ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 327

South Africa outlaws single-religion schools

By Samuel Osborne

Single-religion schools have been outlawed in South Africa after a ruling at the Johannesburg High Court.

Public schools may no longer promote themselves as subscribing to a single particular religion at the exclusion of others, the court ruled.

The Organisasie vir Godsdienste-Onderrig en Demokrasie (Organisation for Religious Education and Democracy), or OGOD, which fights against religious indoctrination through public schools in South Africa, welcomed the judgement.

He said the judgement meant public schools may not promote one specific religion and exclude others.

“Our case was built on the fact that they were called Christian schools and coerced learners to participate‚” Mr Pietersen said, according to South African daily The Times.

OGOD made the application against six predominantly Christian public schools to prevent them from taking part in 71 instances of religious conduct.

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Farewell, Cassini: Saturn Spacecraft’s Crash Is Top Spaceflight Story of 2017

By Nola Taylor Redd

After 13 years in the Saturn system, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft had become an icon.

The probe’s data and imagery reshaped scientists’ understanding of the ringed planet and its 60-plus moons, and brought Saturn’s beauty and mystery to the masses all over the world.

All of that storied work came to an end on Sept. 15, 2017, when Cassini’s handlers sent the craft hurtling into Saturn in an intentional death dive. This plunge wrung the most possible science from the mission while keeping any potentially habitable environments safe from contamination, NASA officials said.

“Not only did we do science here at the very end, but we protected the science to be done in the future,” Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C., said the day after Cassini’s plunge.

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60-Million-Year-Old Meteor Strike Uncovered on Remote Isle of Skye

By Samantha Mathewson

A remote island in Scotland bears traces of out-of-this-world minerals from a 60-million-year-old meteorite impact.

A team of geologists from Birkbeck, University of London was examining volcanic rocks on the remote Isle of Skye in Scotland when they uncovered rare minerals that have never before been found on Earth, according to a study that was published Dec. 12 in the journal GeoScienceWorld.

In the study, the team focused on a 3.3-foot-thick (1-meter) layer at the base of a 60-million-year-old lava flow deposit. Using an electron microprobe, which shoots electrons at samples and analyzes the X-rays the samples emit in response, the researchers found that rocks from the area contained rare minerals from space.

The mysterious mineral, vanadium-rich and niobium-rich osbornite, was previously only found in dust samples from space on the comet 81P/Wild 2, collected by NASA’s Stardust Comet Sample Return Mission.

“When we discovered what it was we were very surprised, and it was a bit of a shock because we were not expecting that,” study co-author Andy Beard, a lecturer in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Birkbeck, University of London, said in the statement.

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Egypt Reportedly Set to Pass Law Criminalizing Atheism

By Hemant Mehta

We’ve known for a long time now that Egypt is not a safe country for atheists. People who have said publicly that they’re atheists, like Karim al-Banna and Alber Saber, have received prison sentences of up to three years for the crime of “blasphemy” or religious contempt.

In 2014, government officials said (in an eerily specific way) that there were exactly 866 atheists in the country. It was a way of suggesting they knew who the people were and that the number was getting lower all the time. But in a country of nearly 95 million people, there’s no way that number was even close to accurate. Estimates put the true number anywhere from two million to four million.

Still, over the past few years, atheism itself wasn’t a crime. You only broke the law if you promoted it publicly. That’s why managing a Facebook group for atheists or criticizing Islam put those activists in the government’s crosshairs. That’s also why millions of potential atheists were rounded down to under 1,000: They knew it was safer to remain in the closet.

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How Religion Made a Global Comeback in 2017

By Emma Green

One of the great paradoxes of Donald Trump is that, for a president who is among the least overtly pious in recent memory, he often presents the world through a religious lens. It’s in his towering rhetoric about the looming “beachhead of intolerance” in the U.S., terrorists who “do not worship God, they worship death,” and America as “a nation of true believers.” It was evident in Trump’s first international trip as president, a spin through Jerusalem, Riyadh, and Rome framed explicitly as a world tour of Abrahamic religions. Religion has been at the center of Vice President Pence’s portfolio, with visits to the evangelist Franklin Graham’s summit on international religious freedom and the annual meeting of Christians United for Israel. And religious groups were instrumental in one of the year’s biggest foreign-policy moves: Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and relocate the American embassy there.

Trump’s first year in office strongly suggests that nationalism is the dominant organizing principle in his understanding of global affairs—and it’s often washed in religious identity. This is a significant break from the Obama administration, which tended to view other factors as more significant drivers of foreign policy. But it’s still not clear what kind of strategy and tangible policies will result from Trump’s worldview, and even the religious groups he intends to benefit may end up worse off as a result.

