Bible Interpretation? It Works Like the Paul-is-Dead Rumor.

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Beatles Bible Paul is DeadHave you heard the “Paul is dead” rumor that started around the time of the release of the Beatles’ 1969 Abbey Road album? Paul McCartney had supposedly died and been replaced by a lookalike several years earlier. Fans eager for confirmation discovered clues in this and earlier albums.

  • The cover of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) shows the four Beatles dressed as if to a funeral. In flowers in the foreground is “Beatles” and a guitar—Paul’s instrument. The back cover shows the four Beatles with Paul the only one facing backwards.
  • The song “Revolution 9” on the White Album (1968) contains the phrase “number nine” repeated many times, but this becomes “turn me on, dead man” when played backwards. There are also clues in other songs.
  • The Abbey Road cover of the four Beatles crossing a street shows Paul (second from left) portrayed differently once again. He’s taking a step with his right foot, while the others are all stepping with the left foot. And here again, we have the elements of a funeral: George, wearing jeans, is dressed as a grave digger; Paul, with bare feet, is the dearly departed; Ringo, in black, is a mourner or the undertaker; and John, dressed in white, is the preacher or a heavenly symbol.

You tend to find what you seek, and fans have found many more clues, though Beatles publicists rejected the story.
What could explain this? Could there have been no deliberate clues at all in these albums? Of course! The covers could simply be enigmatic or artistic, with motivated fans cobbling together what seems to them to be clues. They could find their own meaning, even if none was put there by anyone.
Comparison with the Bible
We see this with Bible interpretation: you find what you seek. Anything that contradicts the Christian’s particular view of the gospel can be reinterpreted and made captive to that view.

  • The idea of the Trinity took four centuries to congeal, with many (now) heretical views discarded along the way. Still, the modern Christian might see the Trinity plain as day in the New Testament, even seeing Old Testament polytheism as instead referring to the Trinity.
  • Jesus talks about secrets: “The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to others I speak in parables, so that, ‘though seeing, they may not see; though hearing, they may not understand’” (Luke 8:9–10). “Secrets”? Mystery religions like Mithraism or Gnosticism have secrets available only to the initiated, but what aspects of Christianity are secret?
  • We find the influence of Marcion. “No one has seen the father but the son” (John 1:18) contradicts the stories of Abraham and Moses seeing God, unless you accept Marcionite thinking in which the father of Jesus is a different god than the one in the Old Testament.
  • Also consider Jesus’ comment to a mob: “Is it not written in your Law …” (John 10:34). “Your law”? Wouldn’t Jewish Jesus say that it was our law? Not if he comes from a different god.
  • John 20:26 says, “Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them.” This isdocetism, the heresy that Jesus had a spirit body and only seemed to be human.
  • Or consider the curious “the last will be first, and the first will be last” from Matthew 20:16. Sure, some bad people are at the top of pile, but aren’t there any good people who became rich or powerful by honest toil? Not according to apocalypticism, in which our world is ruled by the bad guy and the next world by the good guy. Anyone doing well in this world can only be doing so by being in league with the bad ruler, which is why everything is turned upside down in the next world.

Each of these odd ideas is absorbed, Borg-like, into the presupposition. Christianity becomes the ultimate unfalsifiable hypothesis.
Religious belief as conspiratorial thinking
Professor Stephan Lewandowsky talks about something similar, the “self-sealing” nature of conspiracy theories. Imagine an inflatable lifeboat in which any puncture would quickly seal itself: “Any evidence against the conspiracy is interpreted to be in actual fact evidence for the conspiracy.”
For example, consider the statement: The arguments claiming that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an inside job are pretty laughable. Ah, that just shows that the 9/11 Truth movement itself is part of a bigger conspiracy!
If the U.S. moon landing was a hoax, the Soviets had the technology to discover it and would’ve been eager to point out the lie. Ah, that just shows that the Soviets were in on the hoax!
The resurrection of Jesus just steals an element from the stories of prior dying-and-rising gods. That it wasn’t new suggests that it was made up. Ah, but that’s exactly what Satan wants you to think! And why he put those stories into history—just to fool you. (This was Justin Martyr’s argument).
But what about the verses above that are nicely explained by our New Testament being a mosaic of ideas, the aftermath of a tug of war between many different ideologies? Ah, God is simply trying to test us! His message is plain to those with the right faith.
Someone determined to hold onto their presuppositions ride in a self-sealing ideological lifeboat, but they’ve also insulated themselves against any information showing their initial views to be wrong. This is not someone following the evidence.

