Recently, The Big Questions aired an hour long one topic episode asking “is there a difference between a cult and a religion?”
Of course, there is a difference – size. If you’re a large organisation you are described as a religion, if you’re a small one, you’re described as a cult. That is the sarcastic way of saying there is no difference. Which was the general consensus on the show (both the “cult member” guests they had on, and the impartial guests) with the exception of a few religious figureheads.
The general agreement was that cult isn’t a black or white test, it’s a scale, with lots of different characteristics, of each different groups conform to different characteristics, some to many more than others.
Two of the biggest defining characteristics of a cult that kept coming up in the discussion were child abuse and penalty clauses for leaving. I find these two very interesting as the sticking points for whether an organisation is classed as a cult or not due to how closely the major religions match up to such characteristics.
I’m sure no one needs reminding that child abuse is simply endemic in the Catholic Church. Right up to their leader, God’s representative on Earth, Pope Benedict has been involved in trying to cover up child abuse. But they are far from the only example – both the Muslim and Jewish faiths continue to cut out and mutiliate small children’s genitals[1]. Worst of all – they’re proud of it! They define it as their culture to cut apart a defenceless child’s private parts in the name of religion. It’s physically sickening, and it happens on a worldwide scale.
Shunning those who leave is also equally endemic in the major religions. Just try marrying someone who isn’t Jewish[2] in an Orthodox Jewish environment. It won’t end well for you. Oh, and did anyone forget that the punishment for apostasy in Islam is death[3][4]?
It would seem that one of the main differences between a religion and a cult is whether a group gets away with it’s child abuse and psychological abuse of its members, past and present.
This year has been the best year for Formula One I have ever seen. Right from the start it has been an amazing season and Monaco always promises to be an interesting race.
It was great, though it’s hard to say it was extra special given the standard of racing has just been so high this year. In the end, it was a fairly comfortable victory for Mark Webber, though the real victory was that we saw virtually no interruption to racing – the safety car was out briefly at the start (when it doesn’t really matter) and then remained in for the rest of the race.
Following on from my previous post about installing ImageMagick from source, to get it working with Apache you need to do the following. First, we need to install something from Pecl. So make sure you have the pecl command at hand – if not, install it.
Yesterday, it was announced that science fiction author Ray Bradbury, best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, had died. While it is far from a tragedy, at the respectable age of 91, he will be deeply missed.
If remembrance, here is Rachel Bloom singing about her love for Ray.
I really like the concept. Making every day life a little more fun. It’s good because it encourages you to go out and do new things – if only to get the Foursquare points, and anything that encourages people to go out and explore the big wide world is a positive.
However, I found it was just taking over a little too much. The first thing I would do when arriving at somewhere new to check in, and it was just taking too much time to log onto my phone all the time and check in somewhere. So I decided to go cold turkey and remove it from my phone.
The May meeting of the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire saw Mike Granville speak to us on the topic of “The Vatican: How Do They Keep Getting Away With It?”
It was a chilling reminder of the amount of outrageous things the Catholic church have done and gotten away with over the centuries, from the the Papal states, to the complicity in Hitler’s Nazi Germany and constantly covering up child abuse.
This also struck a chord with Alistair McBay’s recent article in NSS Newsline who commented that a certain “non-resident octogenarian” named Rupert Murdock was recently hauled up in front of a government committee to answer claims about his organisation covering up people’s phones being hacked and described as not being fit to lead such an organisation.
Yet, when another non-resident head of a multinational organisation arrives in the UK, someone we know covered up child abuse claims against priests and even resisted their removal from the priesthood, he is welcomed with open arms on what was described as a state visit.
By this point, most developers have realised that Firefox is a cludgey pile of crap that eats up all your memory, and made the switch to Chrome, those developer tools long since surpassed Firebug.
Recently though, I’ve been running out or memory a lot and I don’t think it’s accurate to say Chrome isn’t to blame. As it runs everything in different processes, it’s easy to miss how much memory it is eating up, but I found it using 620MB of memory with just four tabs open.
Of course having Netbeans eating up so much clearly isn’t helping either, but IDEs are always a bag of crap (Eclipse is worse, I miss Notepad++).
You have to be a bit of a dick to park in a disabled bay when you’re not disabled. The same thing applies to parking over two parking spaces. But parking over two disabled spaces – that takes a special kind of asshole.
