It is with a mixture of profound human sadness and deep spiritual gratitude that we announce to the world that Andreas Moritz has returned to the Realms of Light.
During his all-too-brief stay here on Earth, Andreas touched the hearts and minds of people everywhere. Through his teachings, his books, his art, his personal guidance and inspiration, he helped people throughout the world to restore their health and well-being, and, in so doing, transform their lives.
As his mission here on Earth was nearing completion, he worked passionately to write and complete four more books, and they will be released in the coming months.
As we each deal with this shock and our personal grief surrounding his transition, the greatest gift we can give to Andreas is to send Love and Gratitude to assist him as he continues his Mission from the higher dimensions.
At some point in the future we plan to co-create a global celebration of his life and many blessings to the world.
~ The Ener-Chi Family
His cause of death appears to be unannounced by his family, but various sources on the web say that that information will be released after his funeral. Given that he died at least one week ago, I imagine that means we’ll know soon. I will be interested to see if he had cancer or any other disease he claimed was not disease. If he did, I’ll make a new post about it. Otherwise, I imagine I’ll just update this post.
I’m never happy about the death of a fellow human, and I have no intention of gloating about a single thing here. However, I do lament the fact that there are apparently four more Moritz books due to be released. Just as the world didn’t need his death, it didn’t need any of his work. And now that it does have his death, I wish it would do away with his work. This is a man whose legacy should be carried on solely as a private endeavor by his family, friends, and loved ones.
I expect to see more and more rulings like this one:
A U.S. appeals court in New York on Thursday ruled that a U.S. law defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman unconstitutionally denies federal benefits to lawfully married same-sex couples.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is now the second federal appeals court to reject part of the Defense of Marriage Act. It upheld a lower court ruling that had found a central part of the law unconstitutional.
Appeals in several cases are currently pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, which could choose to take up the issue in its current term.
Two members of a three-judge panel ruled in favor of Edith Windsor, an 83-year-old woman who argued that the law discriminates against gay couples in violation of the U.S. Constitution.
They found that gays and lesbians are entitled to heightened protection from the courts, based on the history of discrimination the group has suffered.
“Homosexuals are not in a position to adequately protect themselves from the discriminatory wishes of the majoritarian public,” Judge Dennis Jacobs wrote for the majority.
Here are two predictions I think I can fairly make from this. First is a repeat of what I’ve said about Political Figure Antonin Scalia: This ‘justice’ says he cares about stare decisis, the principle that past case precedence is an immensely important factor in deciding current cases. In Lawrence v Texas, it was established that states cannot make sodomy illegal, and Scalia said this sets the precedence that gay marriage cannot be outlawed. Thus, if this joke of a ‘justice’ actually believes in his so-called principles, he will vote against the idea that states can ban marriage by gay people. I predict he will not.
Second, Christians will claim that their religion always supported equal rights and protections under the law when enough time has passed. We may have to wait a couple of generations, but we should start hearing claims from mainstream Bible-thumpers that Christianity has not only always been in support of equal rights, but that it was the catalyst for the social and court movements we’re seeing today. That will be a blatant lie, but it is exactly what we have seen with slavery, anti-miscegenation laws, segregation, the Enlightenment, our secular forefathers, and especially science. I see no reason why these revisionist patterns will end.
For quite some time now we have been hearing counter-common sense arguments that claim the administration of HPV vaccines will make young girls more likely to engage in sexual activity. One recent study shows those arguments to be bogus:
Adolescent girls who get the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine are no more likely to show signs they may be engaging in sexual activity than girls who do not get the vaccine, according to a new study that challenges a widely held belief…
Researchers from Emory University in Atlanta followed electronic data of nearly 1,400 girls aged 11 and 12 between July 2006 and December 2010 to see whether they received at least one dose of the vaccine within the first year and whether they were later counseled about contraception, acquired a sexually transmitted disease or became pregnant.
More than a quarter of girls ages 15 to 17 report being sexually active, according to the CDC.
The study followed the girls to the age range where sexual activity would have been initiated, according to the researchers.
The nearly 500 girls who received at least one dose of the vaccine were no more likely to be diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease, discuss contraception or become pregnant than the nearly 900 girls who did not get the vaccine, the study found.
“We couldn’t directly look at sexual activity, so we looked at external outcomes that would suggest sexual activity,” said Dr. Robert Bednarczyk, clinical investigator with the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research Southeast, and lead author of the study.
The sort of arguments that inspired the above study are of the same sort that inspire studies which show that abstinence-only education is an abysmal failure. Again and again, social conservatives and overly worried parents will claim or wonder if the exposure to greater information will cause their children to become sexually active at a young age. Only the wonder is justified; over and over we are seeing that access to proper information and sound medical protections are the correct path to take.
