Inward Catholic outrage

Catholics have been flamed a lot over their dogmatic attitudes towards freedom of speech, abortion, and especially their reaction towards people who disagree with them. At University of Notre Dame a rather miniscule group of Catholics protested today against Obama speaking at commencement, and/or against him receiving an honorary degree from there. All because he supports women's right to choose to have an abortion, which the Catholic church continue to be against. More than 100 people gathered in protest. So? Notre Dame is a Catholic university, and with nearly 13,000 students and faculty, one might expect a wee bigger group of protesters if the general attitude weren't favorable of letting Obama speak and receive the honorary degree. So probably it is.

But mostly I wanted to share the good feeling of a Catholic who is justly ashamed of her church:

genia on May 16, 2009 10:28 PM

All this protest and judgement...condeming...this is against everything I was taught as a Catholic.
As a Catholic I wonder why my religious leaders chose to embarrass us. I wonder why they chose to make fools out of my faith...I wonder why they chose to take a stand against the President of the United States...my president?
But mostly I wonder where these Catholic leaders were when Bush decided to attack an innocent country, starting an unprovoked war.... bombing sleeping cities...killing thousands of woman, children..men...and our military....where were the bishops and archbishops then? Are these victims not God's children?
Shame on the Catholic church...shame for spectacle they are making of my religion... shame on them.

Where were these Catholic leaders indeed?! Thanks genia, for sharing your outrage.

Retrospection

Retrospection is a very powerful way of looking at things.

Ruse and Grants

*LIVEBLOGGING from the Darwin Symposium at Caltech*

It's seven-thirty and I'm at the Beckman Auditorium at Caltech. In a minute or so Michael Ruse will be speaking about Darwin's famous book. "The Origin at 150: Is It Past Its Sell-by Date?" I predict he's going to say that while evolutionary theory has evolved (pun planned for months) since then, The Origin still has a lot of useful stuff to tell us. And I predict that when he finally says that, I will go "pfft!"

---

8:34. They changed the schedule. Peter and Rosemary Grant were on first. Here's my questions to them (for after Ruse's talk):
Allopatric speciation is easier to picture, and to infer, but I wonder about the hard evidence that Geospiza speciated allopatrically. Can we rule out sympatric speciation in this case? In times of stress it may be advantageous to specialize on a subset of resources, and one population may split into two specializing on different resources.

[The Grants' lecture ("Darwin's Finches") was great, but my battery was running low, so I decided just to sit and listen instead of typing.]

Michael Ruse is on. So far about how rich Darwin's family was. Darwin was not a rebel. He speaks of Darwin in present tense, which is confusing to me. "He's a great revolutionary, but not a rebel." Ruse quickly goes over the history of the voyage in six sentences. Then he's back.

---

8:49. Ruse remarks that there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Wallace and Darwin came up with their ideas of natural selection independently of each other. I beg to differ. There is at least doubt, as I have written about before.

---

9:16. In 165 lectures at South Kensington, Huxley gave natural selection ten minutes only. He just wasn't interested.

So far it's been a historical perspective of Darwin and his contemporaries. For instance, Ruse makes the point that while The Origin was published in 1859, we have to compare Darwin's thinking on the matter of evolution to his contemporaries of the 1830's. But then after 1859 evolution was widely accepted, except in the American south (laughs).

---

9:20. Pffft! "Thank God! No part of Darwin's theory is still standing. And thank God! All of Darwin's theory still stands.

Ruse's lecture was entertaining. It's always good to hear about the details of the lives of great scientists.

I'll have to send my question to the Grants by email, because we left before the question session, at about 10pm.

Irrelevant and ignored

The AFA is advertising their own failure.

On April 15, concerned and caring individuals held TEA Parties in over 2,000 cities. Hundreds of thousands of Americans participated in the TEA Parties. Despite those numbers, the liberal media practically ignored the event. When asked if he knew about the TEA Parties, President Obama said he was unaware of them.

Are all the media liberal to the AFA? Bill O'Reilly? Rush Limbaugh? Perhaps an acknowledgment that only crazy fundies support them would make the AFA come to their senses.

The email also informs us that the next TEA party is scheduled for the 4th of July. That should prove effective! I mean, because people aren't doing anything else that particular day...

