ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 56

Yogi Bhajan, yoga guru and founder of 3HO, ‘more likely than not’ sexually abused followers, says report

By Philip Deslippe and Stacie Stukin Yogi Bhajan, a spiritual leader and an entrepreneur who promoted his own brand of Sikhism and founded 3HO, the Happy Healthy Holy Organization, in 1969, is probably best known as a guru who brought Kundalini Yoga to the West and formed a worldwide community of 3HO ashrams. Over the …

COVID-Denying Father Sergei Is Just The Latest Example Of The Russian Orthodox Church’s ‘Holy Man’ Problem

By Katie Kelaidis It’s a weird story, even in 2020—and that’s saying something. Father Sergei, a COVID-denying conspiracy-spewing Russian monk, had, with the help of an ad hoc personal army that includes veterans of the recent conflicts in Ukraine, seized control of the women’s monastery in the Ural mountains he’d founded. Now, he’s been excommunicated. But the …

‘This Is All Beyond Stupid.’ Experts Worry About Russia’s Rushed Vaccine

By Carl Zimmer When Vladimir Putin announced Tuesday that Russia had approved a coronavirus vaccine — with no evidence from large-scale clinical trials — vaccine experts were worried. “I think it’s really scary. It’s really risky,” said Daniel Salmon, the director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Salmon and other …

Where Pseudoscience Is Spreading

By Vidya Krishnan Soon after the Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan tweeted that he had tested positive for COVID-19 and been admitted to a Mumbai hospital, the authorities declared his palatial residence in India’s business capital a “containment zone,” and several members of the Bachchan family were announced to have also tested positive. Bachchan is one of the world’s most …

The Christian Right’s Destructive Courthouse Moment Has Arrived

By Robyn E. Blumner “My motto for the rest of the year is leave no vacancy behind,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt in late March. The Kentucky Republican was talking about filling vacant federal judgeships, of course. McConnell reconvened the U.S. Senate in May—while Washington, D.C., was …

Betsy DeVos’s Plot to Enrich Private Schools Amid the Pandemic

By Katherine Stewart How much more does the Trump administration value the children of elite private and religious schools than the children who attend public schools? We can answer the question with some hard numbers. Public school students merit something like $266 apiece in extra pandemic-related funding. Kids attending the right private schools are worth …

God And Woman Suffrage: In The Beginning

By Sue Boland We claim, as a natural right, the same privilege of acting as we think best, which is accorded to the other half of mankind—a right bestowed upon us by God, when he created man in his own image, after his own likeness, both male and female, and gave them equal dominion: Genesis, 1st chap., 26th, …

Greenland’s melting ice sheet has ‘passed the point of no return,’ scientists say, dooming it to disappear

By Morgan McFall-Johnsen Greenland’s ice sheet may have hit a tipping point that sets it on an irreversible path to completely disappearing. Snowfall that normally replenishes Greenland’s glaciers each year can no longer keep up with the pace of ice melt, according to researchers at Ohio State University. That means that the Greenland ice sheet …

Jerry Falwell Jr. dreaded the spotlight. Then came Donald Trump.

By Michelle Boorstein and Susan Svrluga A few days after Jerry Falwell Jr. buried his father in 2007, an author writing about the family visited Falwell Jr.’s office and made what he thought was an obvious comment. With the death of Jerry Falwell Sr., a charismatic religious-right titan, Falwell Jr. was about to become president …

Religious Identity and the 2020 Presidential Election

By Frank Newport The process of analyzing and understanding presidential election dynamics often leads us to look at the American electorate not as a whole, but by segments. Party identification is the most frequently used way to sort voters, but other variables are also meaningfully related to political behavior and help explain how and why …