ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 253

The Christian Right Is Looking To Putin’s Russia To Save Christianity From The Godless West

By Tom Porter

At a gathering of some of the world’s most virulent opponents of LGBT equality, Russian conservative activist Dmitry Komov warned of the destructive agenda underlying the spread of liberal values.

The West, he told a far-right French TV station in December, was committed to the “destruction of all of our collective identities: national identity, religious identity, gender identity,” and warned it would result in  “the destruction of human identity.”

Komov was in Chisinau, Moldova, for the Eurasian colloquium, where Russian Orthodox ideologues and European far-right activists rubbed shoulders. Between 13 and 16 September they are also joined by members of a U.S. conservative Christian groups in the city for the World Congress of Families. The unlikely allies feel that after decades of struggle, the time has come to topple Western liberal hegemony.

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Alabama Revisits Ten Commandments, Hoping for Help From Kavanaugh

By Jeremy W. Peters

McINTOSH, Ala. — At a Saturday night music festival about an hour north of Alabama’s gulf shore, the twangy refrain of a bluegrass song captured how seriously many religious conservatives are taking the battle over the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh.

“Without a firm foundation, a house will fall apart,” the band sang, “but they can’t take the Ten Commandments out of the Bible or my heart.”

For many in the crowd of about 100, the commandments and Judge Kavanaugh are paramount concerns this election season. More than a decade after Roy S. Moore was ousted as Alabama’s chief justice for defying federal court orders to remove a 5,280-pound stone slab of the commandments from the state judicial building, voters will consider a constitutional amendment in November that would allow the Ten Commandments to be displayed in schools and other public property across Alabama.

The amendment’s supporters hope it passes not just on principle but because of the almost-guaranteed response: a legal challenge that ends up in federal courts. Those campaigning for it now say their goal is to get a case before Supreme Court, where they hope — if a Justice Kavanaugh is on the bench — a conservative majority will rule in favor of such displays.

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Japanese Mission Becomes first to Land Rovers on Asteroid

By Elizabeth Gibney, Nature magazine

Japan’s asteroid mission Hayabusa2 has become the first to land moving rovers on the surface of an asteroid.

On 22 September, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) tweeted that it had confirmed the mission’s twin rovers, called MINERVA-II 1A and 1B, had landed safely on the space rock Ryugu, and were moving on the surface.

The Hayabusa2 mothership deployed the small probes late last week as it dropped to just 55 metres above the surface, later pulling up to a higher orbit.

Mission controllers at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) lost communication with the MINERVA rovers in the hours after deployment. The team said the silence was probably down to the landers being on the far side of the asteroid, as seen from the orbiter.

But the hexagonal rovers have now sent back their first, slightly blurry, colour images of their surface and made their first ‘hop’—their primary means of movement on the rock’s surface. The probes use rotating motors to make jumps, each lasting some 15 minutes owing to the body’s low gravity.

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Scientists: Don’t let Arizona superintendent Diane Douglas ‘sabotage’ evolution

By Laurie Roberts

A group of scientists – read: people who don’t believe that dinosaurs marched two-by-two into Noah’s Ark – is asking the Arizona Board of Education not to let Superintendent Diane Douglas “sabotage” the scientific literacy of our kids.

Specifically, they are asking the board to ignore Douglas, who seems determined to insert a little Sunday school into science class by casting doubt on whether evolution occurred.

So determined, in fact, that she recently asked a creationist – a guy who believes the earth is only 6,000 years old and that dinosaurs were passengers on Noah’s Ark – to look over the proposed science standards.

Yep, she did that.

Cue the collective horror of a group of Arizona university science professors, among them a recipient of The Nobel Prize.

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Sharks, dishwashers and guns: A running list of viral hoaxes about Hurricane Florence

By Abby Ohlheiser

The Internet exists, and so does Hurricane Florence. The inevitable result? An ever-growing tally of online hoaxes about the dangerous storm, hoping to go viral on the good intentions of people who are trying to find and share the latest information.

We’ve been here before. As we have in the past, the Intersect is keeping a running list of unverified rumors, hoaxes and other misinformation about Florence as the storm hits the East Coast. And please, if you see something that isn’t in the post, feel free to send it our way.

