ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 791
December 23, 2014
We’re putting an end to religion: Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher and the exploding new American secularism
Credit: AP/Janet Van Ham/Fiona Hanson/Marion Curtis/Photo montage by Salon
By Phil Zuckerman
Excerpted from “Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions”
What is going on? How do we explain this recent wave of secularization that is washing over so much of America?
The answer to these questions is actually much less theological or philosophical than one might think. It is simply not the case that in recent years tens of millions of Americans have suddenly started doubting the cosmological or ontological arguments for the existence of God, or that hundreds of thousands of other Americans have miraculously embraced the atheistic naturalism of Denis Diderot. Sure, this may be happening here and there, in this or that dorm room or on this or that Tumblr page. The best-sellers written by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris—as well as the irreverent impiety and flagrant mockery of religion by the likes of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, House, South Park, and Family Guy—have had some impact on American culture. As we have seen, a steady, incremental uptick of philosophical atheism and agnosticism is discernible in America in recent years. But the larger reality is that for the many millions of Americans who have joined the ranks of the nonreligious, the causes are most likely to be political and sociological in nature.
For starters, we can begin with the presence of the religious right, and the backlash it has engendered. Beginning in the 1980s, with the rise of such groups as the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, the closeness of conservative Republicanism with evangelical Christianity has been increasingly tight and publicly overt. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, more and more politicians on the right embraced the conservative Christian agenda, and more and more outspoken conservative Christians allied themselves with the Republican Party. Examples abound, from Michele Bachmann to Ann Coulter, from Mike Huckabee to Pat Robertson, and from Rick Santorum to James Dobson. With an emphasis on seeking to make abortion illegal, fighting against gay rights (particularly gay marriage), supporting prayer in schools, advocating “abstinence only” sex education, opposing stem cell research, curtailing welfare spending, supporting Israel, opposing gun control, and celebrating the war on terrorism, conservative Christians have found a warm welcome within the Republican Party, which has been clear about its openness to the conservative Christian agenda. This was most pronounced during the eight years that George W. Bush was in the White House.
What all of this this has done is alienate a lot of left-leaning or politically moderate Americans from Christianity. Sociologists Michael Hout and Claude Fischer have published compelling research indicating that much of the growth of “nones” in America is largely attributable to a reaction against this increased, overt mixing of Christianity and conservative politics. The rise of irreligion has been partially related to the fact that lots of people who had weak or limited attachments to religion and were either moderate or liberal politically found themselves at odds with the conservative political agenda of the Christian right and thus reacted by severing their already somewhat weak attachment to religion. Or as sociologist Mark Chaves puts it, “After 1990 more people thought that saying you were religious was tantamount to saying you were a conservative Republican. So people who are not Republicans now are more likely to say that they have no religion.”
A second factor that helps account for the recent rise of secularity in America is the devastation of, and reaction against, the Catholic Church’s pedophile priest scandal. For decades the higher-ups in the Catholic Church were reassigning known sexual predators to remote parishes rather than having them arrested and prosecuted. Those men in authority thus engaged in willful cover-ups, brash lawbreaking, and the aggressive slandering of accusers—and all with utter impunity. The extent of this criminality is hard to exaggerate: over six thousand priests have now been credibly implicated in some form of sex abuse, five hundred have been jailed, and more victims have been made known than one can imagine. After the extent of the crimes—the rapes and molestations as well as the cover-ups—became widely publicized, many Americans, and many Catholics specifically, were disgusted. Not only were the actual sexual crimes themselves morally abhorrent, but the degree to which those in positions of power sought to cover up these crimes and allow them to continue was truly shocking. The result has been clear: a lot of Catholics have become ex-Catholics. For example, consider the situation in New England. Between 2000 and 2010, the Catholic Church lost 28 percent of its members in New Hampshire and 33 percent of its members in Maine, and closed nearly seventy parishes—a quarter of the total number—throughout the Boston area. In 1990, 54 percent of Massachusetts residents identified as Catholic, but it was down to 39 percent in 2008. And according to an “American Values” survey from 2012, although nearly one-third of Americans report being raised Catholic, only 22 percent currently identify as such—a precipitous nationwide decline indeed.
