Covid-19 Stupidity and Magical Thinking

The late Bishop Gerald O. Glenn
Told packed church "God is larger than this dreaded virus"!

A COVID-Denying Pastor Died of COVID-19. Now His Family Has the Virus, Too. | Hemant Mehta | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

The sad death of Bishop Gerald O. Glenn of the New Deliverance Evangelistic Church of Richmond Virginia from the Covid-19 virus and news that his entire family have now caught the deadly virus is a reminder that these unfortunate people are victims as much of the religion virus as they are of the Covid-19 virus.

A week before he died, Bishop Gerald O. Glenn preached to a packed church and boasted that "God is larger than this dreaded virus", in defiance of public advice to limit the size of public gatherings and to cancel church services.

Covid-19 Scam - Not Just the Christians

Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky

Charity Run by Ultra-Orthodox Leader Promises Coronavirus Cure to Large Donors | Hemant Mehta | Friendly Atheist | Patheos.

It's not just the American fundamentalist Christians who have spotted a good money-making opportunity in the Covid-19 pandemic. An ultra-orthodox Jewish group in Israel has dipped its bread in the gravy bowl too. In return for a monthly payment of NIS 100 for 30 months, donors will receive a silver amulet which, it is claimed, will give protection to the household from all illnesses.

It is not clear at this time whether the protection only comes into effect after all 30 payments have been made or whether it strats with the first payment and is withdrawn if the donor defaults.

Run by Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, a leading Haredi Rabbi, a charity called Kupat Ha’ir (City Fund), set up with the noble aim of bringing relief to families suffering from illness, and based in the Covid-19 hotspot of B’nei Brak, has promised:

Christian Scam Alert - Christians For Greed and Selfishness

Pastor Tony Spell "Give me your money!"

COVID-19-Defying Pastor Wants People to Send Him Their $1,200 Stimulus Checks | Hemant Mehta | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

Pastor Tony Spell, the head of Louisiana’s Life Tabernacle Church, always has one eye open for the main chance, and Covid-19 is it! He has his eyes on the stimulus money his target dupes are getting to help the USA out of the virus-induced recession.

Not only did he refuse to close his church to help prevent the spread of Covid-19 on the basis that real Christians don't mind dying (and he doesn't mind helping them so long as they bring money along to his church before they do) but he is now telling them they should give him their $1200 stimulus money rather than spend it on food, rent and essential bills!

Another Cynical Christian Scam

con-artist Jim Humble, inventor of MMS

US halts sale of bleach product touted as 'miracle' virus cure | France24

Never slow to miss a get-rich-quick opportunity, a Christian church has been selling a phony 'cure' for multiple ills, including Covid-19 and claiming it as a 'sacrament'.

The quack cure is the invention of con-artist Jim Humble, who set of the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing as a vehicle for selling industrial bleach for around $50 a bottle under the brand-name "Miracle Mineral Solution" (MMS) with the claim that it will:

Cure, mitigate, treat, or prevent coronavirus, which includes COVID-19, as well as other diseases including Alzheimer’s, autism, brain cancer, HIV/AIDS, and multiple sclerosis.

How Religion Damages Children.

It’s difficult for young children to differentiate between fact and fiction after they have been exposed to religion.

Study Shows Children Raised With Religion Find It Challenging To Judge Fact From Fiction.

A 2014 study published in Cognitive Science shows a marked difference in their ability to distinguish fact from fiction between children brought up in secular households and those brought up in a religious ones.

Children conditioned to accept the magical content of religious stories as factual, find it harder to understand that such stories are actually impossible, not true accounts of real events. For example, when asked to classify the story of Moses waving a magic wand and making a pathway open up through the sea, children subjected to a religious upbringing will be more likely to classify the story as factual rather than fictional, despite the express inclusion of a magical element in the story.

Catholic Child Abuse - Pell Faces 26 More Allegations

Cardinal George Pell "Facing 26 more allegations"

George Pell’s Andrew Bolt interview: Cardinal facing fresh investigation.

There are persistent rumours that Cardinal Pell, former number 3 in the Vatican, who was recently cleared by the Australian High Court, after being convicted of the sexual abuse of two boys in the 1990s, is facing a further 26 allegations and is under investigation by the police.

