Lightning bolt makes healer of Indonesian village boy | theage.com.au
Muhammad Ponari (L), who locals believe possesses healing powers, dips his "magic stone" into a bottle of water. Photo: Reuters MOHAMMAD Ponari was, until last month, a typical kid in the impoverished East Java village of Balongsari. Then, quite literally, lightning struck. The nine-year-old, who had been playing in the rain in his front yard, was hit by the thunderbolt but, to the astonishment of his young friends, he was unharmed. All the more bizarre, according to an account by his village chief and his family, when he came to, he found a stone the size of an egg on his head, and was convinced he possessed healing powers. A boy next door with a fever was his first patient. Advertisement Then another neighbour approached him, a woman in her 30s who had suffered from a depressive condition for 15 years. The miracles, large and small, kept coming, said Nila Retno, the local village chief. "My arm was sprained. "I was inside the house talking to the boy and his family. "Ponari shook him.
Falun Gong
Falun Gong or Falun Dafa (literally means "Dharma Wheel Practice" or "Law Wheel Practice") is a Chinese spiritual discipline for mind and body. It combines meditation and qigong exercises with a moral philosophy centered on the tenets of Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance (Chinese: 真、善、忍). The practice emphasizes morality and the cultivation of virtue, and identifies as a qigong practice of the Buddhist school, though its teachings also incorporate elements drawn from Taoist traditions. Falun Gong was first taught publicly in Northeast China in 1992 by Li Hongzhi. Although the practice initially enjoyed considerable support from Chinese officialdom, by the mid- to late-1990s, the Communist Party and public security organizations increasingly viewed Falun Gong as a potential threat due to its size, independence from the state, and spiritual teachings. Origins[edit] Falun Gong practitioners in Sydney. Falun Gong is most frequently identified with the qigong movement in China.
Heaven: A fool's paradise
In reality, the heaven you think you're headed to – a reunion with your relatives in the light – is a very recent invention, only a little older than Goldman Sachs. Most of the believers in heaven across history would find it unrecognisable. Miller's book, Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife, teases out the strange history of heaven – and shows it's not what you think. Heaven is constantly shifting shape because it is a history of subconscious human longings. Show me your heaven, and I'll show you what's lacking in your life. We know precisely when this story of projecting our lack into the sky began: 165BC, patented by the ancient Jews. So how did the idea of heaven – as a perfect place where God lives and where you end up if you live right – rupture this reality? But it took a big bloody bang to fuse them. Many young men fled into the hills of Palestine to stage a guerrilla assault – now remembered as the Hanukkah story. It continues.
What Your Brain Looks Like on Faith
Sam Harris is best known for his barn-burning 2004 attack on religion, The End of Faith, which spent 33 weeks on the New York Times best-seller List. The book's sequel, Letter to a Christian Nation also came out in editions totalling hundreds of thousands. Last Monday, however, the combative Californian produced a shorter (seven pages) and seemingly calmer publication that will be a hit if it reaches 10,000 readers: "Functional Neuroimaging of Belief, Disbelief and Uncertainty." It appears in the respected journal Annals of Neurology. And Harris, 40, claims it has little if any connection to his two popular books. Believers, however, may draw their own conclusions — and may want to read his subsequent neurological studies even more carefully. The current paper recovers Harris's identity as a doctoral candidate in neuroscience at UCLA, his occupation before he commenced what he calls his "extramural affair jumping into trenches in the culture wars." Which, of course, a lot of people do.
Is the Bible Fact or Fiction? Archaeology's Discoveries
In another part of the world, it would have been a straightforward public-works project. A highway was too narrow to handle the increasing flow of traffic, so the authorities brought in heavy equipment to widen it. Partway through the job, however, a road-leveling tractor uncovered the opening to a cave no one knew was there. That's the law in Israel, where civilization goes back at least 5,000 years and where a major archaeological find could be lurking under any given square... Subscribe Now Get TIME the way you want it One Week Digital Pass — $4.99 Monthly Pay-As-You-Go DIGITAL ACCESS — $2.99 One Year ALL ACCESS — Just $30!
The rival to the Bible | BBC News
What is probably the oldest known Bible is being digitised, reuniting its scattered parts for the first time since its discovery 160 years ago. It is markedly different from its modern equivalent. What's left out? The world's oldest surviving Bible is in bits. For 1,500 years, the Codex Sinaiticus lay undisturbed in a Sinai monastery, until it was found - or stolen, as the monks say - in 1844 and split between Egypt, Russia, Germany and Britain. Now these different parts are to be united online and, from next July, anyone, anywhere in the world with internet access will be able to view the complete text and read a translation. For those who believe the Bible is the inerrant, unaltered word of God, there will be some very uncomfortable questions to answer. The Codex, probably the oldest Bible we have, also has books which are missing from the Authorised Version that most Christians are familiar with today - and it does not have crucial verses relating to the Resurrection. Discrepancies
India's Romeo and Juliet tragedy | BBC News
It was a story buried in the middle of the Indian newspapers. Two star-crossed lovers committed suicide after the local village council, or panchayat, ordered them to annul their marriage or face death. Amreen was Muslim and her husband, Lokesh, a Hindu. Now police have charged the entire panchayat with abetting suicide. 'Fatal mistake' To find out more, we headed east from Delhi into the north Indian countryside. A little more than two hours later, we found ourselves in the village of Phaphunda. Like most others in the area, it was small and unremarkable. The villagers, mostly farmers, live in houses built close to each other, with narrow lanes running through them. Attitudes here can be unforgiving. A tall, well-built man in his 40s, he was very welcoming, pouring out steaming cups of tea as we sat on his carpet. Yes, he had heard about the incident but no it was not his panchayat that had anything to do with it. "It was a gathering of elders from the two families," he told me. Very nervous
