A top anthropologist at the University of British Columbia in Canada has concluded a study of Apple product launches by stating that the company is operating a religion.
Kirsten Bell, who visited the recent launch of the iPad Mini, follows in the footsteps of Eastern Washington University sociologist Pui-Yan Lam, who published an academic paper more than a decade ago that called Mac fandom an "implicit religion".
She wrote in the Christian Science Monitor that a stranger observing one of the launches could probably be forgiven for thinking they had stumbled into a religious revival meeting.
Bell now studies the culture of modern biomedical research, but is an expert on messianic religious movements in South Korea.
She said that an Apple product launch takes place in a building "littered with sacred symbols, especially the iconic Apple sign itself".
Keynote speeches feature an Apple leader reawakened and renewing their faith in the core message and tenets of the brand/religion.
The tradition of not broadcasting launches in real time is akin to a religious event where it is forbidden to broadcast Sacred Ceremonies.
Instead scribes or its Tame Apple Press act like the writers of the gospels, "testifying to the wonders they behold" in a completely non objective way.
Bell said that the idea of Apple-as-religion isn't a perfect analogy, in fact it is pretty superficial.
She said that religion was trying to do something different from a computer brand. Religion tries to give life meaning and explain humanity's purpose, she said. We guess she can't believe that the standards of the world have become so low that its purpose is to buy new techy toys.
But in some ways it clearly is a religion. Apple is selling something more than a product, it is "really about a more connected life," she said.
This is the sort of stuff many faiths promise, she added.
Apple always emphasises its origin story and its founder, Steve Jobs. Few other technology companies are so strongly associated with one person, she said.
It is true that Apple has largely managed to write Steve Wozniak out of its religion. It is sad really because Jobs would not have succeeded without Woz. And arguably, Woz is a better role model.
Within Reality/Divinity, Truth/Absolute-Knowledge precedes Love/Unconditional-Power whereas within Relativity/Humanity, Empowerment/Self precedes Knowledge/Others. The reason for this diametric is because Divinity, or the Material Universe for the overly-developed brain, was there eons before the inexact/emperical science of man began its journey to reclaiming some mythical ascendency, a case of The Egg expecting-demanding that its status be changed to that of The Chicken, just like that, and all because it had just woken up and started smelling the korfee. Afterall, there isn't one normal human who needed a manual to see or breathe exceptthat when foresight is required, an over-developed/egotistical brain is then the requirement.
Every human has 5 dimensionalities with almost all being only privy to the lowest 3 of Subjectivity, Objectivity and Projectivity. The Subjective is one's emotionality and pertains to The Past whereas The Objective-Projective pertain to one's futuristic material-intellect tendencies. In between The Past and The Future lies The Present and within The Present reside all that Of Intelligence, oka Of Depth. When a human was an infant, he lacked thoughts because he has yet to acquire a language. This phase of one's development is entirely emotional, being of The Heart and was when one was of Depth, being able to sense via the 6th and perhaps higher absolute senses which is similar to other non-thinkers like animals and vegetation. Once a human acquires language, he not only has the ability to develop conscience, he is then also able to destroy his self, which most assume as having the ability to destroy another, including all within Nature, an impossibility because there is no other unless there is firstly self. As the First Law Of Thermodynamics observes, energy can neither be created nor destroyed within Humanity/The ElectroMagnetic. When a human has yet to realised his 4th dimensionality, Spirituality, he'll miss his Depth/Universe as he lunges his way towards his future by over-developing his brain/futuristic tendencies. The Future being of Egotism whose quest is to harm another, the human then goes beyond animalism with many devolving into being a fully thinking animal, true animals and vegetation being lacking in conscience/thoughts because they are under the complete guidance of Nature via their absolute senses.
Those who have yet to realise their spirituality are like the dog which has the width of smell but lacking the depth of odour-fragrance or like a bat which has wide hearing but is unable to hear music. Religion & Religiosity is a Tentacle of The Bookie which mesmerises those who are prone to giving away their heart or those who lacked a heart - both being the same in reality - the heart being there for a purpose other than to be given away or to be rejected. When thoughts are balanced, they ceased to exist, a condition which most self-determining humans are unable to attain. In order to realise Conscience, The Width must be balanced with The Depth [or the correct aspect ratio] or else one is either vegetative or animalistic along the scale that is Of Width. This is the so-called secret which had eluded most, especially "scholars" and their frivolous & nonsensical activities, which somehow affords them some self-serving worshipfulness which they always deny, of course, but which are usually exposed at inopportune moments, scholarship being Of The Ego. That of the overly-developed brain which then elicits another set of afflictions like "stress" and "headaches", those
Of Heart, those who take it easy [but not lackadaisical], being alien to headaches unless one subscribes to the Repeat Prescription of "asprin" that is Quackery & Handler's solution to being overly-developed. Afterall, there is and endless supply of "diamonds" in some planet somewhere and we need to develop the brains to collect them. Such is the stupidity that is the overly complex and their lack of Depth.
