ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 262

Illinois Supreme Court Justice Says Government, Not Church, Should Investigate Catholic Sex Abuse

By Brian Mackey

Illinois Supreme Court Justice Anne Burke is calling for a new investigation into sex abuse in the Catholic Church. Church authorities are doing just that, but Burke says the matter cannot be left to the Catholic hierarchy.

Burke is a lifelong Catholic who was part of the 2002 National Review Board for the Protection of Children and Young People.

She says the ongoing revelations about sex abuse by priests — including last week’s grand jury report in Pennsylvania — show it’s time for government authorities to investigate, not the church.

“If they had only done what we asked them to do — and what they asked us to do — was to find out how many offenders and how many victims there were,” Burke said Friday in a telephone interview. “But they withheld. They withheld the information. It’s obvious.”

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The truth about new study claiming ex-gay conversion therapy works

By Zack Ford

A newly published study that purports to show the benefits of ex-gay conversion therapy is exciting anti-LGBTQ groups like the Liberty Counsel that oppose attempts to ban the harmful and ineffective treatment. Unfortunately for those groups, the study’s scientific credentials are lacking and the research isn’t even new.

The study, “Effects of Therapy on Religious Men Who Have Unwanted Same-Sex Attraction,” was published last month in The Linacre Quarterly. According to the Liberty Counsel, it “confirms the overwhelming effectiveness of people receiving counseling to reduce or eliminate their unwanted same-sex attractions, behaviors, or identity.”

It doesn’t.

The researchers did not actually assess whether any particular treatment has any particular effect; they simply surveyed a group of 125 men who had undergone some form of sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE) to see whether they believed it helped. There was no before-and-after assessment. Instead, they simply asked participants to think back to how they believe they felt before they started conversion therapy.

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Mum’s a Neanderthal, Dad’s a Denisovan: First discovery of an ancient-human hybrid

By Matthew Warren

A female who died around 90,000 years ago was half Neanderthal and half Denisovan, according to genome analysis of a bone discovered in a Siberian cave. This is the first time scientists have identified an ancient individual whose parents belonged to distinct human groups. The findings were published on 22 August in Nature1.

“To find a first-generation person of mixed ancestry from these groups is absolutely extraordinary,” says population geneticist Pontus Skoglund at the Francis Crick Institute in London. “It’s really great science coupled with a little bit of luck.”

The team, led by palaeogeneticists Viviane Slon and Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, conducted the genome analysis on a single bone fragment recovered from Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Russia. This cave lends its name to the ‘Denisovans’, a group of extinct humans first identified on the basis of DNA sequences from the tip of a finger bone discovered2 there in 2008. The Altai region, and the cave specifically, were also home to Neanderthals.

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Arkansas School District Rejects Atheists’ Nuanced “In God We Trust” Posters

By Hemant Mehta

On Monday night, American Atheists’ National Program Director Nick Fish was in Arkansas at a meeting of the Bentonville School District board to make an offer: Because Arkansas is a state that now requires schools to display the phrase “In God We Trust,” Fish wanted to donate 1,000 posters that put the religious motto in proper context.

“In God We Trust” is still on there, as is the U.S. flag and Arkansas state flag. So it fulfills everything the law requires.

But appearing in larger font is our nation’s original, unofficial, secular motto “E Pluribus Unum” (“Out of many, one”). It also includes a link to a website that offers more detail.

“We’re pleased to donate these displays that present the full truth and historical context of our national motto,” Fish said in a statement. “Proponents of Act 911, including Bentonville’s State Representative Jim Dotson, claim that mandating these displays is about acknowledging our nation’s ‘history and heritage’ in classrooms. But we think students deserve all the facts, not just a poster of an exclusionary and divisive motto devoid of any additional context or information.”

He makes a great point. And no surprise here: The school board rejected his offer.

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Trump administration sued for refusing to turn over docs about far-right Bible study group

By Alex Bollinger

A watchdog organization has filed a lawsuit to get information from the Trump Administration about Bible study sessions that are being held for Cabinet members.

Conservative pastor Ralph Drollinger has been running Capitol Ministries since 2010 with the intent to influence U.S. representatives. In 2015, he expanded his ministry to include the Senate.

Last year, Drollinger bragged about his influence in the Trump Administration, claiming that several cabinet-level officials were attending Bible study meetings. He mentioned Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, Environmental Protection Agency director Scott Pruitt, and Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, among others.

Drollinger said that it was the first Cabinet-level Bible study group in “at least 100 years.”

For the past nine months, the People for the American Way (PFAW) says that they have been trying to get the Trump Administration to release information about these Bible study meetings under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

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A Too-Narrow Vision of Religious Freedom

By the NYT Editorial Board

Even President Trump’s fiercest critics can find something to applaud in the administration’s campaign to protect and advance religious freedom around the world.

The State Department’s inaugural conference on the subject drew hundreds of activists and scores of foreign officials to Washington last month and produced a statement of core beliefs and a plan to hold follow-up meetings in the United States and overseas.

Invoking the 70-year-old Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the conference’s concluding statement asserted that “every person has the right to hold any faith or belief, or none at all, and enjoys the freedom to change faith” and argued that “defending the freedom of religion or belief is the collective responsibility of the global community.” To which we say, amen.

But the initiative’s good intentions are in danger of being undermined by the administration’s political agenda, which emphasizes the American strain of evangelical Christianity over other beliefs. In addition, the administration is pursuing immigration and foreign aid policies that belie its stated defense of religious rights.

