Saudis want more science in religion-heavy education
Saudi teenager Abdulrahman Saeed lives in one of the richest countries in the world, but his prospects are poor, he blames his education, and it’s not a situation that looks like changing soon. “There is not enough in our curriculum,” says Saeed, 16, who goes to an all-male state school in the Red Sea port of Jeddah. “It is just theoretical teaching, and there is no practice or guidance to prepare us for the job market.”
Saeed wants to study physics but worries that his state high school is failing him. He says the curriculum is outdated, and teachers simply repeat what is written in text books without adding anything of practical value or discussions. Even if the teachers did do more than the basics, Saeed’s class, at 32 students, is too big for him to get adequate attention. While children in Europe and Asia often start learning a language at five or six, Saudi students start learning English at 12. Much time is spent studying religion and completing exercises heavy with moral instruction.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia sits on more than a fifth of the globe’s oil reserves and thanks to high oil prices it has almost tripled its foreign assets to more than $400 billion (248 billion pounds) since 2005. The region’s thinkers had a profound influence on the evolving western science of the Middle Ages. But from kindergarten to university, its state education system has barely entered the modern age. Focussed on religious and Arabic studies, it has long struggled to produce the scientists, engineers, economists and lawyers that Saudi needs.
High school literature, history and even science text books regularly quote Koranic verses. Employers complain that universities churn out graduates who are barely computer-literate and struggle with English. So frustrated are some students, they have taken to the streets in protest.
“Education in our country cannot be compared to education abroad,” says Dina Faisal, mother of a 15-year old student in Jeddah. “We have a lack of sciences, physics, and biology. That is what is needed to push the country forward. There has been some change but it is far from being complete.”
Read this special report by Ulf Laessing and Asma Alsharif here.
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Sorry, Catholics can’t confess via the new iPhone app – Vatican
Catholics cannot confess via iPhone and technology is not a substitute for being present when admitting sins to a priest, the Vatican spokesman said on Wednesday. The statement by Father Federico Lombardi follows the launch of an iPhone application aimed at helping Catholics through confession sanctioned by the Catholic Church in the United States.
“One cannot speak in any way of confessing via iPhone,” Lombardi said on Wednesday, adding that confession required the presence of the penitent and the priest. “This cannot be substituted by any IT application,” Lombardi added.
Read Catherine Hornby’s full report from Rome here. Here’s a link to Vatican Radio’s report.
Some reports on its approval by the Catholic Church in the U.S. suggested confession would now be possible via iPhone. Our original story on this from New York included the following paragraph: The app is not designed to replace going to confession but to help Catholics through the act, which generally involves admitting sins to a priest in a confessional booth. Catholics still must go to a priest for absolution.
The app got a thorough review from Father Z (aka Fr. John Zuhlsdorf), a popular and very tech-savvy traditional Catholic blogger who provided lots of screenshots, lists of sins and suggestions for Confession 2.0 (check it out here). Bill Donahue of the Catholic League was not amused and scolded the media for what he called “irresponsible” headlines. Here’s his list:
• ”Can’t Make it to Confession? There’s an App for That” • ”Catholic Church Approves Confession by iPhone” • ”Bless Me iPhone for I Have Sinned” • ”Catholic Church Endorses App for Sinning iPhone Users” • ”US Bishop Sanctions Cell Phone in Confession” • ”Forgiveness via iPhone: Church Approves Confession App” • ”New, Church-Approved iPhone Offers Confession On the Go” • ”Confess Your Sins to a Phone in Catholic Church Endorsed App” • ”Catholics Can Now Confess Using iPhone App” • ”Catholic Church Approves Online Confession”
Most of them are clearly wrong. Our headline — “Bless me iPhone for I have sinned”– is tongue-in-cheek and Donahue may not have liked the tone. But it does not state the app can replace the real thing. Right under the headline, there are two lines meant to summarise the story that read:
What if a priest answered the confessor with the proper penance.
France to renew tight bioethics limits, critics hit Catholic lobbying
France’s parliament opened debate on revising its bioethics laws on Tuesday amid protests that Roman Catholic Church lobbying had thwarted plans to ease the existing curbs on embryonic stem cell research. The bill, originally meant to update a 2004 law in light of rapid advances in the science of procreation, would also uphold bans on surrogate motherhood and assisted procreation for gays.
