It's round-up time again! Yeagh! Yeagh!

It’s been a long Hellatus (sorry, Supernatural fans), but I’ve been active on Twitter that whole time. Surprise

I’ve decided that a good way to keep content on the blog might be to round-up the week’s tweets in a blog post (which then gets re-tweeted. Ha-HA!). Here goes:

* Wikipedia Bans Church of Scientology | Wired.com

* Police tell cafe owner: Stop showing Bible DVDs, or we will have to arrest you | Daily Mail via @IanGBlack

* Google makes 5 Dead Sea Scrolls searchable | CNN Belief Blog

* Petition on White House website asks for investigation of Scientologists | Beliefnet News

* Torah Games? Bringing Torah to Life Through Game Design | State of Formation

* Thich Nhat Hanh is now a 3D Animated Comic Book | SF Gate via @walterm

* Woman read son’s religion paper minutes before slaying husband, tech expert testifies | NY Daily News

* British police give partial apology, say cafe owner can play Bible videos | Beliefnet News

* “Ha! Face of Jesus shows up on used Nintendo ES system. Kotaku has pics. Owner says: answer to ‘What Would Jesus Play?’” via @godwired

* “Bizarre video game based on a psychotic retelling of the near sacrifice of Isaac: ‘The Binding of Isaac’” via @godwired

I also realised I had some draft posts hanging around, including one I thought I’d lost. Stay tuned for more stuff soon!

Google Earth was in the news regarding religion twice recently. The first story concerns the discovery via satellite photo that a prominent Star of David exists on Iran Air’s main building. My first thought was that it was just a geometric symbol, and also one that is prominent in Islam as its artistic tradition praised mathematical forms over anthropomorphic representations (although, admittedly, this was not so much the case in Persia). It would indeed appear, however, that the building was designed by Israeli architects during the Shah’s reign.
Nayef Zidani ‘Iran outraged as Star of David revealed on airport‘, Al Arabiya News Channel (29/11/10)

The second story tells how, in this age of mineral booms, thieves in the UK are using Google Earth to find churches that still have lead rooves they can fleece. Sneaky.
Reuters ‘Lead thieves use Google Earth to target UK churches‘, Faith World (2/12/10)

Alan Berning

*deep breath* Okay, here’s the rest:

‘Muslims Target TV/Internet Evangelist for Death‘, ChristianNewsWire (14/10/10)

Reuters ‘Dead Sea scrolls going digital on Internet‘, FaithWorld (19/10/10)

Reuters ‘Bible.com investor sues company for lack of profit‘, FaithWorld (20/10/10)

Bob Allen ‘Sheriff’s office settles lawsuit with former church member outed for blog‘, Associated Baptist Press (21/10/10)

Heidi Campbell ‘New Publications in Religion and the Internet‘, When Religion Meets New Media (30/10/10)

Associated Press ‘Palestinian held for Facebook criticism of Islam‘ (11/11/10)

John Blake ‘Pastor: Facebook is encouraging adultery‘, CNN.com (18/11/10)
and
Mark Driscoll ‘Facebook doesn’t cause adultery; people do‘, Washington Post (19/10/10)

Reuters ‘Condoms, Pius XII, sex abuse and other main points in pope book‘, FaithWorld (20/10/10)
Pope admits the Vatican could have discovered that Bishop Williamson was a Holocaust denier by doing a simple search on the internet.

Lahav Harkov ‘IDF uses Facebook to catch 1,000 draft-dodging women‘, Jerusalem Post (23/11/10)
Israeli women who avoid military service due to being “religiously observant” are caught on Facebook eating in non-Kosher restaurants, dressing in “immodest” clothing and responding to invites from IDF agents to parties on the Sabbath. I call “Entrapment!” on that last one.

Helen Carter ‘Girl arrested for allegedly burning Qur’an‘, Guardian (25/11/10)
15 year-old English girl arrested “on suspicion of inciting religious hatred” after posting to Facebook a video of her burning an English translation of the Qur’an.

