In a whirl of limbs and with eyes bulging, the woman is helped to a squat in the ramshackle shed and starts cackling maniacally like a terrified chicken.
“Kaaaa! Ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka,” she screams and stutters, her right arm bent in front of her.

Around her, the other Voodoo worshippers look on, unsurprised but expectant as their ceremony reaches its climactic mid-point. Someone ties a red cloth to her arm, which stops shaking.

In their eyes, she is possessed by a spirit of the dead – one of the 220,000 estimated to have perished in Haiti’s January quake perhaps – and is thus, in a way, blessed.

When she picks up a rusty knife and swings clockwise around the room, gulping from a bottle of cherry-flavored alcohol, they do not draw away.

Instead they embrace her, even kiss her. And in that way they are blessed, too.

But for all the fervor and favor being shared in this back-alley corner of Cite Soleil, a Port-au-Prince slum that was badly smashed in the quake, the practitioners of Voodoo are feeling under seige.

Their cult, a form of west African polytheism that came to Haiti with the slave trade, is being blamed by some followers of the rapidly growing Christian denominations – evangelicals, Seventh-Day Adventists, Baptists – as the cause of God’s anger in smiting their country.

[Read more at the Telegraph]

Among the many medieval plague victims recently unearthed near Venice, Italy, one reportedly had never-before-seen evidence of an unusual affliction: being “undead.”

The partial body and skull of the woman showed her jaw forced open by a brick (above) — an exorcism technique used on suspected vampires.

It’s the first time that archaeological remains have been interpreted as belonging to a suspected vampire, team leader Matteo Borrini, a forensic archaeologist at the University of Florence, told National Geographic News.

“I was lucky. I [didn't] expect to find a vampire during my excavations,” he said. Belief in vampires was rampant in the Middle Ages, mostly because the process of decomposition was not well understood.

For instance, as the human stomach decays, it releases a dark “purge fluid.” This bloodlike liquid can flow freely from a corpse’s nose and mouth, so it was apparently sometimes confused with traces of vampire victims’ blood.

Read More: National Geographic

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) — One of Pope Benedict’s ceremonial ushers and a member of an elite choir in St Peter’s Basilica have been implicated in a gay prostitution ring, in the latest sexual scandal to taint the Vatican.

Ghinedu Ehiem, a Nigerian, was dismissed by the Vatican on Wednesday from the Giulia Choir after his name appeared in transcripts of police wiretaps, published by an Italian newspaper, in an unrelated Italian investigation.

The wiretaps were carried out in connection with a probe into corruption in contracts to build public works, including the planned venue in Sardinia of last year’s G8 summit. The summit was eventually moved to the Abruzzo region as part of efforts to help it recover from an earthquake.

Among four people arrested last month in the corruption probe was Angelo Balducci, a engineer who is a board member of Italy’s public works department and a construction consultant to the Vatican. Balducci was arrested on corruption charges and the allegations of prostitution emerged only later.

Balducci is also a member of an elite group called “Gentlemen of His Holiness,” ushers who are called to serve in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace on major occasions such as when the pope receives heads of state or presides at big events.

“Gentlemen of His Holiness” carried the coffin of the late Pope John Paul at his funeral in 2005.

Excerpts of the wiretaps and police documents published in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica showed that Ehiem, 40, had been in regular contact with Balducci before Balducci’s arrest last month and the subject of their conversation was gay sex.

A police document prepared for magistrates and published in part by La Repubblica said Balducci was in contact with Ehiem and an Italian who were part of what the police called “an organized network … to abet male prostitution.”

Read More: The Washington Post

The draft national curriculum does not prohibit the teaching of creationism in schools, raising questions about whether this will open the door to its promotion as a science in classrooms.

The NSW Board of Studies has explicitly ruled out the teaching of creation theory from the Bible as a science, however it allows the teaching of spiritual perspectives on creation in science classes, as long as they are not dressed up as scientific or used to substitute any curriculum content, such as the teaching of evolution.

Greens MP John Kaye said he did not oppose discussion of Aboriginal Dreamtime or Christian explanations of the world’s origins in science classrooms, as long as they were presented as non-scientific beliefs.

