ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 328

Atheists File Discrimination Complaint Against Wyoming Department of Corrections

By Hemant Mehta

A new complaint filed by the American Humanist Association on behalf of inmates including JonMichael Guy says that the Wyoming Department of Corrections is discriminating against Humanist prisoners by not giving them the same perks and privileges afforded to prisoners with religious beliefs.

While people of faith are allowed to gather, study, and discuss their views, the atheists aren’t given the same opportunity (despite requesting it). That’s because the Department doesn’t even recognize “Humanism” as a valid “Faith Group.”

“The Department’s disparate treatment of Humanist inmates violates decades of clearly established legal precedent,” said David Niose, Legal Director at the Appignani Humanist Legal Center. “The Supreme Court has long held that Secular Humanism, and even atheism, must be treated as equivalent to religion for First Amendment purposes.”

The AHA won a similar case against federal prisons in 2015, but that ruling doesn’t apply here because it’s a state-run facility.

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ACLU sues a Louisiana district over school prayer, enforced religion

By Amanda Marcotte

For students in the Webster Parish school district in Louisiana, according to court documents filed by the ACLU on Monday, Christian proselytization is inescapable. From elementary school throughout graduation, the ACLU alleges, the school exerts immense pressure on students and their parents not only to be Christian but to be showily public about their faith. Now a student and her mother are suing, claiming that the school district has repeatedly violated the constitutional ban on governmental establishment of religion.

“The practice of schools sponsoring and promoting religion, particularly the Christian religion, is pervasive and systemic and goes back many years,” Bruce Hamilton, a staff attorney for the ACLU of Louisiana, said of this district that serves a number of small towns outside Shreveport, Louisiana.

Webster Parish, where nearly 64 percent of voters pulled the lever for Donald Trump in 2016, appears to be another front in the culture wars, where Christian conservatives are intent on imposing their worldview on others, regardless of the Constitution and the law.

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The troubling new language of science under Trump, explained

By Julia Belluz and Umair Irfan

In 1946, George Orwell published the seminal essay “Politics and the English Language,” in which he described how convoluted language can be used to intentionally confuse or mislead people. “A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details,” he wrote. “When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.”

Language is undoubtedly suffering in the Trump era, particularly the language of health and science. “There have been too many instances and too many suspected instances of words or ideas being set out of bounds,” Rush Holt, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, told Vox.

Some of these changes in language are top-down, and they’re meant to shake up priorities, rebrand old ideas, or obfuscate truths. But other changes are happening from the bottom up, as people working inside scientific agencies try to protect their programs from funding cuts and from their new idealogical leaders.

Of course, massaging language for political ends is nothing new. But some of these new examples are particularly worrisome. The administration appears to be controlling terminology to suppress well-established truths in science and take language about health in a more ideological direction, in ways that could harm Americans. Here, we rounded up four of the most important examples.

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Underground Castles? How Desert Spiders Craft Vertical Tunnels

By Mindy Weisberger

Beachgoing sandcastle builders know the exquisite frustration of tunneling into sand that’s too dry. The tunnel simply won’t hold its shape and quickly collapses.

But some types of desert spiders have mastered the technique of working with dry sand, excavating subterranean burrows — a few grains of sand at a time — that somehow retain their form and withstand pressures from wind and the shifting weight of the sand around them.

In a new study, scientists closely observed four species of desert spiders known to excavate vertical sand tunnels for hiding, resting and breeding, in order to dig up their engineering secrets. Unexpectedly, the researchers discovered that the arachnids used different yet equally effective methods for collecting and moving sand while they worked, and they strengthened the tunnels as they dug with carefully laid supporting layers of silk webbing.

Burrow-dwelling spiders like those in the study are strictly nocturnal. For the scientists, that meant spending long hours crouched in sandy environments with a flashlight, the study’s lead author Rainer Foelix, an arachnologist at the Neue Kantonsschule Aarau in Switzerland, told Live Science in an email. 

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Florida attorney general candidate proposes anti-LGBTQ ‘license to discriminate’

By Zack Ford

State lawmakers are already gearing up for their legislatures to return next year, and already, one Florida lawmaker has his eyes set on discriminating against LGBTQ people.

Florida state Rep. Jay Fant (R) has introduced what he calls the “Free Enterprise Protection Act”, which would allow business owners to refuse service to LGBTQ people without repercussion.