74th Symposium at CSHL

In a couple of weeks I will be attending the 74th Symposium at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory: EVOLUTION: THE MOLECULAR LANDSCAPE, and I just can't wait. The list of abstracts is here, and includes such luminaries (and others) as

Behe, M.: "Four decades of experimental adaptive evolution of microorganisms—A review"
Carroll, S.: "Endless flies most beautiful—Cis-regulatory sequences and the evolution of animal form"
Charlesworth, B.: "Genetic recombination and molecular evolution"
Davidson, E.H.: "Evolution of the animal body plan by cis-regulatory alteration of gene network architecture"
Dennett, D.C.: "The cultural evolution of words and other thinking tools"
Hauser, M.: "The origins of a generative brain and the possibility of impossible cultures"
Hoekstra, H.E.: "White mice on white sand—The molecule steps to a phenotypic optimum"
Joyce, G.: "Evolution in an RNA world"
Koonin, E.V.: "Search for a tree of life in the midst of the phylogenetic forest"
Lenski, R.E.: "The dynamics of phenotypic and genomic evolution during a long-term experiment with E. coli"
Levine, M.: "Transcriptional precision in the Drosophila embryo"
Miller, K.R.: "Deconstructing design—A strategy for defending science"
Pääbo, S.: "A Neandertal perspective on human origins"
Pinker, S.: "The cognitive niche"
Scott, E.C.: "The evolution of intelligent design"
Szostak, J.W.: "The origin of cellular life and the emergence of Darwinian evolution"
Wilson, E.O.: "The molecular landscape—A journey along the highway of evolution"

Crash this poll

A Dutch political party wants creationism taught in schools. Arie Slob (gotta doubly love that name), leader of the orthodox ChristenUnie party, says

'It is as if there are no other ideas and theories,' Slob was quoted as saying. 'There are more thoughts about the beginning of this earth than the one printed in the text books.'

There's more than one myth, but only one scientific theory that holds water. That's why evolution is taught, and not creationism.

Then there's a poll to crash:

What is the best explanation for how we got here?
Evolution 65.7%
God created the world in six days 17.1%
God created the world but it took longer 7.0%
Intelligent design 5.9%
Don't know 4.2%

Total votes: 286

Not much to crash, I know, since "evolution" is well in the lead. But with the hordes of Pleiotropy readers, we could surely get that number up to a full 68% !!!

Evolver Zone

Evolver Zone is a newly launched site with various evolution resources aimed at students, teachers, and researchers. For example, it has a very nice list of journals related to evolution, and you can buy this t-shirt with the only figure Darwin drew in The Origin.

Blame the demons

A man at the pharmacist was on his cell phone:

"I have been having trouble staying on a straight path, blamelessly.... Yeah.... Can the church help me?.... Yeah... Yeah.... I keep going to all the wrong places, and I can't help myself.... Yeah.... I have been to many different churches, but no one has been able to help me.... Yeah.... Yeah.... Yeah.... It is the demons inside of me that's taking over, and I was wondering if you could help me get rid if them?.... So you have classes starting tomorrow?.... Yeah."

What I wouldn't give to hear the other end of the line. My suspicion is that whoever he was talking to - I presume a clergyman - was thinking the same as I (why not?), that no demons have possessed him, and as soon as he accepts that the human nature is frail he will be able to take responsibility for himself and stop blaming imaginary beings. I don't know what the wrong places he is going to are, but he may have a real problem (gambling? drugs? prostitutes? atheist meetings?), and if that's the case he ought to get some real help. A quick search finds many people who can help with addictions for gambling, drugs, and prostitution.

Keep it fucking real!

The American Family Association emailed me again today to tell me what a bottom-slapping bad boy Pepsico is (remember to look for their products: Pepsi soft drinks, Frito-Lay chips and snacks, Quaker Oats, Tropicana, and Gatorade). What have they done now? How have they upset the chaste and righteous this time?

Pepsico is a sponsor of the 2009 New York City Gay Pride Parade. On AFA's site you can watch a new amusing video-clip of participants in a parade having the time of their lives, it seems. They warn you that

The video below shows what type of activity occurs at this parade. WARNING: The content is offensive content, including one very strong profanity (at the end).

Ooh, I was expecting something really nasty - I've been to Bar'Do, and I know they can make you spin on your behind with delight over the obscenities. But, sigh, the last line was just a simple "keep it fucking real!" That's it. That's all it takes for the AFA to swoon, I suppose.