However, while the NSW curriculum explicitly required schools to present and ”discuss evidence that present-day organisms have evolved from organisms in the distant past” and to ”relate natural selection to the theory of evolution”, the draft national curriculum ”was remarkably silent on the connection between natural selection and the evolution of ancient species into modern forms”.

“[The state curriculum] leaves open no wriggle room to slip in religiously based views on the origin of species as science,” Dr Kaye said.

[Read more at the Sydney Morning Herald]

The American Family Association, a religious right group, is urging that Tillikum (Tilly), the killer whale that killed a trainer at SeaWorld Orlando, be put down, preferably by stoning. Citing Tilly’s history of violent altercations, the group is slamming SeaWorld for not listening to Scripture in how to deal with the animal.

However, the group is going further and laying the blame for the trainer’s death directly at the feet of Chuck Thompson, the curator in charge of animal behavior. According to Scripture, if one of your animals kills a second time because you didn’t kill it after it claimed its first human victim, this time you die right along with your animal…”the ox shall be stoned, and its owner also shall be put to death.”

Read More: Huffington Post

For most Americans, science is akin to magic. We don’t know how much of this shit occurs, but as long as everything keeps humming along smoothly we feel some sense of peace. The problem with this state of being is that it allows for all sorts of rival interpretations on things that are basically cut and dry.

I’ve had many arguments with religious types regarding abortion, and most cannot wrap their heads around the fact that the gestating fetus is indeed a part of the woman whose belly it’s in, which seems fairly straightforward. I don’t mean to go all Amazon woman on you, but I have to believe the fervently religious who protest in front of abortion clinics and wish death on doctors who perform the procedure have to be somewhat perturbed that a woman, a lesser being according to their holy bible, is in charge of this impending life.

A bill is being proposed in Utah that would criminalize pregnant women who do intentional harm to the fetus. The bill came about after a teenager, probably in response to the difficulty of obtaining a legal abortion in Utah, had someone throttle her stomach in order to stop the pregnancy. Instead of getting this girl some counseling and moving her the hell out of Utah, they attempted to charge her with murder, which fortunately didn’t fly. The next desperate teen may not be so lucky. The exact language of the bill is as follows:

A person commits criminal homicide if [he] the person intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, with criminal negligence, or acting with a mental state otherwise specified in the statute defining the offense, causes the death of another human being, including an unborn child at any stage of its development (see here)

Read More: Black Sun Gazette

Meditation appears to build up cortex, MRI scans find

If you’re trying to reduce your sensitivity to pain, Zen meditation may help by actually thickening your brain, new research suggests.The authors of a new study, published in a special issue of the journal Emotion, reached their conclusions after comparing brain thickness in 17 Zen meditators and a control group of 18 people who didn’t meditate and hadn’t practiced yoga or suffered from chronic pain, brain disease or mental illness.

The researchers applied heat to the participants’ calves and used MRI scans to study how their brains reacted to the pain.

“Through training, Zen meditators appear to thicken certain areas of their cortex, and this appears to underlie their lower sensitivity to pain,” study author Joshua A. Grant, a doctoral student in the University of Montreal’s department of physiology, said in a news release from the school. “We found a relationship between cortical thickness and pain sensitivity, which supports our previous study on how Zen meditation regulates pain.”

[Read more at Bloomberg.com]

(Left) Ria Ramkissoon and her son Javon Thompson, (top right) Queen Antoinette and (bottom right) Trevia Williams.

For more than a week, Ria Ramkissoon watched passively as her one-year-old son wasted away, denied food and water because the older woman she lived with said it was God’s will. Javon Thompson was possessed by an evil spirit, Ramkissoon was told, because he didn’t say “Amen” during a mealtime prayer. Javon didn’t talk much, given his age, but he had said “Amen” before, Ramkissoon testified in a US court in Baltimore.

On the day Javon died, Ramkissoon was told to “nurture him back to life”. She mashed up some carrots and tried to feed the boy, but he was no longer able to swallow. Ramkissoon put her hands on his chest to confirm that his heart had stopped beating.

