I can not in any way take credit for this thought, I've heard it from multiple sources. But I felt it deserved a page on the interwebs.

Pastor Wiley Blake of First Southern Baptist Church in Buena Park, Calif. has been praying for the death of President Obama. On "The Alan Colmes", this exchange took place:

"Are you praying for his death?" Colmes asked.

"Yes," Drake replied.

"So you're praying for the death of the president of the United States?"

"Yes."

Audio available here

What I've heard others say, and I'm going to lay out the argument for, is that under the United States' criminal law, Blake is guilty of conspiracy to commit murder (at the minimum). Let's investigate the terms at hand.

Murder consists of an intentional unlawful act with a design to kill and fatal consequences. Generally, an intention to cause great bodily harm is considered indistinguishable from an intention to kill, as is an act so inherently dangerous that any reasonable person would realize the likelihood of fatality. Thus, if the defendant hurled the victim from a bridge, it is no defense to argue that harm was not contemplated, or that the defendant hoped only to break bones. source

Conspiracy to commit murder is an agreement of two or more people to commit a crame, or to accomplish a legal end through illegal actions. Conspiracy law usually does not require proof of specific intent by the defendants to injure any specific person to establish an illegal agreement. Instead, usually the law only requires the conspirators have agreed to engage in a certain illegal act. This is sometimes described as a "general intent" to violate the law. source

Blake is praying to God for the death of President Obama. What is prayer? Clearly in this case, his prayer is a request from God for an end result. Let's rephrase it using the work "asking": Blake is asking God for the death of President Obama.

Now, let's change God with "a hitman": Blake is asking a hitman for the death of President Obama. Clearly with these terms, Blake is guilty of conspiracy to commit murder. So what's different between "asking a hitman" and "praying to God?" In the eyes of a believer, absolutely nothing.

Can someone be charged with conspiracy to commit murder for praying?

There's really only two options: Either prayer has power and thus praying for the death of someone is conspiracy to commit murder or prayer has no power. Obviously we know where I stand on the issue -- prayer is absolutely, positively powerless.

For a believer they will assert prayer has power. It would certainly be an interesting court case, but I believe that Blake can be charged with conspiracy to commit murder and probably even convicted. Why do I think that if I don't think prayer has any power?

Let's form an analogy. Let's say Bob posts an ad on Craigslist for a hitman. Let's say Bob and an anonymous person talk about it and agree to whatever terms are necessary. Bob then gets arrested. It does not matter whether or not this anonymous person could murder the target or not. The intent is still there and the conspiracy is still there. A death does not need to happen for conspiracy to take place.

OK, really, **should** we charge people with conspiracy to commit murder?

Now that's a harder question to answer. We've seen what can happen to someone like George Tiller. I honestly think that we should prosecute those who publicly admit they are praying for the death of someone, because there are people who will take matters into their own hands.

But we won't have anyone remotely soon attempt to prosecute this sort of charge. Instead, when confronted with someone who prays for the death of someone, this series of questions should give them reason to pause:

1. Are you praying for the death of X?
2. Do you believe God can kill X?
3. Do you believe that God answers prayers?
4. Do you realize that because you are asking for the death of X from God, whom you feel will respond to your prayers and whom you also believe has the ability to kill X, you are guilty of conspiracy to commit murder?

It's time to get back in the swing of things with my video Sundays.

• Hot off the presses, Potholer54Debunks has a new video debunking the creationist myth that the Grand Canyon had to have been formed in the flood.

• A look back at the classic "Mr. Show", their video The Limits of Science:

• That Mitchell and Webb Look take on the Abraham and Isaac story:

Call me naive. Call me what you will. Watch this clip:

I don't see sexism. I just don't see it. I *can see how someone might take it as sexist, but let's dissect what he's saying:

• First example
• • Random girl approaches in a hotel bar and "wants to spend time with you"
• • Be skeptical, she's most likely a prostitute (especially in Vegas)
• Second example:
• • Suppose you're being hit on in a bar.
• • She then says, "You're very interesting, let me tell you a little bit about myself. I'm a Pisces."
• • He says you have two choices
• • • Tell her that astrology is bunk and offend her
• • • Ignore it and move on

The first example clearly is a joke and lies directly in the stereotypical setting for the "confused person doesn't realize he needs to pay" experience. It also is an allusion to an episode in season 2 of Big Bang Theory where this situation happens.

The second example is with what some people take exception. But Bill Prady phrased the situation very specifically. He didn't say, "If any girl approaches you, you can either tell her astrology is bunk or ignore it." He specifically says if a girl happens to tell you more about herself and the first thing she mentions is her sign, you can either ignore it or let her know how you feel about astrology.

