Excluding Muslims

Donald Trump commented that, in order to somehow secure American safety, he would prevent any and all Muslim immigration to our nation. This provoked the typical knee-jerk reactions from both sides, with the left vigorously altering Hitler photos to give him a hilarious haircut. The right quickly responded by pointing out that President Carter, the closest thing to a saint the left seems to have at the moment, had blocked all kinds of immigration from the Middle East during the end of his term. This, I thought, merited a refresher course.

Jimmy Carter, in response to the Iranian government's unwillingness to take custody and care of the fifty Americans held hostage in their country for six months, issued a set of orders concerning diplomatic relations with Iran and the disposition of her citizens. Specifically:

1. The severing of all diplomatic relations, the closing of all embassies, and the declaration of persona non grata for all consular officials.
2. Export sanctions.
3. Seizure of Iranian assets to provide financial remuneration to American creditors and hostages.
4. Invalidation of all Iranian visas and a hold on all new issuances, barring any humanitarian or American interest.

This fourth point has been seized upon by some of the more ahistorically enthusiastic among us to attempt a demonstration of established precedent in support of nouveau dauphin Trump's NIMBY approach to immigration, often quite loudly and with poor spelling and punctuation. These pundits, awe-inspiring though they are, miss a salient point entirely. The target of Carter's sanctions was not, in fact, Iranian Muslims. It's wasn't even the Shia portion of the Muslim population that made up Khomeini's Republican party, but Iranians as a whole. People holding the passport of one particular country, with no other stipulation.

The idea of using religion as a litmus test for immigration is little more than laughable. Regardless of how English colonists behaved, once this land was out from under the monarchy it was also relieved of the onerous yoke of archaic religious nationalism. There are serious, and perhaps unanswerable, questions concerning realistic and enforceable immigration law now that we're confronting issues the majority of the globe has been dealing with for decades. Trying to force a religious template on top of the already overburdened and flawed system will do nothing to address these problems.

The faction calling for a short-term hold on all immigration of the same secular and pragmatic stripe that Carter intended have an argument based on sound, if incredibly selfish, reasoning. Their opponents have an equally solid and compelling Constitutional argument, the numerous and rather emotional patriotic ones notwithstanding. Unfettered or loosely-regulated immigration poses many dilemmas, being a hostage to fortune insofar as imported religious zealots among the more serious. A complete lockdown of our borders would not only fail at preventing domestic attacks or immigration, nothing could be more antithetical to American ideals. 

These Three Things

Religion, among the thousands of very large and very unprovable claims it makes, never even dares to attempt addressing the three most important steps in our species' development.

I Have Made Fire

The oldest definitive evidence of human-controlled fire dates back roughly one million years and was found two years ago in Wonderwerk Cave in Northern Cape, South Africa. In this cave, quite by accident, archaeologists found carbonized plant material and burned animal bones, with the sharp edges of the bone and undisturbed patterns of ash removing any possibility that the material was blown by wind into its position. This discovery brings us slightly closer to confirming that fire was the key in transitioning between Homo habilis and Homo erectus, referred to as the “cooking hypothesis.” This suggests that the benefits of controlled fire allowed for our caloric energy to be spent on general brainy goodness instead of raw physicality, but to prove it we need as-yet-absent evidence from the 1.8 million-year-old habilis/erectus split.

Without the harnessing of fire for defense, warmth, cooking, and social well-being, civilization never happens. Without fire, food requires nearly as much energy to eat and digest as it provides. Without fire, the predators of the night are free to come and take us at their pleasure, and we stay so cold in our bones that the urge to tell stories and recreate the hunt for the entertainment of others never surfaces. Fire brings with it softer food, the ability to sleep on the ground, a sphere of insect-free bliss, and innumerable other benefits.

If you know what I mean, and I think you do.

