ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 349

U.S. Votes Against U.N. Ban On Death Penalty For Homosexuality

by Dan Avery

A United Nations resolution banning the death penalty for homosexuality was opposed by a total of 13 countries in the U.N. Human Rights Council. While several were in Africa and the Middle East, the U.S. surprisingly voted against the measure, as well.

Fortunately the resolution passed on Friday anyway, with 27 countries voting for the measure.

It was brought forward by eight nations—Belgium, Benin, Costa Rica, France, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, and Switzerland—who have made global LGBT rights a priority. (Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, Costa Rican Vice President Ana Helena Chacón and other world leaders attended a U.N. LGBT Core Group meeting earlier in the month.)

“This is a monumental moment where the international community has publicly highlighted that these horrific laws simply must end,” said Renato Sabbadini, director of The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA). “It is unconscionable to think that there are hundreds of millions of people living in states where somebody may be executed simply because of whom they love.”

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Pat Robertson: Disrespect For Trump Caused Las Vegas Shooting

By Michael Stone

Televangelist Pat Robertson blames Las Vegas shooting on disrespect for Trump, the national anthem, and God.

Robertson, host of  the long-running 700 Club television show, told his audience that the deadliest mass shooting in American history was caused by people disrespecting President Trump, the National Anthem, and God.

Appearing on his program Monday, Robertson commented on the Las Vegas shooting, declaring:

Violence in the streets, ladies and gentlemen. Why is it happening? The fact that we have disrespect for authority; there is profound disrespect for our president, all across this nation they say terrible things about him. It’s in the news, it’s in other places. There is disrespect now for our national anthem, disrespect for our veterans, disrespect for the institutions of our government, disrespect for the court system. All the way up and down the line, disrespect.

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Life may have begun millions of years earlier than we thought

By Michael Marshall

Life may have begun on our planet hundreds of millions of years earlier than thought, according to two studies published this week. But both papers are already proving controversial.

Ben Pearce of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, and colleagues simulated conditions on early Earth to find out how readily the key molecules of life could have formed. They focused on “warm little ponds” on land, which are one of the suspected sites of the origin of life – the other being deep-sea vents.

Pearce tackled the formation of RNA, a close cousin of DNA that is widely thought to have been the basis for the first life. Many of the building blocks of RNA are found in asteroids and meteoroids, so Pearce calculated how much could have been delivered to Earth by impacting rocks – of which there were plenty during Earth’s first billion years – and then how much could have accumulated in ponds, given the molecules’ fragility and tendency to leech away.

He concluded that RNA could have formed within a handful of years of major impacts, implying that life could have formed very early in Earth’s history.

There are two problems with this argument, says John Sutherland of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK.

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Earth May Be Close to ‘Threshold of Catastrophe’

By Tia Ghose

The amount of carbon dioxide that humans will have released into the atmosphere by 2100 may be enough to trigger a sixth mass extinction, a new study suggests.

The huge spike in CO2 levels over the past century may put the world dangerously close to a “threshold of catastrophe,” after which environmental instability and mass die-offs become inevitable, the new mathematical analysis finds.

Even if a mass extinction is in the cards, however, it likely wouldn’t be evident immediately. Rather, the process could take 10,000 years to play out, said study co-author Daniel Rothman, a geophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Controversial Thirty Meter Telescope gets go-ahead to build in Hawaii

By Alexandra Witze

Hawaii’s board of land and natural resources granted a fresh construction permit to the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on 28 September, reviving the fortunes of the US$1.4-billion observatory — at least temporarily.

The permit moves the international project closer towards restarting construction near the summit of the Hawaiian mountain of Mauna Kea. Some Native Hawaiians oppose the TMT, saying that its construction would further violate a sacred mountain that is already home to multiple telescopes.

The board’s decision effectively puts the TMT project back where it was before protestors halted the telescope’s construction in April 2015, just days after it had begun, by blocking the road up Mauna Kea. That December, following months of challenges, Hawaii’s supreme court invalidated the telescope’s first construction permit. The court ruled that the state land board had not followed appropriate procedures because it had approved the first permit, in 2011, before it held a set of public hearings on the case. 

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Appeals Court: Texas Cheerleaders Can Promote Christianity at HS Football Games

By Hemant Mehta

A few years ago, the Kountze High School (TX) cheerleaders won a lawsuit that said they could hold up banners with Bible verses on them to support the football team during games.

Now an appeals court has affirmed that decision, opening the door to even more religious signs, held up by student athletes, at school-sponsored events.

You may recall that the cheerleaders were actually fighting their school district in court (not some atheist group) because then-Superintendent Kevin Weldon had told them to stop with the banners. So when Judge Steve Thomas ruled in favor of the cheerleaders in 2013, he was simultaneously telling the district it couldn’t stop them from being all preachy on the football field. Thomas wrote in his decision:

The evidence in this case confirms that religious messages expressed on run-through banners have not created, and will not create, an establishment of religion in the Kountze community.

