Stephen Hawking, the famed cosmologist and former holder of a chair once held by Isaac Newton at Cambridge University, is releasing a new book (with co-author Leonard Mlodinow) that explores the origins of the universe. Entitled The Grand Design, the book is already courting controversy with one of its central assertions: that the presence of a god is not necessary to explain the universe. In a widely quoted advance excerpt, the book states:

Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to … set the Universe going.

This promises to be a fascinating book! I look forward to reading it. It’s release date in the USA is set for September 7.

Already, leaders in the UK’s religious community are speaking out against Professors Hawking and Mlodinow’s assertion that a god is not necessary to explain the origins of the universe. Per CNN:

Writing in the Times, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said: “Science is about explanation. Religion is about interpretation … The Bible simply isn’t interested in how the Universe came into being.”

A couple of comments about that: first, I’m not so sure that I agree with Rabbi Sacks and his assertion that the Bible leaves the question of the origin of the universe alone. As a piece of evidence to the contrary, I would like to introduce Genesis 1:

1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

2. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

3. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

4. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

And so on. In the Biblical worldview, this is how the universe and the Earth were formed. God did it. End of story.

I don’t doubt for one minute that Chief Rabbi Sacks is well acquainted with the Book of Genesis and its rather prominent location at the beginning of the Hebrew Bible. I think he may have been alluding to something else, something rather remarkable: when it comes to the macroscopic explanation of how the universe operates, science now provides the dominant narrative, and most people, even religious leaders, accept it.

I grant that there are some big exceptions to this, but to a great degree science as it is practiced in the world today is accepted by Western religions. In the USA we still have problems with creationism, theocratic politicians, and charlatan faith healers who can cost people their lives. These conflicts continue to have serious consequences and represent a threat to religious freedom and science. But even so, many major religious denominations embrace science now rather than stand in its way. This is a monumental change for any denomination that continues to hold particular texts, such as the Bible, to be inerrant or sacred.

Nevertheless Chief Rabbi Sacks is defining religion down when he acknowledges that the Biblical creation story of Genesis is no longer necessary as a cornerstone of religious belief. There was a time when all the mysteries of the universe were perceived to be explained by the Bible. Pioneering scientists such as Galileo were recognized as threats not only because they gave information that contradicted the teachings of the church but also because they had a method of obtaining knowledge, a scientific method, that is, that circumvented the prevailing religious methods such as studying the Bible.

And when Sacks states that “religion is about interpretation,” he also reveals something very problematic, for indeed, religion is about interpretation, and as it stands now we have thousands of different religious interpretations for how the world works, many of them contradictory. Which is correct? The only method of interpretation that is self correcting and informed by the systematic work of thousands of people dedicated to advancing knowledge is science. That doesn’t mean that science always gets it right, but when it’s wrong, it is eventually corrected, and it must always be based on evidence.

Another religious critic of Hawking, as quoted in the same CNN article, argues:

“The ‘god’ that Stephen Hawking is trying to debunk is not the creator God of the Abrahamic faiths who really is the ultimate explanation for why there is something rather than nothing,” said Denis Alexander, director of The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion.

“Hawking’s god is a god-of-the-gaps used to plug present gaps in our scientific knowledge.

“Science provides us with a wonderful narrative as to how [existence] may happen, but theology addresses the meaning of the narrative,” he added.

He is defining religion down as well, as he has completely let go of the fact that religion once provided the overall explanation for the world around us. Like Rabbi Sacks, he acknowledges that science does, in fact, have most of the answers in hand already about the mysteries of the universe, and he even preempts the possibility that Professor Hawking will fill this picture in even more completely with his book, stating that “theology addresses the meaning of the narrative,” and therefore there is a continued necessity for religion in a scientific world.

But is this true? Does theology really address what science means to the rest of us? Or does it merely assign meaning? With so many contradictory and conflicting religious narratives, it’s hard to see the overall value in any single given narrative vis-a-vis science or even secular humanism, which does not layer supernaturalism onto that which is naturally observed.

I’m not arguing that Stephen Hawking has somehow made religion obsolete with this book; in my less diplomatic moments, I might make the argument that science as a whole has been working on this over the last several centuries, and this new book is another brick in that wall. But I do wish to point out that theologians such as those quoted here are stretching farther and farther to show that religion still has a unique purpose in the world today. And when they have already conceded such a substantial part of the battle, admitting already that science is capable of solving the greatest questions of how the universe operates, then is it so far-fetched to imagine that they may concede the rest someday?

In an age of PSAs and the Vagina Monologues, many of us consider ourselves informed and educated about institutionalized female violence.  “It happens over there,” we tell ourselves, pointing to remote locations on a map, barely envisioning what “it” might entail.  But some forms of violence against women are disguised as customs, some of those customs have crossed oceans to arrive here, and the American Academy of Pediatrics has created a loophole that will keep those customs alive.  Read the rest of this entry &raquo

I hope that this doesn’t fall under the category of too good to be true (hat tip to Feministing):

Operation Rescue, one of the nation’s highest-profile groups in the anti-abortion movement, has told its supporters it is facing a “major financial crisis” and is very close to shutting down unless emergency help arrives soon.

The group’s president, Troy Newman, blamed the economic downturn for its money woes in a desperate plea e-mailed Monday night to donors. But the Wichita-based organization has also been under attack from both fringe anti-abortion militants and abortion rights supporters since the May 31 shooting death of Dr. George Tiller.

The Associated Press goes on to report that, according to Troy Newman, donations to the organization are down 30 to 40 percent this year.

Why could that be? Could it be that people have had enough of the violent anti-abortion rhetoric that may have emboldened Tiller’s assassin, Scott Roeder? Could it be that more people have come to realize that Operation Rescue represents the most extreme elements of the anti-choice movement? Or perhaps people were put off by idiotic stunts like this?

The Associated Press makes a note of how Operation Rescue was linked in the media to the assassination of Dr. Tiller:

Tiller’s killing has also been a public relations nightmare for the group — despite its public condemnation of the slaying — since the name and phone number of the group’s senior policy adviser was found in Roeder’s car when he was arrested. A television crew zoomed in on the scrawled note inside the car in images that made their way to the Internet.

Furthermore, the president of the National Abortion Federation, Vicki Saporta, noted in the article that there is no way that Operation Rescue can be separated from Tiller’s murder, especially since the organization moved itself to Wichita, Kansas, in order to maintain a constant level of harassment at Tiller’s clinic, and because Roeder obviously had dealings with Operation Rescue’s staff.

Time will tell what this will spell for the anti-choice movement in the United States. But I welcome the possibility that Operation Rescue will fade from the scene. While I doubt that all of us will ever reach consensus on reproductive rights, I do hope that this is a sign that Americans are becoming less tolerant of open harassment and violent rhetoric on the part of the anti-choice movement.

I’m sure you’ve heard of Randall Terry, who for years was the face of the anti-choice movement in the United States. Even though he hasn’t been the head of Operation Rescue, an organization that he founded, since 1989, he has managed to keep his name out there as a prominent anti-abortion and anti-reproductive choice activist. Although his star has faded in recent years, he is trying harder than ever to make a comeback to national prominence.

