S.O.S. – Save Our Sharks

I have always had a deep love for the ocean, but there was a time when I was very afraid to go further than ankle depth into the sea whenever I was on a beach. My fear came from two things; the first was when I almost drowned while playing and swimming close to the shore. I was just a kid and hadn’t noticed that the current was taking me out further and further until I realised that I could no longer stand. I was very fortunate that a man swimming nearby had noticed what was happening, and he pulled me out before I disappeared altogether. The experience left me with a healthy respect for the sea, but it also made me very afraid of swimming in it.

The second thing that fed my fear was the movie, Jaws. I was a teenager when the movie came out and, to me, it was confirmation that the ocean was a very scary place indeed. I was quite content to remain ignorant about the sea and the creatures that lived in it, especially sharks. Fast forward to 20 years later – my husband decided it was time for me to confront my fears and signed us both up for a SCUBA diving course. It was one of the toughest things I’ve ever done, I had to deal with my fears head on. I remember my first pool session clearly. There were ten of us in the group, mostly made up of friends, we had all just put on our gear when the instructor said that we would start by going down to the 3 metre level of the pool, and that he would be taking us down one by one. I was first. The thought of going underwater terrified me, and I think that if I had had any sort of a weapon, I would have used it to stop him from taking me down – and this was just in the pool. I had no idea how I was going to react in the open sea, I just knew it wasn’t going to be good.

Our instructor was incredibly patient and took his time with me so that by the time I ready for my first sea dive, I was confidant with my equipment and my ability in the water. However, the sea and a large diving pool are two totally different things, there are no sharks in a swimming pool. so that second fear kicked in as I rolled off the boat into the water on our first sea dive at Sodwana. Bobbing on the surface of the sea, I went into panic mode. The only thing I could think about was that there was 18 metres of water below me with who knows what lurking in the depths.I also recall the instructor shaking me to bring me to my senses. How he got me down to the seabed , I’ll never know, but once I had calmed down long enough to look at was around me, I was hooked.

The vibrant colours of the fish, the beauty of the sponges and corals, and the abundance of life underwater took my breath away, sharks were the last thing on my mind. Every time I dived one thing always stood out for me; the colours – no matter how hard we humans try, there is no way we can reproduce the vivid colours that nature paints our planet with. From the bright gold and purple of a delicate nudibranch to the stark contrasting colours of a Clown Triggerfish,the beauty of our natural world always leaves me awestruck. We did six dives that weekend and each one brought some new discovery for me. On the long drive home I made a decision not to remain blissfully ignorant anymore, I wanted to learn as much as I could about the new world I had discovered. Reading up on sharks taught me that they’re not the single minded man eaters like the one portrayed in Jaws; a misconception that Peter Benchley, the author of Jaws, tried to correct because the movie was in part responsible for the inaccurate stereotypes about sharks and their behaviour. Benchley wrote a number of non fiction books dedicated to promoting marine environmentalism and shark conservation.

The reason I’m telling you about my SCUBA diving experience is to…

(a) encourage you to explore our planet more. If someone as ordinary and fearful as me can learn to SCUBA dive, anyone one can. And (b) to draw your attention to the state that our oceans are in. Over fishing, pollution and climate change is affecting the marine environment. Recent surveys show that the slaughter of sharks worldwide has reached unprecedented proportions with reports that some shark species have declined by as much as 97 to 99.5%. At the current rate of decline, estimates are that the most threatened species of shark will be extinct within 10 to 15 years.

One of the most pointless practises is shark finning. Sharks are caught, their fins are sliced off and the sharks are thrown back into the sea alive, to die a slow death on the seabed. Shark fin soup is a delicacy reserved for the wealthy, costing $100.00 and upwards for a bowl, it is served on special occasions and signifies wealth in Eastern societies. To be able to serve your guests shark fin soup is a way of saying “I’ve made it!” The shocking irony is that shark fin is completely tasteless, it adds nothing to the dish.

From the Sharklife article on shark finning……..

