Is God Dying? By Michael Shermer, from SciAm

Is God Dying?

The decline of religion and the rise of the “nones”

By Michael Shermer

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Image: Izhar Cohen

Since the early 20th century, with the rise of mass secular education and the diffusion of scientific knowledge through popular media, predictions of the deity's demise have fallen short, and in some cases—such as in that of the U.S.—religiosity has actually increased. This ratio is changing. According to a 2013 survey of 14,000 people in 13 nations (Germany, France, Sweden, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Israel, Canada, Brazil, India, South Korea, the U.K. and the U.S.) that was conducted by the German Bertelsmann Foundation for its Religion Monitor, there is both widespread approval for the separation of church and state, as well as a decline in religiosity over time and across generations.

In response to the statements “Only politicians who believe in God are suitable for public office” and “Leading religious figures should exercise an influence on government decisions,” even in über-religious America only 25 percent agreed with the former and 28 percent with the latter. All other countries reported lower figures (with Spain at or near the bottom at 8 and 13 percent and Germany in the middle at 10 and 21 percent, respectively). Moreover, most of the countries in the survey showed a declining trend in religiosity, especially among the youth. In Spain, for example, 85 percent of respondents older than 45 reported being moderately to very religious, but only 58 percent of those younger than 29 said they were. In Europe in general, only 30 to 50 percent said that religion is important in their own lives.

Why the decline? One factor is the dramatic spread of democracy around the globe over the past half a century. Most people surveyed agreed that democracy is a good form of government, with no differences across religious faiths. One of the features of a democracy is the disentanglement of the sacred from the secular because in religiously pluralistic countries no one can legitimately claim special status by faith membership. Democracies also have higher literacy rates and mass education that lead to a tolerance for the beliefs of others that, in turn, lowers the absolutism most religions in the past required, thus undermining the truth claims of any one religion over others.

A second factor is the opening up of economic borders, such as between member nations of the European Union, which replaces zero-sum religious tribalism with nonzero financial exchange. Free trade and the division of labor constitute the greatest generator of wealth in history, and according to the Religion Monitor report using the survey data, “socio-economic well-being generally results in a decline in the social significance of religion in society and a decrease in the numbers of people who base their life praxis on religious norms and rules.” Why? One of the social functions of religion is to help the poor, so as a country's impoverished declines (and, as in Sweden and other European countries, government social programs aid the poor), so, too, does religiosity. And because the middle classes of most countries are growing from the youth up, that could explain the report's assessment that “almost all the countries in the study … exhibit a decline in the centrality and significance of religion for daily life from one generation to another. As a general rule, the younger people are, the lower their religiosity.”

Nevertheless, the authors caution about drawing the Nietzschean conclusion that God is dead: “This does not mean that religiosity and religious behaviour have vanished or will vanish completely from people's lives: between 40% and 80% of European citizens exhibit at least a medium degree of religious belief according to the centrality index of religiosity.” Still, the trend is unmistakable in another statistic from the study. The percentage of people who said that they are “not religious or not very religious” is significant, and the figure for the U.S. (around 31 percent) matches that of other studies.

A 2012 Pew Research Center survey, for example, found that the fastest-growing religious cohort in America are the “nones” (those with no religious affiliation) at 20 percent (32 percent of adults younger than 30), broken down into atheists and agnostics at 6 percent and the unaffiliated at 14 percent. The raw numbers are staggering: with the U.S. adult population (age 18 and older) at 240 million, this figure translates into 48 million nones, or 14.4 million atheists/agnostics and 33.6 million unaffiliated. That's a powerful voting block.

Bill Requiring Drug Tests For Welfare Recipients Passed

Opposing Views

Bill passed requiring drug tests for welfare recipients.

Bill Requiring Drug Tests For Welfare Recipients Passed

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A bill that would require drug testing for welfare recipients has been passed by...

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  David J Strumfels Look -- why don't we just accept where all this is leading to and do it: drug testing for all Americans, no exceptions, with your citizenship & rights stripped if you fail, say, two in a row. And by drugs I of course mean alcohol and nicotine too. Hey, Right is Right and Wrong is Wrong, right? -- I mean, you know what I mean.

  Like · Reply · about a minute ago
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  John Patrick Martin What about drug testing for elected officials?

  Unlike · Reply · 59 · 20 minutes ago
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  Patric Kahla That would be a good idea.If they fail a drug test, there out. And pay all money paid back to the people.

