Category Religion

I Get Email

I don’t I Get Email as often as PZ does, but I figured I’d share this one, sent in by someone going by “Your Name”. I’m not entirely sure what he’s on about, but I think it’s this, which I wrote in a moment of being tired of being calm and reasonable all the time.

Ok, I stumbled your page basically tearing down creationists and their
lack of “facts” or “proof” and it seems that your logical scientific
mind cannot comprehend that:

A: The entire premise of religion, philosophically, is based upon faith.

Nice way to concede right out of the gate. Faith is not a reliable way of figuring out what’s true or false. Rather, it’s an excuse people use to believe something they already want to believe.

To believe in something that cannot be proven by human logic or with
fancy math problems. To ask a person to prove that god exists clearly
shows you have absolutely no clue what religion is, what it means, and
its connection to what makes us human. We’re soooooo smart. We know it
all, yet, the leading scientists in the world cannot explain even the
most basic aspects of human emotions and behavior. Can you prove that
electricity can charge carbon particles that, by some miracle,
“transform” into complex proteins to “magically” evolve into life?
Although Darwin titles his most popular work “the origin of species”,
Darwin’s evolution is NOT the origin of species. It is a theory and the
only parts of it that have any validity are that species (that are
already here) adapt to their environment through natural selection.

And that’s why he titled his book The Origin of Species and not The Origin of Life.

You
let me know when you, or anyone for that matter, electrically charges
carbon to create complex proteins necessary for life to evolve. Please.
Let me know.

Nice collection of strawmen you’ve built yourself there.

B: Creationism has a legitimate right to be taught in schools

In the same way as phlogiston and the ether have a legitimate place in physics class: examining failed hypotheses can be useful in learning how not to make the same mistakes in the future.

Okay, now it’s getting late, and I don’t have the energy for a point-by-point fisking. See the Index of Creationist Claims for more rebuttals.

and to
exist as a theory on the origin of species, seeing as how there is no
solid, universally accepted theory that has been proven as FACT. How can
we learn if never exposed to differing ideas? Isn’t that the point of
education, especially in terms of philosophical perspectives on the
origin of life? I thought all you smartie smarties were all about
exposing others minds to different ideas and perspectives to give them a
true broad sense of whatever it may be that is being discussed so they
come to an educated conclusion? Hmmm. Seems like that attitude has gone
out the window as of late. God forbid someone have a different opinion
(yes OPINION) than you.

I am by no means trying to contradict your opinions and do not wish to
impose any specific ideology on you, rather I suggest you scale back the
vitriol towards others who may not agree with you or have a different
perspective of life. Elitists are constantly insulting us “simple” folk
who accept the fact that we are merely tiny insignificant humans in a
great big universe (many of them depending on what kind of science you
choose to read about.) that we possibly cannot understand. Some would
have us believe humans are DEFINITELY the most advanced and most
knowledgeable creatures in existence. Surely, we know everything there
is to know. Please note the sarcasm.

I started out atheist. I do not go to church. Never have and never will,
but I will tell you what changed my mind in terms of believing in
something that greater than myself, or my species for that matter, that
cannot be proven with science. Its when I started reading about
theoretical physics and the quantum theory and the likes. The fish in a
fishbowl analogy, we’re fish in a fishbowl. We can see whats outside but
cant understand it as we only understand what is known to us in our
reality. Now, I’m no expert, nor am I a scientist, but I think those
theories alone should convince any hard headed atheist that there is
simply too much about our universe that is, and will always be, foreign
to us to the point where we will NEVER understand it. Which is why faith
is so necessary in relation to what makes us human. Einstein didn’t want
to disprove the existence of god, he wanted to know and understand the
way things were built by him. Honestly, I do not even really know what
“creationism” is other than teaching that there are theories life didn’t
“poof” out of the sky during a thunderstorm some odd billions of years
ago and I tend to agree with that because frankly, that’s bullshit. I
find the whack job “were all aliens from outer space” theories more
believable than that.

