Apple is the new religion, say several academics. It’s not a matter of rationality, it’s a matter of faith.

In a research paper published this month by two professors at Texas A&M University, the authors argue that the only way to understand the slavish adoration and over-the top financial success of Apple and its “Jesus Phone” (the iPhone) is to understand its minimalist, white-walled stores as the new churches of the tech generation.

“The religious-like behavior and language surrounding Apple devotion/fandom is an example of ‘implicit religion,’” Prof. Heidi Campbell, one of the authors of the study, told FoxNews.com. Implicit religion can happen when the use of, say, technology becomes a substitute for belief and behaviors once attached to religion and religious practice, she said.

That, according to the authors, explains why fans still believe when the leader of the Church of Apple, Steve Jobs, blames consumers for the poor reception of the company’s cell phone (clearly, users are holding their phones incorrectly). In fact, they flock to buy the device despite its serious design flaws.

The so-called prosperity gospel preached by Benny Hinn does not work for the controversial evangelist.

Hinn has posted a plea for $2 million in donations on his website.

The televangelist says he accumulated the deficit in the past few months because offerings at some international appearances did not cover expenses.

Here’s how the prosperity scam is sold: God wants you to be rich (and/or healthy), but He can not bless you unless you first send money to whichever televangelist or teacher tells you about this scheme.

Such donations are often referred to as “seed-faith offerings” — which is why Benny Hinn is asking you to “sow the best seed you can, as quickly as you can.”

Our advice: If the prosperity gospel works as advertised, folks like Hinn should be sending you and me money so that God can bless him.

We’re not holding our breath. [See also: Hinn and money]

A group called ‘Stop Islamization of America’ is promoting ads on major city public transportation that urge people to leave the Muslim faith. The anti-Islamic campaign is sparking thought about the religion’s place in American society.

Ads by a group calling itself Stop Islamization of America, which aims to provide refuge for former Muslims, read: “Fatwa on your head? Is your family or community threatening you? Leaving Islam? Got questions? Get answers!”

Those ads, appearing on dozens of buses in the San Francisco Bay Area, Miami, and New York, are a response to ones from a Muslim group that say, “The way of life of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad. Islam. Got questions? Get answers.”

The ads are part of a larger conversation over Islam’s image, which Muslim organizations say has been hurt by extremists both at home and abroad. But many conservative groups say that concern about the spread of Islam isn’t alarmist, pointing to evidence of imams in this country inciting militancy and a growing number of American Muslims arrested for plotting terror attacks.

The Islamist rulers of the Gaza Strip have ordered lingerie shops to display more modesty.

A week after banning women from smoking water pipes in public places, the Hamas-run police force has told stores selling women’s underwear to remove scantily-clad mannequins and any posters of racy undergarments.

Hamas leaders have repeatedly denied any intention to impose Islamic law on the Gaza Strip, home to 1.5 million Palestinians.

Last year it ordered women lawyers to wear the hijab, or Muslim headscarf, in court and banned women from riding on motorcycles. It has also banned men from working in women’s beauty salons.

The terrorist group has not yet found the moral will to renounce the terrorist acts it commits in the name of Islam:

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott on Tuesday immediately began a new proceeding to extradite Warren Jeffs, a spokesman for Abbott said.

“We are currently working with the Texas governor’s office and Utah authorities to bring Warren Jeffs to Texas to stand trial,” said the spokesman, Jerry Strickland.

In September 2007 the cult leader, who ruled his polygamous FLDS cult with an iron hand, was found guilty of two counts of being an accomplice to rape.

Last Tuesday his conviction was overturned on a technicality.

Texas authorities have charged Jeffs with bigamy, sexual assault of a child and aggravated assault.

Though Jan David Clark admits to killing his wife during an attempted exorcism in February 2008, he maintains he never intended to harm the woman he “loved and spoiled� for 17 years.

“That was not a willing thing that took place,� Clark, 63, recalled in a jailhouse interview Tuesday. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s still a supernatural thing.�

After more than two years of delays, Clark is scheduled to be tried this fall on murder charges in connection with the death of 59-year-old Susan K. Clark.

According to court filings, Clark told investigators he held his wife’s face to the floor of their bathroom when the exorcized spirit from her body entered his, causing him to kill his wife.

Investigators found Susan Clark wrapped in a bed sheet on her back with a cross and a sword atop her body. Preliminary autopsy results revealed she had been suffocated, court documents show.

Clark said he regrets attempting the exorcism alone, noting a group effort would have been more appropriate.

Everyone in pop culture seems to come through San Diego’s Comic-Con these days. The annual event has grown from a gathering of dedicated comic book fans to an essential stop on the marketing hajj for any major nerd-related media.

A fleet of news outlets now invade the convention annually to see exclusive previews and panel discussions covering a broad spectrum of films, television shows, video games—and, yes, comic books.

Last weekend, at least one evangelical pastor joined the press corps at Comic-Con 2010.

Tony Kim, executive pastor of Newsong Church/Irvine, gained special entrée to the event as a blogger for BabbleOn 5, the movie review site that he and a few friends from church manage. Kim, a long-time Comic-Con attendee and a self-proclaimed “Pastor of the Nerds,” met some of his pop-culture heroes, such as actor Jeff Bridges (Iron Man, The Big Lebowski, etc.), actor Zachary Levi (NBC’s Chuck), and Stan Lee (Spider-Man, X-Men, Iron Man, etc.). He also participated in Morgan Super Size Me Spurlock’s latest documentary project, Comic-Con Episode Four: A Fan’s Hope.