The debate coincided with news of France’s first “saviour sibling,” a designer baby conceived in vitro to provide stem cells to treat a sibling suffering from a severe blood disorder.
Critics of the bill said last-minute changes by deputies of the governing conservative UMP party meant the revision would hardly change the restrictive law currently on the books. The text retains tight limits for research on embryonic stem cells, a technology the Church vigourously opposes because the in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) method used to produce them creates extra embryos that are later discarded.
“The Catholics have succeeded in imposing their view on embryos and seem to be succeeding in their attack on this method,” said François Olivennes, a leading fertility expert, told Europe 1 radio. “We already have a very retrograde law compared to those in Spain, Britain, Belgium, Netherlands and all of Scandinavia. Nothing is advancing.”
“We propose the authorisation” of this research, said Alain Claeys, a deputy from the opposition Socialist Party.
The French Catholic Church has made bioethics a priority issue and overseen reports, public meetings and lobbying efforts to oppose an easing and aim for a tightening of the current law. The bill does not meet all the Church’s demands, however. Among other things, it supports prenatal screening for Down’s syndrome, which if found usually leads to an abortion.
Paris Cardinal André Vingt-Trois kept up Catholic criticism of controversial new medical techniques, saying the “saviour baby” whose birth was announced on Tuesday was produced to be used to heal another child. “Are we going to become instruments? I’m completely opposed to that,” he said. Ten other bishops issued a statement calling the technique an ethical regression and asked: “What will the child say when it finds out it was a ‘designer baby’?”
Bless me iPhone for I have sinned — an app for Catholic confession
An iPhone app aimed at helping Catholics through confession and encouraging lapsed followers back to the faith has been sanctioned by the Catholic Church in the United States.
Confession: A Roman Catholic app, thought to be the first to be approved by a church authority, walks Catholics through the sacrament and contains what the company behind the program describes as a “personalized examination of conscience for each user”.
“Our desire is to invite Catholics to engage in their faith through digital technology,” said Patrick Leinen of the three-man company Little iApps, based in South Bend, Indiana. “Taking to heart Pope Benedict XVI’s message from last years’ World Communications Address, our goal with this project is to offer a digital application that is truly ‘new media at the service of the word.”
The app is not designed to replace going to confession but to help Catholics through the act, which generally involves admitting sins to a priest in a confessional booth. Catholics still must go to a priest for absolution.
Read the full story by David Sheppard here.
For more on religion and smart phones, see Faith and smart phones commune in religion apps.
WikiLeaks bares even tiny Vatican’s diplomatic soul
The Vatican may be the world’s smallest state but even its diplomatic soul has been laid bare by WikiLeaks cables covering everything from sex abuse and media blunders to old “technophobic” cardinals. Cables sent from the U.S. embassy to the Vatican to the State Department depict Pope Benedict as sometimes isolated as aides try to protect him from bad news, and say his number two is seen as a “yes man” with little credibility among diplomats.
The cables were published by the Guardian newspaper, one of several news organizations with have been given access to the leaked cables from U.S. embassies around the world.
A long cable in February 2009, though couched in diplomatic language, reads like a scathing criticism of the Vatican’s internal and external communications structures, which are held responsible for some of Pope Benedict’s biggest public mishaps. “The Holy See’s communications operation is suffering from ‘muddled messaging’ partly as a result of cardinals’ technophobia and ignorance about 21st century communications. Only one senior papal advisor has a Blackberry and few have e-mail accounts. It has led to PR blunders on issues as sensitive as the Holocaust,” a U.S. diplomat writes.
The cable calls the pope’s inner circle of advisers old “Italo-centric” men uncomfortable with information technology and the “rough and tumble of media communications.”
“There is also the question of who, if anyone, brings dissenting views to the pope’s attention,” it says.
Give up your iPod for Lent, British bishops urge
Church of England bishops are encouraging British Christians to give up their iPods for Lent, instead of more traditional vices such as chocolate, to help save the planet.
The Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, and the Bishop of Liverpool, James Jones, are among those calling for a carbon fast for Lent — a period ahead of Easter which Christians traditionally consider a time of penance and reflection — which began on Wednesday.
As well as spending a day without using technology such as mobile phones or iPods, the 46 daily suggestions also include eating by candlelight, cutting meat and vegetables thinner so they cook faster and flushing the toilet less often. “Instead of giving up chocolate for Lent, why not fast for justice … to help those suffering from the effects of climate change,” said Jones.
For God’s sake, blog!, pope tells priests
For God’s sake, blog! Pope Benedict has told priests, saying they must learn to use new forms of communication to spread the gospel message.
In his message for the Roman Catholic Church’s World Day of Communications on Saturday, the pope, who is 82 and known not to love computers or the internet, acknowledged priests must make the most of the “rich menu of options” offered by new technology.
“Priests are thus challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources — images, videos, animated features, blogs, websites — which, alongside traditional means, can open up broad new vistas for dialogue, evangelization and catechesis,” he said.
The Catholic religion is one who openly discriminates against homosexuals and women.
In addition, the very core of their dogma is that they are supposedly superior to all other faiths and non-catholic lifestyles.
If that doesn’t fit the definition of ‘bigot’, then nothing does.
For denying this and calling me a bigot, you earn 10 points for your semi-funny joke.
Did God stop CERN from discovering the “God particle”?
The great quantum physicist Niels Bohr once said a colleague’s new theory was crazy, but perhaps not crazy enough to be correct. Two scientists seem to have taken that approach to heart when they speculated that God may have shut down the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva to keep it from discovering the elusive “God particle.”
According to an essay in the New York Times, the scientists are trying to explain why the collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator turned on with great fanfare in September 2008 by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), was closed down for major repairs just over a week later. The 3 billion-euro collider was supposed to track down the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle believed to have given mass to the universe milliseconds after the Big Bang created it some 15 billion years ago.
Physicists think this minuscule speck of matter, if ever found, could explain the mysterious code at the origin of the physical world. To know this would be to “know the mind of God”, as Einstein put it. The Nobel Prize winning physicist Leon Lederman dubbed the Higgs boson the “God particle” in a book of the same name 15 years ago.
Now, Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen has reached back to the God symbolism to explain what went wrong at CERN. He and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto have suggested, as Times science writer Dennis Overbye put it, that “the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveller who goes back in time to kill his grandfather”.
This is heavy stuff, and it gets heavier.
“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail to Overbye. In an unpublished essay, Overbye relates, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”
We usually report about scientists who say there is no God and ridicule those who believe in Him (like the biologist and “neo-atheist” Richard Dawkins). But at the cutting edge of physics, some kind of faith seems to reappear (as in the case of Templeton Prize winner Bernard d’Espagnat). Isn’t it strange that these scientists turn so often to a “God option” to explain what they’re investigating?
What is God Particle? According my fresh thought:
1. It is a naked singularity of mass or the smallest black hole in the Universe;
2. It has huge naked mass, gravitation and inertia;
3. It is not a material particle;
4. It is not in the Standard Model of elementary particles;
5. It is an Ultimate Particle, cannot be decay;
6. Its Mass cannot be converted into energy;
7. The lowest limit of its mass is about 10.9?g, and the upper limit is about 0.67*10^6kg, that means that its mass may be exceeded one kilogram!
8. Estimated mass of Higgs Particle is about 16 orders of magnitude smaller than lower limit of Mass of God Particle at least. So the mass of God Particle is substantially undervalued by mainstream physics
9. So Higgs particle is not God particle;
10. And so I believe that to find the God particle with LHC is an impossible mission, LHC efforts will be ended in failure, and it is destined. I think that to find God Particle with colliders (such as LHC) is an extremely extravagant wrong way.
How to find God Particle?
Based on my bran-new thread, I design several kinds of very simple and very cheap physical experimental methods to find the God particle, to make a small black hole and to create new unknown stable material particles without using any accelerator or collider such as LHC.
Maybe to find God Particle is not a hard mission for me?
Revolution in Physics will soon arrival, believe me.
A new taint on the Shroud of Turin?