Four Officers from the Auburn Police Area Command arrived at about 2.30 pm at The Good Shepherd Seminary in Abbotsford Road, Homebush, Sydney, NSW, where Pell is staying, for what was describes as a pre-arranged meeting to 'discuss security protocols".

Catholic Child Abuse - Baptism With Violence

Father Jacques Lacroix - Baptism with violence

Imagine! You're a devout Catholic family and you take your baby to the local church to be baptised into the faith - supposedly a joyous and happy occasion - only to have the priest lose his temper and launch a brutal assault on your child during the ceremony.

This was the experience of a French family in the Collegiate Church in Champeaux, near Melun, in the south-eastern suburbs of Paris, in June, 2018.

As this video shows, Father Jacques Lacroix (89), struggled to calm the child down and repeatedly told him to 'calm down' before squeezing his face, then staring him in the eyes before losing his temper and slapping his face with his left hand. There then followed a brief struggle as the horrified parents attempted to prise the distressed child out of the clutches of the priest, who eventually angrily pushed the child into the arms of its father.

Father Jacques later told France Info radio that it was more of a caress than a slap because the child wouldn't hold his head still while he poured water over it. He also announced that he wouldn't be conducting any more baptisms.

Pope Francis Celebrates As Pell Acquitted

Pope Francis decries 'unjust sentences' after cardinal George Pell acquitted | Australia news | The Guardian

In an astonishing intervention in the internal affairs of Australia, Pope Francis, who professes to be determined to rid the Catholic Church of the routine, recreational abuse of children by his priests, has likened Cardinal Pell to Jesus. This followed Pell's acquittal by Australia's Supreme Court, for the child sex-abuse charges for which he had been convicted by lower courts.

Pell had been convicted of the sexual abuse of two choir boys and had further charges against him dropped because it was felt he would not receive a fair trial after his conviction had been leaked to the press, despite an injunction preventing any comment on his trial from appearing in the Australian press. He was the highest ranking Catholic cleric to be so convicted and sentenced to prison. His conviction had been upheld by the Court of Appeal but has now been reversed on a technicality by the Supreme Court - the highest court in the land. The court ruled that the jury in the original trial should have allowed for 'reasonable doubt'.

During the original court case, Pell's lawyer, Robert Richter, in attempting to minimise the offence, describe it as 'just vanilla sex' - penetration without ejaculation and without the boy's active participation!

Catholic Child Abuse - The Practice Continues

Father Matthew Jolly

Photo: Manchester Evening News

Catholic priest thought he was meeting paedophile from Grindr to arrange abuse of his 'two-year-old-son'... it was an undercover cop - Manchester Evening News

Given the enormity of the scandals involving predatory paedophile priests and given Pope Francis' profesed determination to put a stop to it and introduce reforms to prevent it, you would expect it to be a thing of the past by now.

Not a bit of it, it seems. Predatory paedophilia is alive and well inside the Catholic Church and abusers are still being recruited into its ranks, if this case from UK is anything to go by.

Father Matthew Jolly was ordained in 2015 and while in Belgium, made contact with a man on Grindr. Unbeknown to him, the man was an undercover police officer who had only set up a fake account 20 minutes earlier. He was posing as a 36 year-old bisexual with a 2 year-old son. During the conversation, Jolly told the man that he was interested in sex with children. He expressed an interest in young girls but said a 'cute boy' would also be of interest.

Moral Self-Licensing - Catholic Extremists Steal From the Vatican

Members of Amazon indigenous populations walk during a Via Crucis procession from St. Angelo Castle to the Vatican, Saturday, Oct. 19, 2019. Pope Francis is holding a three-week meeting on preserving the rainforest and ministering to its native people as he fended off attacks from conservatives who are opposed to his ecological agenda.

Credit: AP Photo/Andrew Medichini

Thieves steal Amazon fertility statues as synod nears end

A neat illustration of the hypocrisy inherent in religious fanaticism, where 'faith' and piety are used to excuse moral self-licensed exemptions from the standards they would impose on the rest of us, was on display in Rome a few days ago.

