ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 182

A wealthy televangelist explains his fleet of private jets: ‘It’s a biblical thing’

By Michael Brice-Saddler In the waning days of 2015, renowned televangelist Kenneth Copeland laid out exactly why he needs a luxury private jet to do his job: You can’t “talk to God” while flying commercial. Criticized at the time for his use of extravagant planes, Copeland argued that travel for his work would be difficult, nay, impossible …

Walmart And Homeopathic Medicines

NPR’s Scott Simon asks Nicholas Little of the Center for Inquiry about suing Walmart for the way it markets homeopathic medicines. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Walmart is being sued over what are called homeopathic medicines, not for selling them but for how they’re sold. The Center for Inquiry has filed a lawsuit against Walmart for consumer …

Little Green Men? Nope, Extraterrestrial Life May Look More Like Pasta.

By Stephanie Pappas To find life on Mars, scientists should keep their eyes peeled for pasta. Hot-spring-loving microbes create rock formations that look like fettuccini or capellini, according to a new NASA-funded study published online April 30 in the journal Astrobiology. Such pasta-shaped formations could be the first clues to life on other planets, said study author …

Climate crisis more politically polarizing than abortion for US voters, study finds

By Oliver Milman Surging concern among Americans about an overheating planet has done little to shift a political polarization that has now reached a stunning extreme: climate breakdown divides Democrats and Republicans even more than abortion does. When voters were asked to rank topics important to them for the 2020 presidential election, conservative Republicans put global warming …

People Really Don’t Like Atheists. Why?

By Ryan P. Burge For the last few weeks I have been considering a pretty simple question: Why aren’t there more religious nones elected to the United States Congress? I previously concluded that atheists and agnostics are surprisingly cohesive political groups and therefore one cannot say that non-believers can’t get elected because they don’t have a unified …

Research Presented at Vatican Shows That Anti-Atheist Stereotypes Are Inaccurate

By Hemant Mehta Here are two things you never want to hear when it comes to a newly released survey: We got money from the Templeton Foundation and we’re presenting our findings at the Vatican. Neither is disqualifying but both usually require explanations. (The Templeton Foundation has a long history of funding projects that have a pro-religion …

Killing wolves was supposed to solve a problem but created one that will last forever

By Darryl Fears On a cold, miserable morning in May, Stan Gehrt trod across an open field as wind and rain blew in his face. He was leading a team of wildlife biologists on a mission to find an animal with a gift for not being seen. The team didn’t have to travel far from …

There Are Still 10 Chernobyl-Style Reactors Operating Across Russia. How Do We Know They’re Safe?

By Stephanie Pappas In the new HBO miniseries “Chernobyl,” Russian scientists uncover the reason for an explosion in Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, which spewed radioactive material across northern Europe. That reactor, a design called the RBMK-1000, was discovered to be fundamentally flawed after the Chernobyl accident. And yet there are still 10 …

Here’s a Fantastic Primer on the Christian Right’s “Project Blitz”

By Hemant Mehta “Project Blitz” is the Christian Right’s three-pronged strategy to push their faith through the government. The name referred to the idea that if Christian politicians jammed legislatures with a variety of bills, some of them would eventually pass. There were three specific categories of bills: Symbolic ones (like putting “In God We Trust” everywhere), pro-Christian ones (like passing “Christian Heritage …

Abused by missionaries

By Lise Olsen and Sarah Smith George Thomas Wade Jr. had been spreading the gospel as a missionary on African training farms and in bush villages for six years when his Southern Baptist supervisors learned a horrifying secret: The supposedly devout man of God was molesting his own daughter. A supervisor met once privately with …