SCEPTICAL JAYDON

As usual, a lot of religious garbage has been flying around during the Covid-19 outbreak. Ranging from people being told not to be afraid of the virus, to outright floutings of government protocols for containment and curation, to very ridiculous claims about a state in West-African Nigeria that only began to exist in 1991 being recorded in a middle-Eastern Jewish book of legends allegedly written by goatherders thousands of years ago, we have heard it all. But nothing caught my attention quite like the pathetic, sordid claims of Pastor Enoch Adeboye, the general overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God. Earlier this year, Pastor Adeboye had come up, as he and other "prophets" always do, with a series of predictions that God had allegedly given him for the year 2020. He had claimed in this set of predictions that it was going to be a "year of joy and series of victories" for his church members. He also notably said that "sin is becoming rampant...

So you want to pray to a god you claim created diseases because two people ate a fruit after a talking snake told them to. That's akin to asking a guy you claimed has stabbed you for a bandage. But let's leave all that nonsense aside and look at what we know about zoonotic pathogens, how they spillover, and what this means for those who insist invisible cloud people are going to help them. Let's look at what we actually know. Coronaviruses are a large group of viruses that cause diseases in animals and humans. They often circulate among camels, cats and bats, sometimes evolving to infect people. In animals, coronaviruses can cause diarrhoea in cows and pigs and upper respiratory disease in chickens. In humans, the viruses can cause mild respiratory infections, like the common cold, but can lead to serious illnesses, like pneumonia. Coronaviruses are so named for the crown-like spikes on their surface. Human coronaviruses were first identified in the mid-1960s. They ha...

Which is more likely? The entity alleged to be the creator of the cosmos creates the first two people and places them in a magic garden. Now we all know humans learn to talk, but these two have magic genes—maybe like numerous FOXP2 genes on steroids—that allow them to speak instantly. They not only talk instantly but they also allegedly invent the first language. They are then instructed in this language by the creator not to eat a particular magic fruit in the magic garden. But a talking reptile that obviously was present during the invention of the first language—probably hid under the desk whilst Yahweh, Adam and Eve were busy in the Language Invention 001 class—told them to go ahead and eat the fruit. The creator, a.k.a. Yahweh, is really cross about this and decides to punish the first two humans and all their descendants for eating the magic fruit. So humans and all life on earth allegedly begin to suffer from parasites and pathogens. The descendants of Adam and Eve then begi...