ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 366

Life Driven Purpose, pg 42

By the way, Christians believe that when they get to heaven there will be no more struggle, pain, or sorrow. This means there will be no problems to solve during an eternity of praising the Master. Since purpose comes from solving problems, heaven will be Ultimate Purposelessness!

Most believers think the mere material world can’t have purpose. Our lives must be directed from outside in order to have meaning, they preach. They imagine that the spiritual, whatever it is, is superior to the natural. They view the natural world as low and debased, while the supernatural is lofty and sublime.

–Dan Barker, Life Drive Purpose, pg 42

Discuss!

Why I Admire Richard Dawkins by Iona Italia

Written by Iona Italia

Yesterday I learned that Richard Dawkins was de-platformed from a speaking event at liberal radio station KPFA in the town of Berkeley, where he was scheduled to talk about his new book, Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Atheist. The organizer canceled his talk because of his “comments on Islam” which they categorized as “abusive speech.”

Dawkins has always been a man without a filter, who says exactly what he thinks, without worrying whether it might offend. This means that, in his public statements on politics, he occasionally sounds goofy or politically incorrect or voices a sentiment without considering how it will be interpreted by others. He’s no diplomat, no politician. But his frankness is one of his most important qualities, a manifestation of the passion his new book title alludes to, a passion for truth. He has real integrity: he always says what he believes to be true, unafraid of how it will be received. He sometimes admits he’s wrong and corrects himself but he never self-censors in advance. He always speaks truth to power.

Dawkins is certainly capable of expressing what we might ironically term reverence. He’s no cynic or satirist for its own sake. His book The Ancestor’s Tale is one of the most moving, most poetic works I’ve ever read. It expresses his profound awe and wonder at the natural world or what he elsewhere calls “the magic of reality” in a way that is utterly captivating. It’s a hauntingly lovely and yet scrupulously rational and scientific account of life on this planet, where, against all odds, we have the enormous privilege of living. I’ve often described it as my favorite novel — a novel which also happens to be true.

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Letter from cancelled event attendee

Dear KPFA, 

I am quite disappointed and concerned that Richard Dawkins was disinvited from speaking at the KPFA event that was to be held August 9, 2017 in Berkeley. My partner and I were looking forward to attending. I am familiar with many of Dawkins’s ideas through his writings, documentaries, debates, and interviews. He has proved to be both a serious scholar and a valuable public intellectual. He is one of the great rational minds of our time; he attempts to scale his statements to evidence and he exhibits an open mind, willing to modify his ideas based on evidence. 

Like many that have followed him through the years, I am also quite familiar with Dawkins’s criticism of religion in general and Islam in particular. Here too he has proved to be rational and measured. Questioning sacred claims has led to hurt feelings for as long as the curious and skeptical have done it. Some have paid with their lives, and some still do. My longtime partner is an ex-Muslim- she would potentially pay with her life if she were to have a momentary lapse and express her conscience in her home country. Why? Criticism of Islam would be “offensive,” “hurtful,” and “abusive.” She is appalled that the American Left and others who have swallowed whole the politically correct dogma (in this case KPFA) are complicit in disallowing scrutiny of Islam by de-platforming speakers and labeling critics Islamophobic. While Dawkins is not facing such a fate here, the desire to avoid “harm” is doing real harm to an open society.

Some may say, what’s the big deal, as the curious can still access his material in any bookstore, and a lot of his content is online for posterity. He is also free to speak many other places in Berkeley, just not at this KPFA event. Here is the harm: the public in one of America’s intellectual capitals will miss a chance to question his claims. What if his statements about Islam are indeed misinformed, hyperbolic, or flat wrong? The people of Berkeley will miss an opportunity to hold his feet to the fire during the Q and A. Additionally, other rationalists and contrarians get the message when it comes to certain “sensitive” topics: attempt to talk about them honestly at your own peril- you might be labeled, smeared, or banned if you do. Who will want to take such a career risk? Measured critics with a different viewpoint are thus more likely to self-censor and a rational alternative is henceforth hollowed out. Who then becomes the voice of an alternative viewpoint? I assert that it’s firebrands like Donald Trump and Milo Yiannopoulos;  the hordes online will then look to polemicists because rationale analysis has been indirectly censored by political correctness. For my last point about the harm done, I selfishly cite Frederick Douglass: “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.” We wanted to hear one of the world’s great scholars. I should have the right to cover my own ears, but others should not have the right to cover our ears. In fact, KPFA missed out on a chance to bring up his supposedly “hurtful” criticism of Islam and still encourage potential listeners not to cover their own ears and listen in, thereby strengthening an ethos of challenging one’s own ideas. All of this narrows the scope of free inquiry, infantilizes adults, and creates a troubling trend in which tough topics are left unaddressed for fear of offending some. 

