religion

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

Many people enjoy it when technology works automatically. Sometimes, though, a little stick-shift principle might be the wiser course.

I make this entirely free suggestion on having heard about Father Martin McVeigh, a priest in County Tyrone, Ireland.

McVeigh was making a presentation to parents of children preparing for Holy Communion. Like any modern pastor would do, he prepared a PowerPoint and carefully inserted his USB stick into a computer.

For reasons that seem not entirely clear, scenes of gay pornography appeared on the screen. Yes, in a slideshow.

The Associated Press offers that the parents at St. Mary's … Read more

Do you pray to the god of file sharing? If so, you might want to move to Sweden. The Church of Kopimism--a group with roots in file sharing and the notion that everything should be free--is now an official religion there.

Kopimism is the brainchild of philosophy student Isak Gerson, who founded the church in 2010 to protect his beliefs that copying and sharing information is a good thing. (If Kopimism has a Ten Commandments equivalent, I'm guessing "Thou shall not steal" didn't make the cut.)

Before you dispute Kopimism as hogwash, there are some things to consider. According to TorrentFreak, the movement has a couple thousand followers, and the number is expected to rise with its official status. … Read more

The world is more twisted than a neurotic pretzel. Human beings increasingly regard other human beings as if they are closely related to the cockroach.

Why might that be? Our naturally aggressive and selfish nature, as Stephen Hawking describes it? Our complete inability to communicate with each other with entire honesty and complete sentences?

Or is it all Steve Jobs' fault?

No, it is not I who am raising this possibility. It is Britain's chief rabbi, Lord Sacks. As the Daily Mail's ringing ears describe it, the Chief Rabbi gave a speech this week, at which the Queen … Read more