The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.
Laurie Roberts at the Arizona Republic cites heavily the statement by our own Bertha Vazquez opposing the new draft science standards that gut evolution from public education. The Christian Post also covers the issue and Bertha’s statement, giving a lot more space to the state superintendent who did all the evolution-redacting.
At PLOS Blogs, Mike Klymkowsky worries over the abuse of the word “theory,” not in the sense that creationists use it to dilute the veracity of evolution <COUGHarizonaCOUGH>, but how people who should know better throw the word around to elevate their untested ideas.
This is kind of hilarious, and also maddening. In British Columbia, three naturopaths are under investigation for offering a treatment they say will cure autism. Who is supposedly investigating these naturopaths? Why, the College of Naturopathic Physicians! I’m sure they’ll get to the bottom of this, what with all their scientific rigor and reliance on hard evidence.
Jack Jenkins reports on Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker as they both attended the Festival of Homiletics to go fishing for political support from mainline Protestant clergy. His conclusion is quite interesting:
Even if nobody was converted by the senators’ speeches, attendees said there was still a lot to learn from the encounter. And looking ahead at 2020, Booker may have gleaned something from Warren’s performance: His potential opponent, a force in a debate, can preach, too.
Jennifer Rubin “doesn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or scream” in response to Paul Ryan’s speech at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in which he tut-tutted “moral relativism” and “identity politics and tribalism,” and claimed, “Our social doctrine teaches us that democracy requires solidarity, a sense of civic friendship.” Rubin says:
He’s failed the very test of Christian virtue he spelled out. Ryan’s spiritual and moral health is none of my concern, but by his own standards he has failed to live up to the fundamental principles required of a humane, democratic society.
Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, says the resignation of Paige Patterson for sexual predation is “the judgment of God upon a denomination and the larger evangelical movement for decades of failure in dealing rightly with questions of sexual abuse and misbehavior.” Sure took ya long enough, God.
Rob Sherman, the late atheist activist, was killed in a plane crash in 2016, and after an NTBS investigation, there’s still no good answer for why it happened.
Life on Venus. Maybe possible. Sanjay Limaye at the University of Wisconsin-Madison says, “A colony of microorganisms could survive and evolve in those clouds.” Fun fact: On the latet Point of Inquiry, David Grinspoon told me that he really wants another mission to Venus, and now he’s got another reason to go.
Julia Belluz at Vox reminds us that while a new Ebola vaccine is excellent news, the next challenge is getting people to trust it.
Susan Gerbic interviews CSICon 2018 speaker and apparent handrail surfer Troy Campbell about how to be more scientifically-minded.
Quote of the Day
I hate lawns. HATE them. Yeah, I hate your lawn too. Ian Graber-Stiehl at Earther has written what will be the new Antilawn Manifesto:
Americans devote 70 hours, annually, to pushing petrol-powered spinning death blades over aggressively pointless green carpets to meet an embarrassingly destructive beauty standard based on specious homogeneity. We marvel at how verdant we manage to make our overwatered, chemical-soaked, ecologically-sterile backyards. That’s just biblically, nay, God-of-War-ishly violent.
To understand the sheer inanity of devoting 40 million acres, nearly half as much land as we set aside for our biggest crops, to an inedible carpet, we need to back up—beyond the modern lawn’s origins with a real estate family peddling the “American Dream” as Whites-only cookie-cutter suburbs—to the evolution of grass.
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