Christian-based materials dominate a growing home-school education market as top texts dismiss evolution.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Home-school mom Susan Mule wishes she hadn’t taken a friend’s advice and tried a textbook from a popular Christian publisher for her 10-year-old’s biology lessons.

Mule’s precocious daughter Elizabeth excels at science and has been studying tarantulas since she was 5. But she watched Elizabeth’s excitement turn to confusion when they reached the evolution section of the book from Apologia Educational Ministries, which disputed Charles Darwin’s theory.

“I thought she was going to have a coronary,” Mule said of her daughter, who is now 16 and taking college courses in Houston. “She’s like, ‘This is not true!”‘

Christian-based materials dominate a growing home-school education market that encompasses more than 1.5 million students in the U.S. And for most home-school parents, a Bible-based version of the Earth’s creation is exactly what they want. Federal statistics from 2007 show 83 percent of home-schooling parents want to give their children “religious or moral instruction.”

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This green slug, which is part animal and part plant, produces its own chlorophyll and so can carry out photosynthesis, turning sunlight into energy, scientists have found. Credit: Nicholas E. Curtis and Ray Martinez

A green sea slug appears to be part animal, part plant. It’s the first critter discovered to produce the plant pigment chlorophyll.

The sneaky slugs seem to have stolen the genes that enable this skill from algae that they’ve eaten. With their contraband genes, the slugs can carry out photosynthesis — the process plants use to convert sunlight into energy.

“They can make their energy-containing molecules without having to eat anything,” said Sidney Pierce, a biologist at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

Pierce has been studying the unique creatures, officially called Elysia chlorotica, for about 20 years. He presented his most recent findings Jan. 7 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in Seattle. The finding was first reported by Science News.

“This is the first time that multicellar animals have been able to produce chlorophyll,” Pierce told LiveScience. Read more…

ALEIGH, N.C. — Asheville City Councilman Cecil Bothwell believes in ending the death penalty, conserving water and reforming government — but he doesn’t believe in God. His political opponents say that’s a sin that makes him unworthy of serving in office, and they’ve got the North Carolina Constitution on their side.

Bothwell’s detractors are threatening to take the city to court for swearing him in, even though the state’s antiquated requirement that officeholders believe in God is unenforceable because it violates the U.S. Consititution.

“The question of whether or not God exists is not particularly interesting to me and it’s certainly not relevant to public office,” the recently elected 59-year-old said.

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SPOKANE, Wash. —  More than 500 people in the U.S. Northwest filed claims against the Oregon Province of the Society of Jesus in advance of a November deadline, alleging members of the Catholic order sexually abused them as children.

The Spokesman-Review in Spokane reports the claims against the Jesuits span decades and range from Native Alaskan children to students at Spokane’s Gonzaga Preparatory School.

A federal judge overseeing the bankruptcy reorganization of the province set a Nov. 30 deadline for people to file the claims. The organization includes Jesuits in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana and Alaska.

The Jesuits already have settled 200 additional sex-abuse claims.

DUBLIN —  The Roman Catholic Church in Dublin covered up decades of child abuse committed by priests because bishops wanted to protect the church’s reputation at the expense of victims, an expert commission reported Thursday after a three-year probe into previously secret church records.

Abuse victims said they welcomed publication of the probe into the mishandling of 1975-2004 child-abuse cases in the Dublin Archdiocese, home to a quarter of Ireland’s 4 million Catholics. But they said government and church leaders still had far to go to compensate for past wrongs.

The government said the investigation “shows clearly that a systemic, calculated perversion of power and trust was visited on helpless and innocent children in the archdiocese.”

“The perpetrators must continue to be brought to justice, and the people of Ireland must know that this can never happen again,” said the government, which also apologized for the state’s failure to hold church authorities accountable to the law.

This is the second major government-ordered report this year exploring how and why Irish authorities permitted widespread abuse of boys and girls at the hands of the Catholic Church throughout most of the 20th century, the gravest scandal in the history of independent Ireland.

Thursday’s 720-page report — delivered to the government in July — analyzes the cases of 46 priests against whom 320 complaints were filed. The 46 were selected from more than 150 Dublin priests implicated in molesting or raping boys and girls since 1940.