“When sharks attack humans, it inevitably makes news – it is a sexy story. What is rarely reported is that worldwide, sharks kill an average of 10 people every year. It’s usually when people venture into a shark’s habitat and not the other way around. By contrast, humans kill around 100 million sharks every year – a number that has ballooned in recent years because of the enormous demand for shark fins to make shark fin soup.”

Sadly, sharks are not the only marine creatures affected by over fishing, pollution and climate change. Whales, dolphins, turtles and most pelagic fish have populations that have been so badly depleted that many of them are on endangered species lists, and the only way to recover sustainable stocks is to make drastic changes in how we manage the marine environment. For some species, like the Yangtze River Dolphin, it is already too late.

There are some small things that  you, as an individual, can do to help conserve the marine environment.

1. Support restaurants and shops who support the South African Sustainable Seafood Initiative . SASSI has a hotline that you can sms to check if the fish you’re buying or eating is on their Red List. (Unfortunately, the fishsms is only available in South Africa.)

2. Join local or global organisations that support marine conservation. I support Greenpeace, Sharklife, and MarineBio, even if all you do is sign the petitions they send out to alert you to a crisis in the marine environment.

3. Most aquariums have one or two projects going on that involves giving a little of your time or a donation, help out where you can.

4. If you are lucky enough to live near the sea, you can help by keeping your beaches clean and clear of litter, it will go a long way in helping keep our oceans free of pollution.

There is still so much to learn about our oceans and the creatures that inhabit it, some yet to be discovered. It would be such a pity to lose them before we’ve even discovered them.

I’d like to end this post off with a quote from Peter Benchley about sharks…

“The shark in an updated Jaws could not be the villain; it would have to be written as the victim, for, world-wide, sharks are much more the oppressed than the oppressors.”

Gross Stupidity

Timothy Myeni

If you want to see what stupid looks like, take a good look at the photograph of Swazi MP Timothy Myeni. During a speech at a leadership workshop for MPs, Timothy Myeni said that Swaziland needed a mandatory law for HIV testing and that should anyone test positive he or she should be branded on the buttocks.

“I have a solution to this virus. The solution will come from a law that will make it compulsory to test for HIV. Once you test positive, you should be branded on the buttocks,” the member of parliament said last week.

“Before having sex with anyone, people will then check the buttocks of their partners before proceeding with their mission,” the newspaper reported him saying.

Swaziland is a small, landlocked country in Southern Africa; it is also one of the poorest nations in the world where 26.1% of the adult population is infected with HIV. Many people refuse to have any testing done as they are afraid of being stigmatised by the disease, so many of them die without getting the right treatment to help prolong their lives.

The ignorant nonsense that Timothy Myeni is spouting in public is dangerous because it will prevent people from coming forward to be tested. Myeni withdrew his remarks about branding people, but still insisted that HIV testing should be made compulsory.

Perhaps we should start tattooing stupid people on the forehead ; Timothy Myeni can be first in line.

Update
Swaziland MP, Timothy Myeni, has been very busy apologising for the remarks he made about making it compulsory to brand HIV/AIDS patients on the butt. Myeni, who is also a pastor and gospel singer, then used the standard explanation that all religious leaders use when they caught doing or saying anything contrary to their Christian teachings,………. “the Devil made me do it”.

“The devil has trapped me so that he celebrates that, from a Christian, such an uncalled for statement has come out. I am very sincere. I am very sorry. I understand very well that this was a blunder”, said Pastor Myeni at a media conference, in Johannesburg.

Myeni made his apology after the Treatment Action Campaign threatened to disrupt his concerts which are due to be held in Cape Town, South Africa.

Isn’t religion marvelous? When you don’t want to accept responsibilty for your actions, just blame it on a force of evil.

More to the point, doesn’t his Christian compassion for his fellow human beings just make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside?

More Abuse Uncovered In The Catholic Church

Nothing pains me more than having to read about how children or animals are abused at the hands of adults who should know better. Nothing angers me more than discovering that those adults are priests and nuns; people who have supposedly given their life to god and who are supposed to be examples of gods love here on Earth. These are supposedly educated adults, adults who know the difference between right and wrong and yet still choose to hurt and abuse the weakest and most vulnerable members of our society, our children.

