ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 76

A Daughter Is Beheaded, and Iran Asks if Women Have a Right to Safety

By Farnaz Fassihi Before he beheaded his 14-year-old daughter with a farming sickle, Reza Ashrafi called a lawyer. His daughter, Romina, was going to dishonor the family by running off with her 29-year-old boyfriend, he said. What kind of punishment, he asked the lawyer, would he get for killing her? The lawyer assured him that …

CO2 levels hit record high despite emissions dip from coronavirus

By Adam Vaughan Lockdowns and economic slowdowns during the coronavirus pandemic have had no visible impact on the amount of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere, according to new data which shows levels of the greenhouse gas hit record highs last month. Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have been marching upwards for decades due to humanity’s activities. Figures published today by …

The religious right is still sticking by Trump. Sadly, there’s a long, grim pattern

By Sarah Posner As Donald Trump, aided by the attorney general, Bill Barr, orchestrates a militarized, armed-to-the-teeth crackdown, terrorizing lawful protesters of racism and police brutality, much of Trump’s white evangelical base is cheering him as a courageous, godly leader facing down protesters falsely depicted as “professional anarchists”, “cultural Marxists” and “domestic terrorists”. For Trump’s Christian partisans, his …

Why American evangelicals are so tempted by the easy assurance of conspiracy theories

By D.L. Mayfield When I was in grade school, I wrote a report on the Loch Ness Monster. My take: Nessie was actually a dinosaur, a plesiosaurus, proof of a young Earth creationist viewpoint that the Earth was merely 6,000 years old. I made a model plesiosaurus out of wood and proudly presented it to …

Southern Baptists see historic drop in membership

By Sarah Pulliam Bailey Total membership in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination fell at a historic rate between 2018 and 2019, according to an annual report released Thursday. The Southern Baptist Convention said it had 14.5 million members in 2019, down about 287,655 from the previous year. Membership dropped 2 percent, the largest single-year drop …

Mysterious interstellar visitor was probably a ‘dark hydrogen iceberg,’ not aliens

By Louise Lerner The aliens came on Oct. 19, 2017. That was the day telescopes picked up a strange object with an odd, elongated shape that moved like a comet—but had no apparent tail. The object, which baffled astronomers and led some to claim it could be a spacecraft sent by intelligent life, was named …

Trump’s Bible photo op splits white evangelical loyalists into two camps

By Matthew Teague On Monday when Donald Trump raised overhead a Bible – the Sword of the Spirit, to believers – he unwittingly cleaved his loyal Christian supporters into two camps. His most ardent evangelical supporters saw it as a blow against evil and described his walk from the White House to St John’s Episcopal church, over ground violently …

Racist GOP Rep. Steve King May Be Replaced By Another Christian Nationalist

By Hemant Mehta On Tuesday night, Rep. Steve King of Iowa, one of the most openly racist Republicans in a party full of them, lost his primary. There was much rejoicing. Not just from Democrats who had long wanted him out of office, but from Republicans who could breathe a sigh of relief because they would …

The Somali atheist activists who get death threats

By Layla Mahmood “I am going to kill you. I am going to find you. I am going to cut your head off,” was one of the threats that Ayaanle, a Canada-based Somali atheist, received. “[But] that’s kind of normal,” the founder of the True Somali Freedom Page (TSFP) says sardonically as he talks about …

Martian moon’s orbit suggests the Red Planet had a ring

By Elizabeth Howell A cycle of moon formation could explain the slightly tilted orbit of Mars’ moon Deimos. Mars has two moons circling the planet, called Phobos and Deimos. For many years, scientists supposed that both of these moons were captured asteroids, or space rocks. But new research shows the orbit of Deimos would not make that possible. …