After the recent kerfuffle with the (non)depiction of the Islamic prophet Muhammed on (lame) TV show South Park, a couple of web-based initiatives to draw Muhammad have sprung up.
The first is being promoted by YouTube user NonStampCollector. Every YouTuber is being encouraged to draw a non-offensive stick figure and call him Muhammed. The campaign is called Have You Seen This Man? and I hope all those with YouTube accounts get into it.
The second is being promoted by a group calling themselves Citizens Against Citizens Against Humor. They are also encouraging posting of non-offensive Muhammad drawings to sites all across the internet. The cartoonist behind this movement is Molly Norris, and she has declared May 20th Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.
I love this idea and will be doing my own drawing closer to the 20th. In order to show as much deference as possible to Muhammed and his modern followers I'll be copying an old piece of Islamic art which depicts Muhammed preaching to some of his earlier converts. The prohibition against drawing Muhammed didn't arise until the 16th century and has only been sporadically enforced since then. There is actually quite a rich history of Islamic medieval art which shows Muhammed with a full view of his facial features. Claims that drawing Muhammed has always been considered offensive are completely false.
I can imagine one objection to these campaigns might be that we ought not cause offense to our muslim brethren. In normal situations I would agree that it's better to play it safe rather than to set out to deliberately annoy someone. However, Islam has repeatedly demonstrated that it will over-react to even mild satire in a completely unacceptable way. Consider the riots and race-based pogroms that occurred after Jyllands-Posten printed 12 Muhammed cartoons in 2005. Secularists dragged Christianity, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century and now it's time to give Islam a little remedial schooling. A creative arts lesson should be an easy place to start.
April 30, 2010
April 29, 2010
The day God hit reset
In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth, the seas and the skies, the animals and even mankind. Everything was good. Until man learned of his nakedness, he learned how to take pleasure in the company of woman and soon the new world was populated with those who sinned against God's desire.
God decided that the wicked could no longer be saved so he planned to flood his creation and drown the unrighteous who would not listen to his word. But God did not wish to destroy all of his creation and so sent for our hero to build an ark. And our hero did built a great ark. On this ark was loaded all the beasts and birds needed to repopulate the Earth after the flood. Our hero brought his family aboard and sealed the ark shut.
It rained for many days and many nights, long and deep enough to lift the ark from the ground and float it along in the flood waters. Eventually all wickedness had been drowned and God allowed the flood-waters to recede. Our hero and his ark came to rest on the side of a mountain, in a strange land where the remnants of the ark may still be today. But where exactly is the location that the ark's residents finally came ashore to repopulate the Earth?
It turns out the answer to that question depends on which sacred text you read and which god you believe in. If you believe that the hero of the story is a man named Noah and the world was flooded by the god Yahweh, you would expect to find the ark somewhere around Mt Ararat in Turkey. Alternatively, if your hero is called Nuh and your god Allah, the ark should be located on Mt Judi in Iraq. But if you happen to be one of the Iraqi Mandaeans the resting place of the ark is in Egypt.
In the Greek flood myth, Zeus puts an end to the Bronze age (1500 BCE) by flooding the world. However, the hero Deucalion builds an ark which saves him and his family (but he does not take any animals). The location of his ark has been suggested as Mt Parnassus or Mt Etna. Going back even further (to 2000 BCE), the Sumerian hero Atrahasis is told by the god Enki that another god, Enlil, plans to flood the world to prevent overpopulation. Atrahasis builds an ark to save himself, his family, and his animals from destruction. The landing site of this ark was Bahrain.
With all these arks supposedly floating around it seems surprising that we haven't yet uncovered some archeological trace of any of them. Or have we? Well this week ABC carries the story of a potential ark find on Mt Ararat.
Exciting stuff, unfortunately it turns out to be a fake. Randall Price who was the arkaeologist with the Chinese team has denounced the find saying "In the late summer of 2008 ten Kurdish workers hired by Parasut ... are said to have planted large wood beams taken from an old structure in the Black Sea area ... at the Mt. Ararat site. ... During the summer of 2009 more wood was planted inside a cave at the site. The Chinese team went in the late summer of 2009 (I was there at the time and knew about the hoax) and was shown the cave with the wood and made their film." (Read his full account here.)
Ah well, the arkaeologists will have to keep searching and they've got a lot of ground to cover. According to ancient scriptures, almost every mountain range in, and around, the fertile crescent, the Mediterranean, and Bahrain could have the remains of one ark or another. Good luck!
