shown by some elements of the aforementioned groups – who would have infringers permanently kicked off the Internet if they could have their way – it is very rare indeed for influential people traditionally placed in the pro-copyright camp to make statements that are in harmony with their supposed opposition. Tomorrow, therefore, should prove a very interesting day.
After moving on from her position as Vice President of Digital Content for BBC Worldwide, Alice Taylor became Commissioning Editor for Education at the UK’s Channel 4. She is also the significant other of copyfighter, journalist, sci-fi writer, Boing Boing editor and huge Derren Brown Blog fan Cory Doctorow.
Read the rest of the story at Torrent Freak
African Child “Witches” Withstand Brutal Abuse By Churches
Nigeria — The nine-year-old boy lay on a bloodstained hospital sheet crawling with ants, staring blindly at the wall.
His family pastor had accused him of being a witch, and his father then tried to force acid down his throat as an exorcism. It spilled as he struggled, burning away his face and eyes. The emaciated boy barely had strength left to whisper the name of the church that had denounced him — Mount Zion Lighthouse.
A month later, he died.
Nwanaokwo Edet was one of an increasing number of children in Africa accused of witchcraft by pastors and then tortured or killed, often by family members. Pastors were involved in half of 200 cases of “witch children” reviewed by the AP, and 13 churches were named in the case files.
Some of the churches involved are renegade local branches of international franchises. Their parishioners take literally the Biblical exhortation, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”
“It is an outrage what they are allowing to take place in the name of Christianity,” said Gary Foxcroft, head of nonprofit Stepping Stones Nigeria.
Fragment From World’s Oldest Bible Found Hidden In Egyptian Monastery
A British-based academic has uncovered a fragment of the world’s oldest Bible hiding underneath the binding of an 18th-century book.
Nikolas Sarris spotted a previously unseen section of the Codex Sinaiticus, which dates from about AD350, as he was trawling through photographs of manuscripts in the library of St Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt.
The Codex, handwritten in Greek on animal skin, is the earliest known version of the Bible. Leaves from the priceless tome are divided between four institutions, including St Catherine’s Monastery and the British Library, which has held the largest section of the ancient Bible since the Soviet Union sold its collection to Britain in 1933.
Academics from Britain, America, Egypt and Russia collaborated to put the entire Codex online this year but new fragments of the book are occasionally rediscovered.
The Independent (thanks, Tammy)
Balloon boy: Heene family ‘facing criminal charges’
Along with the unfortunate typo above is the article about the “balloon boy” family facing charges for their little prank.
An enormous land and air rescue effort was launched on Thursday as the flying saucer-shaped balloon was swept thousands of feet into the air but the boy was later discovered hiding in the attic of his family garage.
It emerged that his family had appeared in the US edition of the television reality show, Wife Swap, and that his father, Richard, admitted that he was obsessed with getting publicity for his eccentric activities, including storm-chasing.
Then, in an interview on CNN, Falcon was asked by his father why he had not come out of his hiding place sooner. He replied: “You guys said that we did this for the show.”
This Is What Your Spine Looks Like When The Placebo Effect Kicks In
Neuroscientists have conducted a study showing spinal-cord neural activity when individuals were convinced that their pain would be alleviated by a cream treatment. This activity shows where the Placebo Effect occurs and how gullible volunteer test subjects can be.
Basically what researchers at the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany did was tell a bunch of volunteers that they were going to be given a pain-relieving cream while a painful amount of heat was applied to their arms. Instead what the lab coats did was use an inactive cream and reduce the heat to a tolerable level, at least on the first go. In subsequent tests, the heat was set at a painful level and, despite still only receiving the inactive cream, volunteers stated that they felt less pain than without it.
