ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 483

Thanks to a New Texas Law, An Atheist Has Been Able to Document Prayers at School Board Meetings

By Hemant Mehta

On January 1 of this year, a new law went into effect in Texas. Among other things, HB 283 requires any school district with student enrollment of over 10,000 to essentially make video and audio recordings of all board meetings available to the public. Many districts, large and small, do this on their own already, but the TX law now mandates it for the larger ones.

That gave one reader of this site — let’s call him Bob — an idea: If all of these meetings are being recorded, we can finally have a record of which school boards are praying during meetings. Forget relying on a local citizen who just so happens to attend these meetings and knows to report these incidents.

If there was evidence of prayers at meetings, letters of complaint could be sent to the school boards urging them to stop proselytizing. And who knows, maybe one of these instances could lead to a court challenge that ultimately stops this practice for good. Make no mistake: School board prayers are different from city council invocations because they directly involve students. The Texas Association of School Boards even warns board members about including prayers at meetings:

Given the confusing history of the legality of prayer before school board meetings, what is a school board to do if it wishes to pray before board meetings? Essentially, the board needs to consult very carefully with its local counsel and weigh all of the pros and cons. The legal risks associated with the practice are obvious — courts around the country, and even in our own Fifth Circuit, are not consistent in their analysis. Choosing not to pray at school board meetings allows a school district to avoid the time and expense of confronting a legal challenge…

So even Texas is telling school boards not to pray if they want to avoid a legal challenge.

But even with all the data out there, someone would have to keep track of all those board meetings.

That’s just what Bob did.

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Life Driven Purpose, pg 21

“‘What is the purpose of life?’ is a slippery question because purpose has more than one meaning. In its primary usage – the one relevant to living beings – purpose is striving for a goal, an intentional aiming at a target. There is no striving without a reason, and the reason always has something to do with surviving or enjoying your life. If you are not enjoying life – or striving to enjoy life – you are not living your life. Enjoyment doesn’t exist for its own sake; you exist for your own sake. Enjoyment results from successfully reaching or striving to reach a goal.”

–Dan Barker, Life Driven Purpose pg 21

Discuss!

Why Is Lebanon Still Using Colonial-Era Laws to Persecute LGBTQ Citizens?

By Sarabrynn Hudgins

Many draconian Middle Eastern laws are homegrown constructions, ranging from Jordan’s Penal Code 308, which allows rapists to avoid jail time if they marry their victims, to Saudi Arabia’s infamous ban on women drivers. Others are hangovers of colonialism that Middle Eastern governments have been all too happy to uphold.

Lebanon, long called the Switzerland of the Middle East, fancies itself an exception to Middle Eastern authoritarianism: a bustling, cosmopolitan country that serves as an oasis of co-mingling cultures in an increasingly unstable region. A shame, then, that Lebanon applies long-outdated French laws against minority groups such as its LGBTQ population. It seems surreal that in 2016, the state harasses and tortures its own citizens based solely on their sexual orientation and gender identity., Violence against LGBTQ citizens in Lebanon is shockingly common, and stateside human rights defenders should take notice.

Lebanese Penal Code 534, a historical quirk left over from the French mandate that ended in 1943, enables the state to punish “unnatural” sexual acts. The statute’s vague terminology allows officials to apply the law according to their whims; it is presently used to persecute LGBTQ people, who face up to a year in prison if convicted.

Of course, LGBTQ people aren’t marching into police stations to proclaim their sexual orientation. Instead, when their paths cross with authorities, officials use any pretext (often based on stereotypes relating to appearance, mannerisms, and speech patterns) to justify rifling through suspects’ personal belongings for evidence of homosexuality.

Gay men report having their phones searched at routine checkpoints, only to be arrested and beaten for having gay dating apps like Grindr installed or for possessing nude photos of other men. Belonging to LGBTQ-aligned Facebook groups is also sufficient—even if there is no evidence of having participated in homosexual activities. The Lebanese authorities’ opinion of homosexuality is made evident in the purview of the Morality Police, who oversee cases related to homosexuality, along with other suspects accused of drugs and prostitution.

