Brights News Feed

What colour is the world? It is one of those great scientific or philosophical questions.

Well, no, it isn’t really. But in 80 million tiny images from MIT, you can get a pretty good idea of the answer anyway.

The mosaic is comprised of smaller images each of which is an average of several other images each representing the same noun. The images are organised by semantic meaning, hence the areas of similar colour, such as the large green area which is related to vegetation etc.

(Via)

In a possible indication that this PledgeBank pledge (reported previously) has proved highly successful, it is reported today that The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins is the most popular holiday read for the UK’s Labour party MPs this summer. The popular tract is also in second place for the Liberal Democrats (ahead even of Harry Potter!) and second place overall.

In October 2000 a Pakistani, Dr Younus Sheikh, was arrested on the charge of “blasphemy” and he was later found guilty and sentenced to death. He had been an active humanist and campaigner, and only after a concerted effort on behalf of humanist and other NGOs and rights groups was he finally freed in 2004, after three years spent mostly in solitary confinement.

This week, another man who by coincidence is also named Younus Sheikh — a writer who has criticized Islam — has been found guilty of “blasphemy” and sentenced to life in prison. And once again, the media outrage is limited — at this moment there are just two related news stories on Google, one from Pakistani newspaper The News, and the other from the UK’s National Secular Society.

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The government of Pakistan has today added its voice to the official condemnation against the British government’s honouring of novelist Salman Rushdie (now “Sir Salman”) in the bi-annual British hounours ceremony. Iran had already passed a resolution of condemnation yesterday.

Of course, the rent-a-mobs are back out for their now-traditional bi-annual effigy burning photo opportunity. There have been renewed calls for Rushdie’s death.

(Iran’s official position as of 1998 is that Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie was void, but the Iranian state media famously followed the announcement with news that leading clerics considered the fatwa irrevocable, leaving the actual state position somewhat ambiguous.)

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The influential but always controversial figurehead of philosophical post-modernism, Richard Roty, died on Friday at the age of 75.

His writings are often prominently cited as a prime example of intellectual relativism. Rorty earned often bitterly hostile reviews from analytic philosophers, frustrated by his assertions that no culture and no methodology were any better reflections of reality than any other. Daniel Dennett said he showed “flatfooted ignorance of the proven methods of scientific truth-seeking and their power” and Rorty (in his own words) was often characterized as one of the “smirking intellectuals whose writings are weakening the moral fiber of the young”.

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Peter Hitchens today “reviewed” (Hitchens vs Hitchens) his brother Christopher Hitchen’s new book, God is Not Great, which is currently riding high on the secularist publishing wave.

The “review” barely focuses on the book, which he “enjoyed” and recommends “to anybody who is interested in the subject. Like everything Christopher writes, it is often elegant, frequently witty and never stupid or boring.” Despite this, “I also think it is wrong”.

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News broke this morning that the world-famous historic tea clipper ship, the Cutty Sark — housed in Greenwich on the banks of London’s Thames River — has suffered major damage in a blaze which is being treated as suspicious. (See Guardian: “Fire devastates Cutty Sark“)

On the same day in the same township, known as the “centre of the world” on account of being the meridian according to which all international date limes refer, the Greenwich villagers had been celebrating a new addition to their rich scientific heritage: a new planetarium with a conical design which geometrically links it to the shape of the world. (See Guardian: “Keep Watching the Skies“. Sadly, this article, also published this morning but pre-written, refers to the Cutty Sark restoration project and the plan to re-house the ship in a giant glass structure, unknowing of this morning’s fire.)

Richard Dawkins, Enthusiastic Bright, author of The God Delusion and now of Richard Dawkins Foundation fame has a guest contributor spot in the Times of London today.

Objectively judged, the language of The God Delusion is less shrill than we regularly hear from political commentators or from theatre, art, book or restaurant critics. The illusion of intemperance flows from the unspoken convention that faith is uniquely privileged: off limits to attack. In a criticism of religion, even clarity ceases to be a virtue and begins to sound like aggressive hostility.

More here: “How dare you call me a fundamentalist“

The Telegraph (London UK) reports today on Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’s new book, Tokens of Trust. The leader of the Anglican Communion apparently gives much credence to the place of angels within the Anglican Creed. He says angels “can be at least a powerful symbol for all those dimensions of the universe about which we have no real idea”, which nearly implies that the holy beings may only be symbolic and not literal angels. But the book is also quoted as reciting that, “a human form appears to give a message from God and something in the event tells the people involved that this is a moment of terror and truth, and they recognise that they have met an angel in disguise”, which may imply a more literal understanding of the winged creatures.

The commentator for the Telegraph, Christopher Howse, apparently agrees with the Archbishop about the veracity of angels, even warning against dismissing their existence out of hand:

Belief in angels is far more respectable [than belief in Muslim djinn’s or related creatures of folklore]. Why should there not be pure intellects, with no admixture of matter, who are located wherever they act, are of immense intelligence and power, and vary greatly from individual to individual? They remain servants of God.

In the 17th century the danger was to attempt to use angels for magical purposes; the contrary danger in our own day is to assert the impossibility of their existence, as if we were the only creatures in the universe that counted.

The ecumenical theologian and co-director of Christian think-tank Ekklesia, Simon Barrow, has today published an article (aimed at his predominantly liberal Christian audience) called “Why we need to rid ourselves of the ‘god of the slots’“.

As he says in his blog, the article’s “main concern” is:

to show why “the god of the slots” in culture is the equivalent of “the god of the gaps” in science — a related, but distinct, issue.

He links the “God of the slots” to very current questions, such as the religious monopoly of Thought for the Day and hints at the validity of the British Humanist Association’s complaint against religious privileging in politics and broadcast media. In a parallel article (”Losing our (radio) religion?“) also published today, he says:

the idea that a “Christians only” or “religious only” policy is a good way to advance the churches’ attractiveness in the media (or anywhere else) seems to me extraordinarily miscalculated, quite apart from indefensible in a plural era and contradicting of the Gospel message.

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