The Washington Post has an article today about some of Terry’s recent efforts to stay relevant and keep his face on the national anti-abortion brand. It begins with the startlingly creepy image of Terry and his acolytes smearing fake blood all over their hands and copies of the Roe v. Wade ruling while standing outside the confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor. And it’s all downhill from there, as Terry tells the journalist that using fake blood for his protests came to him in a “vision” (is that what he vaingloriously calls having a thought?) while he was planning ways to disrupt the hearings.

It turns out, though, that this was not his first vision; as the Washington Post article states, in reference to the founding of Operation Rescue:

Terry, 50, was in his 20s when he founded Operation Rescue — the result, he said, of a vision from God that appeared before his eyes at a prayer meeting. The vision was, he said, a scroll with instructions to stop abortion. Along with the scroll, he saw thousands of people gathered in front of abortion clinics to save babies, and he saw himself being interviewed on “Donahue,” the popular TV talk show hosted by Phil Donahue.

After serving as a primary spokesperson in favor of federal interference in the Terri Schiavo case in 2005, the Post states that Terry had more or less faded from view for several years. But he is on the upswing once more, getting his name back in the press for the demonstrations against President Obama’s speech at Notre Dame University and his unbelievably hateful comments after the assassination of Dr. George Tiller. (Amongst other things, he said, “George Tiller was a mass-murderer. We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God…Those men and women who slaughter the unborn are murderers according to the Law of God.)

And now he is attempting to lead the charge against President Obama’s middle-of-the-road Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor. Adele M. Stan of AlterNet attended Terry’s demonstration this past Sunday on the steps of the US Supreme Court, and reported on Terry’s demand that the anti-abortion senators filibuster Sotomayor’s nomination:

Terry made the camera operators move forward and adjust their mikes. “Pro-life senators have a moral obligation to filibuster Sotomayor,” he began. “Pro-life Republicans, pro-life Democrats seduce us with their words. They use our money, they take our man-hours, they take our votes, and then throw us away like a used-up mistress after an election. It’s disgusting! If Sen. [Sam] Brownback and Sen. [John] McCain and Sen. [Knute] Nelson and Sen. [Bob] Casey believe that Roe v. Wade must be overturned, then they must filibuster Sotomayor. You can’t say you want to overturn Roe on the one hand, and then vote for somebody who will uphold Roe on the other. It is treachery, hypocrisy, laziness and betrayal.”

He certainly sounds frustrated! Perhaps this ties into Amanda Marcotte’s assertion in the Guardian that Republicans overall have not made abortion front and center in Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings, opting to focus on race and gender-based attacks against her instead. Says Marcotte:

Anti-choice activists used to own the issue of Supreme Court nominations so thoroughly, they were able to bully George Bush out of nominating Harriet Miers, despite her anti-choice views, in no small part because they simply don’t trust women not to stick by their own. Obviously, with Republicans out of power, anti-choice activists can’t block the nomination, but now they can’t even get Republicans to consider their demands a top priority.

The most obvious reason is that gender has been demoted to a second-tier issue so that Republicans can work more efficiently with arguments over race against Sotomayor, playing off anti-Hispanic sentiment and rightwing folk beliefs about a Latino “takeover” to inculcate resentment in their base. Anti-choicers are feeling the sting of falling out of fashion in the circles of rightwing nastiness and resentment.

Marcotte goes on to say that she also believes Republicans may be a little more toned down on anti-choice rhetoric this time around because of the recent murder of Dr. George Tiller. Perhaps they don’t want to be associated with a movement that is so violent in the eyes of many Americans. She’s not optimistic, though, that this distance will last.

I would be shocked if the Republicans filibuster Sotomayor, and I’m sure she’ll sail through confirmation. So the real question here is, what does the future hold for Randall Terry after his stunts at the Capitol are over? The Post notes that some anti-choice activists are less than enthusiastic about his desire to be a more public figure once again:

Leaders of the antiabortion movement are cringing at Terry’s sudden return. They say his incendiary rhetoric and showy tactics turn off ordinary Americans and reflect Terry’s struggle to regain his glory years.

“It’s sad in a way,” said Fredericksburg antiabortion activist Patrick Mahoney, who was close to Terry at one time but, like others in the movement, is now estranged from him. “It’s almost like a heavyweight boxer who’s past his prime. The movement has gone by him.”

While I fear the harmful consequences of his horrific rhetoric and stunts, particularly because they could inspire further violent acts, nevertheless I do feel that Randall Terry serves a useful function for those of us that favor reproductive rights. With his stunts, his jugs of fake blood, his followers disrupting Senate Judiciary Committee meetings, and his references to having “visions” that guide how he organizes his protests, he does represent one idea very well: that his anti-choice position is on the outer fringe. He makes it clear that his strong belief that women should not have control over their own bodies is in fact an extremist position to be defended by fringe and even dangerous characters such as him, operating on the margins of society. His extremist tactics lay bare the extremist nature of the entire anti-choice stance. Even so, we cannot discount the constant threat that Terry’s ugly and explosive language poses. He represents the worst of the intertwining of religion and social activism, when a fanatic believes that he speaks on behalf of his god and that his actions bear a holy endorsement. And we certainly know what kind of trouble that can lead to.

(Crossposted at Friendly Atheist)

Is religion the primary source of people’s moral judgments?

It looks like a nation’s culture plays a larger role than religion itself. David Hume had an interesting post on SecularRight.org last week examining data from the World Values Survey on abortion opinions between religions and between religions within a country:

All things equal there was an international tendency for Catholics to be somewhat more anti-abortion than non-Catholics, but a far better predictor of attitudes was not religion but nationality. In other words Catholic Germans resembled Protestant Germans while Catholic Chileans resembled Protestant Chileans.

But what about religion and irreligion more generally on the international level? That is, do religious and irreligious people within a nation tend to correlate in their attitudes toward abortion? Do atheists in Germany resemble religious people in Germany more than they do atheists in Nigeria?

Lo and behond, atheists in Germany DO resemble religious people in Germany more than they do atheists in Nigeria.

It turns out that there’s huge variability between nations’ views on abortion, and it’s a better predictor than religion. To put it another way: If religion were the primary source of moral judgments, the best way to guess an individual’s views on abortion would be to know that person’s religion. But country is more closely tied – it’s more helpful to know what country the person is from than his religion.

Hume doesn’t include the trendline’s equation in his blog post, but he was helpful enough to include the raw data, which I used to create my own scatterplot:

Here’s an explanation of what you’re looking at:

Each data point is one country. Its horizontal position is what percent of the religious population in that country said abortion is never justified. The country’s vertical position is what percent of the NON-religious population said abortion is never justified. The red line is what we would expect if religion had no effect on people’s opinion. If a country is below the red line (as almost all are), then its religious population is more opposed to abortion than the non-religious population.

On average, those who identify as religious in a country are 13.2% more likely than the non-religious to say that abortion is never acceptable.

What should we take away from this? Well, as always, correlation is not the same as causation. Religious individuals are more likely to interact with their community, which could shape their opinions. People opposed to abortion could be more likely to seek out religious groups.

I suspect that these are true, but it also seems likely that religion does influence opinion. If you believe that a god spoke out against homosexuality, you’ll be more likely to oppose gay relationships.

… It’s just not the biggest influence. Secular society has a culture of its own, one with a huge impact on views. I’d bet it even influences how people interpret their scripture. People might claim to derive moral values from a holy book, but it looks much more as if they get their views largely from society and then skew them a bit based on their book.

What do you get from the data?

