If having your computer pray for you isn’t convenient enough, maybe the new mobile phone Sun Dial will do the trick. It won’t pray for you, but for Muslim cell users at least, it will provide daily alerts—five times a day.
The Sun Dial phone application, developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology, uses imagery and audible alerts to notify users when to perform the daily prayers, known as salat. The phone will display an image of the sun lining up with a green circle as prayer time approaches; when the sun becomes in line with the circle, it’s time to pray.
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Are you religious, but find yourself with no time to pray? Then Information Age Prayer has the solution you need. For just $4.95 a month, this online service will have your prayers said for you.
The program uses text-to-speech synthesizers to say prayers in a voice designed to emulate the volume and speed of an average praying person. Choose from Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and if you’re unaffiliated, no problem! They’ve got options for you as well.
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Remember how all the Prozac we’ve been flushing through our systems (and our sewers) was entering the water supply and messing with the fish? Well, a new argument claims that this is precisely what’s going on with men who’re having a little trouble in the fertility department. And just who is making this rather dubious claim? None other than the Pope himself.
According to His Eminence, the demon birth control is finding its way from the urine of loose women into the otherwise-pure systems of unsuspecting males, robbing them of their baby-making mojo.
Pedro Jose Maria Simon Castellvi, president of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, stated that the pill “has for some years had devastating effects on the environment by releasing tonnes of hormones into nature,” and as a result “[w]e have sufficient evidence to state that a non-negligible cause of male infertility in the West is the environmental pollution caused by the pill.”
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The original seven deadly sins laid out by the Catholic Church—pride, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, wrath, and sloth—are the classics of immorality, the same basic flaws humans have evinced since coming out of the trees (and, perhaps, even before). But in our booming, globalized, highly networked world, there are some new and very harmful errors at our disposal. And while the Vatican doesn’t have a Facebook page yet (unlike Discover), they do recognize that modern times call for modern vices.
In an interview headlined “New Forms of Social Sin,” Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Vatican’s Apostolic Penitentiary, insisted that “new sins have appeared on the horizon of humanity as a corollary of the unstoppable process of globalization.” The list of “mortal sins,” as they have now been classified, came at the end of a week-long seminar in Rome that intended to deal with the dismal turnout at recent confessions. Seems logical: If a wider range of souls are in danger of eternal damnation, more will seek absolution. So, what are the new ways to fall from grace?
Girotti devotes some space to a familiar type of don’t-treat-your-brother-poorly admonitions—like social injustice that causes poverty or “the excessive accumulation of wealth by a few”—but many of the new rules concern modern science, stuff that the sixth-century pope Gregory the Great never dreamed of.
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