ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 248

Pope Francis accepts resignation of D.C. archbishop Wuerl, amid criticism of the cardinal’s handling of abuse claims

By Michelle Boorstein, Chico Harlan, and Julie Zauzmer

Pope Francis on Friday accepted the resignation of Washington’s archbishop, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, a trusted papal ally who became a symbol among many Catholics for what they regard as the church’s defensive and weak response to sexual abuse by priests.

But even as Wuerl becomes one of the highest-profile prelates to step down in a year of prominent abuse scandals, Pope Francis offered the cardinal a gentle landing, praising him in a letter and allowing him to stay on as “apostolic administrator” in the Washington archdiocese until a successor is found.

In his letter, Francis suggested that he had accepted Wuerl’s resignation reluctantly, and said he saw in the cardinal’s request the “heart of a shepherd.” Francis did not criticize Wuerl’s handling of abuse cases, and wrote that Wuerl had “sufficient elements” to defend his actions.

“However, your nobility has led you not to choose this way of defense,” Francis wrote. “Of this, I am proud and thank you.”

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An Atheist Charity is Suing the IRS After Having Its Tax Exemption Revoked

By Hemant Mehta

There are a lot of U.S. laws that privilege religious institutions over other non-profits, and the Freedom From Religion Foundation has been working to expose those differences and get the courts to put everyone on a level playing field.

The most famous example of this involves a case in which FFRF’s co-presidents applied to the IRS for a tax break on their housing — just like the “Parsonage Allowance” that pastors receive. They didn’t get it, and their lawsuit over the matter is currently waiting for a decision from an appeals court.

Now FFRF is suing over a separate matter.

This one involves their charity arm, Nonbelief Relief, which has given away more than $590,000 over the past several years to assist disaster recovery efforts, help atheists trying to escape oppressive regimes, and support groups like Doctors Without Borders.

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Bigger Moons Have Moons, And Some Are Calling Them ‘Moonmoons’

By David Barden

Have you ever gazed up at the night sky, looked up at the moon and wondered if it could have a moon of its own?

While you probably haven’t, a curious four-year-old did back in 2015 and on Tuesday, his astronomer mom and one of her colleague’s published a paper that essentially says: Yes, a moon can have its own moon.

The Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Juna Kollmeier AKA ‘The Junaverse’ told HuffPost that while none of the planets’ moons in our solar system currently have moons (that we know of), “Earth’s moon, one of Jupiter’s moons and two of Saturn’s moons” may all have once had moons.

But the real question is: what do you call a moon’s moon?

While Kollmeier and astronomer Sean Raymond referred to them as ‘submoons’ in their paper, the New Scientist has dubbed them ‘moonmoons.’

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Catholic dioceses in Texas to release names of clergy “credibly accused” of sexually abusing minors

By Emma Platoff

In an effort to restore public trust, all of Texas’ Catholic dioceses will release the names of clergy who have been “credibly accused” of sexually abusing minors, stemming back at least to 1950, the Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops announced Wednesday.

That list, set for release in January 2019, is an important measure of “accountability and transparency,” Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller, archdiocese of San Antonio, said in an interview.

“Even though it will be painful, we believe that to bring this awareness will give [survivors] hope,” he said. “We hope that if some victims have not come forward, they will come forward. … And we believe it’s the right thing to do.”

The months between now and January give survivors time to report abuse and give the church the time to vet further accusations. Officials could not say yet how many names the list is expected to include.

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Belfast Bakery Was Free to Refuse Gay-Marriage Cake, Court Rules

By Ed O’Loughlin

DUBLIN — Britain’s Supreme Court supported on Wednesday the right of a Belfast bakery to refuse to bake a cake with a message supporting same-sex marriage, finding that its Christian owners could not be compelled to reproduce a message contrary to their beliefs.

Although the person who requested the cake was gay, a five-judge panel found that the bakery owners’ refusal was based not on his sexual orientation, but on their Protestant faith’s opposition to gay marriage.

“There was no discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation,” said the judgment, which overturned the rulings of two lower courts.

It cited the United States Supreme Court’s decision in June in favor of a Colorado baker who had refused to create a wedding cake for a gay couple, a narrow decision that left open the larger question of whether a business can discriminate against gay men and lesbians based on First Amendment rights.

