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Posts tagged ‘religion’

May 14

A Mormon Author’s Perspective on Mormon Church vs. WikiLeaks

Jesse Stay, an online friend of mine, has weighed in on the controversy surrounding the release of copyright material owned by the LDS church by Wikileaks.  He says,

As an author, and Social Media developer, and Mormon, I thought I’d pipe in on what I think of the WikiLeaks issues going on. It’s as simple as if J.K. Rowling were to have her content posted and shared on WikiLeaks – she’d be doing the same thing! This is a matter of copyright, not secrecy.

I encourage you to read his full blog post.  Excellent.

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Feb 25

Americans Change Faiths at Rising Rate

A new Pew research report entitled, “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey,” showing that more than 44% of Americans have left the faith of their childhood.

From the NYT article:

More than a quarter of adult Americans have left the faith of their childhood to join another religion or no religion, a new survey of religious affiliation says. The report, titled “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey,” depicts a highly fluid and diverse national religious life. If shifts among Protestant denominations are included, then it appears that 44 percent of Americans have switched religious affiliations.

For at least a generation, scholars have noted that more Americans are moving among faiths, as denominational loyalty erodes. But the survey, based on interviews with more than 35,000 Americans, offers one of the clearest views yet of that trend, scholars said. The United States Census does not track religious affiliation.

In the Pew survey 7.3 percent of the adult population said they were unaffiliated with a faith as children. That segment increases to 16.1 percent of the population in adulthood, the survey found. The unaffiliated are largely under 50 and male. “Nearly one-in-five men say they have no formal religious affiliation, compared with roughly 13 percent of women,” the survey said.

The rise of the unaffiliated does not mean that Americans are becoming less religious, however. Contrary to assumptions that most of the unaffiliated are atheists or agnostics, most described their religion “as nothing in particular.” Pew researchers said that later projects would delve more deeply into the beliefs and practices of the unaffiliated and would try to determine if they remain so as they age.

Interesting read, but it will take some time for me to think about the implications of the data. What about you? What are your thoughts?

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Oct 13

The Mormon Vaults

Alexander Rose from the Long Now Foundation write about a recent visit to the LDS Geneology vaults at Granite Mountain outside of Salt Lake City. Wired Magazine did an extensive article on this in 1999.

Granite MountainSince I began working on the 10,000 Year Clock project, and associated Library projects here at Long Now almost a decade ago, I have heard cryptic references to this archive. We have visited the nuclear waste repositories, historical sites, and many other long term structures to look for inspiration. However we had never found a way to see this facility. This is the underground bunker where the Mormons keep their genealogical backup data, deep in the solid granite cliffs of Little Cottonwood Canyon, outside Salt Lake City. UT.

The Church has been collecting genealogical data from all the sources it can get its hands on, from all over the world, for over 100 years. They have become the largest such repository, and the data itself is open to anyone who uses their website, or comes to their buildings in downtown Salt Lake City.

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