Do I read the bible? Yes. Do I take it literally? Hell no! People who do
need help. They are the ones that give halfway intelligent believers a
bad name, and are the cause for the “evils” in the world that are blamed
on religion and give your kind reason to speak so poorly of those who
believe. Tell a moron who truly believes in whatever god that god wants
him to kill said person and he will. No one can help that for thousands
of years religion has been misused to herd mindless idiots into groups
to do horrible things to our fellow men. Did Jesus come to earth and die
for our sins? Is he the “son” of god? Is there heaven, hell? Who knows
for sure, but I tend to gravitate towards Christianity as the purpose of
the messiah in Christianity is to move people away from ritualistic
nonsense of the old testament and come to an understanding that FAITH
and believing in something greaterthan ourselves is the true point to it
all. I always get a kick out of the fact that self proclaimed geniuses
who claim to have such a broad and open mind are, in fact, some of the
most narrow minded people on earth. Irony. Great, isn’t it?

I’m not the smartest guy on earth, but I’m far from stupid and have
always loved science and technology though unlike you, I have managed to
merge the faith of religion with the rigidity and logic of science.
Science cannot explain what makes us human, though I believe religion
can. I don’t think any specific religion is “right” or “wrong”. I don’t
say religion is “truth” like many of the mindless idiots out there as
that is contradictory to faith, but you are not insulting just those
types with your words. There are many like me, who can look at things
from the proper perspective, whom you insult as well. Which is why you
may want to tone it down. Not every person with faith is an idiot and
not every math whiz computer programmer guy, like yourself, is the all
knowing supreme master of all things life. Have a little humility. Just
please understand. Others may be wrong or illogical, but that doesn’t
make you right. You push a theory and claim it as truth. Sounds a little
like the religious folks you so despise.

Even if evolution were 100% fact. Where did space time come from? What
initiated the big bang? The origin of LIFE goes back much further than
Darwin’s theories predict or even earth itself and the funny thing is;
Well never know. So please stop insulting those who do not think like
you. No individual of faith will ever be able to win a fact based
logical argument because you cant argue the origins of life in that
manner. There are no supporting or contradictory facts on either side.
No one is “right” and no one is “wrong”. You cannot disprove the
existence of a god as I cannot prove it. It is an argument that cannot
be won by either side. Faith is not a competition or judgment of
intelligence. Maybe it is to you but then again, maybe your not as smart
as you think you are.

BillDo Doth Protest

Back on February 23, 1997, the Hartford Courant published an article about Father Maciel, accused of abusing nine children:

The men, in interviews in the United States and Mexico, said the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, molested them in Spain and Italy during the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. Several said Maciel told them he had permission from Pope Pius XII to seek them out sexually for relief of physical pain.

(Emphasis added.)

Bill Donohue wrote a letter to the Courant, saying

To think any priest would tell some other priest that the pope gave him the thumbs up to have sex with another priest–all for the purpose of relieving the poor fellow of some malady–is the kind of balderdash that wouldn’t convince the most unscrupulous editor at any of the weekly tabloids. It is a wonder why The Courant found merit enough to print it.”

(I haven’t been able to find this letter in the Courant. The quoted part above comes from BillDo’s article published on Monday.)

As I understand BillDo’s argument, he’s saying “It’s ridiculous to think a priest (including the pope) would give another priest permission to molest boys. Therefore, it didn’t happen. The people who said that Maciel told them that are lying or mistaken, and Father Maciel is innocent.”

At least, that’s all I can make of it. What’s odd is that BillDo is quoting this in a post entitled “DONOHUE NEVER DEFENDED Fr. MACIEL” (shouty title in the original, as befits his character).

Anyone who’s familiar with BillDo knows that he reflexively leaps to defend the Catholic church against any slight, perceived or real. So all I can figure is that he’s now trying to distance himself from his earlier words through Clintonian parsing (“it depends what the meaning of defend is”).

Happy Meal Game: Find the Blasphemy

A bunch of Catholics in France are offended by this image:

Read More

Judges 6:31

Chapter 6 of the book of Judges in the Bible is the beginning of the story of Gideon. The Midianites are being murderous dicks again, Israel appeals to God, God picks Gideon as Israel’s champion, all according to formula. An angel performs a couple of miracles, Gideon is impressed and gets religion.

