Greenflame
Jottings on science, religion, technology, pop culture, photography and faith from the Aotearoa New Zealand
Category: Science, Technology & Religion
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Today I’ve been adding in some footnotes to articles about food aid to developing countries being linked with the requirement to accept genetically modified foodstuffs or crops. And also the attempts by some governments who supply aid for other problems (e.g. malaria) to make acceptance of GM crops as a condition for receiving that aid.…
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Still thinking about beneficence and technology. Some random quotes from that process. Peterson, James C. Genetic Turning Points: The Ethics of Human Genetic Intervention Critical Issues in Bioethics. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001. The question for any technology is, how can we develop this to best love God and our neighbors? Asking that question is not…
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I’ve been editing some material at the end of the thesis that looks at how the theme of ‘beneficence’ (the doing of good) interacts with technological development. The theme of actively doing good, rather than just not doing evil, is a significant one in religious reflection upon technological use. Indeed, the moral imperative to do…
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Back in July the Bioethics Council started a process of public discussion on and engagement with the theme of human embryo research (see Greenflame: New Zealand discussion of human embryos in research). Now, they have started to make some of the results of that process including video and audio content from public seminars, and later…
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Wired News have an interesting article about the rise of “New Atheism” which aims to bring about a society free of religion and superstition through reason. It’s interesting because it raises the issue that this may become the very fundamentalism it seeks to do away with. See Wired News: Battle of the New Atheism If…
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A while back I wrote about viewing technology in ecological terms (Greenflame: Information ecologies). The outworking of this might be called appropriate technology. Ian Barbour, in Ethics in an Age of Technology puts it like this when he says “the welfare of humankind requires a creative technology that is economically productive, ecologically sound, socially just,…
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The pro-nanotechnology website of the Foresight Nanotech Institute has a brief review of the World Council of Churches report on the convergent/emergent technologies of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive sciences. You can read their slant on the WCC document over at Nanodot: Nanotechnology News and Discussion » Blog Archive » Nanotechnology: World Council of…
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A reasonably long (10 page) but accessible magazine article on recent discussions on the nature of mind and soul and their relation to the body. The latter part of the article picks up some of the religious perspectives that are being shaped by contemporary neuroscience. See USNews.com: New Challenges to Our Most Cherished Beliefs About…
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Sitting on my desk are two recent books that look at religion and computer-mediated communications (CMC). The first book is Religion and Cyberspace, a collection of essays edited by Morten Hojsgaard and Margit Warburg. I saw this by accident in a library the other day and found the essay, “Utopian and Dystopian Possibilities of Networked…
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Mark over at Reflections… wanted some more details about last Friday’s talk. So here are some links to related things: The introduction to my talk is here – Cyborg-Intro.pdf. It’s pretty rough and ready as I read it, rather than have others read it. I used the ASB Bank “Streamline” TV commercial as an example…