ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 282

Focus on the Family: Trump’s Immigrant Prisons Are Bad, But Abortion Is Worse

By Hemant Mehta

As we continue to learn more about the concentration camps for children, created by Donald Trump with the full support of the Republican Party and, by extension, everyone who continues to vote for them, maybe you were wondering what leaders of the Christian Right were thinking. After all, they’re the ones who insist they support “family values.” They’re the ones who call themselves “pro-life.”

Shouldn’t they be leading the charge in opposition to kids being ripped away from their parents for any reason?

Of course not. That assumes they actually give a damn about these people.

Yesterday, Focus on the Family’s Chief Minister Jim Daly wrote an article arguing that, sure, tearing apart families is bad. But why criticize Trump when he can capitalize on the tragedy and condemn Planned Parenthood instead?

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Mammals Go Nocturnal in Bid to Avoid Humans

By Julia Jacobs

Humans, it turns out, can annoy more than just one another. In fact, some animal populations are escaping their Homo sapiens cohabitants by sleeping more during the day, a new study finds.

Mammals across the globe are becoming increasingly nocturnal to avoid humans’ expanding presence, according to the study, published Thursday in Science magazine. The findings show that humans’ presence alone can cause animals across continents — including coyotes, elephants and tigers — to alter their sleep schedules.

“We’re just beginning to scratch the surface on how these behavioral changes are affecting entire ecosystems,” said Kaitlyn Gaynor, an ecologist and graduate student in environmental science at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the study.

Previous research has found that mammals went from being noctural to being active during both day and night about 65.8 million years ago, roughly 200,000 years after most dinosaurs went extinct. “Species for millions of years have been adapting to diurnal activity, but now we’re driving them back into the night and may be driving natural selection,” Ms. Gaynor said in an interview.

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Sessions’s Use of Bible Passage to Defend Immigration Policy Draws Fire

By Julia Jacobs

Attorney General Jeff Sessions turned to the Bible this week to defend the Trump administration’s immigration policy. His use of religious text to justify a federal policy drew some fire; the text itself drew more.

Many were concerned that Mr. Sessions’s chosen chapter, Romans 13, had been commonly used to defend slavery and oppose the American Revolution.

Speaking to law enforcement officers in Fort Wayne, Ind., Mr. Sessions used a passage on Thursday to defend the right of the federal government to enforce a directive to prosecute everyone who crosses the border illegally. The directive has led to the fracturing of hundreds of migrant families, funneling children into shelters and foster homes.

Mr. Sessions said, “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes.”

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Question of the Week — 6/20/2018

We know that if you’re looking for a book to base a society upon, the Bible (which is full of violence and death and floods and plagues and whales swallowing people) is not a great choice. Plus, most of it is made up. But what if we had to choose one book of fiction upon which to found a new and prosperous human society? Could we flourish within a moral society if our civilization was founded upon something like Harry Potter, Great Expectations, or The Cat in the Hat?

Our favorite answer will win a copy of Brief Candle in the Dark by Richard Dawkins.

Want to suggest a Question of the Week? E-mail submissions to us at qotw@richarddawkins.net. (Questions only, please. All answers to bimonthly questions are made only in the comments section of the Question of the Week.)

Weird Low-Light Bacteria Could Potentially Thrive on Mars

By Sarah Lewin

An international team of scientists has found that a strange type of bacteria can turn light into fuel in incredibly dim environments.

Similar bacteria could someday help humans colonize Mars and expand our search for life on other planets, researchers said in a statement released with the new work.

Organisms called cyanobacteria absorb sunlight to create energy, releasing oxygen in the process. But until now, researchers thought these bacteria could absorb only specific, higher-energy wavelengths of light. The new work reveals that at least one species of cyanobacteria, called Chroococcidiopsis thermalis—which lives in some of the world’s most extreme environments—can absorb redder (less energetic) wavelengths of light, thus allowing it to thrive in dark conditions, such as deep underwater in hot springs.

“This work redefines the minimum energy needed in light to drive photosynthesis,” Jennifer Morton, a researcher at Australian National University (ANU) and a co-author of the new work, said in the statement. “This type of photosynthesis may well be happening in your garden, under a rock.” (In fact, a related species has even been found living inside rocks in the desert.)

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Teaching Children To Ask The Big Questions Without Religion

By Deena Prichep

Emily Freeman, a writer in Montana, grew up unaffiliated to a religion — culturally Jewish on her father’s side, a smattering of churchgoing on her mother’s. She and her husband Nathan Freeman talked about not identifying as religious — but they didn’t really discuss how it would affect their parenting.

“I think we put it in the big basket of things that we figured we had so much time to think about,” Emily joked.

But then they had kids, and the kids came home from their grandfather’s house talking about Bible stories.