In Genesis 4:4, Abel burns an animal sacrifice and thereby gains favor with God over his brother Cain, because God's just not that interested in the ritual wasting of hard-won food unless it's through immolation. Later on, in 8:20, the flood recedes and Noah celebrates his successful endeavor by killing and burning “of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl.” Based on Jewish law, this passage can be easily and accurately rephrased as “Noah killed and burned every living thing he didn't plan on eating in the immediate future.” Since there was no provision for feeding animals on the trip, the predators would have long since erased the prey. This means that, despite surviving impossible odds and making it out of the boat to barren dry land, another swath of animals was shepherded into extinction by God's loving hand. In the interest of not inflating the word count of this essay too insufferably, we shall omit discussion of the utter nonsense involved in surviving with no plants and salted water, the inability of the ground to grow crop, as well as speculation on how we have doves at all if the one Noah used as a dry land gauge never came back.

The aforementioned are the first two biblical accounts of humans controlling fire, and both are instances of divinely-warranted needless sacrifice. It seems obvious that these people are familiar with fire and find it neither alarming or abnormal, which clashes with the role of fire as the one and only effective way to curry favor with God. Flame makes many appearances, acting as everything from a font of knowledge to a source of retribution and punishment, but nowhere does the call for sacrifice through immolation or the delivery of fire from God to man appear. The Genesis flood myth, blatantly plagiarized as it is from the Epic of Gilgamesh, can be placed at roughly 2700 B.C.E, around 2000 years after idiots think the Garden of Eden was a place. It's obvious, once examined, that fire was a pre-existing, human-harnessed secular substance. Equally obvious is that the odious people making all this bullshit up were too stupid to even think of taking credit for it.

Couple veiny dicks over here, pulsing demon anuses over here...annnnnd, done!

x^2 + y^2 = r^2

The wheel brings us monumental advances, but in a circuitous and cryptic way. Pottery wheels appear to have arrived on the scene first, but shortly thereafter the wheel found its vertical orientation. Stone wheels are heavy, and assembling a throwing wheel would likely require rolling the top over to the stand before hefting it. At some point, someone just a little bit brighter than the rest thought to connect two wheels with a wooden shaft, and much rejoicing was heard. They appear on transportation in our archaeological record around 3500 B.C.E., located in the landmass spanning from Mesopotamia to Central Europe, making any further attribution difficult. Packs and supplies could now be borne on the shoulders of an axle, instead of a horse or grandmother. Without a person even needing to understand it, the wheel allows us to further exploit the laws of physics concerning horizontal movement, while demonstrating Newtonian principles effortlessly when ascending and descending every hill.

Wheels are mentioned everywhere in scripture, usually describing the opposing army's chariots when not in flowery use to describe Ezekiel's hallucinations. However, as you can no doubt guess, the moment of conception of this invaluable shape is nowhere in the account. One can infer it, of course, since Noah was said to be near his 600^th year of life for the flood and couldn't have moved the materials needed without mechanical advantage. But, once again, no mention of the divine hand delivering such a treasure. Like everything worthwhile created by mankind, religion first takes it for granted and then takes the credit.

The Ghoul of Calcutta, seen here taking credit for inventing medical malpractice.

Shoes Too Small To Kickbox God

When confronting the presently unanswerable questions of our surroundings' beginning and end, again we find God carelessly omitted the latter while thoroughly and completely missing the mark on the former. The closest either Genesis creation story can come to accuracy is when over-friendly, conciliatory reasoning is applied to the creation of light as an attempt to make it work with how we know photons operate. “Let there be light,” sez God, and light happens, but not right away. A verse later God sees the light, declares it good, and separates it from the darkness, thereby unjustly ruining the reputation of darkness to this day. This might seem to fit with the delay one would expect to see between the creation of a star and the photons it emits striking another object. It falls under scrutiny because it also fits with the disproven, shameful, and arrogant geocentric nonsense preached from all pulpits.

When turning to the end of existence on Earth, our sheer inability to imagine such a thing coupled with our extreme shortsightedness makes forming an impression of it nearly impossible. People are really only able to imagine things through their singular frame of reference, so we unavoidably cut-and-paste a stand-in for ourselves into the picture when we cast our thoughts to the unimaginable. We also tend to have a much easier time with the hypothetical death of others than we do our own, regardless of one's personal feelings. This can create a distinctly skewed and temporally-crippled way of examining things, which we then naturally find in spades in every single religious scripture.

