ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 20

Livin’ That Vax Life

Let’s say you’ve been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Enough time has passed, and you’re now “officially” immunized. Now what? Can you go back to living life as it was in 2019? Should you still be wearing a mask? Can you still infect someone even if you don’t get sick yourself? Is it okay to hug? …

Biden Cancels God!

It really should go without saying, but a secular government based upon the separation of church and state should not be issuing proclamations declaring a National Day of Prayer, sending the message that, as Americans, we are all expected to seek favor from a supernatural overseer. But the religious Right, as usual, is not satisfied. …

OPEN DISCUSSION MAY 2021

This thread has been created for discussion on themes relevant to Reason and Science for which there are not currently any dedicated threads. Please note that our Comment Policy applies as usual. There is a link to this at the foot of the page. If you would like to refer back to previous open discussion …

How Your Brain Understands (and Misunderstands) the World

Reality is not what it seems! This is not just a weak attempt at sounding vaguely profound (or what Daniel Dennett might call a “deepity”), but an honest-to-goodness truth about how our brains interpret the world around us. This was the lesson from the most recent presentation by Jeff Hawkins, founder of Palm Computing and …

Atheists’ Rights Are Human Rights

The plight of persecuted nonbelievers has the attention of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). Their most recent annual report on the global state of the freedom of belief highlights several instances and examples in which governments and non-state entities strip basic civil rights from nontheists, forcing them to live in fear …

Unbelievable Change

From the Richard Dawkins Foundation Newsletter. Subscribe here. It wasn’t so long ago, that when a newly inaugurated President of the United States, Barack Obama, mentioned “nonbelievers” in a wholly inclusive way, the minds of said nonbelievers were blown. We had become so accustomed to atheism being entirely taboo in political discourse and to the …

Video: Richard Dawkins on Outgrowing God

As a special treat to celebrate the 80th birthday of Richard Dawkins, the arts-and-sciences nonprofit Pioneer Works released a short clip of a 2019 interview with Richard in which he reads, to everyone’s great amusement, selections from the hate mail he regularly receives. Much to our delight, a couple of weeks later, Pioneer Works posted …

The Wall of Separation May Be About to Buckle

Any day now, perhaps just as you’re reading this, the U.S. Supreme Court is set to rule on the case of Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, in which a Christian foster agency that received government funding is suing to be allowed to discriminate against LGBTQ clients, claiming that their religious beliefs exempt them from having …

Pakistan Roils over French Cartoons

Hardline Islamists in Pakistan are, as The Economist recently said, holding their country hostage. After sparking violent riots in protest over cartoons in France that hurt their religious feelings, the extremist party Tehreek-e-Labaik Pakistan was banned and declared a terrorist organization by the country’s Parliament. But still feeling the pressure from Islamists, the Parliament then debated expelling France’s ambassador. Meanwhile, …

The Tapestry of Nones

The “rise of the Nones” is now a well-documented demographic phenomenon, as surveys show that America’s religiously unaffiliated make up anywhere from a fifth to a third of the population. What’s still difficult to pin down is who exactly all these Nones are. At FiveThirtyEight, political scientist Ryan Burge and reporter Perry Bacon Jr. dig …