Wikipedia religion: A chance to enshrine your faith; Americans Aren’t Honest About Church Attendance; Islamic State: "We Will Take Spain Back"...more

Wikipedia religion: A chance to enshrine your faith, and bash others   The biggest strength of Wikipedia is also its biggest weakness: What one person writes, another can change or delete. This issue is writ large in religion, as a recent article in the Religion News Service says.

"Religious topics are one of the top 100 most frequently vandalized on Wikipedia," says the writer, GR alumna Sarah Pulliam Bailey. In a briskly paced story, she explains not only the why of religious edits, but the difficulties of how to keep things straight -- and, in a field as subjective as belief, what it even means to keep things straight.

She starts with Mormons, surely one of the more scrutinized faiths, especially since Mitt Romney's presidential bid in 2012. In three years, Anthony Willey, a Mormon and a Wikipedia administrator, has done more than 8,000 changes, mostly on his own faith...

Whose Lie Is It Anyway? Americans Aren’t Honest About Church Attendance  ...As has been the case for at least a decade, the number of Americans who say they attend church weekly, occasionally, seldom, or never has remained fairly static.

This is despite the “rise of the Nones,” where the religiously unaffiliated account for some 20 percent of the U.S. population.

A recent survey from Public Religion Research Institute, however, found that those numbers change dramatically when respondents answer online instead of over the the phone...

Muhammed Is Britain's Most Popular Boys Name
As a result of the way the statistics are put together, the name does not appear to have won, as the ONS classifies each of the different spellings as a different entry on the list. This means that "Muhammad" came in 15th with 3,499 children but "Mohammed" was 23rd with 2,887 and "Mohammad" was 57th with 1059 given the name.

As a result the top three spellings alone accounted for the names of 7,445 boys, easily beating the second most popular name Oliver which got just 6,949. Also the statistics are only published for the top 100 names, so the even more obscure spellings of Mohammed are likely to push the total even higher...

Archbishop Okoh: Ebola will be defeated by science and prayer

Islamic State: "We Will Take Spain Back"
Radical Muslims in Spain have launched a social media campaign aimed at generating support for the jihadist group Islamic State[IS]...

Damian Thompson: Islamic extremism and the hypocrisy of the Church of England
...But where is the Church of England’s apology for failing to acknowledge the existence of a worldwide Islamist campaign against Christianity until virtually the other day? And will it ever acknowledge that its ‘meaningful dialogue’ with Muslim hardliners has been interpreted by them as a sign of Christian weakness?

Of course not. The C of E is quick to say sorry for colonialism, sexism, homophobia etc. Not once has it apologised for a naïve liberalism that has endangered the lives of Christians in Muslim countries.