10 religious leaders you may not know about

[rug]

Tuesday, September 16, 2014
Compiled by Herb Scribner

Pope Francis has been America’s darling for more than a year now.

Most American Catholics (68 percent) approve of the pope, according to CBS News. And he’s even reached the hearts of an Argentinean soccer team that wants to name its new stadium after him, BBC News reported.

Similarly, the Dalai Lama has been in the news, saying in not so many words that he thinks he should be the last Dalai Lama, and that the Buddhist religion should change once he’s gone, The Wall Street Journal reported.

But these are just two religious leaders of the more than 4,000 religions that make up the world’s spiritual environment. With that, here’s a look at some of the religious leaders you may not know about.

http://national.deseretnews.com/article/2349/10-religious-leaders-you-may-not-know-about.html

The article profiles leaders in UU, Scientology, Evangelicals, Druze, Judaism, Falun Gong, Thai Buddhism, Bahai, Jedism - and Sam Harris.

[underpants]

1. Two clear omissions

FSM and IHOP

[rug]

3. I think Satanism was slighted.

Didn't Waffle House come about as a schism within IHOP?

[underpants]

5. Yes

The Waffalabists are heavily funded by the Saudi Royals. Sort of their "weird cousins" if you will.

Satan doesn't pasta or pancakes. Very hard to get the temperature right. Always overdone.

[rug]

6. I knew it!

[underpants]

7. BTW "Godless believers"???

What happened to good old fashioned "Heathen!" ???

[rug]

8. It brings up too many memories of Ledger.

[demosincebirth]

2. I never thought Atheism or Sientology was a religion.

[rug]

4. Atheism isn't but Scientology meets the objective criteria.

Harris is, well, Harris, sui generis.

[AtheistCrusader]

9. "Open wallet, look the other way"?

[rug]

10. That's an unkind thing to say about Sam.

[AtheistCrusader]

11. I was speculating about 'objective criteria'.

However, I would not put that past Harris, as a possibility. Nor of any other cult of personality.

[LiberalAndProud]

13. Cult of personality.

Do you think that applies either to Harris or to Dawkins? Seeing as how atheists tend to cling to the freethinking side of the spectrum, you're characterization surprises me.

[AtheistCrusader]

14. Less so in this venue but

I have observed what I would consider a cult of personality for certain members of the atheist 'community', sure. For instance, there are those who so wholly-subscribe to Hitchens, that at the time they could not be budged on any issue, even his rampant warmongering.

A distressing corner to see people painting themselves into.

There are certain elements of 'cult of perosonality' that I can self-critically see myself subscribing to. Susan Blackmore would be an example. She could be talking about what she had for lunch, and I'd probably warrant listening to it.

Edit: And this is not limited to religion. Politics too. There are factions here on DU for whom Obama can do no wrong, and yet more for whom Obama can do no right.

[LiberalAndProud]

15. We all take shortcuts.

If I find I agree with a person on many ideas, and can honestly say they speak for me in so many areas, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking they are right about everything. That is, in my opinion, how the likes of Rush Limbaugh manage to change general public sentiment so quickly. Begin with passionate oration in areas where we agree; move on from there. We can certainly find examples of this phenomenon among church congregations.

The longer I live the more I find that I agree with absolutely no one on absolutely everything, probably especially including Obama and the late, great Christopher Hitchens. I do experience profound disappointment, though, when I discover that to be the case. I'm sure atheists are not immune, but I think I am particularly averse to cultishness precisely because of my distaste for religiosity.

Is that arrogant of me? I suppose it is. Yet, there it is.

[AtheistCrusader]

16. Oh, I absolutely do it too.

We probably all do. And most if not all of us, probably make a conscious effort to be wary, so we aren't getting hoodwinked by people we maybe accept/put too much trust in.

[AtheistCrusader]

12. That linked site has popup scripts on exit, just FYI.

Is Deseret News a Mormon thing? Sounds like their bookstores.

[rug]

17. What's a popup script? A popup ad?

The paper is owned by Deseret Management Corporation.

Deseret Management Corporation (DMC) is a for-profit arm of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. All DMC companies operate under a unified mission, which is “to be a trusted source of light and knowledge reaching hundreds of millions of people worldwide.” DMC focuses on providing content and services through all of its media and service offerings that are consistent with this mission by treating all with dignity, respect, humility and integrity.

Deseret Management Corporation was organized in 1966. Today it owns and oversees life insurance, media, and hospitality businesses including Deseret News, KSL Television & Radio and Deseret Book.

http://deseretmanagement.com/about-us/

[AtheistCrusader]

18. Basically it's a script that runs when you try to exit a web page.

Either by closing the page, or by following a link to another site. In this case, it is attempting to do something like throw a dialog 'are you sure you want to leave?'.

Not something most reputable sites do... Sometimes putting you in a click-loop so you can't get out without closing your browser entirely. Depending on what browser you are using, you may not be seeing it happen at all, or it may be discarded/not allowed.

[rug]

19. I just got the message when I exited this time.

Annoying as hell.

[AtheistCrusader]

20. Something is wrong with one of their advertisers.

This thing has cookies and analytics plugged in like you wouldn't believe. Google Analytics, Chartbeat, realmedia tracking, atmedia, smartadserver, ad advisor, turn, media math, betrad, doubleclick net, etc.

They are squeezing every ounce of analytics and advertising dollar per click out of that page as humanly possible. (And one of them is broken, hence the error on exit)

[rug]

21. Do you have some kind of software tracking? That post is impresssive as hell.

[AtheistCrusader]

22. No, not at all. You can get to that stuff in most or all browsers.

In internet Explorer, debug mode is control-shift-F-12 on the keyboard, and you can start digging into how the page works. Each browser has ways of debugging and viewing what is happening to render the page. Whether that be javascript snippets, or references to other pages hosted on that server, or external data connections like google analytics.

It's just information not actively presented to the user. I tried to debug the error on exit, but it doesn't even work properly enough to see what it is trying to do.


I'd pick up a book on HTML coding. Learning a little about the browser, and how websites work could be useful in determining who is being paid by whom to present certain content to you.

[rug]

23. Thanks for that info. I have to look into it.

[AtheistCrusader]

24. It's funny, because we have one thing on our side. Visibility.

The advertisers have to inject this stuff into the page, so they can fairly get a report of how many clicks and from where, so they can pay the host appropriately for the clicking. That makes it visible to us, the user.

They can't trust the internal, unavailable to us reports of how many people click where, because the host could artificially inflate the numbers.

Greed gives us a tiny crack through which we can gain some visibility into what they are up to.

[AtheistCrusader]

25. Three days later...

http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/19/6537511/google-ad-network-exposed-millions-of-computers-to-malware

Error may have been a symptom of that.
Deseret news is no longer throwing an error on exit.

[rug]

26. I'm glad somebody's keeping an eye on this.

I'm clueless.