In the aftermath of the tragic assassination of Dr. George Tiller, we need to remember what is at stake in the debate over abortion. Indeed, we don’t need to use our imaginations to envision what our nation would be like without legalized abortion; we only need to look at countries like Tanzania, where women suffer and die from policies that religious fanatics are trying to impose in our own country right now. The New York Times reports (h/t to Hullabaloo):

Abortion is illegal in Tanzania (except to save the mother’s life or health), so women and girls turn to amateurs, who may dose them with herbs or other concoctions, pummel their bellies or insert objects vaginally. Infections, bleeding and punctures of the uterus or bowel can result, and can be fatal. Doctors treating women after these bungled attempts sometimes have no choice but to remove the uterus.

Pregnancy and childbirth are among the greatest dangers that women face in Africa, which has the world’s highest rates of maternal mortality — at least 100 times those in developed countries. Abortion accounts for a significant part of the death toll.

Maternal mortality is high in Tanzania: for every 100,000 births, 950 women die. In the United States, the figure is 11, and it is even lower in other developed countries. But Tanzania’s record is neither the best nor the worst in Africa. Many other countries have similar statistics; quite a few do better and a handful do markedly worse.

Even more stunning is the effect that backroom abortions have on maternal mortality around the world:

Worldwide, there are 19 million unsafe abortions a year, and they kill 70,000 women (accounting for 13 percent of maternal deaths), mostly in poor countries like Tanzania where abortion is illegal, according to the World Health Organization. More than two million women a year suffer serious complications. According to Unicef, unsafe abortions cause 4 percent of deaths among pregnant women in Africa, 6 percent in Asia and 12 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Is it clear now what we’re talking about when we talk about choice? Is it clear now that when we talk about access to safe and legal abortion, we’re talking about saving tens of thousands of lives and preventing millions of hospitalizations and crippling aftereffects every year?

Keeping abortion outlawed does not actually reduce the number of abortions; rather, it reduces the safety of those performed. The Guttmacher Institute reports:

Legal restrictions on abortion do not affect its incidence. For example, the abortion rate is 29 [per 1,000 women aged 15–44] in Africa, where abortion is illegal in many circumstances in most countries, and it is 28 [per 1,000 women aged 15–44] in Europe, where abortion is generally permitted on broad grounds. The lowest rates in the world are in Western and Northern Europe, where abortion is accessible with few restrictions.

Where abortion is legal and permitted on broad grounds, it is generally safe, and where it is illegal in many circumstances, it is often unsafe. For example, in South Africa, the incidence of infection resulting from abortion decreased by 52% after the abortion law was liberalized in 1996.

The anti-choice movement won’t paint this picture for you, but this is what they’re advocating: a world where women do not have legal rights over their own bodies and are injured or die due to lack of access to safe and legal abortion. It is a horrifying vision, but it’s one that some anti-choice people are willing to kill for. The best response to the terror waged by Dr. Tiller’s murderer and the hatred of the anti-choice movement is to rededicate ourselves to expanding access to safe and legal reproductive health services and ensure that clinics receive the support and security that they need to operate safely. And we need to ensure that freedom of choice in the United States rests on more than Supreme Court rulings by codifying a right to reproductive choice into law.

Ladies and gentlemen, for your daily dose of stupid, I give you Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) explaining why he doesn’t want to do anything about greenhouse gasses (via Thinkprogress):

“I would also point out that CO2, carbon dioxide, is not a pollutant in any normal definition of the term. It’s not hazardous to health, it’s naturally occurring. I am creating it as I talk to you. It’s in your Coca-Cola, your Dr. Pepper, your Perrier water. It is necessary for human life. It is odorless, colorless, tasteless, does not cause cancer, does not cause asthma.”

“And something that the Democrat sponsors do not point out, a lot of the CO2 that is created in the United States is naturally created. You can’t regulate God. Not even the Democratic majority in the US Congress can regulate God.”

Let’s say that a neighbor were spraying lots of water on his lawn, day and night. It’s ruining your garden, flooding your basement, and causing mold and mosquitoes to spawn in the standing water.

Would you be comforted to hear him say, “Did you know that H2O is naturally occurring? It’s in our Coca-Cola, is necessary for human life, is odorless, colorless, tasteless, does not cause cancer, and does not cause asthma! Besides, rain is water, and we can’t regulate the rain!”

No, you would want him to turn off the damn sprinklers.

We know the harmful effects of greenhouse gasses. No longer suppressed by the Bush administration, the E.P.A. recently declared that there was “compelling and overwhelming” evidence that greenhouse gasses “endanger public health and welfare.”

Barton also had this familiar gem:

“If you think greenhouse gases are bad, life couldn’t exist without greenhouse gases. … So, there is a, there is a climate theory — and it’s a theory, it’s not a fact, it’s never been proven — that increasing concentrations of CO2 in the upper atmosphere somehow interact to trap more heat than the atmosphere would otherwise.”

Keep in mind: this man is the highest-ranking Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee. Wonderful.

Obama is scheduled to give a promising speech on science today at the National Academy of Sciences pledging to devote 3 percent of our GDP to research and development, proclaiming: “We will not just meet, but we will exceed the level achieved at the height of the Space Race… This represents the largest commitment to scientific research and innovation in American history.”

I’m sure that my standards have been lowered by living through the last eight years, but this sort of talk is extremely promising:

Fourth, we are restoring science to its rightful place.

On March 9th, I signed an executive memorandum with a clear message: Under my administration, the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over. Our progress as a nation – and our values as a nation – are rooted in free and open inquiry. To undermine scientific integrity is to undermine our democracy.

That is why I have charged the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy with leading a new effort to ensure that federal policies are based on the best and most unbiased scientific information. I want to be sure that facts are driving scientific decisions – and not the other way around.

There isn’t much question to whom those comments were directed.  Two examples come to mind:

On Plan B (Washington Post April 23): “In his 52-page decision, Korman repeatedly criticized the FDA’s handling of the issue, agreeing with allegations in a lawsuit that the decision was ‘arbitrary and capricious’ and influenced by ‘political and ideological’ considerations imposed by the Bush administration.”

On greenhouse gasses (New York Times April 17): “Agency scientists were virtually unanimous in determining that those gases caused such harm, but top Bush administration officials suppressed their work and took no action.  In his first days in office, Mr. Obama promised to review the case and act quickly if the findings were justified. The announcement Friday [April 17] was the fruit of that review.”

Beyond those cases, I would love to see science restored when it comes to:

• Sex-Ed classes (No more failed Abstinence-only classes)

• Curriculum’s on Evolution (No, there is no controversy)

• Stem-Cell research

Am I missing more?

On Friday the Environmental Protection Agency formally declared carbon dioxide and five other heat-trapping gases to be “pollutants that endanger public health and welfare.” In the decision that should lead to the regulation of these gases for the first time in the U.S., the EPA called the evidence “compelling and overwhelming.”

This decision has been long delayed, and the fact that it finally happened now is a testament to how the Obama administration is different from its predecessor. As reported in the New York Times:

In 2007, the Supreme Court, in Massachusetts v. E.P.A., ordered the agency to determine whether heat-trapping gases harmed the environment and public health. The case was brought by states and environmental groups to force the E.P.A. to use the Clean Air Act to regulate heat-trapping gases in vehicle emissions.

Agency scientists were virtually unanimous in determining that those gases caused such harm, but top Bush administration officials suppressed their work and took no action.