I am talking about the report released by the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse; a body charged with investigating abuse in Ireland’s orphanages, schools, and workhouse-style reform schools run by Roman Catholic religious orders. What the Commission found was that thousands of children suffered physical, sexual, and emotional abuse and neglect. More than 800 priests, nuns, and brothers were implicated in the report, however, they will remain nameless. In 2004, the Christian Brothers religious order, which was Ireland’s largest provider of workhouse-style schools for boys, successfully sued the Commission to prevent names from being included in the Commission’s report. None of the people implicated in the report will be prosecuted, which doesn’t surprise me in the least. The church has always covered up and protected abusers in the past, there is no reason to expect it to change now. There are and have been people within the Roman Catholic Church who have spoken out against abuse, but it has always been after the abuse was uncovered. Not one of them has worked actively to oust abusers and have them criminally charged, not a single one.

 It’s true that abuse was endemic throughout the whole child welfare system, but, according to the government’s Department of Education..

“the deferential and submissive attitude towards the congregations compromised its – the department of Education – ability to carry out its statutory duty of inspection and monitoring the schools. Furthermore, the religious orders covered up cases of sexual abuse.”

It’s not only those 800 priests, nuns, and brothers that should be held accountable for what happened to those children, but everyone else that took part in the cover up and all those that knew what was going on and yet kept quiet. Their sins are just as bad, if not worse, than the perpetrator’s crimes because they failed to protect those children – instead they chose to protect the abusers and the church.

One question I’m often asked is, where do atheists get their morals from without god or religion? My new answer is this, most certainly not from the same source that those 800 priests and nuns got theirs from.

The End Of The World Part 1 – Polar Shift, An Earth Shattering Experience

Courtesy of NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

Since the beginning of recorded history, doomsday prophets have come up with many end-of-the-world scenarios. Earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and pestilence have been some of the popular choices of these soothsayers; but there is one mega disaster that is a little more interesting – a polar shift. Before I go into what a polar shift is, I have to differentiate between a polar shift and a magnetic polar shift, which pseudoscientists have conveniently hashed together to make it sound more plausible and more scientific.

 A Basic Description of Magnetic Polar Shift/Reversals

A magnetic polar shift is a geological phenomenon that does happen. Using technology developed to detect magnetic fields emanating from submarines during World War II; geologists adapted it and measured the magnetic field created by magnetised rock on the sea floor. What they discovered was that the strength of the magnetic field alternated between high and low values in long, narrow parallel bands, called magnetic anomalies. These magnetic anomalies were almost perfectly symmetrical with respect to the crest of the mid ocean ridge. So, if you had to create an image of the anomalies, it would look very much like the barcode we find on everyday items. What the anomalies showed was that the Earth’s magnetic field reversed from time to time. In order to understand how this happens, we have to know how a rock is magnetised. When iron rich lavas cool, the rock becomes magnetised and it acquires the magnetic polarity that exists at the time the lava cooled. This phenomenon is called thermoremanent magnetization. By measuring the thermoremanent magnetization of the lava layers, geologists were able to build up a detailed history of magnetic reversals which goes back millions of years. The detection of these anomalies was also confirmation of seafloor spreading and led to the plate tectonics theory; which allowed geologists to measure plate motions far back into geologic time.

This is a very basic explanation, for detailed information about magnetic polar reversals; please visit Chris Rowan’s interesting geology blog, Highly Allochthonous.

 A Basic Description of a Doomsday Polar Shift.

 This hypothesis is based on the ideas of Charles Hapgood. Hapgood, a history professor, formulated his Polar Shift Theory after a class project in which he and his students looked at possible locations for the lost city of Atlantis. In order to find the location of Atlantis, Hapgood needed to find an explanation for how massive Earth changes could occur; such as, how Antarctica – his prime location for Atlantis – could once have been located much further north than its present location. In his 1958 book, The Earth’s Shifting Crust, Hapgood theorized that the Earth’s crust….

“……may be displaced at times, moving over the softer inner body, much as the skin of an orange, were it loose, might shift over the inner part of the orange all in one piece”.

