ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 485

Decapitated Churches in China’s Christian Heartland

By Ian Johnson

Along the valleys and mountains hugging the East China Sea, a Chinese government campaign to remove crosses from church spires has left the countryside looking as if a typhoon had raged down the coast, decapitating buildings at random.

In the town of Shuitou, workers used blowtorches to cut a 10-foot-high cross off the 120-foot steeple of the Salvation Church. It now lies in the churchyard, wrapped in a red shroud.

About 10 miles to the east, in Mabu township, riot police officers blocked parishioners from entering the grounds of the Dachang Church while workers erected scaffolding and sawed off the cross. In the nearby villages of Ximei, Aojiang, Shanmen and Tengqiao, crosses now lie toppled on rooftops or in yards, or buried like corpses.

On a four-day journey through this lush swath of China’s Zhejiang Province, I spoke with residents who described in new detail the breathtaking scale of an effort to remove Christianity’s most potent symbol from public view. Over the past two years, officials and residents said, the authorities have torn down crosses from 1,200 to 1,700 churches, sometimes after violent clashes with worshipers trying to stop them.

“It’s been very difficult to deal with,” said one church elder in Shuitou, who like others asked for anonymity in fear of retaliation by the authorities. “We can only get on our knees and pray.”

The campaign has been limited to Zhejiang Province, home to one of China’s largest and most vibrant Christian populations. But people familiar with the government’s deliberations say the removal of crosses here has set the stage for a new, nationwide effort to more strictly regulate spiritual life in China, reflecting the tighter control of society favored by President Xi Jinping.

In a major speech on religious policy last month, Mr. Xi urged the ruling Communist Party to “resolutely guard against overseas infiltrations via religious means,” and he warned that religions in China must “Sinicize,” or become Chinese. The instructions reflect the government’s longstanding fear that Christianity could undermine the party’s authority. Many human rights lawyers in China are Christians, and many dissidents have said they are influenced by the idea that rights are God-given.

In recent decades, the party had tolerated a religious renaissance in China, allowing most Chinese to worship as they chose and even encouraging the construction of churches, mosques and temples, despite regular crackdowns on unregistered congregations and banned spiritual groups such as Falun Gong.

Hundreds of millions of people have embraced the nation’s major faiths: Buddhism, Taoism, Islam and Christianity. There are now about 60 million Christians in China. Many attend churches registered with the government, but at least half worship in unregistered churches, often with local authorities looking the other way.

But Mr. Xi’s decision to convene a “religious affairs work conference” last month — the first such leadership meeting in 15 years — suggested that he was unhappy with some of these policies. People familiar with the party’s discussions say it intends to apply some lessons from the campaign in Zhejiang to rein in religious groups across the country.

While the government is unlikely to begin tearing down crosses across China, the sources say, local authorities are expected to begin scrutinizing the finances and foreign ties of churches and other spiritual institutions as part of an effort to limit the influence of religions the party considers a threat, especially Christianity.

“What has been happening in Zhejiang is a test,” said Fan Yafeng, an independent legal scholar in Beijing. “If the government views it as a success, it will be expanded.”

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Texas TV host to school board candidate: ‘Are you Christian enough to represent this district?’

By David Edwards

The host of a Texas political show on Sunday asked Keven Ellis, a candidate for State Board of Education in District 9, if he was “Christian enough” for the job.

During a Sunday face-off between Ellis and far-right opponent Mary Lou Bruner on WFAA’s Inside Texas Politics, both candidates made their case to voters for the May 24th runoff for the GOP nomination.

Ellis argued that schools needed to be properly funded, but that the district had a responsibility to see that money was spent wisely.

Bruner, who has warned that pre-K programs indoctrinate children into the “homosexual agenda,” called for slashing “special programs” and early childhood education.

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Separate Bathrooms by Religion? Oklahoma Opens New Front in Transgender Debate

By Christine Hauser

Oklahoma lawmakers have introduced a bill that would allow students to request on religious grounds that their public schools provide a bathroom or other facility that bars transgender people.