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From Mormon to Secular Agnostic

I am a fan of Richard Dawkins and of the work that he did as a professor of biology, and I have become increasingly grateful for his tireless work for this foundation. I was a Mormon, but have always held some non-standard views of the church. At one point I was a anti-evolution and even overall anti-science, but certain things like a deep love of the earths prehistory and eventually for the true histories of the people who inhabit it. I snapped out of the darkness of pure religious thought later in my teens, and came to love and appreciate science and the pursuit of truth. Now, I’m on my second year of university, studying linguistics and Canadian indigenous languages and cultures. After some careful thought, I’ve found the truth of science, history, culture and language irreconcilable with the false reality that Mormon faith has painted for me throughout my youth and I no longer wish to return to the proverbial darkness of religion which clouds ones vision. As a Mormon, it is customary for family to mourn their “lost sheep,” and that serves as a great point of fear for me. That and the fear that I now recognize as deep indoctrination and psychological issues that have resulted from years of cultural immersion make it extremely difficult to make the transition. I’ve already adopted a more humanist morality. I’m a vegetarian, and I believe in doing as little harm to anything with a nervous system as I can. As I move forward with this, I will need as much support as I can possibly get and the Richard Dawkins Foundation is a great resource for me to begin. Overall, I’d like to thank this organization for everything it does for those who need a help and advice while they transition from the cultural cloud of faith that surrounds them, to the breath of fresh air that is secular agnosticism.

 

-Dominik

Closet atheist needs atheist friends

Dear sir/madam

I don’t know who is going to read this but I really appreciate your time. Thank you.

I was reading about religion for a quite long time because I knew there is something wrong and the religion is not good enough for me or society. The Islamic teachings are so sacred in my country and the only way to let myself to get around this is to find the solution in different Islamic schools of thought. I started to read every book against whabisim and it seemed convincing that time. Little by little I gain the courage to criticise some Islamic teaching and the cycle grow bigger. I thought I’m losing faith so I went to the mosque much more often than usual. When I spoke my thought louder I lost some friends as I were asking for women rights in my country and I was criticising some profound beliefs in that country. Sorry I forgot to say I happened to be from Saudi Arabia.

Losing friends didn’t bother me much, two or three friends aren’t a big loss in the sake of right and gender equality. However, I continued reading and studying religion till the point I considered my self as an atheist but I was hanging in the religion by the last string “family”. By that time I came to the UK to study English language and to study masters in physics.

One day I came a cross the god delusion in charity shop and I bought it for a pound. Half way through the book I announced myself an atheist with a plan to hide this from everyone. No religion can convince me back I tried many religions but each religion is more stupid than the other. Physics and rationalism are my new religion if I could say so.

As I started studying my MSc degree it happened that I was thought by Jim Alkhalili. An atheist came from a Muslim country. That must was hard for him as I expect. The sad thing every one is judging me by skin colour and name every one assumes I’m a Muslim even my British classmates. I don’t blame them it’s rare to find an atheist named [deleted for privacy].

I’m very scared. I already lost a sister because she found about me. I’ll lose all my family soon or later and I’ll be looked at as bad person from every Muslim I know in my country. I’ll lose my job I’ll lose friends and I’ll be headed as the Quran say so.

I’m very terrified.

I have no one to speak to I just want to talk.

Good night

Kind regards

Moha

Eerie Sky Glow Called ‘Steve’ Isn’t an Aurora, Is ‘Completely Unknown’ to Science

By Brandon Specktor

Late at night on July 25, 2016, a thin river of purple light  of northern Canada in an arc that seemed to stretch hundreds of miles into space. It was a magnificent, mysterious, borderline-miraculous sight, and the group of citizen skywatchers who witnessed it decided to give the phenomenon a fittingly majestic name: “.”

Given its coincidence with the northern lights, Steve was just thought to be part of the aurora — the shimmering sheets of nighttime color that appear in the sky when charged plasma particles streak out of the sun, sail across space on solar winds and jolt down Earth’s magnetic field toward the planet’s poles. However, a new study published today (Aug. 20) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters suggests that such a simple explanation might not apply.

According to researchers at the University of Calgary in Canada and the University of California, Los Angeles, Steve does not contain the telltale traces of charged particles blasting through Earth’s atmosphere that auroras do. Steve, therefore, is not an aurora at all, but something entirely different: a mysterious, largely unexplained phenomenon that the researchers have dubbed a “sky glow.”

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Physicists doubt bold superconductivity claim following social-media storm

By Davide Castelvecchi

It was an explosive claim: the discovery of a superconducting material that can carry electricity with virtually no resistance in normal, ambient conditions. The purported finding — announced by two Indian physicists in a preprint1 last month — sparked a rush of replication efforts. But independent researchers have grown increasingly sceptical as they have dissected the claim, in a process that played out mostly on social media.

“All these researchers who normally do not discuss on a single platform have come together and discussed this,” says Pratap Raychaudhuri, who studies low-temperature physics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India. He led a discussion of the results on Facebook. “I think the self-correcting mechanism of science — the ruthless scrutiny of the community — has worked extremely well,” he says.

Raychaudhuri also says that the episode is evidence of the value of posting preprints before publication and having an open discussion about them. “I think this is possibly going to set a very good precedent,” he says.

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