ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 416

Distrust of unbelievers runs deep in American history

By Leigh E. Schmidt

Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama recently raised eyebrows during his confirmation hearing for attorney general when he expressed doubts that secular people respected the truth as much as did those with religious convictions. Even as he insisted that there should be no religious tests for holding public office, Sessions was queasy about the potential dangers of the secular worldview.

This was hardly uncharted territory for Sessions. During a speech in 2015, for example, he had singled out the “relativistic, secular mindset” of Justice Sonia Sotomayor as “directly contrary to the founding of our republic.”

The misgivings that Sessions harbors about secularists and nonbelievers — those who “don’t believe in a higher being” — is no mere eccentricity of a senator from the Bible Belt.

As a scholar who has worked for some years now on the history of atheism and secularism in the United States, I find his suspicions deeply familiar. In my book “Village Atheists: How America’s Unbelievers Made Their Way in a Godly Nation,” I have examined attitudes toward atheists.

Distrust of the irreligious runs deep in American history.

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Trump’s F.D.A. Pick Could Undo Decades of Drug Safeguards

By Katie Thomas

President Trump’s vow to overhaul the Food and Drug Administration could bring major changes in policy, including steps to accelerate the process of approving new prescription drugs, setting up a clash with critics who say his push for deregulation might put consumers at risk.

Mr. Trump has been vetting candidates to run the agency, which regulates the safety of everything from drugs and medical devices to food and cosmetics. Among them is Jim O’Neill, a former official at the Health and Human Services Department who is an associate of the Silicon Valley billionaire and Trump supporter Peter Thiel. Mr. O’Neill has argued that companies should not have to prove that their drugs work in clinical trials before selling them to consumers.

Other candidates also have called for reducing regulatory hurdles.

If the most significant proposals are adopted — and many would require an act of Congress — they will reverse decades of policy and consumer protections dating to the 1960s. Congress toughened the drug approval process in the wake of the worldwide crisis over thalidomide, which caused severe birth defects in babies whose mothers had taken the drug in pregnancy. Since then, the F.D.A. has come to be viewed as the world’s leading watchdog for protecting the safety of food and drugs, a gold standard whose lead other countries often follow.

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Question of the Week, Feb 8, 2017

Nominees to the Supreme Court must first answer questions at the Senate’s confirmation hearings, giving both lawmakers and the American public a chance to get a glimpse of a nominee’s underlying beliefs. If you had the chance to ask Judge Neil Gorsuch a question at these hearings, what would it be?

Our favorite answer will receive a copy of Brief Candle in the Dark by Richard Dawkins.

The Necessity of Secularism, pgs 63-64

“The use of theological experts by Congress or other governmental bodies is not made any more acceptable if representatives of various faiths are invited (current standard lists of invitees: Catholic, Protestant, Jew, Muslim) to avoid the appearance that the government is favoring one religion. This attempt at even-handedness just underscores the futility and pointlessness of the practice. The result is self-proclaimed interpreters of God’s words expressing disagreement about the meaning of God’s words expressing disagreement about the meaning of God’s words. For a representative democracy in the twenty-first century, such an exhibition is disgraceful. It succeeds only in degrading both government and religion.

The worst example of this practice may have been the invitation to testify extended to various theologians by President Bill Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission when the commission was considering the issue of human cloning. Cloning? the Tanakh, the New Testament, and the Qur’an have absolutely nothing to say about this topic, but that did not prevent the invited scholars from waxing eloquent about God’s views on the issue. All they wound up contributing were dogmatic pronouncements without any support external to their own religious tradition. Oh, and the Catholic God was strongly against cloning while the Jewish God permitted cloning if necessary to preserve a person’s genetic line. Identifying the right policy all depends on which God you listen to.”

–Ron Lindsay, The Necessity of Secularism, pgs 63-64

Discuss!

Trump’s SCOTUS Pick Might Just Give Him Trouble in the Courts

By Ruby Mellen & Emily Tamkin

President Donald Trump has chosen 49-year-old Colorado Circuit Judge Neil Gorsuch of the 10th court of appeals to fill the vacant U.S. Supreme Court seat of late Justice Antonin Scalia. The pick is expected to appease traditional conservatives, as Gorsuch mostly fits Scalia’s mold in his education, opinion, and — apparently — “lyrical writing style.”

And it is expected to mollify some liberals, who will “find very little to fault,” according to Mark Hansen, a former partner of Gorsuch at Kellogg Huber Hansen, an elite D.C.-based litigation boutique. Certainly, he was considered appealing to both parties in 2006, when he was confirmed by a unanimous voice vote in the Senate.

But what might it mean for America’s foreign policy — and for citizens around the world?

It’s difficult to read the tea leaves on the international impact Gorsuch’s seat on the bench will have, given that his experience has been so domestically focused. But what seems likely is that Gorsuch, who is a strict supporter of delivering verdicts based on the constitution as it was written, is also wary of executive overreach.