Ramkissoon and several other people knelt down and prayed that he would rise from the dead. For weeks afterward, Ramkissoon spent much of her time in a room with her son’s emaciated body — talking to him, dancing, even giving him water. She thought she could bring him back.

Ramkissoon told the tale of her son’s excruciating death from the witness stand on Wednesday, at the trial of the woman she says told her not to feed the boy. Queen Antoinette was the leader of a small religious cult, according to police and prosecutors, and she faces murder charges alongside her daughter, Trevia Williams, and another follower, Marcus A. Cobbs.

Read More: AP via the Sydney Morning Herald

Much like Halloween, the Jewish holiday of Purim carries a veneer of boisterous and innocuous fun overlaid on some ghoulish history. Of all the “they tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat” holidays in the Jewish calendar, Purim has been the most responsible for shaping the Jewish view of other nations—and the theology behind that worldview has rung many alarm bells over the potential for Jewish violence.

Anyone familiar with the Bible can joke about the seemingly endless array of tribes with peculiar-sounding names, from Jesubites to Hittites. But one tribe’s spiritual legacy is very much alive today and embodies the most controversial commandment in the Bible: Amalek is the nation that attacked Israel at its weakest point during the Exodus story, and God’s quest for revenge is total—commanding King Saul’s army to slay every man, woman, child, and even animal, sparing nothing and no one. That singular military order recalls the broader commandment given to all the Hebrews in Deuteronomy, to “blot out the remembrance of Amalek.”

That Jews today must grapple with their predecessors’ engagement in divine genocide is troublesome enough for many theologians. What makes it even more difficult is that many think the war with Amalek isn’t over.

[Read more at Slate]

“If there’s no God, then where did all this come from?”

I’ve written a fair amount about some of the more painfully bad arguments for religion and against atheism. I’ve written about the argument that religion is just a story, not meant to be taken literally…a story that still somehow makes people get very bent out of shape when atheists point out that it isn’t true.

I’ve written about an assortment of arguments from wishful thinking, from the insulting (and irrelevant) argument that atheists don’t stay atheists when faced with death, to the baffling (and irrelevant) argument that religion gives us a needed feeling of mystery.

I’ve written about the arguments that essentially tell atheists to just shut up. And I’ve written about the ways that, when asked what evidence they have for their religious beliefs, many believers simply deflect the question. Instead of saying, “This is why I believe what I do,” they offer a list of excuses for why they don’t have to show us any stinking evidence.

[Read more at Alternet]

Political, religious and sexual behaviors may be reflections of intelligence, a new study finds.Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. The findings will be published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.

The IQ differences, while statistically significant, are not stunning — on the order of 6 to 11 points — and the data should not be used to stereotype or make assumptions about people, experts say. But they show how certain patterns of identifying with particular ideologies develop, and how some people’s behaviors come to be.

The reasoning is that sexual exclusivity in men, liberalism and atheism all go against what would be expected given humans’ evolutionary past. In other words, none of these traits would have benefited our early human ancestors, but higher intelligence may be associated with them.

“The adoption of some evolutionarily novel ideas makes some sense in terms of moving the species forward,” said George Washington University leadership professor James Bailey, who was not involved in the study. “It also makes perfect sense that more intelligent people — people with, sort of, more intellectual firepower — are likely to be the ones to do that.”

[Read more at CNN]

LEX18.com via the AP

FRANKFORT (AP) — Kentucky may follow the lead of Texas and a handful of other states in allowing Bible classes to be taught in public schools.

The Senate Education Committee on Thursday unanimously approved legislation that would effectively return the Bible to classrooms across Kentucky.

“The purpose is to allow the Bible to be used for its literature content as well as its art and cultural and social studies content,” said state Sen. David Boswell, D-Owensboro, chief sponsor of the bill that is modeled after a Texas measure.

Under the Kentucky proposal, Bible courses would be offered as electives, meaning schools could choose whether to offer them to students as a social studies credit and that students could decide whether to take them.

Boswell said he believes the legislation is constitutional because the Bible won’t be taught from a religious perspective. What sets the legislation apart, he said, is that it proposes teaching, not preaching, the Bible.

Read More: LEX18.com via the AP

From The News Tribune:

As debate club president and a top student, Arlington High School senior Justin Surber has studied the constitutional rights of free speech.

