Hey, a religion thread!

Holy sheet… :)

I seem to recall there being a special collection to fund this initiative. I also seem to recall declining to contribute.

Also, also! My wife and I sang in a choir at the Crystal Cathedral for a funeral once, years ago before we were married. That’s the only time I’ve ever been in the place. I remember it being very sunny inside.

I feel like this title is misleading. There isn’t much about this discussion outside of talking about the Catholic faith. I was hoping on a little more on zoroastrianism.

[quote=“rowe33, post:34, topic:127766”] I doubt the Bible says that gold must be everywhere, that expensive stained glass windows must adorn the walls, etc. A plain gathering hall with whatever additional facilities are needed makes a hell of a lot more sense to me.
[/quote]
Sometimes I wonder what our world would look like if it was designed by someone with postmodern architectural sensibilities.

“Gentlemen, while I understand, with reservations, the need for some adornment here and there, I feel this unrestrained opulence is completely over the top. Twenty-thousand species of butterflies? Millions of fungi? And don’t get me started on all the whole galaxies swirling around willy-nilly! I’m afraid we’re losing our focus here, and the attention of our audience. See here now, what if we had exactly one butterfly – not too big or colorful, mind you! – situated in a prominent place, wouldn’t that send a far more effective message…?”

That Crystal Cathedral place is right next to our office in Orange, just west about 10 min. Maybe I’ll check it out over lunch one day.

The Bahá’i Temple in Santiago – the final continental Baha’i House of Worship – was judged Best Religious Building last month by Azure Magazine. They opened their doors for the first time in October.

Edit: Not my photo

Yeah, that’s freaking awesome.

Yeah, visiting all the Houses of Worship has been on my bucket list for a long time. I may have visited the one in Illinois when I was young, but I only know for sure that I’ve visited the World Centre in person, which is something I’ll never be able to forget.

Edit: Not my photos

Yeah The Bahai World Center in Haifi is spectacular. Haifi is no Tel Aviv but the Bahai World Center is worth a trip.

I’m confused by the color temperature on that lower pic. God’s rays selectively highlighting the temple in yellow, or photoshop making the clouds blue?

No idea about the lower pic above, sorry. Those images were obtained via a shameless google image search.

Today the Baha’i House of Worship of South America (located on the foothills of the Andes Mountains outside Santiago, Chile) was awarded the Innovation in Architecture Award for 2017 by The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. “A luminous worship space designed and built with the creative use of computer modeling, measuring, and fabrication software, and custom glass, has won the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) Innovation in Architecture Award for 2017.” (RAIC)

(RAIC public dropbox share)

(RAIC public dropbox share)

(RAIC public dropbox share)

The Innovation in Architecture award recognizes exceptional architectural innovation. Potential areas for innovation include research and development, applied use of new technology and adaptation of existing technology. Innovation can also be demonstrated by new project delivery and construction methods, advanced design processes and fresh approaches to details and materials.

The award will be presented at the RAIC/OAA Festival of Architecture, which takes place in Ottawa May 24 to 27.

The Bahá’í Temple of South America reflects innovations in materials, technology, and structure. For instance, a search for materials that capture light resulted in the development of two cladding materials: an interior layer of translucent marble from Portugal, and an exterior layer of cast-glass panels developed, in collaboration with the Canadian glass artist Jeff Goodman, for this project.

To realize the complex curves of the design, the studio looked beyond the traditional three-dimensional visualization software used by the architectural industry, toward modeling platforms geared to fabrication and manufacturing.

Located in an earthquake zone, the structure was designed to withstand extreme earthquakes and wind.The super-structures of the wings are comprised of thousands of individually engineered steel members and nodal connections. Each of the wings rests on concrete columns on seismic bearings, so that in the event of an earthquake, the building can slide to absorb the shock.

Prefabricated pieces for the structure and cladding were produced in multiple countries using advanced fabrication techniques, then shipped and assembled on site. The steel superstructure, for example, was made in Germany using CNC plasma cutting and 5-axis CNC milling machines.

"I am very pleased to receive this award,” said partner-in-charge Siamak Hariri, FRAIC. “The brief was for a new type of sacred space, a place of worship that is attractive, open, and inviting to people of all faiths or none at all. Innovation was at the heart of the project. The award is a testimony to the deep collaboration of literally hundreds of people.”

