XML and Religion

Grok Headline matches for XML and Religion

Religion

Religion 09/22/2004 07:03 PM
Redemption and the Power of Man. In Christianity, redemption is essentially an act of divine grace, the salvation of a sinful humanity that is incapable of saving itself. In Judaism redemption depends entirely on man, who is responsible for his own fate. To what extent did Judaism influence the development of progressive, pluralistic democracy?

What Use is Religion?

What Use is Religion? 09/04/2004 05:17 PM
Richard Dawkins discusses religion with a Darwinian outlook .. What Use is Religion?

secularhumanism.org/library/fi/dawkins_24_5.htm
track this site | 4 links

"Its religion gone mad"

"Its religion gone mad" 04/19/2004 09:36 AM

"Which religion is the right one for
you? (new version)"

"Which religion is the right one for
you? (new version)" 03/28/2005 03:19 PM

What the world needs now: Another
religion

What the world needs now: Another
religion 03/06/2004 01:59 AM
Yoism is a made-up "open source" religion that replaces God with an impersonal Divine Mystery that seems to be loosely defined as "The Stuff that Is and the Scientifical Laws It Follows," so that the proof of Yo's existence consists of saying that the universe exists. Yoism pledges to build Heaven on Earth, and, best of all, without self sacrifice! I'm confident Yoism is built on the best of intentions. I'm just having trouble getting past the unintentional self-parody. I guess that makes me a small person. Thanks to Ross Knights for the link....

Technology and Religion

Technology and Religion 03/14/2005 04:21 PM
Technology and Religion

1) PBS: Can Religion Withstand Technology?
http ://www.pbs.org/kcet/closertotruth/explore/show_14.html
2) Institute for the Future Blog: Emerging Technologies and Their Social
Implications
http://blogger.iftf. org/Future/000510.html
3) Cybertheology
http://www.cybertheology.net/
4) National Faculty Leadership Conference: Theology/Technology
http://esoptron.umd.edu/th eo_techno/
5) TechNewsWorld: Technology and Religion
http://www.techne wsworld.com/story/33078.html
6) Wired: on Muslims and technology
http://w ww.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66305,00.html
7) Cornells Minister of Technology
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/02/issue/ forward_cornell.asp?trk=nl
8) Readings in Faith and Science
http: //itest.slu.edu/theologicalview/readings2/index.html

This issue of Topic in Depth explores the relationship between technology and religion in today's world. This first website, from PBS, features interviews with "a skeptic, a devout Muslim scientist, and an expert in the sociology of religion" who address the question, Can Religion Withstand Technology? (1). This blog from the Institute for the Future discusses how religion is making use of technology (2). One way that religion and technology interact, of course, is through the use of the Internet in communicating religious ideas, as is evidenced by this collection of websites listed on cybertheology (3 ), which also offers a number of articles on theology and technology. This next website from researcher at the University of Maryland (4) is "dedicated to illustrations of the trends to refer to and use metaphors from technology in conveying fundamental ideas in theology" and presents some of the data collected so far as part of this research project. In this article from TechNewsWorld (5), an associate deputy of interfaith relations for the Episcopal Church discusses his views on "the future of religion and technology -- and what he views as their joint role in the survival of humanity." Wired offers this perspective on how technology has impacted Islamic traditions (6). W. Kent Fuchs, Dean of Cornell University's College of Engineering, discusses the ways that religion and technology can help each other in this short article (7 ). Finally, this website (8) offers a large selection of articles specifically addressing Faith and Science from the Institute for Theological Encounter with Science & Technology. This will be added to Theology Resources Subject Tracer™ Information Blog. [ From The NSDL Scout Report for Math, Engineering, and Technology, Copyright
Internet Scout Project 1994-2005. http://scout.wisc.edu/]

"Religion sites"

"Religion sites" 04/08/2005 10:10 AM

English Literature and Religion

English Literature and Religion 06/05/2004 02:51 PM
Englis h Literature and Religion.

Justice, Religion, Sexuality

Justice, Religion, Sexuality 05/19/2004 08:46 AM
Here's a transcript of a speech by Justice Michael Kirby of the Australian High (= Supreme) Court on his Christianity and homosexuality. (Thanks to Vergil for the link.) Excerpt: So how did my relationship with God survive this experience of self-discovery? First, I never doubted for an instant the surrounding love of my parents, my brothers and sister. I knew, in my heart, that they would always love me as I was. For years we did not confront the subject verbally. We did not really need to do so. When we did, it was exactly as I expected. No big...

