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On Tuesday 7 January, Coptic Orthodox Christians – who comprise 90 percent of Egypt's Christians – will break their 43-day fast and celebrate Christmas. The festival comes almost two weeks after most Western denominations, including Catholics and Protestants, held their celebrations on 25 December. Ahram Online asked Bishop Abram of the Fayoum Diocese to explain why there was a difference in the dates; he stressed that the difference in fact results from the use of different calendars, not from any underlying theological dispute. Although the exact date of Jesus' birth was -- and remains -- unknown, within the first few...

Sacred Art Class at TMC by David Clayton on December 30, 2013 A chance to learn sacred art whatever your level, and to subsidise TMC students so that they can attend for free. I will teach this and it is offered free to Thomas More College students (who have to pay just the standard weekly charge for room and board in the dorm. Even though I am Artist in Residence at the college it is difficult for the students to get intensive tuition. To learn art properly needs blocks of time and this is difficult to organise in the packed...

How can this thing be divine?!? The Pentateuch, if divine, is full of mistakes from the very first word (we're talking Hebrew here...the basis of the Greek/Latin/English translations everyone in the world uses.) How could that be? Example: In the beginning G-d created, in the Hebrew version, is actually literally "In the beginning OF... G-d created" There are thousands of examples of the Pentateuch making no sense in its grammar or syntax. So how do we know how to interpret it even on a literal level? Well... behold, the Oral Torah... The link is to an hour-long class (in English...

Scientists excavating within the UNESCO World Heritage site of the Maya Devi Temple in Lumbini, Nepal, have unearthed a timber structure that they date to the sixth century BCE. It is situated within and underlies a temple that is considered sacred to many as the birthplace of Siddhārtha Gautama, or Buddha. Until now, there has been no archaeological evidence supporting a date any earlier than the third century BCE for Buddha's life. Some historians have suggested the death of Buddha took place sometime in the late 4th century or early 3rd century BCE, although there are a number of traditions...

They unearthed a 6th Century BC timber structure buried within the Maya Devi Temple at Lumbini in Nepal. The shrine appears to have housed a tree. This links to the Buddha nativity story - his mother gave birth to him while holding on to a tree branch. Its discovery may settle the dispute over the birth date of the Buddha, the team reports in the journal Antiquity. Radiocarbon Every year thousands of Buddhists make a holy pilgrimage to Lumbini - long identified as the birthplace of Siddhartha Gautama, who became the Buddha. Continue reading the main story Lumbini Located in...

Religion is one of the most divisive forces in the world's history. Maps of War is a website that creates fascinating visuals of the world to show how movements spread, wars begin and civilizations fall. They have turned their expertise to religion, focusing on five major faiths to see how they have spread and how wars have determined the influence and stronghold of various religions in a 90-second video. Beginning with the birth of Krishna, the time-lapse video covers 5,000 years of religion. The map slows down for the births of key religious figures and major wars, showing the decline...

Most scientists would probably say that the concept of an afterlife is either nonsense, or at the very least unprovable. Yet one expert claims he has evidence to confirm an existence beyond the grave—and it lies in quantum physics. Professor Robert Lanza claims the theory of biocentrism teaches that death as we know it is an illusion created by our consciousness. … Biocentrism is classed as the theory of everything and comes from the Greek for “life center”. It is the believe that life and biology are central to reality and that life creates the universe, not the other way...

Oprah and the AtheistsTrent Horn October 23, 2013 | Members of the atheist community are outraged, but not at their usual targets, such as conservative politicians or pastors. Instead, they have set their sights on Oprah Winfrey.This past weekend on her show Super Soul Sunday, Oprah interviewed Diana Nyad, the 64-year-old marathon swimmer, to discuss her amazing feat of swimming from Cuba to Florida in 53 hours. During the course of the interview the following exchange occurred:Nyad: I can stand at the beach’s edge with the most devout Christian, Jew, Buddhist, go on down the line, and weep with the...

As headlines go, it's certainly an eye-catching one. "Scientists Prove Existence of God," German daily Die Welt wrote last week. But unsurprisingly, there is a rather significant caveat to that claim. In fact, what the researchers in question say they have actually proven is a theorem put forward by renowned Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel -- and the real news isn't about a Supreme Being, but rather what can now be achieved in scientific fields using superior technology. When Gödel died in 1978, he left behind a tantalizing theory based on principles of modal logic -- that a higher being must...