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Left to right: Stefanie Milam, Michel Nuevo and Scott Sandford. Photo credit: Dominic Hart/NASA

NASA scientists studying the origin of life have reproduced uracil, a key component of our hereditary material, in the laboratory. They discovered that an ice sample containing pyrimidine exposed to ultraviolet radiation under space-like conditions produces this essential ingredient of life.

Pyrimidine is a ring-shaped molecule made up of carbon and nitrogen and is the basic structure for uracil, part of a genetic code found in ribonucleic acid (RNA). RNA is central to protein synthesis, but has many other roles.

“We have demonstrated for the first time that we can make uracil, a component of RNA, non-biologically in a laboratory under conditions found in space,” said Michel Nuevo, research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. “We are showing that these laboratory processes, which simulate occurrences in outer space, can make a fundamental building block used by living organisms on Earth.” Read more…

Somalia’s hardline Islamist group al Shabaab is cracking down on residents who do not follow a strict form of Sharia Islamic law, now publicly whipping women who wear bras, the Times of India reported.

Residents tell the paper that gunmen have been gathering women in Mogadishu who are perceived to have firm busts. These women are then publicly whipped by masked men as punishment for what Islamist leaders call deception.

After the public whippings, the women are forced to remove their bras and shake their breasts, the Times reported.

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After 15 years of rumors, researchers in the U.S. and Ethiopia Thursday made public fossils from a 4.4-million-year-old human forebearer they say reveals that our earliest ancestors were more modern than scholars assumed and deepens the evolutionary gulf separating humankind from today’s apes and chimpanzees.

The highlight of the extensive fossil trove is a female skeleton a million years older than the iconic bones of Lucy, the primitive female figure that has long symbolized humankind’s beginnings.

All told, an international research team led by paleoanthropologist Tim White at the University of California, Berkeley, unveiled remains from 36 males, females and young of an ancient pre-human species called Ardipithecus ramidus, unearthed in the Awash region of Ethiopia since 1994. The creatures take their scientific name from the word for root in the local Afar language.

“It is not a chimp and it is not human,” said Dr. White. “It gives us a new perspective on our origins.”
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At one time or another many of you have been to Proud Atheists. Mark who runs Proud Atheists, started blogging in September of 2008 as a way to share experience and discussions that he found interesting.

When Proud Athiests first anniversary rolled around there was one comment in particular that was trapped in his spam blocker that caught his attention.

The comment from someone posting under the name Gabriel Tanejo, threatened to slaughter Marks friends and family just to cause him pain. The comment also goes on to say “I have gotten signs from God that approve of doing this to all fucking atheists! Someday you may find a gun at your head, or cyanide in your drink, or a grenade in your home—but I will kill you, make no mistake! “

This wouldn’t be the first time that Mark has gotten death threats as he keeps a log of hate comments, many of which wish that Mark gets ‘hit by a bus’, or threaten to ‘hack his website’. Another comments threatens to “get your ip and come and kill u”

Although many believe that this threatening comment is all talk, Mark has contacted the proper authorities just to be on the safe side.

Click here read the full comment on Proud Atheist.

Aug. 31: Temporary tents are set up by a shack in a backyard next to the Dugard home where authorities were digging and searching in Antioch, Calif.

SAN FRANCISCO — Three decades ago, a convicted kidnapper named Phillip Garrido stunned a Leavenworth Prison psychologist by turning down an offer most prisoners would leap to take — help with a transfer to a mental health facility.

Instead, Garrido opted to spend at least three more years doing hard time so he could complete his religious studies.

Along his twisted trail of drugs and sexual violence, records and interviews show that Garrido invoked God at every turn before he was arrested Aug. 26 and accused of kidnapping, raping and imprisoning Jaycee Dugard for 18 years in his backyard.

Again and again, he claimed he had found God. To a woman he had abducted and was about to rape. To the judge who sentenced him to 50 years behind bars for the crime. And later, to business clients and neighbors in Antioch, Calif.

In the end, his increasingly bizarre religious fervor took on a desperate, prophetic quality and led to his capture after he tried to hold a rally on a college campus.

Molesters commonly turn to religion to rationalize their behavior, said Ken Lanning, a former FBI profiler who specializes in kidnapping and child abuse cases.

“A lot of them when they’re molesting children put a lot of time and energy into trying to convince themselves that they’re not bad people,” Lanning said. “In some cases the element of religion will come into it, and they will use varying aspects of their religious belief to justify all of this.”

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