In his first days in office, Mr. Obama promised to review the case and act quickly if the findings were justified. The announcement Friday was the fruit of that review.

It’s almost as if our government cares about science! My cynicism melted for a few minutes there.

But it came back in a hurry. Scientific evidence might overwhelmingly agree that high levels of carbon dioxide endanger public health, but not everyone in government is on board. Rep. John Boehner went on ABC’s This Week on Sunday and had this gem:

BOEHNER: George, the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know, when they do what they do, you’ve got more carbon dioxide.

Two quick notes: I don’t think anyone has claimed carbon dioxide is a carcinogen, only that in large quantities it has a negative impact on our health. Also, while I suppose cows exhale carbon dioxide like we do, Boehner’s euphemism implies that he’s referring to methane, not carbon dioxide. But these are minor corrections alongside the glaring logical flaw.

Boehner pointed out that carbon dioxide is one of our waste products. How is this evidence that it’s not harmful in large quantities? Humans also defecate, but I don’t want a corporation dumping solid waste in my water.

Rep. John Shimkus is better known for using Genesis to inform his environmental policy, but he also had this stunning line of reasoning: “It’s plant food … So if we decrease the use of carbon dioxide, are we not taking away plant food from the atmosphere? … So all our good intentions could be for naught. In fact, we could be doing just the opposite of what the people who want to save the world are saying.”

Boehner must belong to the Shimkus school of thought. It unfortunately seems to be growing.

(Crossposted at Friendly Atheist)

The Pew Forum is a reliable source of interesting surveys. This most recent one shows how strongly various religious groups believe that global warming is occurring and if so, whether the warming is caused by humans or not.

One number that does puzzle me is the 36% of Black Protestants who believe the Earth is warming, but due to natural patterns and not human activity. It’s twice that of the US population as a whole, and triple that of the unaffiliated. Why would that be?

But otherwise, the findings don’t surprise me. The most likely group to believe that humans are causing a global warming? Those unaffiliated with a religion, at 58%. Those least likely? The self-identified White evangelical Protestants, at 34%.

I’m guessing there are confounding factors – White evangelical Protestants are more likely to live in the South, so perhaps it’s their geographic location that causes them not to believe the Earth is warming instead of their faith. It’s a classic correlation vs. causation conundrum.

But I don’t think we can dismiss the notion that faith affects people’s environmental views. Not when we have examples like Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) who read from Genesis in a congressional hearing and proclaimed that “The Earth will end only when God declares it is time to be over. Man will not destroy this Earth, this Earth will not be destroyed by a flood.”

On the other hand, we have to ask: why are these Hong Kong Christians building a full-scale replica of the ark?

There are some things I don’t like about American culture, but stories like this one in the Times Online really make me glad to live here:

A group of Afghan women who braved an enraged mob yesterday to protest against an “abhorrent” new Afghan law had to be rescued by police from a hail of stones and abuse.

The protest by about 200 women, unprecedented in recent Afghanistan history, was directed at the Shia Family Law passed last month by the Afghan parliament which appears to legalise marital rape and child marriage.

The rally, staged by mostly young women with their faces exposed, was a highly inflammatory act of defiance in a country as conservative as Afghanistan. It provoked a furious reaction from local men and a rapidly expanding mob threatened to swamp the demonstrators as they tried to approach the Afghan parliament.

The Times Online article quotes supporters of the law:

Those in favour of the new law chanted “Down with the Christians. Down with the apostates.” At one stage both sides chanted “We want honour and dignity for women” — reflecting their starkly different interpretations of the new law.

“We think those who oppose this law in fact oppose the Koran,” said Nesa Naseri, a female student of Sharia Studies who took part in the women’s counter-demonstration.

“This law does not approve rape, it is rather about loyalty of wife to husband and husband to wife. Rape is what you can see in the West, where men don’t feel responsibility for their wives and leave them to go with several men.”

If “loyalty of the wife to husband” implies that she must have sex with him when he demands, I’m thinking the word ‘rape’ is appropriate. It might also have something to do with the statistic quoted in the Times Online article that 57% of all Afghan brides are under the age of 16. By the way, in the first line the word ‘abhorrent’ is in quotes because that was President Obama’s reaction to the bill. I’m with him.

New Development:

In an article today entitled “Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai vows to change Afghan marital rape law“:

KABUL, Afghanistan – President Hamid Karzai said Thursday that the controversial law permitting men to rape their wives will be changed.

…

The law has drawn international criticism, and Karzai’s comments came a day after several hundred protesters demonstrated against it. Critics say the law bars women from opting out of sex, effectively legalizing marital rape.

The measure applies to the 20% of Afghans who are Shiite Muslims. It was part of a massive piece of legislation aimed at bolstering the nation’s Shiite minority.

(Crossposted at Friendly Atheist)

When Andrew Sullivan posted this disturbing video on his blog last Tuesday with no real description, I thought it was a recent campaign. After some digging, it turns out to be a 2006 video from Answers in Genesis which is now resurfacing, perhaps in light of the 10-year anniversary of the Columbine Shooting coming up on April 20th.

Now that it’s getting attention again, it’s causing quite a stir among the nonreligious blogging community, quickly racking up over 50 comments when Hemant at Friendly Atheist posted it and 80 on Daniel Florien’s post on Unreasonable Faith. Daniel titled his post “AIG Points a Gun at Atheists”. I wasn’t sure how to take it; see what you think:

It turns out that AiG still has a page explaining it:

Every day we are inundated with evolution-based messages intended to remove the Creator from the fabric of our society, our lives, our thoughts. But if we evolved from lower life forms, then the Bible can’t be trusted and life’s supposed billion-year history is one of continual death and struggle. If the Bible isn’t true, then why should we be fair and kind and love our fellow human beings, as the Bible teaches? After all, evolution relies on survival of the fittest—no matter who gets in the way.

It bears pointing out that while the history of life involves death and struggle, there’s so much more to it than that. There’s love and happiness and waffles!

So here’s where I get confused: Even if God told us how he wanted us to act, we still get to decide whether to obey. It’s often noted that if a person is choosing to act morally in an effort to stay out of hell, that’s not exactly altruistic. What I’ve heard more often is that people decide to obey because they feel gratitude and respect for God. Because of that gratitude and respect, they consider His will when deciding how to act.

Well, I feel gratitude to my friends, neighbors, and family. I respect the inherent worth of conscious, sentient life. Because of that gratitude and respect, I act in ways that take their feelings and their wellbeing into account. I don’t need an ancient book to “teach me” to be fair and kind.

The AiG page also says: “Those who feel that neither they nor their actions matter to God lose their motivation to care for the lives of others or for their own life.”

I can vouch from personal experience that they’re wrong. I suspect that most of you can, too.

Why do we care about the lives of others? There are different answers we can give: we have an evolved drive to care, we were raised to care in a social context, we get something out it. But the bottom line is that we do care. We don’t believe that our actions matter to God but we believe our actions matter to each other.

As I sat down on the metro last Saturday, I noticed three magazines on the seat. The first two were Awake! magazine and The Watchtower: “Announcing Jehovah’s Kingdom”. The third magazine — I’m not making this up — was the April 2009 edition of Metro Weekly: Washington’s Gay & Lesbian News Magazine. I would love to know who was sitting there before I was.