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Faith: Few strong links to national identity

By Bruce Stokes

In all countries except Japan, the survey asked respondents whether being Christian or Catholic (reflecting religious traditions in the countries polled) was important to national identity. Across the 13 countries where the question was asked, a median of just 15% say it is very important to be Christian in order to be a true national. Only in Greece do more than half (54%) hold this view, while in Sweden fewer than one-in-ten (7%) make a strong connection between nationality and Christianity.

Religion and the sense of being ‘truly American’

In 2014, Christians accounted for 70.6% of the U.S. population. Non-Christians and those unaffiliated with any religion totaled 28.7%.

About a third (32%) of Americans say it is very important for a person to be a Christian in order to be considered truly American. Roughly three-in-ten (31%) contend that one’s religion is not at all important.

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Leaked Draft of Trump’s Religious Freedom Order Reveals Sweeping Plans to Legalize Discrimination

By Sarah Posner

A leaked copy of a draft executive order titled “Establishing a Government-Wide Initiative to Respect Religious Freedom,” obtained by The Investigative Fund and The Nation, reveals sweeping plans by the Trump administration to legalize discrimination.

This article was reported in partnership with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.

The four-page draft order, a copy of which is currently circulating among federal staff and advocacy organizations, construes religious organizations so broadly that it covers “any organization, including closely held for-profit corporations,” and protects “religious freedom” in every walk of life: “when providing social services, education, or healthcare; earning a living, seeking a job, or employing others; receiving government grants or contracts; or otherwise participating in the marketplace, the public square, or interfacing with Federal, State or local governments.”

The draft order seeks to create wholesale exemptions for people and organizations who claim religious or moral objections to same-sex marriage, premarital sex, abortion, and trans identity, and it seeks to curtail women’s access to contraception and abortion through the Affordable Care Act. The White House did not respond to requests for comment, but when asked Monday about whether a religious freedom executive order was in the works, White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters, “I’m not getting ahead of the executive orders that we may or may not issue. There is a lot of executive orders, a lot of things that the president has talked about and will continue to fulfill, but we have nothing on that front now.”

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In Age of Trump, Scientists Show Signs of a Political Pulse

By Amy Harmon and Henry Fountain

Michael Eisen, an evolutionary biologist, is among the elite of American scientists, with a tenured position at the University of California, Berkeley, and generous funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for his research on fruit flies.

But late last month, dismayed over the Trump administration’s apparent disdain for evidence on climate change and other issues, Dr. Eisen registered the Twitter handle @SenatorPhD and declared his intention to run in the 2018 election for a seat in the United States Senate from California. His campaign slogan: “Liberty, Equality, Reality.”

“I’m not sure I’m the best vehicle for this,” said Dr. Eisen, whose professional attire consists of shorts and T-shirts bearing mottos supporting open access to scientific literature, a cause he has championed. “But if we want to defend the role of science in policy making, scientists need to run for office.”

Since Mr. Trump’s election, many other scientists have expressed concern about rumors and public statements on the new administration’s views on science, climate change and the role of federal offices like the Environmental Protection Agency.

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7 percent of Australian Catholic priests accused of abuse

By Kristen Gelineau

SYDNEY (AP) — Seven percent of priests in Australia’s Catholic Church were accused of sexually abusing children over the past several decades, a lawyer said Monday as officials investigating institutional abuse across Australia revealed for the first time the extent of the crisis.

The statistics were released during the opening address of a hearing of Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The royal commission — which is Australia’s highest form of inquiry — has been investigating since 2013 how the Catholic Church and other institutions responded to the sexual abuse of children over decades.

The commission has previously heard harrowing testimony from scores of people who suffered abuse at the hands of clergy. But the full scale of the problem was never clear until Monday, when the commission released the statistics it has gathered.

Commissioners surveyed Catholic Church authorities and found that between 1980 and 2015, 4,444 people reported they had been abused at more than 1,000 Catholic institutions across Australia, said Gail Furness, the lead lawyer assisting the commission. The average age of the victims was 10.5 for girls and 11.5 for boys.

Overall, 7 percent of priests in Australia between 1950 and 2010 were accused of sexually abusing children, Furness said.

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How Plants Evolved into Carnivores

By Ewen Callaway

Any insect unlucky enough to land on the mouth-like leaves of an Australian pitcher plant will meet a grisly end. The plant’s prey is drawn into a vessel-like ‘pitcher’ organ where a specialized cocktail of enzymes digests the victim.

Now, by studying the pitcher plant’s genome—and comparing its insect-eating fluids to those of other carnivorous plants—researchers have found that meat-eating plants the world over have hit on the same deadly molecular recipe, even though they are separated by millions of years of evolution.

“We’re really looking at a classic case of convergent evolution,” says Victor Albert, a plant-genome scientist at the University of Buffalo, New York, who co-led the study, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution on February 6.

Carnivorous plants occur across the flowering-plant family tree. The Australian pitcher plant (Cephalotus follicularis)—native to a sliver of coastline in Southwest Australia—is closer kin to the starfruit (Averrhoa carambola) than to other species of pitcher plants found in the Americas and southeast Asia. This suggests that carnivory has evolved repeatedly in plants, probably to cope with the nutrient-scarce soils in which they grow, Albert says. “What they’re trying to do is capture nitrogen and phosphorus from their prey.”

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