ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 372

Symposium: The crumbling wall separating church and state

By Erwin Chemerinsky

As Justice Sonia Sotomayor powerfully observed in her dissent, the Supreme Court’s decision in Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer is unprecedented in American history: Never before had the Supreme Court held that the government is required to provide assistance to religious institutions. Despite a footnote that attempts to limit the scope of this holding, the decision is going to engender a great deal of litigation as religious institutions now will claim a constitutional right to a wide array of benefits provided by the government to non-religious institutions. The noble and essential idea of a wall separating church and state is left in disarray, if not shambles.

That notion was not invented by 21st-century liberal law professors. Rather, of course, it came from Thomas Jefferson in a January 1, 1802, letter addressed to the Danbury Baptist Association and published in a Massachusetts newspaper, where Jefferson said: “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.” The phase actually can be traced back to Roger Williams, the founder of the first Baptist church in America, who wrote in 1644 of the need for “a hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.”

In 1947, when the Supreme Court in Everson v. Board of Education held that the establishment clause applies to state and local governments, all nine justices accepted this metaphor of a wall separating church and state as reflecting the commitment of the First Amendment. They also very much accepted the reasoning of James Madison, who said that it was unconscionable to tax some to support the religions of others.

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Solving the Mystery of Whose Laughter Is On the Golden Record

By Adrienne LaFrance

The Golden Record was never meant for this planet. Yet it has remained an object of curiosity on Earth, even after decades of hurtling through the void of outer space.

In fact, the Golden Record has had something of a revival lately. For years, there’s been talk of making a modern, internet-crowdsourced follow-up to the original 1977 version. The original record plays a prominent role in the new young-adult novel, See You in the Cosmos, by Jack Cheng. And a recent Kickstarter campaign to reissue the record on vinyl raised nearly $1.4 million, seven times more than its fundraising goal. Last fall, around the time that Kickstarter campaign launched, I found myself revisiting the record’s tracks.

In doing so, I stumbled upon a mystery.

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GOP bill would let churches endorse political candidates

By Stephen Ohelemacher

WASHINGTON (AP) — Churches should have the right to endorse political candidates and still keep their tax-free status, say House Republicans targeting a law that prohibits such outright politicking from the pulpit.

Republicans repeatedly have failed to scrap the law preventing churches and other nonprofits from backing candidates, so now they are trying to starve it. With little fanfare, a House Appropriations subcommittee added a provision that would deny money to the IRS to enforce the 63-year-old law to a bill to fund the Treasury Department, Securities and Exchange Commission and other agencies.

The subcommittee passed the bill Thursday.

Republicans say the law is enforced unevenly, leaving religious leaders uncertain about what they are allowed to say and do.

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“No Religion” Is Now Australia’s Number One Religion

By Gina Rushton

For the first time ever, “no religion” has overtaken any single religious denomination, toppling Catholicism as the number one religious affiliation for Australians, the latest national census released on Tuesday revealed.

Australia remains a fairly religious country, with 60% of people reporting a religious affiliation.

In 1966 only 0.8% of Australians ticked the box for “No religion”, which includes atheists, secularists and agnostics.

The proportion of people reporting no religion increased to 30.1% in 2016 – up from 22% five years ago, and nearly double the 16% reported in 2001.

Those aged from 18 to 34 were most likely to report not having a religion (39%) than other age groups. Those aged 65 years and over were more likely to report a religious affiliation.

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How to Get an Asteroid Named After You

By Marina Koren

Mary Lou Whitehorne was at a work conference in 2007 when her colleagues surprised her with an asteroid.

They were at an annual meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada in Calgary. Whitehorne, a member of the organization and a longtime science educator, was standing outside of a pub, engaged in a conversation, when a coworker called her inside. He had a special announcement to make: A small asteroid, orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, had been named after Whitehorne.

“I was completely floored and completely speechless,” Whitehorne says.

Whitehorne’s colleagues had waited about two years for the name to be approved. Asteroids can’t be named for just anything or anyone; there’s a careful selection process with lots of rules, managed by an international organization in charge of collecting and sorting observational data for asteroids. The organization is the Minor Planet Center, which is run out of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Massachusetts, and under the purview of the International Astronomical Union, an organization of professional astronomers.

