Is freedom a religious or secular idea?

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Paula Kirby has written a fabulous and thought provoking article in Today’s Washington Post. Paula, like myself, is a former Christian, so she can view this from all sides. Here is how it starts …

Is freedom a religious idea? As John McEnroe would have said, “You cannot be serious.”

If you value freedom, you should flee from religion as the antelope flees the lion. Religion is the very antithesis of freedom, insisting on our complete subjugation to the unachievable demands of an invisible but supremely powerful overlord. Think of Islam, whose very name means ‘submission’! Think of Christianity, which claims it is disobedience that brought original sin into the world, with all that entails in terms of suffering and injustice and even earthquakes and tsunamis. Imagine! To claim that human obedience is so imperative that the purposes of an omnipotent deity and the very fabric of the planet, if not the whole universe, depend upon it and can be catastrophically disrupted at the first whiff of rebellion – and then to claim that such a religion is the source of human freedom!

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Salman Rushdie writing memoir of years in hiding

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There is a Reuters news report that Salman Rushdie is working on a memoir about his hidden years The 63-year-old said of the memoir that there was an “information vacuum” to fill, and that he finally felt it was time to confront a difficult period in his life. “I’m beginning to write this memoir,” Rushdie … Read more

Catholic Church is “on the edge” in Ireland

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The news today in the Irish Independent is …

THE Pope will be officially told the Irish Catholic Church is “on the edge” of national collapse and has only five to 10 years to make a radical recovery by giving laymen and women a greater say in decision-making.

This warning will be submitted in the coming months in a confidential report to Pope Benedict XVI by an international investigator examining the state of the Irish church in the wake of the Murphy and Ryan reports into clerical child abuse.

The full article is here, I’ll let you read it all at you leisure.

To some this is perhaps bad news, but for many others such as myself, this is very good news indeed. Having grown up in Ireland, I’d heard some things that I simply refused to believe at the time, but now know that my friends were not simply telling me tall stories. For there lurking under the social covers were deep dark tragic tales. I need not repeat such stories, we all know them.

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Bill Nye Says Nay To Anti-Evolution

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The following article comes from The National Center for Science Education. In it Bill Nye, The Science Guy, has a few words to say about Creationism, here it is … Prompted by Michael B. Berkman and Eric Plutzer’s recent column in Science deploring “a pervasive reluctance of teachers to forthrightly explain evolutionary biology,” Popular Mechanics … Read more

The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information

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A study appearing Feb. 10 in Science Express calculates the world’s total technological capacity to store, communicate and compute information, part of a Special Online Collection: Dealing with Data. The study by the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism estimates that in 2007, humankind was able to store 2.9 × 1020 optimally compressed bytes, communicate … Read more

Meta-knowledge and the Internet

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We all know what “Knowledge” is, but to ensure we are on the same page, it is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as

(i) expertise, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject;

(ii) what is known in a particular field or in total; facts and information; or

(iii) be absolutely certain or sure about something.

Of course, we can also sum it all up using Plato’s formulation of knowledge as “justified true belief.” So what is “Meta-Knowledge”? Well, think of it as knowledge about knowledge. To clarify, let me run an example by you, Mr Smith lives at No1 High Street – thats ‘data’. I can also step up a level and define the attributes of that data, as Name and Address – thats called “meta-data”, or to put it more simply, its data that describes the data. So Meta-Knowledge is simply knowledge that is knowledge about knowledge.

So why am I babbling on about all this? Well, because the University of Chicago has issued a press-release on the topic that starts out like this …

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