What to do when good religion goes bad

This is not a science post, but rather address the unholy alliance of the Pope and global warming believers*

Should Catholics support their church with the Pope spewing lies about climate change? Morally, that would be monetarily supporting evil. So no, you should not be donating to a church that is spreading lies and misinformation. If the Pope wants to redistribute money forcibly, which is what global warming advocates are demanding, there is no reason to support this action, unless you believe God wants money taken from those who work and produce and given to those who have not yet succeeded. I know of no Biblical statement to that effect. It was said to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s, but if the church joins forces with Caesar (which now the case), there is no admonition about double-dipping for funds. Until the church separates itself from Caesar, no more donations should be made. God is not the government and the government should not be elevated to Godhood. That is morally wrong, no matter who tries to convince you of it.

Assuming one wishes to believe the Pope on global warming, the remainder of the encyclical teaches abortion is wrong, restricts contraception, and denounces homosexuality. So, to avoid “cherry picking”, global warming followers are expected to believe all parts of their hero’s encyclical.  To do otherwise would be wrong and hypocritical. That or lay off the claims of fossil fuel conspiracies, belief in pseudoscience, etc as reasons to dismiss skeptics.  If belief in “conspiracies” and pseudoscience are grounds to doubt skeptics, then alliance with religion should be grounds to doubt global warming believers.
On the flip side, if we return to extreme poverty, living in villages and hunting food, that in and of itself is a form of population control. Women had many children but only a few survived to adulthood. This may be a way of limiting population by government decree without ever revealing the actual intention. One could then say that no contraception was used and that God’s will was the child not grow up. It’s an odd argument, but it could actually yield a solution that satisfies both the Pope and the environmentalists.  A win-win for politics, not so much for religion and a complete loss for science.

*I am using global warming believers since AP is now calling skeptics “doubters”.  Believers are the opposite of doubters.


Just a few new thoughts

In reading through various blogs and sites this morning:
Headline: Poor nations want US to pay reparations for extreme weather (USA Today)
There you have it. Full circle to humans being the medicine men who control weather. Centuries of progress have brought us back to where we now encourage primitive societies to belief in parapsychology in order to justify demands that “richer” nations (read as “the gullible USA with trillions of dollars in debt) give up the money and hard work they have done and dole out money to nations that have not done as well. What it really comes down to is “a handout is so much easier than actually succeeding”. If there’s any doubt, you are referred to the many parasitic species in nature. (Remember, after the parasite kills the host, the parasite dies. This seems to have been forgotten.)

Speaking of parasites, global warming activists are now trying to sue in court to get their ideas in place. Having failed in virtually all other arenas, the great American past-time of suing people has entered the environmentalists tactics now. This would be proof positive that science is not involved in any way in global warming theory. Courts have virtually no science involved except by accident. See OJ Simpson trial if you have doubts. Plus the thousands of personal injury lawyers suing for every drug reaction out there, real or imagined, warned or nt, plus every stupid act of a human being blamed on someone else that has money the lawyer can get (this is not about the “victim” of the drug or the person who committed the act of stupidity). What this latest development really says is “NO SCIENCE HERE”. Move along.

Following the example of global warming scientists, I ran across this question in Retraction Watch (http://retractionwatch.com/2015/08/27/yes-many-psychology-findings-may-be-too-good-to-be-true-now-what/)
“A criticism we’ve heard of replication efforts is that it’s very difficult for a new group of people to gain the skills and tools to do the same study as well as the original authors, so a perfectly valid result may still fail to be replicated. Do you think this study addresses this criticism in any way?

The Open Science Collaborators have installed several checks and balances to tackle this problem. Studies to be replicated were matched with the replicator teams on the basis not only of interests and resources, but also of the teams’ expertise. The open data files clearly indicate the expertise of each replicator team, and the claim that a group of over 250 psychologists lacks expertise in doing these kinds of experiments is a bit of a stretch. Certainly there may be debates about certain specifics of the studies, and I expect the original researchers to point at methodological and theoretical explanations for the supposed discrepancy between the original finding and the replication (Several of the original researchers responded to the final replication report, as can be seen on the project’s OSF page). Such explanations are often ad hoc and typically ignore the role of chance (given the smallness of effects and samples sizes used in most original studies finding a significant result in one study and a non-significant result in another study may well be completely accidental), but they are to be taken seriously and perhaps studied further.
One should always report one’s methods and results in a manner that allows for independent replication; we now have many safe online locations to put supplementary information, materials, and data, and so I hope this project highlights the importance of reporting studies in a much more replicable and reproducible manner.”

Note the attempt to say the replicators are just not smart enough or skilled enough to repeat the experiment.  No, that does not fly here any more than in global warming.  If you cannot present the results of your experiment, whether it be a real data one, computer modeling or survey (the last two are really not experiments, but they are called that often), then you have not produced useful results.  If we must rely on the experimenter’s awesomeness and brilliance for verification, sorry, not science.

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