I reject your reality and substitute my own.
— Doctor Who television show (1974)?

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/15/13.)
Image credit: John Hoey, flickr, CC

My Visit to Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park

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Speaker’s Corner Hyde Park
On a recent vacation in London, I visited Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park. I expected to see men lined up with a sign advertising their position and maybe standing on a step stool, speaking to a stationary audience or just to passersby. I imagined the speaker delivering a monologue or sermon, interrupted occasionally by a comment or question (which he’d answer) or a heckling remark (which he’d talk over). I expected discussions of current political or social topics or Christianity.
That’s not what I saw. There were about two hundred people, all men, all speaking Arabic, and presumably all debating facets of Islam. Conversations were often spirited, but all seemed polite. I saw no police, and I understand they only come in response to complaints. (Keep in mind, though, that this is just what I saw on Sunday evening a week ago, and your mileage may vary.)
After walking around a bit, it looked like I wouldn’t find any debate to engage me, but that turned out to be premature.
Speaker’s Corner Hyde Park
This photo shows the same northeast corner of Hyde Park as the map view above. (People gather to speak on the wide walkway in the park, not in the middle of the trees as the image suggests.)
I did find some interesting atheists who seemed, like me, to be more interested in the rare Christian discussion. One of the atheist regulars videoed me engaged with regular participant Adnan Rashid, a Muslim. (I don’t see the video as especially informative, but I include it for completeness.)
As an aside, Adnan made several claims: thirty percent of Africans taken to the U.S. as slaves were Muslim (source: Servants of Allah by Sylviane Diouf), and Islam is the fastest growing religion in the U.S. I haven’t fact checked either claim.
He made another claim that evening that doesn’t hold up. He said that this kind of open public debate was something that would be typical in cities in any Muslim country, though that’s not what the International Humanists and Ethical Union’s “Freedom of Thought Report 2015” says. It lists twelve countries for which blasphemy or apostasy are punishable by death, including Adnan’s own birthplace of Pakistan.
But the specifics of my conversation aren’t the point. Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, George Orwell, Marcus Garvey, and others reportedly have spoken at Speaker’s Corner. Though I only had a couple of hours to chat, it was a thrill to be there.

Everyone has the right to believe anything they want.
And everyone else has the right to find it fucking ridiculous.
— Ricky Gervais

Credit for images: Google Maps

Armageddon Within Our Lifetime?

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Armageddon BibleWe live in strange times. 41 percent of Americans say that Jesus will definitely or probably return by 2050, and 38 percent believe that natural disasters are signs from God. For white evangelicals, those fractions are 58 percent and 59 percent, respectively.
What accounts for this fascination with the end times? Dr. Robert Price commented on one element of popular culture, the Left Behind novels that wallow in the horror of a post-rapture world. Price sees this as Christian porn. Fans of the series can read in those novels what they’d like to read in the newspaper. They’re eager for Armageddon, and they see themselves as the good guy in the book.
Crying wolf
A larger factor that fuels this anxiety is Christian personalities who point to every bit of bad news as evidence that things are going to hell and that Armageddon is around the corner. These guys never met a natural disaster they didn’t like. Jerry Falwell wondered “whether the crisis in the Middle East is actually a prelude to the end of the world.” Glenn Beck said that the recent story of a Syrian rebel eating a human heart is a sign of the end times. Pat Robertson said that the 5.8 magnitude Virginia earthquake of 2011 was another sign. Oh, and security cameras, too.
Jesus gave this advice about the end times:

When you hear of wars and uprisings, do not be frightened. … Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be great earthquakes, famines and pestilences in various places. (Luke 21:9–11)

