eChurch Blog

We are still witnessing the consequences of Terry Jones’ proposed Qu’ran burning with violent protests across the Muslim world. Yesterday a Church in Pakistan was bombed, thirteen died in protests in Kashmir, a Christian School was torched in Srinagar, and three killed in protests in Afghanistan.

This is to highlight just a few incidences of many.

But is it any wonder when you have Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spouting this sort of inflammatory nonsense:

New York Times

DAMASCUS, Syria — Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, delivered a fiery address on Monday accusing the United States government of orchestrating desecrations of the Koran by right-wing American Christian groups last weekend, Iranian state news agencies reported.

The speech appeared to be part of an effort by Iran’s hard-line leaders to amplify Muslim outrage over scattered gestures to burn or tear pages of the Koran, in the wake of the threat — later withdrawn — by Terry Jones, a Florida pastor, to burn the Koran on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

In Tehran, about 1,000 protesters chanting “Death to America” and “U.S. pastor must be killed” clashed with the police and threw stones at the Swiss Embassy, Reuters reported. The Swiss have handled American interests in Iran ever since the United States severed diplomatic relations with Tehran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The rhetoric has become so bad that India had to block Iranian TV in Kashmir:

After Iran’s state-owned Press TV ran reports about Koran desecrations in the United States, India blocked local cable operators from broadcasting the station in Indian-controlled Kashmir, where angry anti-American protests have taken place in recent days.

In his speech, Ayatollah Khamenei said “the leaders of the global arrogance” — a code for the United States among Iranian conservatives — had engineered the plot to desecrate the Koran, Press TV and other agencies reported. He added that “Zionist think tanks which hold the most influence in the United States government and its security and military organizations” were also involved.

Ayatollah Khamenei warned people not to believe that isolated right-wing American Christians were to blame, calling them “puppets” of the government. “This incident and previous incidents clearly show that what the global arrogance is attacking today is the foundation of Islam and the Holy Koran,” he said.

It beggars belief really, I’m speechless and frankly sick to my stomach. These people want to stir up violence and death at any cost and simply don’t care of the consequences.

The NPR has a piece on the rise of religious search engines:

In a world where Google has put every bit of information at our fingertips, some people are now demanding less information when they surf the Internet.

Some Jews, Muslims and Christians are abandoning Yahoo and Google and turning to search engines with results that meet their religious standards.

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There’s plenty of examples of Christian search engines, but I must admit they’re not something I would make use of.

The NPR article goes on:

According to Michael Gartenberg, a partner at technology research firm Altimeter Group, these religiously centered search engines are bringing new users to the Web.

“You have an emerging generation and emerging culture that wants to take advantage of technology … search engines and the things that they provide but at the same point, be true to their heritage … and not stray from their belief system,” he says.

Although I understand the need for niche search engines in areas such as academia or health, I find the desire to access information that ONLY concurs with preexisting belief systems as a sign of intellectual, or even, faith weakness.

I don’t think specialised religious search engines could be legitimised solely in terms of the wish to avoid objectionable material, it’s not particularly difficult to avoid such material. I appreciate the desire to restrict search results for children, however, surely this is best achieved through robust filtering of all search engine results.

The NPR article goes on to highlight critical responses to religious search engines with use of such terms as censorship and intolerance and although I don’t agree with the first sentiment – It’s up to you if you wish to self-censor – I do have some concern relating to intolerance.

Many years ago it was forbidden – not sure if this was an official stance – for members of the Jehovah Witnesses’ to access the Internet for fear of moral corruption, or let’s be a little more honest, fear of anti-Jehovah Witnesses information.

I note the Jehovah Witnesses’ now have their own highly successful website, but I couldn’t find a dedicated search engine for them.

Given the above and the vast capabilities of the major search engines I simply cannot fathom why some would choose restricted information through a religious search engine.

Would you, or do you, use a specialised Christian search engine and if so why?

Firstly Bishop Nick Baines picks apart Polly Toynbee’s Guardian anti-Pope diatribe:

Reading some of the stuff about the imminent visit by Pope Benedict XVI to the UK later this week, you could be forgiven for thinking that lots of otherwise reasonable people would be quite happy to see the Pontiff suspended from a rope. The nature and degree of the personal venom directed against him raises other questions about what it is that fires such vindictiveness.

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The Church Mouse notes the general lack of response by the Anglican Church to the Papal visit and suggests some principles which he believes may help form an Anglican response to the visit:

Despite some theological differences, we should treat the Roman Catholic church as our brothers and sisters in Christ, and as such we should share the experience of the visit with them in the spirit of Christian unity.

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And lastly the Protect the Pope blog – which I first featured here – is rightly satisfied with the remarkable progress they’ve made in their short two month existence:

We’re amazed to discover that over the past 2 months there have been 60,000 hits on Protect the Pope. Also, readers have made 1,214 comments.

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Congratulations to Young Mr Brown of the Marmalade Sandwich blog (featured here in the past) who has been voted one of the top 50 Scottish blogs for 2010.

Young Mr Brown is a Christian Libertarian from whom I have learnt much and most certainly consider this accolade richly deserved!

Well done Young Mr Brown have an extra marmalade sandwich today.

Just returned from a couple of days visiting Longleat and Salisbury Cathedral, both fantastic!

I’m about half way through the the 1500 news items in my feeders and have thus far found nowt blogworthy save the mighty Cranmer hath revived in time for the Pope’s visit.

Also a reader writes (please note I have edited the swearing and corrected the spelling):

…….[you] can sleep easy in your beds not having to hear the truth i hope you all die long painful cancerous deaths humanity can do without you hatred.

And I pray God may open your heart and mind to his wondrous love.

Written by Tom Rees of Epiphenom

Are you a big-picture person, or do you tune into the detail? Surprisingly, the culture in which you were raised – including your religion (or lack of it) can shape this fundamental aspect of your personality.

A decade ago, researchers found that while westerners were relatively faster at picking out the component parts of a picture, Asians were relatively quicker to see the global, holistic components. They reckoned this was an effect of cultural differences – the individualistic Westerners versus the collective, community-oriented Asians.

In a new series of studies, Lorenza Colzato, a cognitive psychologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and colleagues has shown that, within both of these culture, religion can affect where attention is focussed. Remarkably, it seems that the type of religion, not religion itself, is the critical factor.

The tests use something called a global-local task. Essentially, the subjects are shown either a square or a rectangle, which are themselves made up of smaller squares and rectangles. The task is to spot the shape of either th ‘big’ picture or its components.

Pretty much everyon is faster at identifying the big shape. asians, however, are even faster than Westerners – but at the cost of slower identification of the smaller component shapes.

Colzato compared a group of Dutch Calvinist Christian Students with a similar group who were raised as atheists. The Calvinists turned out to be ‘detail’ people, at least when compared with the atheists. This bias to the detail was evident even in those whose faith had lapsed, indicating that whatever is causing it must happen during childhood.

Then they swapped countries and religions – Roman Catholics in Italy and Jews in Israel. Here the effect was reversed. In these countries the religious were less detail-oriented, and more focussed on the big picture, than the non religious

In the ultimate test of their theory, they teamed up with Shulan Hsieh, at the National Cheng Keng University in Taiwan, one of the least individualistic countries in the world. They found that local Buddhists were more likey to be ‘big picture’ people than were the local atheists.

Colzato thinks that the different religious cultures are affecting the way their subjects look at the world. Dutch Calvinism is highly individualistic, and so children must (so the theory goes) be rewarded for ‘correct’ behaviour – for focussing on the local, and ignoring the wider environment.

Catholicism and Judaism, on the other hand, emphasize collective, social responsibility. Children growing up in that environment are learn to pay more attention to the wider picture, and less on individual responsibility.

Buddhism is very different. However, according to Colzato, it emphasizes the physical and social context in which the practitioner lives. Since meditation is not a particular feature of Taiwanese Buddhism, it’s unlikely that meditation caused the effects they saw.

Now, it is of course possible that what we’re seeing here is selection bias. It might be that those people whose attentional bias doesn’t mesh well with the predominant religion are more likely to become atheists. That’s possible, although the fact that atheist converts differed from those raised as atheists in the Dutch study would tend to suggest that isn’t the case.

Whatever the source of these differences, it does seem likely that culture, religion, and attentional bias are closely intertwined. After all, you would expect that a collectivist culture would develop a religion that fitted and reinforced their collectivist needs.

If that’s the case, then the rise of atheism could trigger some interesting cross-cultural ‘levelling’!

I’m putting this one on as it simply has the “woah” factor:

Telegraph:

A new program enables a robot to detect whether another robot is susceptible to lies, and to use its gullibility against it by telling lies, researchers claim.

The robot could be capable of deceiving humans in a similar way, according to the scientists, based at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

[.....]

Its understanding of the concept of deception would enable the robot to avoid being captured, the scientists said.

But fellow experts raised fears that the technology could further damage the image of robotics with the general public, and potentially lead to dangerous developments such as robots which hunt and gamble.

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Immoral robots….I’ve heard it all now….

Justin Topp of Science and Theology has raised an interesting issue relating to personal beliefs and opinions versus public persona.

Justin ruminates over those who have a high public profile and large following  due to their strongly held views. Examples of such folk are easy to identify, for example Richard Dawkins and Ken Ham, who inhabit antithetical polar positions.

Justin writes:

They and their followers (who are NOT mindless, I’m not saying that) together have built up a public persona.  Even if there was a shred of doubt regarding these positions in their minds, they couldn’t admit it unless they were willing to accept the backlash in both reputation and finances.

Obviously I can’t see into the minds of these popular figures and so I’m not suggesting the likes of Dawkins or Ken Ham have moments of doubt, but it is fair to say that it would be disastrous for them if they did and so they daren’t deviate from their mantra.

It must be truly awful to be “boxed in” in this manner. I’m grateful I recognise the more I learn, the more I don’t know, and I am open to cognitive challenges and reappraisal of my paradigms.

Blogging in the small way I do can expose my paradigm shifts to criticism, as some regular commentators may feel alienated or betrayed and this may subconsciously influence the slant I portray. Imagine this on a MASSIVE scale, very daunting indeed.

I do advocate a bold declaration of what we believe including admitting where we may have erred and may have changed our minds.

Not so easy for those of a high profile….

Is it not a healthy sign of progress to allow ourselves to be challenged by new information? Is it possible that doubt is natural on the path of progress and even of belief systems?

I know of folks who will not honestly look at new sources of information as they [wrongly] perceive this may present an almost existential threat to their entire belief systems. In all truth I understand this mentality as reappraising our dearly held belief systems within the context of new and challenging information can be a traumatic experience.

Anyway, getting back to those public folk of more import, Justin concludes with these questions which I would also like to pose:

So what do you think?  Do you think leading figures like these have doubts about the positions that they put forth so strongly?  Are they afraid to admit this?  Or do you think they’re resolute in their beliefs?  Perhaps the faithful following functions to make them even more unyielding?

Some heartening news on recent church attendance statistics over at the Church Mouse:

The Church Mouse – Christian Research: Church attendance in the UK no longer in decline – exclusive guest post from Benita Hewitt

Hop over and cheer yourself up!