Catholic vandals, attending the Vatican for a synod on preserving the Amazon Rainforest and ministering to the indigenous population there, called by Pope Francis, ignored the 8th Commandment, stole religious fertility symbols known as the Pachamama idols, and threw them in the River Tiber. The statues, symbolic representations of a pregnant women, had been paraded to the Vatican from St. Angelo Castle and presented to Pope Paul as symbols of fertility and life.

Basic Logic for Creationists - Lesson From Pompeii

As a service to creationists, I decided to provide a little explanation, by way of an example, of how deductive logic works.

No doubt, inspired by Ken Ham's stock method for dismissing historical evidence as an explanation for the present, by dismissing anything that hasn't been directly witnessed by the person advancing it with, "Were you there?", one creationist recently made the astonishing claim on Twitter in the tweet below.

"Timothy", known variously as "Dim Tim", "Dimmy" and "Tiny Tim" uses multiple accounts to try to advance creationism, usually making himself a laughing stock in the process. He appears to be a prime example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, being incapable of ever admitting that he could be wrong, no matter how blatantly he is so.

Triple Trouble for 'Intelligent' Design Creationists

Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Resistance to last resort drug arose in patient over 3 weeks -- ScienceDaily

Any truly intelligent designer knows exactly what the results of his or her design will be. A designer who simply blunders along making random changes without any idea what these changes will mean, could not conceivably be called 'intelligent' within the commonly-understood meaning of the word. Stupid would be the more correct term.

A designer who designs something to do harm to people could not possibly be called loving.

So, what are we to make of the news that resistance to antibiotics of last resort has been observed to arise in the bacterium, Pseudomonas aeruginosa?

Hurry For a Good Deal on My Books

Sadly, Amazon are ending the Kindle MatchBook program on 31st October this year.

Under this scheme, customers who have already bought a book through Amazon, could also buy a Kindle ebook version at a special low price, if the author had enrolled in the program.

So, if you want to take advantage of this program and get a reduced-price Kindle version of any of my books, you need to either already own it or order it before 31st October! You do not even need to own a Kindle device as free Kindle readers as available for PCs and Android smartphones.

A list of my books can be found here. The current best sellers are listed below.

Another announcement by Amazon that might affect readers of this blog is that Amazon are also discontinuing their support for blog subscriptions on Kindle. Under this scheme, Kindle owners could, for a small subscription (in the case of my blog, £0.99 per month) receive copies of a blog on their Kindle soon after publication.

If you're wondering why my blog has gone, sadly, that's the reason.

Meanwhile, of course, you can still get copies of my books for your Kindle, and, if you already own a paperback version, you can do so at a very low price!

Silly Bible - History The Authors Got Wrong

The Bible is not only full of bad science - which is at least understandable given that the earliest parts of it were based on myths and legends from, as Christopher Hitchens put it, the fearful infancy of our species - but it is full of very bad history too.

Much of the 'history' is a retrospective attempt to give legitimacy to land claims or to give credence to the claim to power and authority of dubious regimes, or supremacy over neighbours, of course. Giving this spurious credence to despots and insecure rulers of one form or another has frequently been the role of 'historians' and 'genealogists' throughout history, no less in Canaan and the Levant, than in more recent times and places.

The problem is, much of this 'history' was written by people who knew little or nothing of actual history, so they made what can only be described as wonderfully anachronistic schoolboy howlers. Not that they expected their readers (or mostly listeners) to realise this of course. They would have been equally ignorant of real history.

Evolution News - Cambrian 'Explosion' Blows up in Creationists' Face

Yilingia spiciformis and the track it left as it moved.

Credit: Z. Chen et al./Nature

Ancient worm fossil rolls back origins of animal life.

It's another of those bad days for creationism, like most days in biology research, in fact.

This time, one of their favourite misrepresentations - the so-called Cambrian Explosion - just got a lot harder to misrepresent. Fossil evidence has been found of a much earlier complex multicellular, worm-like organism.

This gives the lie to any claims that the Cambrian biota appeared suddenly without ancestry, as though some celestial designer arrived on Earth one day and plonked a whole lot of different, fully formed species, in the sea.

Christian Gay Conversion Therapy Leader Converts - To Honesty

McKrae Game
“I was a religious zealot that hurt people. Why would I want that to continue?”