The gospel of Mark adds that these signs are “the beginning of birth pains.”
The Pat Robertsons of the world will ask, Do you hear about wars and earthquakes in the news? Well there you go—that matches what the Bible predicted. What more evidence do you need? And if you say that there have always been wars and earthquakes, they quote 2 Peter 3:3, “In the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires.” John Hagee interpreted this immunity to the facts: “The very fact that you don’t believe [Jesus] is coming is proof positive he’s on the way!”
But let’s return to reason. For this prophecy to stand out, it can’t be referring simply to disasters, because there’s always a baseline amount of war and natural disasters. It’s about a substantial increase of those things, and we’re not seeing that today.
War, earthquake, famine, and pestilence, oh my!
First, let’s put to rest worries about increasing pestilence. Science has made gains against disease that would have been inconceivable just a few centuries ago. Sewer and clean water systems, vaccines, and antibiotics have altered life dramatically in much of the world, no thanks to God. Smallpox, killer of half a billion people in the 20th century alone, is only a memory, and polio and guinea worm may soon be gone as well. While cancer and influenza still exist, we’ve made great progress against them. The trend is positive here.
Famines in India and China killed millions of people a century ago. Food distribution isn’t perfect today, but modern technology has increased crop yields so that widespread famine is almost impossible. (More on the relative value of magic vs. technology here.)
As for natural disasters like earthquakes, we can’t control them, but for many, we have advanced warning. The Galveston Hurricane of 1900, which caught the city off guard and killed perhaps 10,000 people, could not happen today. We also have warnings for tornadoes and tsunamis.
Famously wrong end-times prophet Hal Lindsey said, “To the skeptic who says that Christ is not coming soon, I would ask him to put the book of Revelation in one hand, and the daily newspaper in the other, and then sincerely ask God to show him where we are on His prophetic time-clock.” Like Harold Camping, or John Hagee, some people just won’t look at the facts and realize that they predict the future no better than a palm reader.
 (What about war? I discuss Steven Pinker’s surprising conclusions about violence in Part 2.)

If you listen closely 
you can hear the footstep of Messiah 
shuffling through the clouds of heaven.
— John Hagee

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/10/13.)
Photo credit: Amazon

A God-Created World Would Look Like a ’60s Family Sitcom

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God Jesus sitcom“You’re so smart?” the Christian apologist says. “You think you can read God’s mind? Then tell us what life on earth should look like if God created it.”
I’m glad you asked. If an omnipotent and all-loving god created human life here on earth as a way to develop us into better people who would deserve eternity in heaven, our world would look like “Leave It to Beaver.”
“Leave It to Beaver” was a popular American sitcom that originally aired 1957–1963. It showed the adventures of Beaver Cleaver (to the right in the photo above, with his TV parents and older brother Wally).
Who graduates from God’s classroom?
First, let’s view life from the Christian perspective. Jesus makes clear that few will make it to heaven.

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. (Matthew 7:13–14)

Making it through that small gate is our purpose in life. I’ve heard Christians give different metaphors for our world. God made a challenging life on earth as a test to see which people are made of the right stuff. Or it’s a proving ground where the good souls get a chance to prove their worth. Or a crucible where the dross burns away to improve our character and prepare us for heaven.
But let’s imagine life as a classroom. God apparently is so poor a teacher that he only graduates a few of his students.
If you were the president of a college, you might think that if 80 percent of the freshmen graduate, that’s a decent fraction. It’s too bad about the rest, but it’s not possible to make that fraction zero. But God could. God would know exactly what the problems were and how to fix them. Is it a lack of motivation? A lack of funds? Classes not relevant or interesting enough? With God in control, he could create colleges with a 100 percent graduation rate.
God isn’t president of an ordinary college; he’s president of the Ultimate College—life. What fraction of people graduate from God’s college into heaven? Not even half.
Is this the best of all possible worlds?
Eighteenth-century German polymath Gottfried Leibniz argued that this must be the best of all possible worlds. How could God allow all the bad that we see in the world—famine, plague, violence, and so on? Leibniz simply assumed that God would give us the best of all possible worlds, that God couldn’t improve one part without making the overall worse. QED.
This is the Hypothetical God Fallacy—assuming God exists and then (surprise!) it all falls into place, with us unable to critique God’s super-smart plan.
Let’s respond to Leibniz. God can’t make things better than what we have now? Let me suggest some ideas.
Tips for God
Here’s how an omnipotent and all-loving God could better organize life. I propose a world with a 100 percent graduation rate where everyone gets into heaven. It would be a world with gentle correction for errors, like in “Leave It to Beaver.”
To see what that world would look like, here are some of the plot summaries from that sitcom:

  • Beaver and Wally are in charge of the neighbor’s cat, but then a dog chases it away (“Cat Out of the Bag”).
  • Beaver discovers his old teddy bear and reluctantly discards him after his father and brother tell him he’s too old for dolls. Beaver changes his mind, but he’s too late to save it before the garbage truck comes. He tries to get it back (“Beaver’s Old Friend”).
  • Beaver is scheduled to receive an award at school and argues with his parents about whether he needs to wear a jacket and tie (“Beaver’s Football Award”).
  • Beaver must write a book report on The Three Musketeers and decides to watch the movie on TV instead of reading the book (“The Book Report”).
  • Beaver and a friend are in charge of the class cookie fund, but another student steals three dollars (“The Cookie Fund”).
  • Beaver rips his suit pants and lies about it. He’s scolded for the lie and then tells the truth when he rips the pants of his other suit, but his parents won’t believe him (“Beaver’s Bad Day”).

There are 234 episodes. In each, the stakes are low, and there is learning at the end. Beaver gets a little wiser as he’s gently nudged toward adulthood. Not everyone reaches their goals in each episode, but nothing particularly bad happens. Sure, embarrassment during a date or punishment after a mistake is traumatic, but it’s not cancer. Things are black and white, just like the show itself. It’s life with training wheels.
Contrast Beaver’s life with plausible plots from our reality:

  • Little Suzie gets smallpox and then dies (“Suzie’s Bad Day”).
  • Frank is at work when he feels an earthquake. He makes his way home, but he’s too late—a tsunami has swept away his entire town, including his family (“Frank’s Bad Day”).
  • Jamey is tormented by homophobic bullying in school and online. He hangs himself at age 14 (“Jamey’s Bad Day”—a true story).

The Christian demands, “Aren’t you the arrogant one? You think you can tell God how to arrange the universe?” But of course that’s not the question. We don’t take God as a presupposition and then rearrange the facts to support it. Instead, we just follow the facts. And this world certainly looks like a world without a god.

The best thing about believing in a crazy, illogical,
manmade, totally fictional afterlife
is that you will never find out you were wrong. 
— Ricky Gervais

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/8/13.)
Photo credit: Wikipedia
 

The Leaky Noah’s Ark Tale (2 of 2)

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Noah Ark Genesis Bible I’ve collected a few other ideas associated with the Noah story that were too good to pass up. I share them here for your amusement and edification. Part 1 of the critique is here.
Noah … or was it Enoch?
In The Reason-Driven Life (p. 103), Robert Price argues that the original flood story wasn’t about Noah at all.
First, a bit of background about the Old Testament prophet Elijah. Elijah may have initially been a sun god who gradually evolved into merely a great prophet as Judaism became monotheistic (more on Jewish polytheism here). Instead of dying, Elijah was taken into heaven on a fiery sun-like chariot. He was hairy, like the rays of the sun, while his disciple Elisha was bald, suggesting the moon.
There was only one other Old Testament figure taken into heaven without dying, and that was Enoch, great-grandfather to Noah and pictured above. Enoch also began as a sun god, and he lived 365 years (get it?). “Enoch walked with God, and then he disappeared because God took him away” (Genesis 5:24). Enoch made 365 circuits with God and then was taken up into heaven—sounds a bit like the sun.
Noah was originally just the bringer of wine, similar to the Greek Deucalion, who also survived a flood. Gen. 5:29 alludes to Noah’s discovery of wine bringing some comfort to the harsh life that God cursed humanity to. Perhaps the original story was about a sun god defeating a rain god’s flood, but the name of the protagonist was inadvertently switched (Noah instead of Enoch—the spelling is similar), giving us Noah as the hero.
What was going through God’s mind?
Here’s how God begins the project.