He called this movement of the outer crust, earth-crust displacement. Hapgood’s theory would have faded into obscurity if were not for one small detail; the foreword to Hapgood’s book, The Earth’s Shifting Crust, was written by none other than Albert Einstein, who essentially supported some of Hapgood’s ideas. A review of the correspondence between Einstein and Charles Hapgood can be viewed here. While Einstein supported some of Hapgood’s ideas, there is no doubt that had Einstein lived to see the development of the plate tectonics theory in the 1960’s, he would have supported the overwhelming evidence it presented.

However, conspiracy theorists and pseudoscientists don’t bother with details like that; all they see is a famous physicists name attached to an outdated theory and use it as evidence that it must be true. There is absolutely no geological evidence whatsoever for Hapgood’s theory of Earth- Crust Displacement. It has never happened.

 The Modern Versions.

Over time, doomsday proponents and armchair pseudoscientists have combined magnetic polar reversals with Hapgood’s polar shift hypothesis and come up with something that sounds reasonably plausible. The modern versions go something like this……..

 A rare planetary alignment will occur when Venus transits the sun in 2012.(This is indeed a rare alignment, it has happened before but nothing catastrophic happened here on Earth as a result of this alignment – which the prophets of doom fail to tell you). This alignment will affect the Earth’s frequency/vibration/axis, and will cause the Earth to stop spinning. This, in turn, will cause the poles to “flip”, with catastrophic consequences for humanity; there will be earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions. The North Pole will suddenly physically migrate to where the South Pole is currently situated, and vice versa.

Another version of the Polar Shift theory tells us that if all the ice were to melt at one of the Poles – for some unknown reason – that this would unbalance the Earth and cause the outer crust to spin on top of the liquid inner layer.

And yet another version speaks of how a mysterious twelfth planet will suddenly make its presence known by increasing  Earth’s geological activity and noticeably slowing down the Earth’s rotation; until it finally stops spinning altogether;  then the Earth’s poles will align with those of the twelfth planet, causing cataclysmic destruction of major cities and life as we know it.

Now, since the Mayan calendar ends on the date 21 December 2012, plus a couple of mediums have predicted a polar shift will happen – oh, and don’t forget, that at least one of Nostradamus’ quatrains will have been shoehorned to predict a polar shift ,  it must mean that all the above is true. 

A Google search on polar shift theory will give you over 250 000 hits. Read through  the nonsense on some of the websites it won’t take you long to realise that the people who buy into polar shift theory are a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic. It’s important to read these sites with a critical mind and a good dose of scepticism.

 Polar Shift Theory is nonsense. There is no geological evidence for it; and while magnetic polar reversals are a genuine phenomenon, there is no evidence of magnetic reversals ever having had any affect on life on Earth.

So, go ahead and start planning that End of the World Party for 21 December 2012.

Flyover wows inauguration crows???

According to The Saturday Star, online edition, the crows at the Presidential inauguration just loved the flyover spectacle provided by the South African Airforce. I wonder what the people attending thought of it?

 

9 May 2009, 15:20

The flyover, including an airbus, wowed the audience after President Jacob Zuma was sworn in at the Union Buildings on Saturday.

After Zuma uttered those all important words: “So help me God”, the 21-gun salute exploded though the air.

The airforce, however, stole the show with a diamond formation of jets soaring above the balcony as Zuma looked on through a glass window behind him.

 Seriously, guys, don’t you proofread your articles before you put them online?

2012 – The End Of The World.

The End Of The World

I’m going to be doing a series of posts on various end of the world predictions; many of which claim that the world will end in 2012. So, seeing as 2012 is not that far off, I thought that it would be a great topic to look into and to try and explain some of the nonsense that Doomsday prophets would have us believe.

There have been many Doomsday predictions throughout history; from the Mayan calendar to the bible, from the Oracle of Delphi to Nostradamus, and more recently from pseudoscientific groups who said we’d all disappear into a man made black hole when the Large Hadron Collider was fired up.

