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Zeitgeist
A DVD exposing Christianity, the Banking System and 9/11

Mutant Algae

from AOL News --
Something big and strange is floating through the Chukchi Sea between Wainwright and Barrow, Alaska. What sounds like a sci-fi movie was a real mystery. Scientists, initially puzzled, have figured out what the floating goo is. But they still don't know why it's there. Hunters and fishermen became concerned when they spotted the stuff last week.

Gordon Brower was among the local officials who went out to take a look. They all returned baffled. No one had ever seen anything like it. "From the air it looks brownish with some sheen, but when you get close and put it up on the ice and in the bucket, it's kind of blackish stuff ... (and) has hairy strands on it," Brower, who works for the North Slope Borough's Planning and Community Services Department, told the Anchorage Daily News. There was only one thing officials knew for sure -- it wasn't an oil slick. "It's certainly biological," Coast Guard Petty Officer 1st Class Terry Hasenauer told the newspaper earlier this week. "It has no characteristics of an oil, or a hazardous substance, for that matter." Hasenauer sent samples to the State Environmental Health Laboratory in Anchorage, which discovered the goop "primarily contained marine algae," according to a brief report issued Thursday by Analytical Chemistry Manager Emanuel Hignutt Jr. There's still a mystery surrounding the blobs. No one along the North Slope has ever encountered the stuff in the ocean before, and scientists don't know what produced this bizarre algae bloom.

Solar Cycles & Global Climate

from Science Daily --
Establishing a key link between the solar cycle and global climate, research led by scientists at the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., shows that maximum solar activity and its aftermath have impacts on Earth that resemble La Nina and El Nino events in the tropical Pacific Ocean. The research may pave the way toward predictions of temperature and precipitation patterns at certain times during the approximately 11-year solar cycle. "These results are striking in that they point to a scientifically feasible series of events that link the 11-year solar cycle with ENSO, the tropical Pacific phenomenon that so strongly influences climate variability around the world," says Jay Fein, program director in NSF's Division of Atmospheric Sciences. "The next step is to confirm or dispute these intriguing model results with observational data analyses and targeted new observations." The total energy reaching Earth from the sun varies by only 0.1 percent across the solar cycle. Scientists have sought for decades to link these ups and downs to natural weather and climate variations and distinguish their subtle effects from the larger pattern of human-caused global warming.

New Brain Research

from Science Daily --
Scientists at Duke University and the University of North Carolina have devised a chemical technique that promises to allow neuroscientists to discover the function of any population of neurons in an animal brain, and provide clues to treating and preventing brain disease. With the technique they describe in the journal Neuron, scientists will be able to non-invasively activate entire populations of individual types of neurons within a brain structure.

Metaphysical Mistake

From the London Guardian --
Confusion by Christians between belief and reason has created bad science and inept religion. Should we believe in belief. The extraordinary and eccentric emphasis on "belief" in Christianity today is an accident of history that has distorted our understanding of religious truth. We call religious people "believers", as though acceptance of a set of doctrines was their principal activity, and before undertaking the religious life many feel obliged to satisfy themselves about the metaphysical claims of the church, which cannot be proven rationally since they lie beyond the reach of empirical sense data. Most other traditions prize practice above creedal orthodoxy: Buddhists, Hindus, Confucians, Jews and Muslims would say religion is something you do, and that you cannot understand the truths of faith unless you are committed to a transformative way of life that takes you beyond the prism of selfishness. All good religious teaching – including such Christian doctrines as the Trinity or the Incarnation – is basically a summons to action. Yet instead of being taught to act creatively upon them, many modern Christians feel it is more important to "believe" them. Why?It was during the late 17th century, as the western conception of truth became more notional, that the word "belief" changed its meaning. Previously, bileve meant "love, loyalty, commitment". It was related to the Latin libido and used in the King James Bible to translate the Greek pistis ("trust; faithfulness; involvement"). In demanding pistis, therefore, Jesus was asking for commitment not credulity: people must give everything to the poor, follow him to the end, and commit totally to the coming Kingdom.
By the late 17th century, however, philosophers and scientists had started to use "belief" to mean an intellectual assent to a somewhat dubious proposition.
 

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