I hope that the issue of Awake! is targeted at children, considering the lack of complexity in their articles. I also hope that no child reads it, considering its misrepresentation of evolution. In a short section “Was it Designed?” the magazine marvels at the toucan’s beak:

The consistency of the toucan’s beak has been compared to that of a hard sponge. Some parts of it are hollow, while other parts are made up of beams and membranes. The result is a lightweight beak that has astounding strength. “It’s almost as if the toucan has a deep knowledge of mechanical engineering,” says [materials scientist Mark Andre] Myers…

As a friend of mine noted, my circulatory system works remarkably well and yet I do not possess a deep knowledge of hydraulics. But I digress. The ending was the most frustrating:

What do you think? Did the toucan’s strong but lightweight beak come about by chance? Or was it designed?

How about C) neither of the above? I think the beak is a result of cumulative natural selection. Awake! seems to be implying that something so successful couldn’t have “come about by chance” and so it must be designed. This great mini-lesson from the University of Indiana’s Evolution & the Nature of Science Institutes would have been helpful:

This lesson provides an elegant, easy way for students to actually compare Darwin’s cumulative non-random selection with the non-cumulative version so often erroneously implied. Students working in pairs attempt to produce a full sequence of 13 cards of one suit (ace – to king). This must be done by shuffling the suit of cards for each round, then checking the cards. Half the teams must look for the full sequence each time, and repeat the process until this is accomplished. The other teams start to “build” their sequence by pulling the ace when it first appears as the top card, then adding to the stack whenever the “next” card for the sequence is shuffled to the top. Discussion clearly reveals how the second method mimics Darwinian natural selection, while the first does not.

Of course, there are some significant differences between this activity and evolution. The students have a desired outcome and are only accepting shuffles that get closer to that ace-king “strong/lightweight beak.” But there’s no reason to assume that nature had to result in that particular beak. Over time the successful random changes propagate while the unsuccessful changes don’t. In that sense, we don’t necessarily know which random mutations and variations will occur, but we know any that stick around will be successful for their environment. The toucan’s variation could have exploited a different niche in its environment, and Awake! would be marveling: “Did the toucan’s incredible, narrow, and flexible beak come about by chance? Or was it designed?”

It’s not chance that the toucan’s beak is successful. It is chance that this particular model is what happened, but I’m not going to give Awake! magazine credit for having that degree of nuance in their question.

Here at the American Humanist Association, we get all sorts of calls, letters, and emails.  A few months ago, a woman named Janina Balabat sent us a copy of her book entitled Conversations with an Atheist along with a handwritten note.  The title intrigued me a bit, and I opened it to see which famous atheist she had spoken with.

Nobody.  She imagines that she poses her questions to an atheist then imagines that he’s stumped.  Her chapter “Answers from an Atheist” begins:

I can picture that my dear atheist friend stopped for a moment and listened attentively as I asked all of my questions.  He grew slightly uncomfortable and his face turned red.  He found himself in deep silence.  He then began talking to himself, “I’m such a powerful person.  I know so much of life, of nature, and not only of things on Earth, but of the nature of the other planets.  I’ve read many educational books.  Yet, I do not have answers to these life questions.  Why can’t I answer?  Why don’t I have any answers?  Why don’t I know?  Why don’t I know who set everything up so wonderfully?  Why don’t I know my Creator?”

This tactic is the very epitome of a straw man argument.  She must not have met (m)any atheists, since her caricature of us is beyond cliche and I doubt very much that an atheist would ask why he doesn’t know his ‘Creator’.

I thank Janina Balabat for her book and her good intentions.  I can picture that she stops for a moment as she realizes that her argument is attacking a straw man.  She finds herself in deep silence.  She then asks herself, “How could I paint such an uninformed caricature of atheists?  Why didn’t I just make some nonreligious friends and talk to them?  Would that have helped me understand them?”

Most of Conversations with an Atheist is Balbat quoting Bible passages at the reader, without ever convincing us that the Bible speaks the truth.  If she had actually discussed this issue with the atheists she considers her audience–and she says she wants every atheist in the world to read it–then perhaps she wouldn’t have spent 400 pages citing a source we don’t consider credible.

To help her meet more atheists, I thought I would try to connect her with Daniel Dennett.  I instantly thought of him as I read this passage of her book:

Not only has nature created beauty for the eyes, but she has also remembered to fill our stomach.  She has prepared tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, garlic, pumpkins, cantaloupes, apples, pears, potatoes, beets, white cabbage, and cauliflower.  Nature knows that man likes sweetness, and she has therefore created the little bee, which works so hard all of its life to prepare sweet honey to satisfy a person’s life, to enhance it and make it sweeter and happier.

Dennett even used honey as an example in a fascinating lecture “Darwin’s Other Strange Inversion” at TED Talks:

For those of you who can’t watch the video, here’s the part I found particularly apt:

It stands to reason that we love chocolate cake because it is sweet, guys go for girls like this because they are sexy, we adore babies because they are so cute, and of course we are amused by jokes because they are funny.  This is all backwards…

Our sweet tooth is basically an evolved sugar-detector because sugar is high energy, and has been wired up to the “preferer” to put it very crudely.  And that’s why we ‘like’ sugar.  Honey is sweet because we like it, not: we like it because honey is sweet.  There is nothing intrinsically sweet about honey.  If you looked at glucose molecules until you were blind you won’t see why they tasted sweet.  You have to look in our brains to understand why they are sweet.

We humans are a result of our environment; we evolved to experience honey as sweet and pleasurable because it provides us with energy.  We change to fit our environment, the environment is not specially designed with us in mind.  It would be like marveling at how well the bottle was designed to fit the water inside it.

The Pope’s visit to Africa has already produced some interesting quotes for discussion, but in reading the Boston Globe today, I found other disturbing passages:

In his homily, Benedict expressed compassion for African children being kidnapped and forced to fight by rebel groups trying to carve up parts of Africa.

“God loves you, he has not forgotten you,” he said in a message to these children.

Child soldiers have been used by rebels in eastern Congo and by Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army. An estimated 3,500 children are still with armed groups in Congo alone.

Of course he hasn’t ‘forgotten’ them; the Catholic god isn’t anthropomorphized with human flaws like Zeus.  So what can we take away from the Pope’s message?  God is aware of the suffering children, loves them, and yet they are still suffering.  The more I think about it, the more I understand why the Problem of Suffering has caused theologians so much trouble over the years.

Many people act as if they believe that God intervenes in the natural world.  They credit God with countless wonderful occurrences like a medical recovery, an overwhelming emotional experience, or a hurricane sent to punish the sinful.  But anyone who believes God has ever taken action in the world must therefore believe that God chose to act in those situations.  He must choose not to act in the situations of suffering children.

The Pope seems to be telling the children: “You’re suffering intensely here in this world, but cheer up!  An entity in another world loves you!”  I suppose it’s better than when the Catholic Church did the reverse earlier this month.  A nine year-old girl was raped by her step-father and became pregnant with twins.  Carrying the pregnancy to term would have put her life in danger, so she had an abortion.  The church’s reaction to the whole thing?  Excommunicate the girl’s mother and the doctor.  It’s as if they were saying: “Your family is suffering intensely here in this world, but God is displeased with your decision.”

