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)."
Re:Bad luck Junior (Score:1, Interesting)
Fanatics on the net? Sounds just like Conservapedia.
And look how well that worked out. Try to build something like that and the end result is inevitable: troll magnet.
So my prediction is simple. These search engines will remain "pure" right up until the moment 4chan and the like take an interest. Expect something akin to googlebombing to swiftly follow. Religious nuts on the net are like catnip to these guys...
Re:imstupid.com (Score:1, Interesting)
Well, there is no evidence for atheism, so they're half right. Proof of the non-existence of God would be logically impossible.
But for the same reason, there's no evidence for Christianity either, so they're still wrong.
Censorship (Score:3, Interesting)
Thoughts on Seekfind from a Christian perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
(Based on its static pages. Haven't been able to search yet.)
A while ago I saw another Christian general search engine (I forget the URL). I tried a few searches on it, and it was absolutely pathetic. The results could not have been less relevant if they tried! That is deeply disturbing to me, as I believe that we as Christians should should aim for excellence in all that we do.
It looks like this Seekfind will be different in that it doesn't aim to be a general search engine. I could see some value in that, if you're looking for thoughts on specific Bible passages or whatnot from a Christian perspective. I suspect that users who use Seekfind for that would have no trouble using Google for everything else, so there is no need to claim that they are "sheltered".
However, what disturbs me about Seekfind is its apparent narrowness in what they deem as "Christian-enough." Apparently they will not index sites that describe end-times from an amillennial perspective -- which is the most widely held view in all of Christendom (not American fundamentalism), and they won't consider infant baptism (as we in the Presbyterian Church do) or even believers' baptism by sprinkling. What the? It would be much more valuable if I could find commentaries from various Christian perspectives.
I'm looking forward to searching them for creation apologist material. From a comment above it looks like they only cover the young earth think tanks. I bet there won't be any results from reasons.org [reasons.org], which IMHO has a much saner interpretation of Creation (they argue that the Big Bang is fully compatible with a literal reading of the Bible).
Re:stupid people (Score:2, Interesting)
It's far worse than people just filtering their search results.
Companies like Amazon make recommendations based on items you looked at previously. iTunes recommends music similar to the music you already have. Many commercial news sites allow you to customize your landing page so that you don't see news stories on subjects that don't interest you. Sites like Digg allow like-minded people to vote stories up and down so that you are more likely to see stories that fit well with your interests and world-view. Slashdot has a comment moderation system where ideas that don't fit with the group-think get hidden.
All so that we don't have to bother our poor little heads with things that disturb us.
Re:stupid people (Score:3, Interesting)
Having your information filtered against your will != choosing a filter for your information. Every time you use a search engine, you're filtering data, otherwise, it will just be a list of sites on the Internet. These sites just start with a pre-defined filter.
Re:imstupid.com (Score:5, Interesting)
If you were a comedian, you couldn't come up with something better than that. Are these people really that stupid?
Yes, they are. And one of the reasons they are is that they filter out evidence to the contrary. Having their own search engines just reduces the mental load, but one key point of all religious teaching is that you know the truth and everything contradicting it is false and/or a temptation by the devil (or whatever your equivalent is). So you train in filtering it out mentally. Having your computer do it for you is only the next logical step.
But without opposing views, your chosen view of the world gets ever stronger and - over time - ever more absurd. Do it long enough and you lose touch with reality entirely and start to believe in... I don't know, gods or some such nonsense.
Re:As an atheist... (Score:4, Interesting)
They are not mutually exclusive.
(A)gnosticism refers to what you know, and (a)theism refers what you believe in terms of gods. They are two independent dimensions. Think cartesian plane with one axis for theism and the other for gnosticism. You can be an agnostic atheist, a gnostic theist or everything in between. Gnostic atheists are hard to come by, but many gnostic theists are pretty loud about it.
Re:Atheist (Score:3, Interesting)
So where's the proof that the existence of a god is vanishingly unlikely? I mean, with a tea set orbiting in space, the existence of such a tea set implies one of a small set of observably unlikely situations (note the word "observably"). The most likely explanation is that some country with an oversized space budget and sense of humour decided to plant the tea set there. Other less likely possibilities include the tea set formed on its own, or that a god placed the tea set there, but since we haven't observed any tea sets occurring in nature, or any divine tea sets handed down from any deities in odd places, we can conclude, with a reasonably strong degree of certainty that the tea set does not exist.