Older predictions like those of Nostradamus and the bible are written in such a way that they could be used to interpret almost anything. More modern predictions have a mere sprinkling of science dusted over them to make them sound as if they’re scientifically researched and backed up by evidence – they are not.

The most popular date given for the end of the world is the 21 December 2012, which happens to be a friday, perfect for hosting an End of The World Party – at least you’ll have the rest of the weekend to get over a bad hangover.

My first post will be about the Polar Shift Hypothesis; a popular myth that just refuses to go away.

 

* Picture courtesy of NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day*

Gary Mannion, Psychic Surgeon

Last night I happened to watch the BBC documentary on Carte Blanche about psychic surgeon Gary Mannion, I’d never heard of him until last night. The documentary wasn’t bad, the interview was well balanced for one on psychic phenomena. However, I cannot say the same about Gary Mannion. I found his performance extremely funny and his healing and psychic abilities just as laughable. There were also parts of the documentary that made me very angry too, which I will get to shortly. If he is the new “wunderkind” in British psychic circles then the woo woo brigade must be scraping the bottom of the New Age barrel.

When I heard that he was a psychic surgeon, I was expecting to see him triumphantly dangle bloody chicken bits in front of the camera as proof of his healing abilities. Icky bits of chicken flesh must be passé in healing circles nowadays because all Gary Mannion did was place his hands on the area that was affected by pain and disease, and voila, the patient was much better – a very disappointing performance indeed.

Gary claims that his hands are guided spiritually during surgery by none other than the biblical Abraham. Gary also channels Abraham and we get to meet him during the program – this was the part that I found hysterically funny – Abraham it turns out, has a posh British accent. One would have expected Abraham to speak Akkadian or some other Semitic language, or even English with a Hebrew or Yiddish accent; instead he sounds like a right toff when he speaks through Gary Mannion. Is there some great spiritual school in the sky that all potential guides have to pass through before they can choose an earthbound human to channel through? They all seem to spout the same airy fairy codswallop; I’ve been to a few New Age fairs and I’ve heard the same drivel repeated over and over. Not only does Gary channel Abraham, but he can chat with other spirits too, although we didn’t get to see him do that during the documentary. He also said that Abraham is constantly with him, except for three days a month; so does he go on ‘oliday then, luv?

Gary also conducted a séance for the cameras, which was hilarious. Naturally all the lights were turned off; the camera crew continued filming so they would have been able to pick up any sleight of hand tricks that Gary might have attempted. Unfortunately, not a single lost soul from the other side made an appearance for the cameras, the table stubbornly refused to move, and not a single spirit felt the urge to knock on the walls to make their presence known. I so wanted to see the table float about, or see some ghostly ectoplasm dribble from Gary’s left nostril, but, sadly, it was not to be.

The documentary focused on a few of Gary’s “patients” and how they have been healed, but there were three that stood out for me. The first was an old man who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. My grandfather had Alzheimer’s disease; it’s a horrendous disease that robs you of your memories and your personality. To watch someone you love die from it is heartbreaking; so to watch Gary Mannion sit there with his hands on this man’s head and claim to have made a difference, made my blood boil. I honestly wanted punch him in the nose and tell him to put his hand on it and get Abraham to heal it for him. The doctor examining the cases Gary Mannion has claimed to have healed said that the patient’s slight improvement was attributed to a brief period of lucidity that Alzheimer’s patients sometimes experience during their illness.

The second patient to catch my attention was an overweight woman who suffered from chronic back pain due to an injury. Now this one I could personally relate to. I fractured two vertebrae in my lower after a bad fall and have ongoing problems with my back; I would have offered her the following advice….

1. Lose weight

2. Strengthen your abdominal and back muscles, and…..

3. See a physiotherapist.

It doesn’t stop the pain altogether, but you are more able to deal with it. Instead, Gary placed his hands on her back for a few minutes and that was supposed to have taken her pain away. Later in the program she tells us that Gary’s psychic surgery didn’t really help and that she was trying another New Age technique to help her deal with the pain.