Behind the scenes, the mechanisms of religion and diplomacy have been muddy. The State Department’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs, established under Secretary of State John Kerry to work with international religious groups, has effectively been shut down. The president has spoken passionately about persecuted Christians in the Middle East, but it remains to be seen what kind of expanded aid or systematic visa help these groups will get. And the administration has bolstered its relationship with countries like Saudi Arabia, which the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom continues to label a “country of particular concern” for “[prosecuting] and [imprisoning] individuals for dissent, apostasy, and blasphemy.”

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Give Thanks for the Winter Solstice. You Might Not Be Here Without It.

By Shannon Hall

On Dec. 21, or Thursday this year, the sun will hug the horizon. For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, it will seem to barely rise — hardly peeking above a city’s skyline or a forest’s snow-covered evergreens — before it swiftly sets.

For months, the orb’s arc across the sky has been slumping, shortening each day.

In New York City, for example, the sun will be in the sky for just over nine hours — roughly six hours less than in June at the summer solstice. The winter solstice marks the shortest day of the year, before the sun reverses course and climbs higher into the sky. (At the same time, places like Australia in the Southern Hemisphere mark the summer solstice, the longest day of the year.)

This is a good opportunity to imagine what such a day might look like if we had evolved on another planet where the sun would take a different dance across the sky. You might want to feel thankful for the solstices and seasons we do have, or we might not be here to witness them at all.

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Missouri Legislator’s Bill Would Use Taxpayer Money to Fund Religious Schools

By Hemant Mehta

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court voted 7-2 in the Trinity Lutheran case to allow state funds to be made available to churches as long as it was for an ostensibly secular reason. The problem with that decision, of course, is that giving taxpayer money to a church would free up money the church could then use for its ministry.

One key thing to remember from that case is that it was all about the First Amendment. The church said Missouri’s decision to deny them funding for a new playground violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment — essentially punishing them for being a church.

Now a Missouri legislator wants to take all that a step further. State Rep. Lindell Shumake is proposing a constitutional amendment that would allow taxpayer funding to support religious schools, challenging the longstanding Blaine Amendment that exists in 38 states prohibiting taxpayer funding to faith-based schools.

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Sundays at the Altar of Science

By Thomas Hooven, M.D.

“I think it’s sad that you feel like you’re alone in the universe,” my mom recently said to me.

We were talking about the fact that I’m an atheist. Unspoken but understood was her dismay that my son and daughter aren’t religious, either. At ages 6 and 3, I’m not sure they’ve ever heard of God.

I was raised differently.

When I was growing up, my family attended a Protestant church in our small Connecticut town. On scarlet velvet pew cushions, I sang hymns and read scripture. In Sunday school, I imagined a God who knew everything about me and everything else.

I believed in biblical miracles: stories of walking on water, talking bushes and multiplying loaves of bread. These tales injected the possibility of imminent magic into my childhood. I assumed they were true because our white-haired minister told them with the same sincerity with which he praised honesty, generosity and other earnest virtues.

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Kentucky judge who refused to hear gay adoption cases found guilty of misconduct

By Darcy Costello

A Kentucky Family Court judge who refused to hear adoption cases involving gays and lesbians has been found guilty of misconduct by the state’s Judicial Conduct Commission.

The commission issued a public reprimand Tuesday against W. Mitchell Nance, who announced his intention to resign earlier this year amid the ethics and misconduct inquiry. That resignation was set to become final Dec. 16.

The order finds that “due to Respondent’s retirement, a public reprimand is warranted, and is the only public sanction available.”

Nance drew national attention in April when he said he would no longer hear adoption cases involving “homosexual parties” because he believes allowing a gay person to adopt could never be in the child’s best interest. 

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Gene editing staves off deafness in mice

By Heidi Ledford

Genome editing has been used to reduce hearing loss in ‘Beethoven’ mice, which carry a mutation that causes deafness in both mice and humans.

The research relies on a technique called CRISPR–Cas9 to knock out a mutant form of the gene Tmc1. In doing so, it lays out a potential pathway for treating other genetic causes of hearing loss. It also addresses a major problem facing the field of genome editing: how to deliver the protein and RNA needed for the CRISPR–Cas9 technique into the cells of a living animal.

In this case, the researchers encapsulated the CRISPR components in positively charged fatty molecules called lipids, which are capable of crossing cell membranes. They then injected those particles directly into the inner ears of the mice, where the lipids were taken up by the hair cells that sense acoustic vibrations. The results are reported this week in Nature (X. Gao et al. Naturehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature25164; 2017).

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