Gimme that New-Time Religion

Gimme that New-Time Religion 07/27/2004 06:10 AM
By Dale Short (Birmingham Weekly) Posted with permission. It may be no coincidence that every explosion we see in an action movie nowadays looks the same. Destruction is no longer a loud bang and a flash of light; it's become a stylized slow-motion ballet of jagged fragments that tumble and ricochet outward from the explosion's exact center toward the viewer and beyond, an artists perspective-drawing turned nightmare. The destroyed object is no more, this surreal display seems to tell us, but the ramifications of the blast have only begun. Its chain of events reaches further into the future than we can imagine, consequences as relentless as they are unforeseeable, but already stirring in us some primal memory of doom.

Karl Marx On Religion

Karl Marx On Religion 03/19/2003 10:25 PM
Perhaps Karl Marx's best known quotation is his description of religion as "the opiate of the masses." This quote is often misrepresented by those ideologically opposed to Marx as though Marx were advocating immediate and total obliteration of all religions. On the contrary, Marx viewed religion as the sole solace, often, of the oppressed proletarian classes. He would not have dreamed of tearing this away, their only consolation in life. Lutheranism was the prescribed Prussian state religion, and career advancement for non-Lutherans and especially Jews was difficult to impossible. But for Marx, religion in general was merely a symptom of a much larger issue -- the fundamentally predatorial economic relationship between the bourgeois class and the proletariat -- rather than religion being a fundamental problem in itself. As Napoleon put it, "Religion is great stuff for keeping the poor from murdering the rich."

Google Finds Religion

Google Finds Religion 05/04/2004 04:59 PM
Yahoo! May 4 2004 9:42PM GMT

All religion leads to extremism

All religion leads to extremism 06/05/2005 10:51 PM
Salman Rushdie attacks an article in the Guardian by Dylan Evans which proposes a moderate atheist stance. The problem with...

Science Fiction and Religion

Science Fiction and Religion 01/19/2004 10:41 AM
I was reading an interview with Ted Chiang, and the first lines struck me: All science fiction is fundamentally post-religious literature. For those whose minds are shaped by science and technology, the universe is fundamentally knowable. Faith dissolves, replaced by a sense of wonder at the complexity of creation.What do you think of this?

Low Power FM Religion Radio

Low Power FM Religion Radio 04/06/2005 11:57 AM
Religion radio co-opts low power FM. Remember the fight over low power FM? It was supposed to help establish community radio stations. It seems that some Christian broadcasting stations have been snapping up low power FM licenses to implement translators, which extend the broadcast area of their main signal. Some groups have been speaking out about this, yet the FCC only acted after it appeared that some of the licenses were being obtained fraudulently for resale. (via Jorn)

Religion Feeds Sudan's Fire

Religion Feeds Sudan's Fire 08/22/2004 02:31 AM
Political rivalries, ethnic strife and poverty have fueled the clashes, but that has not stopped combatants from invoking religion and challenging the devotion of their rivals.

China rules on religion 'relaxed'

China rules on religion 'relaxed' 12/19/2004 03:03 PM
China has announced new rules on religious groups aimed at ending discrimination on grounds of belief.

Americans increasing use of internet for
religion

Americans increasing use of internet for
religion 04/09/2004 04:01 PM

Americans are increasingly using the internet for religious purposes, according to a new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project .

The study's findings include:

64% of the nation’s 128 million Internet users have done things online that relate to religious or spiritual matters. ...
Those who use the Internet for religious or spiritual purposes are more likely to be women, white, middle aged, college educated, and relatively well-to-do...
The “online faithful” are devout and they use the Internet for personal spiritual matters more than for traditional religious functions or work related to their places of worship. But their faith-activity online seems to augment their already-strong commitments to their congregations.

While it is now clear that many netizens use cyberspace to affirm their faith, it is less clear to what extent Americans are using the net to explore other religions.

(via ResourceShelf )

AirBeagle | On Politics, Religion and
Society

AirBeagle | On Politics, Religion and
Society 06/11/2004 05:02 AM
Contact

contact.airbeagle.com
track this site | 6 links

If Religion Writers Rode the Campaign
Bus...

If Religion Writers Rode the Campaign
Bus... 07/16/2004 06:56 PM
... what would be different? It's a question best put to journalists and writers who know something of religion. So we did that, over at The Revealer, where a forum< /a> on the "R" word is underway: "In search of religion on the campaign trail." Journalists and bloggers on the god beat--plus an atheist--turn their attention to politics and its rituals. Here's the deep background.