Losing our freedom to discriminate

To no one's surprise, there is an awful lot of resentment against the bill introduced in Maine to end discrimination against same-sex marriage. For example, a bishop calls gay marriage dangerous, Pat Robertson (televangelist) claims it leads to bestiality and pedophilia, and at Pro-Polygamy.com (eh?) they say the bill in fact discriminates against polygamists (I can just imagine two straight couples deciding to get married all to each other).

In today's Kennebec Journal, there is a (largely insignificant, I know) letter by one Angela Fletcher, Same-sex marriage like Darwin's evolution theory, which is so arrestingly inane that I feel i must display it here in its entirety, with my comments in red:

Even if the governor signs the bill to make same-sex marriages legal in Maine, I will no more let my children or my future grandchildren [why stop there?] believe [are people told what to believe?] that it is OK for same-sex couples to marry, than I did before it becomes a law. This idea of marriage is no more acceptable to me than Darwin's Theory of Evolution. [And you have just labeled yourself as a conservative Christian bigot.]

It is my right to teach my family my religious beliefs without being discriminated against. [Is anyone saying anything else? Or is it the homeschooled peasant's way of interpreting this bill?] That is exactly what would be happening in the public schools -- No thank you. [Your personal beliefs are not discriminated against with this bill - it is you who think that your beliefs entitle you to discriminate against others.]

The demoralization of our great country can be blamed on the fact that our forefathers separated religion from state. [What demoralization? Some people are demoralized by the sexual acts that they get off on picturing others having in private, and others are demoralized by the discrimination against people who want the same rights as you (e.g. health care and inheritance rights).]

It seems to me that those of us of religious descent [no one is of 'religious descent' - being religious is a choice, or?] are losing more and more of our religious freedoms. [Which? Those freedoms to discriminate against others?] Little by little, from state to state, our country's morals are deteriorating. [Or, again, improviong, depending on your level of bigotry.] Why is murder still wrong? [Because it doesn't happen between consenting adults?] Oops, I forgot it's legal in some states, but that's a whole different ballgame. [Hear hear! Too many states still have the death-penalty, and those will have to change. Otherwise, I have no idea what you are referring to.]

Ode

Tomorrow I will see my children for the first time in six weeks. If you're a parent and haven't tried being away from them for that long, my recommendation is never to try it. Not that all parents hate it as much as I do, I know, but given that I feel like someone has cut off my left arm, I just can't tell anyone that it's all the good things one can imagine six weeks alone to be.

My kids are a lot of trouble. Two boys ages five and two, and they are every bit as active and exhausting as it sounds. But they are also my reason to live. Since they were born other important things in life went from top priorities to I hope to get those done when I retire. Or when my kids retire. Not that I plan to retire, but they might. I do go to work, but otherwise spend all my free time together with them. So six weeks suddenly alone is something to adjust to.

For me, one of the worst things things about being away from them is talking to them on the phone. Another bad thing is not talking to them on the phone. On more than one occasion they have been too busy playing or doing something else, and have only reluctantly agreed to talk. And I realize that they are fine without me. And that hurts. It's good for me because it's good for them that they can easily do without me, but it's bad for me for me. I want them to need me, but they don't need me, they need someone. In theory, it would be beneficial for me to have someone else spend all their time and energy on them, and spend my own time pursuing other goals. But then why is it that I feel this way? Are these emotions adaptive, or do they make no sense at all? Am I an example of an organism locked in an indefinite loop of love, neurons firing at will without sense? Admittedly I don't have access to the inner feelings of other fathers, but the ones I overhear here and there from time to time talking to their buddies about their offspring don't strike me as all that emotionally invested. Enough to be great fathers, but not this festering fondness.

In less than twelve hours my boys are back, and my daily life makes another revolution. Coming home to an empty apartment will be substituted with jumping, tickling, sword fighting, drawing, screaming, eating, bathing, laughing. Sleeping in my arms. I recommend.

Why are all the songs about love for a woman, and none of them about the love for children? Lennon is the only writer that comes to mind:

Third ever Scientia Pro Publica

Scientia Pro Publica is the blog carnival that replaces The Tangled Bank (which inexplicably has gone the way of baiji). It's is now up, and has tons of sciency posts: Scientia Pro Publica 3: the Swine 'flu Edition.

Umpteenth Carnival of the Godless

Don't overlook the Carnival of the Godless on Relatively Science. I recommend this post on The Evolving Mind: The Spirit World's Interest in Sex, which concludes like so.