As an example of how narrow our focus can be on the subject of events on the astronomical scale, I offer some solid data followed by speculative conjecture. The age of the universe (which is to say the time elapsed since the Big Bang) is calculated to be 13.8 billion years, with the Milky Way galaxy only slightly younger at 13.2 billion. In a remote and unfashionable end of one spiral arm of that galaxy sits our humble little planet, which clocks in at a barely-old-enough-to-drink 4.5 billion years old. Looking to the other end of eventuality, our Sun's luminosity is steadily increasing to the point that it will evaporate all the water on Earth in approximately 3.75 billion years, and shortly after that swallow our scorched rock whole. Around a quarter billion years after that, the Andromeda galaxy will come along and finish the job by colliding with and erasing our galaxy from the sky.

"I'm very, very slowly coming for your punk ass."

Now, on our paltry little scale, we showed up as a separate genus from the Australopithecine right around two million years ago. Generously speaking, it can be said that on the way to anatomically-modern humans a separate and now-extinct subset of human emerged every four hundred thousand years, until H. sapiens reached dominance roughly two hundred thousand years ago.

For wild speculation, if our species were to follow the oversimplified track record I have outlined above, without molestation and a minimum of self-destruction, we have only two hundred thousand years in our present anatomical – and probably intellectual – state before a divergence appears that our side will undoubtably lose. Our tinier frames and goofy-looking heads must have seemed ridiculous to our predecessors, but our cunning way of bashing their fucking skulls in when they weren't looking meant we got to run the show. Similarly, gradual mutations will occur that at some point will give those who come after a distinct advantage over us. And since there's over three and a half million years to go before our heat death, the incredibly imprecise four hundred thousand year cycle I mentioned earlier can revolve almost nine more times before the game is up. Though it's impossibly hard to imagine, the last human to rattle out an arid dying breath will be eight iterations removed from you and I, and wholly unrecognizable to us.

The horror. The horror.

But no reference to this is made in any religious description of the end times. In fact, they all sound like they could easily happen next week or next month, described as they are in tiny little ideas well-suited to illiterate and unimaginative fools. The mere fact that bumper stickers warning of unmanned vehicles in case of Rapture exist should be more than enough to demonstrate how eager and hurried the religious are to just have done with it all. They really want life – all life – to be over so that they might be happy, which seems reasonable to them because their scripture and leaders told them that's how it would be. It is one of the most disgusting things a person can think, and these groups go one further by claiming such an idea is gracious, humble, and kind. Lies piled upon lies, and all a consequence of claiming to know the mind of God.

Fair Game

It's very fashionable to claim that ideology can be separated from people, and that attacking one doesn't mean attacking the other. This is not only wrong, but a fatally flawed method of thinking.

There is an insidious capitulation occurring among unbelievers who lack the capacity for critical thinking that seeks to soothe the hurt feelings of theocratic zealots, a pitiful and feeble attempt to distance the claimant from the reactions that occur when religion and its practitioners are rightly brought under scrutiny. “Ideology is separate from people,” the claim goes, “and we don't attack all Christians when we attack Christianity.” What off-brand excuse for simple-minded casuistry is this?

This argument, always presented in pictorial meme form because its proponents still aren't capable of holding up their end of an argument without one finger firmly on the caps lock, makes the following (paraphrased) proposition: attacking capitalism is not attacking westerners, attacking nazis is not attacking germans, and attacking religions is not attacking their adherents. To begin with, this argument completely ignores the differences between political and economic practices and religious ideology. Capitalism has no book of doctrine or spiritual figurehead, and “the west” is more than a little difficult to nail down. Do they mean the Dutch, or the kind people of Estonia (I promise, you guys, that statue was dressed like Dr. Frankenfurter when I got there)? No, they mean America, where capitalism may be the general order of the land, but it is not doctrine. No one is killed or made a pariah due to their unwillingness to value money and trade, though they may be viciously mocked as I drive past the farmer's market.

Agrarian culture does not allow for iPhone repair, just so you know.