  Like · 4 · 16 minutes ago · Edited
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  Cecil Sadler Hell Yes Good Idea

  Like · 1 · 17 minutes ago
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  John Patrick Martin They make a lot more than foodstamp recipients do, ,and they seem to like blow, , ,A LOT!!

  Like · 4 · 16 minutes ago
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  Roger Rector wouldnt be many could pass i bet-lot of vacant seats in washington

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  Amy Hopple that did not pass

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  Beverly Nespal Very smart move.

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Universe May Have Been Around Since Forever, According to Rainbow Gravity Theory

Posted by Greg Kestin on Fri, 13 Dec 2013

When did the clock of the universe start ticking? For decades we’ve believed that 13.8 billion years ago the Big Bang set the universe’s clock in motion. While that’s still the prevailing viewpoint, researchers are now exploring a theory called “rainbow gravity” that, if correct, does away with the Big Bang. In a “rainbow” universe, the clock has been ticking forever.
Behind the scenes of the Big Bang is Einstein’s theory of general relativity. But there’s a problem. Einstein’s theory is at odds with quantum mechanics, the theory of tiny particles. Rainbow gravity was proposed to reconcile the two, and if it were correct, the universe would have no beginning—there is no big treasure at the foot of this “rainbow” because the “rainbow” universe goes back forever.

According to the theory of rainbow gravity, the force of gravity would split a source's electromagnetic radiation into different wavelengths, just like a prism does with visible white light.

Why is it called rainbow gravity? Because according to the theory, gravity becomes a cosmological prism that can separate different colors of light. Our eyes can’t see that—when we gaze longingly into the night sky, the stars’ white light appears to have streamed smoothly to our eyes. If rainbow gravity is right though, light’s path through outer-space may be more like the famous Pink Floyd poster, where the different colors become spread apart.
So, why don’t we see rainbow stars? Clara Moskowitz, writing for Scientific American, tells us more:

The effects would usually be tiny, so that we wouldn’t notice the difference in most observations of stars, galaxies and other cosmic phenomena. But with extreme energies, in the case of particles emitted by stellar explosions called gamma-ray bursts, for instance, the change might be detectable. In such situations photons of different wavelengths released by the same gamma-ray burst would reach Earth at slightly different times, after traveling somewhat altered courses through billions of light-years of time and space. “So far we have no conclusive evidence that this is going on,” says Giovanni Amelino-Camelia, a physicist at the Sapienza University of Rome who has researched the possibility of such signals. Modern observatories, however, are just now gaining the sensitivity needed to measure these effects, and should improve in coming years.

Rainbow gravity may just be an illusion, a pretty idea that makes science a bit more colorful. But soon we may find out if we’re living in an infinitely old rainbow universe.

Learn more about other alternative theories in "Fabric of the Cosmos: Universe or Multiverse?"

Tell us what you think on Twitter #novanext, Facebook, or email.

Photo credit: wonderferret/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

New York: The Front of All Fracking Opposition

Posted on December 13, 2013 by Tom Shepstone

Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.
 
Catskill Citizens for Safe Energy is again using Pennsylvania residents as foils in a campaign against fracking in New York, the font of fracking opposition.


Sometimes, I fear readers will think this site is too New York centric, but the truth is this; the bulk of the fracking opposition, whether it takes place in Colorado, California, Texas or the UK (where Dimock is a well known name) is, ultimately, all about New York.  It is primarily New York money that funds most anti-fracking campaigns.  It is New York based organizations who lead the effort. It is New York activists who gin up the controversy wherever it occurs.  No further proof of this is needed than the continued exploitation of Pennsylvania residents, both pro and con, by a group known as Catskill Citizens for Safe Energy.

Who is this Catskill Citizens for Safe Energy? Well, it’s mostly a collection of fairly well-to-do New York City retirees, semi-retirees and trust-funders who have built second homes or retirement homes in the Upper Delaware valley region of Sullivan County, New York. Their address is Fremont Center, New York, where actress Debra Winger resides when she’s not in Manhattan.  Mark Rufalo lives nearby and Jennifer Lopez had a place down the road.

The prime mover in the group is a fellow named Bruce Ferguson, a retired 60 Minutes producer.  It maintains an extensive website and claims to have 1,200 members. Other directors of the organization include Jannette Barth, the art economist who poses as a fracking expert and other close friends of Ferguson.  It is registered as a charity and spent just shy of $150,000 in 2012 fighting fracking, according to its 990 return. Like so many of these organizations, it is inherently political in nature, even claiming one of its purposes to facilitate the contacting of legislators on pending legislation. Yet, it also claims to make no political expenditures. Such is the abuse of the tax-exempt status enjoyed by these groups.