Relationships are important, so don’t deceive others. Perhaps the sexual relationship is the most important to any animal. And thus the focus on sex and offspring in the Bible and other so-called sacred texts. And who better to monitor the sexual lives of people than an all-knowing, all-might, invisible alpha?

Go read it all.

Or you can just enjoy Tim Minchin here:

Darwin symposium at Caltech

For those of you in SoCal here's a tip on how to spend Thursday May 14th: At the Beckman auditorium at Caltech, because that's the time and place of

THE SCIENCE OF EVOLUTION/THE EVOLUTION OF SCIENCE
A symposium on the occasion of:
The 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth
The 150th anniversary of The Origin of Species
The 20th anniversary of the Beckman Institute at Caltech

It's free for all, and speakers include among others:

Eric Davidson: "Some New Ways of Thinking About, and Working on, Evolution of the Body Plan"
John Grotzinger: "Geologic and Environmental Context of the Early Cambrian Radiation of Animals"
Christoph Adami: "The Free-for-All" Effect: A Mechanism for a Drastically Varying Rate of Evolution"
Frances Arnold: "On Beyond Nature: Protein Evolution in the Laboratory"
Michael Ruse: "The Origin at 150: Is it past its Sell-by date?"
Peter and Rosemary Grant: "Darwin's Finches"

Full program is here.

LOLcat is a Christian

Edward Current's cat is a Christian. Of course.

Hobbits perhaps not cretins

Vacation, jet lag, and deadlines all conspire to drag me away from blogging. But no more. Vacation is over, jet lag almost gone, and deadlines have been crossed. No matter.

So, remember John McWhorter's untestable hypothesis that the hobbits (H. floresiensis) were responsible for simplifying a group of Indonesian languages?

For those of us who have doubts that the hobbits were not just... well, retarded humans, new evidence leads anthropologist Dean Falk of Florida State University in Tallahassee to surmise that they perhaps were endowed with vamped up brains:

An analysis of the inner surface of an 18,000-year–old skull assigned to Homo floresiensis, a species also known as hobbits, indicates that this tiny individual possessed a brain blessed with souped-up intellectual capacities needed for activities such as making stone tools

From ScienceNews:

Falk compared a cast of the cranium’s inner surface, or endocast, obtained from the partial hobbit skeleton LB1 to endocasts from both modern humans and from other fossil skulls in the human evolutionary family, called hominids for short. These casts bring into relief impressions made by various anatomical landmarks on the brain’s surface.

“LB1 reveals that significant cortical reorganization was sustained in ape-sized brains of at least one hominid species,” Falk said.

One legitimate concern is that the hobbits were otherwise normal humans who suffered from cretinism: the condition of severely stunted physical and mental growth due to untreated congenital deficiency of thyroid hormones (hypothyroidism) or from prolonged nutritional deficiency of iodine.

So how can we know when all we have is fossils? Pleiotropy! The genetic mechanism - not the blog.

Why pleiotropy? Because

Low levels of thyroid production cause an array of skeletal abnormalities in cretinism, as well as dwarfism.

CT scans of LB1 show no signs of dental, skull or limb conditions associated with cretinism, [William] Jungers [of Stony Brook Health Sciences Center in New York] said. People with cretinism generally have much larger brains than that of LB1, he added.

I must admit that I am emotionally invested in the hypothesis that the hobbits weren't mere humans. Just imagine how cool it would be to meet and communicate, even, with another species. Talk about what that would do to our own image of ourselves as the pinnacle of evolution.

Evolution-proof malaria control

In treating malaria it is crucial to understand evolutionary dynamics. The problem with insecticides such as DDT is that it kills mosquitos (Anopheles) almost immediately after contact, and thus imposes very strong selection for resistance against the insecticide. The mosquitos evolve resistance within a few years, rendering the whole population immune and the insecticide worthless.

It is also important to understand that while mosquitos is the target for the insecticides, they are really just the carrier of the malaria parasites, Plasmodium falciparum. Consequently, it would be beneficial if there was some way to fight the parasite while not causing the mosquito populations to evolve resistance. And there is indeed a way that could be done, because of the fact that the parasite takes some time to develop within the mosquito. Consider these observations:

• The gonotrophic cycle (female mosquitos feed, convert a blood meal into eggs*, lay the eggs, and then seek out a new blood meal) is two to four days long.
• Natural mortality (without insecticides) is so high that few females go through more than a few gonotrophic cycles before they die.
• Development of the parasite is rather slow. It takes about ten to sixteen days (two to six gonotrophic cycles) for it to develop and move to the salivary glands of the host, where it can be transmitted to humans.