Religion Experts Ask How Jesus Would
Vote (AP)

Religion Experts Ask How Jesus Would
Vote (AP) 08/18/2004 08:46 AM
AP - Just a few miles from George W. Bush's former office at the state Capitol, a panel of religious experts weighed a question with relevance to many people of faith: How would Jesus vote?

Sikh religion goes high-tech

Sikh religion goes high-tech 08/31/2004 07:09 PM
The Tribune Aug 31 2004 10:54PM GMT

Bill allows mixing of religion, politics

Bill allows mixing of religion, politics 06/07/2004 08:42 PM

MS (nearly) ditches the PC religion with
home net plans

MS (nearly) ditches the PC religion with
home net plans 01/08/2004 08:24 PM
Maybe it's not the PC, stupid...

Toronto Sun Columnist: Coren - It's
religion gone mad

Toronto Sun Columnist: Coren - It's
religion gone mad 04/18/2004 01:41 AM
This is something deeper, darker, than an imagined fight against a foreign foe .. Toronto Sun Columnist: Coren - It's religion gone mad .. the truth

canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Michael_Coren/2004/04/17/424075. html
track this site | 5 links

American teens using the Web for
religion: UNC study

American teens using the Web for
religion: UNC study 12/18/2003 02:14 AM

Many American teenagers read Web sites for religious information , according to a new study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill .

"Forty percent of those teens who say that their faith is extremely important to them report using the Internet to visit religious Websites a few times each month or more often," said Dr. Christian S. Smith, study principal investigator. "Another 20 percent who describe their faith as very important also say they visit religious Websites a few times each month or more."

The study is associated with the National Study of Youth and Religion , funded by the Lilly Endowment .

(via James Downing )

kuro5hin.org || Karl Marx On Religion

kuro5hin.org || Karl Marx On Religion 03/19/2003 10:46 PM
Karl Marx On Religion

track this site | 9 links

"Michael Crichton on the latest
religion: environmentalism"

"Michael Crichton on the latest
religion: environmentalism" 12/16/2003 08:48 PM

Religion in 2004: Faith comes to the
forefront (USATODAY.com)

Religion in 2004: Faith comes to the
forefront (USATODAY.com) 12/30/2004 06:51 AM
USATODAY.com - If 2004 had one code word, it might be "values." But as Humpty Dumpty said, a word can mean whatever one chooses it to mean. Indeed, in discussions of religious issues during the last year, nuanced voices on values often were lost in the clash of extreme sound bites.

Science fiction writers listed by
"religion"

Science fiction writers listed by
"religion" 04/09/2005 05:56 AM
Cory Doctorow: This is a long list of science fiction writers grouped by "religion," though there's some confusion (I'm listed as "Jewish," even though I'm an athiest; I'm ethinically Jewish but it's certainly not my religion). Still, it's fascinating to see the number of Mormon, Lutheran and Baha'i writers in the field. Link (Thanks, Isaac B2!)

Deep Throat, J-School and Newsroom
Religion

Deep Throat, J-School and Newsroom
Religion 06/05/2005 11:17 PM
Watergate is the great redemptive story believers learn to tell about the press and what it can do for the American people. Whether the story can continue to claim enough believers--and connect the humble to the heroic in journalism--is a big question. Whether it should is another question.

Intolerance in Northern Ireland:
Religion, and Now Race

Intolerance in Northern Ireland:
Religion, and Now Race 01/22/2004 08:20 AM
Belfast, once the engine of violence between Catholics and Protestants, is being seized by a new kind of hostility racism.

Note to alternative browsers: Drop the
religion

Note to alternative browsers: Drop the
religion 08/30/2004 10:21 AM
ZDNet Aug 30 2004 1:53PM GMT

Religion show stand fall probed

Religion show stand fall probed 08/30/2004 06:38 AM
An investigation starts into the collapse of seating at a religious festival that injured more than a dozen people.

"I care not for a man's religion whose
dog and cat are not the better for it."
- Abraham Lincoln

"I care not for a man's religion whose
dog and cat are not the better for it."
- Abraham Lincoln 08/16/2004 08:35 PM
It's been a while since I mentioned our dogs. Lucy and Mischa, the two Rescued Greyhounds, and Pico, their tiny-but-deadly little Italian Greyhound brother. They are all doing well, given the heat and the obligatory fussings from every single skimpy-topped...

Thoughts on magic, religion, metaphors
and technology...