God decided that the wicked could no longer be saved so he planned to flood his creation and drown the unrighteous who would not listen to his word. But God did not wish to destroy all of his creation and so sent for our hero to build an ark. And our hero did built a great ark. On this ark was loaded all the beasts and birds needed to repopulate the Earth after the flood. Our hero brought his family aboard and sealed the ark shut.
It rained for many days and many nights, long and deep enough to lift the ark from the ground and float it along in the flood waters. Eventually all wickedness had been drowned and God allowed the flood-waters to recede. Our hero and his ark came to rest on the side of a mountain, in a strange land where the remnants of the ark may still be today. But where exactly is the location that the ark's residents finally came ashore to repopulate the Earth?
It turns out the answer to that question depends on which sacred text you read and which god you believe in. If you believe that the hero of the story is a man named Noah and the world was flooded by the god Yahweh, you would expect to find the ark somewhere around Mt Ararat in Turkey. Alternatively, if your hero is called Nuh and your god Allah, the ark should be located on Mt Judi in Iraq. But if you happen to be one of the Iraqi Mandaeans the resting place of the ark is in Egypt.
In the Greek flood myth, Zeus puts an end to the Bronze age (1500 BCE) by flooding the world. However, the hero Deucalion builds an ark which saves him and his family (but he does not take any animals). The location of his ark has been suggested as Mt Parnassus or Mt Etna. Going back even further (to 2000 BCE), the Sumerian hero Atrahasis is told by the god Enki that another god, Enlil, plans to flood the world to prevent overpopulation. Atrahasis builds an ark to save himself, his family, and his animals from destruction. The landing site of this ark was Bahrain.
With all these arks supposedly floating around it seems surprising that we haven't yet uncovered some archeological trace of any of them. Or have we? Well this week ABC carries the story of a potential ark find on Mt Ararat.
Exciting stuff, unfortunately it turns out to be a fake. Randall Price who was the arkaeologist with the Chinese team has denounced the find saying "In the late summer of 2008 ten Kurdish workers hired by Parasut ... are said to have planted large wood beams taken from an old structure in the Black Sea area ... at the Mt. Ararat site. ... During the summer of 2009 more wood was planted inside a cave at the site. The Chinese team went in the late summer of 2009 (I was there at the time and knew about the hoax) and was shown the cave with the wood and made their film." (Read his full account here.)
Ah well, the arkaeologists will have to keep searching and they've got a lot of ground to cover. According to ancient scriptures, almost every mountain range in, and around, the fertile crescent, the Mediterranean, and Bahrain could have the remains of one ark or another. Good luck!
April 28, 2010
The Vaccine War
I've just finished watching a new PBS Frontline documentary called The Vaccine War. The documentary covered the current dispute between parents and medical professionals over whether vaccines are safe to give to children.
Both sides of the question were given ample time to present their respective cases, including plenty of screen time for anti-vax cheerleader Jenny McCarthy. Frontline did an excellent job of hearing out the claims made by the anti-vaccine advocates and then debunking them by presenting the scientific evidence and credible explanations by experts in the field.
The documentary also made exposed the major tactic of pseudoscientific proponents which is to shift the goalposts once the scientific facts on their previous claim have been gathered. Led by Andrew Wakefield, the vaccine denialists first pronounced that the MMR vaccine caused detrimental effects in young children who received immunisation. This was shown by epidemiological studies in Denmark, Japan, and the US to be false. Furthermore, it was explained that Dr Wakefield's flawed study had been retracted by the prestigious medical journal in which it was originally published. The anti-vaccine advocates then switched to blaming mercury present in the thiomersal preservative for the autism their children developed after receiving multiple vaccinations. The claim was once again shown to be false by epidemiological evidence. It was also made clear by the scientific experts that the correlation between vaccination and autism was only due to the coincidence in timing between the onset of autism and childhood vaccination schedule and causation should not be assumed (a post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy). Finally, the vaccine denialists were left calling for more studies and generic testing even in the face of overwhelming evidence that vaccines are safe and efficacious.