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Surprising New Poll on Evangelicals and Religious Exceptions

By Peter Laarman

Aghast (like you) in the face of the latest outbreaks of raw tribalism (an orchestrated tribalism, let us remember), I take considerable solace from any hint that Americans can still agree on commonsense principles that have in them at least an imputation of moral sensibility.

Our friends at the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) have just dropped the results of polling done in late August/early September (before the epochal Ford-Kavanaugh standoff).

PRRI founder and CEO Robbie Jones notes in the press release that “partisanship trumps gender” in respect to the proportion of GOP vs. Democratic voters who would support a candidate accused of sexual harassment (not sexual assault, please note).

And yes, here the news is depressing in that all-too-familiar way. While six out of ten Americans would not vote for an accused candidate, the number drops to 41% of GOP women and 28% of GOP men. Worse, 56% of the Republicans polled said they would consider supporting a candidate facing multiple accusations of harassment.

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Peer-reviewed homeopathy study sparks uproar in Italy

By Giorgia Guglielmi

A study1 that claims to show that a homeopathic treatment can ease pain in rats has caused uproar after it was published in a peer-reviewed journal. Groups that promote homeopathy in Italy, where there is currently a debate about how to label homeopathic remedies, have held the study up as evidence that the practice works. But several researchers have cast doubt on its claims.

The authors acknowledge some errors flagged in an analysis of the paper by a separate researcher, but stand by its overall conclusions. Senior author, pharmacologist Chandragouda Patil of the R. C. Patel Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research in Dhule, India, also says that the results are preliminary and cannot yet be applied to people, and that he hopes that the team’s findings will encourage other researchers to conduct clinical studies.

Researchers have presented evidence in support of homeopathy before — famously, in a 1988 Nature paper2 by French immunologist Jacques Benveniste that was later discredited. This latest claim has attracted attention, in part, because it passed peer review at the journal Scientific Reports. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher Springer Nature, which also publishes Scientific Reports).

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Creationists Say a Nobel Prize Winner Didn’t Really Use Evolution in Experiments

By Hemant Mehta

Last week, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to three scientists who used the ideas behind evolutionary biology to design a variety of molecules. One of the laureates was Frances H. Arnold, who used a process called “directed evolution” to create powerful enzymes.

For this “directed evolution” research, she inserted the gene that produced the enzyme she wanted to study into fast-reproducing bacteria. With mutations of the gene, she could then examine how well variations of the enzyme worked. She chose the one that worked best and repeated the process — just like evolution chooses the survival of the fittest over succeeding generations.

…

In her initial experiments in the 1990s, she was able to produce an enzyme more than 200 times as effective as the one she started with by the third generation.

That’s incredible. In fact, in that experiment, the enzyme had ten different mutations which contributed to its effectiveness, which Arnold only figured out due to her ability to harness the randomness of evolution in her favor. As the committee noted, she showed the “power of allowing chance and directed selection, instead of solely human rationality, to govern the development of new enzymes.”

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Brett Kavanaugh tips scales against Roe v. Wade

By Kimberly Atkins

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court now has five justices who have either directly stated or signaled that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided, bringing an end to an era where legal challenges sought to chip away at the ruling and opening the door to a head-on challenge that could overturn it.

Sen. Susan Collins, in explaining her crucial vote in favor of newly installed Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, said Kavanaugh assured her of his belief in “honoring precedent.”

But Kavanaugh, who was one of a long list of conservative potential Trump high court picks culled by conservative legal groups, has contradicted that view in his own words — including in an email from his tenure in the Bush White House where he noted that the Supreme Court “can always overrule its precedent.”

During his confirmation hearing, he declined to directly answer questions about how he would approach abortion cases, reasoning that he could not respond to issues that may come before the court.

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Texas pastors file federal lawsuit seeking license to discriminate against LGBTQ people

By Bil Browning

A group of pastors in Texas have filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn civil rights law that protects minorities. The loving Christians want a license to discriminate against LGBTQ people.

The U.S. Pastor Council are suing the city of Austin, Mayor Steve Adler, and Sareta Davis, chair of the Austin Human Rights Commission, to overturn the city’s employment nondiscrimination ordinance, saying it doesn’t include an exemption for “employers who hold religious objections” to LGBTQ people’s existence.

The group says the ordinance violates the Constitution, the Texas Constitution, and the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

“Every church in Austin that refuses to hire practicing homosexuals as clergy or church employees is violating city law and subject to civil penalties and liability,” the lawsuit argues.

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