Richard Dawkins

It wasn't the first time that Doron Matalon had been verbally harassed on the way home. A young soldier, she had boarded a bus on Wednesday not far from the military base where she served. Shortly before reaching her stop, a 45-year-old man accosted her and demanded that she move to the back of the bus.

The man was demanding that Matalon comply with unwritten rules prescribed by ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel, decrees which require women to sit at the back of the bus or use different pedestrian routes or sidewalks than men do. Matalon, however, had no intention of abiding by the edicts and refused to move -- out of principle as she told the Israeli daily Haaretz. And because the back of the bus was stuffy. The man immediately began insulting Matalon, calling her a whore, and others quickly joined in the harassment.

The bus driver stopped and called the police. The man, a father of 11, was arrested and charged on Thursday before being released against a bond worth the equivalent of €4,000 ($5,200). He is not allowed to ride the bus until his court date.

It is just a single incident, but it shows a growing rift in Israeli society. Just 10 percent of the 6 million people in Israel are ultra-Orthodox, and a percentage of that group is extreme and militant. It is a small minority, but extremely vocal, and becoming more so. Whereas Tel Aviv is almost radically Western and secular, the ultra-Orthodox are attempting to impose their worldview -- a primary element of which is gender separation -- on the public life of an ever greater number of places within the country.

Dumpsters on Fire

On Thursday evening, the Haredi, as the ultra-Orthodox are known, had planned a demonstration in the town of Beit Shemesh, just west of Jerusalem, in order to promote their brand of social order. When it was cancelled at the last minute, riots ensued. Garbage dumpsters were lit on fire, several demonstrators threw stones and three were arrested. No injuries were reported.

Even prior to the Thursday evening incident, the town had become something of a symbol of the societal clash. On Tuesday, thousands of Israelis took to the streets in protest against a recent incident in the town which saw an eight-year-old girl spat on and insulted by ultra-Orthodox men on her way to school because they considered her clothing to be insufficiently modest. "Israel is not Tehran," read some of the signs held by the protesters. Prior to the protest, President Shimon Peres had urged widespread participation.

Incidents of harassment have not been limited to the Israeli hinterlands. Women in Jerusalem too have been bombarded with stones or spittle for not wearing long enough skirts or for not covering their heads. Indeed, even religious Jews have begun to resist the trend. Just a few weeks ago, a rabbi called Uri Ayalon began a media campaign after he noticed that even modest advertising campaigns have been altered such that women are no longer shown -- replaced either by objects or by male models.

"It is the first time in the history of the Israeli state that something like this has happened," Sergio DellaPergola, a professor of demography and Jewish history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. In recent days, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that such intimidation of women is unacceptable. Israel, he told the country's parliament on Wednesday, will take action "against anyone who harasses women, anyone who harasses people in the public sphere."

The recent clashes, however, put Netanyahu in a difficult position. Religious parties are a key part of his conservative governing coalition and his political survival depends in part on the ultra-Orthodox. DellaPergola calls the extreme-religious the "decisive 10 percent."

Read more

"Coming out" now may be a clichéd term, but as the "We Are Atheism" project has shown, it hasn't entirely lost its currency. The new organization encourages others to be open about their atheism, an act that is more than a confession; it holds the real risk of losing family and friends.

By affirming "it's OK to be an atheist" and encouraging video testimony from those who have already made the journey out into the open, "We Are Atheism" hopes to help others do the same. There are, however, serious hurdles for the no-longer-closeted to overcome.

According to the recent Public Religion Research Institute's "2011 American Values Survey," 67 percent of Americans are "somewhat uncomfortable" with the idea of an atheist as president, with 48 percent being "very uncomfortable." Muslims fare better here than atheists, and in the current political climate, that's saying something.

Even more shocking, a recent study by the University of British Columbia showed that when it comes to trust and atheism, "only rapists were distrusted to a comparable degree."

Being an open atheist, then, is a path toward marginalization.

Read more

via Mark Frauenfelder at BoingBoing

I have tried with friends to say the most blasphemous sentence I can possibly say and it does not come close to the blasphemy of Michelle Bachman saying that earthquakes and hurricanes were the way God was trying to get the attention of politicians.

Penn Jillette: An Atheist's Guide to the 2012 Election

Mmm... hot hot Darwin porn, as banned by the Turkish government

Worrying news from Turkey, where a government body has moved to block sites that mention evolution or Charles Darwin.

The Council of Information Technology and Communications (BTK) released the "Secure Internet" filtering system on 22 November. Sites that includes the words "evolution" or "Darwin" are filtered if parents select the child-friendly settings on the filter, as though it's porn. Among the sites banned, according to Reporters Without Borders, is Richard Dawkins' website richarddawkins.net. The homepage of Adnan Oktar, an Islamic creationist, is still accessible. The system has already attracted controversy: apparently it bans terms linked with the Kurdish separatist movement, and Reporters Without Borders has accused the Turkish government of "backdoor censorship".