Thoughts on magic, religion, metaphors
and technology... 04/18/2004 06:51 PM

So this is one of those posts that nothing good can come from. This is because it's one of those posts that is inspired by something so profoundly clumsy and grotesquely insensitive that I stumbled upon elsewhere that I'm almost loathe to link to the original source. And I'm going to make it worse, I fear, because in order to get some kind of interesting aesthetic resonances I'm going to smash it together with a bit of horrific ethnic sterotyping, cod technology might-be-April-Fools technocrap and some wodges of clumsy Occidentalism. Nothing good can come from such clumsiness, and I want to start off saying before I go any further that I'm a bit ill and that the sheer depths of my ignorance on almost every aspect of what follows should not be underestimated. This is an extended riff around a theme. No more.

Basically the whole thing starts and ends with an extremely dodgy thread on Barbelith - more specifically a thread in the Temple section of the board. This section has the honour of being essentially the best board on the internet about Chaos Magick, paganism and alternative spiritualities. This is in itself a pretty good thing. On the other hand, it's also a bit of a ghetto that doesn't mix that well with the rest of the community. I find it even more problematic because for the most part I don't believe in any of it. I'm basically interested in Magickal practice only in as much as I'm interested in how models of said practice that concentrate on language and sigils tend to intersect with structuralist and post-structuralist thought on language as a conceptual binding agent for the modernist universe. At which point, of course, I should shut up before I sound like a complete twat.

Anyway - back to the questionable thread in question, which has been posted by one of the fun new guys who have been turning up on the site pretty regularly since we opened up the site to Google spidering. The thread is called - rather depressingly - Al queda wizards and is, essentially, about whether Al Qaeda used practicing magicians in order to influence the success of their attacks on the States and across the world. Let me say straight off that it is, in my opinion, a pretty dumb insensitive thread written by a pretty dumb insensitive person. And yet the thread has tweaked my interest because of another post which reads as follows:

"But djinn and efreeti on the battlefield would be so cool, especially if they went up against the robot tanks and battlesuits that are in development."

Which got me thinking about technology and the way we use it to make the dreamed-of real. Because whether or not we're at such a place where technologies are able to meet the fantasy desires of human beings - and whether or not those dreams would inevitably have to come with deep-seated provisos and qualifiers and restrictions - it's pretty clear that these fantasies and beliefs and aspirations and desires are starting to be made real. Moreover it's increasingly clear that our aspiration is to do this - that technology is moving more and more towards the attempt to fulfil things that have been human fantasies for hundreds or thousands of years.

Let's start with some simple examples - which fantasies have we seen become technologised and then become commonplace? A few hundred years ago, it was the magical objects that were the focus of our aspirational children's fantasies - fairy stories of enchanted carpets that could whisk you anywhere you wanted, cave-doors that would only open if you knew the correct passwords, magical talking beasts that could aid you in your quests, objects that responded to your whim in some way from a distance. And these objects gradually become technologised in our myth-making as they become increasingly close to plausible. The talking horses and magic carpets became the talking cars full of gadgets, the magic carpets secret military helicopters hidden in atolls. The man who could call down the power of the sun became the man with the orbiting satellite. And then the cars in real-life got GPS and computer controlled suspension and cruise controls and the televisions started keeping programmes for you that you liked and the houses started turning the lights on when you got home or responding to your voice-print. Magic became aspirational fantasy technology became real-life technology. And it'll keep happening. It's not that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - it's that the aimof all technological advancement is to aspire towards the appearance of magic.

Some fantasies were born from a scientific mindset - a modernist frame of being - but had no relationship to science itself. Many of these were fantasies of aspirational human powers - extensions and enhancements of the self that are best exemplified by super-heros and comic books. These characters - given their gifts by collisions of lightning and mysterious chemicals or by the rays of strange exotic suns - might as well have been purely mystical in origin for all their relationship to any laws of thermodynamics that I'm familiar with. But that too started to change. A few decades ago a fresh pass of the fantasy crystals of TV-land created the six-million dollar man. And technologists started to try and buildworkable jet-packs. Our sensibilities with regard to fantasy started to change and our super-heroic figures started blurring more in with the realms and limits of technological possibility. And now our soldiers are wearing nanofibre weaves that make them nigh-on indestructible and have extended senses that make normal humans look comparatively useless. Binoculars become smart-glasses, clothing becomes exo-skeletal or supportive and people keep working on the jet-pack every few decades. And why? Because fundamentally people want to fly like the birds fly and they'll keep dreaming about it until someone has made it real - however long it takes.

