Friday, March 16, 2012

Human fossils hint at new species - Johnathan - BBC

Thanks to rod-the-farmer for the link.

The remains of what may be a previously unknown human species have been identified in southern China.

The bones, which represent at least five individuals, have been dated to between 11,500 and 14,500 years ago.

But scientists are calling them simply the Red Deer Cave people, after one of the sites where they were unearthed.

The team has told the PLoS One journal that far more detailed analysis of the fossils is required before they can be ascribed to a new human lineage.

"We're trying to be very careful at this stage about definitely classifying them," said study co-leader Darren Curnoe from the University of New South Wales, Australia.

"One of the reasons for that is that in the science of human evolution or palaeoanthropology, we presently don't have a generally agreed, biological definition for our own species (Homo sapiens), believe it or not. And so this is a highly contentious area," he told BBC News.

Much of the material has been in Chinese collections for some time but has only recently been subjected to intense investigation.

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TAGGED: EVOLUTION, PALEONTOLOGY



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Australian Atheist Bus Ad Says God Better Have ‘a Good Excuse’ - Hemant Mehta - Friendly Atheist

Chaplain Demands Atheists Canceled At...

Justin Griffith - Press Release

CHAPLAIN DEMANDS ATHEIST FESTIVAL CANCELED AT FORT BRAGG
Chaplain Thinks Organizers Want to Set Fire to Churches

Melvyn Bragg attacks Richard Dawkins'...

Victoria Ward - Daily Telegraph

Melvyn Bragg, the broadcaster, has launched a withering attack on Professor Richard Dawkins, accusing him of “ignorance” and of showing “no respect” for religion.

Westboro Baptist Church to attend...

justin vacula - Scranton Atheism...

Westboro Baptist Church to attend Reason Rally with special message for atheists

Fort Bragg Guarantees Criticism of...

Justin Griffith - Press Release


US ARMY PROTECTS ATHEIST FESTIVAL AT FORT BRAGG
Fort Bragg Guarantees Criticism of Organized Religion and Adherents

Yes, life without God can be bleak....

Julian Baggini - The Guardian

Yes, life without God can be bleak. Atheism is about facing up to that

Atheists likely to outnumber Christians...

Al Webb - The Washington Post

Atheists likely to outnumber Christians in England in 20 years


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Does Conservatism Have to Be Synonymous With Ignorance? - Lawrence M. Krauss - Huffington Post

The Republican flavor of the past month has been Rick Santorum, who has just won two more Southern primaries, after every other conservative alternative to Mitt Romney was examined and tossed by the Tea Party base of the new Republican Party.

The timing of Santorum's original rise occurred as the Roman Catholic Church created a cause célèbre by objecting to President Obama's proposal that Catholic-run institutions, including hospitals and medical facilities, be required to offer health insurance that provides contraception for women who request it.

The Catholic Church has long been an enemy of emerging technology, especially when it comes to reproductive health, opposing any technology that alters the 'natural' scheme of sex and reproduction. Quixotically, the focus on sex is unique and is, needless to say, inconsistent with the running of hospitals, which by their very nature do daily battle against otherwise naturally occurring disease and death.

That Rick Santorum rigorously followed the Vatican's hard line stance is not surprising. It is a little more surprising, perhaps, that Newt Gingrich was similarly opposed, as in other areas he has never met a futuristic technology he didn't like.

One might have been tempted to ask Newt Gingrich, weeks ago when he still appeared to be a viable candidate, whether he and his Catholic wife practiced contraception during their eight-year affair in order to hide any obvious evidence of their indiscretion.

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TAGGED: POLITICS



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Heaven Can Wait - Was I wrong about the afterlife? No. - Christopher Hitchens, as told to Art Levine - Washington Monthly


At the end, the manner of my “passing,” as the pious so delicately refer to death, was as much a disappointment to the dewy-eyed acolytes of god-worship as it was to me, although for rather different reasons. For more than a year after I publicly announced in June 2010 that I would begin chemotherapy for esophageal cancer, the stupidest of the faithful either gloated on their subliterate Web sites that my illness was a sign of “God’s revenge” for having blasphemed their Lord and Master, or prayed that I would abandon my contempt for their nonsensical beliefs by undergoing a deathbed conversion. The vulgarity of the idea that a vengeful deity would somehow stoop to inflicting a cancer on me still boggles the mind, especially in the face of the ready explanation supplied for my illness by my long, happy, and prodigious career as a smoker of cigarettes and drinker of spirits.

