religion

That which people project is not necessarily an expression of that which remains inside.

This simple truth is one that has saved me even more often than relative sobriety in the early hours of many mornings.

It's a truth that's apparently confirmed by figures emerging from a famous hub of pornography. For they suggest that even in the most outwardly saintly parts of America, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.… Read more

Life becomes more meaningful when someone from a long way away reflects your own thoughts.

It makes you feel less alone, less forlorn on your island of one.

I was, therefore, lifted to heights previously unimagined on hearing that the head of Saudi Arabia's religious police has declared that Twitter is an appalling waste of time, mind, and soul.

Actually, it's worse than that.

As the BBC reports, Sheikh Abdul Latif Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh mused that anyone who uses Twitter "has lost this world and his afterlife."

It may well be that the Sheikh's biggest … Read more

Even some of the more faithful might have wondered over the last few days whether there truly is a God.

Famed physicist Stephen Hawking would like to help. Let's imagine there isn't, seems to be his preference.

Indeed, in a speech at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., on Tuesday night, he made jokes about God's supposed power and omnipresence.

"What was God doing before the divine creation? Was he preparing hell for people who asked such questions?" asked Hawking, clearly not afraid of meeting a reddish man with a fork and a … Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Anthropologist says Apple is definitely a religion.

- Google brings Street View to the Grand Canyon.

- Apple now owns the trademark to The Beatles' Apple Corps Logo.

- What I learned while live-tweeting a friend's funeral.

Video voice mail: Mossimo has a positive update on a previous video voice mail.… Read more

I am not sure that religions are really religions any more.

Fundraising and struggling for the attentions of the young have tended to force them into indecision between rigidity and compromise. Perhaps this is one reason why the real and the bedraggled have increasingly turned to material things in order to dedicate their beliefs.

There is something painfully unsurprising, therefore, in hearing that Dr. Kirsten Bell of the University of British Columbia believes that Apple is a cult-like religion.

Did it take deep analysis to discover this? Perhaps not. For ZDNet reports that she observed launch videos and actually went … Read more

World politics intrude on Silicon Valley (again). After days of violence sparked by outrage over a video trailer mocking Islam's prophet, Google and its YouTube subsidiary are caught up in a controversy in which the options boil down to bad and worse.

A brief recap: Demonstrations erupted in the Middle East this week against "Innocence of Muslims," a YouTube clip denigrating Muhammad as a buffoonish, skirt-chasing molester. The video, originally uploaded to YouTube in July, was a trailer for a movie produced by a Southern California filmmaker named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. In the violent blowback that followed, … Read more

Technology is taken for granted by those who design it, grow up with it, or worship it as if it's a digital deity.

Yet not everyone believes that, for example, giving 24-Hour Fitness your fingerprint in order to lose a little blubber is such a natural, safe act.

Take certain parents at Moss Bluff Elementary School in Louisiana. Their arms are raised up high in celestial fright at the school's heathen attempts to introduce a palm scanner into the cafeteria.

As KPLC-TV reports it, the parents see the devil in the details.

Mamie Sonnier, a very concerned parent, … Read more

Priests are human beings. They have feelings, too. They try, they suffer, they get frustrated.

However, what seems to be denied them is the ability to express those feelings on Facebook.

I genuflect in sympathy toward Canon Paul Shackerley, an Anglican priest in Doncaster, England. For, perhaps in an amusing attempt to lay bare his humanity, he reportedly went on his Facebook page one weekend and posted: "I've done f*** all today other than jazz lesson and visit a friend. I hear the fizz of tonic in my gin beckoning."

If there's one place whose inhabitants … Read more

Put down the hymnal and pass the PlayStation. A British cathedral plans to incorporate a video game into worship services this Sunday.

At the Exeter Cathedral in Devon, England, the congregation will collaboratively play the PS3 game Flower, passing the Sony controller around until the first level is completed.

Developer ThatGameCompany calls the game a "video game version of a poem." In it, players guide a flower petal through environments that swing between the pastoral and the chaotic, and in doing so, cause the onscreen world to change. Sounds a lot more contemplative than Call of Duty. … Read more