[Jehovah] regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. So [Jehovah] said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.” (Gen. 6:6–7)

God regrets? God changes his mind? As an omniscient being, why didn’t he see this coming? Speaking of which, why would omniscient God allow Noah’s son Ham to survive the flood since he would be progenitor of the Canaanites (Gen. 10:6–20) who would cause the Israelites so much trouble? Far easier and far more humane than killing the Canaanites tribe by tribe would’ve been to kill Ham.
But in the early days, of course, God was merely powerful, not omniscient. And not particularly benevolent either.
Rick Warren imagines God saying this about Noah, “This guy brings me pleasure. He makes me smile. I’ll start over with his family.” And of course “start over” to this cheerful and genial God means to drown every human outside of Noah’s family—adults, children, and unborn. I wonder what the children could have done to deserve this slow death. Perhaps you can buy drowning people to go with the Noah action figure. Warren’s article is titled, “May God Smile On You,” but for the millions in the Noah story who die, it might as well be titled, “May God Smite You.”
Robert Price says that Warren takes the Bible literally but not seriously. Warren says that the Noah story literally happened, but he’s not about to take it seriously enough to worry about or even consider the consequences.
This reminds me of a Sherman’s Lagoon comic. A guy finds what he thinks is a piece of Noah’s Ark. He’s excited until his friend spots “Made in China” stamped on it. The guy is disappointed, but not because this is devastating counterevidence to his hypothesis. He’s just disappointed to discover that Noah outsourced construction. Like Rick Warren, he won’t let the facts get in the way of his happy hypothesis.
Other Christians aren’t caught in this trap, and they laugh at the Bible literalists. Of course the Noah story isn’t literally true, they’ll say, but it’s still true anyway. But then in what sense is it “true anyway” without being true a literal sense?
The beautiful, benign rainbow
At the end of the flood story, God says, “I will place my bow in the clouds, and it will become a guarantee of the covenant between me and the earth” (Gen. 9:13). Never again will God destroy all living things—by flood, anyway. The “bow in the clouds” is obviously a rainbow, but the word refers to the kind that shoots arrows. This explains why the rainbow looks like a war bow—God has hung up his bow and will no longer use it against mankind.
What started this off in the first place?
What got God so hot under the collar anyway? Why did he insist on drowning everyone and starting over? One pastor has it all figured out.

The last straw for God before He brought the flood was when they started writing wedding songs to homosexual marriage and Jesus said that you’ll know the end times because it will be like the days of Noah. There’s never been a time in the history of the world since before the flood when homosexual marriage has been open and celebrated, and that’s another sign that I believe that we’re close to the end.

As you guessed, like most everything else bad in the world, it’s all the gays’ fault.

[God’s] not good at design, 
he’s not good at execution. 
He’d be out of business 
if there was any competition. 
— Sol Hadden in Carl Sagan’s Contact

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/4/13.)
Photo credit: Wikipedia
 

The Leaky Noah’s Ark Tale

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I discussed the logic (or lack of logic) in the Garden of Eden story in recent post. The story of Noah and the flood is another fascinating tale from this period and from the same sources.
Let me again address the question many are probably asking: given that this is just an ancient myth, why evaluate it as if it’s history (which I will be doing)? Because for 60 percent of Americans it is literally, word-for-word true. For Protestants, that figure is 73 percent. For Evangelicals, it’s 87 percent.
Prior flood stories
Robert Price in The Reason-Driven Life (pages 102–106) gives a summary of what came before.

[The Noah flood story] is a derivative version of demonstrably much older flood epics from the same area, including the Gilgamesh epic [Sumerian], the Atrahasis epic [Akkadian], the story of Xisuthros [Sumerian], and that of Deucalion and Pyrrha [Greek], all of whom survived the world-devastating flood by setting sail in a protective ark, most of them bringing the animals along for the ride. We find all the familiar details: The decision of the gods to flood the world for some offense committed by the human race, the stipulated dimensions of the ark, the provision for the animals, the onset of the rains, the number of days the flood lasted, the naming of the spot the ark came to rest, the sending forth of birds to find dry ground, the emergence of the refugees, their sacrifice, and the promise of the gods never to doom the world thusly ever again. It’s all there, at least most of it in most versions.