Thank God that’s over. This is as good an opportunity as any to announce the arrival of a new contributor to the site, Mediaevalia. Something from her soon!

Alan Berning

Trying to clear a bottleneck of stories I haven’t posted on. Mea maxima culpa.

Heidi Campbell ‘Can an online community be a church ? IRS says “No”!‘, When Religion Meets New Media (24/8/10)

Joshua M. Z. Stanton ‘Cyber Dialogue: The Future of Inter-Religious Engagement‘, Patheos (6/9/10)

Eli Yishai ‘Shas minister shuts down online payments on Shabbat, holidays‘, Haaretz.com (14/9/10)

Matthew Razak ‘Fallout Online viral advertising moves to religion‘, Destructoid (18/9/2010)

Reuters ‘Vatican Bank head in money laundering probe–sources‘, FaithWorld (21/9/10)
Vatican probably the only place in the world that allows people to use ATM’ s in Latin.

Mollie ‘Code name Esther‘, GetReligion (1/10/10)
The Biblical connection of the computer worm that got through Iran’s Digital Veil (that’s what we’re calling it, by the way).

Reuters ‘France charges man for burning, urinating on Koran‘, FaithWorld (5/10/10)

Randall Munroe ‘Online Communities 2‘, xkcd (5/10/10)
You can see “Religious Blogs” in the lower right-hand corner, east of the “Sea of Zero (0) Comments” and southwest of the “Blogosphere (Core Region)”.

tmatt ‘Bible-toting bullies with webcams?’, GetReligion (5/10/10)
and in the same vein
Jeff Kunerth ‘Religion plays different roles in cyberbullying debate‘, Orlando Sentinel (5/10/10)
as well as
Erica Brown ‘Outrage at humanity’s use of technology‘, Washington Post (7/10/10)

Elizabeth Drescher ‘Gen X, Gadgets, and God‘, Religion Dispatches (8/10/10)

Reuters ‘Brazil “values voters” go YouTube against prez hopeful Rousseff‘, FaithWorld (8/10/10)

Phew! That’s broken the back of it. Some more tomorrow, then we return to our regular programming schedule.

In honour of the Pope’s highly successful tour of England (a.k.a the Roman Invasion) and in the spirit of complete bias in reporting, I’ve decided to play advocatus diaboli to Andrew’s advocatus Dei.

It’s amazing what you find by being literal with Google: who would have thought that there was a Jewish iPhone Community website: I mean, apart from the Jewish iPhone community?

In flat contradiction to the offlining movement, the Jewish iPhone community is advocating for Yom Kippur in glorious MP3.

Similarly a Cincinnati-based congregation is offering live stream of High Holidays services to the pocket of your choice.

Offlining during Yom Kippur is an understandably Jewish response to contemporary hyper-connectivity. Yet, both of my examples above fit well into another very  Jewish tradition, that of tikkun olam (תיקון עולם‎), a Hebrew phrase that means “repairing the world.” The concept originated in the early rabbinic period from the performance of ritual mitzvot (commandments or religious obligations). It was given new meaning under Lurianic Kabbalah, in which God contracted part of God’s self into vessels of light to create the world. These vessels shattered and their shards became sparks of light trapped within the material of creation. Prayer, especially contemplation of various aspects of the divinity (sephirot), releases these sparks and allows them to reunite with God’s essence.

The question is, can cyber-space also contain these sparks to redeem? Given the existence of 4chan it’s easy to argue that the virtual world needs all the repairing it can get.

Jewish iPhone Community website, ‘Yom Kippur in mp3‘

Jonah Mandel, ‘Rosh Hashana online; Yom Kippur services go mobile‘, The Jerusalem Post (09/07/2010)

Dr. Lawrence Fine, ‘Tikkun in Lurianic Kabbalah‘, MyJewishLearning.com

BONUS REFERENCE! Blogger Velveteen Rabbi gathers together a whole bunch of Yommy sparks from across the cyber-expanse here and here.

Offlining Inc.

Jewish ad execs Mark DiMassimo and Eric Yaverbaum have created a campaign for people to disconnect from social media for Yom Kippur. The pair have a co-opted an old series of posters for Levy’s Jewish Rye Bread to create a number of cautionary tales involving celebrities.

