ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 264

Oklahoma School Shuts Down After Parents Threaten Trans Student with Castration

By Sarahbeth Caplin

An Oklahoma school district shut down for two days this week in response to an onslaught of threats against a 12-year-old trans student.

The student, Maddie, had been living as a girl the entire time she’s been part of the Achille Public Schools. While she had used a staff bathroom for the past two years, she was at a new school this year and hadn’t been given that same permission, so she used the girls restroom instead. She was quickly accused of peering under the stalls and became the subject of an angry Facebook rant from a parent.

Before long, even adults were threatening her.

The horrific messages, which referred to 12-year-old Maddie as “it,” “this thing,” “half baked maggot” and “the transgender,” were posted on a Facebook group for parents of students in Achille, Oklahoma.

All that is troubling enough, but at least one parent made a direct threat of castration, saying, “if he wants to be female make him a female. A good sharp knife will do the job really quick.”

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The Mormon Church Doesn’t Want To Be Called “Mormon” Any More

By Jim Dalrymple II

In a reversal of years of branding and more than a century of colloquial use, the religion commonly known as the Mormon Church has asked that people stop using the word “Mormon” when referring to the faith.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced Thursday in that the nickname “Mormon” and the abbreviation “LDS” should be avoided. Instead, the church would prefer to be called “the Church,” “the Church of Jesus Christ,” or “the restored Church of Jesus Christ.”

Members of the faith, who are widely referred to as “Mormons,” should be called “members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” or “Latter-day Saints.”

“We ask that the term ‘Mormons’ not be used,” the style guide now states. It also says that “the term ‘Mormonism’ is inaccurate and should not be used.”

Referring to the changes, the faith’s leader, President Russell Nelson,  in a statement Thursday that “the Lord has impressed upon my mind the importance of the name He has revealed for His Church,” adding that “we have work before us to bring ourselves in harmony with His will.”

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Satanic Temple Unveils Baphomet Statue at Arkansas Capitol

By Hannah Grabenstein

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — The Satanic Temple unveiled its statue Thursday of a goat-headed, winged creature called Baphomet during a First Amendment rally at the Arkansas State Capitol to protest a Ten Commandments monument already on the Capitol grounds.

With Satanists, atheists and Christians among those in attendance, several speakers called for the removal of the Ten Commandments monument or for state government officials to install Baphomet as well. The Satanic Temple said the Ten Commandments monument violates constitutional freedom of religion rights and that installation of their statue will demonstrate religious tolerance.

Satanic Arkansas cofounder Ivy Forrester, who helped organize the rally, said “if you’re going to have one religious monument up then it should be open to others, and if you don’t agree with that then let’s just not have any at all.”

The statue of Baphomet, who is seated and accompanied by two smiling children, can’t be installed under a 2017 law that requires legislative sponsorship for consideration of any monument.

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Catholics and lawmakers respond to sex abuse report

By Jack Jenkins

When Pennsylvania officials unveiled a report this week detailing accusations that Catholic priests had sexually abused more than 1,000 children since the 1940s and that church officials shielded the abusers, the public outcry was swift. Some compared the document to The Boston Globe’s 2002 “Spotlight” investigation, which unearthed comparably horrifying allegations in Massachusetts.

But two days after the report’s release, questions remain as to what effect, if any, it will have on American Catholicism or whether it will impact how states prosecute clergy sexual abuse in the future.

The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor at large at America Magazine, predicted fallout from the revelations could be as far-reaching as what followed the Spotlight stories.

“We can already see the convulsive effect it has had on the church in this country,” he told RNS by email. “People are nauseated, and that includes people far from Pennsylvania. … People are more disgusted than they were in 2002, if that’s possible.”

Catholics are already expressing dismay. Alice Niles, who lives near Philadelphia, said she called her parish and altered her contributions to the church after reading the report. She said she still supports her parish but wants to find a way to prevent her funds from being used by church authorities to protect predators.

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This Ancient Mummy Is Older Than the Pharaohs

By Mindy Weisberger

Embalming in ancient Egypt predated the pharaohs, an ancient mummy reveals. That would mean that the practice began at least 1,500 years earlier than once thought.

The mummy — an adult male curled on its left side in a fetal pose — is about 6,000 years old. It was previously thought to be naturally preserved by desert conditions at the site where it was buried. But the first-ever tests performed on the remains showed that the mummy was embalmed, making it the earliest known example of Egyptian mummification, researchers reported in a new study.

