dangerousmeta!, the original new mexican miscellany, offering eclectic linkage since 1999.

Daily Beast: The Fireplace Delusion - A Metaphor for Religious Belief.

“Among adults, wood burning is associated with more-frequent emergency room visits and hospital admissions for respiratory illness, along with increased mortality from heart attacks. The inhalation of wood smoke, even at relatively low levels, alters pulmonary immune function, leading to a greater susceptibility to colds, flus, and other respiratory infections.”

ShortFormBlog: Gingrich robocall says Romney forced Holocaust survivors to eat non-kosher.

And he wants to be President. Like that’s gonna happen. A regular William Randolph Hearst, he is.

Seattle Times: Alaska Airlines to stop handing out prayer cards to passengers.

You know, Spalding Gray used to tell a story of taking a flight in an Asian country with a particular dominant religion. When he climbed on board, the plane was lined up with the runway and the pilots were busy taping newspaper all over the cockpit windows because the sun was in their eyes. His comment, “I decided to think twice about flying with pilots whose religion features multiple reincarnations.” Pass on the prayer cards.

NY Times: How to Integrate Europe’s Muslims.

What’s Europe doing wrong? From my reading, most immigrant populations in America integrate fully within two generations.

S+R Today: Why Would Americans Be More Willing Now to Say They Have No Spiritual Interest?

“One-third of Americans have always been pretty indifferent to religion, but those people are now less likely to describe themselves as belonging to a particular faith tradition and more likely to say that they don’t belong to one—and don’t care much.”

Big Think: Evolution Is Still Happening - Beneficial Mutations in Humans.

Pull this one out for your doubting friends ...

Guardian.UK: The first sexual revolution - lust and liberty in the 18th century.

“Everywhere in the west, sex outside marriage was illegal, and the church, the state and ordinary people devoted huge efforts to hunting it down and punishing it. This was a central feature of Christian society, one that had grown steadily in importance since late antiquity. So how and when did our culture change so strikingly?” Titillating read.

SF New Mexican: Access to legal abortions increasingly limited.

Sickening. Defend your rights, ladies, or it’s back to the Dark Ages for you. Yearly pregnancy and early death.

Is abortion death? Yes. Death is a part of birth - the older the woman, the more fertilized embryos (in conservative religious parlance, ‘lives’) are passed through the uterus without implanting (in conservative religious parlance, ‘murder’). As they get towards their late ‘30’s, women can have ~9 non-implantations (9 ‘murders’) for every one successful pregnancy. Noone mentions this, noone touches this fact with a ten-foot pole. Don’t believe me? Walk into any women’s health center or fertility clinic and ask.

And I will harshly remind idiotic anti-abortionists, that late-term abortions are NECESSARY (for many reasons, not just that single one). [Do NOT view if you are squeamish.]

There is no gentle way to educate on this subject, unfortunately. I respect the religious moral stance of individuals, but I will not agree to having their mores applied to nonbelievers.

Why Do So Many Have Trouble Believing In Evolution? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

“But evidence for evolution is also much more palpable, for example in the risks of overprescribing antibiotics: the more we (and farm animals) take antibiotics, the higher the chance that a microbe will mutate into one resistant to the drug. This is in-your-face evolution, species mutating at the genetic level and adapting to a new environment (in this case, an environment contaminated with antibiotics).” I’ve said this for ages now - if you doubt evolution, put away your modern meds.  Moral inconsistency keeps hundreds of thousands of evangelicals alive.

Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire: Ex-Wife Claims Gingrich Wanted “Open Marriage”.

Oh, gag.

WaPo: Rick Perry defends Marines accused of urinating on Afghan corpses.

Masking the Right’s disdain for the Geneva Conventions. Soldiers used to honor the GC; perhaps no longer? What do they teach modern warriors?

S+R Today: What Is the “Deep Conflict” Between Naturalism and Science?

Leave this one for the weekend, after work. 

NY Times: Trinity Church, a Sanctuary for Music, Cuts Back.

“All this adds up to deprivation and uncertainty for parishioners and followers of Trinity’s music program. And for all the current caricatures of classical music as an elitist pursuit, no one would mistake the crowd at the free Bach at One concerts for 1 percenters. Many are tourists, stopped in their tracks by what they hear.” A shame. Trinity sits at an important crux point, between Wall Street, the Stock Exchange, the waterfront, the site of the former WTC. It remains a connection to the past, to the future. If you work in the area, you often eat lunch in the cemetery with Alexander Hamilton, John Jacob Astor, Luther Martin, Robert Fulton and others. Nice green space in the concrete jungle.

