ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 320

A wedding cake is an ‘artistic expression’ that a baker may deny to a same-sex couple, Calif. judge rules

By Fred Barbash

Forcing a baker to provide a wedding cake for a same-sex marriage over her religious objections violates her right to free speech, a California judge has ruled.

“A wedding cake is not just a cake in a Free Speech analysis,” wrote Superior Court Judge David R. Lampe in a decision late Monday. “It is an artistic expression by the person making it that is to be used traditionally as a centerpiece in the celebration of a marriage. There could not be a greater form of expressive conduct,” he said.

As a result, a state anti-discrimination law, which applies to all kinds of other goods and services, does not apply to the baker, who lives in Bakersfield.

The judge’s reasoning is similar to that of the “cake artist” awaiting a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. In that case, Jack C. Phillips, a Colorado baker, is arguing that the First Amendment’s free speech and free exercise of religion clauses give him the right to refuse wedding services to a same-sex couple, despite public accommodations laws that require businesses that are open to the public to treat all potential customers equally. The court heard arguments in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission in December.

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To know Donald Trump’s faith is to understand his politics

By Martyn Percy

The only surprising feature of Donald Trump’s first year in office is that it has been entirely predictable. So when I mention to colleagues that I have been researching Trump’s religious faith, reactions vary from mild scoffing (“I thought he was his own religion”) to bafflement and surprise. But Trump has a faith. And if you want to know how the next few years of his presidency will pan out, understanding Trump’s religion is an important key.

Start with his inauguration ceremony. Pastor Paula White was one of the clergy nominated to pray for Trump on the day. A televangelist and exponent of the “health, wealth and prosperity” movement, she preaches the “prosperity gospel”, an unorthodox approach to Christianity that says God wants people to be rich, and that he makes them wealthy as a sign of his blessing. So the richer you are, the more obvious it is that God loves you, and the stronger your faith is.

White teaches that God rewards “faithful” people who invest in His promised providence. You invest by making deposits – faith, prayers and gifts of money – to God (the church, naturally, is the “steward” of your financial gifts). So if you want to be healthy and wealthy, all you need to do is give, and then believe, and all your heart’s desires will be realised. The more you invest, the greater the likely rewards.

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Health officials push for vaccine against neglected tropical virus

By Declan Butler

When the chikungunya virus hit the French Caribbean territories of Martinique and Guadeloupe in a 2013–15 epidemic, around half of the population fell ill. Few people died from the disease, which causes high fever and severe joint pain. But years after the infection, many of those affected still struggle to dress themselves, to grip objects and to close their fists, says Fabrice Simon, a chikungunya researcher at Laveran military teaching hospital in Marseille, France.

Advocates are attempting to accelerate the development of a vaccine for this disabling disease, which is endemic in the tropics and sub-tropics — regions that are home to some 1.3 billion people. Epidemiologists, vaccine developers and regulators are meeting in New Delhi on 5–6 February to review the latest data on vaccine candidates, and to consider how to get the promising ones to market.

“The timing is right; there are promising vaccine candidates in the pipeline; what’s needed now is momentum,” says Johan Holst, a vaccine specialist at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) in Oslo, an influential body formally launched in 2017 to speed up the development of vaccines against epidemic threats. Its members include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, the World Economic Forum, the European Commission and several governments, including those of Germany and Japan.

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Elon Musk Does It Again

By Lee Billings

Earlier today, our sun gained a new satellite, courtesy of SpaceX’s first test launch of its Falcon Heavy rocket: A cherry-red Tesla Roadster once driven by SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, blasting tunes from David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” with a spacesuit-clad “Starman” dummy strapped in the driver’s seat. On the dashboard display as Starman hurtled into the darkness, waiting in the sky? “Don’t Panic,” the tagline from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Launched with an earth-shaking roar from Pad 39a at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida—the same launch site of the Apollo 11 lunar mission in 1969 and the first space shuttle flight in 1981—the Roadster was planned to embark on an interplanetary trajectory looping between the orbital vicinities of Earth and of Mars. Instead, the Falcon Heavy’s upper stage overperformed on its final burn, pushing the outer reaches of the Roadster’s heliocentric orbit beyond Mars and into the asteroid belt.* The Roadster is neither the first car nor even the first electric model ever launched into space (the Apollo-era lunar rovers take both of those prizes). But it is certainly the fastest, approaching a speed of 12 kilometers per second relative to Earth when it separated from the Falcon Heavy’s payload fairing en route to deep space.

The big news here, though, isn’t actually the Falcon Heavy’s eccentric payload, but rather the mere fact that this behemoth of a rocket exists and is on the verge of regular operations. Musk, for his part, had pegged the chances of success at only 50/50, where “success” was defined as the rocket merely flying high enough to clear the launch pad before exploding. In actuality, the rocket performed nearly flawlessly.

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The American Religious Landscape is Volatile

by Ryan P. Burge

I was browsing a political science message board a few years ago and an anonymous poster commented that he/she wondered why those who study religion and politics think it’s somehow special compared to other group based identities. I am always trying to be aware of blind spots in my own thinking, so that argument has stuck with me. I think I have constructed a rebuttal. Put simply, religion is not an identity in the way that race/ethnicity is an identity because religion is a choice. It’s not immutable or unchangeable. While someone may grow up evangelical, they can choose to leave that identity at some point in their life (and many do). Others are born into a faith and never leave. That’s something that doesn’t really exist in other contexts.