House Bill 871 is modeled after the First Amendment Defense Act introduced in Congress. It prohibits the government from taking any “discriminatory action” against a business because of its “personnel and employee benefit policies” or because it exercises its freedoms of expression and religion. Given Florida has no state law protecting LGBTQ people from discrimination in employment, housing, or public accommodations, this would be nothing short of an invitation to discriminate — one that would sidestep protections that exist at the local level in cities across the state.

The “discriminatory actions” from which Fant wants to protect businesses include tax penalties; denying grants, contracts, or certifications; or excluding the business from speech forums.

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America’s New Religion: Fox Evangelicalism

By Amy Sullivan

To hear the Christian right tell it, President Trump should be a candidate for sainthood — that is, if evangelicals believed in saints.

“Never in my lifetime have we had a Potus willing to take such a strong outspoken stand for the Christian faith like Donald Trump,” tweeted Franklin Graham, the son of the evangelist Billy Graham. The Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress sees a divine hand at work: “God intervened in our election and put Donald Trump in the Oval Office for a great purpose.”

Testimonials like this confound critics who label conservative evangelical figures like Mr. Graham and Mr. Jeffress hypocrites for embracing a man who is pretty much the human embodiment of the question “What would Jesus not do?”

But what those critics don’t recognize is that the nationalistic, race-baiting, fear-mongering form of politics enthusiastically practiced by Mr. Trump and Roy Moore in Alabama is central to a new strain of American evangelicalism. This emerging religious worldview — let’s call it “Fox evangelicalism” — is preached from the pulpits of conservative media outlets like Fox News. It imbues secular practices like shopping for gifts with religious significance and declares sacred something as worldly and profane as gun culture.

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The FDA Is Cracking Down on Homeopathic Remedies

By Kristen V. Brown

Gwyneth, watch out.

On Monday, the Food and Drug Administration announced plans to crack down on so-called “homeopathic remedies”—treatments that due to agency enforcement policy have managed to avoid regulatory oversight.

But no more, says the agency. Many of those products, it said in a statement, aren’t just herbal tea cures for a sore throat. They’re products being marketed as treatments for serious diseases—hope bottled up and sold to desperate people, without any sort of clinical evidence that they might actually work.

“In recent years, we’ve seen a large uptick in products labeled as homeopathic that are being marketed for a wide array of diseases and conditions, from the common cold to cancer,” FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in a statement. “In many cases, people may be placing their trust and money in therapies that may bring little to no benefit in combating serious ailments, or worse–that may cause significant and even irreparable harm because the products are poorly manufactured, or contain active ingredients that aren’t adequately tested or disclosed to patients.”

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Question of the Week: 12/19/2017

What do you think was the most important story or event from 2017 having to do with the challenges to science, reason, and humanist values?

The person with our favorite answer will receive 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.)

How Richard Dawkins Will Win You Over to His Side

Many people would like to have a one-on-one argument with renowned professor, author, and all-around big thinker Richard Dawkins. He’s most one of the world’s most prominent public intellectuals and has written over a dozen books on matters as wide-ranging as atheism and science. Because he attacks such deeply held beliefs, many people disagree with him. But how is he so effective at what he does? Simple. He imagines his argument from the other side’s perspective. That way, Richard Dawkins posits, there’s a much higher chance that he can land his point. Richard Dawkins’ new book is Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist.

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Interstellar Visitor Stays Silent: No Signs of Life Yet on ‘Oumuamua

By Mike Wall

The first interstellar asteroid ever discovered in our solar system remains silent, at least for now.

An initial search for artificial signals coming from ‘Oumuamua, the needle-shaped interloper that zoomed past Earth two months ago, has come up empty, scientists with the $100 million Breakthrough Listen project announced today (Dec. 14).

But researchers aren’t done analyzing the data that came in from the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia yesterday (Dec. 13), and they also plan to conduct three more “blocks” of observations, team members said.

“It is great to see data pouring in from observations of this novel and interesting source,” Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research Center in California, said in a statement. “Our team is excited to see what additional observations and analyses will reveal.”

‘Oumuamua has caused quite a buzz in the astronomy, planetary-science and SETI communities since the asteroid was detected in mid-October. The object’s trajectory reveals that it came here from another solar system, and its weird, extremely elongated shape has sparked speculation that the rock could be an alien spacecraft of some sort.

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