As for that longed-for conversion, it never came, despite the fervent wishes of such clerical mountebanks as the Reverend Rick Warren. Said reverend, who portrayed himself as my “friend” while consigning homosexuals and nonbelievers to one of Dante’s outer circles of Hell, proclaimed with the arrogant surety of the devout: “I loved & prayed for him constantly & grieve his loss. He knows the Truth now.” Indeed I do, and much better than he. Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, for his part, did not fail to use my death as an opportunity to stoke the fear of damnation among the credulous. Having somehow managed to evolve the thumbs needed to “tweet” his followers on his BlackBerry, he declared that my end—as if death were not a natural process common to all mammals—was “an excruciating reminder of the consequences of unbelief,” while observing with the religionist’s usual condescension that my “brilliance & eloquence” will not matter “in the world to come.”

How would he know?
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TAGGED: CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS



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Sunday, March 11, 2012

Christians have no right to wear cross at work, says Government - David Barrett, - The Telegraph



Christians do not have a right to wear a cross or crucifix openly at work, the Government is to argue in a landmark court case



The Government has refused to say that Christians have a right to display the symbol of their faith at work
Photo: PA


n a highly significant move, ministers will fight a case at the European Court of Human Rights in which two British women will seek to establish their right to display the cross.


It is the first time that the Government has been forced to state whether it backs the right of Christians to wear the symbol at work.


A document seen by The Sunday Telegraph discloses that ministers will argue that because it is not a “requirement” of the Christian faith, employers can ban the wearing of the cross and sack workers who insist on doing so.


The Government’s position received an angry response last night from prominent figures including Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury.


He accused ministers and the courts of “dictating” to Christians and said it was another example of Christianity becoming sidelined in official life.
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Yes, life without God can be bleak. Atheism is about facing up to that - Julian Baggini - The Guardian



Attempts to brighten up atheism's image miss its unique selling point – life can be brutal, yet we live in recognition of that



Atheists have to live with the knowledge that there is no salvation, no redemption, no second chances.' Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian


The problem with the "atheist" moniker has been recognised for decades. It's too negative, too associated with amoral nihilism. It's understandable then that many would agree with Richard Dawkins that we need a word like "gay" which "should be positive, warm, cheerful, bright". So why not "bright"?


One reason, which I mentioned right at the start of this series, is that it sounds too smug. But there's an even more important reason why we should not choose a word that is "positive, warm, cheerful": although many atheists are all those things, atheism itself is none of them.


Atheists have seemed rather keen in recent years to stress their jolly side. As well as the whole "brights" movement, there's the "happy human" logo used by the International Humanist and Ethical Union, the British Humanist Association and several other humanist groups. Then there were the atheist bus posters telling us that we should stop worrying and enjoy life.


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Science book delayed when someone notices it's written by creationists - GrrlScientist - The Guardian



Thanks to CargoUK for the link.


Once again, Evil Scientists have thwarted a plan by those vile Creationists to take over the world



William Dembski, who does not approve of this piece.


Creation Science and its more moderate offspring, Intelligent Design (ID), have never been taken seriously by scientists. This is because most of the actual science is poor, and in ID, at least, is never about the designer. Because of this, ID's supporters have difficulty publishing in the scientific literature, so they have to resort to other methods of getting their message out, like starting their own journal. Their latest ruse is to hold a conference and publish a book of conference proceedings.


This all unravelled last week when someone noticed. A long time ID watcher known online as "sparc" saw that the German publishers, Springer-Verlag, announced a book edited with the title Biological Information: New Perspectives. The editors of the book were well known names: Robert Marks II, Michael Behe, William Dembski, Bruce Gordon, and John Sanford. Despite clearly being an ID book (more on that below), it was being published in the "Intelligent Systems Reference Library" series in Engineering and Applied Science, i.e., not in biology. The more cynical (sensu Sir Humphrey) suspected this was an attempt to get the book through the Springer review process by sending it to an editor less likely to understand the context of the book and its proposal. The senior editor (Marks) is a computer scientist, who apparently is well respected in his field, and it may be that his reputation helped steer the book proposal through the publisher.


