ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 151

A Miscarrying Woman Nearly Died After a Catholic Hospital Sent Her Home Three Times

By Amy Littlefield There’s a single hospital in Bellingham, a picturesque coastal city 20 miles from the Canadian border in Washington. So when a Bellingham mental health counselor named Alison started bleeding three months into her pregnancy in 2013, PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center was her only option. Alison had first gone to her OB-GYN’s …

More North Carolina families using religious exemptions to opt out of vaccinations

By Jonah Kaplan and Tonya Simpson We may be One Nation Under God, but religion, at least on paper, is becoming more of a factor in North Carolina families saying “no thanks” to immunizations for all. In this special investigation, the ABC11 I-Team joined the seven other ABC Owned Television Stations to dig into vaccination rates and …

A Strange New Higgs Particle May Have Stolen the Antimatter from Our Universe

By Paul Sutter Why our universe is swirling with more matter than its bizarre counterpart antimatter — and why we exist at all — is one of the most perplexing puzzles of modern physics. Somehow, when the universe was incredibly young, almost all the antimatter disappeared, leaving just the normal stuff. Theorists have long stalked the ever-elusive explanation …

Trump Announces New $25 Million “Religious Freedom” Initiative During UN Speech

By Jeff Taylor President Donald Trump announced a new initiative at a United Nations event on Monday, pledging to spend “$25 million to protect religious freedom, religious sites, and relics.” Trump also said he would be “forming a coalition of U.S. businesses for the protection of religious freedom,” calling it a first of its kind event, and …

Taking Evangelical Support of Israel at Face Value Is a Terrible Idea: A Response

By Chrissy Stroop As many readers of Religion Dispatches are likely aware, The Forward recently published a couple of pieces portraying Christian Zionism in general, and evangelical Christian Zionism in particular, as essentially benign. Most recently, a partner at a Christian law firm writing under the pseudonym Jarvis Best accused some of his Jewish friends and others who harbor suspicion about …

Census Results Show That Nearly Half of New Zealand Has No Religious Affiliation

By Hemant Mehta The first results from the 2018 New Zealand Census have just been released and there’s a bombshell when it comes to God: Nearly half the population has no religious affiliation whatsoever. Based on the raw data made available to the public, there are 2,264,601 people who checked a box marked “No religion.” That’s in a nation of 4,699,755 …

Venus May Have Been Habitable Until a Mysterious Catastrophe Millions of Years Ago

By Peter Dockrill Venus is not a nice place, by human standards. For a world named after a Roman goddess of love and beauty, it really is quite the toxic, super-heated hellscape. But it wasn’t always this way. In a new study, scientists make the case for how ancient Venus could have once supported life alongside oceans of …

A Pastafarian hilariously trolled a town council meeting. The stakes are profoundly serious.

By Ian Millhiser Last Tuesday, Barrett Fletcher, the “founding pastor of the First Lower Peninsula Congregation of Pastafarians,” placed a pasta strainer on his head and opened an Alaskan local government meeting with a prayer. “I’m called to invoke the power of the true creator of the universe, the drunken tolerator of all lesser and more …

Unvaccinated Children Are Now Barred From Going To School In New York — And Their Anti-Vax Parents Are Really Mad

By Ellie Hall Furious anti-vax parents in New York this week are posting memes and images of sad children — and have shown up in person to protest the governor — because a new law prohibiting unvaccinated children from attending school went into effect. The mandate, enacted in June, “prohibits a school from permitting any …

The Christian converts who are setting fire to sacred Aboriginal objects

By Erin Parke Christian missionaries are causing a fresh wave of upset in outback Australia, promising to bring people back from the dead, and promoting the idea traditional Aboriginal culture is a type of devil worship. An investigation by Background Briefing has uncovered dramatic scenes in the Kimberley region, where Aboriginal followers of a Tongan-born …