The church is ignoring suffering in this world – sometimes even exacerbating it, as with AIDS in Africa – because they have beliefs about another world.  I would love it if we all spent our energy focusing on this world, our opinions, and our suffering.  Thoughts about God’s opinion are distracting us.  He isn’t saving the poor and the hungry.  In his new book Losing my Religion, William Lobdell describes the reaction of a friend who came to the realization:

“It nearly drove him insane that no loving God was protecting his children.  I had the advantage of seeing too much on the religion beat.  I knew of many times when faithful Christian parents lost their children.  I hadn’t seen any evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, that children were safer with God watching over them.  It reminds me of a bumper sticker peddled by atheists that makes the point rather bluntly: ’20,000 children died of hunger today.  Why should God answer YOUR prayers?’”

He doesn’t.  If we stop holding mistaken beliefs about the supernatural, we can do a better job caring for this world.

File this under “not surprising, but still infuriating”:

Pope Benedict XVI said on his way to Africa Tuesday that condoms were not the answer in the continent’s fight against HIV, his first explicit statement on an issue that has divided even clergy working with AIDS patients.

The Pope went on to say, “You can’t resolve it (HIV/AIDS) with the distribution of condoms…On the contrary, it increases the problem.”

The full scale of that alarming statement is better understood in this context:

Africa is the one region in the world where Catholicism enjoys healthy growth.

According to Vatican statistics, the number of African Catholics grew by three percent in 2007 — despite competition from evangelical Protestant denominations and Islam — while populations remained stable elsewhere in the world.

In 2006, baptised Catholics made up 17 percent of the African population, compared with 12 percent in 1978.

In other words, don’t count the Pope’s influence out.

This is not the worst statement from a Catholic leader regarding condoms in Africa. One example from 2007:

The head of the Catholic Church in Mozambique has told the BBC he believes some European-made condoms are infected with HIV deliberately.

Maputo Archbishop Francisco Chimoio claimed some anti-retroviral drugs were also infected “in order to finish quickly the African people”.

In other words, Pope Benedict’s statement is just one part of a long misinformation campaign by the Catholic Church regarding condoms and their ability to prevent the spread of HIV.

Overall this isn’t really new news, of course, except that this latest statement by the Pope is his first on the subject of condoms since assuming the papacy. I doubt anyone was holding out hope that he would break with previous Catholic doctrine on this subject. Nevertheless, this is frightening. Combating HIV/AIDS is an uphill battle, although there have been some successes. But HIV/AIDS organizations already have so many challenges, from worn and underfunded public health infrastructure to the inherent difficulties in changing people’s sexual behavior. When one of the most influential religious leaders in the world comes through with what could only be described as lies (condoms make HIV/AIDS worse?) on the subject, he is perpetuating dangerous ideas that, in the long term, could cost people their lives.

For more information on international HIV prevention strategies that incorporate accurate information about condoms, visit the UK organization Avert.

As humans, we fancy ourselves to be unique creatures. That is why Jane Goodall’s landmark study of the chimpanzees of Gombe, Tanzania, in the early 1960′s caused such initial disbelief in the wider scientific community. Jane Goodall was the first scientist to observe the behavior of tool making and tool use by chimpanzees, which, by extension, made her to the first person to document the use of tools by any animal other than humans. Anthropologists had long defined human beings as “man the tool maker”, and, as the famed anthropologist Louis Leakey exclaimed in response to Jane Goodall’s initial report, “Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.”

We now know that several species of animals are capable of using tools. But a chimpanzee named Santino, living in captivity at the Furuvik Zoo in Sweden, has pushed our understanding of chimp behavior (and human uniqueness) forward once again. In a new study published in Current Biology, researchers documented Santino’s recurrent behavior of calmly collecting rocks and breaking apart chunks of the concrete in his zoo enclosure in the morning and then subsequently using the stockpile of projectiles to throw at zoo visitors later in the day. Santino is a 31-year old alpha male, and he never attacked the other chimps in his enclosure. He reserved his ire (and projectiles) only for humans.

This is amazing. Even recently, I read that one of the defining characteristics of humans is that we are capable of thinking about the future in an abstract way and making plans. And yet Santino directly challenges that idea. As one of the researchers quote in the Associated Press article stated:

“These observations convincingly show that our fellow apes do consider the future in a very complex way,” said the author of the report, Lund University Ph.D. student Mathias Osvath. “It implies that they have a highly developed consciousness, including lifelike mental simulations of potential events.”

In other words, Santino had thought about what he wanted to do and how he could do it. And he wasn’t acting in a blind rage but rather with premeditation, because several hours (and sometimes days) separated his stockpiling of weapons and his assaults on zoo visitors.

While much time and talk has been spent on the subject of intelligent life in other corners of the universe, we have so much more to learn about intelligent life on our own planet. As we start to understand more and more how intelligence is a continuum and that chimpanzees and humans have more in common than we previously imagined, I hope that we also rededicate ourselves to protecting this endangered species.

A fun article came out today in the Science Daily. Researchers applied the Stroop Test, a common psychological experiment in which subjects try to name the color of words like “purple” and “red” (see right). The scientists found that the brain activity was different between people who believed in God and those who didn’t.

Compared to non-believers, the religious participants showed significantly less activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a portion of the brain that helps modify behavior by signaling when attention and control are needed, usually as a result of some anxiety-producing event like making a mistake. The stronger their religious zeal and the more they believed in God, the less their ACC fired in response to their own errors, and the fewer errors they made.

“You could think of this part of the brain like a cortical alarm bell that rings when an individual has just made a mistake or experiences uncertainty,” says lead author Inzlicht, who teaches and conducts research at the University of Toronto Scarborough. “We found that religious people or even people who simply believe in the existence of God show significantly less brain activity in relation to their own errors. They’re much less anxious and feel less stressed when they have made an error.”

“Obviously, anxiety can be negative because if you have too much, you’re paralyzed with fear,” he says. “However, it also serves a very useful function in that it alerts us when we’re making mistakes. If you don’t experience anxiety when you make an error, what impetus do you have to change or improve your behaviour so you don’t make the same mistakes again and again?”

I started to think about why the religious subjects were less affected by their own errors. I imagine that belief in a protecting, benevolent God would be comforting – if you’re used to viewing the world through the lens that “it will all work out in the end” making mistakes won’t upset you.

But I’m also reminded of the words of humanist Edwin H. Wilson [edit: Corliss Lamont]: “This world is all, and enough.” Nontheists don’t believe in the supernatural or in the afterlife. We believe that this is the only life we get, and that it matters. Our behavior matters, our mistakes matter. Contrast that with Hugh Hewitt’s words as related in William Lobdell’s upcoming book Losing My Religion:

“Compared to eternity, we’re on this Earth for less than a blink of an eye. With that perspective, any suffering here is so minimal, and we won’t know why we even have that until we see the Lord. It will all be made clear, Billy, in less than a blink of an eye. I can wait. Heaven will be a wonderful place.”

A sense of calm can certainly be useful and important. But I care about this world and this life. Perhaps it would be a better place if we all took a less lackadaisical approach and started caring about our actions and mistakes.

A recent New York Times article discusses some developments in anthropology that shed light on the complex evolutionary origins of human behavior. Apparently, fundamental insights into human evolution can be gained just by watching how babies and adults interact:

In the view of the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the extraordinary social skills of an infant are at the heart of what makes us human. Through its ability to solicit and secure the attentive care not just of its mother but of many others in its sensory purview, a baby promotes many of the behaviors and emotions that we prize in ourselves and that often distinguish us from other animals, including a willingness to share, to cooperate with strangers, to relax one’s guard, uncurl one’s lip and widen one’s pronoun circle beyond the stifling confines of me, myself and mine.

