The Advent of Religious Search Engines 583
Beetle B. writes "Do Google search results contradict your religious views? Tired of getting pornographic results and worried you'll burn in Hell for it? Are you Christian? Try SeekFind — 'a Colorado Springs-based Christian search engine that only returns results from websites that are consistent with the Bible.' Muslim? Look no further: I'm Halal. Jewish? Jewogle is for you. NPR ran a story on the general trend of search engines cropping up to cater to certain religious communities. I wonder how many other 'filtered' search engines exist out there to cater to various groups (religious or otherwise) — not counting specialized searches (torrents, etc)."
Rather, Church encoding (Score:3, Informative)
Your comment is particularly nice because, of course, Alonzo Church collaborated with Alan Turing, and both of those atheists would have been equally horrified at yet another example of the way that some so-called Christians seek to exclude any information that is incompatible with their "truth".
Re:Atheist (Score:5, Informative)
Atheists believe in the power of citations. :-)
Omphalos - The Pagan Search Engine (Score:3, Informative)
I did this many years ago. I built and maintained a yahoo style directory of Pagan and Wiccan websites called Omphalos. I added a search engine that indexed all the sites in our directory, using an open source search engine called UDMsearch. I had a pretty extensive index by the time I was done, and the site was fairly popular, given the small size of the potential audience. Sadly, I lost the domain name and then lost the ability to host it eventually, and the whole thing died. The domain name belonged to a squatter last time I looked (Omphalos.net).
It was a lot of work and took a lot of my time up. I still have a backup of the site itself somewhere on my HD I think. Certainly I have the old text files I had posted there from my BBS days kicking around. I am sure Omphalos must have been superseded by something better by now, but at the time it was the only pagan search engine.
"belief" (Score:2, Informative)
The problem with your statement is that atheists use the word "belief" differently from how religious people use it when they talk about their religion. When a religious person say "I believe in God", they mean that they have absolute faith that their god exists. They know that their god exists.
When an Atheist says "I believe that there is no God", that person means "given the current evidence, I've come to the conclusion that it makes sense to live my life under the assumption that no god exists."
Atheists use "believe" in that sentence in the same way most people use it when they say something like "I believe it will rain tomorrow", not in the "absolute faith" kind of way.
And let's also note that atheism per se doesn't require that you believe that God doesn't exist. Atheism merely requires that you don't believe that a god exist. A lot of atheists are agnostics as well. In other words, the absolute absence of faith in a god is not the same as absolute faith in the absence of a god.
Re:Creationist Wolfram Alpha? (Score:3, Informative)
Well, God is supposed to have killed "all life that lived on dry land and breathed through its nostrils [wikipedia.org]". Seems pretty evil to me.
Re:Atheist (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Vertical search is fairly old (Score:3, Informative)
There have been "vertical search engines" that only search within particular fields for a very long time now -- everything from cars to plumbing. Not sure how newsworthy it is that there are also ones for Christian and Muslim theology.
Did you read the article? This isn't about searching theology. This is a "general" search engine that filters out material not acceptable to their religion(s).
Re:Atheist (Score:4, Informative)
A Foucault pendulum [wikipedia.org]. It's only translational reference frames which have no absolute reference (if you and someone else are moving apart at constant direction and speed, you can't tell who is standing still and who is moving, or if both are moving). It's fairly easy to distinguish a rotating reference frame from a non-rotating one since rotation generates phantom centrifugal "forces" (consequently there is only one single absolute, universal non-rotating reference frame). These "forces" are what make a Foucault pendulum appear to rotate.
Re:How Modern Tech Narrows Minds ... (Score:3, Informative)
Only because you are looking at the wrong end of the eye piece your using to judge society.
Are followers of bronze age religions who have learned to click a few buttons a sign of progress through technology? No.
Holding a chunk of technology in your hand that required 100 years or more of scientific research and study to develop does not transfer the progress made by the many people before the subject into the subject's mind through osmosis. It is a very common misconception that wielding technology somehow makes you an advanced technological being, it doesn't.
Without the education to fully understand the wielded technology and a good dose of critical thinking that may very well dispel the stone and bronze age myths a society has lived by for many generations the technology will only become a part of the mythology. [wikipedia.org]
If instead of viewing and judging the effects of technology by looking at the end users you viewed those who actually do the study, research and development it is more likely you will find the progress you are looking for.
But I will state that continuous technological advancement and progress of humanity is not guaranteed by the advances in science and technology. While it may not be the stated intent of these religious search engines, and the political engines I've seen mentioned as well, to halt, impede, and often reverse all technological advancement and human progress that is the result they will affect if not critically addressed.
Tolerance of ignorance and stupidity are the enemies of human progress and they are the enemies of scientific and technological advancement. While individuals should be allowed to tightly grasp their failed ideologies they should not be allowed to evangelise their failed dogma without rebuttal no matter how much it hurts their feelings.
Re:Atheist (Score:2, Informative)