Then God tells Gideon to start fighting a competing religion, that of Baal, starting with Gideon’s own father:

25 That same night the LORD said to him, “Take the second bull from your father’s herd, the one seven years old. Tear down your father’s altar to Baal and cut down the Asherah pole beside it. 26 Then build a proper kind of altar to the LORD your God on the top of this height. Using the wood of the Asherah pole that you cut down, offer the second bull as a burnt offering.”

Gideon’s not a complete moron; he’s afraid of what’ll happen if the townspeople catch him desecrating religious edifices. So he does this at night.

In the morning, the townspeople find the altar demolished, the sacred pole burned to sacrifice a stolen bull. They go to Joash, Gideon’s father, and tell him to give them his son the iconoclast. Presumably one of Joash’s duties as a head of family is to uphold religion. But he also doesn’t want to have his son killed, which puts him in a bit of a predicament. So he says:

But Joash replied to the hostile crowd around him, “Are you going to plead Baal’s cause? Are you trying to save him? Whoever fights for him shall be put to death by morning! If Baal really is a god, he can defend himself when someone breaks down his altar.”

This is a precursor to “What does God need with a starship?“: “if Baal is really all that, why does he need you people to fight his battles for him?”

But of course, the question can be turned to YHWH, or any number of other gods. If anyone claims to be doing some god’s work by executing gays, or flogging adulterers, or feeding the hungry, or spreading their holy book, or outlawing abortion, ask them what God needs with a starship. Surely any god worthy of the name would be capable of snapping his/her/its fingers and make manna fall in the Sahara, or make gays fall down dead, or add a gene that prevents conception in people who aren’t married and financially stable.

Presidents and kings need spokespeople because they’re only human and don’t have time to answer everyone’s question. But on important policy matters they step out in front of the cameras and explain what they’re trying to achieve. Or, if they can, they issue orders and make stuff happen.

Why can’t gods do the same?

News Items

VA AG tells universities to be more bigoted

The WaPo reports that the attorney general has urged colleges and universities in Virginia to rescind their policies against discrimination against gays.

You might think the Post got it wrong. That he’s saying that Virginia has no laws against discrimination against gays; that universities who do have such policies are going above and beyond what they’re required to do.

You’d be wrong. The AG’s statement says:

It is my advice that the law and public policy of the Commonwealth of Virginia prohibit a college or university from including “sexual orientation,” “gender identity,” “gender expression,” or like classification, as a protected class within its non-discrimination policy, absent specific authorization from the General Assembly.

(emphasis added)

So yeah, the AG just said that universities have to seek special permission to not be bigoted.

TX judge calls death penalty unconstitutional

Also from the Post:

A Texas judge in the county that sends more inmates to death row than any other in the nation ruled in a pretrial motion this week that the death penalty is unconstitutional, saying he could assume that innocent people have been executed.

Sounds good to me. I don’t disagree with the idea that there are people who deserve to be put to death, sometimes by chainsaw, but I nonetheless have a problem with the death penalty, because in the case of a mistake, there’s not a whole lot you can do to undo it. That’s on top of the other arguments against it.

Naturally, the judge is now taking flak from Texas governor Rick Perry. And the Texas AG is calling this “judicial activism”. Figures.

KS considers taxing churches

Finally, the Kansas state House is considering a bill that would raise taxes on churches. Or at least that’s what the hoopla is about. The Kansas City Star and ABC’s have articles about this, but perhaps the clearest explanation comes from the KC Star’s Prime Buzz blog:

The bill would impose the state’s 5.3 percent sales tax on power, gas and water bills. It would also remove a sales tax exemption enjoyed by churches and some particular business transactions.
…

Right now the state exempts 96 specific groups or types of business transactions from the state’s sales tax. Those exemptions add up to more than $4 billion. Lawmakers eager to avoid deeper cuts to schools and other state services suggested the repeal of some of these breaks to help eliminate a nearly $500 million deficit.
…

The [House Tax] Committee removed a provision repealing the sales tax exemption for non-profit organizations and for home repairs.

As I understand it:

• Kansas currently does not tax utilities; the bill would impose this tax on utilities, for everyone in Kansas.

• On a separate topic, there are various groups that currently don’t pay sales tax on anything. This bill would repeal a lot of these exemptions, including the one for churches and non-profits.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. I agree that nonprofits that do good for the community should be given tax breaks (and I’m willing to concede for now that churches fall into this category). But these are lean times, and these tax breaks are costing the state revenue. At the same time, lean times mean that people need charitable organizations more than ever.

