is available to pre-order from amazon now and is due to be released Sept 29th. now!
Military personnel threw away, and ultimately burned, confiscated Bibles that were printed in the two most common Afghan languages amid concern they would be used to try to convert Afghans, a Defense Department spokesman said Tuesday.[source]
The unsolicited Bibles sent by a church in the United States were confiscated about a year ago at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan because military rules forbid troops of any religion from proselytizing while deployed there, Lt. Col. Mark Wright said.
Such religious outreach can endanger American troops and civilians in the devoutly Muslim nation, Wright said.
"The decision was made that it was a 'force protection' measure to throw them away, because, if they did get out, it could be perceived by Afghans that the U.S. government or the U.S. military was trying to convert Muslims," Wright told CNN on Tuesday.
An elegant experiment has quashed a major objection to the theory that life on Earth originated with molecules of RNA.Now of course this doesn't necessarily mean this is exactly how it happened, but it does prove one thing; It proves that for a self replicating molecule - life - to form a magical man in the sky is not required. You just need the right chemicals, the right conditions and they can do it all by themselves.
John Sutherland and his colleagues from the University of Manchester, UK, created a ribonucleotide, a building block of RNA, from simple chemicals under conditions that might have existed on the early Earth.
The feat, never performed before, bolsters the 'RNA world' hypothesis, which suggests that life began when RNA, a polymer related to DNA that can duplicate itself and catalyse reactions, emerged from a prebiotic soup of chemicals.
"This is extremely strong evidence for the RNA world. We don't know if these chemical steps reflect what actually happened, but before this work there were large doubts that it could happen at all," says Donna Blackmond, a chemist at Imperial College London.
I have just finished watching an interview Christopher Hitchens done on CBC's The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos in which Hitchens mentioned that he is planning to do a full length documentary film called "God is not great", based on his book of the same name, in which he will "go to the counties where the parties of god are throwing their weight around" and "go through the holy books showing that they are full of contradictions".
Daniel Hauser has what doctors consider one of the most curable types of cancer, Hodgkin's lymphoma.
But the 13-year-old and his parents don't want him to have chemotherapy and radiation, the standard treatments. For the past three months, they have ignored the advice of his cancer specialists and turned to natural therapies, such as herbs and vitamins, instead.
Daniel, one of eight children, has asserted that treatment would violate his religious beliefs. The teenager filed an affidavit saying that he is a medicine man and church elder (at 13) in the Nemenhah, an American Indian religious organization that his parents joined 18 years ago.
James Olson, the Brown County attorney, has filed a petition accusing Daniel's parents, Colleen and Anthony Hauser, of child neglect and endangerment, and he has asked a judge in New Ulm to order the boy into treatment.