After some digging around by ID watchers, the following story has emerged. The book is a collection of papers presented at a meeting held on the campus of Cornell University, in the School of Hotel Administration(!). About 120 people were invited, including roughly 27 speakers. Presumably this was arranged by John Sanford, who is a "courtesy professor" at Cornell (meaning, he was a professor, but retired in 1998, evidently to spend more time with his gene gun).


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A good summary


Steven Novella
NeuroLogica blog


We live in an increasingly complex society. There is a proliferation of clever strategies to deceive you, including in areas that require a great deal of expertise to sort out. We can no longer take comfort (if we ever could) in the notion that the trappings of legitimacy are a reasonable guide to what is legitimate. Universities have been infiltrated by all manner of pseudoscience, their good names abused to provide legitimacy for nonsense. False controversies are manufactured to erode confidence in legitimate science, while ideological journals are invented to pretend to be part of the mainstream scientific literature. Docudramas can dress up fiction as if it were fact. The quality of journalism is eroding while it is getting more challenging to separate scientific truth from pseudoscientific fiction. Meanwhile the internet has made the dissemination of information so fast that it’s a challenge just to keep up. It has also drastically reduced the price of pretending to be a legitimate organization – all you need now is a slick website.


The purveyors of pseudoscience are also getting slicker at distorting and getting around the institutions of science and academia, while eroding confidence in those institutions. The two movements that have perhaps been the most successful at this are alternative medicine and creationism, and there is remarkable overlap in their strategies (for example, the use of “health care freedom” laws and “academic freedom” laws respectively).


Recently we learned about creationists infiltrating geologist scientific meetings in order to spread stealth creationism.


From Grrlscientist in The Guardian we now have a story of another clever attempt by creationists to manufacture false trappings of scientific legitimacy. The story starts with a meeting organized at Cornell University of a bunch of intelligent design (ID)/creationists.  How did such a meeting take place? Well, first off it was held in the School of Hotel Administration. It was organized by John Sanford, a young earth creationist who is a courtesy professor at Cornell (i.e. retired). The conference consisted of the usual ID suspects giving the usual information theory, evolution can’t explain the complexity of life nonsense.


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Atheists likely to outnumber Christians in England in 20 years - Al Webb - The Washington Post



LONDON — Christianity is waning in England and could be outnumbered by nonbelievers within 20 years, according to a new study.


The study conducted by the British Parliament showed there were 41 million Christians in Britain, down nearly 8 percent since 2004. Meanwhile, the number of nonbelievers stood at 13.4 million, up 49 percent over the same period.


Researchers at the House of Commons Library concluded that Christianity had declined to 69 percent of the population while those with no religion increased to 22 percent.


“If these populations continue to shrink and grow by the same number of people each year,” the study said, “the number of people with no religion will overtake the number of Christians in Great Britain in 20 years.”
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15 Bible Texts Reveal Why “God’s Own Party” is at War with Women - Valerie Tarico - EXchristian.net

Why can’t GOP politicians trumpet their religious credentials without assaulting women? Because fundamentalist religion of all stripes has degradation of women at its core. Fundamentalist Christianity is no exception. Progressive Christians believe that the Bible is a human document, a record of humanity’s multi-millennial struggle to understand what is good and what is God and how to live in moral community with each other. But fundamentalists believe that the Bible is the literally perfect word of the Almighty, essentially dictated by God to the writers. To believe that the Bible is the literally perfect word of God is to believe that women are tainted seductresses who must be controlled by men.

Listen to early Church father Tertullian: “You [woman] are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert—that is, death—even the Son of God had to die.”

Or take it from reformer John Calvin: “Woman is more guilty than man, because she was seduced by Satan, and so diverted her husband from obedience to God that she was an instrument of death leading to all perdition. It is necessary that woman recognize this, and that she learn to what she is subjected; and not only against her husband. This is reason enough why today she is placed below and that she bears within her ignominy and shame.”

Both Tertullian, a respected Catholic theologian, and Calvin, a leader of the Protestant Reformation, took their cues on this matter straight from the book of Genesis:

To the woman [God] said, I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you. -Genesis 3:16

No matter how outrageous Santorum and Gingrich may seem to secularists and moderate people of faith, they are right on target for an intended audience of Bible believing fundamentalists. If you have any doubt, check out these fifteen Bible passages.

  1. A wife is a man’s property: You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor. Exodus 20:17

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All verses are quoted the New International Version of the Bible, a favorite of evangelicals.

TAGGED: US POLITICS



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