Okay, fine, fine, fine. Here’s my sonnet that I wrote about CFI and read to a room full of reporters. If you’re not careful, I’ll put it to music and sing it while playing a lute.
Stacey Barchenger at the Asbury Park Press reports that a private Jewish Orthodox religious school in Lakewood, NJ has been purchasing creationist textbooks with taxpayer funds:
“Fundamentals of Life Science” is for middle school students and covers cells and ecology, according to Amazon. But its back cover credits those creations to God.
“Hashem made our world in such an awesome way so that we could easily recognize His ultimate wisdom and kindness,” the cover reads. “With advances of modern science, our generation is privileged to know about more Nifla’os Hashem than ever before.” Nifla’os Hashem means “God’s wonders.”
Sens. James Lankford (R-OK) and Chris Coons (D-DE) have introduced a resolution calling for the global repeal of blasphemy laws:
Resolved, That the Senate–
(1) recognizes that blasphemy, heresy, and apostasy laws inappropriately position governments as arbiters of religious truth and empower officials to impose religious dogma on individuals or minorities through the through the power of the government or through violence sanctioned by the government…
… (6) urges the governments of countries that enforce blasphemy, heresy, or apostasy laws to amend or repeal such laws, as they provide pretext and impunity for vigilante violence against religious minorities; and
(7) urges the governments of countries that have prosecuted, imprisoned, and persecuted people on charges of blasphemy, heresy, or apostasy to release such people unconditionally and, once released, to ensure their safety and that of their families.
A group of humanist performers ask the prime minister of Spain to begin an effort to repeal the country’s blasphemy law, which they characterize as “medieval restrictions on the right to think and speak freely.”
Greg Epstein starts his new gig as MIT’s first-ever humanist chaplain.
To mitigate some of the coming disasters of climate change, some scientists are suggesting we prop up ice sheets by building a wall (and making the penguins pay for it).
(I made up the part about the penguins.)
Jason Lemon at Newsweek notes the frustrating contrast between the way Russian authorities address mockery of Christianity (possible jail time) versus how they handle threats against its LGBTQ citizens (that’s fine as far as they’re concerned).
Helena Bonham Carter, currently playing Princess Margaret in Netflix’s The Crown, admits, “I was in a real dilemma about the role. I asked a psychic — I’m completely wacko — who was actually de-ghosting our house.”
Apparently there are media outlets that believe that we still need to hear from the Blink-182 guy who is totally sure that space aliens have been here.
Julia Beluz at Vox reports that it’s not just anti-vaxxers causing vaccination rates in Europe to drop, opening the door for the current measles epidemic. It’s also, and maybe mostly, austerity policies:
“The [public health spending] cuts were mainly on prevention — like preventive clinics and also staff,” the study’s lead author, Veronica Toffolutti, a health economist at Bocconi University in Milan, told me. “Many people were not hired anymore as staff.” And without staff and services in place to vaccinate people, more people aren’t getting vaccinated, and measles is spreading.
Clay Jones says, in effect, just get your kids the damn chicken pox vaccine, okay?
A study published in Psychology of Religion and Spirituality employs “a robust scale measure to calculate the religious distance between parents and children” and finds that teens are on average about 12-17 percent less religious than their folks.
Laurie Roberts at the Arizona Republic reports on the efforts of a group of scientists to stop Superintendent Diane Douglas from “sabotaging” students’ scientific literacy with creationist claptrap. The scientists write:
Douglas is on record as stating that intelligent design, a brand of creationism, ought to be taught with evolution in public school science classrooms, despite the unbroken string of federal court decisions finding that teaching creationism in the public schools is unconstitutional.
Her staff subsequently sabotaged the treatment of evolution in a prior draft of the standards. And she then appointed a creationist to the committee charged with revising the portions of the standards addressing evolution.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan hires a former federal judge to review New York dioceses’ procedures and protocols concerning allegations of sexual abuse.
Quote of the Day
Two neuroscientists, Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik, go to a psychic fair for Scientific American, and yeah, it’s nuts:
SUSANA: I was feeling a bit out of sorts after the psychic readings, so I went to check on Steve.
STEVE: Susana arrived just at the time I found myself speechless concerning the many varied explanation and uses of this pseudoscience, so I welcomed her into the conversation. I said: “Susana, would you believe that this gentleman here has quantum accelerated this laser pointer, and he’s been using it to remove cysts from his wife’s breasts?”
SUSANA: I couldn’t think of any suitable reply to that statement. All I managed to do was turn around 180 degrees and convulse in silent laughter.
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Linking to a story or webpage does not imply endorsement by Paul or CFI. Not every use of quotation marks is ironic or sarcastic, but it often is.