As New Scientist reported in 2009, Turkey is something of a centre for Islamic creationism. The editor of a popular science magazine, Bilim ve Teknik, was sacked that year after trying to run a front-page article celebrating Darwin's 200th birthday. The aforementioned Oktar, under his pen name of Harun Yahya, claims in large, lavishly illustrated books that evolution is a "disproved" theory (just for the record: it isn't. It's the absolute cornerstone of everything in biology, without which nothing makes sense) imposed by Western imperialists to keep Muslims in their place. A 2006 survey of 34 countries put Turkey 34th, just behind the US, in the rate of popular acceptance of evolution.

Read more

Almost 2 years ago, Richard Dawkins and Elisabeth Cornwell asked me to deliver a lecture for the RDFRS at the AAI convention in Burbank California. I was happy to do that, but even happier to discover the reaction that followed. Much to my surprise, once RDFRS posted it to YouTube it became something of a hit, and now has over a million views. Almost a year later several friends of mine who had seen the lecture suggested I consider a book on the subject, and after discussing it with Leslie Meredith at Simon and Schuster's Free Press, the die was cast. I was very happy to have the opportunity to extend the discussions I gave in the lecture, and add significant background material describing the underlying science. Equally important I wanted to address and refine the key question of creation from nothing that I had been thinking about at length following the lecture, and also following several debates with theologians and the like. The last three chapters of the book focus on this. Upon completing the book, I asked my good friend RIchard to write the afterword, and he responded with a remarkably beautiful and insightful piece, which I am very happy that my publisher agreed to let us share on this site as a preview of the book. Unfortunately, our good friend Christopher Hitchens, who had agreed to write a foreword, became too ill to complete it, and died shortly after the book went to press. While we all mourn his passing, I am hoping that this book, and our other activities, will help carry on in some small way his remarkable legacy of skepticism, reason, and humanity. I am, in any case, very happy to have this opportunity to thank Richard and Elisabeth for helping me create something from nothing, and I hope you enjoy his afterword, and the book that accompanies it.

Lawrence Krauss

Afterword

by Richard Dawkins

Nothing expands the mind like the expanding universe. The music of the spheres is a nursery rhyme, a jingle to set against the majestic chords of the Symphonie Galactica. Changing the metaphor and the dimension, the dusts of centuries, the mists of what we presume to call “ancient” history, are soon blown off by the steady, eroding winds of geological ages. Even the age of the universe, accurate—so Lawrence Krauss assures us—to the fourth signi!cant !gure at 13.72 billion years, is dwarfed by the trillennia that are to come.

But Krauss’s vision of the cosmology of the remote future is paradoxical and frightening. Scienti!c progress is likely to go into reverse. We naturally think that, if there are cosmologists in the year 2 trillion "#, their vision of the universe will be expanded over ours. Not so—and this is one of the many shattering conclusions I take away on closing this book. Give or take a few billion years, ours is a very propitious time to be a cosmologist. Two trillion years hence, the universe will have expanded so far that all galaxies but the cosmologist’s own (whichever one it happens to be) will have receded behind an Einsteinian horizon so absolute, so inviolable, that they are not only invisible but beyond all possibility of leaving a trace, however indirect. They might as well never have existed. Every trace of the Big Bang will most likely have gone, forever and beyond recovery. The cosmologists of the future will be cut off from their past, and from their situation, in a way that we are not.
Read more

'A Universe From Nothing' by Lawrence Krauss, AAI 2009

Releases January 10th and available for advance purchase now. Purchasing via the links below helps support RDFRS

Amazon.com - US hardcover release 10 Jan, 2012
Amazon.com - audio CD
Amazon.com - Kindle edition
Amazon.co.uk - UK hardcover release 16 Feb, 2012
Amazon.co.uk - MP3 CD
Amazon.co.uk - Kindle edition

Christopher Hitchens said there was one goal he most wanted to achieve. The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science US offers "Six Way to Reframe Secular Issues and Strategy" and, in this presentation, connects the Vision for a Secular America to serving the goal Christopher Hitchens articulated.

Sean Faircloth is the author of the book "Attack of the Theocrats, How the Religious Right Harms Us All and What We Can Do About It." Faircloth serves as Director of Strategy & Policy for the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science US.

For further information and to purchase an advance copy of Sean's book including a free DVD click here or the image below

Contest Rules
[Update 12/30]
This speech places the Ten Point vision in the context of an overall secular strategy.

If you would like a free DVD of Sean's speech introducing Richard Dawkins in Lynchburg KY and videos of Sean discussing each of the chapters of his book as well as summary video please just send an e-mail to store@richarddawkins.net with "Free DVD" in the subject line and your mailing address. If you are placing an order with the store just add a note to include the DVD and we'll ship it with your order.

