ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 318

Decoding the Overlap Between Autism and ADHD

By Ricki Rusting

Every morning, Avigael Wodinsky sets a timer to keep her 12-year-old son, Naftali, on track while he gets dressed for school. “Otherwise,” she says, “he’ll find 57 other things to do on the way to the bathroom.”

Wodinsky says she knew something was different about Naftali from the time he was born, long before his autism diagnosis at 15 months. He lagged behind his twin sister in hitting developmental milestones, and he seemed distant. “When he was an infant and he was feeding, he wouldn’t cry if you took the bottle away from him,” she says. He often sat facing the corner, turning the pages of a picture book over and over again. Although he has above-average intelligence, he did not speak much until he was 4, and even then his speech was often ‘scripted:’ He would repeat phrases and sentences he had heard on television.

Naftali’s trouble with maintaining focus became apparent in preschool—and problematic in kindergarten. He would stare out the window or wander around the classroom. “He was doing everything except what he was supposed to be doing,” Wodinsky recalls. At first, his psychiatrist credited these behaviors to his autism and recommended he drink coffee for its mild stimulant effect. The psychiatrist also suggested anxiety drugs. Neither treatment helped. A doctor then prescribed a series of drugs used for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), even though Naftali’s hyperactivity was still considered a part of his autism; those medications also failed or caused intolerable side effects.

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On the Battlefield, Ants Treat Each Other’s War Wounds

By Stephanie Pappas

A species of warmongering sub-Saharan ant not only rescues its battle-wounded soldiers but also treats their injuries.

This strikingly unusual behavior raises the survival rate for injured ants from a mere 20 percent to 90 percent, according to new research published Feb. 13 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

These same ants, a species called Megaponera analis, were observed last year bringing their injured back to the nest, but no one knew what happened to the wounded ants after that, said study leader Erik Frank, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. Now, it’s clear that the ants get extra TLC after being saved from the battlefield. 

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Freedom From Religion group takes issue with ‘blatant praying’ at Carter County school

By Karla Ward

An organization of atheists and agnostics has taken issue with a prayer circle held after a high school basketball game in northeastern Kentucky recently.

Players, cheerleaders and coaches from cross-county rivals West Carter High School and East Carter High School gathered on the court and joined hands in prayer after their game on Jan. 26, according to a post on West Carter School’s Facebook page.

A photo of the prayer time was posted with a caption that said, in part, “What a way to end the game! #cometpride #wearecartercounty.”

The Freedom From Religion Foundation issued a news release Friday, asking that school employees stop praying with students and saying the school shouldn’t be using its official page “to endorse religion.”

The organization sent a letter to Carter County Superintendent Ronnie Dotson on Feb. 6, saying that “federal courts have held that even a public school coach’s silent participation in student prayer circles is unconstitutional.”

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Massachusetts bill would bar companies from citing religious exemptions

By Steve LeBlanc

BOSTON (AP) — Lawmakers are weighing a bill aimed at preventing corporations from being able to claim religious exemptions from state anti-discrimination laws for conduct that occurs in Massachusetts.

The bill is in part a reaction to the 2014 U.S. Supreme Court decision that enabled the Christian-owned Hobby Lobby chain to be exempt from a federal mandate to offer contraceptives as part of its employee health care plans.

The bill states that “the powers of a business corporation do not include assertion — based on the purported religious belief or moral conviction on the part of the corporation, its officers, or directors — of exemptions from, or claims or defenses against, federal or state law prohibiting discrimination.”

Supporters say Massachusetts already prohibits many forms of discrimination in employment, housing, credit, and public accommodations on grounds that include race, color, religious creed, national origin, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, genetic information, disability, ancestry, or veteran status.

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Trump’s budget for NASA defunds the space station and includes vague plans for the Moon

By Loren Grush

The Trump administration wants NASA to move away from doing business in low orbit around the Earth and instead focus on sending astronauts back to the Moon. That’s according to President Donald Trump’s new budget request, out today, which details how the White House wants to fund NASA in fiscal year 2019.

The request instructs NASA to end direct funding for the International Space Station by 2025, while pursuing a coordinated campaign to put humans on the Moon by the mid-2020s, according to a copy of the detailed budget request reviewed by The Verge. However, there aren’t a lot of details for how the Moon plans will play out, and very little funding is allocated for developing all the hardware needed for putting people on the lunar surface again.

The budget confirms previous reporting from The Verge regarding the future of the space station. However, a new internal document from NASA, reported yesterday by The Washington Post, reveals that the space agency does not intend to get rid of the ISS once government funding ends, but instead turn it into something of a commercial real estate venture. The goal is for other countries and private space companies to pick up the slack and “operate certain elements or capabilities” of the ISS, so that NASA still has a platform to conduct science experiments, according to the document. “NASA will expand international and commercial partnerships over the next seven years in order to ensure continued human access to and presence in low Earth orbit,” the memo states.

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Trump vowed to destroy the Johnson Amendment. Thankfully, he has failed.