Even benign legal matters can turn dangerous. A police officer who met with a Syrian man attempting to gather the paperwork needed for refugee resettlement in North America interpreted the refugee’s mannerisms as “uneven,” a code word for effeminate and possibly gay. So the police officer orchestrated a 2014 raid on the hamam (Turkish bathhouse) where the man formerly worked; 27 people were arrested, after which they were subjected to compulsory HIV tests and torture severe enough to incite forced confessions. A similar raid on a movie theater in 2012 saw the arrest of 36 people who endured rectal exams and were lambasted as “perverts” on Lebanese television.

Unfortunately, these incidents of state-sponsored violence are not anomalies. Police often resort to beatings and outright torture in order to elicit confessions. Victims report enduring anti-gay slurs from law enforcement and situations that would constitute entrapment under U.S. law. A Lebanese LGBTQ news outlet reported that in April 2016 a transgender woman was arrested and tied to a chair for three days. A male officer demanded she sleep with him and, had the woman agreed, reportedly planned to use the incident as evidence against her.

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The Perils of Writing a Provocative Email at Yale

By Conor Friedersdorf

Last fall, student protesters at Yale University demanded that Professor Nicholas Christakis, an academic star who has successfully mentored Ivy League undergraduates for years, step down from his position as faculty-in-residence at Silliman College, along with his wife, Erika Christakis, who shared in the job’s duties.

The protesters had taken offense at an email sent by Erika Christakis.

Dogged by the controversy for months, the couple finally resigned their posts Wednesday. Because the student protests against them were prompted by intellectual speech bearing directly on Erika Christakis’s area of academic expertise, the outcome will prompt other educators at Yale to reflect on their own positions and what they might do or say to trigger or avoid calls for their own resignations. If they feel less inclined toward intellectual engagement at Yale, I wouldn’t blame them.

Nicholas Christakis will continue on as a tenured Yale faculty member. Erika Christakis, who gave up teaching at Yale last semester, recently published a book, The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need From Grownups.

She has no future classes scheduled.

The controversy that culminated in this week’s resignations began last October, when Erika Christakis was teaching a Yale class called “Concept of the Problem Child.”

An expert in early childhood education, she’s long been critical of ways that adults deprive children of learning experiences by over-policing their behavior. When Yale administrators sent an all-students email advising Yalies to avoid “culturally unaware or insensitive choices” when choosing their Halloween costumes, Erika Christakis responded with an email of her own, acknowledging “genuine concerns about cultural and personal representation,” lauding the “spirit of avoiding hurt and offense,” but questioning  whether students were well-served by administrators asserting norms rather than giving them space to shape their own.

“Have we lost faith in young people’s capacity—in your capacity—to exercise self-censure, through social norming, and also in your capacity to ignore or reject things that trouble you?” she asked. “What does this debate about Halloween costumes say about our view of young adults, of their strength and judgment? Whose business is it to control the forms of costumes of young people? It’s not mine, I know that.”

Many students were outraged by the email, particularly a portion that Erika Christakis attributed to her husband: “Nicholas says, if you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended. Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society.”

Student critics responded, in part, by circulating a petition that accumulated scores of signatures from Yale students and alumni. “You ask students to ‘look away’ if costumes are offensive, as if the degradation of our cultures and people, and the violence that grows out of it is something that we can ignore,” the petition stated, adding that “we were told to meet the offensive parties head on, without suggesting any modes or means to facilitate these discussions to promote understanding.”

The petition assumes that offensive Halloween costumes beget violence; proceeds as if Nicholas Christakis simply advised students to ignore all offensive costumes; acknowledges in the next clause that, in fact, he also declared, “or tell them you are offended;” and most bizarrely, concludes as if Ivy League students advised to “talk to each other,” the most straightforward of human behaviors, somehow need further counsel on “modes or means to facilitate these discussions,” as if they are Martians unfamiliar with talking to classmates—even as they put forth a persuasive petition aimed at those same classmates.