As Read, Lynch, and Thomas puts it in their PLoS Biology article, How to Make Evolution-Proof Insecticides for Malaria Control, the facts above lead to one of the great ironies of malaria:

most mosquitoes do not live long enough to transmit the disease.

The obvious conclusion is that killing only old mosquitos would solve the problem of the parasite infecting humans, and would avoid selection for mosquito resistance against insecticides. This is exactly what Read et al. propose. They suggest a number of approaches through which only older mosquitos would suffer, and then present a numerical model that shows how such control would play out:

• Low sublethal doses of insecticides accumulating after continued exposure could result in death of older mosquitos.
• Microencapsulation could provide slow release of insecticide.
• Compounds disproportionally affecting mosquitos with senescence.
• Compounds disproportionally affecting mosquitos suffering the costs (e.g. metabolic) of parasite infection.

In other words, it might even be the case that simply lowering the concentration of insecticides would be sufficient to eradicate malaria. Fancy that!

That would be an enormous benefit. There are between 350 and 500 million cases of malaria every year, and a resulting one to three million deaths, of which the majority is African children. It would totally rock.

Unfortunately, nothing much in science is as straightforward as that. The majority of the work done by Read et al. was numerical. Their model aimed to quantify to what extent the use of insecticides acting at later gonotrophic cycles can prevent the evolution of resistance. Figure A below shows the fraction of resistant mosquitos as a function of time for con(ventional) insecticides and different hypothetical late-life-acting (LLA) insecticides that kill mosquitos from their second through sixth gonotrophic cycles. The paper does not specify the time-units on the x-axis, so we cannot tell when the mosquitos evolve resistance. But if we assume that it takes one to two years for them to evolve resistance to conventional insecticides, it looks like it takes approximately five times longer in the case of C3, which is five to ten years. Quite an improvement, but not exactly evolution-proof.



The numbers in the second column in B, the relative fitness of mosquitos in the presence of insecticide, needs to be below 1 for the insecticide to be evolution-proof. If there was a way to lower it, it would theoretically be possible to use the same insecticide forever, and never need to develop new ones, as is the case today.

In figure 3 we see that the relative fitness of the infected mosquitos can indeed drop below 1 (the green columns). This happens when there is an additional cost on the mosquitos of being infected with the parasite, which kills an extra fraction of mosquitos every day. Further, if the insecticide affects uninfected mosquitos less than infected ones, then it also gets easier to lower the relative fitness of infected mosquitos.



Read et al. concludes by scaring us with the prospect of disaster if the evolution of resistance is ignored:

The Global Malaria Action Plan (GMAP) [10] has laudable ambitions of spraying 172 million houses annually, and distributing 730 million insecticide-impregnated bed nets by the year 2010. If implemented with existing insecticides, this program will impose unprecedented selection for resistance. The historical record [22], and theory (e.g., Figure 1) shows that the medium-term prognosis for the insecticides currently in use is inescapably poor. Transitioning to an LLA insecticide strategy could see the benefits of the massive GMAP effort sustained, and could maintain for the long term the contribution of several key vector control tools to the goal of eradication. Failure to address evolution now runs the risk of replaying history [22]: operational disaster and a derailing of the whole malaria control agenda.

Don't ignore the science, or you'll pay the price!

Reference:
Read, A., Lynch, P., & Thomas, M. (2009). How to Make Evolution-Proof Insecticides for Malaria Control PLoS Biology, 7 (4) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000058

This post has been submitted to the NESCent competition for a travel award for the ScienceOnline 2010 un-conference in Durham, NC, January 14‐17th, 2010.

* Make that fertile eggs.

Carnival of the Godless

The 2009 April 19th edition of the Carnival of the Godless is up on Geekgrrrl's blog.

I recommend a list of ten myths about atheists presented on Not a Potted Plant. Excerpt:

2. Because atheists do not believe in God, they have no basis for morality, and therefore do all sorts of immoral things.
Response: We have as fine a sense of morality as anyone else. You don't see atheists raping, killing, or stealing in any unusual numbers; indeed, there are proportionally fewer atheists in prison, particularly for violent crimes, than there are of any religion. We don't really eat babies, that's just a joke.