Ever since I read “Switching Faith” by Darren Sherkat (who was on my dissertation committee) I’ve always wanted to explore religious switching in more depth, but never really had the data or the inclination to wade into the problem. However, I became aware that the Cooperative Congressional Election Study not only has a longitudinal survey that they conduct every two years, but they also conducted a panel survey in 2010, 2012, and 2014. For those who are not privy to survey methodology, a panel survey is when the same people are asked questions over an extended period of time. They are invaluable to track actual change in opinion or behavior over time. They are also perfect to track religious migration in the United States. The CCES Panel is especially valuable because it started with 9,500 respondents. That allows for a lot of subgroup comparisons. Let’s start as broadly as possible and look at the entire dataset and how much change occurred between 2010, 2012, and 2014.

Each of the three vertical bars represented the distribution of religious identities in each year. This visualization also contains an alluvial diagram, which are the bands that represent the flow of individuals from one tradition to another across the three panel waves. The thicker the band, the greater number of individuals migrated from one religious tradition to another. There is obviously a lot going on in this graph, but two things become apparent. One is that there is a tremendous amount of religious stability amongst some religious traditions, but there is also a great deal of movement from one tradition to another across these two year time periods.

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A Proposed Utah Bill Could Block the Most Powerful Critics of the Mormon Church

By Hemant Mehta

Utah State Rep. V. Lowry Snow just introduced a bill that could silence the most powerful critics of the Mormon Church.

H.B. 330 has a seemingly straightforward purpose: It says you can’t record a private conversation without the consent of the other person (with few exceptions). Several other states have laws on the book regarding this issue.

So why Utah and why now? It’s possible that the bill was introduced because some of the most damning revelations about the Mormon Church lately have come by way of  and showing the world just how absurd they are, or exposing leaked documents (including audio and video) revealing secrets about the Church.

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A Ticking Time Bomb of Mercury Is Hidden Beneath Earth’s Permafrost

By Brandon Specktor

When the mercury’s rising in your thermometer, it may also be rising in the ocean.

According to a new study published Feb. 5 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, theremay be more than 15 million gallons (58 million liters) of mercury buried in the permafrost of the Northern Hemisphere — roughly twice as much mercury as can be found in the rest of Earth’s soils, ocean and atmosphere combined. And if global temperatures continue to rise, all that mercury could come pouring out.

In geology, permafrost is defined as any soil that has been frozen for more than two years. In the Northern Hemisphere, permafrost accounts for about 8.8 million square miles (22.79 million square kilometers) of land — or roughly 24 percent of exposed Earth, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Over time, naturally occurring compounds in the atmosphere, such as mercury and carbon dioxide, can bind with organic material in the soil and be frozen into permafrost, potentially remaining trapped underground for thousands of years before it thaws, the new paper said.

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Geneticists unravel secrets of super-invasive crayfish

By Ewen Callaway

Molecular biologists have sequenced the genome of an invasive species of crayfish that can reproduce without mating and is spreading rapidly across Madagascar. The marbled crayfish (Procambarus virginalis) was first spotted in aquariums in Germany in the 1990s. Now, DNA sequencing suggests that the species is probably the product of two distantly related members of a different crayfish species, a team reported on 5 February in Nature Ecology and Evolution1.

The marbled crayfish has already been banned in the European Union and some parts of the United States because of the threat it poses to freshwater ecosystems. The species has now spread into the interior of Madagascar and risks crowding out seven native crayfish species. “This is a very aggressive population,” says Frank Lyko, a molecular biologist at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, who co-led the study. “If the marble crayfish continues to explode at its current pace, it will probably outcompete endemic species.”

The marbled crayfish carries three copies of each chromosome, instead of the usual two2. Lyko and his team sequenced the genome of a single individual from a laboratory strain known as Petshop. Its DNA revealed a surprise: it had two different genotypes at many places of its genome. The best explanation for this pattern, says Lyko, is that two of the chromosomes are nearly identical in sequence, but the third differs substantially.

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State Lawmakers Introduce New Faith Adoption Legislation

By Ross Terrell

State lawmakers approved an adoption bill to overhaul the state’s system.

But now they will consider another bill, Senate Bill 375, that would let adoption agencies that receive state funding deny services based on “sincerely held religious beliefs.”

Last year, Georgia’s adoption bill failed in the Senate due to a provision that let adoption agencies that got state money refuse service based on their mission statements.

This year, state senators narrowed that provision and put it in its own bill. It allows for denial of service based only on “sincerely held religious beliefs” that don’t conflict with any civil rights laws.

Jeff Graham, with the advocacy group Georgia Equality, said the new bill still opens the door for unfair treatment.

“It’s not just members of the LGBT community that could be discriminated against,” Graham said. “You could have members of a minority faith being discriminated against. Or a single mother, just because she’s unwed.”

Republican State Sen. William Ligon, the bill’s sponsor, said people who run adoption agencies shouldn’t have to compromise their religious beliefs just to do business.

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NM Candidate: Opponents of Our Ten Commandments Display Want a “Secular Utopia”

By Hemant Mehta

Hobbs, New Mexico is one of those cities that has a Ten Commandments monument outside the local courthouse. It’s been up there for decades. A couple of weeks ago, when an atheist activist spoke at a city council meeting about why it needed to be removed, he was essentially mocked by the elected officials.

One of them slapped his knee in laughter. Another argued about his interpretation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, before telling him, “Well, I think you should see if you can get the Constitution rewrote.” Another dismissed him because he had been seen at a local “Black Lives Matter” rally. And another said in a ranty monologue, “I hope we continue being — we will continue being a Christian community. I’m a Catholic and I’m a Christian.” (As if that mattered.)

I bring that up because elections for several of the seats for City Commission are taking place a month from now, and a man named Dennis Wayne Barcuch is running for the District 5 seat (currently occupied by knee-slapper Garry Buie).

Naturally, he’s hyping his religion as a selling point for his candidacy. He even said on Facebook on Sunday that, if elected, he would make sure the Ten Commandments monument stays right where it is.

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