The science of Happiness?

A clash of Titans. LXI

Belated recognition for the rights of Jehovah's servants in Germany.

Germany Grants Highest Legal Status to Jehovah’s Witnesses

After more than 26 years of legal proceedings, Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany obtained the same legal status as that granted to major religions in the country. On January 27, 2017, North Rhine-Westphalia was the last state of the 16 German states to grant public law status to Jehovah’s Witnesses. The decision is significant for the Witnesses because even though they have been present in Germany for well over 100 years, their national headquarters and the thousands of congregations in the country were considered independent religious associations. Now that the Witnesses have finally been granted public law status in all German states, they are viewed as a single religious entity and enjoy the benefits that this status provides.

The Long Struggle to Obtain Public Law Status

In 1921, Jehovah’s Witnesses were first registered in Germany under private law. After the reunification of Germany in 1990, the Witnesses applied for public law status because of the benefits available to religious organizations that have it.

In order for a religious association to be registered throughout the country as a public law corporation, the law requires that it first obtain public law status in the German state where it is based. It may then apply for this status in the 15 other German states. In 1990, the religious association Jehovas Zeugen in Deutschland (Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany) first applied to the state of Berlin, where it maintains its legal address. Although most religious organizations seeking public law status obtain it within a short period of time, perhaps within a year or two, the Berlin government refused to grant public law status to Jehovah’s Witnesses for many years. One reason the government cited was that the Witnesses refrain from voting in national elections. However, this argument is not valid, since the law does not require German citizens to vote; to do so is entirely voluntary.

This issue eventually came before the courts. On March 24, 2005, the Higher Administrative Court in Berlin ruled that Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany must be acknowledged as a “corporation of public law.” Over a year later, the state of Berlin relented and granted public law status to Jehovah’s Witnesses, ending a 16-year legal struggle with the Berlin government.

Next, the Witnesses applied for public law status in the remaining 15 German states. In 2009, 11 states granted public law status; another 3 states followed in subsequent years; and the last state, North Rhine-Westphalia, granted public law status to Jehovah’s Witnesses on January 27, 2017. The persistent efforts of Jehovah’s Witnesses to obtain the same legal status as that granted to major religions in Germany finally ended after 26 years of legal proceedings.

The Benefits of Having Public Law Status

The national headquarters and the more than 2,000 congregations of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany now function under a single corporate structure. In the past, because each association representing at least one congregation was viewed as an independent religious association, it was subject to state laws requiring the submission of annual reports and tax returns. Adjustments in an association’s structure resulting from an appointment of new elders, purchase of property, or the renaming or merging of congregations had to be reported to the government. In the past these reporting requirements required much effort and time on the part of congregation elders, but now they can focus more fully on the pastoral care of congregation members. The lack of public law status also required congregations to pay fees for the processing of reports. A longtime elder in one congregation commented: “Now we have greater freedom to use donated funds to support the public ministry of congregation members.”

Without the superior legal status of public law, Jehovah’s Witnesses were not viewed as a mainstream religion, even though some 274,000 Witnesses and their associates were attending their meetings in Germany. Armin Pikl, an attorney for the national headquarters of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany, observed: “During the more than 26 years of legal efforts to obtain the status as a corporation of public law, the media published hundreds of untrue and defamatory statements about our religion, sometimes almost weekly. Now the flood of untrue and defamatory statements has subsided.” Werner Rudtke, a longtime Witness, stated: “Since a religious association that wants to become a public law corporation must be law-abiding in every way, many false allegations against the Witnesses can be refuted.” Another Witness, named Petra, mentioned the past challenges facing schoolchildren. She said: “This kind of recognition is very helpful for children in school. Until now it has been the tendency of teachers to discriminate against Witness students as a result of the false allegation that they belonged to a ‘sect’ rather than to a religion.”

Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany are grateful that their sincere religious activity has been recognized by the government as qualifying for public law status. They hope that such recognition will alleviate some of their past challenges and will benefit them as individuals and as a religious community.

File under "Well said" LV

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.
JOHN ADAMS

Reports of Adam and Eve's demise greatly exaggerated?

Does Science Rule Out a First Human Pair? Geneticist Richard Buggs Says No
Ann Gauger

Dennis Venema, associate professor of biology at Trinity Western University, and Scot McKnight, professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary, have written a book,  Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science, that addresses the question of human origins. Venema defends the standard scientific narrative on neo-Darwinism and human origins, while McKnight attempts to reconcile Christian theology with the science. Because the book argues that science disproves the existence of a historical Adam and Eve, it is worth responding to in some detail.

