Why atheism will replace religion

An interesting article from Psychology Today website:

The reasons that churches lose ground in developed countries can be summarized in market terms. First, with better science, and with government safety nets, and smaller families, there is less fear and uncertainty in people’s daily lives and hence less of a market for religion. At the same time many alternative products are being offered, such as psychotropic medicines and electronic entertainment that have fewer strings attached and that do not require slavish conformity to unscientific beliefs.

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Now it’s ‘Everybody Deny the Holocaust Day

Another good article by Michael Peck of True Slant.

This is how you payback the unbelievers. Some Muslims, furious at the “Everybody Draw Muhammed Day”, are retaliating with an “Everybody Draw the Holocaust Day”.

Of course, what the author of this Facebook page really means is an Everybody Deny the Holocaust Day, which will teach the infidels not to draw Muhammed in a bear suit. His semi-coherent manifesto seems to be that if people have the right to draw the Prophet Muhammed, then they have the right to question the existence of the Holocaust.

He is correct. We can’t defend the right to satire a religious figure and yet bar the right to deny the Holocaust, as some European states do (frequently the ones who directly or indirectly supported the genocide). However, what is fascinating here is the moral equivalence. Outraged at the “insult” to his religion, this fundamentalist won’t strike back by drawing a cartoon of Jesus or mocking atheists. He’s going to do it by denying the Holocaust. Since in his mind, Jews control the world, then question the Holocaust and the Elders of Zion will pull a few levers to make the cartoons stop. Because this is exactly the kind of world that a fundamentalist understands and desires. A cleric decides what is sacred and what is profane, which cartoons are permitted and which are not. There is no dissent.

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The Ten Most Disturbing Scientific Discoveries

An interesting article from the Smithsonian website.

Science can be glorious; it can bring clarity to a chaotic world. But big scientific discoveries are by nature counterintuitive and sometimes shocking.

Here are ten of the biggest threats to our peace of mind.

1. The Earth is not the center of the universe.
2. The microbes are gaining on us.
3. There have been mass extinctions in the past, and we’re probably in one now.
4. Things that taste good are bad for you.
5. E=mc²
6. Your mind is not your own.
7. We’re all apes
8. Cultures throughout history and around the world have engaged in ritual human sacrifice.
9. We’ve already changed the climate for the rest of this century.
10. The universe is made of stuff we can barely begin to imagine.

Obviously you'll need to read the article to find out the details. Enjoy.

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UK 'will push EU on CO2 targets'

The UK government will push the EU to move to a higher target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. It will urge the EU to cut emissions by 30% from 1990 levels by 2020, rather than the current 20% target, partly through more support for renewables.

A higher proportion of tax revenues will come from environmental taxes.

In 2009, EU leaders endorsed two targets for greenhouse gas emissions - 20%, rising to 30% in the event of a global deal on climate change.

That failed to materialise at December's Copenhagen summit.

But the recession has lowered emissions across the continent, making the higher target more easily achievable.

Environment groups have been lobbying governments to move to 30% immediately, to re-stake the EU's claim for global leadership on climate change - a call that the coalition has now endorsed.

Only problem is the conservative-Lib Dem coalition also confirmed there would be a free vote on fox-hunting and that badger culling was back on the agenda for England

10 Misconceptions About Neanderthals

As of 2009, the complete Neanderthal genome has been mapped. The most important implication of this is that it now becomes technically possible to clone a Neanderthal – to raise them back from the dead so to speak. The current estimated cost of doing this is $30 million US and no one is putting up the cash. There are ethical questions that are always going to be raised regarding cloning and this is also a hindrance. But there is absolutely no reason not to believe that we will – one day – be able to give birth to and raise a Neanderthal (or at least the closest thing possible to one).

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Anti-gay laws in Africa are product of American religious exports

When he arrived at Kampala’s Hotel Triangle for a three-day conference, the Rev Kapya Kaoma knew that he would not like what he heard.

The clue was in the event’s title — “Exposing the truth behind homosexuality and the homosexual agenda” — and in the line-up of guest speakers arranged by Stephen Langa, head of the Ugandan-based Family Life Network (FLN), and an outspoken advocate for the criminalisation of homosexuality in Uganda.

Given top billing at the event hosted by the FLN was Scott Lively, president of Abiding Truth Ministries, an American conservative Christian group from California, and a Holocaust revisionist whose controversial book The Pink Swastika names homosexuals as “the true inventors of Nazism and the guiding force behind many Nazi atrocities.”

Weeks after the Kampala conference in March last year — which followed a meeting between the speakers and members of the Ugandan Parliament — a clause appeared in the country’s draft Anti-Homosexuality Bill recommending life imprisonment for certain homosexual “crimes” or, for “serial offenders”, the death sentence.

To Mr Kaoma, an Anglican priest from Zambia who is project director of Political Research Associates — a Massachusetts-based progressive think-tank — it was further evidence of how America’s Christian Right has stoked intolerance to homosexuality in Africa.

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Cameron, Clegg and...chimps?

An interesting article from Anjana Ahuja of the TimesOnline.co.uk website's Eureka Zone section on British Politics and how our common ancestors with Chimpanzee's have been doing the same thing for millions of years.

By bringing their two tribes together, David Cameron and Nick Clegg are hardly making history. They might be partners in the first coalition government that Britain has seen for 65 years but they are, in fact, practising a behaviour that dates back more than five million years.

It was mainly thanks to the Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal that psychologists discovered that people don't have the monopoly on forming coalitions. His pioneering observations at Arnhem Zoo, summarised in his 1982 classic Chimpanzee Politics, showed that chimpanzees can be as artful as politicians in orchestrating tactical partnerships and strategic alliances. This has led primatologists and others to conclude that the ability to form coalitions goes back at least as far as the common ancestor of humans and chimps, giving it a provenance of five to seven million years.

In hierarchical chimp colonies, governed by an alpha male, lower-ranking males sometimes gang up to depose the alpha. In fact, these colonies often form a landscape of constantly shifting alliances, with deposed alphas returning later to seize the throne once more. Interestingly, female chimps also form their own alliances to keep overly domineering male counterparts in check, and sometimes to aid the underdog as the colony reconfigures itself

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