Soon after his wife sent her email, Nicholas Christakis found himself standing on a campus quad surrounded by protesters. He attempted to respond in person to their concerns. After watching videos of the scene, I noted the core disagreement between the professor and the undergraduates. Christakis believed that he had an obligation to listen to the views of the students, to reflect upon them, and to respond that he was persuaded or articulate why he maintained a different view. In short, he believed that one respects students by engaging them in earnest dialogue.

Many students believed that his responsibility was to hear their demands for an apology and to issue it. They saw anything short of a declaration of wrongdoing as unacceptable. In their view, one respected students by validating their hurt feelings.

Their perspective was informed by the idea that their residential college is akin to a home. At Yale, residential colleges have what was then called a “master”—a professor who lives on site and is responsible for its academic, intellectual, and social life.  “Masters work with students to shape each residential college community,” Yale stated, “bringing their own distinct social, cultural, and intellectual influences to the colleges.” The approach is far costlier than what’s on offer at commuter schools, but aims to create a richer intellectual environment where undergrads can learn from faculty and one another even outside the classroom.

“In your position as master,” one student said, “it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students who live in Silliman. You have not done that. By sending out that email, that goes against your position as master. Do you understand that?!”

“No,” Christakis said, “I don’t agree with that.”

As he saw it, there was no contradiction between creating a safe residence for Silliman students and challenging them intellectually, a view Yale itself officially shares (though what its representatives convey to prospective students is opaque to outsiders).

Professor Alan Jacobs of Baylor University published one of the more insightful posts on this aspect of the controversy, observing that any Yale student seeking an environment akin to a home is bound to be disappointed, because their residential colleges are, by design, places where “people from all over the world, from a wide range of social backgrounds, and with a wide range of interests and abilities, come to live together temporarily, for about 30 weeks a year, before moving on to their careers. It is an essentially public space,” he added, “though with controls on ingress and egress to prevent chaos and foster friendship and fellowship.”

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Who would rally against Reason?

by Richard Dawkins

 

June 4th is a landmark date for Washington, D.C. Thousands will converge on the world’s leading capital city to celebrate the crowning human virtue of reason.

How have we come to the point where reason needs a rally to defend it? To base your life on reason means to base it on evidence and logic. Evidence is the only way we know to discover what’s true about the real world. Logic is how we deduce the consequences that follow from evidence. Who could be against either? Alas, plenty of people, which is why we need the Reason Rally.

Reason, as played out in the grand cooperative enterprise called science, makes me proud of Homo sapiens. Sapiens literally means ‘wise,’ but we have deserved the accolade only since we crawled from the swamp of primitive superstition and supernatural gullibility and embraced reason, logic, science and evidence-based truth.

We now know the age of our universe (13-14 billion years), the age of the Earth (4-5 billion years), what we and all other objects are made of (atoms), where we come from (evolved from other species), why all species are so well adapted to their environments (natural selection of their DNA). We know why we have night and day (Earth spins like a top), why we have winter and summer (Earth is tilted), what is the maximum speed at which anything can travel (two thirds of a billion mph). We know what the sun is (one star among billions in the Milky Way galaxy), we know what the Milky Way is (one galaxy among billions in our universe). We understand what causes smallpox (a virus, which we have eradicated), polio (a virus, which we have nearly eradicated), malaria (a protozoan, still here but we’re working on it), syphilis, tuberculosis, gangrene, cholera (bacteria and we know how to kill them). We have built planes that can cross the Atlantic in hours, rockets that safely land men on the moon and robot vehicles on Mars, and might one day save our planet by diverting a meteor of the kind that – we now understand – killed the dinosaurs. Thanks to evidence-based reason we are blessedly liberated from ancient fears of ghosts and devils, evil spirits and djinns, magic spells and witches’ curses.