Italian scientist Luigi Garlaschelli tells me he has been getting lots of hate mail as well as emails of support since our Oct 5 story that he had reproduced the Shroud of Turin with material available in the Middle Ages, a feat that he says proves definitively that the linen some Christians revere as Jesus Christ’s burial cloth is a medieval fake.
Given the controversy that has surrounded the Shroud, particularly since the 1988 carbon dating tests, this was hardly a surprise. One of Christianity’s most disputed relics, it is locked away at Turin Cathedral in Italy and rarely exhibited. It was last on display in 2000 and is due to be shown again next year. The Catholic Church does not claim the Shroud is authentic nor that it is a matter of faith, but says it should be a powerful reminder of Christ’s passion.
Until now, scientists have been at a loss to explain how the eery image like a photographic negative of a crucified man was left on the cloth. Garlaschelli, a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Pavia, will present his findings at a conference in northern Italy this weekend.
No one expects this to be the last we hear of the Shroud. As Garlaschelli told me in our telephone interview, those who fervently believe the Shroud is real will continue to do so. Our main news website, www.reuters.com, gave a rough gauge of international interest in the Shroud in its “Most Popular” rankings. Over 24 hours after we ran the news, it was still the third most popular story out there, ahead of a host of important economic stories and the latest twists in the David Letterman sex scandal. That says something about how the Shroud still arouses passions — whether it is 2,000 years old or only 700.
What is your feeling on the Shroud and the controversy that has surrounded it. Does it make a difference to one’s faith if it is real or not?
Garlaschelli’s simulation is very interesting, but not for what he would like it to be.
Detractors sometimes say that the Shroud is fake because the hair is in an unnatural straight position and the hands could not be there, covering the genitals. But Garlaschelli’s simulation actually shows that it is anatomically correct to have the hair and hands in that position.
Also the Garlaschelli’s result is not also more crude and rough than the original (just compare the faces in the top picture), but it very different at a microscopical level. Starting with the fact that the the blood was placed after the painting of the human figure (and not before as the Shroud of Turin does) and is not
real blood (the Shroud of Turin has real human blood).
So on the contrary of what he intended, his demostration can actually be used by believers to support the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin.
Personally I don’t know if the Shroud is fake, but if that’s the case, it’s the best falsification ever. A masterpiece work of art. And what drives me crazy is the fact that there’s no other similar object on Earth. When an artist creates a masterpiece in any art, you can see a tradition of masters and students improving their art for centuries before they can master the art. But to make such a work ex novo, out from scratch: the only single existing piece of this art (and we still are not sure how the forger did it), is just amazing.
from AxisMundi Jerusalem:
Sorting through a digital history
With more and more libraries digitising their archives, academics have a growing number of texts they can access without having to get on a plane and journey to distant continents. Perhaps in the near future, researchers will be able to simply log on from their office to view a database of a nearly infinite number of ancient texts, prayers or whatever writings have been handed down by our ancestors.
Of course, problems arise with digitising thousands of years of handwritten documents. Making a digital copy is the easy part. Helping the computer understand what is written, well, that is a tough one.
Gideon Ben-Zvi, who has founded a couple companies in the field of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), told me that: "The eyes outperform even the best OCR software by magnitude, although the speed achieved by OCR is far faster than humans."
That means a researcher can sit for hours in front of a page of text and will always emerge with a better understanding of the words written. However, once a computer program can discern words, phrases and even handwriting in the most highly degraded texts, you can then search through millions of pages almost instantaneously.
Historians will be able to find pages from books that may have been scattered across the globe simply by searching for key words, sentence structures or handwriting styles.
A team of researches at Israel's Ben-Gurion University has developed an algorithm that could be an important step in achieving such a database. Uri Ehrlich, a liturgist at the university, explained how it took a few years of research to locate a single page stored in a different library that matched a ancient page of text he had been studying. If the research team indeed creates a user-friendly computer program, and libraries agree to centralise these archives in one, giant digital database, imagine the secrets of our past we have yet to discover!
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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The US needs more Christianity in it’s science heavy education! The macro evolution faith movement and secularization of church and state have laid waste to a generation!! Science without religion is inept-Einstein!