Nathan acknowledges that this came from a good place, and his father was acting in concern. “He feels like these lessons encapsulate a blueprint for how to move through life. And so of course, why wouldn’t we want our children to have those lessons alongside them as they travel through the world?”

But while Nathan and Emily wanted their kids to learn about love and compassion, they didn’t want them to hear Bible stories. When the boys were so young, the certainty of those stories felt like indoctrination.

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Blame Evangelicals for the Decline in Christian Faith

By R. Laurence Moore and Isaac Kramnick

A recent poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute placed white evangelical approval of President Donald Trump at 75 percent, a level of adulation higher than when he was elected. Anyone who doesn’t see a moral conundrum in that figure can stop reading. But it speaks volumes about why Americans, especially young Americans, are in increasing numbers joining the “nones,” a category coined by pollsters to single out people who have no religious affiliation, who say that religion is not very important in their lives, and who, while they may believe in some sort of spiritual power, reject the idea of God described in the Bible.

Trends are unmistakable. According to polls conducted by the Pew Foundation, 23 percent of Generation X Americans (born between 1965-1980) claim no religious affiliation. That number rises to 34 percent of older millennials (born between 1981-1989), and to 36 percent of younger millennials (born between 1990 and 1996). Although the retreat from traditional forms of Christianity has long been apparent in western European countries, the pattern of a declining attachment to religion in the young is unprecedented in American history. Until the last decades of the 20th century, they fell in line with the denominational attachments of their parents.

What has happened? One opinion attributes the growing religious indifference of young people to scientific knowledge that has made a creator of natural phenomena irrelevant. God didn’t design the evolution of species or arrange for the big bang. Yet American universities sanctified Darwinian biology for many decades along with the demystifying explanatory powers of physics loosening the ties of young Americans to their traditional faiths. True, there is a correlation between higher education and religious skepticism. However, even after most colleges and universities had broken ties with the religious denominations that had founded them and ended compulsory chapel, pollsters in the post World War II years had no need for the category “none” in recording the religious beliefs of college students.  Theologians, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich among them, attracted large audiences on college campuses and wrote best sellers used in college courses.

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Donald Trump May Have Violated the Johnson Amendment With His Shady Foundation

By Hemant Mehta

When New York’s attorney general filed a lawsuit the other day against Donald Trump and his children, accusing them of “persistently illegal conduct” with regards to their family foundation, I didn’t think much of it beyond the headlines. (Trumps behaving badly? Not exactly news.)

The allegations were primarily about how the Trumps used money donated to the charity foundation to fund Trump’s presidential campaign, pay off Trump’s debts, decorate Trump’s golf clubs, and stage lavish events to benefit (who else?) Trump. They didn’t really help other human beings because… well, why start now?

But when you say you’ve set up a charity, the expectation is that you run it as a charity, with proper governance and oversight, and following all the laws our country has for non-profit groups. The Donald J. Trump Foundation is accused of having done none of that.

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Giant Black Hole Swallows a Star and Belches Out a Superfast Particle Jet

By Lee Billings

Marshaling a decade’s worth of data from telescopes around the world, scientists have captured new details of a gargantuan black hole feasting on a hapless star, watching as the black hole consumed its prey and burped out a jet of material moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light. The results are published in the June 14 edition of Science, and could help researchers better understand how black holes grow and influence their galactic surroundings.

“Never before have we been able to directly observe the formation and evolution of a jet from one of these events,” says study co-author Miguel Pérez-Torres of the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Spain.

The discovery’s first inklings emerged in January 2005, when a team led by astronomer Seppo Mattila of the University of Turku in Finland detected a brilliant pointlike source of infrared light from within Arp 299, a pair of merging galaxies some 150 million light-years from Earth. That July another team led by Pérez-Torres reanalyzing previously gathered data confirmed a bright source of radio waves from the same location.

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Politicians preach Christian nationalism at the Southern Baptist Convention

By Andrew L. Seidel

The Southern Baptists invited discord by hosting Vice President Pence and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott as speakers at their annual gathering.

For much of the annual SBC meeting this week, held as a scandal swirls — something we wrote about a few weeks ago — it seemed hopeful that progressive secular values might be infiltrating the enclave. But things ended on a sour political note as Vice President Mike Pence took to the stage Wednesday. He preached a toxic brand of Christian nationalism — conservative politics, historical revisionism, absolutism, and Christianity — that he and Donald Trump rode into the Oval Office. This was exemplified when Pence once again proclaimed that he is “a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican . . . in that order.”

Pence wasn’t the only Christian nationalist at the meeting. Long-time hater and FFRF-obstructor, Abbott, also preached this poisonous strain of religio-politics to the ministerial gathering.

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