The article goes on to discuss how cooperative parenting, such as sharing in the raising of village children, is a human behavior that is both common around the world and also built on social trust. Another key paragraph explains:

Dr. Hrdy wrote her book in part to counter what she sees as the reigning dogma among evolutionary scholars that humans evolved their extreme sociality and cooperative behavior to better compete with other humans. “I’m not comfortable accepting this idea that the origins of hypersociality can be found in warfare, or that in-group amity arose in the interest of out-group enmity,” she said in a telephone interview. Sure, humans have been notably violent and militaristic for the last 12,000 or so years, she said, when hunter-gatherers started settling down and defending territories, and populations started getting seriously dense. But before then? There weren’t enough people around to wage wars. By the latest estimates, the average population size during the hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution that preceded the Neolithic Age may have been around 2,000 breeding adults. “What would humans have been fighting over?” Dr. Hrdy said. “They were too busy trying to keep themselves and their children alive.”

In other words, during our species’ early formative years, the population density was so low that warfare between populations of humans was highly unlikely. Rather, cooperative behaviors were evolving; women who could leave their children in the care of others for a day could be more effective gatherers, for example. It seems that this cooperation and trust is built into our species today; for example, Dr. Hrdy notes in the article that humans operate with an implicit trust that other members of our species will not harm us as a matter of normal day-to-day behavior.

I’ve long objected to the overuse of the term “human nature.” Not because I doubt that humans have some characteristics that may be so universal as to be ascribed to an inherent human nature, but rather because the term is so often employed to present an incomplete observation in the guise of some sort of universal truth about Homo sapiens sapiens. Think about how often you have heard someone say, “It’s human nature to make war,” or, “we’ll never get rid of greed, it’s human nature,” or “it’s human nature to lie, steal, etc.” It seems to be a prop for pessimism, an excuse to doubt humanity’s potential, a reason to maintain the status quo in light of a fear of change.

The reality is, of course, that whatever nature that humans have inborn in us, or hard-wired, is extraordinarily intricate. Human beings are capable of warfare and destruction, but they are also capable of acts of heroism and compassion. I don’t want to belabor this rather obvious point — that human behavior and its origins are very complex — but it is good to keep that in mind, as one of the most common criticisms that secular humanists receive in the U.S. is that we somehow cannot have any kind of morality because it isn’t anchored in some sort of god or holy text. To someone like me, who was raised in a freethinking household and considers himself to be both a lifelong humanist and a moral person, this criticism is absurd. Just as absurd is the idea that humans have some sort of innate destructiveness that must be checked by the threat of hellfire. Secular humanists know that they have no such original sin and need no such external threat to hold it back. As humans we are already capable of functioning as a society without some invisible eye monitoring our behavior– it is what we evolved to do.

The world is far from a perfect place, and much ugliness persists. The story of this ugliness, of destruction and war, is as complicated as the road that we followed to our big brains and upright gait. But assuming that killing is so inherent in our nature as to be an immutable characteristic is to ignore a huge part of the story, a story that may be simply understood the next time you look upon an infant that is no relation to you but still feel the instinctual urge to protect that child as if it were your own.

Yesterday the Colorado state legislature voted on a bill that would require the health care providers of pregnant women to give them HIV tests (although the women may opt out). The reasons are pretty clear–if the mother is HIV-positive, it helps to know so that the baby can be protected and treated. The measure passed 32-1. The lone dissenter was Republican state Sen. Dave Schultheis. Why did he vote against the bill? According to the Colorado Independent, he claims that HIV “stems from sexual promiscuity” and didn’t want to “remove the negative consequences that take place from poor behavior and unacceptable behavior.”

My first reaction was that it’s not the mother being punished for promiscuity; it’s the child who doesn’t get treated for HIV. I was sure that Schultheis had just failed to think it through because he couldn’t really mean THAT, could he? Apparently he could:

“What I’m hoping is that, yes, that person may have AIDS, have it seriously as a baby and when they grow up, but the mother will begin to feel guilt as a result of that,” he said. “The family will see the negative consequences of that promiscuity and it may make a number of people over the coming years begin to realize that there are negative consequences and maybe they should adjust their behavior.”

I was horrified when I read that. There are many ways to contract HIV besides careless and promiscuous sex–blood transfusions come to mind. But even for someone who believes promiscuity is a sin, it is despicable to advocate that the child suffer for it. It is contrary to our conception of justice. Luckily the thirty-two other legislators agreed.

Crazy things keep coming out of Texas (where I once lived decades ago) – the Texas pledge of “one state under God,” public school Bible courses, Religious Viewpoints Anti-discrimination Act and now, defining a fetus (or unborn child to some) as a “person” for purposes of the capital murder statute.

My real concern is not with the bonus for prosecutors — two convictions for one murder. That’s right. Under TX Penal Code 1.07(a)(26), an “‘Individual’ means a human being who is alive, including an unborn child at every stage of gestation from fertilization until birth.”

No, my concern is that the Texas legislature routinely drinks Christian right Kool-Aid, which can be seen from above example of its definition of individual being religious-based, not science-based.

Two weeks ago on Nov. 20, a Texas Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction of Jacob Eguia for capital
murder for causing the death of Ruby Elaine Garcia and her fetus during the same criminal transaction. Eguia was sentenced to life in prison, which was the only possible sentence since the State did not seek the death penalty.

Among other defenses, Eguia filed a motion to quash the indictment against him for causing the death of Garcia’s fetus because the Texas statute that defines an “unborn child” as a “person” for purposes of the capital murder statute is unconstitutional. In particular, he alleged that the definition violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of U.S. Constitution because the definition “has the effect of endorsing religion as it is based solely upon a religious belief that life begins at conception.” (Eguia also complained of a violation of Texas’ constitution – “no preference shall ever be given by law to any religious society or mode of worship.” Tex. Const. Art I, § 6.)

In holding that the Texas law defining an “individual” did not violate either the U.S. or Texas Constitutions, the appeals court said: “A statute is not automatically rendered unconstitutional simply because it advances ideals that harmonize with religious ideals. Harris v. McRae, 448 U.S. 297, 319-20 … (noting that Judeo-Christian religions’ forbiddance of stealing does not preclude state or federal legislatures from outlawing larceny).”

The appeals court also said that Eguia also “fail[ed] to demonstrate how the statute’s principal or primary effect advances religion, or how the statute fosters excessive government entanglement with religion.”

I believe that the appeals court analogy with stealing is misplaced because, unlike stealing, the notion that life begins at conception is uniquely a religious viewpoint.

However, because I am not familiar with the trial record, it would be inappropriate for me to comment on whether or not the defendant sufficiently proved of his Establishment Clause violation claim.

Instead, I’ll close by saying that in our judicial system the deck is stacked heavily against those who claim a violation of the principle of separation of church and state and that complainants probably need two, three or four times as much evidence as they think would be sufficient. What is needed is a smoking gun (so to speak) where there is a record of a religious purpose for enacting the challenged legislation.

Anti-choice groups in the United States have increasingly turned to the ballot initiative process to attempt to restrict reproductive freedom on a state-by-state basis. This year, however, they failed in three states.