The third patient had been seeing Gary on and off for a year to help her with gallstones. She had one large gallstone that Gary said had broken up and dissolved during the psychic surgery sessions she had been receiving. She had believed him because she had not been in pain for a year, so she was quite confident to undergo another ultrasound when the interviewer asked her if she was willing to have one to prove that Gary had healed her. There are no prizes for guessing what the result of her ultrasound was. Yep, you guessed it, the gallstone was still there. Absolutely nothing had happened to it. The patient was disappointed and Gary was at a loss for words. I could see his mind searching desperately for a reason to give the interviewer as to why the gallstone was still there after Gary had said it was gone. I almost felt sorry for him. Then it was my turn to be gob smacked when she said that she would continue to see him for psychic surgery because although the gallstone was still there, he had taken her pain away.

The doctor who was asked to look into  Gary’s healed patients said that all of the cases could be attributed to the placebo effect or to the medication that the patients were already taking before seeing Gary Mannion for psychic surgery; so in fact, not one of them had been cured by Gary Mannion.

The interviewer said that what he saw in Gary Mannion was pure faith and that it was this faith that perhaps made people continue to come and see him; all I saw was a well rehearsed conman, and not a very good one at that. He’s quick to cover his arse with disclaimers by saying that he is not a doctor and the advice he offers on a range of illnesses is purely his opinion and that people are free to make decisions regarding their health based on his opinions. Until recently, he claimed to be able to heal people suffering with cancer, but had to take those claims off his website after complaints by skeptics. In my view, Gary Mannion is a fraud and a dangerous one at that; but hey, that’s my opinion and you’re free to listen to it or ignore it.

Galaxy Zoo 2 Challenge

As part of the International Year of Astronomy, Galaxy Zoo 2  is celebrating 100 Hours of Astronomy this weekend by challenging people to make 1 million clicks in 100 hours. You don’t have to be a regular user at Galaxy Zoo, you can still register and join in this exciting project to help classify galaxies.

Galaxy Zoo was orginally launched in July 2007. Volunteers sorted through a million digital images of galaxies, collected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and classified them according to their shapes. Many projects are underway using the data collected by Galaxy Zoo, which you can read about here, in the first papers to be published as a result of the project. There have been a few interesting discoveries made by Galaxy Zoo volunteers along the way, such as The Voorwerp, which Galaxy Zoo scientists are working on to find out exactly what it is.

Galaxy Zoo 2 still needs volunteers to help with the data they’ve collected. So, if you’re interested in astronomy and want to feel like you’re contributing in some way to science, register with Galaxy Zoo 2 and join in the fun.

The Pope Gets It Wrong Again

According to AVERT, the international AIDS charity, global estimates for 2007 showed that there were 33 Million people living with AIDS, that includes men, women, and children.  There were 2.7 Million newly infected people in 2007. Other statistics on their website show that……

More than 25 million people have died of AIDS since 1981.

Africa has 11.6 million AIDS orphans.

At the end of 2007, women accounted for 50% of all adults living with HIV worldwide, and for 59% in sub-Saharan Africa.

Young people (under 25 years old) account for half of all new HIV infections worldwide.

In developing and transitional countries, 9.7 million people are in immediate need of life-saving AIDS drugs; of these, only 2.99 million (31%) are receiving the drugs.

And according to a table on their website….

Regional statistics for HIV & AIDS, end of 2007

Region	Adults & children living with HIV/AIDS	Adults & children newly infected	Adult prevalence*	Deaths of adults & children
Sub-Saharan Africa	22.0 million	1.9 million	5.0%	1.5 million
North Africa & Middle East	380,000	40,000	0.3%	27,000
Asia	5 million	380,000	0.3%	380,000
Oceania	74,000	13,000	0.4%	1,000
Latin America	1.7 million	140,000	0.5%	63,000
Caribbean	230,000	20,000	1.1%	14,000
Eastern Europe & Central Asia	1.5 million	110,000	0.8%	58,000
North America, Western & Central Europe	2.0 million	81,000	0.4%	31,000
Global Total	33.0 million	2.7 million	0.8%	2.0 million

* Proportion of adults aged 15-49 who were living with HIV/AIDS

You will notice that Africa  has by far the largest number of infected people in the world. The point in showing all these statistics is to highlight the absurd statements made by the Pope that the use of condoms in Africa could possibly increase the problem of AIDS in Africa. He didn’t elaborate how this could happen. It’s true that just handing out condoms and money to Africa isn’t going to solve the problem of HIV and AIDS, only education and the correct use of condoms will prevent new infections.  It is also true that condoms are not 100% effective, but according to the Treatment Action Campaign male latex condoms are the most efficient technology there is to reduce the transmission of HIV among sexually active South Africans.