Dawkins has expanded human knowledge and questioned truth claims for decades- what can be more sacred than that? Are a few hurt feelings worth this sacrifice? At the birthplace of the of the Free Speech movement, in the city of the world’s best public institution of free inquiry, one of the places where Dawkins began his career, and in coordination with a station that espouses its support of open inquiry and free speech. In Berkeley, this is a great irony and shame. 

Adam DeAvilan

Berkeley resident

Oakland middle school teacher

Prof. Mo Mojahedi on KPFA Cancelation

Dear Professor Dawkins‏:

Words cannot describe how sad and appalled I was when I heard that KPFA radio station has canceled your previously scheduled event. As a person who was born and grow up in an Islamic culture, as a person who with his own eyes has seen and with his own skin has experienced the inhumanity and cruelty of the Islamic laws, I find what KPFA has done doubly offensive, cowardly, and hurtful. Here is Richard Dawkins, an individual who has spent much of his life – at a great cost and danger to himself and his family – fighting for human rights and freedom of thought, and these know-nothing clowns at KPFA have the audacity to chide him for “abusive speech”. This must be a bad joke!

To be honest, as disgusted I am with the action of KPFA, I cannot say that I am totally surprised. Truth be told, the “Left” also has its own Donald Trumps.

Prof. Mo Mojahedi

University of Toronto, Dep. Of ECE

A letter from Elizabeth Loftus, PhD to Quincy McCoy, General Manager of KPFA

July 27, 2017

To: Mr. Quincy McCoy, General Manager of KPFA gm@kpfa.org

From: Elizabeth Loftus, Ph.D. & Kaleda Denton, Student

We just met last night, one of us a professor at UC-Irvine (EL) and another a senior at UCLA (KD), and our conversation turned to the unfortunate events surrounding the disinvitation by KPFA of Richard Dawkins. Generations apart, we believe this is profoundly wrong. It is not only wrong for free speech issues, and our strong belief that the solution to free speech problem is more speech, as many others have already discussed. But there is more. As a University of California professor, EL spends her professional life in search of ways to inspire students. Dawkins has inspired so many young minds, and sent them in a scientific direction, including KD who is now, because of him, majoring in evolutionary biology at UCLA. So the disinvitation is a lost opportunity for Dawkins’ to reach many more young minds. We’ll start listening again to KPFA when the station does the right thing – apologizes to Dawkins and reissues that invitation.

Elizabeth F. Loftus, Ph.D.

Distinguished Professor

Psychology & Social Behavior

Criminology, Law & Society

School of Law

 

Huge landslide triggered rare Greenland mega-tsunami

By Quirin Schiermeier

One of the tallest tsunamis in recorded history — a 100-metre-high wave that devastated a remote settlement in Greenland last month — was caused, unusually, by a massive landslide, researchers report.

Seismologists returning from studying the rare event hope that the data they have collected will improve models of landslide mechanics in glacial areas and provide a better understanding of the associated tsunami risks. They warn that such events could become more frequent as the climate warms.

The landslide occurred on the evening of 17 June, in the barren Karrat Fjord on the west coast of Greenland. It caused a sudden surge of seawater that wreaked havoc in the fishing village of Nuugaatsiaq, located on an island within the fjord about 20 kilometres away (see ‘Greenland tsunami’). The wave washed away eleven houses, and four people are presumed dead.

The slide was so large that it generated a seismic signal suggestive of a magnitude-4.1 earthquake, confounding initial efforts to identify its cause, says Trine Dahl-Jensen, a seismologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. But more careful examination indicated no significant tectonic activity just before the landslide.

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Canaanites Live: DNA Reveals Fate of Biblical People

By Stephanie Pappas

The people of modern-day Lebanon can trace their genetic ancestry back to the Canaanites, new research finds.

The Canaanites were residents of the Levant (modern-day Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine) during the Bronze Age, starting about 4,000 years ago. They’re best known from the Old Testament of the Bible, in which they’re described as the cursed descendants of Canaan, blighted by God because Canaan’s father dishonored his own father, the patriarch Noah. The Canaanites were often in conflict with the Israelite tribes that wrote the Hebrew Bible. In fact, the Book of Deuteronomy features Yahweh (God) ordering the Canaanites to be exterminated.

In part because the Canaanites kept their records on easily degradable papyrus rather than clay, little is known about their side of the story. But now, ancient DNA reveals that the Canaanites were the descendants of Stone Age settlers and the ancestors of the Lebanese.