Even if it's merely a wisp of something, or even a set of laws --- there is enough infinite questioning about the origins of that "something" which is the observable universe, to imply that the realm of any afterlife is perhaps an after-thought by some primal moronic philosopher aping comfort for the masses.
But I don't really give a damn what "nothing" means to philosophers; I care about the "nothing" of reality.
No space, no time, nothing, no pre-existing quantum vacuum. Does not exist, I reckon.
Yet within our cities of dreaming spires, steeples, needles and minarets, we are mostly commanded to bow before religeon, when it is usually the universe that's surpising us, not the other way around.
Religious seekers have been doing the experiment of changing their mind to change the world for thousands of years.
Pompous theologians who say, "out of nothing, nothing comes," and the more charismatic use brow-beating charm, humor, wit and culture as weapons against nonsense: "Look at me! I'm not the messiah! I'm a naughty naughty boy! Created by 'special divine action' & 'spooky action at a distance' on the order of hooking a fish to axe him the question or to pop the querant who hath an ear to grind our simian monkey minds-meld." It represents illusion and suggests that the querant is being fooled by themselves or others about questions of a material nature oka nutation dict direct from the nutator. To disavow the spiritual must surely be the souless unforgivable sin of blasphemy.
The advance of knowledge and technology where theoretical physicists are beginning to push even further, even unto new universes and new physics, into controversies once thought to be squarely within the domain of theology or philosophy, encourage the non-believers to come out from behind the woodshed.
In our brave new cosmology, "nothing" is almost everything; It is No-Thing and it is everything.
Examples of its observables include energy, position, momentum, and angular momentum, and all of the fun of calculating the probability of obtaining possible outcomes from measuring an observable to last a lifetime.
Here we have joined god and goddess by a reciprocal relationship or a conjugate pairing, as you do, especially for the promontory of the sacrum and the pubic symphysis. Amen.
Quantum physics now puts forward the idea that the expectation of the observer influences not only what is seen, but what is actually there, in essence, both science and religion describe the same phenomena where here we are in a world of shite and whatever we can't know or see must be the God of the gaps in our informed-ignorance hereby defining the Sinners-in-the-Hands-of-an-Angry-God obliquities of our apostasy, tilt we get the inclination for a higher plane an trip out to a better neighborhood with a more cosmocentric view.
I suspect the Truth is that the only Being powerful enough to banish the indetermination of our pitiable quantum state of ignorance and who is powerful enough to crunch the infinities who'd dance on the head of a pin, is purely and unblemished as without the eccentricity of a trepidation of the equinoxes, and is of course a lunatic in the flesh, IS the one and only, Moggy Schrodinger, who, like Pandora's theodicy, eschews Adonoy, the one true Dog star and a very good boy to boot, in cat-play forcing Him to hide on the dark matter of the Moon and be culpable to the stark delineation of dawn... You are a saying this is a man and his cat, an idol clay goddess and her jar; but they are separate aspects of the One Thing.
There is no good nor evil per se, only you do the maths and serve as the universal watcher and whipping boy, in the flesh; for only the living doth perceive, and the everything else's are scalar quantities in space time.
You, the observer, are separating the chuff from the chaff, but it requires one to know one. The greater part of your level of word and symbolic operator; hence the greater level of spectra perceived by the sensate; but all of you in existence are measured in literation of enumeration, and must equal at some nexxus your grade of gravity. Your power tools, your universe, but ultimately, all three come a cropper and are made a chocolate teapot.
The notion that there exists a primordial mind: The One True Teapot, Who well He would not blow off at you nor have need to make you to worship the Biscuit.
Your orbit is what lies before you after you've trodden what lied before that. But the impious chimp is utterly negligible and the "existence of a 'beneficent being' who tailor-made the universe bespoken for our convenience," well I'd fancy that. It is a bit like winning the lottery here on of all places the earth with a cherry on top.
The results are equivalent and neither system is the correct one. After immense periods of time, the universe will end in futility. What fate could be more sublime than simple cessation of the Ego?
Modern physics opens up a nightmare of 'speculative possibilities of conceiving immortality in different realms of being and forms of embodiment' the possibility of 'a continuation of life in different forms and in different space-times' take over the whole physical universe, and even 'spread into all spatial regions in all universes which could logically exist, and will have stored an infinite amount of information, including all bits of knowledge which it is logically impossible to know''. Mankind's innate quest to subdue all things beneath his foot and have our way with them, is an anathema to creation, albeit requisite for procreation. If Eternal Pentance in Damnation trully exists, then I'll probably be thrashing about it with that bloke what commented afore me.
Let's not rape Mother Nature, but leave her more dangly bits to the err, imagination.