ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 299

Ten Commandments display to go back up at Arkansas capitol after first one destroyed

By Morgan Gstalter

The date is set for the new Ten Commandments monument to go up at the Arkansas capitol after the first version was destroyed when a driver plowed into it.

State Sen. Jason Rapert (R), who sponsored the original monument, said that crews will reinstall the Ten Commandments on the statehouse grounds in Little Rock next week. A spokesman for Arkansas Secretary of State Mark Martin confirmed to Arkansas Online that the installation is set for April 26.

“We are happy to have made this all possible for the citizens of Arkansas as they honor one of the historical and moral foundations of American law – the Ten Commandments,” Rapert wrote on the project’s GoFundMe account.

Rapert founded the American History and Heritage Foundation, which raised over $85,000 for a new monument, which will include concrete barriers for protection.

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Catholic Hospitals Require the Burial of Fetal Remains; All of Texas May Follow

By Hemant Mehta

Last year, Texas passed a law saying all fetal remains had to be buried or cremated. That used to be the case only for fetuses older than 20 weeks, but the new anti-abortion measure made the age irrelevant. The law also banned donation of that tissue for research purposes. It was blocked by a federal judge earlier this year, just days before it was supposed to go into effect, and that’s where we are right now.

While the intent was to dissuade women from having abortions, the reality was that women who suffered miscarriages or had very early abortions were essentially forced to treat it as a homicide, complete with burial. (As if a fetus that was never viable required a burial.) For women who went through a miscarriage, it only added insult to injury. But that’s what happens when anti-abortion officials get to write the laws.

How does a law like that even come into existence? You won’t be surprised to learn it has religious roots.

Sophie Novack at the Texas Observer just published the heartbreaking story of Blake Norton, who experienced the effects of this law before it ever became a law. That’s because, in 2015, when her doctor realized her 11-week-old baby didn’t have a heartbeat, he sent her to a Catholic hospital to remove the tissue. And that hospital already had a burial policy in place.

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White Evangelical Men Can’t Get Enough of Trump

By Harriet Sinclair

A record number of white evangelical Christians say they support President Donald Trump.

According to a poll from the Public Religion Research Institute released on Thursday, 75 percent on white evangelicals said they had a favourable view of the president and just 22 percent saying they had an unfavourable view.

And white evangelical men are the most likely of that group to back the president, with 81 percent holding a favourable view of Trump compared with 71 percent of white evangelical women.

This is a dramatic jump in support for Trump when compared to the rest of the population, with a recent poll from ABC News/Washington Post putting the president’s approval rating at just 40 percent. Another survey from NBC News/Wall Street Journal  put Trump’s approval rating at 39 percent.

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How to blow up a star

By Elizabeth Gibney

After spending three months trying to blow up a star, Hans-Thomas Janka and his team finally saw what they had been waiting for. Like the world’s most patient pyromaniacs, they watched their massive stellar simulation — rendered in painstaking detail — inch closer to detonation. Each day, their supercomputer ticked through just 5 milliseconds of the star’s life.

But perseverance has its rewards. In the team’s previous attempts to make a realistic simulation, the stellar fireworks always petered out. This time, in 2015, Janka watched as the shock wave needed to drive the explosion continued to grow; the mock star was going supernova1. “That was the moment we recognized that, OK, now we are at the point we longed to be at for two decades,” says Janka, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany. “We were on the path to clarifying the explosion mechanism of these massive stars.”

For more than half a century, physicists have suspected that the heat produced by elusive particles called neutrinos, created in the core of a star, could generate a blast that radiates more energy in a single second than the Sun will in its lifetime. But they have had trouble proving that hypothesis. The detonation process is so complex — incorporating general relativity, fluid dynamics, nuclear and other physics — that computers have struggled to mimic the mechanism in silico. And that poses a problem. “If you can’t reproduce it,” Janka says, “that means you don’t understand it.”

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I Hung Out with Followers of Indonesia’s Self-Proclaimed Doomsday Prophet

By Arzia Tivany Wargadiredja

The biblical Garden of Eden was probably somewhere in modern-day Iraq. But what a lot of people don’t know is that there’s another Eden—a secretive place where people are preparing for the end of the world, right in the middle of the Indonesian capital.

Two weeks ago, I found myself standing at the gates of Eden. I was too afraid to ring the bell. I grew up hearing tales of Jakarta’s Eden, a mysterious cult run by a woman named Lia Eden who claims to have a direct line to God. According to her, God is angry at humanity for allowing religion to ruin the Earth. It’s gotten so bad that the only way forward is for the “purified” few to board a UFO piloted by the Archangel Gabriel and ride to a different Earth, in another galaxy, where we can start civilization over again without the negative effects of religion.

It’s a pretty bold statement to make in a country where blasphemy is illegal, and Lia Eden—her real name is Lia Aminuddin—has actually been jailed twice for insulting religion. It was back in 2005 during her first arrest that I started to hear about Lia Eden and her cult. People were calling her a “misguided,” person who claimed to be a prophet or angel. Others just said she was downright delusional.

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The Trump administration is paying Focus on the Family to stop the AIDS epidemic in South Africa

By Danielle McLean

The State Department gave a prominent anti-LGBTQ religious organization a grant to combat HIV/AIDS in South Africa through a religious program that pressures kids into pledging that they will abstain from sex until marriage.