Similarly, the eight million or so members of the Nazi party at its height in 1945 was a fraction of the roughly 65 million people composing the nation of Germany. The majority of people there saw no necessary connection between their nationality and required affiliation with a national socialist group, and rightly so. Being born in Germany doesn't make one a nazi, any more than being born in a taxi cab makes you a member of the transportation union. Choosing to join the nazi party, however, means that your nationality becomes incidental to the argument. You can be a Swede and a nazi, or an American for that matter, and many were.

You can't tell, but they're wearing Hugo Boss.

Turning to the meat of my argument, the problem that has arisen is this weak-spined, almost ecumenical position that followers of a religion are not to be attacked for their ideology because they are somehow absolved or detached from the horrific consequences visited upon us by their faith. The ideas and doctrines can be attacked, so the argument goes, but it is unfair to include the clergy in that attack because people are only people, or some such neo-hippie bullshit. This position is just a half-hearted secular redressing of the nonsensical “love the sinner, hate the sin” philosophy espoused by the more nauseating evangelists who walk among us, and not a very clever one.

Which is odd, because they usually make so much sense.

To reiterate, plenty of Germans were not affiliated with the nazis, an equally large amount of westerners do not appear to consider themselves capitalists, but no religious person considers themselves separate from their faith. One exception might be an allowance for their angst-ridden dark night of the soul, but that strikes me as the same kind of self-aggrandizing pity play seen in overly-dramatic teenagers. Belief in ideology involves you in same, because without people reading it and attempting to live their lives by the rules set out therein, the bible or Qur'an is another book gathering dust on a forgotten shelf of our collective library.

It's in there, as meaningless as the rest without a person to believe it.

To oppose comes the argument that criticism of any book, Huckleberry Finn as an example, doesn't extend to the people who enjoy reading the book or find value in it. The critique of the literary work is separated from its readers, it is argued, because arguments against the book are not arguments against the people. With the exception of the light fluff we all consume for mindless entertainment, I find two significant problems with this approach.

Aside from the selection of one of Twain's dullest works.

First, we do make judgements about people based on what they read and write. Criticism of whatever softcore porn leads the Times Bestseller list is a direct criticism of the tastes of people buying that book, in this case their literary standards and ability to walk upright without dragging their knuckles too terribly. Reading Mein Kampf doesn't make one a nazi, but if that's all one reads, your friends have the right to question your thinking process. We use literary scope as a metric to base our perception of an individual's intelligence in many cases, and rightly so. Someone who has shelves full of a broad range of titles has a different kind of mind and way of thinking than someone who has one shelf full of Danielle Steel. Pretending otherwise is an exercise in self-deception.

Secondly, the main significant difference between popular fiction and religious texts is that very rarely do people become so enamored with fiction that they endeavor to enforce the content of the text on others. One reasonable exception might be the pitiable Randians of today, who are so taken with Galt's message that their way of thinking and interacting with the world changes fundamentally instead of gradually. But even they do not come to my door in the morning to make sure I've heard the good word, they do not introduce legislation in our nation's capital in the name of Rand, and they do not say I should be killed for disagreeing with them. People who believe in religious texts do all of those things, which is why it is improper to level an equivalent accusation at common popular fiction.

Believe it or not, this has nothing to do with whitewashing fences.

But, for example, it isn't hard to imagine an economist or broker so convinced of the truth of capitalism that they would enact its principles on everyone, regardless of compassion or consequence. In that instance, is there anyone who would argue that in criticizing capitalism you are not criticizing the person carrying out the doctrine? Without people to enact these ridiculous and archaic ideas brought to us by religion, they would be harmless relics of our ancestors and soon forgotten, just like Beanie and Cecil. This is where these conciliatory apologists fail in their argument, by imagining that the holy texts have some kind of agency on their own. They think that faith in a religion doesn't mean you're affiliated with that group, or somehow that you do not share in the responsibility for the damage done to our society. Instead, argument against a faith necessarily includes arguments against the followers, and rightly so. To pretend otherwise merely extends the time the rest of us are forced to let these addle-minded fakers and the willfully ignorant dictate our lives.

