News stories

A new group called ‘The Love Commandos’ have attracted recent media attention by launching a crusade against traditionalists who try to oppose marriage across caste and religious borders in India.

News stories

The gruesome tragedy in Norway, leaving 93 (as of writing) dead, is being compared to the Oklahoma bombing, is a chilling reminder of the dark side of ideologies – when it comes to mixing politics of hate with personal beliefs. As details about the gunman and arsonist Anders Behring Breivik emerges, it is becoming increasingly

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On June the 28th, 2011, Pope Benedict XVIth posted the first ever tweet on the internet with the words : “Dear Friends, I just launched www.news.va. Praised be our Lord Jesus Christ! With my prayers and blessings, Benedictus XVI”, on an iPad, ushering a new era of digital information portal for the Vatican. In recent

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As Dr Richard Scott , general practitioner in the United Kingdom gets ready for an appeal against the General medical Council’s written warning to him for suggesting the curative power of the Christian faith to one of his patients, we get an opportunity to reflect upon some of the peculiarities that this incident has thrown

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What does it really mean to own or possess something ? Something that we can touch, physically locate or ‘legally’ add to our list of things that belong exclusively to us ? A new study carried out by the Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU) Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and School of Design (1) suggests that virtually

Current issues

There is little doubt that meat is nutritious and tasty, and that humanity itself evolved from hunter-gatherer groups, with superior tools for killing animals being a crucial factor that put homo sapiens ahead of other human (humanoid) species. Yet instinctively to modern humans killing is ‘bad’, and we only need to look at the horror

Current issues

While 9/11 was an eye-opener to how destructive the forces of fundamentalism can be in the modern world, one of the saddest aftermaths have been the emergence of waves of Islamophobia across the world. It has also been stated widely that Islam is often poorly understood and under-represented in the worlds’ media as a vibrant

Current issues

One of the important consequences of a reductionist approach to teaching biology is the loss of the sense of the social self. No matter how much we understand the workings of the DNA or the processes through which cells interact with each other, it is difficult to impossible to translate this understanding of biology to

Current issues

In 1997, the when the supercomputer Deep Blue finally achieved its revenge victory over Gary Kasparov, a long-time dream of many A.I. enthusiasts was fulfilled. It was said for years before that the day computers would master chess would be the day when the Artificial intelligence dream would be finally fulfilled. the event was well-publicized

Current issues

Although the Origin of Species is quoted as a classic scientific text, and generations of atheists have held Darwin close to their heart in their crusade against Creationism, the actual theological content of this work is generally under appreciated. A recent paper published in the British Journal for the History of Science ( BJHS) argues

• Why Islamophobia must be vigorously resisted by everyone to strengthen its secular leadership.
• Education : Can we teach our children to respect clumps of cells ?
• What exactly is artificial about Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) ?

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A new study (1) published in the quarterly International Journal for the Psychology of Religion carried out jointly by researchers from the Universities of Oregon and British Columbia, USA, suggests that a mean, punishing God actually deterred groups of college students from cheating on tests. By comparison, belief in a loving forgiving God had absolutely

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The recently published Amnesty International 400-page report, “Amnesty International Report 2011: The State of the World’s Human Rights” squarely blames the Holy See, the political arm of the Vatican for turning a blind eye over the past decades for widespread sexual abuse of children in various countries. Amongst the list of failures, it includes “not

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A new study on census data from 9 European nations (Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland) has predicted on the basis of mathematical modelling that ‘religion will become extinct’. One of the authors of the study, Richard Weiner of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and the

• Comments : Amnesty Names Vatican in hard-hitting report
• Comments : BBC Report : Religion to become extinct in 9 countries