Conversion therapy leader for 2 decades, McKrae Game disavows movement he helped fuel | News | postandcourier.com

McKrae Game was a leading exponent of the 'gay cure' or 'conversion therapy' that feeds off the guilt Christianity inflicts on homosexuals. He founded Truth Ministries, later rebranded as Hope for Wholeness, a faith-based conversion therapy program in South Carolina.

But now he has had his own conversion - to honesty. He has come out as gay and is campaigning to undo some of the harm he and his fellow 'gay cure' parasites did to people.

For two decades he preached that homosexuality would send gays to Hell and that they could be saved by his Conversion Therapy course. As stark an example of how Christianity, In Hitch's words, declares you ill and commands you to be well - and sells you the 'cure' - as you could wish for.

Evolution News - Another Piece of the Jigsaw

Facial reconstruction of A. anamensis by John Gurche

© Matt Crow, Cleveland Museum of Natural History

A new fossil cranium reveals the face of Lucy's ancestor | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

What is probably the most important hominin fossil since 'Lucy' was announced by the Max Planck Institute a few days ago. Like all significant scientific discoveries, it means a revision of our understanding is now needed to accommodate this new information.

Sadly for creationists, it doesn't mean that our understanding of human evolution was fundamentally wrong, but that it was incomplete. We now know a little more and so have a better understanding of the exact path our evolution from pre-hominin ancestors took.

Regrettably, the paper in Nature by Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Stephanie Melillo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and their colleagues sits behind an expensive paywall. However, we have the detailed press release from Max-Planck-Gesellschaft.

It really is time that major papers of this importance are published open access.

Catholic Abuse News - Cardinal Pell Conviction Stands

Cardinal George Pell. Outside court, wearing prison cloths and clerical collar

Cardinal George Pell loses appeal against sexual abuse convictions - BBC News

Cardinal Pell, former archbishop of Melbourne, Australia, formerly number three in the Vatican and the personal choice of Pope Francis to sort out the rapant financial corruption at the heart of the Catholic Church, has lost his appeal against conviction for child sexual abuse. Pell now becomes the most senior Catholic to be convicted of child abuse offences.

By a majority of two to one, the Australian appeal court judges upheld the conviction last December and dismissed the claim that the chief witness - one of the two whom Pell had sexually abused as a child - was unreliable and therefore there was insufficient evidence on which to convict.

Big Bat Cave Bother For Creationists

Gomantong Cave, Borneo, Malaysia

Photo: Donald McFarlane

https://eos.org/articles/how-bat-breath-and-guano-can-change-the-shapes-of-caves

Deep inside a massive limestone cave in Borneo, there is a mound of bird and bat droppings, produced by a constant 'rain' of fresh excrement from the bats and birds that occupy the ceiling of the cave, some 60 metres above.

This is not a place for the squeamish, and probably not a nice place for creationists desperate to believe Earth is just a few thousand years old.

In places, this mound can be 10 to 12 metres high. So massive it it that is sustains a whole ecosystem of cockroaches, microorganisms and other creatures that depend entirely on the fresh guano.

40% of Americans Believe in Creationism!

40% of Americans Believe in Creationism.

As though having elected Donald Trump as president wasn't bad enough for America's reputation, we now learn that four out of every ten Americans still believe that a god created modern humans exactly as they are today.

However, hidden in these abysmal figure is evidence that this sorry state of affairs is changing. Believe it or not 40% is close to the historical low for this figure since Gallup began polling on this issue in 1982. Although there is a statistically insignificant rise of 2 percentage point in the last year, this is the third year in a row that the figure has been at or below 42%; a figure only once before bettered with 40% in 2010. Prior to 2008, figures in the upper 40s were the norm.

Refuting Intelligent Design Creationism

Lee Thomas Wimberley, MD.
CDesign Proponentsist

On the Emergence of Life | Lee T. Wimberley, MD.

First a little background.

Apparently, Lee Thomas Wimberly, MD, is highly regarded in creationist circles in the social media, though not in scientific circles, where he appears to be a complete unknown. He has written what he believes is a critique of evolution and what he calls 'evolutionists'.