Surber, 18, recently took a stand that will keep him from appearing in his club’s yearbook photo.

Once a week, Surber wears a black T-shirt featuring the 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s take on religion. In block letters, the shirt reads “GOD IS DEAD.”

Nobody has told him he can’t wear the shirt to school. He wears it to provoke debate, he says, and that’s why he wore the shirt the day the debate club photo was taken for the yearbook.

Now Surber believes his T-shirt prompted the school’s yearbook adviser to ask for a retake of the photo, without the T-shirt.

“I feel I am a victim of censorship,” Surber said.

When a student yearbook staff member came to take a second photo of the debate club a few weeks ago, Surber’s friend Reed Summerlin asked for an explanation.

The yearbook staffer indicated she had been asked by the yearbook adviser not to tell Surber the reason for the retake, Summerlin said. “She said it was about Justin’s shirt.”

In protest, Surber and Summerlin chose not to be in the second photo.

[Read more at The News Tribune]

A wooden object claimed to be a replica of the Biblical Ark of the Covenant has gone on display at a Zimbabwe museum.

The “ngoma lungundu” belongs to the Lemba people – black Africans who claim Jewish ancestry.

They say the vessel was built almost 700 years ago from the remains of the original Ark, which the Bible says was used to store Moses’ 10 Commandments.

For decades the ancient vessel was thought to be lost, until it was found in a storeroom in Harare recently.

Tudor Parfitt, who rediscovered the artefact three years ago, told the BBC he believed it was the oldest wooden object ever found in sub-Saharan Africa.

“On each corner there is the remnants of a wooden ring, and obviously at one point, it was carried by inserting poles through these two rings on either side,” he said.

[Read more at BBC News]

The following is the second chapter from Russ Kick’s classic bite-size Disinformation book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, published in 2003.

For more on Russ Kick, check out his website, The Memory Hole.

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Before he was Pope Pius II, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini was a poet, scholar, diplomat, and rakehell. And an author. In fact, he wrote a bestseller. People in fifteenth-century Europe couldn’t get enough of his Latin novella Historia de duobus amantibus. An article in a scholarly publication on literature claims that Historia “was undoubtedly one of the most read stories of the whole Renaissance.” The Oxford edition gives a Cliff Notes version of the storyline: “The Goodli History tells of the illicit love of Euralius, a high official in the retinue of the [German] Emperor Sigismund, and Lucres, a married lady from Siena [Italy].”

It was probably written in 1444, but the earliest known printing is from Antwerp in 1488. By the turn of the century, 37 editions had been published. Somewhere around 1553, the short book appeared in English under the wonderfully old-school title The Goodli History of the Moste Noble and Beautyfull Ladye Lucres of Scene in Tuskane, and of Her Louer Eurialus Verye Pleasaunt and Delectable vnto ye Reder. Despite the obvious historical interest of this archaic Vatican porn, it has never been translated into contemporary language. (The passages quoted below mark the first time that any of the book has appeared in modern English.)

The 1400s being what they were, the action is pretty tame by today’s standards. At one point, Euralius scales a wall to be with Lucres: “When she saw her lover, she clasped him in her arms. There was embracing and kissing, and with full sail they followed their lusts and wearied Venus, now with Ceres, and now with Bacchus was refreshed.” Loosely translated, that last part means that they shagged, then ate, then drank wine.

His Holiness describes the next time they hook up:

Thus talking to each other, they went into the bedroom, where they had such a night as we judge the two lovers Paris and Helen had after he had taken her away, and it was so pleasant that they thought Mars and Venus had never known such pleasure….

Her mouth, and now her eyes, and now her cheeks he kissed. Pulling down her clothes, he saw such beauty as he had never seen before. “I have found more, I believe,” said Euralius, “than Acteon saw of Diana when she bathed in the fountain. What is more pleasant or more fair than these limbs?… O fair neck and pleasant breasts, is it you that I touch? Is it you that I have? Are you in my hands? O round limbs, O sweet body, do I have you in my arms?… O pleasant kisses, O dear embraces, O sweet bites, no man alive is happier than I am, or more blessed.”… He strained, and she strained, and when they were done they weren’t weary. Like Athens, who rose from the ground stronger, soon after battle they were more desirous of war.