Who then would rally against reason? The following statements will sound all too familiar.

1. “I don’t trust educated intellectuals, elitists who know more than I do. I’d prefer to vote for somebody like me, rather than somebody who is actually qualified to be president.”

What other than this mentality accounts for the popularity of Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, George W Bush –politicians who flaunt their ignorance as a vote-winning virtue? You want your airline pilot to be educated in aeronautics and navigation. You want your surgeon to be learned in anatomy. Yet when you vote for a president to lead a great country, you prefer somebody who is ignorant and proud of it, someone you’d enjoy having a drink with, rather than somebody qualified for high office? If you are such a voter, you will not join the Reason Rally.

2. “Rather than have them learn modern science, I’d prefer my children to study a book written in 800 BC by unidentifed authors whose knowledge and qualifications were of their time. If I can’t trust the school to shield them from science, I’ll home-school them instead.”

Such a parent will not enjoy the Reason Rally. In 2008, at a conference of American science educators in Atlanta, Georgia, one teacher reported that students “burst into tears” when told they would be studying evolution. Another teacher described how students repeatedly screamed “No!” when he began talking about evolution in class. If you are such a student, the Reason Rally is not for you – unless you take the precaution of stopping up your ears lest a word of unwelcome truth might penetrate.

3. “When I am faced with a mystery, with something I don’t understand, I don’t interrogate science for a solution, but jump to the conclusion that it must be supernatural and has no solution.”

This has been the lamentable but understandable first recourse of humanity for most of our history. We have grown out of it only during the past few centuries. Many people have never grown out of it, and if you are one of those the Reason Rally may have no appeal for you.

That is the fourth time in this essay I have said something like: “the Reason Rally is not for you.” But let me end on a more positive note. Even if you are unaccustomed to living by reason, if you are one of those, perhaps, who actively distrust reason, why not give it a try? Cast aside the prejudices of upbringing and habit, and come along anyway. If you come with open ears and open curiosity you will learn something, will probably be entertained and may even change your mind. And that, you will find, is a liberating and refreshing experience.

A hundred years from now, there should be no need for a Reason Rally. Meanwhile, unfortunately, the need is all around us and may become increasingly apparent in this election year. Please come to Washington and stand up for reason, science and truth.

Author’s note: This article was originally published in the Washington Post for the Reason Rally of March 2012. We reproduce it here for the 2016 Reason Rally, with only minimal changes to bring it up to date.

As long as we study life, it will be read’: the Selfish Gene turns 40

by Adam Rutherford

It’s 40 years since Richard Dawkins suggested, in the opening words of The Selfish Gene, that, were an alien to visit Earth, the question it would pose to judge our intellectual maturity was: “Have they discovered evolution yet?” We had, of course, by the grace of Charles Darwin and a century of evolutionary biologists who had been trying to figure out how natural selection actually worked. In 1976, The Selfish Gene became the first real blockbuster popular science book, a poetic mark in the sand to the public and scientists alike: this idea had to enter our thinking, our research and our culture.

The idea was this: genes strive for immortality, and individuals, families, and species are merely vehicles in that quest. The behaviour of all living things is in service of their genes hence, metaphorically, they are selfish. Before this, it had been proposed that natural selection was honing the behaviour of living things to promote the continuance through time of the individual creature, or family, or group or species. But in fact, Dawkins said, it was the gene itself that was trying to survive, and it just so happened that the best way for it to survive was in concert with other genes in the impermanent husk of an individual.

This gene-centric view of evolution also began to explain one of the oddities of life on Earth – the behaviour of social insects. What is the point of a drone bee, doomed to remain childless and in the service of a totalitarian queen? Suddenly it made sense that, with the gene itself steering evolution, the fact that the drone shared its DNA with the queen meant that its servitude guarantees not the individual’s survival, but the endurance of the genes they share. Or as the Anglo-Indian biologist JBS Haldane put it: “Would I lay down my life to save my brother? No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins.”