One of the claims Venema makes in his book is that the effective population size of our last common ancestor with chimps has never been fewer than 10,000. In fact, he equates the certainty of that statement with our certainty about heliocentrism. That is an extreme claim that needs justification. Assuming no bottlenecks, this would exclude the possibility of an original human pair as the progenitors of the human race.

Effective population size is very hard to determine. In fact, in some situations the effective population size cannot be determined (On the Meaning and Existence of an  effective population size P. Sjödin, I. Kaj, S. Krone, M. Lascoux and M. Nordborg (2005) Genetics 169: 1061–1070). So any estimates concerning effective population size should be taken a bit skeptically.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Richard Buggs, a British biologist who has published over thirty articles on genetics in journals such as Nature, Current Biology, Evolution, and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, wrote to Venema to lay out his concerns in May of this year. Venema failed to respond to Buggs’s email so Buggs  posted it online last week, and tweeted a link to it here. In his letter he comments on effective population size estimates:

As I am sure you know, effective population size is a measure of a population’s susceptibility to drift, rather than an attempt to measure census population size. I would be very hesitant to rely too heavily on any estimate of past effective population size.

Could we have begun with a population of 10,000 and then had a bottleneck of two? Obviously this estimate is relevant for human origins, since a bottleneck of two would indicate some sort of unique beginning. Venema says a bottleneck of two is impossible based on the levels of human genetic diversity present today.

If a species were formed through such an event [by a single ancestral breeding pair] or if a species were reduced in numbers to a single breeding pair at some point in its history, it would leave a telltale mark on its genome that would persist for hundreds of thousands of years — a severe reduction in genetic variability for the species as a whole.

Buggs responds:

It is easy to have misleading intuitions about the population genetic effects of a short, sudden bottleneck. For example, Ernst Mayr suggested that many species had passed through extreme bottlenecks in founder events. He argued that extreme loss of diversity in such events would promote evolutionary change. His intuition about loss of diversity in bottlenecks was wrong, though, and his argument lost much of its force when population geneticists (M. Nei, T. Maruyama and R. Chakraborty 1975 Evolution, 29(1):1-10) showed that even a bottleneck of a single pair would not lead to massive decreases in genetic diversity, if followed by rapid population growth. When two individuals are taken at random from an existing large population, they will on average carry 75% of its heterozygosity (M. Slatkin and L. Excoffier 2012 Genetics 191:171–181). From a bottleneck of a single fertilised female, if population size doubles every generation, after many generations the population will have over half of the heterozygosity of the population before the bottleneck (Barton and Charlesworth 1984, Ann. Rev. Ecol. Syst. 15:133-64). If population growth is faster than this, the proportion of heterozygosity maintained will be higher.

This means that a single pair of individuals can carry a great deal of  heterozygosity  with them through a bottleneck, provided they come from an ancestral population with high diversity and undergo rapid population growth after the bottleneck. They will pass most of that diversity on to the population they found, so long as population grows rapidly.

Buggs goes on to discuss the relative genetic diversity of chimpanzees at 5.7 million SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) and humans at 3.1 million (Prado-Martinez et al 2013 Nature). He makes the point that if a pair of chimpanzees were moved to an isolated region where rapid population growth was possible, the new population would have similar levels of genetic variability to modern humans.

He explains:

I am not stating these figures because existing populations of chimpanzee gave rise to modern humans, but simply to show that it is hard to see how overall levels of SNP diversity and heterozygosity in modern humans could exclude the possibility of a past bottleneck of two individuals.

On top of this, we need to add in the fact that explosive population growth in humans has allowed many new mutations to rapidly accumulate in human populations, accounting for many SNPs with low minor allele frequencies (A. Keinan and A. G. Clark (2012) Science 336 (6082): 740-743).

PSMC (pairwise sequentially Markovian coalescent) analysis is a method used by population geneticists to try to recover the history of human populations. Venema discusses it in his book. Unfortunately he cannot use it to prove that a sudden, short bottleneck never happened. In the original Li and Durbin 2011 paper describing PSMC analysis, the authors note that an instantaneous reduction in population size was not detected as such, but was instead “spread over several preceding tens of thousands of years in the PSMC reconstruction.” Continued work in  Beth Shapiro’s lab also indicates that the PSMC method cannot accurately reconstruct sharp bottlenecks.

