ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 354

White Christians are now a minority — but they’re getting more isolated and less tolerant

By Amanda Marcotte

Last week, the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) put out a new report on religion in America that measured a truly remarkable shift: For the first time, almost certainly in the country’s history, people who identify as white Christians are a minority of Americans. Four out of every five Americans were self-described white Christians in 1976, but now that group only constitutes 43 percent of the U.S. population.

There are a lot of reasons for this shift, study author Robert P. Jones, who heads PRRI and is the author of “The End of White Christian America,” explained to Salon in an interview. To a large extent, Jones said, it’s the trend of “young, white people leaving Christian churches that is driving up the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans.”

This reflects, he added, “a culture clash between particularly conservative white churches and denominations and younger Americans” over issues like science, particularly climate change and evolution, and especially the rights of LGBT people.

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Question of the Week: 9/13/2017

While current events continually remind us that we live in a time of great divisiveness and conflict, the solar eclipse was for many that rare unifying experience as people of all beliefs, cultures, and ideologies enjoyed this rare spectacle as a single species.

Trump’s nominee to head NASA, Jim Bridenstine, wants to prioritize the commercial development of space over exploration. If you were NASA’s administrator, what would be your priority for the agency?

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.)

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will crash into Saturn — its final screaming success

By Sarah Kaplan

In 10 days, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will nose-dive into Saturn and burn up in the planet’s atmosphere. It’s the final, suicidal step of a months-long dance through Saturn’s rings that has given scientists an unprecedented view of the sixth planet from the sun. It’s also the end of a mission that has revolutionized our understanding of Saturn and opened our eyes to two worlds that could be home to alien life — the moons Titan and Enceladus.

It really is the end of an era. And Cassini fans are devastated.

To understand why, you have to understand Cassini — a plucky, school-bus-size spacecraft that has been orbiting Saturn since 2004.

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Trump names climate science denier to run NASA

By Joe Romm

In a Friday night news dump, the White House announced that President Donald Trump Plans to nominate Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-OK), a climate science denier to be administrator of NASA.

Bridenstine is a politician without any scientific credentials, unlike previous NASA chiefs, and for that reason his nomination has already been criticized by both Florida’s senators Marco Rubio (R) and Bill Nelson (D), Politico reports. Rubio said, “I just think [his nomination] could be devastating for the space program.”

NASA scientists have led the way in documenting the scientific reality of climate change. But in 2013, Bridenstine not only gave a speech on the House floor filled with standard denier talking points, he actually ended his remarks with a demand that President Obama apologize for funding research into climate science.

“Mr. Speaker, global temperatures stopped rising 10 years ago,” claimed Bridenstine, “Global temperature changes, when they exist, correlate with Sun output and ocean cycles.”

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How Richard Dawkins became the Scarlet Pimpernel for atheists fleeing religious persecution

By Russell Leadbetter

IN February 2015, Dr Avijit Roy, a prominent atheist blogger, and his wife, Rafida Bonya Ahmed, were brutally set upon by Islamic extremists wielding machetes in the Bangladesh capital of Dhaka.

The couple were leaving a book fair at the city’s University when they were bodily dragged from a bicycle rickshaw and attacked. Dr Roy, an author and prominent secular activist, and founder of a blog site that promotes liberal secular writing, was hacked to death, while his wife suffered stab wounds to the head and one of her thumbs was sliced off.

There’s an appalling photograph of Ahmed standing, drenched in blood, close to her husband’s body, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers.

This was one of many attacks on secular bloggers in Bangladesh. As Ahmed, a leading freethinker, wrote earlier this year, on the second anniversary of the attack: “Why did we deserve such violence? Because fundamentalists were threatened by our writings – on science, philosophy and criticism of religious dogma – and they identified us as enemies of Islam”.

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Study: Atheists behave more fairly toward Christians than Christians behave toward atheists

By Eric W. Dolan

Psychologists have long known that people tend to favor their own group over others, a social phenomenon known as ingroup bias. But new research provides evidence that atheists are motivated to buck this trend in an attempt to override the stereotype that they are immoral.

Psychology researchers from Ohio University found that Christians demonstrated an ingroup bias towards other Christians in an economic game but atheists did not have an ingroup bias towards other atheists. The study was published online July 10 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

“The rise of the so-called ‘New Atheists’ about a decade ago coupled with the ongoing ‘culture wars’ between religious and secular groups in the United States has led atheists as a population to gain an unprecedented level of visibility in this country in recent years, even as their prevalence has only incrementally increased. This has sparked a particular interest in anti-atheist prejudice research in social psychology,” explained study author Colleen Cowgill, a PhD student.