An affiliate of Focus on the Family (FOTF) received a $49,505 grant under the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) from the State Department’s Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator on September 18, 2017, while the department was under the leadership of then-Secretary Rex Tillerson, according to USA Spending. Focus on the Family’s Thriving Family is tasked with using these funds to prevent HIV and AIDS by implementing its global abstinence-only purity pledge program, called “No Apologies,” to 7,000 “learners” in 90 schools in South Africa between October 2017 and September 2018.

South Africa has the largest HIV epidemic in the world, with nearly 19 percent of its population, a total of 7.1 million people, living with the deadly sexually transmitted infection as of 2016, according to the U.K.-based global HIV and AIDS organization Avert.

PEPFAR was created in 2003 under the George W. Bush administration to combat the global epidemic — an effort Focus on the Family’s leadership has frequently criticized.

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NJ Supreme Court Says Taxpayer Money Cannot Be Used to Fund Church Renovations

By Hemant Mehta

In a unanimous decision just announced by the New Jersey Supreme Court, taxpayer dollars cannot be used to help repair or maintain churches. It’s a major victory for church/state separation advocates and one that will save taxpayers in the state millions of dollars that would otherwise have gone to promoting religious dogma.

The case involved more than $5.5 million in “historic preservation grants” that were given to a dozen churches in Morris County between 2012 and 2015. They were presumed legal because they didn’t directly promote faith.

But giving churches money for general maintenance is promoting faith since it frees up funding that goes right back into worship.

That’s why plaintiff David Steketee and the Freedom From Religion Foundation filed a lawsuit in 2015 saying the grants were illegal.

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How Would We Know If Intelligent Life Existed on Earth Before Humans?

By Charles Q. Choi

Reptilian menaces called Silurians evolved on Earth before humankind — at least in the “Doctor Who” rendition of the universe. But science fiction aside, how would we know if some advanced civilization existed on our home planet millions of years before brainy humans showed up?

This is a serious question, and serious scientists are speculating about what traces these potential predecessors might have left behind. And they’re calling this possibility the Silurian hypothesis.

When it comes to the hunt for advanced extraterrestrial civilizations that might exist across the cosmos, one must reckon with the knowledge that the universe is about 13.8 billion years old. In contrast, complex life has existed on Earth’s surface for only about 400 million years, and humans have only developed industrial civilizations in the last 300 years. This raises the possibility that industrial civilizations might have been around long before human ones ever existed — not just around other stars, but even on Earth itself.

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Otter Poop Helps Scientists Track Pollution at a Superfund Site

By Deirdre Lockwood

The Duwamish River, which winds through Seattle, contains a lot of unpleasant stuff. In one industrially contaminated stretch, which has been designated a Superfund site, levels of many pollutants exceed state health standards. The compounds, which include notorious chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), settle in river sediments and make fish and shellfish unsafe to eat.

Swimming amidst this pollution is a population of river otters. Now researchers are proposing to use otter poop to help monitor a 17-year-long plan to clean the river, recently approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Biologist Michelle Wainstein, from Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo, says the charismatic mammals are top predators who mainly eat fish and crabs but also dine on frogs, birds and small mammals. All these river denizens take in pollutants and pass them along to otters. The otters, in turn, use communal latrines on shore to defecate, making it easy and noninvasive to sample their scat for pollutants. “They like to get together and have poop parties,” Wainstein says.

This kind of sampling can give scientists a much better idea of what is getting into a body than simply analyzing water or river sediment. Picking up scat to determine pollutant levels also is preferable to trapping otters, because handling the creatures “can be extremely stressful for animals,” says Elizabeth Peterson, a postdoctoral researcher at Colorado State University–Pueblo. And cleaning the river is important. In mammals including humans PCBs disrupt reproduction and the endocrine and neurological systems, and are carcinogens. Many PAHs are also probable human carcinogens. In the otters, scientists suspect PCBs may harm reproduction but do not yet have direct evidence.

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How Liberty University Built a Billion-Dollar Empire Online

By Alec MacGillis

It was the start of the 2017 Fall Family Weekend at Liberty University, the school founded by Jerry Falwell Sr. 47 years ago in Lynchburg, Va., and the lines were especially long to get into the basketball arena for the mandatory thrice-weekly student convocation. There was a festive feel in the air — as usual, a live band kicked things off with some Christian rock.

Penny Nance, a newly named Liberty trustee who is the head of the socially conservative group Concerned Women for America, took the stage to say that with Donald Trump in the White House, the country was much closer to overturning Roe v. Wade and putting “true limits on the abortionist’s hand.” Tim Lee, a Texas preacher and evangelist who lost his legs in the Vietnam War, gave a sermon bemoaning “homosexuals and pornographers,” declaring that one problem with “pulpits today is that they’ve got a lot of girlie men in them.” A young man in front of me in a Nautica T-shirt clapped and shouted, “That’s right!”

Liberty is spread out on more than 7,000 acres overlooking Lynchburg, a former railroad-and-tobacco town on the James River below the Blue Ridge Mountains. The student body on campus is 15,500 strong, and the university employs more than 7,500 people locally. Throughout the university grounds, there is evidence of a billion-dollar capital expansion: mountains of dirt and clusters of construction equipment marking the site of the new business school; the $40 million football-stadium upgrade, to accommodate Liberty’s move into the highest level of N.C.A.A. competition; and the Freedom Tower, which at 275 feet will be the tallest structure in Lynchburg, capped by a replica of the Liberty Bell.

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