Presumably in honour of ‘Burn a Koran Day’ on the 11th of September QUT employee Alex Stewart, who works in the university’s legal services department, posted a video to YouTube (since removed) that featured him rolling ‘joints’ with pages from the Qur’an, then the Bible. Stewart started to suspect things may have gotten out of hand when The Courier Mail (click there for a still-live video) turned up two days later to ask if the marijuana was fake, which Stewart confirmed as grass clippings. Police were reported as unconcerned his performance may have been illegal. He started this thread on the Brisbane Atheists Meetup group, and a day later expressed worry (since deleted) that he may lose his job over a comment by QUT’s VC Peter Coaldrake:

And, yea, I shall delve into the archives for something to write about, for you may know me as a fisher of compliments, but I say unto you, I have become as a fisher of posts.

On the 19th of October the Atheist Foundation of Australia and the Global Atheist Convention websites suffered a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) when unknown persons flooded their servers with requests that overloaded them, shutting them down. They were down for at least 2 days (although it’s up again now, a month or so later), and in retaliation atheists created a Facebook group to organise a retaliatory DDoS for God – or at least Heaven’s prayer servers – on the 8th of November.

This is a call to all non-believers and advocates for freedom of speech to join us in a global co-ordinated minute of prayer with the aim of inundating God with so many useless prayers that it causes his divineness to go offline as as result of our own DDOS (‘Divine’ Denial of Service).

I find it fascinating that the atheists have chosen to conduct their entirely metaphysical protest according to the structure set out by something that can only be found online. This alone makes up for this Dawkins-acolyte atheism being referred to as “Atheism 2.0″.

It’s not going to be prayer meetings and love-ins for all atheists, however. Atheist P. Z. Myers retorted:

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to join in, because whatever I have planned for that time, whatever it may be, will be far more interesting and productive than babbling to an invisible man.

Chris Duckett ‘Atheist sites suffer wrath of DDoS‘, ZDnet.com.au (21/10/09)
Bennett Gordon ‘Overloading God’s Servers‘, Utne Reader (27/10/09)

Now, I know I’m behind in my posting, but this is getting ridiculous. A lot of the feeds in my RSS reader have been spewing up old news and this is one of them (although I can’t work out which it was, as I’ve had the tab open for ages). Still, it’s interesting anyway.

Apparently this video made the top 3 topics on the front page of Digg, bringing it to the attention of its host YouTube for the first time. YouTube deemed this “inappropriate content” and it was removed. Predictably enough, this was deemed ‘censorship’ by many in the YouTube community, and it was rehosted multiple times.

I’m not sure exactly what YouTube deems “inappropriate” in this case. One or two of the images used in the slideshow are vaguely offensive, but it’s mostly pretty puerile stuff.

blargfrit ‘YouTube Pulls Atheist Video After Making Front Page of Digg.com‘, disinformation (6/1/09)

Photo credit: Susan NYC

With apologies to Msrs Berry, Buck, Mills and Stipe.

The first story concerns the burgeoning scene of Muslim punk, which goes by the name of Taqwacore after the novel by Michael Muhammad Knight. I posted a story about this on my Facebook a few months ago (before I’d resumed blogging), but it’s doing the rounds again for some reason. Not directly relevant to our blog, but bear with me.

I was reminded again of this while reading this article on ‘New Jews’, or “Judaism 2.0″ (more on that last in a sec). This article describes the “New” Jews (primarily Gen X-ers in their 30′s) who are determined to wear their Judaism in a way that suits them. These might include devout punk, Lesbian Jewish weddings, hip magazines or micro-breweries (“HE’BREW”). Sarah Lefton founded G-dcast, a series of weekly, downloadable animated cartoons as a way of making learning about Judaism less stuffy. I’m not sure I’d call this new Judaism “Judaism 2.0″, not only because the whole “x 2.0″ thing is so horribly daggy, but also because that term would surely suit post-Temple, Rabbinic Judaism better.

Next up we have the recent tightening of restrictions on Sabbath use of lifts by observant Jews. As Jews are not allowed to work on the Sabbath, and rabbis decided that pressing a button constitutes work, lifts in buildings used by many Jews were altered to automatically stop on every floor on the Sabbath. A recent ruling by a group of prominent Israeli rabbis, however, could change that, leaving many elderly Jews in high apartment buildings up… -stairs without a lift. The sticking point has always been whether the lift uses a sensor to gauge how many people were inside it, thus turning the lift into one big button. I’m not exactly sure why it would need to do this: surely, if it’s stopping on every floor it doesn’t matter. It couldn’t stop altogether when it’s empty, because then you’d need to press a button to call it. Unless the area outside the lift on each floor had its OWN pressure pad… Rabbis, I don’t envy you.

Lastly, we return to the “.0″s with the recent self-description of many atheists, disenfranchised with the current pack of “New Atheists”, as “Atheism 3.0″. These atheists admit there may be a place for religious belief in the world, and refuse to see it as the single source of the world’s ills. This nomenclature works slightly better than “Judaism 2.0″, although I worry about the lack of any definition of what exactly constitued “Atheism 1.0″. Can’t people think of better names for things?!

Linkography:
Kate Shellnutt ‘Young Muslims use punk to loosen their religion‘, Chicago Sun-Times (20/9/09)
Jessica Ravitz ‘“New Jews” stake claim to faith, culture‘, CNN.com (30/10/09)
Paul Vitello ‘Another Landlord Worry: Is the Elevator Kosher?’, New York Times (9/10/09)
Daniel Burke ‘Atheism 3.0 Finds a Little More Room for Belief‘, beliefnet (//09)