By David Saperstein and Amanda Tyler

David Saperstein, director emeritus of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, is an ordained rabbi who served as U.S. ambassador at large for international religious freedom from 2015 to 2017. Amanda Tyler is the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.

At the National Prayer Breakfast a little more than a year ago, President Trump vowed to “totally destroy” the Johnson Amendment, a federal law prohibiting houses of worship, charitable nonprofits and private foundations from endorsing, opposing or financially supporting political candidates and parties. Fortunately for religious congregations — and the entire charitable sector — he has not yet fulfilled his promise.

Trump’s failure to eliminate the Johnson Amendment is not for lack of will. Members of Congress pursued similar goals to the president, attempting to include language that would weaken the law as part of the tax reform bill, but that effort ultimately failed. And at one point, Trump described his goal of eliminating the prohibition on election activity as potentially his “greatest contribution to Christianity — and other religions.”

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The Necessity of Secularism, pg 148

“Can Civilization Survive Without god?” was the sensationalized title given by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life to a 2010 conversation/debate between Christopher Hitchens and his brother, Peter Hitchens. That the Pew Forum, a project of the nonpartisan and respected Pew Research Center, would hold a conversation on this topic is by itself revealing. No respectable organization would hold a symposium on the topic “Can Civilization Survive Christianity?” or “Can Civilization Survive Islam?” At least no organization could do so without engendering severe and immediate public criticism. Atheism, though, not only threatens many people, but it is still considered acceptable among some to label it as a threat. Even if it is conceded that the individual atheist may be a good person, there is an abiding concern that the spread of atheism bodes ill for civilization. The spread of atheism is regarded like the spread of the plague – or perhaps the invasion of the body snatchers. ”

–Ron Lindsay, The Necessity of Secularism, pg 148

Discuss!

The complicated history of ‘In God We Trust’ and other examples Trump gives of American religion

By Julie Zauzmer

In his address to the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday morning, President Trump steered clear of policy and stuck instead to a spiritual theme: “America is a nation of believers,” he said.

Every president since Dwight D. Eisenhower has addressed the annual prayer breakfast, which is organized by Christians with the goal of preaching unity in faith across political divides.

At his first address to the breakfast last year, Trump made a policy promise — he said he would “totally destroy” the Johnson Amendment that bans churches from endorsing political candidates, a promise he has partially fulfilled by executive order but Congress failed to carry out through legislation. He joked, too, about praying for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s TV ratings.

This year, Trump struck a different tone. His theme was the heroism of everyday Americans, including military and police, teachers, even a 9-year-old with a serious illness. Trump repeatedly emphasized evidence that that American spirit is based in religion.

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The Government Gets Into the Church-Rebuilding Business

By Emma Green

Tucked among the provisions in the budget bill passed by Congress on Friday are new rules about how FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, works with houses of worship. According to the new law, religious nonprofits can’t be excluded from disaster aid just because of their religious nature, which had been the agency’s policy in certain contexts prior to January.

The move resolves a long-standing controversy over the agency’s policy on religious aid, mostly recently raised during Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, which damaged a number of houses of worship in the South. It’s also part of a significant trend: Rules on government money going to religious organizations are loosening, a shift that has consequences well beyond disaster aid and emergency management.

Last summer, when Hurricane Harvey ripped across islands in the Caribbean, Louisiana, and Texas, it left roughly $125 billion in damage, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—second in cost only to Hurricane Katrina. Worse, it was followed almost immediately by Hurricanes Irma and Maria, which further devastated Florida, North Carolina, Puerto Rico, and other areas.

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How Should Atheism Be Taught?

By Isabel Fattal

Louis J. Appignani, an 84-year-old living in Florida, tells a compelling story about his conversion to atheism. Despite attending Catholic schools from a young age and through his teens, he didn’t really question belief in God growing up; people in his world, he said, sort of took faith for granted. Then he got to college and started reading the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who argued against traditional defenses of God’s existence and justified, as Appignani put it, “what I deep down believe.” Now, the proud atheist holds nothing back when it comes to his personal views on religion. The study of atheism, he said, “gave me strength to believe that faith is stupid … [that] mythology is not true.”

Appignani started his career as a businessman, serving as the president and chairman of the famous Barbizon International modeling and acting school, among other endeavors. In 2001 he turned his focus to atheism, establishing the Appignani Foundation, which supports “critical thinking” and “humanistic values” and has given grants to organizations such as the American Humanist Association and the Secular Coalition for America. Then, in 2016, Appignani through his foundation endowed a chair for the study of atheism and secularism at the University of Miami, an institution he had long been involved with as a South Florida resident. His $2.2 million gift to the university marks the first time in American history that a faculty position has been endowed specifically for the study of atheism, and he hopes it will “legitimize the word ‘atheism’” in the public sphere. The university recently announced that Anjan Chakravartty, a professor of metaphysics and the philosophy of science at the University of Notre Dame, will hold the chair.

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