But Euralius isn’t just a horndog. He waxes philosophical about love to Lucres’ cousin-in-law:

You know that man is prone to love. Whether it is virtue or vice, it reigns everywhere. No heart of flesh hasn’t sometime felt the pricks of love. You know that neither the wise Solomon nor the strong Sampson has escaped from this passion. Furthermore, the nature of a kindled heart and a foolish love is this: The more it is allowed, the more it burns, with nothing sooner healing this than the obtaining of the loved. There have been many, both in our time and that of our elders, whose foolish love has been the cause of cruel death. And many who, after sex and love vouchsafed, have stopped burning. Nothing is better when love has crept into your bones than to give in to the burning, for those who strive against the tempest often wreck, while those who drive with the storm escape.

Besides sex and wisdom, the story also contains a lot of humor, as when Lucres’ husband borrows a horse from Euralius: “He says to himself, ‘If you leap upon my horse, I shall do the same thing to your wife.’”

Popes just don’t write books like that anymore!

Reference: Piccolomini, Aeneas Silvius (Pius II). The Goodli History of the Ladye Lucres of Scene and of Her Lover Eurialus. Edited by E.J. Morrall. Oxford University Press, 1996. • Translations from early English into modern English by Russ Kick.

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Look for more 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know in the next 50 days
under the tag “50 Things” on disinfo.com.

Above Image: The life and deeds of Pope Pius II in the Cathedral Library at Siena
by Pinturicchio, c. 1502.

For a fee, this service will place your dog or cat in the home of a caring atheist on Judgment Day.
Many people in the U.S.—perhaps 20 million to 40 million—believe there will be a Second Coming in their lifetimes, followed by the Rapture . In this event, they say, the righteous will be spirited away to a better place while the godless remain on Earth. But what will become of all the pets?

Bart Centre, 61, a retired retail executive in New Hampshire, says many people are troubled by this question, and he wants to help. He started a service called Eternal Earth-Bound Pets that promises to rescue and care for animals left behind by the saved.

Promoted on the Web as “the next best thing to pet salvation in a Post Rapture World,” the service has attracted more than 100 clients, who pay $110 for a 10-year contract ($15 for each additional pet.) If the Rapture happens in that time, the pets left behind will have homes—with atheists. Centre has set up a national network of godless humans to carry out the mission. “If you love your pets, I can’t understand how you could not consider this,” he says.

Centre came up with the idea while working on his book, The Atheist Camel Chronicles, written under the pseudonym Dromedary Hump. In it, he says many unkind things about the devout and confesses that “I’m trying to figure out how to cash in on this hysteria to supplement my income.”

[Read more at Business Week]

The following is the first chapter from Russ Kick’s classic bite-size Disinformation book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, published in 2003.

For more on Russ Kick, check out his website, The Memory Hole.

_____________________________________

First Amendment battles continue to rage across the US over the posting of the Ten Commandments in public places — courthouses, schools, parks, and pretty much anywhere else you can imagine.

Christians argue that they’re a part of our Western heritage that should be displayed as ubiquitously as traffic signs. Congressman Bob Barr hilariously suggested that the Columbine massacre wouldn’t have happened if the Ten Commandments (also called the Decalogue) had been posted in the high school, and some government officials have directly, purposely disobeyed court rulings against the display of these ten directives supposedly handed down from on high.

Too bad they’re all talking about the wrong rules. Every Decalogue you see — from the 5,000-pound granite behemoth inside the Alabama State Judicial Building to the little wallet-cards sold at Christian bookstores — is bogus. Simply reading the Bible will prove this. Getting out your King James version, turn to Exodus 20:2-17. You’ll see the familiar list of rules about having no other gods, honoring your parents, not killing or coveting,
and so on. At this point, though, Moses is just repeating to the people what God told him on Mount Si’nai. These are not written down in any form.

Later, Moses goes back to the Mount, where God gives him two “tables of stone” with rules written on them (Exodus 31:18). But when Moses comes down the mountain lugging his load, he sees the people worshipping a statue of a calf, causing him to throw a tantrum and smash the tablets on the ground (Exodus 32:19).