The most extreme measure was in Colorado:

“Colorado voters on Tuesday rejected Amendment 48, which would have defined a ‘person’ from the point of egg fertilization. If the measure had passed, Colorado would have become the first state to grant full constitutional rights to a fertilized egg.”

The Colorado amendment ended up being rejected nearly three to one. It was so far-reaching that National Right to Life and several prominent Republican candidates in Colorado declined to support it. Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family did lend its support. But in the end Coloradans rejected the attempt to make their state one of the most extreme anti-choice states in the nation. Not only would the measure have made abortion illegal in all cases, even if the life of the mother was at risk, but it also could have led to some forms of birth control being banned. A strong No on 48 campaign, led by the medical community of Colorado and supported by leading civil liberties, reproductive rights, and legal groups, pushed back and successfully defended a woman’s right to choose in the state.

South Dakota wasn’t reaching quite that far, but Measure 11, which received a “no” vote of 56 percent, was still extreme. A revised version of the last attempt to ban abortion there, which was rejected by voters by a 10 percentage point margin in 2006, proponents hoped to pass Measure 11 by providing for exceptions in the case of rape or if the life of the mother was in danger. However, these provisions were still incredibly strict:

“Opponents argued the exceptions were still too narrow — abortions were only permissible if the woman identified her assailant and proved paternity through DNA testing, or if a doctor found the mother faced possible organ failure if the pregnancy came to term.”

In other words, a rape victim would have to endure the additional trauma of quickly proving a case against her assailant and receiving permission from the state to terminate the pregnancy. It is not at all clear that a state as anti-choice as South Dakota would let that happen anyway. And the health exception could only be applied in the most extreme cases and would effectively tie a doctor’s hands with a narrow legal definition of “health risk.” In the end, South Dakotans said no to the law that very well could have ended up in front of the US Supreme Court.

Finally, as part of the nation-wide effort of anti-choice groups to chip away, incrementally, at access to abortion, Proposition 4 in California proposed to require that doctors notify parents 48 hours in advance of performing an abortion on a minor. In the case that the minor did not want to inform her own parents of the abortion, she could have another adult family member informed, but a child abuse investigation would subsequently have to be opened against her parents. Or perhaps the minor could persuade a judge to grant her a non-notification abortion.

But what are all of those requirements, really? They are obstacles. The goal of Proposition 4 was to restrict reproductive choice as much as possible without stepping over the line and violating the constitutionally protected right to privacy, as defined in Roe v. Wade. Proponents were trying to dress the proposition in the idea of protecting minors from sexual abuse, but doctors are already mandated reporters of abuse and rape. So if a minor seeks an abortion in the state of California today, and the doctor suspects that the pregnancy was the result of sexual abuse or rape, the doctor is already required by law to report this to the police.

Thankfully, Californians saw through Proposition 4. It failed.

This isn’t the last time we’ll hear from the anti-choice forces in the United States. But by defeating these three measures, the voters are making their support for a woman’s right to reproductive choice increasingly clear. Combine that with the fact that we can expect better appointments to the US Supreme Court in the coming years, and we can see that reproductive freedom will overall be better protected in the years to come. But it will take years of hard work to undo the damage already done in so many states by similar measures. And I doubt that the anti-choice organizations are going to go quietly.

The latest drug store to stop selling contraceptives and filling birth control prescriptions–appropriately named Divine Mercy Care Pharmacy–has set up shop in Chantilly, Virginia, according to today’s Washington Post.

Apparently, this pharmacy is also not selling candy or soda. And don’t forget about the bishop who came in to sprinkle holy water on the store’s shelves. What is this, the 19th century?

Virginia already has the unfortunate law that allows pharmacists to refuse to fill a prescription without any justification whatsoever. It’s a classic case of an individual’s faith trumping safe, medical access for all, and a spokesperson from NARAL Pro-Choice America sums this up nicely:

“If this emboldens other pharmacies in other parts of the state, it could really affect low-income and rural women in terms of access,” said Tarina Keene, executive director of the Virginia chapter of the National Abortion Rights Action League.

If pharmacists are allowed to refuse service to “sinful” men or women having–God forbid–sex, what could stop other pharmacists from filling prescriptions for lung cancer patients because they object to the individual’s history of smoking? Or worse–pharmacists who will eventually be allowed to discriminate based on race?

One surprising statistic: a Gallop poll reveals that 75 percent of U.S. Catholics believe you can be a “good Catholic” even if you use birth control. The culture is already changing, and pharmacists need to be available to provide safe contraceptives for people who need it.

Mark your calendars: Darwin Day is just around the corner!

Darwin Day, a project of the Institute for Humanist Studies, celebrates the birthday of evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin with events all around the world on or around February 12. The year 2009 marks the 200th anniversary of his birth, so many organizations will be going the extra mile. Science organizations that are part of the Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS) have already declared 2009 “The Year of Science.”

The Institute for Humanist Studies recently launched a newly designed Darwin Day website at www.darwinday.org. Groups and individuals can post their Darwin Day events, submit photographs and artwork, or learn more about Darwin’s significance in the scientific community.

The website’s launch couldn’t come at a better time in light of an article in today’s Dallas News: In Texas, three critics of evolution were appointed to a six-member State Board of Education committee that reviews curriculum standards for public school science classes.

It probably comes as no surprise that one of the appointees is the vice president of the anti-evolution think tank Discovery Institute, while another is a signer of the Institute’s “Dissent from Darwinism” document which states, “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”

But progressive groups are speaking out:

Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller, who frequently spars with social conservative groups, called it “simply stunning that any state board members would even consider appointing authors of an anti-evolution textbook to a panel of scientists.” The textbook is titled Explore Evolution.

“Texas universities boast some of the leading scientists in the world,” said Ms. Miller, of the progressive, nonprofit group. “It’s appalling that some state board members turned to out-of-state ideologues to decide whether Texas kids get a 21st century science education.”

Miller hits it right on the nose. I hope that the Texas Freedom Network and other grassroots efforts to counter the so-called ‘intelligent design’ movement find success and keep all forms of education masking as creationism out of our public schools.

Suddenly, Darwin Day seems more than just a party with a birthday cake–it’s a battle for the future of science education. What will you be doing?

Scientists in Virginia are reporting the second known case of a shark pup being conceived without any shark sex involved.

Scientists have confirmed the second case of a “virgin birth” in a shark. In a study reported Friday in the Journal of Fish Biology, scientists said DNA testing proved that a pup carried by a female Atlantic blacktip shark in the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center contained no genetic material from a male.

Many around the Internet are hailing the new Shark Messiah, but as a skeptic I would have to personally witness the shark pup perform some miracles first.

But in all seriousness, this is a rather remarkable finding, and it raises so many questions, such as, is this a frequent occurrence in nature? What impact could this have on shark genetic health? Are there other animals as large as sharks that can reproduce asexually? Is there anything in particular that triggers this kind of reproduction in sharks?

I write this not to weigh in on a topic in science on which I am no expert, but rather to point out that those of us who do not believe in a creator of the universe or an all-powerful god or the supernatural still live in a world of mystery and wonder. No matter how much we learn about the world through science, there will always be more questions, more unexplored territory, more new ideas. The pursuit of knowledge is never ending, and I, for one, love the journey, even if there is no definitive destination, no end point where we can see that we know all that there is to know. I shudder to think of the complacency and stagnation that would come with such a time, when we lost the will to explore, whether it be the planet, the universe, or the DNA of a shark.