This isn’t the only abuse. Catskill Citizens also, with the help of a disreputable group called the Civil Society Institute, funded by George Soros and others, mailed New Yorkers 190,000 copies of one of the trashiest anti-gas pieces we’ve ever scene. It can only be described as a pack of lies and was purely political, being aimed at encouraging New York towns to pass fracking moratoriums.  Catskill Citizens also worked with Debra Winger on a failed campaign to get second owners to register to vote in upstate New York towns and take them over on behalf of their gentry class, kicking out the locals and sued some of these towns in an attempt to bully them.

Catskill Citizens also loves using Pennsylvania residents as foils for its New York campaign. Two years ago, the organization funded an infamous billboard in Dimock, an hour away from its own base of operations. That billboard showed a dirty pitcher of water against a background of chemical names, suggesting, with no basis in fact, these chemicals had been introduced by fracking and had made the water brown. It was all a fabrication and later testing by the EPA proved it. There was nothing in the water making it unsafe or that could be connected to fracking operations and when Phelim McAleer, producer of FrackNation, asked Craig Sautner to produce dirty water from his faucet, he couldn’t. It was all another fantastic lie engendered and repeated by Catskill Citizens and others for the sole purpose of keeping fracking out of New York.

Now, they’re at it again. We just received a copy of an e-mail invitation from trial lawyer representative Craig Stevens about a rally being organized by Catskill Citizens in Franklin Forks, Pennsylvania on Monday in an attempt to stop WPX Energy from removing water buffaloes from homes placed there before the Commonwealth’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) determined methane problems in some water wells had not been caused by gas drilling. Labeled “A Grinch Christmas Christmas in Franklin Forks, PA?” the e-mail includes a distorted history of events that takes issue with the DEP findings and says to contact Catskill Citizens for more information.

 

The Franklin Forks story has been told many times and need not be retold here. Readers unfamiliar with the facts can find a nice summary here and here. Suffice it to say this is another trial lawyer hustle to collect money from a company with deep pockets, combined with a New York anti-fracking campaign. The families involved are being exploited by both. The Mannings, in particular, have been used by Yoko Ono and friends, and now Catskill Citizens, for no other purpose than grabbing attention and lending credibility to their New York fight.

The Mannings probably could have had their well repaired long ago as a courtesy from the gas company, but were convinced to go for the big kill and sue, despite overwhelming evidence drilling had nothing to do with it. They have been encouraged to give continued life to a story that only serves others’ objectives, reducing themselves to role-playing in juvenile acts of attention seeking by the likes of Vera Scroggins and Catskill Citizens.

We see this routine played out over and over again as New York based groups seek out event opportunities everywhere they can in the world to generate controversy and negative press for fracking. Plainly put, they’re simply users. When the blood is sucked out of this little controversy, they’ll simply move onto the next and the Mannings won’t even rise to the level of distant memory for them. If they really cared, they’d raise the money to fix the Manning water well, which only has a mechanical problem caused by flooding a few years ago.  A solution isn’t what’s desired, however, by these groups.  They want the issue and they created the box the Mannings are now in, having encouraged them to sue.

This takes us back to the last time Catskill Citizens and its New York allies interjected themselves into a Susquehanna County matter. That involved the Sautners, who were exploited in a very similar way by trial lawyers and New York fractivists before EPA testing brought the whole charade to a merciful end. Who can forget the scene in FrackNation where Julie Sautner, while threatening Phelim McAleer with the fact she had a gun, said she’d sic the NRDC on him? She obviously thought the NRDC was there for her when needed and, no doubt, had the same view of Catskill Citizens, which gave her the billboard screen, after it was taken down, to place on her roof. Does anyone think the NRDC would take her call today?

Nothing is stopping the NRDC from still talking about the Sautners and their case but their name has, nonetheless, disappeared into that dustbin of history. They are no longer useful foils for the New York campaign and so they’ve been sloughed off.  That fate awaits the Mannings as well.  It will all end with a dull and imperceptible thud when they are no longer useful in supposedly demonstrating the dangers of fracking to New Yorkers.  Catskill Citizens, NRDC, et al will then seek out new foils, because New York is the font of all fracking opposition.