These ideas were espoused by only a handful of scientists in the middle decades of the 20th century – notably Bob Trivers, Bill Hamilton, John Maynard Smith and George Williams. In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins did not merely recapitulate them; he made an impassioned argument for the reality of natural selection. Previous attempts to explain the mechanics of evolution had been academic and rooted in maths. Dawkins walked us through it in prose. Many great popular science books followed – Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, Stephen Pinker’s The Blank Slate, and, currently, The Vital Question by Nick Lane.

For many of us, The Selfish Gene was our first proper taste of evolution. I don’t remember it being a controversial subject in my youth. In fact, I don’t remember it being taught at all. Evolution, Darwin and natural selection were largely absent from my secondary education in the late 1980s. The national curriculum, introduced in the UK in 1988, included some evolution, but before 1988 its presence in schools was far from universal. As an aside, in my opinion the subject is taught bafflingly minimally and late in the curriculum even today; evolution by natural selection is crucial to every aspect of the living world. In the words of the Russian scientist Theodosius Dobzhansky: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”

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Straight Talk about Religion: Reza Aslan Peddles False Wares to Influential Dupes

By Jeffrey Tayler

“I’m not a Muslim because I think Islam is more right” (than other religions), the media personality and scholar of religions Reza Aslan told Oprah on a recent episode of Super Soul Sunday, her television channel’s weekly spiritual chat show.  “It’s not.  I don’t think Islam is more true.  It’s not.”

Why, then, does he call himself a Muslim?

[F]or me, it’s about recognizing that the language of Islam, the language that it uses, the symbols and metaphors that it uses to define the relationship between human beings and God — that language appeals to me in a way that other languages do not.

By “languages” Aslan meant religions, he pointed out.  He also fessed up to not praying five times a day. A “profession of faith” such as Aslan’s — that Islam is just one “language” of many, neither necessarily more nor less valid than any other — has nothing in common with the message of the Shahada, the unmistakably clear, concise declaration of monotheism that is the first of five “pillars” (acts incumbent upon believers) of Islam: “I testify that there is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.” (Ritualistic prayer five times a day is the second pillar). Yet Aslan went on to redefine the Shahada for Oprah, telling her that it is:

[N]ot a statement of monotheism, although most people think it is.  It’s a statement about the definition of God, it’s that God is in and of Himself one-ness.  That means God cannot be divided.

“So, God is all things,” answered Oprah, waving her arms slowly and expansively.

“God is,” said Aslan.

“God is, period,” intoned Oprah gravely.  “Capital I, capital S.”

The above exchange presents us with a hodgepodge of nebulous fatuities and outright falsehoods that might, to some, seem harmless.  After all, does anyone really tune in to Oprah for penetrating discourse on religion?

Yet such blather, composed almost entirely of gauzy, misleading tropes, does damage to the dialogue about religion, and specifically Islam, we so urgently need to have if we hope to safeguard ourselves from terrorist violence and protect our freedom of speech from theocrats, their apologists, and their (often unwitting) enablers.  If gullible viewers accept what Aslan says as holding for a majority of Muslims, they will come away puzzled as to how anyone could commit violence in Islam’s name.  In fact, they might just be tempted to think (as President Obama has stated) that “extremists” really are practicing a perversion of Islam in, say, ISIS land, and that ISIS, therefore, “is not Islamic.”

The line Aslan is selling us — that Islam consists not of propositions (conveyed through the Quran) regarding the origins and future of the universe and our species, accompanied by instructions to all of us about how to behave, but of ethereal, infinitely malleable abstractions — “symbols” and “metaphors” and such — may pass as credible on a talk show.  Yet among those for whom the faith retains its genuine, primordial characteristics as a divinely inspired blueprint for control and exploitation, backed by a harsh apparatus of enforcement — it would sound blasphemous, and would surely earn its telegenic peddler a caning — or worse.  Aslan is free to espouse whatever sort of Islam he chooses, obviously, but we should not confuse his fanciful version of it with reality.