Read the full excerpt by clicking the name of the source located below.
Ebola Dragnet Has Lots of Holes
FREETOWN, Sierra Leone—Inside the bustling Ebola “Command Center” in Sierra Leone’s capital, it appears that the disease outbreak might finally be brought under control. Staff register alerts that stream in from a call center, and they dispatch surveillance officers located in each neighborhood, who decide whether an ambulance is warranted. However, a day spent with the surveillance officers—medical school students hired by the government for this response—reveals how messy the roundup can get in practice.
The dragnet is part of an operation dubbed “the surge,” announced on December 17 by Sierra Leone’s president, Ernest Bai Koroma. The goal is to find and quarantine people suffering from the virus, but one week in, it has dredged up hordes of people with a variety of maladies left untreated, and it is not yet clear whether the effort increases the number of Ebola patients brought in for care.
With 500 new Ebola cases in the country’s western region since December 1, something more had to be done. In the past few weeks, the government has added about 600 new hospital beds to hold people who have, or may have, Ebola. And it has placed 16 additional ambulances on the road, bringing Freetown’s total to three dozen.
One key to the operation has been hiring hundreds of people to monitor their own communities and to dial “117” if they see someone who might have Ebola. Other citizens have been urged to do the same. The alerts are forwarded to the command center, which contacts surveillance officers on the ground to track down the case and call for an ambulance if Ebola seems probable. If laboratory tests confirm Ebola, the individual is moved to a hospital for treatment and the command center dispatches a team to quarantine anyone who might have been in contact with that person for 21 days.
The strategy sounds efficient, but on the ground, the surge can seem bewildering. It is the country’s first intensive experience with a system like the U.S.’s 911, and now that it exists, they’ve found plenty of reasons to call for help.
Another image from the Command Center in Freetown.
Credit: Amy Maxmen
Alpha Kamara, a medical student on a surveillance team in Tembeh Town, a densely populated neighborhood in Freetown, says that since the surge began a week ago, he has been busy, but not with people who seem to have Ebola. Twice he’s tracked down the same local drunk, whose neighbors dial 117 when the man stumbles into their alleyway.
Another suspect, it turned out, coughed with tuberculosis. The man quickly made his case for not being hauled into a hospital by showing Kamara his TB drugs. On Saturday, Kamara hopped on the back of a motorcycle and tracked down a vomiting teenage boy when I was not tagging along with him, after the command center received an alert from the teen’s neighbor. When Kamara arrived, he says the boy’s relatives screamed, “No Ebola! No Ebola!” They claimed the boy was hung over from drinking too much alcohol the night before. Other young men, seemingly drunk, added to their shouts. “They surrounded me, and threatened the bike driver, and said we should leave,” Kamara says. As he departed, he watched the young men march toward the house of the neighbor who had reported their friend. Kamara says he’ll check on the boy today, and if Kamara is again threatened, his supervisor says he’ll alert the police.
Incredibly, Kamara, like all surveillance staff, has not been given a thermometer. He must decide to call for an ambulance based on how the person looks and how they say they feel. He asks questions like, Do you feel feverish and fatigued? Have you been vomiting? Do you have diarrhea? How is your appetite? “It would be nice to have a thermometer,” Kamara admits.
I accompany Kamara on one of his trips to trace an alert from the command center. We walk off the paved road and scale down a rocky slope that ends in eroded cement steps. People rarely have street addresses in Sierra Leone, so in this case, Kamara locates the place that was reported by asking women who wash clothes in buckets along a narrow dirt path that winds between concrete tenements. Eventually, someone points to a second-floor apartment. Once we arrive at the doorstep, a woman inside says the man is not home. The man’s son approaches Kamara and says his father suffers from arthritis, not Ebola. Kamara nods and says he’ll return tomorrow to check again. We climb back up the hill.