Politically Motivated "Environmental" Groups and Democratic Allies on KeystoneXL

By Kate Sheppard   
 

 Democrats Ask Obama To Postpone Keystone XL Decision Amid Conflict Of Interest Probe         

Posted: 12/12/2013 4:24 pm EST 

David Strumfels comments (so far):

Of course the oil companies (or some) are going to make a ton of money from KeystoneXL  That doesn't mean it automatically hurts us, or that it must be unsafe, or that scientists and scientific organizations (and the Friends of the Earth are not one) are corrupted by them (very insulting!) or that the economy won't strongly benefit from it.  We send oil all around the country in pipelines, whose total mileage vastly exceed XL and there doesn't seem to be any significant problems.  It is the safest way to transport oil.  Nor is this about the State Department as well, which is just one player in this "game", and hasn't done anything wrong to even warrant "investigation -- read "witch hunt") by government or anyone else.  Of course you're going to hire experts in a scientific/technical area to evaluate its safety; and in this case, that certainly means have to some degree worked for the oil business -- do you believe that Obama is going to find more qualified people to evaluate them?  Anyway, Canada is going to pump the tar sands out and transport, even if to their own ports for sales overseas.  And if the naysayers would bother to check facts, they would find other assessments that indicate this pipeline (and the operations in general) don't represent a significant threat to the environment and is basically as safe as the other thousands of miles of pipelines built in North America.  The attacks on pipeline supporters are mostly innuendo, combined with exaggerated claims of dangers -- there is no justification for any probes or serious investigations whatever.

                    

 

Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) is one of 25 House Democrats who sent a letter to President Barack Obama on Thursday urging him to delay a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline until the State Department's Inspector General completes an investigation into conflict of interest concerns related to a contractor that developed the assessment of the pipeline's environmental impact. | ASSOCIATED PRESS

                            

WASHINGTON –- Twenty-five House Democrats sent a letter to President Barack Obama on Thursday urging him to delay a decision on Keystone XL until the State Department's Inspector General finishes investigating the contractor that completed the environmental analysis of the proposed pipeline.

Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, took the lead on the letter expressing "serious concerns about conflicts of interest" related to the consulting firm that authored the most recent environmental impact analysis, which downplayed environmental and safety concerns. As The Huffington Post has previously reported, after contractor Environmental Resources Management wrote the report on Keystone XL, it was discovered that some of the consultants involved in the analysis had done previous work for the company seeking to build the pipeline, TransCanada. They had also done work for a TransCanada subsidiary and for other oil companies that could benefit from the pipeline's construction. Documents released via a Freedom of Information Act Request showed that the company had not disclosed the previous work in its conflict of interest statement.

ERM's supplemental environmental impact statement, released last March, found that the environmental effects of the pipeline are "expected to be rare and relatively small." A final version of the report has not yet been released, but will inform the State Department's ultimate decision on the pipeline. Because the proposed 1,600-mile pipeline from Alberta, Canada to Texas crosses an international border, State will make the call on whether or not it gets built.

Environmental groups asked the State Department's Office of Inspector General to look into whether the contractors' previous work for TransCanada should have been considered a conflict of interest. The IG's analysis is still underway. Doug Welty, a spokesman for the IG's office, told The Huffington Post Thursday that his office expects to release the report at the end of January, sooner than the previous estimate of late February.

The members of Congress wrote Thursday that it "would be unwise and premature" for the State Department to release a final environmental impact analysis from ERM while the investigation is ongoing. The letter also accuses the company of "lying to federal officials about its ties to TransCanada and over a dozen oil companies with a direct stake in whether or not Keystone XL gets approved." From the letter:

The Department of State apparently overlooked these conflicts when it accepted Environmental Resources Management’s (ERM) bid to perform the analysis. Because of the seriousness of the conflicts and because of allegations that ERM lied to the Department of State to get the contract, we believe no EIS from the company – draft or final – should be accepted by the administration before these issues are resolved.

The IG's office had already looked into conflict of interest concerns regarding another contractor, Cardno Entrix, after environmental advocates pointed out that the company had done quite a bit of previous work for TransCanada. That IG report concluded that hiring Cardno Entrix had not created an actual conflict of interest, but it dinged the State Department for failing to independently evaluate the contractor's claim that it had no conflicts and for "accepting them at face value."

The lawmakers urged the White House to wait for the outcome of this latest investigation before making any decisions on the pipeline. "If the allegations that ERM lied to the Department of State about its conflicts of interest turn out to be true the Department of State must conduct a new [environmental impact statement] that is not tainted by conflicts of interest," they wrote.