ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 410

Ex-congregants reveal years of ungodly abuse

By Mitch Weiss

SPINDALE, N.C. (AP) — From all over the world, they flocked to this tiny town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, lured by promises of inner peace and eternal life. What many found instead: years of terror — waged in the name of the Lord.

Congregants of the Word of Faith Fellowship were regularly punched, smacked, choked, slammed to the floor or thrown through walls in a violent form of deliverance meant to “purify” sinners by beating out devils, 43 former members told The Associated Press in separate, exclusive interviews.

Victims of the violence included pre-teens and toddlers — even crying babies, who were vigorously shaken, screamed at and sometimes smacked to banish demons.

“I saw so many people beaten over the years. Little kids punched in the face, called Satanists,” said Katherine Fetachu, 27, who spent nearly 17 years in the church.

Word of Faith also subjected members to a practice called “blasting” — an ear-piercing verbal onslaught often conducted in hours-long sessions meant to cast out devils.

As part of its investigation, the AP reviewed hundreds of pages of law enforcement, court and child welfare documents, along with hours of conversations with Jane Whaley, the evangelical church’s controlling leader, secretly recorded by followers.

The AP also spent more than a year tracking down dozens of former disciples who scattered after leaving the church.

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New UN climate chief: ‘Action on warming unstoppable’

By Roger Harrabin

The UN’s new climate chief says she’s worried about President Donald Trump – but confident that action to curb climate change is unstoppable.

President Trump said he’d withdraw from the UN climate deal and stop funding the UN’s clean energy programme.

But former Mexican diplomat Patricia Espinosa told BBC News that the delay in any firm announcement suggests the issue is still unresolved.

She travels to US this weekend to try and meet the new US secretary of state.

‘World will carry on’

Ms Espinosa said it would be more damaging for the US to leave the on-going climate talks process altogether than to stop funding the clean energy programme.

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How to Defeat Those Who are Waging War on Science

By Jonathan Foley and Christine Arena

President Trump’s decision to constrain and muzzle scientific research signals an important milestone. The War on Science has shifted into high gear. This is a fight for our future, and scientists as well as citizens had better prepare for what is coming next.

At his confirmation hearings last week, the new EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt unveiled the new language of this war—a subtle, yet potentially damaging form of science skepticism. Manmade climate change, he says, is “subject to continuing debate.” There is reason to be concerned about methane released by fracking, but he’s “not deeply concerned.” And research on lead poisoning is “not something [he has] looked into.”

These might sound like quibbles compared to the larger cultural and political upheavals happening in America today, but collectively, they add up to something big.

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Coming Out Atheist, pg 56

“When you come out as an atheist, you’ll probably be in for a round of Atheism 101 – Myths and Facts. Maybe more than one round. Even the most supportive believers often have misunderstandings about us. And the more people you come out to, the more mythbusting you’ll have ahead of you.

So do some homework first. Get familiar with the common myths about atheists – that we don’t have any morality, that we left religion because we’re angry at God, that there are no atheists in foxholes, etc. And be prepared to counter them. (Several atheists have written pieces debunking the myths about us: Amanda Marcotte, Sam Harris, and Austin Cline have particularly good ones, and I’m fond of my own as well.)”

–Greta Christina, Coming Out Atheist, pg 56

Discuss!

Practicing Evidence-Based Medicine

By Steven Novella

An excellent article in ProPublica by David Epstein discusses the problem of doctors not adhering to the best evidence-based standards. The full article is worth a read, and I won’t just repeat it here, but I do want to highlight a few points which align well with what I have been writing here and at SBM for years.

The essential problem is that there is a disconnect between the best evidence-based standards and what is actually practiced out in the world. There are actually two problems here. The first is the scientific evidence itself. The second is the alignment of practice to this evidence.

Scientific evidence in medicine has a few challenges. There is publication bias, researcher bias, p-hacking, the decline effect, and problems with replication. What all of this adds up to is that there is a lot of published preliminary evidence, most of which is wrong in the false positive direction. There is a tendency, in my opinion, of adopting treatments prematurely.

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This Hinged Skull Helps Dragonfish Eat Prey Bigger Than Its Head

By Jackson Landers

Don’t try to eat anything bigger than your own head. That’s good advice for most living things, but a group of creatures called the dragonfishes found an evolutionary way to break that rule.

A pair of scientists have discovered how the dragonfishes are able to swallow prey that is almost as big as they are. They found the first known hinged cranium in a fish and described it recently in the journal Plos One.