Buggs sums up his problems with Venema’s analysis:

In general, I am concerned that the studies you cite did not set out to test the hypothesis that humans have passed through a single-couple bottleneck. They are simply trying to reconstruct the most probable past effective population sizes of humans given the standard assumptions of population genetic models. I personally would feel ill at ease claiming that they prove that a short sudden bottleneck is impossible.

 scientists have argued have argued against Venema’s position by disputing key assumptions, including the idea of common descent. Buggs’s argument is valid, though, whether or not common descent is true. In fact, he has told me he is assuming common ancestry, but arguing that we can still have come from a single couple as ancestors.

What is needed is a model that does not rely on the standard assumptions of population genetics. Recently Hössjer, Gauger, and Reeves have proposed such an alternative model. The model, when programmed, will be available for use by anyone to test the effects of various starting conditions, like population size, the degree of gene flow, recombination and mutation rates, mate choice effects, and ultimately the effects of selection. The outcomes of various scenarios can be tested and compared to summary statistics from modern populations, in order to determine which scenarios best explain current populations.

Finally, given Buggs’s critique, Venema’s claims that our starting population was at least 10,000, and that we could not have come from just two, seem unjustified. Certainly Venema cannot claim these are facts as sure as heliocentrism. He should at least acknowledge the facts above, and soften his claims. Further revision may be necessary following the results from Hössjer, Gauger, and Reeves’s model. We shall see.

College not the only game in town.

College not the only game in town II

College not the only game in town III

College not the only game in town IV

The Watchtower Society's commentary on the 'lake of fire'

LAKE OF FIRE:


This expression occurs only in the book of Revelation and is clearly symbolic. The Bible gives its own explanation and definition of the symbol by stating: “This means the second death, the lake of fire.”—Re 20:14; 21:8.

The symbolic quality of the lake of fire is further evident from the context of references to it in the book of Revelation. Death is said to be hurled into this lake of fire. (Re 19:20; 20:14) Death obviously cannot be literally burned. Moreover, the Devil, an invisible spirit creature, is thrown into the lake. Being spirit, he cannot be hurt by literal fire.—Re 20:10; compare Ex 3:2 and Jg 13:20.

Since the lake of fire represents “the second death” and since Revelation 20:14 says that both “death and Hades” are to be cast into it, it is evident that the lake cannot represent the death man has inherited from Adam (Ro 5:12), nor does it refer to Hades (Sheol). It must, therefore, be symbolic of another kind of death, one that is without reversal, for the record nowhere speaks of the “lake” as giving up those in it, as do Adamic death and Hades (Sheol). (Re 20:13) Thus, those not found written in “the book of life,” unrepentant opposers of God’s sovereignty, are hurled into the lake of fire, meaning eternal destruction, or the second death.—Re 20:15.

While the foregoing texts make evident the symbolic quality of the lake of fire, it has been used by some persons to support belief in a literal place of fire and torment. Revelation 20:10 has been appealed to, because it speaks of the Devil, the wild beast, and the false prophet as being “tormented day and night forever and ever” in the lake of fire. However, this cannot refer to actual conscious torment. Those thrown into the lake of fire undergo “the second death.” (Re 20:14) In death there is no consciousness and, hence, no feeling of pain or suffering.—Ec 9:5.

In the Scriptures fiery torment is associated with destruction and death. For example, in the Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Scriptures the word for torment (baʹsa·nos) is several times used with reference to punishment by death. (Eze 3:20; 32:24, 30) Similarly, concerning Babylon the Great, the book of Revelation says, “the kings of the earth . . . will weep and beat themselves in grief over her, when they look at the smoke from the burning of her, while they stand at a distance because of their fear of her torment [Gr., ba·sa·ni·smouʹ].” (Re 18:9, 10) As to the meaning of the torment, an angel later explains: “Thus with a swift pitch will Babylon the great city be hurled down, and she will never be found again.” (Re 18:21) So, fiery torment here is parallel with destruction, and in the case of Babylon the Great, it is everlasting destruction.—Compare Re 17:16; 18:8, 15-17, 19.

Therefore, those who are ‘tormented forever’ (from Gr., ba·sa·niʹzo) in the lake of fire undergo “second death” from which there is no resurrection. The related Greek word ba·sa·ni·stesʹ is translated ‘jailer’ in Matthew 18:34. (RS, NW, ED; compare vs 30.) Thus those hurled into the lake of fire will be held under restraint, or “jailed,” in death throughout eternity.—

On the transalantic slave trade.