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Question of the Week – 12/14/16

How do you navigate the holiday season? Whether or not you personally celebrate anything this season, what advice can you offer to those whose secular identity makes a stressful time all that much more difficult?

Our favorite answer wins a copy of A Brief Candle in the Dark by Richard Dawkins (no repeat winners).

And please don’t forget to send in your submissions for Question of the Week! You can suggest a question by emailing us at QotW@richarddawkins.net. Please remember this is for “Question of the Week” suggestions only, and answers to the Question of the Week should be submitted through the comments section on the Question of the Week page. Thank you!

Life Driven Purpose, pg 55

“I think most believers are good people. Although religious doctrine is generally irrational, divisive, and irrelevant to human values, some religions have good teachings sprinkled in with the dogma, and many well-meaning believers, to their credit, concentrate on those teachings. Surveying the smorgasbord of belief systems, we notice that they occasionally talk about peace and love. Who would argue with that? Sermons and holy books may encourage charity, mercy, and compassion, even sometimes fairness. These are wonderful ideas, but they are not unique to any religion. We might judge one religion to be better than another, but notice what we are doing. When we judge a religion, we are applying a standard outside of the religion. We are assuming a framework against which religious teachings and practices can be measured.

That standard is the harm principle. If a teaching leans toward harm, we judge it as bad. If it leans away from harm, it is good, r at least better than the others. If a religious precept happens to be praiseworthy it is not because of the religion but in spite of it. Its moral worth is measured against real consequences, not orthodoxy or righteousness. “

–Dan Barker, Life Driven Purpose, pg 55

Discuss!

The minds of other animals

By Antone Martinho

I have recently decided to bring two small parrots into my home. They are celestial parrotlets, originally from Ecuador and Peru, and one of the smallest parrot species that can cohabit with humans. I call them Dandolo and Madeleine. They fit well into my apartment life in Oxford, despite the burgeoning beak-scars on my fingers, and they fill my weekends with rainforest twittering.

They are the first birds I have kept as pets – which is surprising, because my professional life is entirely concerned with birds. I am interested in how they learn, what they learn, and the behaviours that made them such a successful group of organisms. Birds are directly descended from dinosaurs, and have diversified into more than 10,000 species, far more than mammals, amphibians or reptiles. In the past, I have worked with crows and pigeons, and am currently focused on ducks.

Recently I’ve been investigating whether ducks can learn the concepts of ‘same’ and ‘different’. First, my colleagues and I trained ducklings to recognise, for example, two red spheres, via imprinting. This is the process by which young birds can learn to identify and follow a moving object, normally their mother. The shapes were attached to rotating booms, and the ducklings followed them around like a mother duck. Then we gave them a choice between two more pairs of shapes: two red pyramids, and a red cube and a red rectangular prism.

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Climate change skeptic to head EPA; McMorris Rodgers as Interior secretary?

By Joe Connelly

The Trump administration appears set to take a hard right turn on environmental policy, with climate change skeptic Scott Pruitt as boss of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., a possible Interior secretary.

Pruitt is Oklahoma’s attorney general and a down-the-line ally of the oil and gas industry. The EPA appointment was leaked Wednesday afternoon.

The Oklahoma AG has sued the EPA over its Clean Power Plan, designed to lower greenhouse gas emissions at power plants.  He has also sued the EPA for its recently announced measures to curb emissions of methane from oil and gas plants.

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The Biggest Junk Science of 2016

In 2016, the year of “Post-Truth,” it’s no surprise that there was a fair amount of junk science being tossed around. Like we do every year, we strived to debunk as much of it as we could. We also called out its most prominent purveyors. Now, we count down the worst of the worst. So here it is: our annual list of the biggest junk science of 2016. Click the red arrows to the right of Jean Luc Picard (pictured above) to begin. And gird yourself, this will get ugly.

Afterwards, we encourage you to peruse our past lists from 2013, 2014, and 2015 (if you haven’t knocked yourself out from excessive facepalming, that is).

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John Glenn, American hero, aviation icon and former U.S. senator, dies at 95

By Joe Hallett

His legend is otherworldly and now, at age 95, so is John Glenn.

An authentic hero and genuine American icon, Glenn died this afternoon surrounded by family at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus after a remarkably healthy life spent almost from the cradle with Annie, his beloved wife of 73 years, who survives.

He, along with fellow aviators Orville and Wilbur Wright and moon-walker Neil Armstrong, truly made Ohio first in flight.