The red swan hypothesis

Are there any red swans? Hypothesis: There exists a red swan. It is my secret scientific hypothesis. Now what to do?

I have been looking high and low. Zoos and parks, but so far I haven't found any. I have never heard mention of any red swans, but I still think it is a hypothesis worth investigating. Can you prove the hypothesis wrong? If I hypothesized that there are no black swans, then that would be easy to falsify. Indeed, it has. But it is pretty god damn hard to disprove my red swan hypothesis. There are many places to look, and perhaps the red swans are very small. Even if no one has ever seen a red swan, one could still be hiding somewhere - I think it would be a tiny Amazonian one, or one living on a tiny atoll somewhere far off in the pacific. I propose to investigate both, but even if they send teams of scientists there and nothing is found, red swans could be hiding elsewhere.

I may be crazy to insist on the possibility of red swans. But can you prove my hypothesis wrong? No, strictly speaking you cannot.

Another example: Can you prove that a brick will always fall to the ground when let go a meter above the surface of the Earth? Countless experiments have been done, and so far no suspension. How about death. That we all must die one day is often said to be the only thing we know. But how do we know? The answer is by induction. We have overwhelming empirical evidence that all bricks fall to the ground when let go, and that all humans must eventually die, but only because both have been observed a ridiculous number of times (and because we have good theories for both phenomena). In other words, as with most things we know about the natural world though induction, we feel pretty confident that they are true, even though when forced we must concede that we don't know for sure (i.e. 100 percent) that no bricks will hover, and no one will live forever. Such is science.

Same thing with my red swan hypothesis. That no one has ever seen a hint of a red swan is enough that we should give up the belief that one exists. Not knowing for sure is a fact of life. That I hypothesized the existence of a red swan because I have a religious belief that they one exists does not make the hypothesis unscientific. The motivation for the hypothesis is entirely besides the point. On the other hand, while I continue to have faith that a red swan is out there, I must admit that the hypothesis is dead in the scientific sense.

Therefore we do not teach children and high schoolers about red swans.

Similarly, the existence of irreducibly complex systems is too a scientific hypothesis, despite that people continue to claim that it is not. It can indeed be tested, just as much as my red swan hypothesis can be tested. And the fact that it was proposed by religious people with an agenda, that really makes no difference. Additionally, the fact that "intelligent design" directly (and shamelessly) replaced "creationism" in Of Pandas and People has no bearing on the its validity as a scientific hypothesis. Yet, this was one of the main points in the Dover trial that made Judge Jones rule that ID is not a scientific theory.

While I argue that irreducible complexity is a valid scientific hypothesis, time and again systems proposed to be irreducibly complex have been shown to have homologs, and that there is a way they could have evolved. Every proposed system - flagellum, eye, blood-clotting cascade, cell, mousetrap - have been shown not to be irreducibly complex. As a result the hypothesis that such a system exist has been proven unworthy of merit. As far as we can tell, evolution does not have a problem evolving any of these systems.

Intelligent Design and irreducible complexity should therefore not be taught to children and high schoolers.

Nauseating double oxymoron

I am in the middle of experiencing something horrendous on TV. You could say I'm liveblogging it.

Danish Christian rock. A double oxymoron. This will bother me for ages. Just sit there in the back of my mind queasing the hell out of me for weeks on end.

The music is decent rock, really. Nothing inventive about it, just like most rock. But the text (in Danish): "Holy, holy, holy, we praise. Worthy, worthy, worthy, we praise. God, you're the only one. We sing only to praise you." Pretty easy stuff to write. And then the scene: A stage full of people constantly full of energy, clapping with arms over their heads. But the audience is lame, nearly standing still. Some raise their hands to the side, closed eyes - sort of in prayer. Everyobdy seems to know the lyrics.

It's an oxymoron because there is nothing rock about Christianity. The two aren't perpendicular, they are antiparallel. Imagine the reaction when The Rolling Stones sings they newest song called "I follow Jesus." Instant exodus. Complete cold shoulder.

But then, on top of that, this is Denmark. Bastion of secularism. Take Phil Zuckerman's word for it. Or look at the belief in evolution vs. creationism in western countries. Denmark is, goddammit, supposed to be free of such lunacy.

Seeing this kind of upbeat praise for the lord in Denmark - copied directly from Jesusland - nauseates me.