ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 246

Voters with no religious affiliation hold power to sway direction of country

By Annie Laurie Gaylor

Secular voters could very well determine the outcome of the upcoming midterm elections.

The ranks of atheists, agnostics and those with no religious affiliation – “the Nones” – have increased by 19 million since Barack Obama was first elected president, making them the fastest-growing group by religious identification in America. In 2004, the Nones comprised just 16 percent of all American adults, but have now grown to a represent roughly a quarter of all adults and a third of millennials.

The Nones have been traditionally underrepresented at the ballot box, but that’s changing. The religiously unaffiliated accounted for 15 percent of voters in the 2016 presidential elections, a 3 percentage point increase since 2012. The coming election will quite possibly see a further uptick in this number.

“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,” states a recent Atlantic magazine analysis. “Political engagement may be providing these Americans with a new form of identity.”

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GOP Rushes to Confirm Enemy of Church/State Separation to Appellate Court

By Hemant Mehta

In news that’s shocking to nobody, Republicans are trying to push judicial nominees through the confirmation process even though Democrats (and several Republicans) on the judiciary committee are home campaigning. Indeed, that’s the reason they’re going through with the hearings at all — might as well jam these six ultra-conservative nominees through en masse before anyone can push back against them.

It’s a travesty, yet it’s also the only way Republicans seem to operate these days. They know many of these nominees would never make it through a fair process, under critical questioning, so they’re trying to work around it by holding hearings without any Democrats around.

One of the nominees four Republicans were around for yesterday was Allison Jones Rushing, who could have a lifetime appointment to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. One of the four senators around to question her, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), said in his opening remarks to Rushing, “I’m very impressed with you.”

But a number of church/state separation groups are condemning her nomination specifically.

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Jamal Khashoggi: What the Arab world needs most is free expression

By Jamal Khashoggi

A note from Karen Attiah, Global Opinions editor

I received this column from Jamal Khashoggi’s translator and assistant the day after Jamal was reported missing in Istanbul. The Post held off publishing it because we hoped Jamal would come back to us so that he and I could edit it together. Now I have to accept: That is not going to happen. This is the last piece of his I will edit for The Post. This column perfectly captures his commitment and passion for freedom in the Arab world. A freedom he apparently gave his life for. I will be forever grateful he chose The Post as his final journalistic home one year ago and gave us the chance to work together.

I was recently online looking at the 2018 “Freedom in the World” report published by Freedom House and came to a grave realization. There is only one country in the Arab world that has been classified as “free.” That nation is Tunisia. Jordan, Morocco and Kuwait come second, with a classification of “partly free.” The rest of the countries in the Arab world are classified as “not free.”

As a result, Arabs living in these countries are either uninformed or misinformed. They are unable to adequately address, much less publicly discuss, matters that affect the region and their day-to-day lives. A state-run narrative dominates the public psyche, and while many do not believe it, a large majority of the population falls victim to this false narrative. Sadly, this situation is unlikely to change.

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Pharmacist at Meijer store in Michigan refuses medicine to woman having miscarriage

By Kristen Jordan Shamus

A Michigan woman is demanding that Meijer discipline a pharmacist and implement a company-wide policy for how pharmacists should handle religious and moral objections to dispensing medication after she was denied a prescription to help complete a miscarriage.

Rachel Peterson, 35, alleges a pharmacist at a Meijer store in Petoskey refused to fill her prescription for a drug called misoprostol (brand name Cytotec) in July because of his personal religious views. She says he also refused to transfer the prescription to another pharmacy.

Misoprostol can be used to prevent stomach ulcers and also can be used to induce labor during pregnancy, to aid in the completion of a miscarriage and in the treatment of postpartum hemorrhage. When combined with another drug, it can be used to induce an abortion.

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Prominent evangelical leader on Khashoggi crisis: let’s not risk “$100 billion worth of arms sales”

By Tara Isabella Burton

A major evangelical leader has spoken in defense of US-Saudi relations after the apparent killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in a Saudi consulate, saying that America has more important things — like arms deals — to focus on.

Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, appeared on its flagship television show The 700 Club on Monday to caution Americans against allowing the United States’ relationship with Saudi Arabia to deteriorate over Khashoggi’s death.

“For those who are screaming blood for the Saudis — look, these people are key allies,” Robertson said. While he called the faith of the Wahabists — the hardline Islamist sect to which the Saudi Royal Family belongs — “obnoxious,” he urged viewers to remember that “we’ve got an arms deal that everybody wanted a piece of…it’ll be a lot of jobs, a lot of money come to our coffers. It’s not something you want to blow up willy-nilly.”

Robertson praised the approach of President Donald Trump, who has publicly cast doubt on the allegations against the Saudis, comparing them to those of sexual assault against Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh earlier this month. On Wednesday, after the New York Times reported that it had obtained audio of Khashoggi being tortured, murdered, and dismembered inside the consulate, Turkish newspaper Yeni Safak reported that Trump said that he had requested the recording, “if it exists,” later adding “I’m not sure that it exists.”