The bill appears to be one of the first state-level legislative actions to challenge the Obama administration’s directives, issued last week, that said students must be allowed to use the facilities that match the gender they identify as, even if that is different from their anatomical sex.

The Senate bill introduced on Thursday in Oklahoma defined “sex” as the “physical condition of being male or female, as identified at birth” by an individual’s anatomy.

It says any student can request a “religious accommodation” from a school for restrooms, athletic changing facilities or showers that are exclusively used by people with the anatomical sex at birth that is similar to their own. This means that a male student could request that the school provide facilities only for use by other students who were male when they were born.

It said a student can do so based on “sincerely held religious beliefs.”

The proposed legislation says single-occupancy facilities would not be considered an allowable accommodation.

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How the Giraffe Got Its Neck

By Anthony Lydgate

It’s difficult to know what to make of the giraffe. It shuffles like a camel (right legs forward, then left legs) but runs like a rabbit (hind legs forward, then front legs). Its distinctive aroma repulses many ticks but enchants certain people. It bellows, hisses, and moans in the wild, and in captivity it hums in the dark. It naps with its head aloft but sleeps like a swan, with its head on its haunches. Had Aristotle ever seen a giraffe, he might have said that it was the product of an interspecies dalliance at the watering hole, which he thought of as a kind of zoological swingers’ club—a place where “bastard animals are born to heterogeneous pairs.” Centuries of further guesswork failed to clarify the giraffe’s essential nature. Simone Sigoli, a Renaissance traveller, wrote that it had the body of an ostrich, only with fine white wool instead of feathers, and that it ate bread. “It is quite a deformed thing to see,” he concluded. Sigoli’s contemporary Sir John Mandeville (likely the pseudonym of a travel-averse plagiarist) described the “gerfaunts” of Arabia as deer-rumped horses. For the eunuch general Zheng He, who brought a giraffe home to Beijing, in 1415, it was a mythical qílín incarnate. Not until the seventeenth century did the English, who fixated on the giraffe’s camel-ish shape and leopard-ish coloring, stop calling it a camelopard. Today, of course, we recognize the giraffe as a distinct species, though the misapprehensions of the past endure in the animal’s Linnaean name: Giraffa camelopardalis.

And then there’s that neck. Why is it so long? Unlike the swan and the ostrich, which have a surplus of neck bones, the giraffe has seven cervical vertebrae, the standard count for a mammal. But each one is eleven inches in length. A human’s entire spine, by comparison, is about two feet from top to bottom, not much longer than a giraffe’s tongue. (Fynes Moryson, a Scotsman who went to Constantinople in 1597, was distressed to find that the giraffe in the palace menagerie there was able to plant “familiar kisses” on him from great range.) The French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck held that a giraffe was merely an antelope whose progenitors had strained their necks toward higher and higher branches for food. Charles Darwin gave barely a thought to the neck problem—it didn’t appear in his magnum opus, “On the Origin of Species,” until the sixth edition—but he favored a similar, if more scientifically rigorous, explanation. In periods of drought, he suggested, when all the other animals on the savannah were scrounging at eye level, Giraffa sprouted the evolutionary equivalent of an EZ Reacher, which gave it access to a private larder in the succulent crowns of the acacia trees, a privilege it passed on to its offspring. “It seems to me almost certain that an ordinary hoofed quadruped might be converted into a giraffe,” Darwin wrote, echoing Lamarck. The theory was accepted as gospel for decades, until researchers noticed two problems. First, no other quadrupeds underwent such a conversion: the giraffe remained the lankiest thing around. And second, the animal grazed with its neck horizontal about half the time, feeding on the same bushes and shrubs as everyone else. (As Edgar Williams notes in his book “Giraffe,” the animal is a born topiarist, “giving a manicured appearance to the savannah.”)