In neither of these cases does the Bible refer to “commandments.” In the first instance, they are “words” which “God spake,” while the tablets contain “testimony.” It is only when Moses goes back for new tablets that we see the phrase “ten commandments” (Exodus 34:28). In an interesting turn of events, the commandments on these tablets are significantly different than the ten rules Moses recited for the people, meaning that either Moses’ memory is faulty or God changed his mind.

I. Thou shalt worship no other god.

II. Thou shalt make thee no molten gods.

III. The feast of unleavened bread thou shalt keep.

IV. Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou shalt rest.

V. Thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, of the firstfruits of wheat harvest,
and the feast of ingathering at the year’s end.

VI. Thrice in the year shall all your men children appear before the Lord God.

VII. Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven.

VIII. Neither shall the sacrifice of the feast of the passover be left unto the morning.

IX. The first of the firstfruits of thy land thou shalt bring unto the house of the LORD thy God.

X. Thou shalt not seethe a kid [ie, a young goat] in his mother’s milk.

_____________________________________

Look for more 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know in the next 50 days under the tag “50 Things” on disinfo.com.

Above Image: Moses with the Ten Commandments by Rembrandt (1659).

The Washington Post, today:

The case against Saeed Mohammed Saleh Hatim seemed ironclad.

The Justice Department alleged that Hatim, a detainee at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, trained at an al-Qaeda military camp in Afghanistan, stayed at terrorist guesthouses and even fought in the battle of Tora Bora. . . .

But a federal judge reviewed the case and found the government’s evidence too weak to justify Hatim’s confinement. The judge ordered the detainee’s release, ruling that he could not rely on Hatim’s statements because they had been coerced. He also found that the government’s informer was “profoundly unreliable.”

The case is more the rule than the exception. Federal judges, acting under a landmark 2008 Supreme Court ruling that grants Guantanamo Bay detainees the right to challenge their confinements, have ordered the government to free 32 prisoners and backed the detention of nine others. In their opinions, the judges have gutted allegations and questioned the reliability of statements by the prisoners during interrogations and by the informants. Even when ruling for the government, the judges have not always endorsed the Justice Department’s case. . . .

Legal scholars and outside experts who have studied the issue say the government is likely to suffer further losses because many cases appear to be built on the same kinds of evidence that have drawn such skepticism . . . .

In other words, if one hears only the Government’s unchallenged, untested accusations about detainees and others whom it labels Terrorists and Enemy Combatants, it semes clear and obvious that the person is an Evil, Dangerous and Bad Man.  But when those accusations are actually subjected to scrutiny by courts, it turns out that — in the overwhelming majority of cases — there is virtually no reliable evidence to support them.  Even beyond those cases, Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, had access to detainee files and revealed that a huge number of Guantanamo detainees — constantly accused of being the Worst of the Worst — were, in fact, completely innocent, as even the Bush administration came to acknowledge.  It’s unsurprising that the Government would falsely accuse so many people:  unlike in traditional (i.e., real) wars, where POWs are captured in uniform, as part of an army and on a battlefield, most of the people accused of being Terrorists and Enemy Combatants are captured far away from any battlefield:  in their homes, walking on the street, at work, etc.  The potential for both error and abuse (and thus the need for real safegurads) is radically greater.

[Read more at Salon]

An email prankster tricked the host of a Christian TV show into reading out the plots of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Star Wars in the belief they were stories of personal salvation.

The unsuspecting host read out most of the opening rap to The Fresh Prince, a 1990s US sitcom starring Will Smith, apparently unaware that it was not a genuine testimony of faith.

The prankster had slightly adapted the lyrics but the references to a misspent youth playing basketball in West Philadelphia would have been instantly familiar to most viewers.

The lines read out by the DJ included: “One day a couple of guys who were up to no good starting making trouble in my living area. I ended up getting into a fight, which terrified my mother.”

The presenter on Genesis TV, a British Christian channel, eventually realised that he was being pranked and cut the story short – only to move on to another spoof email based on the plot of the Star Wars films.

