ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 280

Mary McAleese: Baptised children ‘infant conscripts’

By Patsy McGarry

Babies baptised into the Catholic Church are “infant conscripts who are held to lifelong obligations of obedience”, according to former president Mary McAleese.

Saying that early Baptism breaches fundamental human rights, she said: “You can’t impose, really, obligations on people who are only two weeks old and you can’t say to them at seven or eight or 14 or 19 ‘here is what you contracted, here is what you signed up to’ because the truth is they didn’t.”

The current model of Baptism “worked for many centuries because people didn’t understand that they had the right to say no, the right to walk away”, she declared.

“But you and I know, we live now in times where we have the right to freedom of conscience, freedom of belief, freedom of opinion, freedom of religion and freedom to change religion. The Catholic Church yet has to fully embrace that thinking,” she told The Irish Times.

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No, You Probably Shouldn’t Follow Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Lectin-Free’ Diet

By Bahar Gholipour

In a recent interview with NBC’s Today show, singer Kelly Clarkson said her 37-lb. (17 kilograms) weight loss was a happy side effect of a diet she followed primarily to overcome her thyroid problem.

“I literally read this book, and I did it for this autoimmune disease that I had, and I had a thyroid issue,” Clarkson said. “I’m not on medicine anymore because of this book.” And along the way, she also lost weight, she said.

Clarkson was referring to the book “The Plant Paradox” (Harper Wave, 2017) by Dr. Steven Gundry, which was published last year and was followed by a cookbook this April.

The book comes with a big, controversial claim: Gundry says a broad group of plant proteins called lectins — found in grains; beans and legumes; nuts; fruits; nightshade vegetables such as eggplant, tomatoes and potatoes; and dairy — are the root of modern illnesses, ranging from obesity and gastrointestinal issues to autoimmune disorders and allergies. Lectins, according to Gundry, bind to sugar molecules in cells throughout the body, altering their function.

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Ivanka Trump Gives Pastor $50,000 for “Immigration Ministry” Targeting Kids

By Hemant Mehta

Last week, Pastor Jack Graham of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas tweeted about how his congregation was “determined to act” in the wake of migrant families being separated and locked up.

Even though that cruelty was the result of Donald Trump‘s vindictiveness, his daughter Ivanka Trump got in contact with Graham and sent his church a gift of $50,000 to help the kids.

But not actually help. This is, after all, someone named Trump.

Prestonwood announced yesterday that the money would go towards an “immigration ministry.”

“HHS officials have told us that the basic needs of the children are being taken care of,” Graham said. “What the kids really need most is someone to brighten their day. They need someone to give them hope. Our plan is to create an event for the children that will encourage them and make them smile. Of course, we will also focus on how we can provide financial aid to families to assist them in their situation.”

Although the physical needs and education are being provided to the immigrant children, Prestonwood is seeking to provide things such as money, volunteers and Vacation Bible School-type activities.

So instead of using his power and privilege as a conservative Christian leader to condemn the Trump administration for its cruel policies, he’s going to use the $50,000 to give effectively orphaned kids “Vacation Bible School-type activities,” which, let’s face it, is just code for Jesus.

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Royal Observatory at Greenwich working for first time since London smog shut down telescopes 60 years ago

By Sarah Knapton

The Royal Observatory at Greenwich has been pivotal to astronomy and navigation since the beginning of time. Well, international standard time at least. But what few people realize is that the observatory has not actually observed anything for more than half a century.

Astronomers were forced to abandon their work in the 1950s as London smogs grew so bad that they could no longer see the stars through their telescopes.

As the railways expanded nearby, the rumble of trains also made it impossible to take accurate readings with sensitive instruments, while the ever-growing capital brought increasingly dazzling light pollution.

Now, after more than 60 years a new telescope has been installed at Greenwich to restore its status as a working observatory once again. Not only is London’s air cleaner now, but modern telescope filters can tune out the pollution to hone in on the stars, planets, nebulae and even galaxies.

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Justices decline to rule on florist who refused wedding services to same-sex couple

By Robert Barnes

The Supreme Court signaled Monday that it is unwilling to immediately answer whether a business owner’s religious beliefs can justify refusing gay couples seeking wedding services.

The justices returned to lower courts the case of a Washington state florist who refused to provide a floral arrangement for a longtime customer when he told her it was for his wedding to another man. A unanimous Washington Supreme Court found that the florist, Barronelle Stutzman, violated the Washington Law Against Discrimination, a state civil rights law.

The U.S. Supreme Court said the case should be reconsidered in light of its decision earlier this month in favor of Colorado baker Jack C. Phillips, who declined to create a wedding cake for a gay couple.

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OK State Rep’s Education Plan Blames “Secular Progressives” for Ruining Schools

By Hemant Mehta

This Tuesday, Oklahoma will hold its primaries for the upcoming election, and Chuck Strohm will be running for re-election in the state’s House of Representatives. After narrowly winning the Republican primary in 2014, he cruised to victory in 2016 and hopes to repeat that this year. That shouldn’t be too difficult coming from a deeply red district.