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Trump Is Planning A New Rule To Let Federal Contractors Fire Employees For Religious Reasons

By Dominic Holden

When the Trump administration issued a directive in August that expanded a “religious exemption” for federal contractors who are accused of discrimination, activists feared the worst. The policy was essentially legal guidance, but it targeted LGBT rights specifically.

Now their fears have escalated.

The Trump administration is currently planning to create a formal religious-liberty regulation for businesses with federal contracts, which would create a loophole in an Obama administration policy protecting LGBT workers, according to several people familiar with the Labor Department’s plans who spoke to BuzzFeed News. Unlike the August directive, a regulation would carry more legal force and is tremendously difficult to undo.

It is unclear if the regulation will limit its scope to strictly religious corporations — for instance, a Jewish charity with a federal contract. The directive refers to the Supreme Court’s decisions in Hobby Lobby and Masterpiece Cakeshop, which concerned closely held, for-profit businesses with religious owners, not religious corporations.

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What legal weed in Canada means for science

By Elie Dolgin

Jonathan Page has been around cannabis all his life. Growing up on Canada’s Vancouver Island in the 1970s, he was surrounded by hippie beachcombers and dope smokers. So after earning a PhD in plant biology and phytochemistry, he felt completely at ease working with the plant Cannabis sativa as a postdoc in Germany in the early 2000s.

During that time, Page helped to characterize a pair of genes that some varieties of the plant uses to make fragrant oils responsible for pine- and lemon-like aromas1. And during an interview for a position with Canada’s National Research Council (NRC), Page proposed similar projects to reveal how cannabis produces pharmaceutically active compounds known as cannabinoids.

He got the job, but was dismayed when he showed up to start his lab group in 2003 at the NRC’s Plant Biotechnology Institute in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Page recalls his boss saying: “You’re not going to work on cannabis here. We’re the government.”

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Scientists Discover a Weird Noise Coming From Antarctic Ice Shelf

By Brian Kahn

The Antarctic is no stranger to weird sounds, from ancient trapped air bubbles popping to entire ice sheets disintegrating. Now we can add another freaky track to the ouevre of icy masterpieces.

Scientists monitoring the Ross Ice Shelf in West Antarctica captured the acoustic oddity. Using a series of ultra sensitive seismic sensors, they produced a soundscape that would fit in perfectly at a Halloween haunted house or as the soundtrack to a 1950s B-movie about aliens arriving on Earth. But beyond being spooky, the sounds reveal how numerous processes from winds to warming are changing Antarctica’s ice.

Julien Chaput, an ambient noise monitoring expert at Colorado State University and new faculty at University of Texas, El Paso told Earther the records were a “happy accident.” In 2014 researchers were deploying seismic equipment on the Ross Ice Shelf, the largest hunk of floating ice in Antarctica, to study the crust and mantle underneath it. Chaput hopped on board hoping to tease out seasonal changes to the ice shelf’s mass, “and instead found strange spectral anomalies that escaped easy explanations, suggesting high frequency trapped seismic waves in the top couple of meters of snow.”

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Pence’s Religious Freedom Policy Made ‘LGBQ’ Hoosiers Sick—Literally

By Sunnivie Brydum

A new study reveals the scope of psychological damage done by Indiana’s 2015 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to gay, lesbian, bisexual and questioning Hoosiers. Although the study, led by the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health’s Center for LGBT Health Research, stops short of suggesting Indiana’s law directly caused LGBQ people to feel physically or mentally unwell, researchers noted that Indiana was the only state of 21 studied where LGBQ people reported a significant spike in the number of “unhealthy days” over the course of that year.


Not only was Indiana the only state whose LGBQ residents reported more “unhealthy days” in 2015, but the number of LGBQ people experiencing those days for at least half the month had nearly doubled between the first and last quarter of the year. Then-Governor Mike Pence signed the first iteration of Indiana’s RFRA on March 26, and then amended it a week later amid national backlash in an effort “clarify” that the law did not void existing non-discrimination protections. But the damage was already done.


The study analyzed 2015 data reported by 21 states to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as part of its Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, focusing on the self-reported mental health of 5,000 people who identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual or “unsure” of their sexual orientation. Researchers compared the number of “unhealthy days” reported by residents of each state, using the CDC definition of “the total number of days in the past 30 that people reported that their physical and mental heath were not good,” according to the press release announcing the study’s findings. The Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System does include a question that allows participants to identify as transgender or gender-nonconforming, but states are not required to include that question in their surveys.

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Washington Catholic Archdiocese Names 31 Priests ‘Credibly Accused’ Of Sexual Abuse

By Emily Sullivan

The Catholic archdiocese of Washington, D.C., has released a list of 31 clergymen who have been “credibly accused” of abusing children over a decades-long period — a move that comes just days after Pope Francis accepted the resignation of Archbishop Cardinal Donald Wuerl for allegedly covering up sexual abuse in the Church.

The list documents cases dating back as far 1948 and as recently as 1996. Eighteen priests were arrested and 17 of them are now dead. None of those still living are currently active clergymen.

“Where credibility could not be determined,” the archdiocese says, allegations are “treated as credible for purposes of tracking and responding.” It also says that .

The release of the list comes amid upheaval in the archdiocese.

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