Of course, I haven’t read the bill, so I don’t know the details. Maybe it maintains exemptions for nonprofits that clearly do good, like soup kitchens and homeless shelters, and raises taxes on organizations that provide only nebulous benefit like “spiritual uplift”.

The DC Dick Move Compromise

For those who hadn’t heard, last year DC passed a measure legalizing gay marriage. It’s scheduled to take effect tomorrow. This was a bit of a nail-biter, since Congress had threatened to repeal the law. But thankfully, the federal legislature is so dysfunctional that two and a half months weren’t enough to follow through on their threats.

Naturally, this ruffled a few feathers among homophobes (or, as I like to call them, bigots) like Catholic Charities, which I gather is a separately-incorporated of Caritas, which in turn is a branch of the Catholic church (CatholiCo, Inc.). From their rather vague “About us” page, I gather they do various charitable work like joining people who have money with people who need money, eliminating poverty, and promoting diversity, by which they mean they don’t discriminate on the basis of skin color, which is the only type of diversity among humans.

At any rate, Catholic Charities DC, or the bishop-in-command, figured that if teh gays were allowed to get married, they’d be considered equal to people, and that just wouldn’t do. So they threatened to be colossal dicks and pull out altogether.

The story today is that they decided to be merely huge dicks about this. They’ll continue their operations in DC. But they’re cancelling benefits for spouses. Not just gay spouses, but everyone (except current employees, who will be grandfathered in).

Once again, a religious institution digs in its heels and has to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

One final note: throughout this whole affair, Catholic Charities and people speaking on its behalf have justified their stance by using phrases like “faithful to the church’s teaching” and “values”. This reminds me of nothing so much as the 19th-century euphemism “our peculiar institution”, used in the south to refer to slavery, back when they got an inkling in the back of their minds that maybe what they were doing was wrong.

I take this as a positive sign. We’ve already progressed enough as a society that people can no longer admit in polite society that they’re racists. It may be that we’re now moving into a phase where people have to use linguistic doilies to cover up their homophobia as well.

Shooting the Message, Not the Messenger

Today, White House staff met with a group from the Secular Coalition for America, an association of disparate atheist and secular groups, to discuss policy (USA Today, by way of RichardDawkins.net. McClatchy article).

Apparently the meeting went pretty much as I expected: brief meeting with White House staff (but not the president), polite airing of views, no immediate effect on anything.

Of course, not everyone was happy with that. Christian NewsWire reports:

“It is one thing for Administration to meet with groups of varying viewpoints, but it is quite another for a senior official to sit down with activists representing some of the most hate-filled, anti-religious groups in the nation,” says In God We Trust’s Chairman Bishop Council Nedd.
…

“President Obama seems to believe that it is a good idea to have a key senior aide plan political strategy with people who believe faith in God is a disease,” Nedd says. “Some of the people in this coalition believe the world would be better off with no Christians and no Jews and they aren’t shy about it. The fact that this meeting is happening at all is an affront to the vast majority of people of all faiths who believe in God.”

According to the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s President Dan Barker, “Christianity is an enemy to humanity, and the antithesis of freedom.” (Dan Barker, Freedom from Religion Foundation Co-President in Losing Faith in Faith Page 255) and “Religion also poses a danger to mental health, damaging self-respect, personal responsibility, and clarity of thought.” (Losing Faith in Faith Page 217.)
…

“The President should tell the American people whether he believes these groups’ hate-filled views to be ‘mainstream’ and worthy of his supposedly inclusive administration,” Nedd says.

BillDo cranked up the Persecut-O-Tron and pounded out a predictable spittle-flecked screed:

[I]t is the business of the American people, most all of whom are believers, to know where the president and his administration stand with regards to their concerns. It is not likely that this outreach to anti-religious activists—many of whom would crush Christianity if they could—will do anything to calm the fears of people of faith.

Ooh, scary! Atheists are “hate-filled” and want to “crush Christianity”. They think “the world would be better off with no Christians”. The meeting is “an affront”. Kinda makes you want to lock up your daughters and barricade the windows, doesn’t it?