The jury:

Howard Sutcliffe, FRAIC, Principal, Shim-Sutcliffe Architects, Toronto;
Michael Green, FRAIC, Principal, Michael Green Architecture, Vancouver;
J. David Bowick, P. Eng., President, Blackwell Structural Engineers, Toronto.

(RAIC)

Yet another statement from this Pope that is actually in tune with the modern world.

Well, even at the time of Galileo the Church leaders weren’t really believing in the Ptolemaic geocentric model so much as they were concerned about the political impact of heliocentric thought and how this threatened the classical cosmology that the Church relied upon to reinforce its power. That, and Galileo was a lousy politician and a worse salesman. Unlike Copernicus, who actually co-opted Church people into his work and even got them to sponsor his books, Galileo was sort of an arrogant twit who refused to grease the skids even to the extent of trying to explain to the clergy how his freakin’ telescopes worked.

There’s a famous story of how a Cardinal or other Church official refused to look through the telescope, and the snarky explanation is that the cleric was afraid he’d see demons or something. But in reality, it was a lot more prosaic; this technology was not well known, Galileo did not explain how it worked, and there was zero reason, logically, for a typically educated person to connect the dots and assume that, yes, looking through a tube with pieces of glass in it would allow you to see stuff unimaginably far away. When Galileo in effect said, see, look through my magic tube and see the evidence, the Cardinal, not surprisingly, demurred.

When they burned alive giordano bruno, is because they thought he had cold and need some warm.

Just for the record, none of what Pope Francis said would not be odd to hear from the voice of any of the popes in the modern age.

I just recently saw the main subject of that article, Br. Consolmangno, speak at my high school alma mater (a Jesuit school). He’s a salutary figure in the dialogue of science and faith. He also knows a thing or thirty about the composition of meteorites…

@TheWombat – The other thing is that Galileo was ultimately right, but couldn’t adequately prove it during his lifetime. When challenged by the experts at the time (many of them clerics) to give detailed evidence, some of his arguments about the shape of the earth’s orbit (he assumed they had to be perfect circles) and the orbit’s effect on the tides didn’t hold water. But Galileo insisted in an adamant and impolitic way.

@Teiman – The death of Bruno was awful, but he wasn’t a scientist, he was a spiritualist and a poet who expressed grand cosmologial visions that just happen be sound like things we’ve discovered scientifically in the modern age. He also denied core doctrinal tenets at the time (which didn’t include the cosmological questions), promulgating ideas like reincarnation and pantheism, and it’s these things that got him burned at the stake. Nobody should be burned at the stake, but Bruno is a poor example of religious suppression of scientific truth.

You can’t get to call Giordano Bruno a no-scientist and Galileo a scientist before science is invented. Because by that rule, Paracelso is… what? They all are precursors of what science would be.

True. I think the point being made, though, is that the core of the Church’s opposition to people like this has little to do with what we’d call “science” per se, but rather a lot to do with pretty basic Renaissance Christian theology. I mean, long after the Church accepted most of the scientific discoveries of the age, they were still going after heretics.

New research thinks there may be quite a few more atheists in America than previously thought.

The authors of the study, published earlier this year, adopted a novel way to measure atheist identity. Instead of asking about belief in God directly, they provided a list of seemingly innocuous statements and then asked: “How many of these statements are true of you?” Respondents in a control group were given a list of nine statements, such as “I own a dog” and “I am a vegetarian.” The test group received all the same statements plus one that read, “I do not believe in God.” The totals from the test group were then compared to those from the control group, allowing researchers to estimate the number of people who identify as atheists without requiring any of the respondents to directly state that they don’t believe in God.1 The study concludes that roughly one-quarter (26 percent) of Americans likely do not believe in God.2

While this result is fairly stunning and not consistent with any published survey results, there is good reason to suspect that more direct measures significantly underestimate the number of atheists.

And then Reed descenced the street in his car and noticed that Religion Item was build On Governement Grounds, and decided that was wrong and sent his car into collision route

Arkansas' Ten Commandments Monument Lasted Less Than 24 Hours : The Two-Way : NPR?

A druid nearby overheard him saying this:

Whatever you think of the monument, it’s a sad story given that the suspect appears to have been driven by mental illness.