ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 478

Orlando Shooting Renews Debate Over Limits on Gay Men Donating Blood

By Donald G. McNeil Jr.

In the aftermath of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla., 53 people were alive but wounded, many in desperate need of blood. Blood banks in the area put out a call for donors.

Gay men were ready to volunteer. Rumors even went around that blood centers in Orlando had relaxed a ban on donations from sexually active gay men.

But the rumors were false. The ban, imposed by the Food and Drug Administration, remains in place, infuriating some gay rights activists.

The agency does not permit a man who has had sex with another man in the past year to donate blood. Loosening that restriction, officials say, would greatly increase the chances of contaminating the blood supply with H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted infections.

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What Obama Actually Thinks About Radical Islam

By Jeffrey Goldberg

It is not a new practice for critics of President Obama to question his commitment to the fight against Islamist terrorism, but Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has cast doubt on Obama’s commitment to this struggle in uniquely florid and bizarre ways. On Tuesday, he claimed that Obama “prioritizes” America’s enemies over the American people; on Monday, he insinuated that Obama is sympathetic to the Islamic State terror group. (Read the previous sentence again and ask yourself: How has it come to this?)

Trump’s recent statements about Obama grow from a neurotic belief in the president’s malevolent otherness: On ISIS, Trump said, Obama “doesn’t get it, or he gets it better than anybody understands.” Barack Obama, to Donald Trump, is, and will forever be, the Manchurian President—Manchuria, by way of Kenya, with a detour in Raqqa.

It is true that Trump’s critique of Obama’s handling of terrorism is, among other things, analysis-free and comprehensively unserious, but it is also true is that there are non-hysterical critiques to be made, and not only critiques that concern Obama’s reluctance to describe the threat as one posed by “radical Islam” (a reluctance the president addressed on Tuesday). Critics to Obama’s right fault him for prematurely withdrawing American troops from Iraq, and for not doing enough to prevent Syria from becoming a safe haven for ISIS. His reluctance to involve the U.S. more systematically in the Syrian civil war, the argument goes, has allowed jihadists to fill the vacuum created by the absence of the world’s sole superpower. Some critics on the right also argue that Obama blanches when confronted by the ugly truth about Muslim dysfunction and extremism; political correctness, in this view, hamstrings the president, and makes him obtuse. Critics to Obama’s left, on the other hand, argue that he is killing too many people, particularly through the use of drone strikes, and that his policies are distressingly of a piece with those of his Republican predecessor. The over-militarization of the so-called war on terror, that argument goes, exacerbates a problem that has already been hyped by “Islamophobic” fearmongers.

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Pakistani woman burned daughter alive over marriage dispute

By Jon Boone

A young Pakistani woman who was burned to death by her family on Wednesday for running away and marrying without their permission had been tricked into returning home by her mother’s promise to organise a proper wedding ceremony, her husband has said.

Seventeen-year-old Zeenat Rafiq was doused with petrol and set on fire by her mother, Perveen, in a neighbourhood of Lahore. The mother reportedly made no attempt to hide her crime, shouting to neighbours that she had killed her daughter for supposedly dishonouring her family.

Zeenat ran away with and married Hassan Khan last week, angering her Punjabi family who were furious that she had married an ethnic Pashtun without permission.

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Gay Muslim: Islam Is No Religion of Peace

By Parvez Sharma

“What’s his name?” I asked my husband as he woke me to tell me of the carnage in Orlando. “It’s going to be a Muslim name.”

I just knew it. I had never been one to racially profile my own community. But this time my premonition was right.

A few years ago, in Islamic year 1432, I was in Mecca on the hajj pilgrimage. I shared a meal with an older Yemeni at Al Baiq, the Saudi version of KFC. We discussed the monstrous Kingdom Tower looming over the Kaaba, the beating heart of my faith, where millions of Muslims converge every year to perform the rituals that make up Islam’s highest calling. The bin Laden family was responsible for its construction, along with the destruction of countless historic sites and artifacts of Islamic history to pave the way for resort hotels and other conveniences reserved for the 1 percent.

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Admit It: These Terrorists Are Muslims

By Maajid Nawaz

The atrocious attack in Orlando, Florida, was an act of ISIS-inspired jihadist terrorism that targeted gays. It must concern us all.

Before any of our assumed multiple identities, we are human beings first and foremost. You don’t have to be black to condemn racism, nor Jewish to condemn anti-Semitism, nor Muslim to condemn anti-Muslim bigotry, and you certainly don’t have to be gay to condemn the evil that just descended upon Orlando.

A puerile response by some of my fellow Muslims is to ask “why should we apologize for something that has nothing to do with us.” But this entirely misses the point.

