Retraction Watch just announced the pending retraction of the Comet Research Group's Sodom & Gomorrah pseudoarchaeology paper.
Quote:Sodom comet paper to be retracted two years after editor’s note acknowledging concerns
Reports will retract a controversial paper claiming to present evidence an ancient city in the Middle East was destroyed by an exploding celestial body – an event the authors suggested could have inspired the Biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah.
The decision comes two years after Scientific Reports, a Springer Nature title, published an editor’s note informing readers the journal was looking into concerns about the data and conclusions in the work.
Criticism of the article, “A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea,” began soon after its publication in September 2021.
The authors’ response reiterated the “high-temperature melted pottery and melted surficial sediment” they had reported at the site. An earlier Matters Arising, published in March 2022, questioned whether those findings could be the result of ancient smelting technologies rather than a fireball from space. “The observations and data presented here do not meet the well-established criteria for documenting evidence of an extraterrestrial event,” the critics concluded.
https://retractionwatch.com/2025/04/23/s...-concerns/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
