Magic Statistics

It is well and truly open season on Christians in India.  Hindus and Muslims have been intimidating and terrorising Indian Christians for years.  Now even Marxists have gotten in on the act.

After a court decision favourable to Christian educational institutions, Marxist student groups in Changanassery, Kerala state, inflicted severe property damage on local Christian schools.

Church leaders and organizations have condemned the vandalism unleashed on Christian educational institutions by the student outfits belonging to the ruling Communist Party of India, Marxist government in the southern Indian state of Kerala.

On Wednesday, Students Federation of India, the Leftist student wing, smashed computers, vehicles, doors and windows of some Church-run educational institutions in Kerala following a court order that seemingly favored self-financing professional colleges run by minority communities.

Church leaders on Thursday deplored the violence. “It is disgraceful that Marxist student outfits are attacking minority institutions that are serving the society,” said Changanassery Archbishop Joseph Powathil, who is also the chairman of the Education Commission of the Kerala Catholic Bishops Council.

The archbishop is convinced that the student groups acted with the tacit approval of the ruling Marxist party.

The Christian church in Kerala state was founded by St Thomas the Apostle, who came here c AD 52.  He preached the gospel and estabished the first churches in India.  He was martyred in India in AD 72; some believe he brought the gospel to China before he died.

h/t: International Christian Concern

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• Indian public servant killed for his faith in Christ
• Hindu extremists torch church, arrest carol-singers

Withholding raw data used in ascertaining published findings is something I would have thought absolutely verboten among academics and scientists.  If the data are not shared, other experts cannot ensure that a researcher has appropriately handled the data and utilised sound procedures in generating results.  It is difficult to imagine a stratagem more certain to undermine accountability and credibility and damage the very concept of a scientific community.

Yet that is exactly what’s happened to Canadian engineer and climate researcher Steve McIntyre who, with statistician Ross McKittrick, is notorious among global warming alarmists for debunking the so-called Hockey Stick temperature chart.  An e-mail from Douglas J. Keenan, published this morning by John Ray at Greenie Watch, outlines the story.

One of the big problems in global warming studies, and in science generally, is that research data is often not available to outsiders. Instead, researchers tend to hoard the data for themselves and their friends (who are reluctant to be critical).

Last month, Steve McIntyre (of Hockey Stick fame) began a battle against this by filing an FOI Act request for data used in an important global warming study. The study was done by Phil Jones (a leading researcher), at the University of East Anglia. McIntyre's request was initially refused in toto by the university. McIntyre then filed an appeal with the university.

Separately, I filed a request for a portion of the same data. At first, the university said they were going to process my request in they same way that they had processed McIntyre's, which I believe to be improper. So I drafted a letter of complaint to the UK Information Commissioner's Office, sent the draft to the university, and asked them to let me know if they believed the letter to be inaccurate.

Yesterday, April 3rd, McIntyre and I received notices that the university would supply the information that we requested. More details are posted on McIntyre's blog.

This could change the way that research is conducted in the UK. The result should be both (i) higher quality, as researchers realize that their analyses will be scrutinized far more closely than has been done in the past, and (ii) much improved cross-fertilization of science. In other words, the potential change for UK science is truly huge.

For what it's worth, I have had some small involvement with one other FOI request for scientific data. This was with the infamous "Gillberg affair" in Sweden. There the researchers fought the request hard and, before the data could be examined, they destroyed it: 100,000 pages covering 15 years of research was lost.

What on earth could Prof Jones be afraid of?  If the university follows through on its promise to provide the data, we should soon find out.  I can’t wait.

Now that I think of it, the authors of the Lancet study of Iraqi deaths have also refused to release their raw data.  I wonder if an FOI Act request would pry those data loose.

Previous related posts:

• Global-warming alarmists are the real skeptics
• Has global warming been oversold?
• Global-warming scare-mongers rule
• Kyoto is pointless: The globe has stopped warming

Lifted shamelessly from MadPriest at Of course, I could be wrong . . .

MP, your excellent cartoon is most praiseworthy. 

Some dimwit vandals in Warren, Michigan, spray-painted pro-Christian graffiti and anti-Arab obscenities on a newly built Assyrian Christian church.  HELLO!

Vandals used paint and slurs to send a message, however vulgar and misguided, at a local church in the overnight hours of April 1-2.
. . .
Several words were written in blue and black spray-paint on the rear of the Holy Apostolic Catholic Assyrian Church of the East. The church serves a congregation of Assyrian Christians, many of whom are of Syrian, Iranian or Iraqi descent. The words, including several profanities, were seemingly directed at Arabs, while one phrase referred to “1 God Jesus.”

“We don’t know who they are. We ask our Lord to forgive them,” said Father Benjamin Benjamin, the church’s local leader. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”

Got that right!  The church building is named for St Mary and several crosses are clearly visible on its exterior.  (See photo below.)

Christian worship among Assyrians dates back to the first or second century.  Also, most Assyrians are not Arabs and do not speak Arabic.

Local police and the Michigan Department of Civil Rights are investigating.  The Mayor of Warren released a statement denouncing the vandalism.

After worshipping for twenty years at an older building in the Detroit suburb, the congregation of about 200 families had this new church built at a cost of several million dollars.  Rev Father Benjamin Benjamin said that the church’s opening will go ahead as scheduled on 6 May.

The Holy Apostolic Catholic Assyrian Church of the East, to which St Mary’s Church belongs, is neither Catholic nor Orthodox.  It split from the undivided early church at the time of the Nestorian schism of 431, but its theology is no longer Nestorianism.  In 1994, Assyrian Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV and Pope John Paul II met at the Vatican and signed a Common Christological Declaration.  In 2001, Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) declared that Roman Catholics in Iraq unable to attend a Catholic church could receive the Eucharist at an Assyrian Church.

h/t: Assyrian Life

Previous related posts:

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Painting: Giotto di Bondone, Washing of Feet, 1304-06. Cappella Scrovegni (Arena Chapel), Padua.