The last segment of the program focused on the harm that anti-vaccine advocates are causing. The first and most obvious problem is that the children who are not vaccinated get sick with these deadly diseases. I some cases, such as polio and measles, anti-vaccination movements have actually prevented these diseases from being eliminated from our planet. Every year people get sick and die from vaccine-preventable diseases, yet vaccine denialists still promote the non-use of these life-saving measures (see the Jenny McCarthy body count - 509 deaths at the time of writing). The second issue is that of lost herd immunity. Some, because of age or ill-health, cannot safely be vaccinated and rely on those around them not to pass on diseases. With the lower levels of vaccinations, this herd immunity is lost. The Vaccine War included the story of one little girl who almost died from Pertussis (whooping cough) a disease many young doctors have never even seen in their patients. The final problem is that of distraction. The money and time spent on eliminating the MMR vaccine and thiomersal as a potential cause of autism could have been better spent studying the actual causes of autism and providing real results to desperate parents who have so many unanswered questions.
One final point that Frontline touched on but did not provide a definitive answer for, was that of requiring parents to vaccinate their children. After all, we expect parents to take reasonable care of their children, to prevent injury and sickness as best they can. Since vaccines are such a success, perhaps parents should have no say in the matter and vaccination should be mandated by the government. Although the ideal situation would be for informed parents to make the right choice and get their children vaccinated, I think it the importance of preserving herd immunity and wiping out these deadly diseases outweighs the slight loss of parental freedom. Ironically, if every parent had their children properly vaccinated, these diseases would disappear and there would be no need for a continued vaccination program. Smallpox is currently the only virus which has been eradicated and other diseases could be eliminated if only people would listen to the experts and get immunised. Overriding the parents' choice is not the perfect system but as long as vaccine denialists continue to spread their misinformation, it may be a necessary one.
Both sides of the question were given ample time to present their respective cases, including plenty of screen time for anti-vax cheerleader Jenny McCarthy. Frontline did an excellent job of hearing out the claims made by the anti-vaccine advocates and then debunking them by presenting the scientific evidence and credible explanations by experts in the field.
The documentary also made exposed the major tactic of pseudoscientific proponents which is to shift the goalposts once the scientific facts on their previous claim have been gathered. Led by Andrew Wakefield, the vaccine denialists first pronounced that the MMR vaccine caused detrimental effects in young children who received immunisation. This was shown by epidemiological studies in Denmark, Japan, and the US to be false. Furthermore, it was explained that Dr Wakefield's flawed study had been retracted by the prestigious medical journal in which it was originally published. The anti-vaccine advocates then switched to blaming mercury present in the thiomersal preservative for the autism their children developed after receiving multiple vaccinations. The claim was once again shown to be false by epidemiological evidence. It was also made clear by the scientific experts that the correlation between vaccination and autism was only due to the coincidence in timing between the onset of autism and childhood vaccination schedule and causation should not be assumed (a post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy). Finally, the vaccine denialists were left calling for more studies and generic testing even in the face of overwhelming evidence that vaccines are safe and efficacious.
The last segment of the program focused on the harm that anti-vaccine advocates are causing. The first and most obvious problem is that the children who are not vaccinated get sick with these deadly diseases. I some cases, such as polio and measles, anti-vaccination movements have actually prevented these diseases from being eliminated from our planet. Every year people get sick and die from vaccine-preventable diseases, yet vaccine denialists still promote the non-use of these life-saving measures (see the Jenny McCarthy body count - 509 deaths at the time of writing). The second issue is that of lost herd immunity. Some, because of age or ill-health, cannot safely be vaccinated and rely on those around them not to pass on diseases. With the lower levels of vaccinations, this herd immunity is lost. The Vaccine War included the story of one little girl who almost died from Pertussis (whooping cough) a disease many young doctors have never even seen in their patients. The final problem is that of distraction. The money and time spent on eliminating the MMR vaccine and thiomersal as a potential cause of autism could have been better spent studying the actual causes of autism and providing real results to desperate parents who have so many unanswered questions.
One final point that Frontline touched on but did not provide a definitive answer for, was that of requiring parents to vaccinate their children. After all, we expect parents to take reasonable care of their children, to prevent injury and sickness as best they can. Since vaccines are such a success, perhaps parents should have no say in the matter and vaccination should be mandated by the government. Although the ideal situation would be for informed parents to make the right choice and get their children vaccinated, I think it the importance of preserving herd immunity and wiping out these deadly diseases outweighs the slight loss of parental freedom. Ironically, if every parent had their children properly vaccinated, these diseases would disappear and there would be no need for a continued vaccination program. Smallpox is currently the only virus which has been eradicated and other diseases could be eliminated if only people would listen to the experts and get immunised. Overriding the parents' choice is not the perfect system but as long as vaccine denialists continue to spread their misinformation, it may be a necessary one.
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