ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 358

Transgender ban frozen as Mattis moves forward with new review of options

By Dan Lamothe

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis announced Tuesday that he is freezing the implementation of President Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the military, saying that he will first establish a panel of experts to provide advice and recommendations on how to carry out Trump’s directive.

The Pentagon confirmed the move in a statement attributed to Mattis, saying that he will first develop a study and implementation plan “as directed” by the president in a memorandum released Friday. Soon-to-be arriving political appointees at the Defense Department “will play an important role in this effort,” Mattis added. The plan will address both the potential for transgender people looking to serve in the military for the first time and transgender troops who already are serving.

“Our focus must always be on what is best for the military’s combat effectiveness leading to victory on the battlefield,” Mattis said. “To that end, I will establish a panel of experts serving within the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to provide advice and recommendations on the implementation of the president’s direction.”

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A Film About One Woman’s Journey Out of Westboro Baptist Church Is In the Works

By Hemant Mehta

If you knew her before 2013, Megan Phelps-Roper was a member of Westboro Baptist Church who would proudly picket at the funerals of soldiers, calling their deaths revenge for America’s acceptance of homosexuality. She was carrying on the hateful ideology of WBC founder Fred Phelps.

Cut to two years later, and Megan wasn’t just out of the church, she was trying to make amends for her disturbing past.

That journey became the subject of a fascinating New Yorker profile by Adrian Chen.

Yesterday, it was announced that the story — along with Megan’s autobiography due out soon — will be the basis for a movie called This Above All. Reese Witherspoon is one of several producers who will be working on the project.

These movies take a long time to go from announcement to a theater, but there’s no doubt a compelling story to tell of a religious fanatic who had a change of heart. It’s like the opposite of God’s Not Dead. And this one will have a happy ending.

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Large Asteroid to Safely Pass Earth on Sept. 1

Asteroid Florence, a large near-Earth asteroid, will pass safely by Earth on Sept. 1, 2017, at a distance of about 4.4 million miles, (7.0 million kilometers, or about 18 Earth-Moon distances). Florence is among the largest near-Earth asteroids that are several miles in size; measurements from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and NEOWISE mission indicate it’s about 2.7 miles (4.4 kilometers) in size.

“While many known asteroids have passed by closer to Earth than Florence will on September 1, all of those were estimated to be smaller,” said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “Florence is the largest asteroid to pass by our planet this close since the NASA program to detect and track near-Earth asteroids began.”

This relatively close encounter provides an opportunity for scientists to study this asteroid up close. Florence is expected to be an excellent target for ground-based radar observations. Radar imaging is planned at NASA’s Goldstone Solar System Radar in California and at the National Science Foundation’s Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The resulting radar images will show the real size of Florence and also could reveal surface details as small as about 30 feet (10 meters).

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How religious freedom can bring common ground to common foes

By Kelsey Dallas

SALT LAKE CITY — As the Trump administration focuses on boosting religious freedom across the globe, government officials may be overlooking a potential ally here at home: nonbelievers.

Compared to their experiences with past administrations, leaders of key nontheist groups say they feel frozen out of the president’s religion-related efforts, in spite of the fact that atheists are often the victims of faith-based violence.

“We will stand with coalitions and groups defending Christians around the world, and it’s also important that the U.S. opposes atheists being threatened,” said Nicholas Little, legal director for the Center for Inquiry, an organization that advocates for a secular society. A former Center for Inquiry leader served as chairman of the United Nations NGO Committee on the Freedom of Religion or Belief.

The State Department’s latest report on international religious freedom, released last week, included several examples of people being targeted for their lack of belief. For example, a man in Saudi Arabia was sentenced to eight years in prison and 800 lashes in 2016 for spreading atheism and threatening the moral fabric of the country.

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Richard Dawkins – Red in Tooth and Claw – Think Again – a Big Think Podcast #112

Since 2008, Big Think has been sharing big ideas from creative and curious minds. Since 2015, the Think Again podcast has been taking us out of our comfort zone, surprising our guests and Jason Gots, your host, with unexpected conversation starters from Big Think’s interview archives.

Today’s guest is internationally best-selling author, speaker, and passionate advocate for reason and science as against superstition Richard Dawkins. From 1995 to 2008 Richard Dawkins was the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.  Among his many books are The Selfish Gene, the God Delusion, and his two-part autobiography: An Appetite for Wonder and A Brief Candle in the Dark. His latest is a collection of essays, stories, and speeches called Science in the Soul, spanning many decades and the major themes of Richard’s work.

In this episode, which Dawkins described as “one of the best interviews I have ever had,” Richard and Jason talk about whether pescatarianism makes any sense, where morality should come from (since, as Hume says, “you can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’), the greatness of Christopher Hitchens, and the evils of nationalism.

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Question of the Week- 8/30/2017

“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.

What other astronomical events or discoveries that you can think of have had a similar impact on us Earthlings, dampening our animosities and helping us to rediscover our common humanity?”