Ignoring The Islamic State

We can make the collective choice to turn our backs on what the Islamic State represents, but that decision must be a deliberate one made with full knowledge of the trade we are making.

The somewhat limp and always disappointing-to-me backlash against American involvement in a military action against theocratic fascists in Mesopotamia seems to me, looking at it in a generous light, to be solely driven by the desire to not continue sending our countrymen to die in the desert at the hands of people we probably wouldn't collectively be thinking or talking about if our soldiers weren't there. This is drawing an affirmative conclusion from a negative or unproved premise, namely that our soldiers being there is guaranteed to result in their death and that non-involvement will somehow insulate us from the developments in the region. It is inaccurately described as “war weariness” by our media, as if any civilian opining on military action from the comfort of 6,000 or more miles removed has the right to claim to be weary of combat. This is more of the same petulant and smug complaining from the comfortable set, weary of nothing but the intrusion of other people into their self-serving cocoons. Instead of choosing action based on well-reasoned and logical argument for non-involvement, it is a complacent and conciliatory trade we are engaged in with this growing horrorshow, just as a lifelong laborer trades wage for cartilage.

The ignorant and self-defeating proposition from the more fuzzy-minded among us would have you believe that groups such as the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda are somehow extremists, that their incredibly barbarous and backwards ideas and actions are a perversion or corruption of the horrific relic referred to unironically as a religion of peace instead of a fundamental command from their holy texts. The latter is obviously true, and denial of that fact in the name of tolerance is one of the more odious symptoms of the virus running unchecked through otherwise intelligent people who would like very much to allow for religious pluralism while simultaneously not being at war with those same religions. This proposition necessarily requires peaceful co-existence with groups of people who are told they have divine warrant for the wholesale slaughter of anyone from any other group. As you can see, this is an incredibly difficult endeavor to simply imagine, let alone achieve with the rapidity we require to avoid the worst outcomes imaginable.

I'm actually referring to a nuclear war, but this is still somehow horrifying.

The population of a group of true believers relative to the rest of us, especially when they are committed to getting what they want through violence, has never created an obstacle to one crackpot religion after another shaping us through force both culturally and politically. It must be unthinkable to us to forget what all religions of the world have done – the damage inflicted and civilizations lost forever – when they thought they could get away with it due to no secular resistance. Dismissals of the Islamic State as being a non-threat to America due to their geographic distance and perceived logistical shortcomings may be technically true for the immediate future, however those dismissals ignore the fact that diseased beliefs like religion spread very quickly in both a benign vacuum as well as under threat of death. The converts flocking in currently small numbers to the pretender caliphate are not only people with no futures from the region, they are people from tolerant and pluralist countries like the US, Australia, and Great Britain, where publicly speaking out against the threat Islam poses us is not yet recognized as common sense. Whether their group grows by the dozens or thousands by year's end, there is no amount of them small enough or geographic region isolated enough to be tolerable or judged to pose no threat to the rest of us. I argue that if left unchecked they will grow and expand outside Mesopotamia to pose a constant and credible threat to all nations, and they will do so waving their holy texts.

Just like these extras from "Conan" and their ghost horses.

Either the writings of the Qur’an and hadith are the divine delivery of mandate from the creator of everything through the Archangel Gabriel to the prophet Mohammed or they are not. Within those writings are the mandates for the oppression of other peoples, the subjugation of women, the destruction of modernized civilizations, and the death penalty for apostates. If these instructions are the creator's divine word then these “extremists” are the only true believers getting it right, as it were, and our decision to pretend they're not Muslim is not only suicidally ignorant but incredibly disrespectful to their religious beliefs, which we claim to respect. On the other hand, if these mandates are nonsense dictated by an illiterate epileptic, which they are, what does that say about the parsing of real Muslims from false ones? And why, with the inability of influential mullahs and imams to issue a blanket fatwa against any kind of false crusade due to their religion, do we continue to pretend these actions are not recognized, promoted, and praised by the leaders of this sick and dangerous cult? I do not propose a false choice, and I do not see how any other conclusion could be reached.

Those other conclusions have an inordinate amount of 'splaining to do.