He has a medical degree from the University of Alabama School of Medicine and works as an internist associated with several hospitals in Birmingham, Alabama, USA. He appears to have no background in biological research or scientific research of any kind. He is an 'intelligent design' advocate, in other words, he is a creationist. As his record in the social media shows, he is a Bible-literalist Young Earth Creationist who believes in Noah's Ark, and a 6000 year-old Earth.

Having asked on Twitter why evolution can't explain the origin of life, as though demanding a scientific explanation for one thing - evolution - explain another - abiogenesis - is some sort of rebuttal of the ToE, and having conspicuously ignored the proffered ten-step process by which abiogenesis could very plausibly have happened, Wimberly challenged me to read and comment on his blog.

These tweets are my response, numbered to overcome the limited number of permissible characters on Twitter.

Why Americans Are Losing Confidence In Religion

Why Are Americans Losing Confidence in Organized Religion?

Following on from their poll finding that American confidence in organised religion is continuing to decline, an article by Gallup's Frank Newport analysed the reasons for this decline in greater details.

As I reported a few weeks ago, from being the most respected of American institutions in 1974, with 68% of Americans having a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in it, this figure has now sunk to just 36% in 2019.

New Light on Cichlid Evolution in Africa

Just a few of the Lake Victoria Cichlids

New light on cichlid evolution in Africa - LMU Munich.

Cichlids are a ubiquitous group of freshwater fish in the tropics and are notable for the wide range of morphologies and patterns of behaviour that have adapted them to exploit a wide range of freshwater habitats. There are some 1100 different African species alone, most of them belonging to the Haplotilapiini group.

Now a collaborative research project carried out under the auspices of the GeoBio-Center at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany (LMU), has helped shed light on the origins and causes of this central paradigm in evolutionary biology.

The most notable example of this diversification is in the Great Lakes, Lakes Tanganyika, Malawi and Victoria, and others, in the East African Rift Valley where we can date the beginnings of this radiation with a fair degree of accuracy because several of these lakes are know to have dried up at particular geological times. This effectively zeros the local evolutionary process at the point where the lakes fill again.

Declining Religion in UK

Religion Identity, behaviour and belief over two decades | British Social Attitudes 36 - Religion.

'Christian', as a self-identifier of religious belief, fell below 40% for the first time in 2018 in the UK, while 'non-religious' oustripped all the others combined at 52%.

Coincidentally, the UK voted to leave the EU by exactly the same percentage of those who voted as those who now state they have no religion. On the basis of that margin, the UK is now going through the most fundamental change in its constitution since the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

The constitutional change as a result of 52% of people having no religion has been conspicuous by its absence. In Theresa May's words, nothing has changed. In this instance though, that statement is true.

The End of Christian Fascism in Greece?

Greek fascist 'Golden Dawn' flag

Greece election results: Landslide for centre-right New Democracy after Syriza concedes defeat | The Independent

Hidden in the result of the recent Greek general election a few days ago was a welcome result which went almost unnoticed by the mainstream news media; the extreme right-wing, Orthodox Christian-supported and openly fascist party, 'Golden Dawn' was totally wiped out, losing all its MPs.

Golden Dawn had previously been Greece's third largest party but under the Greek proportional electoral system, having failed to reach the 3% threshold, it did not qualify to have even one MP.

According to this report, the Greek Orthodox Church, which unlike Catholicism, does not have a rigid hierarchical structure but has devolved regional autonomy, is at least ambivalent towards Gold Dawn's openly fascist, ultra-nationalist policies and violent tactics. While some bishops have been critical other have been lukewarm or even openly supportive of Golden Dawn.

U.S. Confidence in Religion Falls Again

U.S. Confidence in Organized Religion Remains Low | Gallup.

The confidence of Americans in organized religion has fallen by a further two percentage points in the last year and now stands at another historic low of just 36% having a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in it.

Historical lows have been recorded in each successive year for the last 5 years and there has only been one brief respite in an otherwise inexorable decline since 2010. In 1975, soon after Gallup began polling the same question about a number of American institutions, organized religion has fallen from the most trusted at 68% (a position it held until 1985) to sixth place.

Over the same period, those expressing very little of no confidence in organized religion has risen from 11% to 27%.