Look on this list, ye Mighty, and despair.

SHARKS SHARKS SHARKS 

**takes a deep breath**

Shark hoaxes are so common during natural disasters involving flooding that their circulation has become a meme. And yet, those who aren’t online all the time seem to fall for these hoaxes every storm. Florence appears to be no exception.

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A failure of parents to transmit religion to their children could be driving the rise of nonreligion

By Eric W. Dolan

The number of so-called “nones” — individuals who do not identify with any organized religion — is rapidly growing in the United States. New research suggests that this trend could be driven, at least in part, by a disconnection between parents and their children.

The study, published in the journal Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, found a large gap between the religiousness of parents and their teenage children.

“In an earlier publication, Joseph Hammer, Michael Nielsen, and I developed a new scale for measuring how secular someone is,” said study author Ryan T. Cragun of the University of Tampa.

“There were many reasons why we developed that scale. The obvious reason was that no one had done anything like that before. But there are two other important reasons. Most prior measures of religiosity either did a really poor job of asking questions that could be answered by the nonreligious or didn’t even ask questions that were relevant to the nonreligious.”

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Spanish actor detained over blasphemy complaint released

By the AFP

A Spanish actor accused of blasphemy was released without bail after being questioned in court on Thursday, in the latest high profile case to raise free speech fears in the country.

Willy Toledo, a cinema and television actor, is facing a complaint over a social media post last year.

He was arrested in Madrid on Wednesday after he had twice failed to show up for questioning.

The case stems from a July 2017 Facebook message in which Toledo, 48, defended three women charged with blasphemy for staging a mock-religious procession wielding a giant vagina.

In profane language, Toledo expressed contempt in his post for God and the Virgin Mary.

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Testing and cleaning North Carolina’s water supply post-Florence could prove tricky. A microbiologist explains why

By Frankie Schembri

Hurricane Florence dropped record-breaking amounts of rain as it hovered over the Carolinas last week. The resulting floodwaters killed dozens of people and created a lingering crisis for drinking water supplies. Across North Carolina, lagoons full of livestock waste, enclosures full of dead chickens and hogs, raw sewage from wastewater treatment plants, and coal ash ponds are all overflowing. The Environmental Protection Agency issued a statement on Monday that at least 23 drinking water systems in the state had temporarily halted their operations and that 21 others were operating with boil water advisories.

Rachel Noble, a microbiologist at The University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and her team are working to track potentially dangerous bacteria and viruses as they flow through North Carolina’s water system. She told Science about poststorm threats to drinking water and how to cut down on the dangerous lag time in the tests that detect them.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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Planet Earth Wobbles As It Spins, and Now Scientists Know Why

By Stephanie Pappas

Humans are responsible for some of the wobble in Earth’s spin.

Since 1899, the Earth’s axis of spin has shifted about 34 feet (10.5 meters). Now, research quantifies the reasons why and finds that a third is due to melting ice and rising sea levels, particularly in Greenland — placing the blame on the doorstep of anthropogenic climate change.

Another third of the wobble is due to land masses expanding upward as the glaciers retreat and lighten their load. The final portion is the fault of the slow churn of the mantle, the viscous middle layer of the planet.

“We have provided evidence for more than one single process that is the key driver” for altering the Earth’s axis, said Surendra Adhikari, an Earth system scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and a lead researcher on the new study.

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Mike Pence warns Christian conservatives against complacency in midterm elections

By Maureen Groppe

Two years after Mike Pence helped convince evangelical Christians to back Donald Trump’s presidential bid, the vice president warned faith voters that complacency is the greatest threat to Republicans keeping control of Congress.

“The other side is mobilized, and some say they’re motivated as never before,” Pence said Saturday at the Family Research Council’s Voter Values Summit. “But I say we must match – in fact, I say we must surpass – the energy of the American left and their enthusiasm and passion.”

He called the midterm elections a “choice between a party that celebrates America and one that often demeans millions of our neighbors and friends.”

 “Let’s keep faith that He who has ever watched over this nation still governs in the affairs of men,” Pence said.

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