Sociology of religion is the study of the beliefs and organizational forms of religion using the tools and methods of the discipline of sociology. This objective investigation may include the use of both quantitative methods and qualitative approaches such as participant observation and analysis of archival and documentary materials. Modern academic sociology began with the analysis of religion in Émile Durkheim's 1897 study of suicide rates among Catholic and Protestant populations, a foundational work of social research which served to distinguish sociology from other disciplines, such as psychology; the works of Karl Marx and Max Weber emphasized the relationship between religion and the economic or social structure of society. Contemporary debates have centered on issues such as secularization, civil religion, the cohesiveness of religion in the context of globalization and multiculturalism; the contemporary sociology of religion may encompass the sociology of irreligion. Sociology of religion is distinguished from the philosophy of religion in that it does not set out to assess the validity of religious beliefs.

The process of comparing multiple conflicting dogmas may require what Peter L. Berger has described as inherent "methodological atheism". Whereas the sociology of religion broadly differs from theology in assuming indifference to the supernatural, theorists tend to acknowledge socio-cultural reification of religious practice. Classical, seminal sociological theorists of the late 19th and early 20th century such as Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx were interested in religion and its effects on society. Like those of Plato and Aristotle from ancient Greece, Enlightenment philosophers from the 17th through 19th centuries, the ideas posited by these sociologists continue to be examined today. Durkheim and Weber had complex and developed theories about the nature and effects of religion. Of these and Weber are more difficult to understand in light of the lack of context and examples in their primary texts. Religion was considered to be an important social variable in the work of all three. According to Kevin J. Christiano et al. "Marx was the product of the Enlightenment, embracing its call to replace faith by reason and religion by science."

But he "did not believe in science for science's sake … he believed that he was advancing a theory that would … be a useful tool … effecting a revolutionary upheaval of the capitalist system in favor of socialism." As such, the crux of his arguments was. Religion, Marx held, was a significant hindrance to reason, inherently masking the truth and misguiding followers; as we will see, Marx viewed alienation as the heart of social inequality. The antithesis to this alienation is freedom. Thus, to propagate freedom means to present individuals with the truth and give them a choice to accept or deny it. In this, "Marx never suggested that religion ought to be prohibited."Central to Marx's theories was the oppressive economic situation in which he dwelt. With the rise of European industrialism and his colleague Friedrich Engels witnessed and responded to the growth of what he called "surplus value". Marx's view of capitalism saw rich capitalists getting their workers getting poorer. Not only were workers getting exploited, but in the process they were being further detached from the products they helped create.

By selling their work for wages, "workers lose connection with the object of labor and become objects themselves. Workers are devalued to the level of a commodity – a thing …" From this objectification comes alienation; the common worker is led to believe that he or she is a replaceable tool, is alienated to the point of extreme discontent. Here, in Marx's eyes, religion enters. Capitalism utilizes our tendency towards religion as a tool or ideological state apparatus to justify this alienation. Christianity teaches that those who gather up riches and power in this life will certainly not be rewarded in the next while those who suffer oppression and poverty in this life, while cultivating their spiritual wealth, will be rewarded in the Kingdom of God. Hence Marx's famous line – "religion is the opium of the people", as it soothes them and dulls their senses to the pain of oppression; some scholars have noted that this is a contradictory metaphor, referring to religion as both an expression of suffering and a protest against suffering.

Émile Durkheim placed himself in the positivist tradition, meaning that he thought of his study of society as dispassionate and scientific. He was interested in the problem of what held complex modern societies together. Religion, was an expression of social cohesion. In the field work that led to his famous Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim, a secular Frenchman, looked at anthropological data of Indigenous Australians, his underlying interest was to understand the basic forms of religious life for all societies. In Elementary Forms, Durkheim argues that the totems the Aborigines venerate are expressions of their own conceptions of society itself; this is true not only for the Aborigines, he for all societies. Religion, for Durkheim, is not "imaginary", although he does deprive it of what many believers find essential. Religion is real.

QTCH is a filetype used by QuickTime to store audio or video files streamed from a server on the client's computer hard drive. The first 16 bytes are: Hex. Pqtch........ This file type seems to have been introduced with QuickTime Player 7.x. The file is stored in any sub-directories of the following location: %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Apple Computer\QuickTime\downloads For example, C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Application Data\Apple Computer\QuickTime\downloads\08\02\82580278-44f0f184-c8c435b8-526b4f79.qtch Previously, QuickTime Player 6.x would store these audio and video streams as files on the hard drive that had auto generated names such as 59B8794Ad01. Unlike.qtch files, these files had the correct a/v magic number and could be played by an appropriate player. For example, the first 16 bytes of an m4v file are: Hex. Using the Firefox browser the location of these files would be: %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<session id>\Cache\ For example, C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\jb4efpu5.default\Cache\59B8794Ad01 Although the files have different headers their a/v payload can be the same.

In this example the same a/v file was streamed from a server and stored on the hard drive using QuickTime Player 6.x and QuickTime Player 7.x respectively: The first 16 bytes of the file are different: QuickTime Player 6.x 00 00 00 14 66 74 79 70 33 67 70 34 00 00 04 00. QuickTime Player 7.x 00 00 00 50 71 74 63 68 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 02. Pqtch........ However the a/v data starts at: 7D 57 3F 1A 9A D6 CE 94 95 59 D0 CE 02 C1 E2 92 From here both files are identical. To prove that the a/v information is intact within the.qtch file you can replace the.qtch file contents above this start a/v hex value with that from the QuickTime Player 6.x file and it will play normally. It may be impossible to know the filetype embedded within a.qtch file without having a side-by-side comparison with the same file streamed using QuickTime Player 6.x. Tools such as TrID/32 - File Identifier would, when analysing the file in the above example, only give you this information: 75.0% QuickTime Cached data It would not tell you the embedded file type.

The only known way to establish the file type of a.qtch file is to employ a packet sniffer and search for the stream's file type as it is received by the network card. For example, for QuickTime you would search for the leaf atom called ftyp. Knowledge would be required to build the correct header to the point of the actual a/v data start. Although iTunes stores.qtch files in the same way as described above the a/v content appears to be scrambled in some fashion so that a side-by-side comparison of the original file with the stored streamed file would find no match in the a/v data. List of file formats QuickTime streaming media

Ezinqoleni Local Municipality was an administrative area in the Ugu District of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. Ezinqoleni is an isiZulu name word meaning "at the wagons". Traffic in the early days was by wagon drawn by donkeys and post carts drawn by mules. There is an acute shortage of basic services and facilities and employment. After municipal elections on 3 August 2016 it was merged into the larger Ray Nkonyeni Local Municipality; the 2001 census divided the municipality into the following main places: The municipal council consists of eleven members elected by mixed-member proportional representation. Six councillors are elected by first-past-the-post voting in six wards, while the remaining five are chosen from party lists so that the total number of party representatives is proportional to the number of votes received. In the election of 18 May 2011 the African National Congress won a majority of eight seats on the council; the following table shows the results of the election. Official website