In anticipation of the immediately obvious rebuttal, that of the vast majority of people who profess the Muslim faith are peaceful and contributing members of society, perfectly wonderful human beings to all they meet, loved by puppy dogs and goldfish, let me offer this explanation. Every person I have personally met who claimed to be Muslim has been a genuinely warm and sweet individual, not including those whom I have met tangentially through debate. They do not want to kill me or anyone else, they are as furious at the actions of the Islamic State as I am with the added seasoning of shame and revulsion at what they feel is being done to their religion's reputation. Their wives and girlfriends speak openly, and I can see their face when they do so, and no one is missing any body parts. I can scarcely believe they're being honest with me about their faith. I again argue that if you are not adhering to the mandates handed down by the being you believe created you and will punish you for disobedience, on what authority can it be argued you are an adherent of that cult? If Allah told Gabriel to tell Mohammed to tell Muslims to kill apostates, and you're smarter than that, what need have you to still tie the noose of religion around your own neck? It should be cast off, as all the needs people fulfill with religion can be satisfied just as easily without it.

As illustrated here, in this poorly photoshopped metaphor.

On material costs. By postponing the extirpation of the Islamic State, we are actively delaying the reconstruction of a tragically and needlessly destroyed modern civilization that made irreplaceable contributions to the advancement of knowledge and humanity. This is a consequence that should cause any thinking person discomfort. We prevent the reconstruction of education and trade infrastructure, which the area is muddling through but can obviously use as much help and time as possible without ignorant savages blowing everything up. Postponing the stabilization of development of Mesopotamian oil supplies, which is approaching amounts unseen since the Hussein crime family controlled the region, strangles the financial benefits to both Iraqi and Kurdish people.

 Ignoring our pocketbooks for a moment, I want to explore what would result as the moral consequences of our decision. To begin with, we leave the peoples of the area who are powerless or ineffective at providing real resistance to the Islamic State at their mercy, which is a very grim thought if you mull it at all. The eschatology of Islam, along with all other religions, calls for the absolute end of all humanity. Total erasure of man from the face of the Earth at the time of (or to bring on) the second coming. Since these people proclaiming an Islamic State must have the primitive self-awareness necessary to understand how pitifully inept they would be at any kind of scientific or technological endeavor, they must outsource the brain power necessary to achieve their ends. Muslims educated at European and American institutions must go and help these savages with their work. The consequence of this, and no one can call it alarmist, is that every day we do not actively participate in the stabilization and reconstruction of the region we move one day closer to finding out what the religious will do with nuclear and biological weapons. This isn't news to anyone, but I bring it up to reiterate and reinforce that Islam calls for the extermination of all humanity to bring on the final judgement. 

Just in case you forgot what that will look like.

At that time, Mahdi the redeemer of Islam will come to Earth and team up with Jesus like some kind of post-modern Superfriends to do battle against the false messiah, whom they apparently have in common. Their inevitable victory will result in all of our deaths and the eradication of sin so that their ghosts may eat grapes and our ghosts may suffer eternally. As silly as all this sounds to anyone with half a reasoning mind, it barely begins to relate the sheer mindless nonsense the Muslim religion imparts to our enemies. The very real consequence of that nonsense, and our reward for trading in tolerance, is that as soon as these people get their hands on a way to carry out nuclear or biological attack on our civilization, they will.

Today's Example of Why Science Will Outlive Superstition

The refutation of Bicep2's announced discovery illustrates the ease and comfort with which the scientific community ingests and adapts to new information compared to religious organizations.

Just following the Ides of March of this year, researchers from the BICEP2 installation at the South Pole publicly announced the finding of a very specific variety of polarized light in the cosmic microwave background. This light is thought only to be produced by interaction with gravitational waves produced by the accelerating expansion of the universe in the slimmest subsection of time following the Big Bang. The announcement was quite monumental, ultimately suggesting that a previously-unexplored and incredibly exciting area of physics known as the idea of grand unification could be better understood in our lifetime. My clumsy and bearskin-clad effort to explain the unbelievable magnitude and majesty of what a unified theory and evidence of faster-than-light speeds would represent is profoundly and embarrassingly unrefined. I highly recommend individual understanding of this topic, as it is more awe-inspiring that any alternative I could list. Unassociated scientists were publicly optimistic, though all provided caveats regarding the need for peer-review and a confirmation of the findings. The staff of BICEP2 reportedly waited a year to announce their findings, in an effort to apply due diligence to their research, and finally felt comfortable when the Keck Array installation (a new post in the same spot) showed the same results. 

