Synesthesia

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user Synesthesia on 2007-09-14

• Blogs, Wordpress, Zitgist and the Semantic Web at Frederick Giasson’s Weblog:
  Frederick Giasson has released an interesting plugin which searches out semantic information form links. I don’t understand it yet, but will play for a while…
  Keywords: wordpress, semanticweb
• Backup Del.icio.us with Excel:
  Keywords: SocialBookmarks, Tools, Spreadsheets, via:fritz
• Alfresco:
  Award-winning open-source enterprise CMS from a UK firm…
  Keywords: cms, opensource
• SilverStripe - Open Source CMS / Framework:
  Keywords: CMS, OpenSource
• Pharyngula: Arguments for morality are not arguments for religion:
  Keywords: philosophy, atheism
• Privoxy:
  Privoxy is a web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities
  Keywords: web-proxy, security, privacy
• Anonymous browsing with JAP:
  java tool that links with online intermediary servers to allow anonymous surfing
  Keywords: privacy
• Share This - Wordpress plugin:
  Alex King plugin to make easy for readers to capture blog posts to social sharing sites like del.icio.us
  Keywords: wordpress
• Articles plugin for Wordpress:
  Alex King plugin which allows you to extract sleected blog posts out to another summary page.
  Keywords: Wordpress
• Managing Successful Programmes - updates in 2007 revision:
  Keywords: MSP, OGC, Standards

Technorati Tags: atheism, CMS, del.icio.us, MSP, OGC, OpenSource, Philosophy, SemanticWeb, standards, wordpress

…or, what if the things you believe are fundamental to keeping your society together are in some way linked to the negative effects that you see around you?

That might be the sort of question you ask after reading a study published in the Journal of Religion & Society which suggests that a high level of religious belief may harm a society.

As reported in the Times, the study, Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies looks at data across the first world Western democracies, and examines both the level of overt belief in God / disbelief in evolution and the occurrence of various societal measures such as homicides, early mortality, STDs, teenage pregancy and abortion. The paper finds strong correlations between the general level of religiosity in a society and high levels of these negative measures.

The author is clear that this is an initial study of the correlation between data sets, and does not hypothesise a causal link, however he does include a call to arms for social sicences to examine these issues more closely.

Ironically, the scientific method, which to-date has been shown to be the most effective way of exploring links between events “out there” and putative causes is, I suspect, likely to be the last thing that members of a highly religious society will turn to.

Print version of paper [PDF]

[ via Voidstar]

Technorati Tags: atheism, creationism, evolution, rationality, religion, Science, secularism, Society, UK, USA