ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 72

Louie Giglio ‘White Blessing’ Incident Reveals Something Critical About Evangelical Efforts To Address Racism

By Jeremy L. Sabella On June 14th, as the city of Atlanta reeled from the murder of Rayshard Brooks at the hands of white police officers two days prior, white evangelical Christian pastor Louie Giglio hosted a panel on race at his Passion City Church. While sharing the stage with Black Christian rapper Lecrae and Chick-fil-A CEO Dan …

Hubble Captures Heartbreaking Images of Dying Stars

By Victor Tangerman A new study sheds reveals the spectacular final stages of stars nearing the end of their lives. Using fresh observations of two distant nebulas collected in multi-wavelength form by NASA’s Hubble space telescope, a team of astronomers made several new discoveries about what stars go through as they die. “These new multi-wavelength …

Evangelical Writer: Christians Can Win the Culture Wars By Having More Kids!

By Beth Stoneburner Conservative Christians have been in deep despair this week, ever since the Supreme Court issued a 6-3 decision saying anti-discrimination laws that protect employees on the basis of “sex” apply to gay and transgender people, too. (The question of whether an employer’s religious beliefs can override those rules has been kicked down the road.) Kevin DeYoung, …

Diocese of Providence ‘saddened’ by larceny charges filed against former Warwick priest

By Jessica A. Bothelho The Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence is reacting to larceny charges that have been filed against a former Warwick priest. “The Diocese of Providence and SS. Rose and Clement Parish are saddened by the charges against Matthew Glover which are very serious and deeply disturbing,” the diocese noted in a statement Wednesday …

The Supreme Court’s Landmark LGBTQ Rights Decision Didn’t Address One Crucial Thing

By Carol Kuruvilla The Supreme Court delivered a significant victory for LGBTQ rights this week by recognizing that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans from workplace discrimination. But it remains to be seen just how effectively this ruling will shield queer workers who may actually need …

Scientists have grown mini brains containing Neanderthal DNA

By Katie Hunt We now know that many of us are part Neanderthal, with our genes carrying traces of past encounters between our early ancestors and the Stone Age hominins that populated Europe until around 40,000 years ago. The evidence that early humans interbred with Neanderthals emerged in 2010 after scientists led by geneticist Svante Pääbo pioneered methods to extract, …

Jim Bakker sued by second state for selling fake coronavirus cure

By the Associated Press Arkansas’ attorney general on Tuesday sued Missouri-based TV pastor Jim Bakker over his promotion of a product falsely touted as a cure for the illness caused by the coronavirus. Attorney General Leslie Rutledge filed the lawsuit in Arkansas against Bakker and Morningside Church Productions, less than three months after the state of Missouri …

Churches Are Receiving Bailout Dollars and the GOP is Hiding All the Details

By Hemant Mehta When the U.S. government passed the “Paycheck Protection Program” (PPP) in April, the big scandal was how large businesses (like restaurant chains) were receiving millions of dollars while many actual small businesses received nothing at all. But because non-profits were also eligible for the money, many religious institutions also applied for the cash. …

Can the “religious left” save abortion rights from Republican hypocrisy?

By Paul Roseberg Donald Trump’s upside-down Bible photo-op at St. John’s Church has led to unprecedented blowback from retired military generals, culminating in a mea culpa from Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But the religious pushback was similarly sharp, starting with the Rev. Gini Gerbasi, an Episcopal priest who was among those “literally DRIVEN OFF of the …

Dark Matter Experiment Finds Unexplained Signal

By Natalie Wolchover The physicists who run the world’s most sensitive experimental search for dark matter have seen something strange. They have uncovered an unexpected excess of events inside their detector that could fit the profile of a hypothetical dark matter particle called an axion. Alternately, the data could be explained by novel properties of neutrinos. …