Catholic Abuse News - Pope's Envoy To France

Archbishop Luigi Ventura, papal nuncio to France

Credit: Rémy Gabalda/AFP/Getty Images

Vatican lifts diplomatic immunity for envoy facing assault claims | World news | The Guardian

On January 17 this year, the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, gave a new year’s address to diplomats, religious leaders and civil society figures in the city hall. Also invited was 74-year-old Archbishop Luigi Ventura, papal nuncio to France, the equivalent of an ambassador for the Vatican City state and the personal representative of Pope Francis. He has held the post since 2009.

While there he allegedly repeatedly sexually assaulted a member of the city staff, by groping his bottom, once in full view of witnesses. The attention was unwanted, uninvited and unwelcome.

The employee reported the matter to his employers who, on 24 January, reported the matter to the police as a sexual assault, and an investigation was launched. After these allegations emerged, a second man alleged that Ventura had molested him in Canada. Christian Vachon alleged Ventura touched his buttocks at least twice during a banquet held at the Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, near Quebec.

However, as an accredited diplomat, Ventura was immune from prosecution, as is every other diplomat under the 1961 Vienna Convention, unless diplomatic immunity is withdrawn by the diplomat's own country - in this case, the Vatican City.

Catholic Abuse News - German Congregation Walkout

Rev. Ulrich Zurkuhlen
"I have never experienced anything like this in the 54 years of my life as a priest."

German Catholics Storm Out Of Sermon Urging Forgiveness For Predator Priests | HuffPost UK

Once upon a time, the members of a Christian congregation were nothing if not derential. Not so now though if Münster in Germany is anything to go by.

A congregation would once sit, sometimes for hours, enduring the lectures priests delivered from their pulpit. They would nod piously but silently in agreement, as the sacred words of wisdom poured forth upon the assembled godly, enlightening them, reinforcing their sense of unworthiness and their need to come back again next week to endure another lecture, hand over money and beg for forgiveness.

They would even shake hands with the priest as they left, congratulating him on another wonderful sermon - whilst scarcely remembering a word of it.

Not so today, as events in the German city of Münster showed. Gone is deference to the moral authority of the church and it's priests. Sickened by daily stories of hypocrisy and moral depravity of priests, and in this case Catholic priests, the congregation in the Holy Spirit Church answered back, loudly and angrily. Eventually half the choir walked out followed by about 70 of the congregation and held an impromptu protest meeting outside.

How Christians Lie to Us - Gay 'Conversion' Fraud

Science Journal Retracts Paper That Said Gay Conversion Therapy Works | Hemant Mehta | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

Last August, an American Christian rights pressure group, Liberty Counsel, issued a press release in which they claimed:

A recent study, Effects of Therapy on Religious Men Who Have Unwanted Same-Sex Attraction, confirms the overwhelming effectiveness of people receiving counseling to reduce or eliminate their unwanted same-sex attractions, behaviors, or identity.

In this study, more than two-thirds of those who participated in group therapy or received professional help had significant heterosexual shifts in sexual attraction, sexual identity, and behavior, and moderate-to-marked decreases in suicidality, depression, substance abuse, and increases in social functioning and self-esteem. The study’s effectiveness rates for counseling people with unwanted same-sex attraction were comparable to the effectiveness rates of psychotherapy in general for any unwanted issue.

[...]

This current research also strongly refutes claims the American Psychological Association [APA] and other organizations have made aimed at discouraging counsel to change unwanted same-sex attractions, behavior, and identity.

Cultural Evolution and Wood Pigeons

Common wood pigeon, Columba palumbus

I'm sitting in my garden enjoying a beautiful sunny summer day with a light breeze. About ten feet to my right is a tangle of buddleia and ceanothus with a vine and a wisteria twinging up through it, having outgrown their pergola. In the centre of this tangle is a wood pigeon's nest. A couple of wood pigeons are strutting about not six feet from me.

Outside my front door, in a tangle of Clematis montanum and making a right mess of my outside lamp and the ground beneath, is another wood pigeon's nest. The first clutch of young having flown about a week ago, they already seem to be sitting on a second clutch of two eggs. Always two and always one male and one female - a 'pigeon pair'.