It's very similar to any situation where I'm talking with any gendered person, and they bring up religion. Depending on who this person is and how much I want the conversation to continue, I will either change the subject/say something non-committal or tell them I'm an atheist.

Let alone he wasn't being sexist to any of the women attending TAM7, unless you happen to be someone who would introduce yourself as your astrological sign. If you are, you need to seriously get caught up on your reading.

What I really feel is going on here is confirmation bias. I think there's a lot of situations that can be considered "gray area" for any number of topics, including sexism or racism. When something triggers that notion that is similar to what you're expecting, you assume it was what you were expecting. I feel that a lot of the movements often claim injustice when the offense wasn't really there.

I'm not saying that every claim of injustice is unwarranted -- far from it. I realize we still battle with sexism and racism. There is legitimate concern to be had when people are sexist or racist and harm others, whether it's emotionally or physically. But I think that before anyone makes a claim as severe as calling someone sexist, one should consider the arguments skeptically and thoroughly before coming out with the claim.

But perhaps I'm misunderstanding why this is considered sexist. If so, please leave a comment and let me know, because I'm utterly clueless right now.

I got back from The Amazing Meeting 7 (TAM7) on Tuesday. This was my first TAM, and I had a great time. I wanted to share some highlights, and hopefully encourage more people to come next year. TAM is a conference where skeptics get together to discuss different topics that are currently affecting the world. The most prominent one this year was probably the Anti-vax movement.

This year 1,007 people were officially registered when James Randi stood up to give his opening remarks. This was a huge crowd, but I did run into a lot of the people I was hoping to meet. On Thursday after I arrived, I went to Red Rock Canyon with a skeptic couple I met on the JREF Forums. It's amazing to see what was created in only 6,000 years.

It was hard to get pictures that did the scale justice. If you've never been to Red Rock, it's a must see. It's only $5 per vehicle, and is totally worth the scenic drive. That night was the "meet and greet" where I started to make some friends. I did end up meeting up with Matt Dillahunty for a few minutes before going our separate ways. While we were both there, we tended to go our own paths syncing up once in a while.

The original plan to do some recorded interviews fell through as it was realized a little too late that the speakers could only be booked by going through the TAM organizers, and by the time we inquired, they were basically all booked. That was actually OK with me, because I enjoyed having the flexibility of doing whatever I wanted to :)

I got great seats for the Jamy Ian Swiss, Banachek, Mac King, and Burke show that night. A few moments after I sat down in the second row, none other than Randi himself is seated right in front of me. A few minutes after that, Penn comes up and talks to him for a few minutes.

The show was hilarious and mesmerizing. As a skeptic I know nothing magical is happening, but I can't figure out how in the world they do their tricks. Mac King was great, and I will be going to see his full show, but what stumped me the most was Banachek. It appeared that he was able to guess people's full names, birth dates, and more. I haven't a clue how it works.

Later that night in the lounge, I happened to take a great picture of Brian Brushwood from Scam School:

Day 1 - Friday

Friday morning started off with a live taping of The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Shortly thereafter, Randi gave his introduction in which he explained his absence as of late.

During a routine medical examination more than a month ago, it was discovered that I had a nasty visitor inside me – yet another stunning example of Intelligent Design at work, friends. My doctors went in and removed it, and things are looking up again.

While he is certainly looking his age, his spirits were high through the conference.

Up next was the keynote delivered by Bill Prady, co-creator of The Big Bang Theory. It was a very entertaining talk, and it's refreshing to have a TV show written by people who love science, and it shows in the dialogue. He showed some highlights from the show, and talked about some of the stories behind the characters. It was a great way to kick off the show.

The next part of the day that amazed me was the conversation between Jamy Ian Swiss and James Randi about some of his previous stunts and gigs. Would you believe that he was part of Alice Cooper's videos and built some of the effects?

That night was the SGU dinner, which was very delicious. I was able to meet Jay Novella and briefly Evan Bernstein. Technically I "met" Rebecca because she was the reason Evan left our table so quickly. Unfortunately my paths never crossed with Steve Novella.

After the dinner was Dean Cameron's Nigerian Spam Scam Scam. This was by far the most I laughed all weekend. It is a reenactment of the all-too-common Nigerian 419 scam letters, to which he replied and kept dragging them along. Apparently he always replies with the same line to start off the exchange: "Great! Do you have any toast?"

While it's hilarious to read, it's great to see it acted out with great timing, voices, and facial expressions.

After that George Hrab gave a slightly condensed version of his songs for the elements (a short song written for each of the elements of the periodic table).