Telegraph.UK: Italian study claims Turin Shroud is Christ’s authentic burial robe.

“They concluded that the exact shade, texture and depth of the imprints on the cloth could only be produced with the aid of ultraviolet lasers – technology that was clearly not available in medieval times.” When you’re starting with an hypothesis that rests on the tests backing up your preconceived notions (or the obverse), how objective can one be? Loosely filed under ‘science.’

Gramophone: Hildegard of Bingen to be canonised and admitted as a Doctor of the Church.

“Her music gained popularity as the result of various recordings, including Gothic Voices’ ‘A Feather on the Breath of God’, recorded by Hyperion in April 1985 and which won numerous awards, including Gramophone’s Choral Award.” Indeed, I think ‘85 was when many of us heard of her for the first time. Please don’t part her out into ‘relics’ ...

Byzantine Blog: Transition to Christianity, Onassis Cultural Center, New York City.

“A magnificent head of Aphrodite, dating to first century Athens, bears the marks of Christian vandalism. The eyes and lips have been chipped to ‘blind’ and ‘silence’ the deity. A cross was then inscribed on the forehead of Aphrodite. Once part of a full length statue, the decapitated head may have served as a trophy for the victory of Christianity over the dethroned gods and goddesses of Olympus.”

Seed Mag: Buddhism and the Brain.

“Despite my doubts, neurology and neuroscience do not appear to profoundly contradict Buddhist thought. Neuroscience tells us the thing we take as our unified mind is an illusion, that our mind is not unified and can barely be said to ‘exist’ at all. Our feeling of unity and control is a post-hoc confabulation and is easily fractured into separate parts.”

Standpoint: Jews, Christians and Judaeo-Christians.

“The switch in the perception of Jesus from charismatic prophet to superhuman being coincided with a geographical and religious change, when the Christian preaching of the Gospel moved from the Galilean-Judaean Jewish culture to the pagan surroundings of the Graeco-Roman world.” This pullquote seems only mildly interesting, but I wanted to leave the good stuff for you to discover yourselves. Read.

S+R Today: What Strategies for Convincing Evangelicals About Global Warming Work?

“Droughts and floods, heat waves, and rising sea levels are just a few of the climate impacts we see around the world. To ignore their cries and cast scorn on those who attempt to draw our attention to their plight is not a response of love; it is acting out of fear, and God is not the author of fear.”

HuffingtonPost: Science, Religion and Religious Minimalism.

“The truth is, many of us feel torn. We’re pulled between some core religious commitments we neither can nor want to escape, on one hand, and the core beliefs we acquire from non-religious sources, especially from the theories and discoveries of natural science, on the other.” We are all a lovely, illogical mess aren’t we? Too bad we don’t have the wisdom to celebrate our foibles instead of using them as stakes to drive into the hearts of one another.

SF New Mexican: Las Posadas - Holiday procession kindled by community spirit.

Local color for your morning.

Retronaut: Jewelled Skeletons, 1600s.

Macabre, and astonishingly beautiful. Elegant, even. Worthy of an epic poem.

ArtDaily: Walking 40 miles in Jesus’ shoes.

“On the Gospel Trail, tourists can ride toward the Sea of Galilee on horseback, accompanied by escorts from a nearby ranch wearing jeans, big belt buckles and embroidered cowboy boots with spurs. The scene feels more Texas than Gospel, especially because according to the New Testament, Jesus’ mount of choice was a donkey. Horses were considered vehicles of war. ” Okay, that’s just bizarre. Then again, after seeing Perry’s video ... what the Hades do I expect?

Later: Speaking of donkeys ... [click it now, it may not be there for long].

The Daily Beast: Evangelicals Flocking Toward Newt Gingrich.

“Gingrich benefits, of course, from the powerful Christian narrative of sin and deliverance. ‘These voters believe in forgiveness, they believe in redemption’ ...” I find it particularly maddening that evangelical women seem to be falling for this. I’ve smelled puer aeternus around him since the earliest of ‘90’s. He is the political Peter Pan of our era.

HuffPo: ‘Rembrandt And The Face Of Jesus’: DIA Show Explores Radical Religious Paintings.

“Jesus was, of course, Jewish. But few artists emphasized his ethnicity, or his humanity, as frankly and directly as Rembrandt did.”