These dozens of dragonfish species live in extremely deep areas of the ocean in almost total darkness. With a long, glowing barbel hanging beneath their face, the creatures uses bioluminescence to attract prey. But in the deep, dark ocean it could be months between one fish sighting and another. So these dragonfishes must be able to take advantage of any opportunity to eat—even something nearly their own size.

“Probably close to 100 years ago someone looked at the anatomy of dragonfishes and noticed that there was a gap by the brain case,” says Dave Johnson, a curator in the division of fishes at Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and co-author of the study along with Nalani Schnell of the Muséum national d’Histore naturelle at the Sorbonne in Paris. “But at that time they didn’t have X-rays.”

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Hundreds of Babies Harmed by Homeopathic Remedies, Families Say

By Sheila Kaplan

WASHINGTON — Case 7682299: Aug. 1, 2010. A mother gives her toddler three homeopathic pills to relieve her teething pain. Within minutes, the baby stops breathing.

“My daughter had a seizure, lost consciousness, and stopped breathing about 30 minutes after I gave her three Hyland’s Teething Tablets,” the mother later told the Food and Drug Administration. “She had to receive mouth-to-mouth CPR to resume breathing and was brought to the hospital.”

The company, Hyland’s, promotes “safe, effective, and natural health solutions” that appeal to parents seeking alternative treatments. But the agency would soon hear much more about Hyland’s teething products. Staff at the FDA would come to consider Case 7682299 one of the luckier outcomes.

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Same-sex marriage policy linked to drop in teen suicide attempts

By Maarten Rikken

Suicide is the second leading cause of death in young people between the ages of 15 and 24, and for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and questioning students the risk is much higher. In a new JAMA Pediatricsstudy, Julia Raifman and colleagues, report that state-enacted laws that legalize same-sex marriage were linked to a significant reduction in the rate of suicide attempts by high school students.

We spoke with Julia Raifman of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health about the work.

ResearchGate: What motivated this study?

Julia Raifman: The study was motivated by evidence that lesbian, gay, and bisexual adolescents experience a number of health disparities, and I wondered whether unequal rights might be associated with them. I chose to focus on adolescent suicide attempts as one of the most extreme health disparities. In our study, 29 percent of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and questioning students reported attempting suicide in the past year, relative to six percent of heterosexual adolescents.

RG: What were your results?

Raifman: We found that state same-sex marriage policies were associated with a lower proportion of adolescents attempting suicide. We found that there was a seven percent reduction in suicide attempts. We calculated that this would be equivalent to more than 134,000 fewer adolescents attempting suicide each year based on the population of the United States.

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Could Pluto Regain Its Planethood?

By Mike Wall

Advocates of Pluto’s planethood are about to fire another salvo in the decade-long debate about the famous object’s status.

Scientists on NASA’s New Horizons mission, which performed the first-ever flyby of Pluto in July 2015, will officially propose a new definition of “planet” next month, at the 48th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.

The new definition would replace, or supersede, the one devised by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in 2006. A planet, the IAU determined, is a body that orbits the sun without being the moon of another object; is large enough that its own gravity has rounded it into a sphere (but not so large that it undergoes fusion reactions, like a star); and has “cleared its neighborhood” of most other bodies.

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A West Virginia Native Is Trying To Keep Senate Bill From Destroying State Vaccination Rates

By Kavin Senapathy

A West Virginia grassroots network is calling on lawmakers to not allow religious or philosophical vaccine exemptions for children attending public school or state-regulated child care centers.

“West Virginia is in trouble,” Meredith Snead, a concerned native of the state who is spearheading the effort, told me of Senate Bill 359. “No one listened” she says of the many times her impoverished state has been let down. “There is nowhere else I’d rather be, but the people of my state have been sold out by politicians and businessmen over and over.” The state is one of only three in the U.S., along with California and Mississippi, that only allow physician-recommended exemptions for clearly-defined cases in which immunization is contraindicated.

Introduced on February 21st, the bill contains language that would potentially wreak havoc in the state by allowing parents to forgo vaccines for their children for religious or philosophical reasons. Data suggest that parents in WV vaccinate their children primarily because they have no other choice, and rates would dip dangerously if non-medical exemptions were allowed.  Consider that vaccination for preschool-aged children in the state are among the lowest in the nation according to the CDC. By contrast, when kids reach elementary school, rates climb starkly to 97% or higher for all recommended vaccines. In conjunction with current narrow medical exemptions allowed in WV, the relatively high poverty levels mean that parents don’t have the resources to opt out of public school, so vaccination rates jump and remain high for school-aged children.

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