Aslan, when not teaching creative writing at the University of California at Riverside, authoring books about religion, or producing television shows, has for years served as a media go-to person for Islam.  He can be relied upon to exculpate his faith when called on to opine about the latest Islamist atrocity, deflect attention from its violence-inducing doctrines of jihad and martyrdom, and propound a postmodernist interpretation of the religion according to which all blame attaches to miscreant individuals and what potentially perverse propensities they bring to their “scriptures,” plus various other societal factors, and none to the content of those scriptures. 

There is a market for this.  Many, especially in the media, wish to avoid confronting the dilemmas we face in dealing forthrightly with Islam and Islamist terrorism.  A good number have fallen for the semantic trap noun “Islamophobia,” which equates criticism of Islam with bigotry against Muslims as people and which plays off the nonwhite skin color of a majority of its adherents.  Moreover, we all know that danger menaces those who speak out against Islam, leave the faith, or even draw cartoons about it.  For on-air interviews, then, best to avoid inviting guests who might talk too frankly about Islam and suggest that possibly, just possibly, the problem stems from the texts revered by 1.6 billion Muslims the world over.  A general reluctance to criticize religion of all sorts doesn’t aid dialogue either.

Aslan’s media appearances have been many, and he has been convincingly rebutted.  His latest book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, has drawn fire as a work of pop culture, not scholarship — no surprise given that he “does not hold either a doctorate or a teaching position in the academic study of religion.”  (It hardly helps that there’s little reason to think Jesus even existed).

Yet his interview on Oprah’s show cries out for critique, if only because his words on Islam help further the prevalent misconception that it is harmless, and maybe even laudable, to accept the veracity of, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, propositions about reality and definitions of proper human behavior laid out in ancient and medieval texts.  Or, put another way, to profess one of the three Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity, or Islam.

Back to Super Soul Sunday.  When Aslan then informs Oprah that “symbols and metaphors . . . define the relationship between human beings and God” he is begging the question, assuming that we already accept the existence of a supernatural being (as he can expect the famously pious Oprah to do), but which has been a matter at least thought worthy of argument, even among theologians of yore.  Lest we forget, the validity of the entire Abrahamic enterprise rests on God’s factual existence, if for no other reason than He had to exist to issue the “revelations” providing the sole basis for regarding the Tanakh, the Bible, and the Quran as anything more than oversize compendia of lurid, often cruel fairy tales, and not the inerrant, irrevocable Word of God.  Absent divine authorship, these tomes would merit no more respect than The Epic of Gilgamesh (from which the Flood legend surely derives) and certainly less esteem than, say, Homer’s magnificent, far more imaginative oeuvre. 

Note: if there can be no relationship between humans and an imaginary celestial despot, there can, however, exist delusion.  One who believes without evidence may well believe anything, even ludicrous absurdities — say, human parthenogenesis, flying horses, blabbering donkeys, and demonic pigs — that, were they not sheltering under the ennobling rubric of religion, would otherwise incite peals of laughter and howls of derision from sane inhabitants of the modern world.

This is a problem.  The right to practice (and speak freely about) the faith of one’s preference is, of course, a fundamental achievement of the Enlightenment. But in the United States, well-funded Evangelicals vote as a bloc and have influenced education and legislation concerning abortion, same-sex marriage, and the right to die with dignity.  The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia found nothing untoward in musing about possessed pigs to New York Magazine, which should have set us wondering about just how clear-headed his legal reasoning was as he adjudicated so many landmark cases.

Europe is affected, too, of course.  In the United Kingdom, for instance, Sharia courts now imperil the rights of Muslim women and children residents.  None of this would be possible were secularists not according religion a deference it manifestly does not deserve.