Even Irish coppers like it

via ‘Try the OffLining Pledge for Yom Kippur?‘, Read the Spirit (17/9/10)

(C) FIAA GmbH

Rumours of a Bible MMO have been greatly exaggerated. The Bible Online: Chapter 1 – The Heroes looks to be less than its source material might promise. Players assume the role of Abraham and (somehow) his descendants; this last being perhaps the most interesting feature mentioned. I’m not sure how they could incorporate that into the MMO-sphere, but I’d be interested to see how they did (the screenshot above may give some small clue).

I had initially hoped for a Sword and Sandal epic in glorious 3D, but so far we have what looks like a particularly insipid RTS. I get that you can play it online, but I’m not sure that makes it Massively Multiplayer. Apparently RPG elements will also feature, but these are not yet represented on the rather barren website.

One should not imagine The Bible Online to inhabit the same space as juggernauts such as World of Warcraft, or even smaller residents such as Warhammer Online; rather, it belongs to the surprisingly large but still unexplored (by me) world of free, browser-based MMO’s. Publisher FIAA have two other games on the market: FPS Operation 7 and traditional, fantasy RPG Kalos War. FIAA are situated in Germany, so perhaps the information on their website holds up better in their native tongue, but descriptions of Kalos War – itself incorporating Judaeo-Christian history and mythology in an interesting manner – include the following:

The elders of the Presbyterian Vanadin El Lathir of the Elf lost the Holy Sword that was kept in a secret place. Worried that this may break the current truce, Vanadin and his companions began to trace the whereabouts of the secret mark.

The Bible Online‘s site contains much less information at the moment, although it appears news bureaus were issued with a press release of some sort. This garnered attention from the boys at Penny Arcade, who (although they seem to have mistaken Genesis for Exodus) responded in the expected manner.

via Jerry “Tycho Brahe” Holkins ‘Remove Sandals 0/2‘, Penny Arcade (30/8/10)

There was an article in the Herald about typos on Google Maps, one of which rendered Oatley Park’s Jewfish Bay as “Few Fish Bay”.

I imagine it was just misreading on the part of the data enterer, but it reminded me of a friend’s complaint that she was unable to search for “Jew” on Google, but they were okay with returning results for “N-gger” (sensitivty hyphen not included; I just don’t particularly want my blog turning up when people search that). When we tried to replicate this we had no problem, as is the case today, but I wonder if there was some kind of weird squeamishness at one point.

Arjun Ramachandran ‘Australia … according to Google Maps‘, Sydney Morning Herald (4/11/09)

Rabbi Ben Greenberg has collected a number of readings from the Torah – re-tweeted by a selection of Jewish users – into a book available from internet self-publisher Lulu.

Not everyone is pleased with the marriage of religion and social media, however, and Corey Hodges warned against obscuring Christianity beneath layers of entertainment, in his blog for the Salt Lake Tribune. Describing an unnamed church in Houston that encourages parishioners to tweet comments and questions during the sermon that appear on screens behind the pastor who later addresses them. Surely a greater danger is someone deciding to write “this sermon is lame” for all to see.

Social media and religion are not irreconcilable, however, as devotees of this fine blog are no doubt aware. Writing for Arizona State University’s State Press Joseph Hermiz draws the same analogy as A. Prof. Mark Goodacre of Duke, that in the 1st century Paul himself utilised the most advanced social medium of the time, the epistle, to evangelise the Mediterranean.

More traditional folk are still serviced by the digital revolution, however. The 1985 Jewish Publication Society translation of the Tanakh has been made into an audio recording, replacing the previous standard audio of the JPS’ 1917 translation. The audio stretches over 60 hours and is published online in weekly podcasts.

Joseph Hermiz ‘“Tweeting” the Torah, bringing religion online‘, State Press (19/10/09)
Corey J. Hodges ‘Tweeting in the pews? Pray it ain’t so‘, Salt Lake Tribune (15/10/09)

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)