ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 244

Politics as the New Religion for Progressive Democrats

By Emma Green

The voters who are most amped for the 2018 elections look elite in nearly every way. They are Democrats, college-educated, and largely secular. They are likely to be women, but they’re not necessarily white or particularly young. These are the people who might post rants about Donald Trump on Facebook or harass their friends to donate to Planned Parenthood. They may sign petitions on Change.org or follow the Facebook page of the U.S. Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke, even though they don’t live in Texas. Maybe they attended the Women’s March two years ago, or the March for Our Lives this spring.

This is the sketch that emerges from a new poll by The Atlantic and the Public Religion Research Institute, which looks at Americans’ civic engagement in the lead-up to November’s midterms. With Democrats fired up in opposition to Trump and the Republican majority in both houses of Congress, it’s no shock that liberal voters are leading the way with political activism. “Whoever is in the losing party tends to be more energized,” said Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, the director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University. “They have something to win back.”

It’s the segment that’s surprising: Religiously unaffiliated voters, who may or may not be associated with other civic institutions, seem most excited about supporting or donating to causes, going to rallies, and expressing opinions online, among other activities. Political engagement may be providing these Americans with a new form of identity. And in turn, they may be helping to solidify the new identity of the Democratic Party.

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Solar neutrinos reveal how the Sun shines

By Aldo Serenelli

Energy is generated in the interior of the Sun through sequences of nuclear reactions in which four protons fuse together to form a helium-4 nucleus. These sequences are accompanied by the release of two particles known as electron neutrinos. Models suggest that 99% of the nuclear energy released by the Sun originates from three reaction sequences — collectively known as the proton–proton (pp) chain — that are initiated by the fusion of two protons. In a paper in Nature, the Borexino Collaboration1 reports the first complete measurement of neutrino fluxes that originate from these three sequences, based on an analysis of more than 2,000 days of data collection. The results help us to understand the details of how and why the Sun shines.

Neutrinos interact weakly with matter, and therefore escape almost unhindered from the Sun’s interior, to reach Earth about eight minutes later. Solar neutrinos therefore provide a direct view into the nuclear furnace in the Sun’s core. The Borexino experiment (Fig. 1) detects such neutrinos and determines how much energy they have by measuring the amount of light produced when the particles interact with the detecting agent (an organic liquid, called the scintillator, which is kept underground to minimize the amount of background radiation that can interfere with the neutrino signals). In contrast to all other solar-neutrino experiments, Borexino can measure the energies of both high- and low-energy neutrinos, which makes it possible to study the structure of the solar core using a technique known as neutrino spectroscopy.

Electron neutrinos can change into two other types (or flavours) of neutrino, known as tau and muon neutrinos, as they travel to Earth, a phenomenon known as flavour oscillation. The Borexino experiment is more sensitive to electron neutrinos than to tau or muon neutrinos, and so flavour oscillation needs to be accounted for when the measured neutrino fluxes are used to calculate the fluxes produced in the Sun. Taking this into consideration, the Borexino collaborators used the measured neutrino flux to work out the total power generated by nuclear reactions in the Sun’s core, with an uncertainty of about 10%, and found that this is the same as the measured photon output — thus showing that nuclear fusion is indeed the source of energy in the Sun. This value, calculated for the amount of energy produced through nuclear reactions, is comparable with previous2 results obtained by combining data from several neutrino-detection experiments, and places the most robust and model-independent constraints on the source of solar energy.

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Alaska archdiocese launches commission to review church files on sexual abuse

By Jack Jenkins

The Archdiocese of Anchorage is launching an independent commission on sexual abuse to review all personnel files of those who have served in the region since 1966 and plans to release names of any Catholic church workers in their purview with credible sexual misconduct claims against them.

The move mirrors that of other U.S. dioceses that have launched similar efforts in an attempt to respond to the ongoing sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church.

The Alaskan announcement came just hours after Virginia’s attorney general declared his state would also begin examining accusations of child sex abuse in local dioceses.

The archdiocese announced its commission Wednesday morning (Oct. 24), saying it was created by a decree the previous day by Archbishop Paul D. Etienne. It plans to review not only the files of priests and religious workers — both men and women — but also allegations of sexual misconduct by lay volunteers and employees reported to the archdiocese.

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Should clergy get a housing tax credit? Longtime provision could go away after Freedom From Religion group sues

By Angie Leventis Lourgos

The Rev. Chris Butler often uses his home to host Bible studies or pastoral counseling for members of Chicago Embassy Church, his small Pentecostal congregation on the South Side.

Like many faith leaders, he receives a tax-free housing allowance for clergy, which he considers critical to his ministry as well as the church’s survival.

Now Butler and other local pastors are fighting in federal court in Chicago to keep that tax break, after a judge in Wisconsin ruled last year that the decades-old ministerial housing allowance violates the separation of church and state. Oral arguments in the case — which is followed closely by clergy across the country — began in Chicago on Wednesday.

“Living close to the congregation I serve means I can devote my time to serving at-risk youth, the poor, those affected by drugs and gang violence, and most importantly those who are lost and seeking a real connection with God,” said Butler, whose home is in the Kenwood neighborhood. “Taking this vital provision away would be detrimental to Chicago’s neediest communities that receive important support from ministries run by Chicago Embassy Church and other ministries.”