[Read more at the Telegraph]

Concerns over privacy have aligned with apocalyptic Biblical prophecy in a proposed Virginia law that limits the use of microchip implants on humans because of a lawmaker’s concern that the chips will prove to be the Antichrist’s “mark of the beast.”

On Wednesday, Virginia’s House of Delegates passed a bill that forbids companies from forcing their employees to be implanted with tracking devices, a move likely to be applauded by civil libertarians. But Virginia state Delegate Mark Cole’s reasons for proposing the law have as much to do with the Book of Revelation as they do with concerns over privacy in the digital age.

Cole says he is concerned that the implants will turn out to be the “mark of the beast” worn by Satan’s minions. “My understanding — I’m not a theologian — but there’s a prophecy in the Bible that says you’ll have to receive a mark, or you can neither buy nor sell things in end times,” Cole said, as quoted at the Washington Post. “Some people think these computer chips might be that mark.”

Read More: RAW Story

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We are proud to bring you an interview with Henry Lincoln, author of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and subject of the disinformation® documentary Origins of the Da Vinci Code.

Henry’s work was the basis for Dan Brown’s famous novel, as well as numerous other works in the genre.

We discuss the mystery surrounding the town of Rennes-le-Chateau, and even talk about Henry’s early work, including writing the second series of Doctor Who!

Thanks for listening! Share your enjoyment with a brand, new Disinformation: The Podcast T-shirt available NOW via disinfo.com.

According to the New Catholic Dictionary the Holy Grail is “a legendary sacred vessel, identified with the chalice of the Eucharist or the dish of the Paschal Lamb, and the theme of a medieval cycle of romance”. It “is said to have been the dish… used by Joseph of Arimathea to gather the Precious Blood of Christ.” And, according to author, historian and folklorist Mark Oxbrow, the Grail has actually been found.

Of course, the Grail was once in the hands of Indiana Jones, but even he ultimately lost it; so what makes Oxbrow’s claims special? Why should we believe him when we already have several Grails, including the Nantios Cup, the “Holy Bloodline” of Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln’s The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and the Stone Tablets of the Ark of the Covenant in Graham Hancock’s The Sign and The Seal? And the foregoing is a non-exclusive list; a full tally of all claimants to being the Holy Grail would take considerably more room than space permits.

Before we examine Oxbrow’s claim, it might be worth establishing exactly what it is we’re actually talking about.

Traditionally, the Grail is said to be the plate used for the Last Supper, or a cup used to catch the blood of Christ on the cross. Where do these ideas come from? Three of the four Gospels of the New Testament specifically mention a cup or platter at the Last Supper – perhaps not all that surprising, as it was a meal, after all. None mention a vessel used by Joseph of Arimathea, or anyone else, to collect the Blood of Christ while on the Cross.The closest we have to a biblical mention of blood and a vessel is when Christ pours wine into a cup and urges the assembled Disciples to drink of his blood. So that’s pretty much all we can glean from the Bible.

For the next mention of the Grail we have to wait for an event which supposedly happened in AD 717 but was not recorded in writing until about 1200. In 717, according to the Cistercian chronicler Helinandus, a hermit was shown a vision of the dish of the Last Supper. This learned hermit then wrote a book in Latin, entitled Gradale. Gradale is the mediæval Latin for ‘dish’, and the Old French for dish was Gradalis, whence we get graal, greal and greel. One short leap across the English Channel and we end up with ‘grail’.

[Read more at Fortean Times]

So I learned that God actually has a Facebook Fan Page. But only 3.2 millions fans?

There’s another Facebook page calling for 100 Million Christians Who Worship God that’s reached 1 percent of its goal. In all fairness, I’m sure if I poked around more and took the aggregate number of fans from all the “God Fan” Pages that exist, there would be plenty … however, would be interesting to see how much religious diversity exists on Facebook.

Mathew Ingram writes on GigaOM:

Peter Warden, a former Apple engineer, likes to analyze data — so much so that he started scraping public profiles and photos from hundreds of millions of Facebook accounts about a year ago, and now has data collected from more than 200 million around the world. He wrote a fascinating post recently on his personal blog about what that data shows about how interconnected (or disconnected) users in the various American states are.

Read More: GigaOM referencing PeteSearch