According to the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), wood pigeons, Columba palumbus, are now competing with blue tits and blackbirds for the top spot as Britain's commonest garden bird. Something has changed radically in the behaviour of wood pigeons over the last ten to twenty years.

Muslims Losing Faith Too

The Arab world in seven charts: Are Arabs turning their backs on religion? - BBC News

A major new survey by the Arab Barometer research network for the BBC, conducted across ten countries and the Palestinian territories between late 2018 and spring 2019 shows a marked increase in those with no religious beliefs.

Other finding in the survey show a move towards a more liberal attitude to a range of social issues.

Across the area, those self-identifying as "not religious" rose from just 8% to 13% between 2013 and 2018. This represents a 1% per annum increase. Amongst the under-30's this rose to 18%. The largest increases were seen in Tunisia, Libya, Morocco and Egypt, and only Yemen recorded a fall.

Terrible News for Creationists - Evolution of Ruminants Now Known

Lesser Mouse Deer, Tragulus kanchil

By Seshadri.K.S. - Own work,
CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Masai giraffe, G. c. tippelskirchi

By © Hans Hillewaert,
CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

From Sheep and Cattle to Giraffes, Genome Study Reveals Evolution of Ruminants | UC Davis

The ruminants are a large and very successful group of mammals ranging in size from the tiny lesser mouse deer of Malaysia to the giant African giraffes, and occupying a wide range of ecosystems. A characteristic of this group is a four-chambered stomach modified to digest a high-cellulose diet with the aid of specialist microorganisms, regurgitation and re-chewing of the food (chewing the cud), a pair of horns or antlers used for defence and sexual display and teeth adapted for eating grass and leaves.

This group emerged between 32 and 39 million years ago and has provided several important domesticated animals such as cattle, sheep and goats, but how exactly they are related had not before been fully worked out.

Now a team of scientists led by Wen Wang and Guojie Zhang at the Kunming Institute of Zoology, China, and Rasmus Heller at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and including Professor Harris Lewin at the UC Davis Department of Evolution and Ecology and Genome Center, Davis California, has gone some considerable way to working out a phylogenic tree for this group.

Catholic Abuse News - Cardinal Nichols' Complacency

Cardinal Vincent Nichols

The Roman Catholic Church Case Study: Archdiocese of Birmingham Investigation Report | IICSA Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse

The leader of the Catholic Church in England, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, has been severely criticised by an Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) report, for being more concerned with the reputation of the church than with the protection of children.

Nichols was Archbishop of Birmingham between 2000 and 2009 and, although he denies a coverup, was found to have "ignored" allegations which, if investigated could have prevent the abuses of children. In all, there were 130 allegations of child abuse against 78 Catholic priests in the archdiocese.

The chair of the IICSA, Professor Alexis Jay said, "I am truly shocked by the scale of sexual abuse within the Archdiocese of Birmingham." The inquiry concentrated on the case of four predatory paedophile priests in particular, one of them being Father John Tolkien, son of the author JRR Tolkien. One of the four remains anonymous.

Catholic Abuse News - Church of the Holy Hypocrite

Thomas J. Tobin, bishop of Providence, Rhode Island

Catholic bishop who ignored child sex abuse cases calls Pride parades ‘harmful for children’ / LGBTQ Nation

In a stunning display of the nauseating hypocrisy that passes for sanctimonious piety in the Catholic Church, a bishop who stood by and did nothing while priests abused children, has hit out at a planned gay pride month, warning parents that:

[Gays] promote a culture and encourage activities that are contrary to Catholic faith and morals. They are especially harmful for children.

Bishop Thomas J. Tobin, bishop of Providence, Rhode Island, served for four years in the 1990s as auxiliary bishop of Pittsburgh, one of six Pennsylvania dioceses covered in the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report that reveals a horror story of decades of child abuse by Catholic priests and routine cover-up by senior clerics.

Bear Facts Refute Creationism

Polar bear, Ursus maritimus
Evolved by losing information.

News: How eating meat shifted polar bears’ DNA | College of Natural Sciences (CNS) | UMass Amherst

How did new information create polar bears?

According to creationists, it can't have done because, so the dogma says, no new information can arise due to mutations, and since evolution requires mutations on which selection can work, it should follow that evolution can't include new information. A corollary to this dogma is that loss of information is invariably detrimental.