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Islam’s Jihad Against Homosexuals

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The Orlando massacre is a hideous reminder to Americans that homophobia is an integral part of Islamic extremism. That isn’t to say that some people of other faiths and ideologies aren’t hostile to members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, or LGBT, community. Nor is to say that Islamic extremists don’t target other minorities, in addition to engaging in wholly indiscriminate violence. But it is important to establish why a man like Omar Mateen could be motivated to murder 49 people in a gay nightclub, interrupting the slaughter, as law-enforcement officials reported, to dial 911, proclaim his support for Islamic State and then pray to Allah.

I offer an explanation in the form of four propositions.

1. Muslim homophobia is institutionalized. Islamic law as derived from scripture, and as evolved over several centuries, not only condemns but prescribes cruel and unusual punishments for homosexuality.

2. Many Muslim-majority countries have laws that criminalize and punish homosexuals in line with Islamic law.

3. It is thus not surprising that the attitudes of Muslims in Muslim-majority countries are homophobic and that many people from those countries take those attitudes with them when they migrate to the West.

4. The rise of modern Islamic extremism has worsened the intolerance toward homosexuality. Extremists don’t just commit violence against LGBT people. They also spread the prejudice globally by preaching that homosexuality is a disease and a crime.

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Scientists turn CO2 to stone in just two years: a solution for climate change? (+video)

By Jason Thomson

Nature can turn carbon dioxide into rock, but it takes thousands upon thousands of years. Scientists in Iceland may have just figured out how to do it in less than two.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) holds enormous potential to slow climate change, taking carbon dioxide gas out of the atmosphere and storing it underground – in theory, anyway.

But efforts to turn theory into reality have faced huge technical challenges, not least concerns that the liquid carbon dioxide being pumped down into the Earth might leak back out.

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Barton Bunk: Religious Right ‘Historian’ Claims People Who Criticize Him ‘Hate America’

By Simon Brown

David Barton is still David Barton, which means the Religious Right’s favorite fake historian is once again distorting facts to suit his own agenda.

Last week, Barton appeared on a right-wing radio program called “The Patriot and The Preacher,” hosted by Mark Anthony – a former tech sector worker with a self-described “passion” for history – and the Rev. Ben Kinchlow – a former co-host on Pat Robertson’s “The 700 Club.”

The segment got off to a rocky start as the show claimed Barton was once named by Time magazine as “America’s Historian.” It turns out that never happened. Not even close. In 2005, Barton was named by the magazine as one of the 25 most influential evangelicals in America, but nowhere in that article did the publication bestow any sort of title on him.

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The Mistrust of Science

By Atul Gawande

The following was delivered as the commencement address at the California Institute of Technology, on Friday, June 10th.

If this place has done its job—and I suspect it has—you’re all scientists now. Sorry, English and history graduates, even you are, too. Science is not a major or a career. It is a commitment to a systematic way of thinking, an allegiance to a way of building knowledge and explaining the universe through testing and factual observation. The thing is, that isn’t a normal way of thinking. It is unnatural and counterintuitive. It has to be learned. Scientific explanation stands in contrast to the wisdom of divinity and experience and common sense. Common sense once told us that the sun moves across the sky and that being out in the cold produced colds. But a scientific mind recognized that these intuitions were only hypotheses. They had to be tested.

When I came to college from my Ohio home town, the most intellectually unnerving thing I discovered was how wrong many of my assumptions were about how the world works—whether the natural or the human-made world. I looked to my professors and fellow-students to supply my replacement ideas. Then I returned home with some of those ideas and told my parents everything they’d got wrong (which they just loved). But, even then, I was just replacing one set of received beliefs for another. It took me a long time to recognize the particular mind-set that scientists have. The great physicist Edwin Hubble, speaking at Caltech’s commencement in 1938, said a scientist has “a healthy skepticism, suspended judgement, and disciplined imagination”—not only about other people’s ideas but also about his or her own. The scientist has an experimental mind, not a litigious one.

As a student, this seemed to me more than a way of thinking. It was a way of being—a weird way of being. You are supposed to have skepticism and imagination, but not too much. You are supposed to suspend judgment, yet exercise it. Ultimately, you hope to observe the world with an open mind, gathering facts and testing your predictions and expectations against them. Then you make up your mind and either affirm or reject the ideas at hand. But you also hope to accept that nothing is ever completely settled, that all knowledge is just probable knowledge. A contradictory piece of evidence can always emerge. Hubble said it best when he said, “The scientist explains the world by successive approximations.”

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Faith in the spotlight as Australians tipped to lose their religion

By Debbie Schipp

A push for Australians to mark “no religion” in the 2016 Census could see Christianity overtaken as the most popular “religion” and change the way government policy is made and projects funded in Australia.

It’s a subtle change, but overseas experience is that moving the “no religion” option to the top of the list of responses on the question of religion saw a dramatic rise in the number of people identifying with a particular faith.

This year’s Census has done that, with the option moved to the top of the list of possible responses to the “What is the person’s religion?” question for the first time since the “no religion” option was introduced in 1991. The “Catholic” option moves to second on the list.

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