Still, coming from a state where public education is a hot mess, Strohm released a “blueprint” for to handle the issue over the weekend. His solutions would turn a hot mess into a flaming dumpster fire.

It would take a long time to go through the entire 48-page document and point out all the problems, but let me highlight some key concerns.

The biggest one may be that, while teachers are protesting stagnant wages and cuts to education funding, Strohm is miffed that they went on strike even after they received a raise (emphasis his).

For decades the state of Oklahoma grappled with the issue of funding for public schools. Just this spring, the legislature acted by passing a historic teacher pay raise averaging 16 percent.

Then, in proof that fact is often stranger than fiction, teachers engaged in a two-week long strike — after the pay raise was signed into law by the Governor! As a State Representative, I have never seen anything like it, and those who’ve worked at the Capitol for decades told me they had never seen anything like this…. not ever. The level of hostility, and the number of angry, disrespectful and threatening contacts was unprecedented.

He neglects to mention that teachers were upset because the raise wasn’t enough to meet their sensible demands; neither was funding for schools.

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‘We’re Coming for Them’: Survivors Demand Release of 884-Page Pennsylvania Clergy Sex Abuse Report

By Victoria Albert

Mark Rozzi thought he was days away from justice, or at least the beginning of it.

It started when he was 13, and a priest at his school in Hyde Park, Pennsylvania, started grooming him. For months, the Rev. Edward Graff talked with Rozzi about sex, gave him alcohol, and showed him pornography. Then, one fateful day, he raped him in a rectory shower.

Rozzi didn’t report his abuse for 26 years. But he later learned that during that period, Graff was transferred multiple times between parishes, and allegedly abused children in Texas, too. In 2002, Graff was arrested on child-abuse charges after facing dozens of accusations, The Washington Post reports. He later died in jail.

Rozzi is now a Pennsylvania House representative and he campaigned on the promise of extending the statute of limitations for child sex abusers. After years of grappling with his traumatic past, he was expecting a major breakthrough this month: the release of a 884-page report detailing the findings of an 18-month grand jury investigation into child sexual abuse in six Pennsylvania dioceses. The report, according to The Guardian, is expected to “detail decades of clerical sexual abuse and coverups by the Roman Catholic Church.”

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Walgreens Pharmacist Denies a Woman Medication to End Her Unviable Pregnancy

By Louis Lucero II

Nine weeks into her pregnancy, Nicole Arteaga got distressing news from her doctor: There was no fetal heartbeat and the pregnancy would end in a miscarriage.

Rather than have a surgical procedure to remove the fetal tissue from her uterus, Ms. Arteaga, a first-grade teacher who lives in Peoria, Ariz., decided on Wednesday to take misoprostol, a medication that can be used to end a failed pregnancy.

The medication is approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration for use by a licensed provider to end a pregnancy within the first 10 weeks, for what is known as a medical abortion.

She dropped off a prescription for the medication and by that night, got an email saying it was ready to be picked up.

But when she tried to get the medication from her local Walgreens on Thursday, the pharmacist asked whether she was pregnant. When she said she was, he refused to give her the misoprostol, citing “his ethical beliefs,” she recalled in a detailed account on Facebook.

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Growing Secular Movement Could Indicate Change in Political Tide — Even in Texas

By David R. Brockman

“The future of American voters is secular.”

So said Sarah Levin of the Washington, D.C., nonprofit Secular Coalition for America, speaking to a standing-room-only crowd at the Texas Democratic Party Convention in Fort Worth Friday. The occasion was the second-ever meeting of the Secular Caucus, a Democratic group aiming to represent the legislative agenda for roughly 6 million nonreligious Texans.

Levin’s prediction probably overstates the case; religious belief in America isn’t going away soon, if ever. But the enthusiastic turnout of about 250 delegates, coupled with candidates’ growing willingness to identify as secular, points to what may be a turn in the political tide — even in religious-right Texas, where the state constitution still mandates that officeholders  “acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being.”

James White, a progressive activist from Dallas who helped to organize the group’s caucuses at the 2016 and 2018 conventions, said that he couldn’t find any candidates willing to speak at the first convention caucus two years ago. The story was very different this time around: a state Senate candidate, three candidates for the state House, and several local government hopefuls signed up to speak.

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Antarctica Is Getting Taller, and Here’s Why

By Mindy Weisberger

Bedrock under Antarctica is rising more swiftly than ever recorded — about 1.6 inches (41 millimeters) upward per year. And thinning ice in Antarctica may be responsible.

That’s because as ice melts, its weight on the rock below lightens. And over time, when enormous quantities of ice have disappeared, the bedrock rises in response, pushed up by the flow of the viscous mantle below Earth’s surface, scientists reported in a new study.

These uplifting findings are both bad news and good news for the frozen continent.

The good news is that the uplift of supporting bedrock could make the remaining ice sheets more stable. The bad news is that in recent years, the rising earth has probably skewed satellite measurements of ice loss, leading researchers to underestimate the rate of vanishing ice by as much as 10 percent, the scientists reported.

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