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Ireland to vote in referendum on ‘largely obsolete’ blasphemy law

By Kara Fox

Irish voters head to the polls Friday where they will be asked to vote on removing the offense of blasphemy from the constitution.

The referendum on blasphemy is the most recent in a series of referendums poised to reflect the nation’s continued trajectory into a secular, diverse society.

The referendum, which takes place on the same day as Ireland’s presidential election, will ask the public whether to remove the word “blasphemous” from Article 40 of the constitution, which reads: “The publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter is an offence which shall be punishable in accordance with law.”

Although the nation’s blasphemy ban was enshrined in the constitution in 1937, no one has ever been prosecuted under it.

In 1995, a member of the public lodged a blasphemy case against the Sunday Independent newspaper, which had printed a cartoon of government ministers refusing the Catholic sacrament of communion. Ireland’s Supreme Court eventually threw out the case in 1999, ruling that although blasphemy was technically a crime, there was no law to enforce it.

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D.C. attorney general opens inquiry into sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Washington

By Peter Jamison and Michelle Boorstein

D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine said Tuesday that his office has begun an investigation of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy in the Archdiocese of Washington, the latest in a string of state-level law enforcement officials now looking into the Catholic Church’s handling of abuse complaints.

The investigation, announced by Racine at a regularly scheduled breakfast among the District’s elected officials, will bring scrutiny to Catholic leaders who have come under intense criticism in recent months.

Pope Francis accepted Cardinal Donald Wuerl’s resignation this month as Washington’s archbishop amid an uproar over a Pennsylvania grand jury report that depicted systemic abuse in the Catholic Church across the state, including in Pittsburgh, where Wuerl had been a bishop.

Former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, Wuerl’s predecessor at the Washington Archdiocese, was removed from ministry in June amid allegations that he had sexually abused a teenager decades ago while serving as a priest in New York.

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Virus detectives test whole-body scans in search of HIV’s hiding places

By Sara Reardon

Antiretroviral drugs have transformed HIV infection from a death sentence to a chronic condition for many people who carry the virus. But because HIV never truly leaves the body, the virus rebounds rapidly if patients stop taking the drugs for even a short time.

Now scientists are trying to figure out how, and where, HIV hides when blood tests show that a person’s viral load is low or undetectable. The location of this reservoir has long been a mystery, but that could soon change. Powerful new techniques are giving researchers an unprecedented look at how HIV travels though the bodies of people and animals — turning up clues to the virus’s hiding places and new targets for future therapies.

HIV is a challenging foe because it integrates into the DNA of its host cells. Some scientists argue that a true cure would require removing all traces of the virus’s DNA from the body, rather than simply preventing HIV from hijacking cells to replicate itself — and that goal may be unreachable. “We are starting to realize that getting rid of all the HIV DNA is not completely realistic,” says Sara Gianella, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of California, San Diego.

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Atheist Group Calls for Arkansas Razorbacks Coaches to Stop Praying with Players

By Hemant Mehta

Here’s some life advice for Christian athletes and coaches everywhere. If your public university is breaking the law by letting coaches praying with athletes on the field, don’t brag about it online.

Julian B. Griffin, the Offensive Quality Control coach at the University of Arkansas, tweeted this picture of Associate Head Coach Jeff Traylor praying with athletes.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is now calling on the university to put a stop to this unconstitutional promotion of religion. Legal Fellow Colin McNamara notes that state schools cannot lead players in on-field prayers.

… Coaches should be aware of the tremendous influence they have on their athletes. Coach Traylor, Coach Griffin, and rest of the staff control over players’ positions, playing time, and in some cases, their very futures. Injecting religion into this coercive relationship is inappropriate and constitutionally suspect.…

Of course, nothing in this letter or in the law prevents students who wish to pray by themselves or with each other from doing so. The issue is not with prayer itself, but with officers of the state using their positions of influence to promote their personal religion.

Will anyone notice that FFRF has no problem with the athletes praying alone or with each other? I doubt it. This issue is about power and coercion, not the act of praying itself. Now it’s up to the university to make sure it’s not violating the law.

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Anti-gay lawyers just showed up in the Supreme Court with a big ask for Brett Kavanaugh

By Ian Millhiser

A team of conservative lawyers filed a petition in the Supreme Court on Friday, effectively asking the Court to allow religious conservatives to discriminate against same-sex couples.

This latest case, Klein v. Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries, presents many of the same issues that arose last term in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. That case, billed as an epic showdown over whether religion can be used to discriminate, wound up being resolved in a nothingburger opinion holding that states must be exceedingly polite to religious conservatives when those states enforce their civil rights laws.

Yet, while Klein is factually quite similar to Masterpiece Cakeshop, the lawyers behind Klein ask for an even more aggressive decision than religious conservatives sought in Masterpiece. They do not simply ask for a decision permitting their client to discriminate, they ask the Court to completely overhaul its interpretation of the Constitution’s promise that everyone can freely exercise their religion — and to overrule a 28-year-old precedent authored by Justice Antonin Scalia in the process.

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A Conversation with Richard Dawkins