UK, an evolving post-christian secular nation

Social researchers have been looking into the attitudes of the growing numbers of non-religious young Britons. Its an important question to ask because if the recent polls are correct, then the majority of the population in the UK are not religious. Let me spell that out for you … if you take every possible form of religious belief, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu and lots more, add up all the followers in the population, you find that together they are a minority.

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iPhone 5 coming in September

OK, this item is here simply because I’m keen to get my hands on the next iPhone … the news is …

(Reuters) – Apple’s next-generation iPhone will have a faster processor and will begin shipping in September, three people with direct knowledge of the company’s supply chain said.

The production of the new iPhone will start in July/August and the smartphone will look largely similar to the iPhone 4, one of the people said on Wednesday.

The iPhone — introduced in 2007 with the touchscreen, on-demand application template now adopted by its rivals — remains the gold standard in the booming smartphone market.

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A galactic rose

NASA Press release …

April 20, 2011: To celebrate the 21st anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope’s deployment into space, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., pointed Hubble’s eye at an especially photogenic pair of interacting galaxies called Arp 273. The larger of the spiral galaxies, known as UGC 1810, has a disk that is distorted into a rose-like shape by the gravitational tidal pull of the companion galaxy below it, known as UGC 1813. This image is a composite of Hubble Wide Field Camera 3 data taken on December 17, 2010, with three separate filters that allow a broad range of wavelengths covering the ultraviolet, blue, and red portions of the spectrum.

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Singularity 101

The Singularity, also known as the nerd rapture, can be a bit of a mystery to some, well no longer because the Singularity Institure, has published a Singularity FAQ (think of it as Singularity 101).

Is there anything skeptical here? Well yes, but I’ll come to that in a minute.

First, some basics (from the FAQ of course) …

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Debating believers … oh so frustrating

Now this little post is to simply amuse you, and is not designed to actually inform, except to perhaps enable you to laugh and my foolish attempts to engage with an utterly irrational believer on a rational basis.

The context here is that I’ve been attempting to explain to him the historical facts regarding the four gospels and that the only actual claim that jesus = god emerges in the Gospel of John (written about 95 CE). I’ve also explained that the phrase “son-of-God” does not in any way imply that Jesus = God, but rather that it is a Jewish belief that an individual is simply claiming to have been adopted by God as a son (like King David was).

However, what truly astonished me is that the sticking point was his claim that Jesus was Worshiped, hence he was God.

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