 

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.)

Coming Out Atheist, pg 331

“And if you’re having these qualms about coming out, it’s worth thinking about whether atheism, or even outright opposition to religion, is important enough to you to overcome your qualms. Evelyn again: “A conversation with a hardline Muslim changed my view. The guy said that he thought that Salman Rushdie deserved to be executed if he went to a Muslim country. Later in the conversation, he admitted after some evasion that he had no problem with the death penalty for adultery. When I disagreed he said, ‘It’s divine law, you can’t question it.’ I realized that the only reasonable answer to that was, ‘No it’s not and yes you can,’ although I did not have the courage to say so at the time.”

–Greta Christine, Coming Out Atheist, pg 331

Discuss!

It only takes a few gene tweaks to make a human voice

By Andy Coghlan

How and when did we first become able to speak? A new analysis of our DNA reveals key evolutionary changes that reshaped our faces and larynxes, and which may have set the stage for complex speech.

The alterations were not major mutations in our genes. Instead, they were tweaks in the activity of existing genes that we shared with our immediate ancestors.

These changes in gene activity seem to have given us flat faces, by retracting the protruding chins of our ape ancestors. They also resculpted the larynx and moved it further down in the throat, allowing our ancestors to make sounds with greater subtleties.

The study offers an unprecedented glimpse into how our faces and vocal tracts were altered at the genetic level, paving the way for the sophisticated speech we take for granted.

However, other anthropologists say changes in the brain were at least equally important. It is also possible that earlier ancestors could speak, but in a more crude way, and that the facial changes simply took things up a notch.

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Hurricane Harvey: Why Is It So Extreme?

By Mark Fischetti

Hurricane Harvey is drowning southeastern Texas for the fourth day, putting a vast area under feet of water. Experts say Harvey has been stuck longer in one place than any tropical storm in memory. That’s just one of the hurricane’s extremes; the storm is off the charts in many categories. Scientific American wanted to learn why, and asked meteorologist Jeff Masters for help. Masters is the co-founder of Weather Underground, a web site that meteorologists nationwide go to for their own inside information about severe weather. Masters also wrote a fascinating articleon why the jet stream is getting weird.

Why did Hurricane Harvey so quickly explode from a Category 1 hurricane to Category 4?

Last Wednesday night, August 23, Harvey was a tropical depression, but after just eight overnight hours it was forming a hurricane eye wall. “That’s remarkably fast,” Masters says. On Friday it rapidly ballooned from a Category 1 hurricane to Category 4. That’s because it happened to pass over a region of extremely warm ocean water called an eddy. This spot of hot water was 1 to 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the Gulf of Mexico around it, which itself was already 1 to 2 degrees F higher than average, reaching 85 or 86 degrees F in places. The hotter the water, the more energy it drives into a storm. Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed New Orleans in 2005, also mushroomed to Category 4 in similar fashion because it, too, passed over a hot eddy in the Gulf.

Why is Harvey so stuck in place over Texas?

Hurricanes are circular structures with winds that spiral counterclockwise. But they are steered by larger wind patterns in the greater atmosphere that push them in one direction. In Harvey’s case, a big high-pressure system over the southeastern U.S. is trying to push the storm in one direction, but a big high pressure system over the southwestern U.S. is trying to push the storm in the opposite direction. “The systems have equal strength and are cancelling each other out,” leaving Harvey stranded, Masters says. “It’s highly usual to have two highs on either side of a hurricane of equal strength.” The only other time Masters recalls that happening to a huge storm system was Hurricane Mitch in 1998, which struck Central America and killed an estimated 7,000 people in Honduras.

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Former 700 Club producer: “I knew where the line was. But that didn’t stop us.”

By Tara Isabella Burton

In the 1980s, TV producer Terry Heaton was at the helm of one of the most influential media properties of the decade. As executive producer for the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN)’s Pat Robertson — one of the world’s most famous televangelists — Heaton spent the 1980s and early ’90s transforming the network’s flagship show, The 700 Club, into a pioneer of conservative opinion journalism.

But decades after The 700 Club’s massive success paved the way for an alliance between the Christian right and GOP party politics, Heaton has more mixed feelings about his role in the “culture wars.” In his new book The Gospel of the Self: How Jesus Joined the GOP, Heaton reflects on his years working alongside Robertson, and how the advertising strategies he brought to CBN helped transform and politicize a generation of Christians. Heaton presents Robertson and his team as well-meaning idealists whose desire to use the power of the media to bring people to Jesus morphed into a need to hold on to power for its own sake.

Often, Heaton writes, the desire to put on a convincing “show” for their audience meant eliding the truth in favor of a more marketable approach: casting only conventionally attractive and “successful”-looking Christians in their segments, exclusively focusing on the positive aspects of Christianity, and hinting that faith could bring temporal as well as spiritual rewards. In other words, the Bible became a “self-help manual” advertised as something to be valued because of its impact on one’s own life, what Heaton now calls “the gospel of the self.”

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