And what of Islam in particular?  What of those who cite divine sanction for slicing off their daughters’ clitorises? (Even in the United States, more than a half-million women and girls are now at risk of genital mutilation).  For beating their wives?  For stoning or hurling gays from rooftops?  Untoward respect for Islam de facto abets mutilators, abusive misogynists, and the murderers of LGBT people.  Faith is often much more than a mere matter of conscience: it has victims. Aslan and Oprah may practice their religions without harming others, but the same cannot be said for all, as any glance at the headlines these days will attest.

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Infection Raises Specter of Superbugs Resistant to All Antibiotics

By Sabrina Tavernise and Denise Grady

American military researchers have identified the first patient in the United States to be infected with bacteria that are resistant to an antibiotic that was the last resort against drug-resistant germs.

The patient is well now, but the case raises the specter of superbugs that could cause untreatable infections, because the bacteria can easily transmit their resistance to other germs that are already resistant to additional antibiotics. The resistance can spread because it arises from loose genetic material that bacteria typically share with one another.

“Think of a puzzle,” said Dr. Beth Bell, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “You need lots of different pieces to get a result that is resistant to everything. This is the last piece of that puzzle, unfortunately, in the United States. We have that genetic element that would allow for bacteria that are resistant to every antibiotic.”

The bacteria are resistant to a drug called colistin, an old antibiotic that in the United States is held in reserve to treat especially dangerous infections that are resistant to a class of drugs called carbapenems. If carbapenem-resistant bacteria, called CRE, also pick up resistance to colistin, they will be unstoppable.

“This is huge,” said Dr. Lance Price, a researcher at George Washington University. “We are one step away from CRE strains that cannot be treated with antibiotics. We now have all the pieces in place for it to be untreatable.”

The gene for resistance to colistin was first found in China, where the drug is used in pig and poultry farming. Researchers reported its discovery there in November. It has also been found in the intestine of one pig in the United States.

CRE is still relatively rare, causing just 600 deaths a year, but by 2013, researchers had identified it in health care facilities in 44 states. Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, often calls it the “nightmare superbug” because it is resistant to all but one antibiotic — colistin.

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Short Answers to Hard Questions About Antibiotic Resistance

By Sabrina Tavernise, Erica Goode, and Denise Grady

The idea of people dying from infections that were once easily cured may seem outlandish. But it is happening already — taking about 23,000 lives in the United States a year — and experts warn that things will get worse because bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics faster than we can make new drugs to fight back.

We have ourselves to blame, for overusing the drugs in people and squandering them on livestock. Now, a dangerous form of drug resistance has reached the United States, leaving us just one step away from infections that are completely untreatable.

What is antibiotic resistance?

It used to be that infectious diseases were the biggest killers of Americans — illnesses like tuberculosis and pneumonia. The invention of antibiotics, which were developed for medical use in the 1940s, changed all that. But they became overused, and the bugs they were invented to fight started to develop ways of resisting them. For some years now, infectious disease doctors have been warning that unless we rein in use of antibiotics in both people and livestock, there will come a day when they will be powerless against the most ferocious bugs, turning the clock back to the early years of the 20th century.

What is CRE?

CRE, which stands for carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, is the most fearsome family of germs because it is resistant even to last-resort antibiotics.

The only drug that reliably treats CRE is colistin, an old and inexpensive drug that came on the market more than 50 years ago. This week researchers reported that they had discovered a gene in a bacteria that makes bugs resistant to colistin. It was found in a strain of E. coli in the urine of a patient in Pennsylvania. The patient was successfully treated, but if that gene makes its way into a strain of CRE, the bug would be unstoppable.

“We depend on colistin for the worst of the worst,” said Dr. James Johnson, a professor of medicine and an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota. “If it is knocked out, in most cases we really have nothing.”

Should I be scared?

Not yet. The discovery does not mean that an otherwise healthy person with a urinary tract infection is in danger of dying from it. (The Pennsylvania woman eventually recovered because her infection was treatable with antibiotics.) But the gene is mobile and can be picked up by other bugs — in sewer systems, in animal feed lots, in people’s guts or urinary tracts. That can make more bugs more resistant. The biggest worry is that a strain of CRE will pick up the gene. That could be devastating for anyone who is suffering from a CRE infection. “That is the combination we are all afraid of,” said Dr. Lance Price, a researcher at George Washington University.