When the 117 Ebola hotline launched in August, people in Freetown didn’t call because they mistrusted doctors. They had heard too many stories of patients who entered clinics and never returned home. By December, as it became clear that Ebola outcomes were worse at home, people began to dial in, but they became upset when ambulances didn’t arrive. There were not enough vehicles and beds to hold patients, and people died because Ebola can kill its victims within days after they show signs.
In the first half of December, about a third of the corpses picked up around Freetown tested positive for Ebola. That means Ebola victims died at home, likely infecting other people before they passed away. Burial-team workers told me that when they arrived at houses to collect dead bodies, frustrated family members who had called 117 with no response would scream at them. “People say, ‘You don’t come for the sick, you just come for the dead,’” explains Thomas Abu, the supervisor of several burial teams in Freetown.
Now, with additional beds and vehicles, the capacity to isolate suspected Ebola patients has increased. But how to efficiently respond to a flood of 117 alerts is daunting in a country largely without addresses or GPS tracking, and with a host of health problems beyond Ebola—many of which have been exacerbated as hospitals devote their energy to this disease alone. In this context, a lone help line becomes rapidly overwhelmed.
In Devil’s Hole, a rural village on the outskirts of Freetown, I accompany two surveillance officers as they respond to an alert. A group of men standing in the shade of a mango tree direct us to an elderly woman. She perks up as we approach. Flies hover around the yellowed bandages surrounding her badly swollen foot. As she complains of pain, the officers ask if she has a fever. “Sometimes,” she answers in Krio, the language spoken in this area. And vomiting? She says no but then begs us to call an ambulance. “No,” the officers mutter apologetically, because ambulances are for Ebola only. She does not fit the case definition, they affirm with one another.
I offer the old woman money for a taxi to bring her to the hospital, but a crowd who had gathered to watch the scene explains that taxi drivers no longer take sick-looking people anywhere, because they’re afraid of contracting Ebola.
Later, in Waterloo—a bustling town beside Freetown with a population around 40,000—surveillance officers locate a woman collapsed beside the road, lying in the hot afternoon sun. One of her legs appears badly mangled, and she says she cannot walk since being hit by a motorcycle yesterday, or maybe it was the day before. She is far from her village. Could we send for an ambulance?
The officers apologize and explain that ambulances are only for people with Ebola symptoms. They say they cannot put her in their car either, in case she turns out to have the disease. After we depart, Major Alex Massaquoi, a military man who monitors dozens of surveillance officers across the region, says, “It’s so terrible. We have too many problems in this country. We need to build an alert system for other emergencies.”
Beyond these false alarms, the surveillance officers often couldn’t locate their targets. Many of the callers switch off their phones after dialing 117. Massaquoi guesses it’s because they don’t want to be known as informants. So the surveillance teams operate like detectives. Sometimes they succeed; frequently they don’t.
The second prong of the command center’s surge operation seems even more confused. The directive is to quarantine anyone who had recent close contact with a person diagnosed with Ebola. Yet it currently takes two or three days for the diagnosis to filter from the laboratory to the command center and down to the appropriate staff on the ground. An exasperated surveillance officer, Daniel Sesay, says, “Family members and neighbors are traveling for days before they know about a person’s results.”
One week into the surge, it’s impossible to determine whether the operation will curb the spread of Ebola. There are some positive signs, including the sheer fact that people are calling. “It’s good that people call frequently, even if [the individuals they report] don’t meet the case definition,” Massaquoi says. “At least then we can check them out.”
Just outside of Freetown, Massaquoi and I come across an ambulance on the side of the road. The head of the community here tells us the vehicle arrived within an hour after he dialed 117. He called because he noticed a woman who had wandered into his village, slumped beside the paved road jutting through town. She said she felt feverish and had vomited, and he convinced her that the hospital was her best chance for survival. I watch her step into the caboose of the ambulance. A member of the ambulance team kicks the door shut behind her, douses the surrounding region with chlorine, and then the vehicle speeds away, siren blaring.