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Sun’s gravity could power interstellar video streaming

By Jesse Emspak

Need to send a message across interstellar space? Use the sun for a signal boost. A new proposal suggests that the sun’s gravity could be used to amplify signals from an interstellar space probe, allowing video to be streamed from as far away as Alpha Centauri. Better still, the technology to do it has already been invented.

Though we don’t have probes far out enough to take advantage of this technology yet, it may eventually come in handy for interstellar communications. Building the communications grid now makes calls to our own spacecraft – or that of another alien race – a future possibility.

To receive even a single-watt signal from a probe in Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to our own, independent astrophysicist Michael Hippke found that an Earth-based instrument would need to be 53 kilometres across – bigger than New York City.

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Mammoth Resurrection: 11 Hurdles to Bringing Back an Ice Age Beast

By Laura Geggel

The road to bringing back the mammoth — a giant that went extinct at the end of the last ice age — is filled with barriers.

The questions are almost never ending: Will scientists find ancient, uncontaminated mammoth DNA? How will they create new mammoths? If a mammoth calf is born, how will it learn how to behave without a parent or herd to guide it?

Beth Shapiro, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, discusses these queries in “How to Clone A Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction” (Princeton University Press, 2015). Here are 11 of the many challenges she considers, including those that are scientific, ethical and environmental.

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Ebola outbreak in Africa ends — but gaps in public health leave region vulnerable

By Erika Check Hayden

Epidemiologist Anne Rimoin boarded a flight to Kinshasa on 19 May with a precious cargo in her luggage: the components of a diagnostic test for Ebola.

Rimoin hoped that the test, the GeneXpert Ebola Assay, would help officials to track cases in the latest Ebola outbreak, which was declared in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on 11 May. The test was developed during the disastrous 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa.

The existence of the Ebola assay is a sign that the world’s ability to respond to outbreaks of the virus has improved. But the test was not available where it was needed when Ebola erupted in the DRC, says Rimoin, of the University of California, Los Angeles, who has worked with the Congolese Ministry of Health for 15 years. “The fact that I had to go out there with diagnostics in my briefcase is an example of the fact that we’re not fully prepared on that score,” she says.

On 2 July, the Congolese government and the World Health Organization (WHO) declared an end to the DRC outbreak — but public-health officials caution that its low death toll doesn’t prove that the world has learnt all the lessons of the West African crisis. They credit the fact that only four people died to the expertise of Congolese officials, who had dealt with seven previous Ebola outbreaks, and to the remoteness of the northern Bas Uele province where the outbreak occurred.

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Coming Out Atheist, pg 245

“Another piece of good news: You are part of the most secular generation in history. There are almost certainly lots of other atheist students at your school, even if you don’t know it yet. You know how I keep telling people throughout this book that if they come out as atheists, there’s a good chance that other atheists will start coming out of the woodwork? If you’re a student, multiply that chance by at least two or three. (About 5-15% of Americans don’t believe in God, depending on which poll you look at. For Americans under 35, that number jumps to 36%.) And even your fellow students who aren’t atheists are more likely to be familiar and comfortable with atheism than older folks. If for no other reason, they’re more likely to live large parts of their lives on the Internet – and atheism is all over the Internet.”

–Greta Christina, Coming Out Atheist, pg 245

Discuss!

Air Pollution May Make Solar Panels Less Efficient

By Jasmin Malik Chua

From inefficient grids, shortfalls in policy, and even the occasional eclipse, solar-energy collection faces no shortage of hurdles. Scientists have discovered another stumbling block: air pollution.

Published last week in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters, the study revealed that the regions most susceptible to this challenge also have the heaviest solar investments. These regions include China, India and the Arabian Peninsula.

“My colleagues in India were showing off some of their rooftop solar installations, and I was blown away by how dirty the panels were,” Michael Bergin, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Duke University and lead author of the study, said in a statement. “I thought the dirt had to affect their efficiencies, but there weren’t any studies out there estimating the losses. So we put together a comprehensive model to do just that.”

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