The problem with that dogma is that real world biology keeps finding examples that shouldn't be there. The latest is the finding that polar bears evolved from a common ancestor with brown bears by adaptations that required changes in the number of certain key genes. This was discovered by researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Natural Science.

Creationism Dogged By More Bad News

Dogs evolved a special muscle that lets them make puppy dog eyes | New Scientist

Creationists are probably used to ignoring yet another example of a 'non-existent' fossil showing intermediate or 'transitional' features between an ancestral and a descendant species. If not, they should be since these turn up with monotonous regularity.

A little more unusual are those examples of another of their 'non-existent' feature of biological evolution - new structure.

So, today's news gives creationists another fact to ignore and proclaim not to be there - domestic dogs have a structure which is not found in their wolf ancestors. Moreover, the mechanism by which it evolved is easy to understand in terms of how the environment selected for the ability this new structure gives dogs.

Has Creationism's Intelligent Designer Blundered?

New vulnerability found in major human viruses: Structural feature may lead to antivirals for the common cold, polio, and other pathogens -- ScienceDaily

It looks like creationism's Intelligent (sic) Designer might have blundered and built a vulnerability into some of its most annoying viruses - if you believe that creationist view of biology.

The vulnerability comes from the way viruses replicate inside cells. To enter the cell, they need to change the shape of their protein coat, so if the shape of this protein can be 'locked' they would be unable to infect cells.

Malevolent Designer News - America Gets A Special Virulent Zika Virus

Source

Are American Zika strains more virulent than Pacific and Asian strains? -- ScienceDaily

It's beginning to look like the malevolent designer, flushed with success at designing the zika virus to cause microcephaly in babies whose mothers became infected during pregnancy, then spreading it from Africa to South America, has now moved to the next level.

From the work done by a Japanese team of researchers from National Institute of Infectious Diseases, Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan, it looks like a slight tweaking of the design means that the strain of zika now spreading to North America is more virulent. The malevolent designer is planning something a little special for the southern states of the USA.

Their work was published open access in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases yesterday. The accompanying press release explains:

Christians - It's Intolerant not to Tolerate Their Intolerance

Barronelle Stutzman, Christian
Intolerable that the courts won't tolerate her intolerance.

Christian Florist Who Won’t Sell Flowers for Gay Weddings Loses in Court Again | Hemant Mehta | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

Christians in the USA are again crying foul because a court has found against their intolerance and faith-based need to victimise, demonise and deny the rights to others that they demand for themselves.

The case involved a Washington State Christian florist who in 2013 refused to supply flowers for a same-sex marriage between Robert Ingersoll and Curt Freed, even though same-sex marriages were legal in the state. She had been prosecuted by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission in the Benton County Superior Court, and fined $1000 for discrimination. She then appealed to the Washington State Supreme Court.

Having lost in the Washington State SC, which ruled that Barronelle Stutzman, owner of Arlene’s Flowers in the city of Richland had violated the state’s anti-discrimination law and a consumer protection measure, Stutzman took the case to SCOTUS.

Religious Marriages Plummet As UK Rejects Religion

Marriages in England and Wales - Office for National Statistics

Figures for 2016, released by the UK Office for National statistics a few days ago, show rapidly changing attitudes to marriages and especially to religious marriages in England and Wales. Religion is becoming detached from the institution of marriage and playing little or no part in relationships between adults now. Marriage is quite simply not a religious institution in England and Wales anymore.

The main points were:

1. In 2016, there were 249,793 marriages in England and Wales, 1.7% more than in 2015, but 1.0% fewer than in 2014.
2. 97.2% of all marriages were between opposite-sex couples and 2.8% were between same-sex couples.
3. There were 7,019 marriages between same-sex couples in 2016, an increase of 8.1% from 2015; of these marriages, 55.7% were between female couples.
4. Marriage rates for opposite-sex couples in 2016 were lower at all ages compared with 2006, except for men aged 60 years and over and women aged 50 years and over.
5. For the first time ever, less than one-quarter (24%) of all marriages in 2016 were religious ceremonies.
6. 30 July was the most popular day to get married in 2016, with 4,742 marriages on this day.