Bow down before Cheesus' tasty, tasty goodness

The Lord is revealing Himself in ever more mysterious ways — this time showing up in a bag of crunchy cheese puffs.

A couple from Houston, in the southern US state of Texas, made their now famous discovery while driving in their car one night a few weeks ago.

Sara Bell and husband Dan were chomping through a packet of Cheetos, which they had picked up at a local petrol station on their way home, when Mrs Bell dug up an irregular-shaped Cheeto that she fancied resembled a person in a robe praying.

"Jesus appeared!" she was quoted by local newspaper Preston Hollow People as saying.

They nicknamed it "Cheesus".

The orange figurine is described as five centimetres tall and has a missing right arm.

"I had eaten most of the ones in my hand and one was left lying there, and I said 'Oh my gosh! Look at this! It really looks like a person in a robe praying,'" Mrs Bell, a retired teacher, told local TV news station KTVT-TV.

Her husband looked over and said: "Wow! It does look like a praying Jesus".

The couple is keeping the cornmeal snack wrapped in tissue inside a box.

"What I've been worried about is if I have it around my house, it'll get eaten, " Mrs Bell reportedly said.

She is still considering whether to put "Cheesus" up for auction on e-Bay.

It is not the first time a likeness to Jesus has shown up in a packet of Cheetos. Last year CNN reported on a similar find in the Midwestern state of Missouri.

London's buses go to hell

LONDON: Buses emblazoned with advertisements declaring "there's probably no God" will soon be travelling through the streets of London after the prominent atheist Professor Richard Dawkins agreed to help pay for them.

Campaigners say the messages will provide a "reassuring" antidote to religious ads that "threaten eternal damnation".

Professor Dawkins, the author of The God Delusion, said: "Religion is accustomed to getting a free ride - automatic tax breaks, unearned 'respect' and the right not to be 'offended', the right to brainwash children.

"Even on the buses, nobody thinks twice when they see a religious slogan plastered across the side. This campaign to put alternative slogans on London buses will make people think - and thinking is anathema to religion."

The advertising campaign, which could be plastered across as many as 60 buses for a month if just £11,000 ($27,000) is raised, was triggered by a blog posting. Those behind the project are confident they will raise enough money to pay for two sets of 30 bendy buses to travel through the capital in January bearing the atheist slogan: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

The Painted Ones

Youngsters called "Pintados", translated as "Painted Ones", cover themselves in oil and ash to ward off evil spirits and parade through the village of San Nicolas de los Ranchos, 100kms east of Mexico.

This tradition, celebrated in the town located at the feet of Popocatépetl volcano (smoking hill, in Nahuatl language sees young people running in the streets to drive away the bad spirits before Carnival.

Every person must give some change to “the Painted ones” and if someone refuses, he or she will be embraced and stained with the painting from the Painted ones.

Islamic Artisans Constructed
Exotic Nonrepeating Pattern

500 Years Before Mathematicians

Medieval Islamic artisans seem to have developed a procedure for creating jigsawlike mosaics that ultimately led them to an exotic pattern that mathematicians would discover nearly half a millennium later.
Researchers report that 15th-century buildings in Iran feature tiles arranged in a so-called quasicrystal, which is symmetric but does not repeat itself regularly.

"Here is evidence it [the pattern] was being used, if not understood, 500 years ahead of when we had any idea what was going on with [it] in the West," says physics graduate student Peter J. Lu of Harvard University. Lu began poring over photos from Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Afghanistan after seeing hints of the pattern while traveling in Uzbekistan. The Islamic artisans seem to have spun a wide variety of symmetric traceries from a set of five shapes, according to a report Lu co-authored, published online February 22 in Science.

Medieval Islamic mosques, palaces and other buildings were routinely covered in ornate tile work, called girih, that inscribes stars and other shapes. Scholars believe that workers drew many of these patterns with compass and straightedge. But some of the shapes could only have been accurately constructed using a set of five "girih tiles," Lu and Princeton University physicist Paul Steinhardt, a quasicrystals expert, say in their study.

.. read on

interactive tour of Dante's inferno

via Presurfer

They're all god movies, in mysterious ways

The internet has become almost like a 21st-century church or temple, says a Sydney academic.

Disenchantment with organised religion has given rise to spiritual movements inspired by cinema and books and promulgated on the World Wide Web, says Adam Possamai, president of the Australian Association for the Study of Religions and a sociologist at the University of Western Sydney.

The futuristic Matrix trilogy and the Star Wars franchise - of which the final chapter, Revenge of the Sith, was released at midnight - are part of a phenomenon of "hyper-real" religions that draw on old religious symbolism and works of popular culture.

The internet is like a place for worship, but instead of pews, followers, mainly teenagers, congregate in chat rooms.

Star Trek, the Matrix trilogy and Star Wars, even the Harry Potter films, the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are more than pieces of cinematic or television escapism, Dr Possamai says.

Their stories of spiritual drama, littered with a religious subtext of good versus evil, "chosen ones", prophets of doom and a benevolent universal power, mean they are a source of inspiration for "seekers".

Dr Possamai said the Matrix trilogy had spawned "Matrixism", a so-called movie-based religion that claims 300 adherents and has as one of its tenets a belief in the prophecy of "the One".

The Jedi Knight movement, which has a quasi-spirituality of the Force and an ethical code, promotes ancient techniques for developing the self such as meditation, yoga and shamanism.

The neo-pagan network of the Church of Old Worlds claimed to be inspired by Star Trek and the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein , he said. The Passion of the Christ had been used as a rallying cry by organised religion and many Christian groups had embraced popular culture by creating comic book heroes and virtual bibles.

"Hyper-real religions are a simulacrum of a religion partly created out of popular culture. They have been underground since the 1960s but are becoming more mainstream, due to the advent of the internet," said Dr Possamai, whose book on the subject has just been released.

"We live in a consumer society where popular culture is becoming more commercialised. As society becomes more consumerist I expect the hyper-real religious phenomenon to grow, but to what extent I've got no idea."

source : smh