BillDo, in particular, doesn’t actually come out and say that the ravenous atheist hordes want to burn down your church and rape your pets. He’s just saying people have a right to know if that’s the case.

But look at what the atheists’ quoted or paraphrased words are: that “faith in God is a disease”; that “the world would be better off with no Christians and no Jews”.

What if I said that heroin addiction is a disease, and that the world would be better off if there were no heroin addicts. Who in their right mind would think that I want to go off on a junkie-killng spree?

A more apt comparison would be to homophobes who claim that homosexuality is a disease. I’d bet money that if you surveyed the people who believe that, that the vast majority of them would rather use some therapy to turn gays straight, than to execute them.

Dan Barker is quoted as saying that “Christianity is an enemy to humanity”. Christianity, not Christians. And that “Religion also poses a danger to mental health”. Again, religion, not religious people (except, obviously, insofar as religious people act on their beliefs). If religion is a disease, the obvious course of action is to cure it, not to kill the patient.

In An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks writes of a patient with Tourette’s Syndrome:

[The patient says:] “Funny disease—I don’t think of it as a disease but as just me. I say the word `disease,’ but it doesn’t seem to be the appropriate word.”

It is difficult for Bennett, and is often difficult for Touretters, to see their Tourette’s as something external to themselves, because many of its tics and urges may be felt as intentional, as an integral part of the self, the personality, the will.

(An Anthropologist on Mars, ISBN 0-679-43785-1, LCC 94-26733, p. 102.)

It looks as though people like Nedd and BillDo have the same relationship with their religion: they can’t distinguish between killing the disease and killing the self. Either that, or they’re fear-mongers trying to stir up anti-atheist feeling.

How about a reality check? Atheism has been on the rise in the US for at least a decade. Millions of Americans don’t believe in any gods, and millions have read (or at least bought) the “new atheists”‘ bestsellers. How much anti-religious crime has there been? I’ll even tentatively spot you Jason Bourque and Daniel McAllister, at least until the facts of the matter, and whether they’re atheists and whether that played any role in their alleged crimes, come to light.

Equally importantly, try to find an atheist who defends them. Or those perennial favorites, Stalin and Pol Pot. In contrast, it’s much easier to find someone who defends or supports Scott Roeder’s murder of Dr. George Tiller. To say nothing of mass murderers like Moses and Joshua in the Bible.

The Dawkinses, the Dennetts, the Barkers and Gaylors, the Hitchenses, Harrises, and PZs just aren’t into bloodshed, rape, and arson, and neither are the people who listen to them. They pose no threat to religious people’s health, safety, or property. The worst they’re likely to do is to pen sharply-worded books and blog articles. Perhaps get legislation passed to curb the most egregious excesses of religious organizations. Very few of them have horns or eat babies.

If you’re so worried about these people that they shouldn’t even be allowed to meet with a White House staffer to try to have a say in how their country is run, you’re a loon. Get over it.

(Thanks to Attempts at Rational Behavior for pointers.)

We’ll Have Ample Warning of the Apocalypse

People have been arguing for ages now that the end of the world, as foretold in John’s shroom trip the book of Revelation, will be upon us any minute now.

But I think the Bible makes it clear that we’ll have ample warning — thousands if not millions of years — before that happens.

Revelation 6:12-13 says:

12I watched as he opened the sixth seal. There was a great earthquake. The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red, 13and the stars in the sky fell to earth, as late figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind.

As I understand it, all seven seals have to be opened before Armageddon, and the seventh seal can’t be opened until the stars fall to earth.

The thing is, we know where the closest stars are. The nearest one is four and some change light years away. Even Kent Hovind concedes that stars up to 100 ly away can be located via parallax.

We can also directly measure the velocity with which stars are moving toward or away from us by looking at their spectrum shift.

What this adds up to is that we’ll be able to tell when neighboring stars start moving toward us. Since stars are such massive objects, they have a lot of inertia. They can’t just turn on a dime. We’ll see them slowing down and shifting direction. And even when they’re on a collision course with the solar system it’ll take centuries before they get here.

