From the monthly archives:

October 2009

Believers and skeptics

October 27, 2009

An English property developer has challenged his sacking as unlawful, and claims his belief in global warming is a religious belief they are illegally discriminating against. Tim Nicholson, former head of “sustainability” at Grainger PLC, claims he was fired because “his views on the environment are so strong that they led to clashes with other [...]

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Religion and airport scanners

October 26, 2009

A bit of a weird round-up this time, but airport security stories have been turning up on the religion blogs lately.
The first story concerns a Canadian Roman Catholic bishop who was discovered with sexual images of young children on his laptop hard-drive by airport security. Tmatt at GetReligion asked “What made them search a bishop?” [...]

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Taoism or Daoism?

October 25, 2009

Wade-Giles or Pinyin?
Singaporean Taoists are moving to provide all their literature (canonical texts, websites, etc.) in English as well as Mandarin, and the newest priest-training college also plans to be bilingual. This is no huge surprise in an ex-British colony, but I was surprised to see the breakdown according to the 2000 census cited on [...]

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Are Buddhas lesser than gods?

October 12, 2009

I’ve decided to keep all my posts on religion and videogames for my gaming blog, but I’ll link to them and make any further comment I think is more appropriately placed here.
I may be rather late to the party, but I’ve only just discovered “Buddha Mode” mods for gaming. Read all about it in my [...]

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Parsis in the Digital Age

October 11, 2009

One of the things that really interests me is how archaic and minority religions survive their various diasporas. AFP published a piece on how Parsis are using digital and social media technology to contact one another and bolster their religious identity. This can be anything from Zpeakerbox, an online zine for Zoroastrian youth to Facebook [...]

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Death 2.0

October 1, 2009

The Huffington Post, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and the New York Times have all recently grappled with the notion of ‘digital afterlife’ – the online legacy left by the deceased. I particularly liked the Huffington Post’s assertion that “In the virtual realm, there is life after death.” Oh what religious ideas that notion might [...]

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