Eideard

A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction, say researchers.

The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation.

The team’s mathematical model attempts to account for the interplay between the number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one. The result, reported at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, US, indicates that religion will all but die out altogether in those countries.

The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland…

Dr Wiener continued: “In a large number of modern secular democracies, there’s been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion; in the Netherlands the number was 40%, and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic, where the number was 60%.”

The team then applied their nonlinear dynamics model, adjusting parameters for the relative social and utilitarian merits of membership of the “non-religious” category.

They found…that those parameters were similar across all the countries studied, suggesting that similar behaviour drives the mathematics in all of them. And in all the countries, the indications were that religion was headed toward extinction.

However, Dr Wiener told the conference that the team was working to update the model with a “network structure” more representative of the one at work in the world.

“Obviously we don’t really believe this is the network structure of a modern society, where each person is influenced equally by all the other people in society,” he said. However, he told BBC News that he thought it was “a suggestive result”.

Overdue. Not that I think philosophical idealism will vanish. We have a few too many genes that need to update before that could happen. But, so-called organized religion appears to be working as diligently as possible to become a force for regressive, even reactionary behavior. Probably, because those who profit the most from incumbency fear the only way to maintain power and profit is by drawing back into fundamentalism for protection.

Since the study concerned educated secular democracies, the United States obviously has little need to fear a change.

A survey of scientists studying stem cells suggests that the absence of clear federal regulations governing the use of embryonic stem cells and uncertainty over funding for stem cell research…

According to the survey, published…in the journal Cell Stem Cell, nearly half of the scientists questioned who study embryonic stem cells or are considering using the cells said that the climate of uncertainty has had a substantial impact on their research. Many said they had delayed the start of new projects or were considering moving away from the field altogether. While many experts in the field had predicted these negative outcomes, the survey is one of the first efforts to systematically assess the effects of U.S. policy regarding stem-cell research…

Embryonic stem cells are considered one of the most promising tools for regenerative medicine, especially as a source of replacement tissue, thanks to their ability to replicate themselves and to grow into any cell type in the human body. But the topic has been fraught with controversy because deriving new lines of embryonic stem cells requires the destruction of human embryos.

Stem-cell researchers experienced a brief bout of optimism two years ago when President Obama signed an executive order ending a restrictive policy enacted in 2001 by President Bush. That policy had blocked federal funds from being used to study most human embryonic stem cells and led to a patchwork of state regulations governing funding for the field. Current federal policy permits federal funding for research using existing cells but not the derivation of new cells.

The optimism came to an unexpected end last August when a federal judge issued an injunction blocking federal funding for any research involving embryonic stem cells, pending the result of a lawsuit claiming such funding to be illegal. As a result, research and grant reviews at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the nation’s largest biomedical funding agency, came to a halt, and scientists who had federal funds were left wondering what to do. The Obama administration successfully appealed the injunction in September, but ongoing uncertainty over the timing and outcome of the lawsuit means that confusion remains.

The absurdity of a nation with a self-professed history of freedoms having to waste funds and years fiddling in court with 19th Century moralizers is more than frustrating. It looks like researchers who picked up and left the country with the advent of the Bush Taliban controlling the Republican Party may have made the safe choice.

Though mainstream religions kept an easy truce between church and state for decades, the assumption of a mantle of infallibility among the fearful who have crawled into the bosom of fundamentalist demagogues – has constructed a wall of fire and brimstone between essential civil service and the ranks of scientists, educators and scholars. The latter didn’t set out to spend their career explaining the Age of Reason all over again to ignorant opportunist politicians every four to eight years.

You thought I was joking about the snake oil?

The company that produces Boob Job cream has been accused of being a “charlatan and a bully” for using libel laws to silence a plastic surgeon who criticised its product.

Rodial, which claims its cosmetic cream can increase a woman’s breast size by up to 8%, threatened to sue Dalia Nield after she said the product’s claim was “highly unlikely”.

Nield is being represented by Robert Dougans, the lawyer who also acted for science writer Simon Singh after he faced a similar libel for comments he wrote about the British Chiropractic Association.

But speaking in the house of commons yesterday, Conservative MP David Davis said that the ability of companies such as Rodial to use libel law against critics was a violation of ancient principles of English law.

“[Rodial's threat] would be ludicrous, bordering on the farcical, were it not so serious in its wider implications,” said Davis.

“It is a disgraceful tactic, and it should not be possible under a decently balanced judicial system…”

Yesterday, the supreme court made significant changes to the defence of “fair comment”, invoked by defendants in libel cases to show their criticisms are honestly-held views based on fact.

There is a slim chance that before this century is out British common law will have entered the last half of the previous century.

Americans are by all measures a deeply religious people, but they are also deeply ignorant about religion.

Researchers from the independent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life phoned more than 3,400 Americans and asked them 32 questions about the Bible, Christianity and other world religions, famous religious figures and the constitutional principles governing religion in public life.

On average, people who took the survey answered half the questions incorrectly, and many flubbed even questions about their own faith.

Those who scored the highest were atheists and agnostics, as well as two religious minorities: Jews and Mormons…“Even after all these other factors, including education, are taken into account, atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons still outperform all the other religious groups in our survey,” said Greg Smith, a senior researcher at Pew.

That finding might surprise some, but not Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists, an advocacy group for nonbelievers that was founded by Madalyn Murray O’Hair.

“I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people,” Mr. Silverman said. “Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.”

No surprise to me. I’ve been an atheist since I was 13 years old, a philosophical materialist since 18.

Still does.

Two Comedy Central funnymen are apparently entering into the partisan political fray with rallies of their own in the nation’s capital.

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have set October 30 as the date for their respective rallies.

On Thursday night’s airing of “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” the comedian announced plans for a “Rally to Restore Sanity.”

“See you October 30 on the National Mall to spread the timeless message, ‘Take it down a notch for America,’ ” he said. Stewart dubbed the event a “clarion call for rationality…”

On “The Colbert Report,” which airs immediately after Stewart’s show, Colbert fired back with plans for his “March to Keep Fear Alive.”

“Now is not the time to take it down a notch. Now is the time for all good men to freak out for freedom,” Colbert said…

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Up until last summer, Jennifer Gray of Columbus, Ohio, considered herself “a weak Christian” whose baptism at age 11 in a Kentucky church came to mean less and less to her as she gradually lost faith in God.

Then the 32-year-old medical transcriptionist took a decisive step, one that previously hadn’t been available. She got “de-baptized.”

In a type of mock ceremony that’s now been performed in at least four states, a robed “priest” used a hairdryer marked “reason” in an apparent bid to blow away the waters of baptism once and for all. Several dozen participants then fed on a “de-sacrament” (crackers with peanut butter) and received certificates assuring they had “freely renounced a previous mistake, and accepted Reason over Superstition….”

Within the past year, “de-baptism” ceremonies have attracted as many as 250 participants at atheist conventions in Ohio, Texas, Florida and Georgia. More have taken place on college campuses in recent years, according to Hemant Mehta, chair of the board of directors for the Secular Student Alliance, a group that promotes atheism among high school and college students….

In Christian theology, baptism can’t be undone. If a Southern Baptist renounces his or her baptism, then that person is usually presumed to have never received an authentic baptism in the first place, according to Nathan Finn, assistant professor of Baptist studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C.

Personally I like the Southern Baptist aesopian response best: Your first baptism was sour anyway. Har!