I’ve been bothered over the past several months by people who have been claiming that NYC has had soft drinks over a certain size outlawed for some time now. That just hasn’t been true. [/rant] Now a ban has been put in place:
New York City passed the first U.S. ban of oversized sugary drinks on Thursday in its latest controversial step to reduce obesity and its deadly complications in a nation with a weight problem.
By an 8-0 vote with one abstention, the mayoral-appointed city health board outlawed sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces nearly everywhere they are sold, except groceries and convenience stores. Violators of the ban, which does not include diet sodas, face a $200 fine.
Opponents, who cast the issue as an infringement on personal freedom and called Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who proposed the ban in May, an overbearing nanny, vowed to continue their fight. They may go to court in the hopes of blocking or overturning the measure before it takes effect in March.
When I first heard about this, I figured it was a publicity stunt – the desired publicity being to draw attention to the obesity problem. I didn’t think anyone would follow through with this, but here we are. So that said, I’m not sure how I feel about this. I’m all for calories being listed on menus (because informed consumption is important), but I’m not entirely convinced this will make any difference in fighting obesity. I see people buying their oversized drinks elsewhere, such as in grocery stores where they are still legal. Alternatively, businesses may just offer free refills more often. One thing, however, of which I am convinced is that this lady is wrong:
“It’s sad that the board wants to limit our choices,” Liz Berman, a business owner and chairwoman of New Yorkers for Beverage Choices, a beverage industry-sponsored group, said in a statement. “We are smart enough to make our own decisions about what to eat and drink.”
Perhaps people should be allowed to buy what they want, but it’s absolutely clear that most Americans are not smart enough to make their own decisions about what to eat and drink.
I recently wrote about the Secular Coalition for America’s push to establish chapters in all 50 states. I mentioned that I had been interviewed for a piece in the local Maine newspapers concerning that push. Here is that piece:
Rarely does a news release headline jump off the screen like this one that landed last week in my inbox: “Maine atheists to organize state lobbying group this month.”
Good heavens. As if Maine doesn’t have enough to argue about these days.
Later this week, the Secular Coalition for America will open its phone lines to anyone and everyone in Maine who a) doesn’t believe in God, b) can’t be sure there is a God or c) believes, regardless of his or her spiritual underpinnings, that government at any level should not be doing anything in the name of the man (or woman) upstairs…
“Lobbying is the tip of the iceberg,” [Sean] Faircloth agreed. Like the gay rights movement has done over the last three or four decades, he said, “the key is building a grassroots organization that has credibility.”
Which is where Mainers like Michael Hawkins come in.
Hawkins, 27, grew up attending the Roman Catholic St. Mary’s School in Augusta.
His road to atheism began when he was in his teens and heard a group of God-fearing adults asserting, with utmost certainty, that the Earth is a mere 7,000 years old.
“I knew that wasn’t true — but I didn’t know why it wasn’t true or by how much they were wrong,” recalled Hawkins, who’s now one course away from a bachelor’s degree in biology and helped found a loosely knit group on Facebook called Atheists of Maine.
Hawkins, upon hearing about the Secular Coalition for America’s conference call at 1 p.m. Thursday, said he’ll definitely be on the line. (To join in, call 530-881-1400 and punch in the access code 978895.)
But where it all goes from there, Hawkins said, is still up in the air.
He’s well aware that “there’s a lot of stigma around the word” atheist.
And he harbors no illusions that in Maine’s current political climate, wary politicians on either side of the aisle might embrace what undoubtedly would be branded the “atheist agenda.”
“With the Republicans in control of everything, it’s not going to be well received,” Hawkins predicted. “It’ll take a little while.”
If not an eternity.
The comment sections on this article are interesting. (The article appears on several websites because many of Maine’s major newspapers are owned by the same company.) Some people are going off with the usual garbage about atheists calling the religious stupid. I’ve never heard or read any major atheist do this. Other people are attacking Faircloth for this or that. One person even said he doesn’t have a real job, even though he’s one of only 4 people listed at the head of the Richard Dawkins Foundation. A few are trying to tackle the writer, Bill Nemitz, for one imagined thing or another. Hey, maybe my mention of the fact that Republicans control everything in Maine right now really is Nemitz’s political agenda. That totally makes sense. Fortunately, a good number of people are simply excited about this. We’ve even seen a slight uptick in membership on the Facebook page Atheists of Maine.