Further examination showed that the ancient embalmers used multiple ingredients to preserve the corpse, employing a similar recipe to the ones used 2,500 years later, when mummification in Egypt was at its peak. 

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This spaghetti-breaking problem stumped physicist Richard Feynman. Two MIT students have now solved it.

By Allyson Chiu

A quick Google search of the current biggest mysteries in physics turns up a daunting list of questions: What exactly is dark matter? Why does time only move in one direction? What happens inside a black hole?

But sometimes, as American physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman discovered decades ago, equally vexing conundrums can be found in everyday objects, say dry spaghetti noodles.

One night, while preparing one of his favorite meals with supercomputer pioneer Danny Hillis, Feynman noticed something strange about spaghetti. If a dry noodle is taken and broken in half, it will almost always break into three or more pieces, tiny bits spraying in every direction.

“Why is this true — why does it break into three pieces? We spent the next two hours coming up with crazy theories,” Hillis recalled in a biography about Feynman. But, after two hours, all the duo had were their theories — “no real good” ones, Hillis said — and a mess of broken spaghetti all over Feynman’s kitchen.

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Here Are the Worst Abuses by Catholic Priests from the PA Grand Jury’s Report

By Hemant Mehta

I spent the better part of the day reading through the Pennsylvania grand jury’s report about the Catholic Church’s child abuse scandal that occurred in just six dioceses: Allentown, Erie, Greensburg, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, and Scranton.

That may have been a mistake. My mind is numb. I posted something brief yesterday about the document, but that was before going through the detailed accounts of what more than 300 priests did over the course of several decades. Those accounts are so much worse than the news reports indicated because they couldn’t include all these cases.

Most of the priests are dead now. Some of the stories were heavily redacted because the priests are alive and haven’t been charged with a crime. In some cases, the statute of limitations has long expired. But this was always about documenting the abuses more than anything. When you read this report and realize it’s just one group of priests in one state, you have to wonder what the stories would look like if a similar document was produced across the country, if not the world.

So brace yourself.

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The Masterpiece Baker Is Back. Now He Won’t Make a Trans-Themed Cake.

By Samantha Allen

All along, Jack Phillips, the Christian baker at the heart of the Masterpiece Cakeshop Supreme Court case has claimed that he doesn’t deny service to specific people—just to individuals looking for cakes for specific events, like same-sex weddings.

“I don’t discriminate against anybody—I serve everybody that comes in my shop,” he told NBC in June, after the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Colorado had been hostile toward his religious beliefs. “I don’t create cakes for every message that people ask me to create.”

But in the latest legal drama involving Phillips and the anti-LGBT legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, that distinction between person and event is getting harder to maintain. It’s almost as if it was a spurious one to begin with.

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How digital drug users could help to halt the US opioid epidemic

By Sara Reardon

With the tip of her syringe, Brandi pokes at a grey lump of heroin in a spoon. It’s a new variety of the drug that has shown up on the market in the past few days, and Brandi likes it. “I feel this more, I feel more of the pain resistance,” she says.

Once it has dissolved into a liquid, she injects it into her arm, then uses a fresh needle to inject the skinny arm of another woman. “She does it better than the hospital,” the woman comments.

“I’ll help anybody who needs it,” Brandi explains to public-health researcher Daniel Ciccarone of the University of California, San Francisco, who has been filming the entire process.

Ciccarone’s team has embedded with Brandi — whose name has been changed for this story — in Charleston, West Virginia, documenting her interactions without judgement or interference. Later, the group will analyse this video, in addition to half a dozen other videos of drug users from across the city, logging details big and small. Brandi does not heat the solution on the spoon, for instance, and that may increase the likelihood of spreading viruses such as HIV. And tests reveal that what she’s taking has been laced with fentanyl, a synthetic drug up to 50 times more powerful than heroin.

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Pseudoscience: Homeopathic hocus-pocus

By Jon Hauxwell, MD

The nonprofit Center for Inquiry has lodged a federal lawsuit against pharm giant CVS due to its deceptive marketing and sales of “homeopathic” nostrums.

CVS manufactures its own HP products, and sells other brands. CVS is charged with “deliberately fostering the impression through display and placement that they are effective to treat particular complaints, and that they are comparable in efficacy, and regulation to science-based medical products.”

HP is a “pseudoscience,” defined as “a system of theories, assumptions, and methods erroneously regarded as scientific.”

Samuel Hahnemann invented HP in the 1700s, when we hadn’t even discovered Germ Theory yet. Hahnemann knew nothing of today’s molecular chemistry.

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