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As hurricanes and wildfires rage, US climate politics enters the realm of farce

By David Roberts

On Tuesday afternoon, as Southern Floridians nervously watched Hurricane Irma become a Category 5 monster, they received an odd message from popular right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh: The hurricane forecasts are not to be trusted.

In “official meteorological circles,” he said, “they believe that Al Gore is correct” about climate change. They “desire to advance this climate change agenda,” he warned, “and hurricanes are one of the fastest and best ways to do it.” So these meteorologists, he argued, create needless fear and panic.

What’s more, local TV stations are hyping the hurricane to drum up bottled-water sales for local businesses. (Seriously.) For Limbaugh, the hurricane conspiracy goes deep.

If you can put aside how irresponsible it is to send that kind of message to a group of people in real and serious danger (uh, extremely irresponsible), it’s almost funny. This is what conservative climate denial has come to. Even with one climate-amplified hurricane barely in the rearview mirror, another barreling down, and much of the Western half of the country on fire, the only reaction someone like Limbaugh can imagine is to double down. He would rather deny an oncoming hurricane than accept climate change.

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Purpose Driven Life, pg 15-16

“I do not speak for all atheists. The subtitle of this book is “How an Atheist Finds Meaning,” not “How All Atheists Find Meaning.” Each atheist is an individual, not part of a religion or creed. We do not agree with each other on all issues, nor should we. Atheism is simply the absence of theism. Atheists do not have a religious belief; we lack a belief in God or gods, and that is the only thing that unites us. (We might possess beliefs about other things, but we don’t have a belief in a god.) but I am certain that the views I express in this book are shared to a very large degree by most atheists on the planet. I have talked with thousands of them. I have read the writings of many hundreds more. To be sure, a small handful of atheists (including some well-known philosophers) are existential nihilists who think life has no meaning and ultimately ends in despair and emptiness. My religious opponents like to quote those pessimists, pretending that they speak for all of us. The cheery Schopenhauer, for example, said that the only thing better than suicide is never to have been born in the first place. I don’t share that view, and I don’t know any atheists who do. The atheists I know, virtually all of whom are happy and mentally healthy, might more properly be called anti-nihilists. We are mainly optimists who love our lives and find them to be full of meaning and purpose.”

Discuss!

‘Dark matter’ microbes add 20 new branches to the tree of life

By Alice Klein

They were right under our noses all along – thousands of novel microscopic life forms, now unmasked by genetic analysis. Many belong to entirely new groups, as different from other microbes as an insect is from a chimpanzee.

Earth’s microorganisms are split into groups called bacteria and archaea. Together, they make up the vast majority of species on the planet, but until recently we were only able to study a tiny fraction of them.

This is because less than 10 per cent can be isolated and grown in the lab. The rest can only survive in the conditions of their native environment – be it a hydrothermal vent or the guts of a cow. Researchers call them microbial dark matter.

However, a technique called metagenomics is bringing them to light. It involves taking an environmental sample, sequencing all the DNA in it – its metagenome – then piecing together the genomes of each of the microbes present. “It’s like getting a mix-up of lots of different jigsaw puzzles, and then trying to put together the pieces of each individual puzzle,” says Donovan Parks at the University of Queensland in Australia.

Parks and his colleagues analysed more than 1500 metagenomes that researchers worldwide had uploaded to a public database. Each contained jumbles of DNA sequences collected from environments such as soil, the ocean, hydrothermal vents, industrial effluent, and cow and baboon faeces.

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Trump Nominates Lawyers from Anti-LGBT ‘Religious Freedom’ Group to be Texas Federal Judges

By Michael Barajas

Jeff Mateer and Matthew Kacsmaryk have worked to erode the firewall between church and state as lawyers for the First Liberty Institute, a Christian legal advocacy group that protects pastors who mobilize their flock to overturn local non-discrimination ordinances, county clerks who refuse to issue same-sex marriage licenses and anti-abortion centers that trick women into thinking they’re walking into actual medical clinics.

Trump’s nomination of the two religious-right legal activists to vacant federal judge seats in Texas has rattled LGBT rights groups, who call the appointments a gift to anti-LGBT activists.

“First Liberty Institute has used anti-LGBTQ policies to blatantly vilify our families and neighbors for two decades,” Equality Texas said in a Friday statement. “By nominating associates of this hate group, the president is using his office in an attempt to ensure policies will be created and spearheaded to advance anti-LGBTQ discrimination in employment, housing and places of business all under the guise of protecting religious liberties.”

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