Another popular theory involved sexual selection. To establish social dominance, male giraffes engage in a practice known as necking, swinging their heads at each other and trying to score a hit with their ossicones, the horn-like growths on their skulls. (Afterward they make up, sometimes quite bawdily.) For the neck to be a primarily sexual characteristic, it would need to be larger in males than in females, like a fiddler crab’s fiddle claw—but it isn’t. Although males are indeed taller and heavier than females, the sexes’ necks are proportional. Yet another theory, less widely accepted than the first two, posits that the giraffe’s long neck is compensation for its long legs. (You try bending down to drink on those things.) The neck’s true provenance is perhaps some combination of these theories. As Darwin wrote, “The preservation of each species can rarely be determined by any one advantage, but by the union of all, great and small.”

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A Veto for Oklahoma’s Quixotic Abortion Bill

By Matt Ford

Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin vetoed a unprecedented bill Friday that would have made it a felony for physicians to perform abortions in the state, saying the proposed law would not survive the inevitable legal challenges against it.

“While I consistently have and continue to support a re-examination of the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, this legislation cannot accomplish that re-examination,” Fallin said in a statement.

Senate Bill 1552 would have imposed a one- to three-year prison sentence for performing an abortion and stripped providing physicians of their medical licenses—a direct violation of Roe v. Wade that was virtually guaranteed to be struck down by the courts.

Oklahoma’s Senate approved the bill by a 33-12 vote on Thursday. The Oklahoma House previously passed the legislation in April by a 59-9 vote.

Fallin, who strongly opposes abortion, signaled Thursday she could veto the legislation after it passed the Senate. “The governor will withhold comment on that bill, as she does on most bills, until she and her staff have had a chance to review it,” Fallin spokesman Michael McNutt told the Washington Post at the time.

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London’s Newly Elected Mayor Flies Rainbow Flag from City Hall

By Yezmin Villarreal

Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, flew the rainbow flag from City Hall on Tuesday to commemorate the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia.

The event is celebrated every year on May 17 to draw attention to the violence and discrimination LGBT people experience internationally.

“I could not be more proud to help celebrate IDAHOT 2016 by flying the Pride flag here at City Hall,” said Khan in a statement to U.K. LGBT outlet Pink News.

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Muslim states block 11 LGBT groups from attending UN Aids meeting

By Reuters

A group of 51 Muslim states has blocked 11 gay and transgender organizations from attending a high-level meeting at the United Nations next month on ending Aids, sparking a protest by the US, Canada and the EU.

Egypt wrote to the president of the 193-member general assembly on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to object to the participation of the 11 groups. It did not give a reason in the letter, which Reuters has seen.

Samantha Power, US ambassador to the UN, wrote to the general assembly president, Mogens Lykketoft, and said the groups appeared to have been blocked for involvement in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender advocacy.

“Given that transgender people are 49 times more likely to be living with HIV than the general population, their exclusion from the high-level meeting will only impede global progress in combating the HIV/Aids pandemic,” Power wrote.

UN officials said the EU and Canada also wrote to Lykketoft to protest against the objections by the OIC group, whose members include Saudi Arabia, Iran, Indonesia, Sudan and Uganda.

The issues of LGBT rights and participation in events at the UN have long been contentious. The UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, has advocated for LGBT equality but faced opposition from African, Arab and Muslim states as well as Russia and China.

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The gene’s still selfish: Dawkins’ famous idea turns 40

By Jonathan Webb, Science reporter, BBC News

As The Selfish Gene notches up 40 years in print, BBC News asked Richard Dawkins whether his most famous book is relevant today (answer: yes), whether he has any regrets about public spats over religion (no), and whether he is quitting Twitter (sort of).

“I’d so much rather talk about this than about politics.”

This, from a thinker most famous as a fearless firebrand, sounds rather incongruous. But as Prof Dawkins hunches over his laptop to dig up examples of biomorphs – the computer-generated “creatures” he conceived in the 1980s to illustrate artificial selection – it is transparently, genuinely felt.

Later, we touch on the fact that he sees public debate as a scientist’s responsibility. Right now, he wants to talk about molluscs.

Pretend molluscs.