For now, CRE is rare. The CRE germs cause about 600 deaths a year, usually strike people receiving medical care in hospitals or nursing homes, including patients on breathing machines or dependent on catheters. Healthy people are rarely affected.



How has antibiotic resistance changed medicine?

Dr. Johnson from Minnesota says the spread of resistant bugs means doctors are having to blast patients’ infections with increasingly stronger antibiotics. That has led to more patients coming in with infections caused by the C. difficile, a gut germ that flourishes when the patient has taken a lot of antibiotics. (The germ was estimated to cause almost half a million infections in the United States in 2011, and 29,000 people died within 30 days of the initial diagnosis.) Doctors now frequently send patients home with setups for intravenous antibiotics because pills no longer do the trick. Sometimes the specter of resistant infections can delay or cancel surgeries.

Why aren’t there more new antibiotics?

Most drug companies are not eager to make them. Compared with other drugs, antibiotics are not big moneymakers, and some manufacturers have gotten out of the business. Most people take antibiotics just once in a while, for a short time — unlike drugs for blood pressure, high cholesterol or diabetes, which most patients will take every day for the rest of their lives. When a new antibiotic comes out, doctors may hesitate to prescribe it, wanting to keep it in reserve for tough infections that older drugs cannot cure. Once the drug gets more widespread use, germs may become resistant to it, and doctors will quit prescribing it. So an antibiotic that required lots of time and money to develop may have a short life on the market. Infectious disease experts are working with Congress and the Food and Drug Administration to try to find ways to create financial incentives for drug companies to invest in making new antibiotics.

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Women Are Leaving Church, And the Reason Seems Clear

By Patricia Miller

A new Pew Research Center analysis of General Social Survey data confirms a long-simmering trend in U.S. religious observance: While attendance at religious services has declined for all Americans, it has declined more among women then men.

In the early 1970s, 36 percent of women and 26 percent of men reported attending church services weekly, a ten-point gap that reflected the long-standing trend of women being more religiously committed than men.

The gap reached its widest point in 1982, when it hit 13 percent, but then it began to shrink. By 2012, 22 percent of men reported attending church weekly, as did 28 percent of women, reflecting a “worship gap” of only six percent, an historic low.

Pew’s David McClendon gives several possible reasons for women’s declining levels of religiosity as measured by church attendance. One is the increase in the number of women in the workforce, which could theoretically decrease their leisure time and force them to cut back on activities like church. But as McClendon himself notes, “the fastest increase in women’s full-time employment” actually “occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s, during which time the gender gap on religious service attendance actually widened somewhat.”

If women aren’t too busy with work to go to church, maybe it’s because they’re becoming too well educated. Higher rates of educational attainment are correlated to less church going, except McClendon notes that both more educated and less educated women are going to church less.

Finally, McClendon notes that the growth of the “nones” appears to having contributed to women’s declining church attendance, as “the rate of growth in the unaffiliated has been slightly more rapid for women than men,” which has “helped narrow the gender gap in weekly attendance.”

But it seems likely that more women becoming unaffiliated is part and parcel of the same trend of more women staying away from church. It still doesn’t explain why this is happening.

What McClendon overlooks is that the years that women’s church attendance began to decline are the very years when religious leaders in the Catholic Church and the evangelical movement fused religion with the culture wars, with overall attendance for women taking it’s first steep drop in the 1980s.

This drop in church attendance for women coincided with the period when the Catholic bishops began making abortion a litmus test for Catholic politicians, as in the 1984 election when Vice Presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro was attacked for being pro-choice.

And Pew’s own numbers appear to back this up. According to Pew, women are slightly more likely than men to say that churches should keep out of politics (55 percent vs. 53 percent), and overall 60 percent of Catholics say church should keep out of politics.

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