He spoke with Christianity Today about his double life in fandom and the kingdom.

Federal authorities say a minister borrowed nearly $500,000 from a Florida-based mission group to build a new church in Indianapolis but spent part of the money on luxury items for himself instead.

The Rev. Wayne Taft Harris Jr. was scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court in Indianapolis this afternoon to face charges of wire fraud.

But after Harris didn’t show up, court officials learned there had been a miscommunication in Houston, Tex., where Harris had turned himself in earlier this month and posted $25,000 bond. A magistrate judge reset the initial hearing for Aug. 3.

For residents of Rome, the sight of courting priests is hardly an anomaly. The phenomenon is a well-known secret here, and one that was largely ignored until last weekend, when the Italian weekly magazine Panorama published a shocking exposé called “Le Notti Brave Dei Preti Gay,� or “Good Nights Out for Gay Priests.�

Investigative journalist Carmelo Abbate spent 20 days undercover posing as the boyfriend of a man who ran in gay clerical circles, secretly videotaping the sexual escapades of three Rome-based priests.

Abbate caught the priests on hidden camera dirty dancing at private parties and engaging in sex acts with male escorts on church property. He also caught them emerging from dark bedrooms in time to celebrate mass. In one postcoital scene, “Father Carlo� parades around seminaked, wearing only his clerical vestments. Abbate’s “date� even had sex with one of the priests to corroborate the story.

“This is not about homosexuality,� Abbate, who is not gay, told NEWSWEEK. “This is about private vices and public virtues. This is about serious hypocrisy in the Catholic Church.�

Indonesia’s highest Islamic body has issued a fatwa banning Muslims from watching gossip shows or having sex-change operations, an official said Wednesday.

The increasingly assertive Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) said gossip shows about the intimate details of people’s private lives — a popular genre on Indonesian television — were immoral and threatened society.

“We’re not against all infotainment programmes… What’s haram (forbidden) is material that’s gossipy and exposes shameful details about people.

Profiting from infotainment shows is also forbidden under the edict, posing a theological conundrum for the media industry in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, AFP reports.

Another fatwa passed at an MUI meeting late Tuesday forbade receiving or conducting a sex-change operation unless there is a good medical reason.

The council is the top Islamic authority in Indonesia and while its edicts are usually ignored, they can be cited by religious hardliners to justify vigilante-style crackdowns on “un-Islamic” activities.

Nestlé is the leading multinational company when it comes to developing marketing strategies for Muslim consumers, according to Miles Young, worldwide ceo of Ogilvy & Mather.

Speaking to Warc at the Oxford Global Islamic Branding and Marketing Forum at the Saïd Business School, Young said the food and beverage giant had most quickly identified Muslim shoppers as an important demographic.

Parishioners at an evangelical church in Montreal are taking legal action against a prominent pastor they say pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars loaned to him in God’s name.

Several members of the Bethel Christian Community have gone public with troubling allegations about money they say they lent to their spiritual leader — Rev. Mwinda Lezoka, a Congolese native who has ministered to Montreal’s growing African community for two decades.

At least 24 members of the modest parish claim they loaned Lezoka significant amounts of money — sometimes even remortgaging their homes — to support their church’s activities.

All of them say they have never seen promised returns.

A Malaysian court fined 12 Muslims on Tuesday and sentenced one of them to a week in prison for illegally protesting the construction of a Hindu temple and parading a severed cow’s head.

The protest last August stoked tensions among Malaysia’s three main ethnic groups — the Malay Muslim majority and Chinese and Indian minorities, most of them Buddhists, Christians or Hindus who have complained that their religious rights are often sidelined in favor of Islam.

The 12 men were among scores of Muslims who marched with a bloodied cow’s head from a mosque to the central Selangor state chief minister’s office on Aug. 28, 2009 to denounce the state government’s plan to build a Hindu temple in their largely Muslim neighborhood.

Some of the protesters also stomped and spat on the head and made fiery speeches that deeply offended Hindus. The cow is the most sacred animal in Hinduism.

In March, 2009, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer became the first major metro daily newspaper to go online-only. It now thrives as seattlepi.com. Good for them, but we hope their recent article about the opening of Seattle’s new Church of Scientology regional headquarters is not representative of the news outlet’s journalistic standards.

The piece reads like a PR brochure for the cult. It’s a missed opportunity to hold Scientology up to daylight.

In a separate item the ‘reporter’ also uncritically describes her experience with the E-meter, a gadget Scientologists use to bamboozle potential customers into accepting the cult’s quackery.

“Did it measure my (not-so-subconscious) distress?” SeattlePI’s reporter asks. Well, Amy: “None of the scientology theories associated with, or claims made for, the E-meter is justified.”

For a decade, Sister Milindia has tugged on heartstrings in Little Italy. Wearing a cross, veil and nun’s black habit, she approaches strangers and asks for donations, saying she’s an Episcopal sister raising money for an orphanage and the homeless.

But “Sister Milindia” is not a sister, the New York Post writes. The Episcopal Church has never heard of her; she’s been busted at least once, in 1997, for misrepresenting herself as a nun in The Bronx; and the orphanage for which she claims to raise money doesn’t exist.

Her real name is Mindy LeGrand, 54, and she’s connected to a “church” in Crown Heights founded in the 1970s by a killer rapist with a harem of a dozen phony nuns. The church is now led by the founder’s son, who is also a convicted rapist.

The outfit has no Episcopal or other church affiliation, is not a registered charity and has no foster- or day-care license of any kind.