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Only as Bad as it’s Ever Been: PJ O’Rourke on American Values, Politics and Culture

November 28, 2016

Host: Josh Zepps

This week we’re dusting off a favorite Point of Inquiry episode from three years ago: Josh Zepps’ conversation with P.J. O’Rourke – humorist, cultural commentator and bestselling author of sixteen books. Originally broadcast in December of 2013, this episode’s subject matter is remarkably relevant for this current political and cultural moment, as we prepare for the presidency of a man whose campaign was based on the promise to return America to a golden age that really never existed.

O’Rourke is an early proponent of “gonzo journalism” and is a self described libertarian, he’s served as editor-in-chief of National Lampoon, and has spent 20 years reporting for Rolling Stone and The Atlantic as the worlds only “trouble spot humorist” going to wars, riots, rebellions, and other “Holidays in Hell” in more than 40 countries. O’Rourke is the H.L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute and a frequent panelist on National Public Radio’s game show Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!

In this episode they discuss everything from abortion and privacy, to the party following the fall of the Berlin Wall, to the looting of the Baghdad Museum. They discuss American values both of individualism and the fundamental shared American mentality of dissatisfaction, and that things are never good enough. The same dissatisfaction that often has us yearning for the “good ol’ days” is also the American quality that propels us forward, hungry for a better life, and unwilling to settle.

Click here to listen to this episode of Point of Inquiry.

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Japan Is Obsessed With Climate Change. Young People Don’t Get It.

By Tatiana Schlossberg

TOKYO — At 12:30 p.m. on a recent Wednesday, the Ministry of the Environment offices here were almost completely in darkness, lit only by the silver-blue glow of computer screens.

All of the government ministry offices are supposed to go dark for an hour in the middle of each day to save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Satoru Morishita, deputy director general of global environment affairs at the ministry, said the policy is a daily reminder of the stakes of climate change.

“We’re trying to change behaviors in addition to changing attitudes on climate change, and from that, to change the whole society,” Mr. Morishita said in an interview.

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Peter Boghossian on Critical Thinking, The Atheos App, and the Post-Modern Influence on Universities

By Malhar Mali

Peter Boghossian (@PeterBoghossian) is an Assistant Professor of philosophy at Portland State University. His primary research interests are critical thinking and moral reasoning. He’s written for publications such as Time Magazine, Scientific American, and The Philosophers’ Magazine, and has appeared on talk shows like The Rubin Report, The Joe Rogan Experience, and FOX News. He took a break from his sabbatical to speak with me.

The following is our conversation transcribed and edited for clarity.

Malhar Mali: What in your opinion is the best way of fostering critical thinking when it comes to religious and supernatural beliefs?

Peter Boghossian: I think the whole way we’ve taught critical thinking is wrong from day one. We’ve taught, “Formulate your beliefs on the basis of evidence.” But the problem with that is people already believe they’ve formulated their beliefs on evidence — that’s why they believe what they believe. Instead, what we should focus on is teaching people to seek out and identify defeaters.

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ISIS in the Caribbean

By Simon Cottee

This summer, the so-called Islamic State published issue 15 of its online magazine Dabiq. In what has become a standard feature, it ran an interview with an ISIS foreign fighter. “When I was around twenty years old I would come to accept the religion of truth, Islam,” said Abu Sa’d at-Trinidadi, recalling how he had turned away from the Christian faith he was born into.

At-Trinidadi, as his nom de guerre suggests, is from the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), a country more readily associated with calypso and carnival than the “caliphate.” Asked if he had a message for “the Muslims of Trinidad,” he condemned his co-religionists at home for remaining in “a place where you have no honor and are forced to live in humiliation, subjugated by the disbelievers.” More chillingly, he urged Muslims in T&T to wage jihad against their fellow citizens: “Terrify the disbelievers in their own homes and make their streets run with their blood.”

For well over a year and a half now, Raqqa, the so-called stronghold of the Islamic State in Syria, has been subjected to sustained aerial bombardment by U.S., French, and Russian war planes. In recent months, the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition has reportedly killed more than 10,000 ISIS fighters, including key figures among ISIS’s leadership, most notably its senior strategist and spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani. It has also launched an offensive, now in its second month, on the group’s Iraqi capital of Mosul. According to estimates by American officials, ISIS has lost about 45 percent of its territory in Syria and 20 percent in Iraq since it rose to prominence in the summer of 2014. At the same time, the flow of foreign fighters to the caliphate has plummeted, from a peak of 2,000 crossing the Turkey-Syria border each month in late 2014 to as few as 50 today. Yet still there are people making the long and precarious 6,000-mile journey from Trinidad to Syria in an effort to live there. Just three days before the release of Dabiq 15, eight were detained in southern Turkey, attempting to cross into ISIS-controlled territory in Syria. All were female, and they included children.

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