My only disappointment is that my old school got a mention. It isn’t something I’ve ever tried to hide, but I’m sure the people at St. Michael School (previously known as St. Mary’s) weren’t overly excited about it. As much as I disagree with the Catholic religion, I’m constantly grateful that I went to that school over the less than stellar public choices in the area.
At any rate, I hope the SCA makes a big splash in Maine. I’ll keep things updated.
The Secular Coalition for America is excited to announce the initial organizing efforts for a chapter in Louisiana this month. The state chapter will lobby state lawmakers in favor of a strong separation of religion and government.
The initial organizing call for the Secular Coalition for Louisiana will be held on September 12th at 3:00PM ET / 2:00PM CT. The SCA encourages interested participants to call in. Participation is open to anyone who supports a strong separation of religion and government and wants to get involved, irrespective of personal religious beliefs.
Other state chapters being organized later this month include Delaware, District of Columbia, Idaho, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, and Wisconsin. Since June, the SCA successfully held initial organizing calls for new chapters in 27 states. Participants will be trained in lobbying state lawmakers, and the chapter will be provided with a website and other materials.
The big effort here, as far as I can tell, is going to be to dampen the negative effects religion has in politics. Namely, the goals will be to kill stealth creationist bills, promote science education, and maybe even support pro-science candidates. Along with this will come to the promotion of Gnu Atheist values.*
I’m excited about this; I’ve already contacted the former Executive Director of the SCA, Sean Faircloth. He is a former Maine legislator and currently heads up strategy and policy for the Richard Dawkins foundation. I’m not 100% of his involvement with the group at this point, but I do know he is being interviewed for an article that will appear in the Maine Sunday Telegram in a couple of days. (I was also interviewed for the piece.) I hope he can help get me started with all this or at least point me in the right direction. Maine atheists, agnostics, and nonbelievers need to be organized.
The current “organization” for Maine atheists and others currently amounts to an Atheists of Maine Facebook page I run with two other people. As far as I can tell, it is the largest collection of atheists in the state, so if you haven’t liked it yet, you should. I plan on utilizing it to do what I can to help establish an SCA chapter in Maine.
I haven’t written about the legalization of marijuana very much on FTSOS, but I have long been in favor of it. No study has ever established a causative link between marijuana and cancer (or any other major disease), and I don’t think it is particularly detrimental to society to allow people to smoke it. Moreover, criminalizing the plant only creates an atmosphere of violence and real crime, not to mention the creation of criminals from the non-criminals who get locked up for using or selling it. That said, however, some new evidence has forced me to reel my views back at least a little:
Researchers found persistent users of the drug, who started smoking it at school, had lower IQ scores as adults.
They were also significantly more likely to have attention and memory problems in later life, than their peers who abstained.
Furthermore, those who started as teenagers and used it heavily, but quit as adults, did not regain their full mental powers, found academics at King’s College London and Duke University in the US.
Those who started later in life – usually during their college years – also experienced a drop in IQ, but were able to recover relatively soon after quitting.
I don’t particularly have a horse in this race – believe it or not, I do not smoke anything and I have no desire to ever start – but I’ve seen plenty of promising people lose track of their lives because of weed. Some have gotten things back on track and the others certainly could do the same, but that’s lost time and productivity. I think the world would simply be a better place with legalization and regulation of marijuana, especially where minors are concerned – and there’s good evidence behind that view.
Update: This post has received a pingback from Jesse Bering. It does not support the contention he makes, nor does he make it clear which “outspoken atheist blogger” he means (me or PZ). I have asked him to correct his obvious error, but he refuses.
PZ Myers irresponsibly said this last year concerning circumcision:
The health benefits. Total bullshit. As one of the speakers in the movie explains, there have been progressive excuses: from it prevents masturbation to it prevents cancer to it prevents AIDS. The benefits all vanish with further studies and are all promoted by pro-circumcision organizations. It doesn’t even make sense: let’s not pretend people have been hacking at penises for millennia because there was a clinical study. Hey, let’s chop off our pinkie toes and then go looking for medical correlations!
The American Academy of Pediatrics on Monday announced its first major shift on circumcision in more than a decade, concluding that the health benefits of the procedure clearly outweigh any risks.
“There is clear evidence that supports the health benefits of circumcision,” said Susan Blank, who led the 14-member task force that formulated the new policy being published in the journal Pediatrics…
For starters, Blank says, circumcision helps baby boys pretty much immediately.
“The health benefits of male circumcision include a drop in the risk of urinary tract infection in the first year of life by up to 90 percent,” she says.
But there’s a much bigger reason to do it, Blank said. Circumcised males are far less likely to get infected with a long list of sexually transmitted diseases.