And while the extreme ends of super-heroics are visible on the horizon, even now we can see traces of the future possibilities of implants and genetic development in the cyborgised grannies with hi-tech hips and knees. The next few hundred years will see the development of human beings in directions that will astonish us. Any sufficiently advanced (and rich) human being will be indistiguishable from a super-hero (or a super-villain - but more on that later).

Which brings me to the religious and mystical aspirations like the idea of djinn and efreeti on the battlefield. Fundamental dreams and concepts that have lived in the narratives of cultures for millennia. And immediately I'm drawn to attempts to bring about religious events with technology that I've read about in Wired. Unfortunately I read it in an April (Fools?) issue of Wired so I don't know if I believe it or not (I'm thinking not), but the story remains online and it's scary and plausible enough to support the weight of my flimsy argument even if it's not true: How a hologram, a blimp and a massively multiplayer game could bring about the end of the world. The article suggests that a prophecy says that a temple made of light will descend onto the site of Solomon's temple in Jerusalem - and some rather nutty technologists are proposing to make it happen with mist, some holograms and a convenient blimp. Apparently, there's no collision with what is understood by the religions in question (Judaism and fundamentalist Christianity) except that a lamb must be sacrificed onto the altar and they're wondering how its blood could be spilt on something with no physical substance. Prophecy is a different thing to fantasy, and this story may be total bunk, but the promise remains - could technology be used to satisfy another few aspirational desires in ways that - to all outsiders - would look like magic...

So what about djinn and efreeti on the battlefield? Will they be battling robots? Well, we already have concepts of smart dust, and self-organising swarms and motes. We already have illustrative science fiction concepts that place distributed technologies in the Middle East. Who's to say that resurgent interest in technology combined with non-Christian value systems might not generate technologies that are built around radically non-Western metaphor sets or aspirations? Who's to say that cultures that are based around the ultimate stability of the nation-state might not concentrate on representations of the enhanced body politic, the ultimate Westerner/Viking/ThunderGods, while cultures who have a different relationship to statehood, a different relationship to land and a different land to have a relationship with (or who are concentrated around religious identities, or in extreme cases have an understand of warfare at the cellular guerilla level, or have a more nomadic heritage - but generally just have a radically different set of metaphors and aspirations to cast into matter in the heat of technology) might view their goal to make the very land itself swarm up and fight back - to make the powerful spirits of their traditions emerge from narrative and into reality.

The world of the future, then, is full of the products of our fantasies but is it a better place? As ever it's impossible to say. The story of the human race is no different from that of most other creatures - there's always a tension between what's good for the individual and what good for the collective or the environment or ecosystem within which they operate. And fantasy is a singular thing, the product of one mind wanting to put itself in the centre of an idealised future. But not everyone can be in the centre and so as individuals get catered for more and more, there's ever more reason for people to ignore the collective and concentrate on their own gain. Arguing that the future is full of dreams fulfilled doesn't make it necessarily Utopian - it simply means that individuals are able to experience things they've only dreamed of before. Whether the indirect consequence of this is that they're also forced to experience a degradation in society and the environment that they've only dreamed of before is unclear. Most likely balances will be struck, equilibria found, and fantasy will move on through to the creation of more authentic experiences, new and more vigorous attempts to become the individual godheads we all secretly crave to be (in one field or another). And only the variety of cultural backgrounds that we have around us can hope to provide us with enough metaphor sets to provide us with enough new avenues for discovery to last us in the longer term. The future we're looking towards may be one where memetic biodiversity is severely threatened as all our dreams come true.

Addendum: Think of this as the product of an unsound metabolism and don't take it too seriously. The satisfaction I'm getting from such a large mind-dump is enormous, but don't take that as sufficient reason to believe that anything within it is even slightly plausible. It might get edited for sense over the next couple of days as I try to find out what it's supposed to be about.

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Losing His Religion: Adrian Lamo
Interview

Losing His Religion: Adrian Lamo
Interview 04/09/2004 04:04 PM

Open Source isn't Religion—Just
Good Business

Open Source isn't Religion—Just
Good Business 05/25/2004 05:53 PM
Opinion: David Coursey talks to MySQL and Red Hat executives, and finds Open Source isn't just for communists after all—there's a real business rationale for letting people have your source code.

Open Source isn't Religion�Just Good
Business

Open Source isn't Religion�Just Good
Business 05/25/2004 07:26 PM

Grok Description matches for XML and Religion
GrokA matches for XML and Religion

XML and Religion

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