…

Neither the Establishment Clause nor any other law prohibits the cheerleaders from using religious-themed banners at school sporting events. Neither the Establishment Clause nor any other law requires Kountze I.S.D. to prohibit the inclusion of religious-themed banners at school sporting events.

There were two big problems with this ruling, according to church/state separation experts.

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En direct avec Jean-Jacques Subrenat du Center For Inquiry

(JJS) CFI : Avec plaisir. CFI (Center For Inquiry) et RDFRS (Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science) m’ont demandé de les représenter au 7ème Congrès de l’AILP à Paris. Ancien diplomate français, j’ai servi en alternance à l’administration centrale du Ministère des affaires étrangères (à Paris), et à l’étranger (Singapour, Tokyo 2 fois, Bruxelles, Tallinn, Helsinki). Retraité, je fais un travail bénévole dans différents domaines : gouvernance de l’Internet, culture, affaires internationales.

AILP : Qu’est-ce que le CFI et Quels sont les objectifs de votre association et vos actions ?

CFI : CFI est une organisation à but non lucratif, créée en 1991 aux Etats-Unis d’Amérique. En 2016, CFI et RDFRS (Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science) ont fusionné, permettant ainsi au nouvel ensemble de mieux poursuivre le but commun, qui est de ”promouvoir les valeurs des Lumières (pensée critique, culture scientifique, humanisme, liberté de l’individu) au 21ème siècle’’. Dirigés par Mme Robyn Blumner, directrice générale, CFI et RDFRS ont un conseil d’administration commun, dont l’un des membres est le professeur Richard Dawkins, le célèbre spécialiste de biologiste et d’éthologie, auteur de nombreux ouvrages dont ‘’Le gène égoïste’’ sur l’évolution.

Voici le site de CFI : https://www.centerforinquiry.net/ .

CFI est active…

… aux Etats-Unis:

Institut de formation des enseignants pour la science de l’évolution (TIES, Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science)

2016, tournée du professeur Dawkins à travers les Etats-Unis, plus de 6 000 participants

”Célébrants laïques” (Secular Celabrants, jugement rendu dans l’état de l’Indiana en 2014, dans l’Illinois en 2017)

Campagne ”Ouvertement laïques” (Openly Secular)

…dans d’autres pays :

Conseil des droits de l’homme de l’ONU : représentation du fait non-religieux dans la sphère internationale

”Secours laïque” (Secular Rescue)

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OPEN DISCUSSION – OCTOBER 2017

This thread has been created for open discussion on themes relevant to Reason and Science for which there are not currently any dedicated threads.

Please note it is NOT for general chat, and that all Terms of Use apply as usual.

If you would like to refer back to previous open discussion threads, they can be found here (but please continue any discussions from them here rather than on the original threads):

OPEN DISCUSSION

OPEN DISCUSSION – SEPTEMBER 2017

Compelling Conversation through Deconversion

by Gretta Vosper

A Pastor’s Deconversion

A chasm of distrust lies wedged between religious and secular world views, preventing meaningful dialogue and sustainable engagement. Often, those who make the journey from religion to secularism are scathing in their indictment of those left behind. Drew Bekius refuses that course. The story around which he built his life crashes around him with cinematic drama. But standing in the wreckage, he draws on a strength of commitment he learns is all his own, and turns it to the work of building dialogue. In an extraordinary offering, Bekius invites those on both sides of the chasm to find their way toward one another and as they do so, to build an alternative to rancour and path toward understanding.

So Many Stories

I have read my share of deconversion stories over the past decade, almost all of them written by men, and most of those long retired. Some served the church through long and well-respected ministries while others wandered the edges of religious belief, poking at it over the years, alone on their journeys of discovery.

Liberal clergy rarely write these books. Their theological education opened them to the world beyond the literal before they ever stepped into their first pulpit. But those who put their stories down on paper wrestle with the dissonance that scorched their ministry, impugned their integrity and left them scarred by sadness, confusion, and anger. Their writing is an exorcism of sorts, naming the betrayals of the wider church, naming, too, the betrayals of their own lack of courage. Such stories are hard to read.

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Astronauts to Flat-Earther B.o.B: We’ve Seen the Curve

By Mike Wall

Some former NASA astronauts have a message for flat-Earther B.o.B: The curve is real, and we’ve seen it.

Last week, the Atlanta-based rapper kicked off a crowdfunding campaign to raise $1 million, ostensibly so he can build and launch one or more satellites to settle the “question” of Earth’s shape once and for all.

B.o.B doubts that Earth is round because the horizon looks pretty flat in photos taken from the planet’s surface. That’s a simple consequence of Earth’s large size, of course, but B.o.B doesn’t see it that way. “Help B.o.B find the curve!” the crowdfunding project’s description reads, in part.

This plea elicited a response from former NASA astronaut Terry Virts.

“I can save BoB a lot of money — the Earth is round. I flew around it,” Virts tweeted Wednesday (Sept. 27) via his @AstroTerry account.

Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin (@TheRealBuzz) responded to Virts Wednesday, tweeting, “I did too. It’s called an orbit: the curved path of a celestial object around a star, planet, or moon.”

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