Yes, just because there were prior flood stories from that region doesn’t mean that the Noah story didn’t actually happen. And yes, just because the Sumerian cosmology both preceded Genesis and is the same as that described in Genesis—it water pours in from below and above (see Gen. 7:11)—doesn’t mean that the Genesis account was copied.
But in both cases, that’s certainly an enormous clue pointing to myth.
Contradictions
As with the two Genesis creation stories—six days vs. Garden of Eden—a flood story from the older J source (about 950 BCE) is combined with one from the P source (500 BCE) to make an unhappy compromise. (I discuss this Documentary Hypothesis and the Old Testament’s different sources here.)
The clumsy intermingling of the two stories can be seen, for example, in Genesis 8. The first five verses (the P account) tell about the water receding, the ark coming to rest on Ararat, and land becoming visible. The next seven verses (from J) make clear that land is not yet visible when Noah sent out birds to check for land, but “there was water over all the surface of the earth.”
The P source says that Noah brought just one pair of all animals (Gen. 6:19–20), while the J source says that he also brought seven pairs of all birds and kosher (“clean”) animals (7:2–3).
Why not keep pick one story to keep? According to Price, these two sources each had their partisans, so each had to be preserved. Better to merge them, however imprecisely, than to drop a beloved story element.
Story problems
It’s fun to compare the Noah story with science and history as we know it. Here are some of the problems that I’ve come across..

  • The ark was 137 meters long, making it the largest wooden ship ever built. It would’ve required tens of thousands of big trees. Where did the wood come from? Could four men (Noah and his sons) have built such a craft by hand in less than 100 years?
  • Consider how the square-cube law applies to the ark (discussed more thoroughly at Skeptoid). When you double the size of a ship, you double it in three dimensions. That’s also true for every piece of timber. Take a beam, 6 feet long, with a 4-inch-by-4-inch cross section. Now double it to 12’×8″×8″. The volume has gone up 8-fold, but the cross section has only increased by a factor of 4. It’s 8 times heavier but only 4 times stronger. This means that if you take a small boat and double every dimension, you have a much more fragile boat. To make it seaworthy, you’d have to use much thicker timber. How much cargo space would’ve been available given the massive beams the ark would’ve needed?
  • What did the carnivores eat? There were a few extra kosher animals and birds for sacrificing, but what’s left for the lions and tigers and bears? What’s left for Noah and his family?
  • What did the herbivores eat? Hay could store well, but what about the hummingbirds that drink nectar and bats that eat fruit? Flowers and fruit probably wouldn’t last for the many months of the journey. Did Noah’s sons collect fresh Chinese bamboo for the pandas?
  • What did the insects eat? Biologists today would probably be unable to provide the right kind of food and living environments to ensure 100% survival for all known insects, but we’re to imagine that Noah and his sons had no problem?
  • How did the fish survive? With the earth covered by a single body of water, which was likely turbulent and muddy in parts from the violent flow of water, the freshwater and the saltwater fish couldn’t have both been happy.
  • How did animals travel from far-away places and then get back home afterwards? How did the penguins and polar bears get to Mesopotamia and stay comfortably cool during the trip? How did the kangaroos and koalas get to Australia?
  • What did the carnivores eat after they were released from the Ark? Remember that eating even a single rabbit or zebra would’ve made that species extinct.
  • Could all of today’s plants have survived months of immersion in salt water to recolonize the land?
  • Some Bible literalists try to bypass the problem of finding space on the ark for millions of species by arguing that by “kinds,” the Bible isn’t referring to species but genera (the next-higher taxonomic level). Creationist Ken Ham seems to think that “kinds” were more like biological orders. But this forces them to imagine rapid speciation in the 6000 years after the flood, which is hard for the evolution deniers among them to do.

And let’s simply bypass the problem that geology tells us that there was no global flood.
Of course, God could’ve solved any of these problems with a miracle, but then why tell the story as if Noah and his family did everything? Why not just have God poof into existence a new world with everyone painlessly dead except Noah and his family? Because it’s just a story written with no concern about modern science.
Concluded in part 2.

If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. 
If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. 
The same happens in the absence of prayers. 
— Steve Allen

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/2/13.)
Photo credit: Amazon