The atheist community hailed last year’s scientific confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson, for which the British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs was co-recipient this past week of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Higgs had theorized, all the way back in 1964, that there must be something that gives subatomic particles their mass, which enables them to form atoms, which, in turn, form molecules, all of which is integral to creation as we know it. That something turned out to be the Higgs boson. And its discovery, declared Dan Barker, co-president of the so-called Freedom From Religion Foundation, an...

Self-proclaimed Biblical scholar Joseph Atwill has written a book in which he claims that Jesus was fabricated by a little-known group called the Flavians. He also claims he has some sort of “smoking gun” type of “confession” from these ancient people that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that they entered into a conspiracy with the Roman government of the time to fabricate a character called Jesus as a “gentle Messiah” figure to wage psychological warfare on, and control, the masses so they would pay Caesar taxes without complaining. He is apparently going to present this evidence at a...

'Female figurines and inscribed prayers to a "divine couple" found in temples in Israel suggest that the “one God” of the Bible may not have been entirely alone. A recent excavation in Tel Motza, not far from Jerusalem, found what archaeologists believe to have been a ritual building - with clay figures of animals and men from the time of the First Temple, according to Israel's Haaretz news site. The find suggests that Iron Age religion in the area around Jerusalem may not have been monotheistic just before the time the Hebrew Bible – the basis of the Old Testament...

The little human being living inside a pregnant mother turns out to be a lot more capable than previously known. Kathy Drummond describes the research that led to the startling finding that newborns can recall words they heard in the womb in The Verge: ...new research offers provocative evidence that an unborn fetus can not only hear sounds from the outside world, but is actually capable of recalling specific words in the days following birth. In a study out of the University of Helsinki that builds on previous investigations, a team used EEG scans on 33 newborn babies to reach...

The "near-death experience" reported by cardiac arrest survivors worldwide may be grounded in science, according to research at the University of Michigan Health System. Whether and how the dying brain is capable of generating conscious activity has been vigorously debated. But in this week's PNAS Early Edition, a U-M study shows shortly after clinical death, in which the heart stops beating and blood stops flowing to the brain, rats display brain activity patterns characteristic of conscious perception. "This study, performed in animals, is the first dealing with what happens to the neurophysiological state of the dying brain," says lead study...

<p>JERUSALEM — Scientists using American space technology have started a huge project to digitally photograph the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest known version of the Hebrew Bible, and post it on the Internet for all to see, Israeli authorities said Wednesday.</p>

Campaigner who urged state of Maharashtra to pass anti-black magic bill killed by motorbike assailants in Pune A prominent campaigner against religious superstition has been shot and killed while out for a morning walk in the western Indian city of Pune. Narendra Dabholkar was at the forefront of a long-running campaign to ban superstitious religious practices by getting the state of Maharashtra to pass an anti black-magic bill. He died on Tuesday after being shot by two gunmen riding a motorcycle. Police said four shots were fired at Dabholkar from close range as the rider slowed behind him on a...

An American man, who woke up speaking Swedish but with no idea of his identity, has travelled to Sweden in the hope of restoring his memory. Michael Boatwright was discovered unconscious in a motel room in Palm Springs, California, in February.

Amid escalating violence against Egypt’s Copts, churches in Minya, located in upper Egypt, cancelled Sunday Mass for the first time in 1,600 years. Other churches in Minya also didn’t hold prayer services. "We did not hold prayers in the monastery on Sunday for the first time in 1,600 years,” Priest Selwanes Lotfy of the Virgin Mary and Priest Ibram Monastery in Degla, just south of Minya, told the al-Masry al-Youm daily. He said supporters of ousted president Mohammed Morsi destroyed the monastery, which includes three churches, one of which is an archaeological site. “One of the extremists wrote on the...

Minya churches canceled on Sunday the second mass, holding only a brief one. Meanwhile, prayers did not take place at other churches which were attacked. Priest Selwanes Lotfy of the Virgin Mary and Priest Ibram monastery in Degla, south of Minya, said, “We did not hold prayers in the monastery on Sunday for the first time in 1,600 years.”

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Raising the dead may soon become medical reality. According to critical care physician Sam Parnia, modern resuscitation science will soon allow doctors to reanimate people up to 24 hours after their death.At some point, everyone's heart will stop. For most, this is when they begin to die. Doctors succeed in very few cases at bringing the clinically dead back to life. However, more patients could be saved if medical professionals put existing knowledge about the treatment of cardiac arrest to better use, argues critical care physician Sam Parnia, 41, who is leading a revival of research in this field at...