The Pope’s solution to the AIDS epidemic? Abstinence and fidelity in marriage. That’s right, an 82 year old virgin is telling you that you shouldn’t have sex before marriage, and that you shouldn’t cheat on your spouse. It would be lovely to live in the Pope’s idea of a perfect world, but it doesn’t exist.  Humans by nature, are sexual creatures and will always be so.  All we can do is educate them about the best ways to stay healthy and help them prevent nasty diseases from spreading. This isn’t the first time the Vatican has got it wrong. In 2003/04 the Vatican published a document  by  Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo published which stated that…..

…….condoms have holes in them, allowing HIV- the virus that causes AIDS – to pass through.

The document even suggested that condoms were one of the main reasons for the spread of HIV because they promote promiscuity. However, the misinformation contained in Cardinal Trujillo’s document was quickly refuted by the World Health Organisation, and even by some Catholic organisations such as Condoms4Life ….

Cardinal Alfonso Trujillo’s claim on a recent BBC program that “the AIDS virus is roughly 450 times smaller than the spermatozoon. The spermatozoon can easily pass through the ‘net’ that is formed by the condom.” The World Health Organization immediately declared, “These incorrect statements about condoms and HIV are dangerous when we are facing a global pandemic which has already killed more than 20 million people, and currently affects at least 42 million.” WHO maintains “consistent and correct” use of condoms reduces transmission by 90 percent.

Just to illustrate how deadly the wrong information can be, have a look at the statistics for Sub Saharan Africa. The highest number of infections in that area are from South Africa, thanks to Thabo Mbeki’s belief that HIV does not cause AIDS, and also  thanks to the criminally incompetent Health Minister , Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, who promoted beetroot and garlic as a cure for this deadly epidemic.

 Anyone who promotes incorrect information which leads to preventable deaths on a large scale should be hauled before an international court and charged with genocide, be they Popes or Presidents.

Is God On Holiday?

Courtesy of atheistcartoons.com

The prayer for rain gathering did not escape my notice. At the beginning of February, potato farmer turned evangelist, Angus Buchan and 3000 of his followers gathered in the Eastern Cape to pray for rain.  The Eastern Cape  is facing the worst drought in more than 40 years, so one can understand that  the farmers are starting to feel a little desperate. While there has been some rain, it hasn’t been enough to break the severe drought. So one has to wonder what god has been up to not answer the prayers of so many people.

1. Is god on holiday? Maybe he was away on the day that everyone prayed and never got the message, it’s so hard to find good help these days, you know.

2. Perhaps they’re not praying to the right god. There’s a whole plethora of gods out there, it just might be that  Angus and his followers were appealing to the wrong one.

3. Maybe god was busy at the time and just forgot to get around to answering their prayers. I know how that can happen, I’ve done it a few times myself.

4. Maybe Angus Buchan is not god’s spokesman. I think I would be rather annoyed if someone I had not chosen claimed to represent me, I wouldn’t listen to what he and his followers had to say, that’s for sure.

5. Maybe  god has been so busy, that the appeal for rain was trivial in the grand scheme of things. I mean, what with war, AIDS, bad guys to smite, and little catholic girls to punish, god is just way too busy to be concerned with a few farmers and their drought problems.

6. Or just maybe there is no god, and the whole gathering was a total waste of everyones time. This one seems the most plausible explanation to me, but then I’m an atheist so I would be expected say that.

Anyhow, I’d still be interested to know what Angus and his flock have to say about the lack of rain.  I’m guessing that he’ll be wagging his finger in my direction and saying that it’s because atheists don’t believe in god that made the almighty decide to ignore their request.