Of course, there’s the whole business of the size of stars compared to the Earth. When the events of Rev. 6:13 occur, I doubt anyone will describe it as “stars falling to earth”. When those stars collide, they’ll destroy all of the inner solar system planets. Which raises the question of where, exactly, the seventh seal will be opened.

But I’ll let the theologians worry about that. And Michael Bay, because that seems like the kind of movie he’d make.

Science, Theology, and Information

Creationists like to ask where the information for evolution comes from. I thought I’d turn that question around a bit.

Back when I studied information science in college, the instructor said that the information content of a message is a measure of surprise. That is, if you’re trying to communicate as tersely as possible (because you’re trying to minimize your bandwidth usage, or because you’re being charged by the word, or whatever) you shouldn’t waste precious bits describing high-probability events. If you’re playing hangman or Wheel of Fortune, it’s less surprising to learn that the word contains an E or a T, than to learn that it contains a Y or a Z. And if someone told you that the (English) word is composed of Latin letters, you’d wonder why they were wasting your time.

So if information is a measure of surprise, then being surprised means that you’re learning something. And in this respect, science certainly delivers. A quick search yielded examples like:

“The universe keeps making strange things stranger than we can think of in our imagination,” said Jon Morse, head of astrophysics for NASA.

“We were surprised to find that subtle modification of only two amino acids in this very large protein can prevent the onset of disease.

The investigators were however surprised to find that the the degree of modifications on the histones continued to be about the same.

Speaking by phone from Japan, Kawaoka said he was surprised how effective T-705 was against avian influenza and how superior it proved to Tamiflu.

So the $64,000 question is, are creationists, Intelligent Design researchers, or theologians ever surprised by their work? How often do they say things like “A year ago, I would have bet you $100 that the answer was X, but after checking, it turns out that the answer is Y. Who knew?”

I can’t think of any such instances. Nor have I been able to find any. And if they aren’t surprised, are they really learning anything?

Now, one could argue that theologians have been at it for so long that all the big discoveries have been made, all the important conclusions arrived at, and new discoveries are so minor or so few and far between that they don’t make the news anymore.

But the cumulative sum of all these discoveries should be considerable. And someone who got them all in quick succession should certainly be surprised. That is to say, theology students and seminarians. What are they surprised to learn?

If Bart Ehrman and Daniel Dennett are to be trusted, by and large seminary students are surprised to learn just how little evidence there is to support the notion that the Bible was inspired by God; that many of the epistles are likely forgeries; that politics played a huge role in how the Bible was put together. That is, information from history, archeology, literary analysis, and the like.

Surprising things that they don’t learn, on the other hand (as far as I know) are things like “Well, that one-god-in-three-persons thing you learned is fine for Sunday school, but it turns out that there are 4.129486… persons. We’re still working on figuring out whether that number is rational or irrational.” Or experiments showing how brain damage affects the soul. Or sonograms and MRIs showing how and when the soul enters and leaves the body, and how that affects debates about abortion and euthanasia. Or “if we compare religions from around the world, we see this pattern that shows that Jesus also appeared in Australia and South America.”

Again, maybe they do learn these things. But if so, I’ve never heard of them, even they’re the sort of thing you’d think would crop up when theists accuse people like Dawkins of ignoring sophisticated theology.

So again, I have to ask: if theologians aren’t surprised, how can they be said to learn anything?

Ken Ham Is Not Ashamed, for Some Reason

Not too long ago, in a post entitled
“I Am Not Ashamed,
Ken Ham, director of that epicenter of idiocy, Answers in Genesis,
criticizes Christians too wimpy to admit that they still believe in
fairy tales. He urges all True Christians™ to embrace their
inner crazy and proudly proclaim their gullibility to the world.

AIG will lead this charge by erecting billboards with the theme of
“I Am Not Ashamed”
Some examples include



If I might suggest a few others:

The Bible speaks for itself on pr0n:
There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.
Ezekiel 23:20

The Bible speaks for itself on revenge:
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.
Psalm 137:9

The Bible speaks for itself on whether the Earth is round:
an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world
Matthew 4:8

The Bible speaks for itself on 401(k)s:
Take therefore no thought for the morrow
Matthew 6:34

You get the idea. I’m sure you can come up with your own suggestions.

There is one bright spot for Mr. Ham, though:

The Bible speaks for itself on intelligence: