Archive for the ‘google’ tag
Northern Irish Young ‘Friendly Across Religions’
More and more Northern Irish teenagers have friendships with people from a different religious background, a new report has found. Photo from Google News
from Google News and the UK Press Association
An increasing number of teenagers in Northern Ireland have friendships across the religious divide, a research study has said.
Only a minority of young people have no acquaintances from other religious or ethnic backgrounds, added the university Young Life and Times Survey (YLT).
Dr Paula Devine, from Queen’s University, said: “The YLT survey found that friendship patterns among 16-year-olds are wider than ever before, encompassing both religious and ethnic diversity.”
They found 12% of young people never socialise with those from a different community and 16% do not associate with other ethnicities.
Dr Devine added: “The comments made by young people in the survey suggest a blurring of the traditional us and them categories. Whether someone is like us or them is not purely based on their religious or ethnic background but on other factors such as personality.”
Key findings in the report, No More Us And Them For 16-18-year-olds?, include that cross-community friendship was more common in 2011 than in 2003. In 2011, 22% of YLT respondents had no friends from the other main religious community, compared with 33% in 2003.
God and Google
From The Washington Post
By Brad Hirschfield
Like pretty much everything else, God can be found on Google. And this week, with the help of Google Street View, you don’t even have to search for images of the Divine to find you.
This image, captured by the Street View feature of ubiquitous searcher (a fact about Google which may hint at the search engine itself is increasingly God-like, if not actually God) has been interpreted by thousands as a glimpse of God captured on camera. Of course others have suggested that it is more likely bird poop on the camera lens. Whatever it is, there is a lesson here in when and why we see/think we see God.
It comes down to admitting that we all find the God or no-God for which we are looking. There is proof of either the existence or the non-existence of God. Their constant debating to the contrary, that is something upon which both deep believers and ardent atheists ought to agree.
When believers in the infinite insist that there are scientific proofs for the existence of the God in whom they believe, they are reducing the object of their faith to something whose existence can also be disproved. Is that really what they want? Is the God in whom they believe really so small as to be disproved? Maybe, but that’s no god worthy of one’s faith.