“It drops the risk of heterosexual HIV acquisition by about 60 percent. It drops the risk of human papillomavirus [HPV], herpes virus and other infectious genital ulcers,” she says.
It also reduces the chances that men will spread HPV to their wives and girlfriends, protecting them from getting cervical cancer.
“We’ve reviewed the data and, you know, we have gone through them with a fine-tooth comb, and the data are pretty convincing,” she says.
So now the only question that remains is, When is PZ Myers going to recant his blatantly and irresponsibly false statement where he said that health benefits of circumcision vanish with further studies? It would also be nice if he could clarify whether or not the American Academy of Pediatrics is a “pro-circumcision organization”.
Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin has been all over the news for saying this in response to a question about abortion in the case of rape:
People always try to make that one of those things, ‘Oh, how do you slice this particularly tough sort of ethical question. It seems to me, first of all, what I understand from doctors is that’s really where, if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.
He then goes on to say that he opposes abortion in cases of rape. (Before I go on to address the big issue here – the use of the word “legitimate” – I want to note how surprising it is that this position isn’t more widespread in the anti-abortion camp. If the life of a child is what matters, then why is it important how that child was conceived? If a life is a life, then a life is a life. The argument that ‘every life matters’ doesn’t cease to be the right-wing’s cornerstone because of external reasons that do not reflect upon the innocence of the life itself.)
Anyway. The major issue at hand here is that Akin, apparently, distinguished between legitimate and, presumably, illegitimate rape. I think it is important, at this point, to listen to the actual clip from the interview:
I think this makes his words much more ambiguous. Let’s start with the first part of what he says. When quoted in writing, it sounds like he’s being dismissive and condescending to people who ‘always try to make that one of those tough ethical questions’. That is, if I had only read what he said, I would have placed his words in a context where he was practically saying that the issue is nothing more than a “gotcha question”. Listening to the video, it’s clear he’s just summarizing the nature of the argument. I think it’s clear he does think the question is a tough one. His inflection indicates that. But I never would have gotten that from just reading his quote.
Now let’s look at his use of the word “legitimate”. I think what he was trying to emphasize was a difference between consensual sex and rape. That is, he was trying to say the female body has a way of distinguishing between two types of sex acts (consensual and non-consensual). Of course, there is no way the female body does that, and I suspect he was merely repeating the all too common anti-abortion propaganda out there that has no regard for science.
To be sure, Akin used a stupid word. And to be extra sure, I think his position on abortion is just as stupid. However, I do not think that he meant to say that women who claim to be raped yet still get pregnant are lying, that their rapes were not legitimate. I think he believed, erroneously, that there is some physiological mechanism in place that prevents pregnancy in the case of rape, but he also believed that it was not 100% effective. (Again, his belief was wrong through and through, but I think that’s the position he held.)
I don’t want to defend Akin. And, frankly, part of me is glad that this has not only impacted his chance of election, but that it has placed a negative light on the Republican party all together. However, just as President Obama’s use of the word “that” did not mean he believed business owners did not build their own businesses, I do not think Akin’s use of the word “legitimate” means he thinks pregnant rape victims are liars. For me, this issue goes beyond the social concerns and the ethical issues. I very much see it as an issue of language. I’m not willing to grill someone over what I think was a slip of the tongue. Until I see evidence that Akin might actually believe that rape victims are liars – a certainly shitty position – I’m not jumping on the bandwagon.
Finally, let’s go back to what I said right before the video: “I think it is important, at this point, to listen to the actual clip from the interview.” I intentionally used the word “actual”; most people who read it likely assumed I was distinguishing between the video clip and the written quote. And I was. However, it would not be difficult to falsely interpret my sentence to mean that I think there is a real clip and a fake clip. Or, alternatively, it could be interpreted to mean that I think the written quote is somehow fabricated or quote-mined. None of that would be true, of course. All I was saying was that there is a difference between reading a quote and hearing a quote. The nature of language allows for broad interpretations, though – especially when there is an agenda-driven narrative already in place.
NASA’s Curiosity rover has zapped its first Martian rock, aiming its laser for the sake of science.
During the target practice on Sunday. Curiosity fired 30 pulses at a nearby rock over a 10-second window, burning a small hole.
Since landing in Gale Crater two weeks ago, the six-wheel rover has been checking out its instruments including the laser. During its two-year mission, Curiosity was expected to point the laser at various rocks as it drives toward Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-high mountain rising from the crater floor.
Oh. And it also has the goal of determining if Mars is inhabitable or something.
For the Sake of Science 