Test for colorblindness or a picture of gravity waves? Only my hairdresser knows for sure.

Attention faded, as it does, and soon the excitement of a Unified Theory receded to a tiny table in the back corner to drink coffee and catch up on Stephen King. The plausibility of the findings and their revolutionary potential was still a topic of debate, and I had the pleasure of listening to a group of people much smarter than myself discuss the subject. One person in the group was very convinced, and his attitude could best be described as "proceed as if true," but even he happily provided caveats regarding the ultimate need for more information.

Today the Washington Post carried an article quoting Uros Seljak, a physics and astronomy professor at UC Berkeley, as saying there is still a question regarding the source of the detected polarized light. There is a chance, Seljak contends, that the received signal could have been produced by the interference of dust in space situated much, much closer to Earth than the edge of perceivable light. This is similar (again, in a clumsy and indelicate fashion) to taking a flash picture outside at night and seeing a pinpoint light source in the picture as if someone was standing fifty meters away with a flashlight. The light source is actually a particle in front of the camera, reflecting light from the flash back into the lens, but one could be forgiven for the confusion. The question should be decided later this year, when the Planck Space Telescope takes a more refined "picture" of the visible sky in multiple frequencies and with a much finer tolerance for differentiation between dust and a physics revolution. 

There is no tolerance for seeing this and thinking "ZOMG, ghost orbs!" Idiot.

The finest point to take away from BICEP2's announcement and the associated debate is the overall world view that allows for such an effortless and non-defensive incorporation of newly-discovered information tempered by the need for independent verification, the closest thing to a chiseled-in-stone commandment you're likely to find in this community. There may be personal embarrassment involved in working diligently on a world-changing project, then having to face the idea that you may have been so excited you were tricked by space dust, but regardless of the outcome there will be no honor killings. There will be no excommuncations from the church of rational thought, no proclamations of heresy leveled by both sides, no resulting schismatic split leaving us with Fundamentalist Science and Hip Young Reformed Science. The information will be measured on its merits, the evidence considered with multiple sets of sober eyes, the results based on fact. Science and the secular community around it is the only game in town if you prefer facts over superstition and reasoning over faith, which is exactly the set of tools best suited to aid us in understanding the actual universe of which we are a very real part. 

That would be us, on the right.

Since beginning to slog and wade its way out of the thickly-encrusted Augean stables that is religion, a labor which has yet to reach completion due to no conveniently diverted rivers in the area, science has repeatedly shamed and outpaced religion when both are confronted with a new development in our primitive understanding. Unable to simply wait around until flaccid holy men can get drunk enough to have a serious argument about nothing at all, science regularly and without undue stress has undergone reformation, using the process of discovery and reason to incorporate verifiable knowledge such as the effects of gravitation and heliocentrism. Religion responded to this approach to the world with condemnation and death sentences, a childish and ignorant recitation of their primitive and phenomenally wrong holy books, and an arms-crossed refusal to embrace logic which persists and has regrown immense strength in our time. 

Again, pictured on the right.

BICEP2's reported findings and their detractors are, quite literally, discovering and debating over what may be the single most important astronomical discovery in our lifetimes, with incomprehensible ramifications to every single aspect of our tiny little lives. And they are doing it without the vitriol one would expect if exposed to what we laughably call modern news and religious debate, with absolutely zero danger that the debate will result in any kind of split in the community. There is, quite literally, no way for an evidence-based community such as the one I describe to have a fault wherein these kinds of schisms have their genesis. Differences of opinion or of conclusion are resolved by the presentation of fact, those facts being the result of experiments and evidence and peer-review, none of which any religious community has the slightest time for.