Day 2 - Saturday

During the Saturday Morning breakfast, the SGU was scheduled for another live taping. After showing their spoof ghost hunting show video (which hasn't been posted yet AFAIK), things took a surprising turn when Sid Rodrigues stood up and proposed to Rebecca Watson.

Adam Savage of the Mythbusters gave an extremely moving and wonderful talk about his failures getting to where he is now in life. It was this talk that made me 100% sure I was going to buy the DVDs when they're available.

The Magic and Skepticism panel was also excellent. DJ Grothe asked questions and the magicians responded. The questions centered around ethics, when is it OK to lie, etc. It was very interesting to hear them talk about how to structure their magic shows so that they come across explicitly as "tricks" and nothing supernatural.

The Skepticism in Broadcasting panel was equally as entertaining and interesting.

And of course, Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer finished up with a great talk about why the world will not end in 2012.

Day 3 - Sunday

Sunday was a light day that started with paper presentations, which were all done very well. But the big focus was on the Million Dollar Challenge.

This was the first challenge I had watched, and there are many write-ups already, so I won't go into details about what exactly happened -- she failed. What was fascinating to me is that she flew on her own dime out to Vegas without ever trying the test protocol on her own. I would think that anyone who was about to spend that kind of money would double check that the protocol they agreed to would still let their "powers" work.

It was boring, yet extremely fascinating. Everyone was extremely quiet -- apparently the audience watching the stream over the internet didn't even realize there was a crowd of 1,000 skeptics in the room. Of course she's already bickering about the test not being fair, but she did agree to it all.

But the real highlight to me of the day was an auction item that I was a partial winner of -- four people went to a planetarium and observatory with Phil Plait for the evening. We started off by eating a quick dinner, and then watching his Bad Astronomy planetarium show, which despite his uncertainty, was done quite well and was entertaining. The stars were out by then, and we made our way out to the telescopes.

Unfortunately the observatory was right by two baseball fields, and the lights were on full blast for most of the night. But it was still a great experience, having our astronomy questions answered first hand and observing a few globular clusters and binary stars. If anything it confirmed my desire to delve into astronomy more.

Conclusion

Even though I tried to keep my summaries short, you can see how much stuff is jam packed into the TAM experience. If you don't walk away with anything else from this post, definitely mark your calendars next year for TAM 8. I'll be trying my best to make sure I'm there.

Sorry for the long outage, I've been having a crazy busy summer. I'm trying to finish up a lot of work before I'm off to TAM, but as I was walking my dog the other day, I was listening to the latest episode of The Non-Prophets. In it Dennis reads out part of an email from someone named Jim they received. If anyone knows who the author is and if they have a website, please let me know so I can link to them.

I play drums in a rock band for fun, and I've decided I need to help the global financial crisis by buying a new set of drums. Anyway, I was busy setting them up, all excited, when I dropped my tuning key -- a small key, a few centimeters across used for setting up and tuning the drums. Something that drummers always lose.

I watched it bounce to the floor, and under my kick drum pedal. I got down on my hands and knees and found the key under the pedal, resting on the pedal base plate. However, it was sitting perfectly in a drum-key shaped rubber hollow. It had fallen in into a special spot designed by the kick pedal designers to store the drum key.

I was amazed. The key holder was a clever and useful design and I only found it because I accidentally dropped my drum key, and it fell into it. I have a mathematics degree, and I knew this was not impossible, but certainly improbable. However, I was quite excited about how I discovered the secret storage place. The odds were very low, so I knew it would make a great story to share about how I found it.

I want you to pause here, and ask yourself what assumption you personally would have drawn from that experience. Same as me?

Because a while later, I was packing up the drums and found a drum key on the floor. It was the one I had dropped. The rubber hollow already had another spare drum key in it by those very clever kick pedal designers.

Now I, a very scientifically minded person, automatically assumed the incredibly high odds of it falling-perfectly-into-its-mold hypothesis, rather than the very obvious spare-key-already-in-place hypothesis. In both cases, I jumped to the less probable conclusion.

This is a perfect anecdote to use to ponder: when should you be skeptical of highly improbable events? The discussion ensues, and they highlight most of the good points:

• Since his skepticism would have only wasted his efforts when all he needed was a drum key, his conclusion jumping wasn't harmful.
• Someone might be too skeptical if they were to look an additional 10-15 minutes after they found the spare key.
• A true-believer is someone who would later find the other key and continue to proclaim that the original key was the one in the mold.

So, how would you have reacted? I found this story fascinating because I jumped to the same conclusion -- probably partially a result of his choice of words. However, I think I would have also came to that conclusion initially as well.