“I don’t know whether you know the classic book by D’Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form? He showed that all mollusc shells are a tube, which is enlarging as it coils around. You only need three numbers to specify a mollusc shell.”

Those three numbers can be plotted inside a cube, Prof Dawkins explains. “Evolution is then just a walk through this cube of all possible shells.”

In a computerised game he wrote in 1996, people could construct their own such walk by choosing for themselves which offspring would “breed” in successive generations of shells.

This game has now been resurrected online to mark the 20th anniversary of the book it arose from, Climbing Mount Improbable.

Its mollusc shells are presented alongside an ancestral explanatory exercise: the biomorphs. These were first programmed 10 years earlier, when Dawkins wrote The Blind Watchmaker. He clearly remembers getting lost in the work.

“When I discovered that I could actually start getting something that looked like an insect, I got really obsessed with the idea of breeding insects.”

As the biomorphs grow from simple, branching stick-shrubs into more elaborate and occasionally familiar shapes, they make an important point – and one that is better grasped by being involved than by hearing it explained.

“You get much more of an idea of what it’s like to breed dogs from wolves, or to breed cauliflower from wild cabbage,” Prof Dawkins says, clearly enjoying the sight of the spindly shapes evolving again on his screen.

Like Darwin long before him, Dawkins settled on artificial selection – selective breeding for desirable characteristics, such as speed in race horses – to explain an important point about natural selection.

For Darwin, it was the idea that variations within a population, or herd, can persist and shape future generations if they are favoured by the breeder. If we humans can coax domestic dogs into their astounding variety of breeds then nature, with vastly more time at its disposal, can produce all the variety of life on Earth through a similar, slower selection process.

For Dawkins, the focus was the notion that has underpinned so much of his work: this process has no need for an architect. Slow, subtle preferences for one form over another will gradually produce complexity.

The Blind Watchmaker, many scientists and writers agree, was Prof Dawkins at his finest. His arguments are made with infectious enthusiasm and powerful imagery.

Ten years earlier again, Dawkins’ pioneering account of the “gene-centric” view of evolution, The Selfish Gene, also won huge acclaim.

It crystallised an argument that had been brewing since Watson and Crick’s beautiful DNA structure marked a new peak in our understanding of inheritance: these sequences would tend to accumulate and propagate mutations that were beneficial to the gene itself. Any given gene “wants” to be passed on to as many future offspring as possible.

Forty years on, however, this concept faces some opposition among today’s biologists.

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No longer closeted

I read “The god Delusion” two years ago and it took me down a serious path that I came to care about. I didn’t necessarily become magically successful because I read this book, but I felt not so alone in my beliefs. I live in the Bible Belt of the U.S., so being an atheist is more chastised than just about anything. However, I’ve always questioned why God would let terrible things happen. Why he made them happen.

I was 10 years old when I first came to the idea that maybe there isn’t a god. The same year I brought the question to my mother, “who created God?” Obviously, no answer that I was given sufficed. I kept my beliefs a secret until I read “The god Delusion.” It wasn’t until my mother told me that she would pray for me that I finally gave a glimpse of my secular angst, if you will. I hated that. “Pray for me? Pray for yourself.”

I eventually told my mother. My father found out despite careful consideration in all of their conversations about me and I haven’t felt more free. Uncloseted.

Your book helped me take a burden off of myself and legitimately changed my life. I just thought that it would be good to let you know that you’ve made an impact.

Thank you.

Lucas B

A Manual For Creating Atheists pgs 79-80

“Having certain convictions–even the belief that one should form one’s beliefs on the basis of evidence–is not noble. Formulating beliefs on the basis of evidence and acting accordingly does not make one a better person. It just makes it more likely that one’s beliefs are true and far less likely that one’s beliefs will be false. Similarly, not formulating beliefs on the basis of evidence (faith) does not make one a bad person. Aristotle made the distinction between a moral virtue and an intellectual virtue, and working toward developing a reliable epistemology is a step toward developing intellectual virtue.”

–Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists, pgs 79-80

Discuss!