ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 238

The not-so-dangerous lives of Neanderthals

By Marta Mirazón Lahr Injuries are part of everyday life, from a scratch on the skin to a broken bone to a fatal trauma. Although many injuries are accidental, others can arise as a consequence of an individual’s or a group’s behaviour, activity or social norms — characteristics that tell us about societies and the inherent …

How Trump administration pressure to dump 4-H’s LGBT policy led to Iowa leader’s firing

By Courtney Crowder and Jason Clayworth The Trump administration pushed the national 4-H youth organization to withdraw a controversial policy welcoming LGBT members — a move that helped lead to the ouster of Iowa’s top 4-H leader earlier this year, a Des Moines Register investigation has found. The international youth organization, with more than 6 million members, …

Texas Will Keep Teaching Kids That Moses Influenced the Founding of America

By David Gee The Texas Board of Education has decided to keep the biblical character of Moses in the part of the social studies curriculum that discusses historical figures important to the founding of the United States. We reported in September on the board’s preliminary vote, which recommended keeping Moses and removing Hillary Clinton from the overall curriculum. …

The Earth Is Eating Its Own Oceans

By Stephanie Pappas As Earth’s tectonic plates dive beneath one another, they drag three times as much water into the planet’s interior as previously thought. Those are the results of a new paper published today (Nov. 14) in the journal Nature. Using the natural seismic rumblings of the earthquake-prone subduction zone at the Marianas trench, where the …

Lab-grown ‘mini brains’ produce electrical patterns that resemble those of premature babies

By Sara Reardon ‘Mini brains’ grown in a dish have spontaneously produced human-like brain waves for the first time — and the electrical patterns look similar to those seen in premature babies. The advancement could help scientists to study early brain development. Research in this area has been slow, partly because it is difficult to obtain fetal-tissue …

Wentzville (MO) Settles Case With Atheist Who Criticized “In God We Trust” Sign

By Hemant Mehta Back in February, atheist activist Sally Hunt attended a meeting of the Board of Aldermen in Wentzville, Missouri to criticize the “In God We Trust” sign they had in giant letters in their meeting room. You can hear her speech in that video. It’s direct, but it’s calm. Hunt explained the history of the …

Politicians, Take Note: Secular Voters Are a Powerful, and Growing, Part of the Population

By Andrew L. Seidel Given the intensity of the news cycle last week, you might have missed the biggest story of the election: the surge of the “nones.” U.S. voters hit two important milestones in the 2018 midterm. First, Protestants were not the majority of the electorate, according to Religion News Service. Second, as white evangelical Christians, who carried Trump into office on a …

First-grade public school teacher’s ‘daily Bible verse’ angers parents in Texas district

By Brandon Mulder

Parents of students in a Texas public school district have taken issue with an online video a first-grade teacher showing her class repeating Bible verses, apparently in violation of a U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down school-sponsored Bible readings and prayer.

The video, which was posted to Facebook on Nov. 1 by Susan Schobel, a teacher at Brown Primary School in the Smithville Independent School District, shows her classroom sitting in a circle repeating Romans 12:9-10.

“Start your day with a good Bible verse and life just seems better!!” Schobel wrote in the video’s caption. “This is our daily Bible verse.”

The video was removed several days later, but not before a copy was saved by at least one parent and shared with the Smithville Times newspaper.

“This is not okay,” wrote Ashley Nicole, who has a child at Brown Primary, in a letter to the school district. “I am truly shocked. I am concerned about how this is getting handled.”

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Activists take aim at anti-LGBTQ ‘hate group,’ Alliance Defending Freedom

By Julie Compton

Surrounded by the skyscrapers that tower over Times Square, a new billboard went up this week that in large black letters reads: “NO GAYS ALLOWED.” Just below, a smaller message states: “STOP Alliance Defending Freedom. Learn more at NoGays.org.”

The billboard is part of a new campaign that aims to draw attention to the conservative Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, or ADF, which has been labeled an anti-LGBTQ “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a designation the group disputes. Since its founding nearly 25 years ago, ADF has been linked to efforts seeking to criminalize homosexuality, restrict transgender people’s access to sex-segregated facilities and permit businesses to deny service to LGBTQ people.

Caleb Cade, a spokesman for Citizens for Transparency, the advocacy group behind the campaign, said the powerful nonprofit law group has fought for years to undermine lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer rights, often behind the scenes.

“We want to remind people that there are still really insidious forces at work against our community,” Cade told NBC News. “ADF has been leading that war for a long time, with tens of millions of dollars to do it.”

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The Catholic Church is embroiled in a hell of its own making

By Elizabeth Bruenig

In ancient Rome, the gates of hell were always open — a wise rendering of the inferno. “The gates of hell are open night and day; smooth the descent, and easy is the way,” the poet Virgil’s oracle tells his hero Aeneas, “But to return, and view the cheerful skies — in this the task and mighty labor lies.” For most, the effort of escape was too extreme — though an exemplary soul, such as Aeneas, could sometimes make it back to the land of the living if they possessed appropriate courage and willpower.

How little the Eternal City changes. Contemporary Rome now finds itself embroiled in a hell much of its own making, and its gates are wide-open — if anyone has the moral fortitude to simply walk out.

The events at this week’s meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore haven’t given much cause for confidence. The main subject of the convention was set to be the sex abuse crisis, which has roiled the church anew since this summer’s revelations concerning Pennsylvania and disgraced Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. The bishops had planned to vote on “concrete measures to respond to the abuse crisis,” but Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, the conference president, was informed the night before the meeting that the Vatican had decreed there would be no such vote.

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