“Canaanite ancestry was widespread in the region,” study researchers Marc Haber and Chris Tyler-Smith of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the United Kingdom wrote in an email to Live Science, “and several groups who were probably culturally different shared the same ancestral background.”

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Anthony Scaramucci Called Me to Unload About White House Leakers, Reince Priebus, and Steve Bannon

By Ryan Lizza

On Wednesday night, I received a phone call from Anthony Scaramucci, the new White House communications director. He wasn’t happy. Earlier in the night, I’d tweeted, citing a “senior White House official,” that Scaramucci was having dinner at the White House with President Trump, the First Lady, Sean Hannity, and the former Fox News executive Bill Shine. It was an interesting group, and raised some questions. Was Trump getting strategic advice from Hannity? Was he considering hiring Shine? But Scaramucci had his own question—for me.

“Who leaked that to you?” he asked. I said I couldn’t give him that information. He responded by threatening to fire the entire White House communications staff. “What I’m going to do is, I will eliminate everyone in the comms team and we’ll start over,” he said. I laughed, not sure if he really believed that such a threat would convince a journalist to reveal a source. He continued to press me and complain about the staff he’s inherited in his new job. “I ask these guys not to leak anything and they can’t help themselves,” he said. “You’re an American citizen, this is a major catastrophe for the American country. So I’m asking you as an American patriot to give me a sense of who leaked it.”

In Scaramucci’s view, the fact that word of the dinner had reached a reporter was evidence that his rivals in the West Wing, particularly Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, were plotting against him. While they have publiclymaintained that there is no bad blood between them, Scaramucci and Priebus have been feuding for months. After the election, Trump asked Scaramucci to join his Administration, and Scaramucci sold his company, SkyBridge Capital, in anticipation of taking on a senior role. But Priebus didn’t want him in the White House, and successfully blocked him from being appointed to a job until last week, when Trump offered him the communications job over Priebus’s vehement objections. In response to Scaramucci’s appointment, Sean Spicer, an ally of Priebus’s, resigned his position as press secretary. And in an additional slight to Priebus, the White House’s official announcement of Scaramucci’s hiring noted that he would report directly to the President, rather than to the chief of staff.

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Trump Administration Advances School Vouchers Despite Scant Evidence

By Peg Tyre

In a 1955 essay, free market visionary Milton Friedman proposed a revolutionary model of education. Rather than seeing public schools as a rich local resource and driver of social mobility, he suggested they were a reflection of government overreach. Because a stable and democratic society depends on an educated electorate, he reasoned, the government should pay for children to go to school. But that did not mean the government should run schools. Instead, Friedman said, it ought to require a minimum level of education. And to finance that education, it should give parents “vouchers redeemable for a specified maximum sum per child per year if spent on ‘approved’ educational services.” Breaking the government monopoly on education, he argued, would allow “consumers” (parents) to support the best “product”—that is, to enroll their kids in the most effective and highest-performing institutions. Mediocre public schools, subjected to market forces, would improve or perish.

The idea captured the imagination of elected officials and policy makers all over the world. Now President Donald Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, is preparing to give the scheme its first national rollout in the U.S. She has made voucher programs the centerpiece of her efforts to enhance educational outcomes for students, saying they offer parents freedom to select institutions outside their designated school zone. “The secretary believes that when we put the focus on students, and not buildings or artificially constructed boundaries, we will be on the right path to ensuring every child has access to the education that fits their unique needs,” says U.S. Department of Education spokesperson Elizabeth Hill.

Because the Trump administration has championed vouchers as an innovative way to improve education in the U.S., Scientific American examined the scientific research on voucher programs to find out what the evidence says about Friedman’s idea. To be sure, educational outcomes are a devilishly difficult thing to measure with rigor. But by and large, studies have found that vouchers have mixed to negative academic outcomes and, when adopted widely, can exacerbate income inequity. On the positive side, there is some evidence that students who use vouchers are more likely to graduate high school and to perceive their schools as safe.

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Richard Dawkins Celebrated by Activists and Ex-Muslims at London Conference for Free Expression

written by Alison Bevege

When ex-Muslim Bonya Ahmed reached out her hand to accept an award in London on Sunday, it was missing her thumb.

Islamists hacked it off in Bangladesh, 2015.

She had thrown her arms in front of her husband Avijit Roy to shield him from machetes as a mob cut the life out of him for criticising Islam.

The attack happened in a crowded public street but the people – including police – stood by and did nothing.

The ceremony that recognised this brave woman had to be held in a secret location because London is no longer safe for ex-Muslims, atheists or even secular Muslim believers who dare to say that Islam should not be implemented as a system of laws.

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