[Update 12/22]
Win Dinner with Richard Dawkins - YouTube Thunderf00t

Details about how you upload your submission will be provided in January. There will be no further creative instructions other than what is visible on this page and in the FAQs linked here:

Is the video supposed to go over each of the ten points?

Not necessarily. However, the ten point vision underscores the pervasiveness of the problem and the breadth of the vision of a Secular American. The entry should do so as well. Your submission should rally people to the Ten Point Vision as a catalyst for unity and social action in a context that presents secularism as a movement in a positive light, but that doesn’t necessarily mean quoting each point verbatim. It’s up to you how you do it. Your submission should persuade and spark organizational effort for a uniting and optimistic vision.

What approach should be taken to as to tone (humor, an earnest plea, etc) and production technique (video, still image etc)?

It’s up to you. Be creative. This can be done implicitly or explicitly, but it must be done effectively. Your submission can use drama, humor, still images, moving images, images from the speech video. It’s your choice.

Finalist submissions will be selected based on their ability to:

1) persuade a broader public and

2) inspire organizing and action in our secular movement.

Production values: Video submissions must be less than five minutes long. Still images suitable and sized for Facebook or other websites will also be accepted. Regardless of the format, each submission will be judged on the likelihood to have broad appeal and to be moving or entertaining.

Are there any examples or other videos that have been submitted?

No. All contestants start from the same place. The additional information to be provided in January will only be regarding the method of uploading. No additional creative instructions will be provided. Once finalists are selected, they will be presented on the website for a public vote on the winner.

Update - link to original contest posting, thanks for posting below Miranda.

Farewell, great voice. Great voice of reason, of humanity, of humour. Great voice against cant, against hypocrisy, against obscurantism and pretension, against all tyrants including God. Farewell, great warrior. You were in a foxhole, Hitch, and you did not flinch. Farewell, great example to us all.
Richard

VANITY FAIR'S TRIBUTE

Christopher Hitchens—the incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant—died today at the age of 62. Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in the spring of 2010, just after the publication of his memoir, Hitch-22, and began chemotherapy soon after. His matchless prose has appeared in Vanity Fair since 1992, when he was named contributing editor.

“Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic,” Hitchens wrote nearly a year ago in Vanity Fair, but his own final labors were anything but: in the last 12 months, he produced for this magazine a piece on U.S.-Pakistani relations in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, a portrait of Joan Didion, an essay on the Private Eye retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a prediction about the future of democracy in Egypt, a meditation on the legacy of progressivism in Wisconsin, and a series of frank, graceful, and exquisitely written essays in which he chronicled the physical and spiritual effects of his disease. At the end, Hitchens was more engaged, relentless, hilarious, observant, and intelligent than just about everyone else—just as he had been for the last four decades.

“My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends,” he wrote in the June 2011 issue. He died in their presence, too, at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. May his 62 years of living, well, so livingly console the many of us who will miss him dearly.

Original Vanity Fair article

A selection of videos of Christopher Hitchens on our website can be found here. These are a combination of videos featuring him and videos submitted by others about him.

A great YouTube collection The Best of the Hitchslap

Christopher Eric Hitchens was an English author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career spanned more than four decades. He was a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the Hoover Institution in September 2008. He was a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits and in 2005 was voted the world's fifth top public intellectual in a Prospect/Foreign Policy poll. He was a champion for atheism, skepticism, science, history and common sense. He will be sorely missed.

The chimps made soft "hoo" sounds to warn individuals that had not seen the threat

Chimpanzees appear to consider who they are "talking to" before they call out.

Researchers found that wild chimps that spotted a poisonous snake were more likely to make their "alert call" in the presence of a chimp that had not seen the threat.

This indicates that the animals "understand the mindset" of others.

The insight into the primates' remarkable intelligence will be published in the journal Current Biology.

The University of St Andrews scientists, who carried out the work, study primate communication to uncover some of the origins of human language.

To find out how the animals "talked to each other" about potential threats, they placed plastic snakes - models of rhino and gaboon vipers - into the paths of wild chimpanzees and monitored the primates' reactions.

"These [snake species] are well camouflaged and they have a deadly bite," explained Dr Catherine Crockford from University of St Andrews, who led the research.

"They also tend to sit in one place for weeks. So if a chimp discovers a snake, it makes sense for that animal to let everyone else know where [it] is."

Read on

Richard Dawkins will be giving a live interview on Sky News today, Saturday 17 December, at 1.30 pm GMT, in response to David Cameron's claim that Britain is a Christian country.

It will be available to watch, live, via this link or, if you are in the UK and have Freeview, on Channel 82 (thanks to Hemidemisemigod for the Freeview tip!)