Travel funds for this story were provided by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.
Before I Deconverted: Christmas Became A Christian Holiday To Me
Avoid Backlit Reading Before Bed
When you curl up in bed, consider reading an old-fashioned printed book rather than a smartphone or tablet. Your sleep should be deeper and more restful. That’s the finding of a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Anne-Marie Chang et al, Evening use of light-emitting eReaders negatively affects sleep, circadian timing, and next-morning alertness]
Researchers had 12 healthy young adults read either a printed book or an iPad for four hours before bed during five consecutive evenings. During the fifth night blood samples were collected every hour via an IV during both the reading and sleeping periods. The research team assessed sleep time and REM cycles, and the subjects self-rated their sleepiness every evening and morning. All participants read for five nights on the iPad and for five from a book.
As anticipated, reading print made for better Zzzs. Participants reading the iPad took about ten minutes longer to fall asleep, secreted less sleep-inducing melatonin, and shifted their internal circadian clock. They also reported feeling more tired the next morning.
The study’s first author, Anne-Marie Chang, then of Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, says that devices like the original Kindle, that do not produce their own light, should likely still be a good choice for bedtime reading. But when it comes to those backlit gadgets, probably best to read those over your morning coffee.
—Dina Fine Maron
(The above text is a transcript of this podcast)
The reason for the season.
Today Michaelyn and I are traveling to her mother’s house to spend Christmas. I have a few posts ready to go, but no heavy lifting. But I wanted to leave you with this one. I posted it last year and it’s still depressing relevant.
My father came across somebody who said…
This year and every year I will remember the true reason for the season….Jesus is the reason for the season and I will continue to keep CHRIST in CHRISTMAS!!!!!!!!!!!!
I think I might have been convinced had they used just one more exclamation point.
Dad responded with his usual measured eloquence.
Jesus may be YOUR reason for the season; however, THE reason for the season is the winter solstice, which was here and being celebrated long before there were any Jews, let alone any Jesus.
Jury Rules Against Diocese That Fired a Teacher for the “Grave, Immoral” Sin of Fertility Treatments
Emily Herx (center, black jacket) reacts to the Appeals Court’s decision
Emily Herx was a language arts teacher at St. Vincent de Paul Catholic School when she sought in vitro fertilization treatments in order to get pregnant. Herx and her husband, in keeping with the Church’s teachings about the sanctity of embryos, did not destroy any of their preserved embryos. School administrators were aware of and even allowed time off for her treatments.
But after her third treatment, in February 2011, when the parish priest, Rev. John Kuzmich, got wind of what was going on, he insisted that the school drop Herx’s employment contract. This was on the grounds that she was a “grave, immoral sinner” for seeking fertility treatments, who had in doing so violated the morality proscribed in her school’s employment contract.
Open thread: Festivus edition
This is the ghost of Professor Ceiling Cat, summoned forth by his minions to create a forum for discussion. In the thread below you can talk about whatever you want.
In the spirit of the days ahead, let us start with the Airing of Grievances.
If you have no idea what this form references, check out the clip below.
December 21, 2014
SciShow Talk Show: Ecology Project International & Serpentina the Rubber Boa
This week on the SciShow Talk Show Haley Hanson joins us from Ecology Project International to talk about how they bring high school students into the field to help with research and learn about ecology and conservation. Then Jessi from Animal Wonders brings in Serpentina, a rubber boa.
Ecology Project International: http://www.ecologyproject.org/
Animal Wonders: https://www.youtube.com/user/Anmlwndrs
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“God’s Not Boring”: A Precocious Young Video Maker Evangelizes; Grows Up To Be An Atheist Vlogger.)
Scientists Translate Monkey Sounds To English
Photo credit:
muuraa via Shutterstock. Campbell's monkeys such as this one have dialects adapted to their local conditions
Monkeys not only have language, but distinct local dialects. Research into the variations could throw light on both our own linguistics and the way our fellow primates think.
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