What about god? What observation tells us that he does not exist? Well, we haven't seen him, and nobody we know has seen him, but given his scope, he could be literally anywhere, in (or even outside) an extremely expansive universe. We haven't found any gods occurring naturally in the universe, but then again, the god that is claimed to exist by christians isn't exactly claimed to be common. We haven't found any intelligible message for humanity hidden in quantum mechanics or in the digits of Pi, but we supposedly have all the messages we are supposed to receive for now, so we weren't exactly anticipating them. We haven't found the hand of god measurably influencing the lives of faithful christians, but if anything could influence the course of events profoundly and cover his tracks, it would be god.
What evidence do we have against his existence? Well, about as much as we have for his existence. All we know is that, if he exists, he is thoroughly outside our sphere of perception. We can't determine a likelihood of events outside our sphere of perception, unless we make the assumption that what we perceive inside holds uniformly true outside, an assumption that presupposes that God doesn't exist anyway.
I suppose you could make an inductive argument: "We've seen what we've seen of the universe (or of any greater realities encompassing it, if they exist), and it holds true everywhere we've seen. Therefore, it holds true everywhere." The problem with that is that its strength relies on our perceiving a representative sample of reality, but we have little to back that assumption up.
Actually, this reminds me of a discussion [slashdot.org] I participated in a month or so ago. We were discussing how calculating Pi to 5 trillion digits could potentially be used as evidence as to whether or not Pi was a normal number. [wikipedia.org] I argued that such a calculation actually tells us no more about normality than a calculation of the first 10 digits, because without some idea of a pattern that the infinite expansion follows, we have only a vanishingly small sample of the complete expansion of Pi, and we have no clue as to whether it is representative of the whole expansion or not. So, even though the number of digits we've calculated seems large by our standards, in the scheme of proving by brute force that Pi is normal, we've discovered almost nothing at all.
The same thing clearly applies here. We've observed a slice of reality, but we don't really know how large the whole of reality is, or what it looks like as a whole. Can we actually claim that we know reality just from the observable universe?
(FYI, I'm an agnostic.)
Re:Atheist (Score:3, Interesting)
Every atheist accepts that there is no deity on blind faith and without further investigation.
Next please, this one has no idea what he is talking about.
Semantics hint: Every sentence starting with "every" or any other all-quantor is by definition false. You are always able to find an exception. Yes, this is an intentional paradox.
atheism is often far less harmful than some religious notions, but it is no more rational.
1rational
adj \rash-nl, ra-sh-nl\
Definition of RATIONAL
1
a : having reason or understanding b : relating to, based on, or agreeable to reason : reasonable
2
: involving only multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction and only a finite number of times
3
: relating to, consisting of, or being one or more rational numbers
-- rationally adverb
-- rationalness noun
(source: Merriam-Webster [merriam-webster.com])
I must assume from context that you mean that 1st definition. I must also assume that you are referring to early 21st century atheism, not some ancient or fictional one. If my assumptions are correct, then you should maybe try to do a bit of research on the subject matter. Most of the current-day atheists are also strict rationalists. It is not an accident that most of the famous ones are scientists.
Stating "I know..." about a thing that is, by definition, unknowable, is irrational.
Only in a simplified universe that doesn't want to open itself to reason and insists that by fiat, some things are unknowable. Where do you even take it from that some things are "unknowable"? Oh yes, "by definition". Wait, isn't that exactly the kind of a priori reasoning that you are trying to put down?
21st century atheists do not usually state "I know there is no god". What they do state is that there is no evidence whatsoever, that all the claims made by believers either have been disproved or are easy to disprove, or are pure semantic trickery to avoid falsification. The end result, as Dawkins put it so nicely, is that there may be a chinese teapot in orbit around Saturn, and with current technology it is impossible to be absolutely certain that there isn't - but it is so unlikely that whoever makes the claim ought to provide the evidence, not the other way around.
Atheists differ from Agnostics in that an agnostic essentially assumes the chances are 50:50 while an atheist has come to the conclusion that the chances that there is a god even remotely resembling the description of any of the major religions is so ridiculously small that believing in a teapot orbiting Saturn is a better idea, because that's more likely.
Re:Atheist (Score:3, Interesting)
religion helps a believer to lead happy life and frees him from anxiety.
Really? Many religious people I know are intensely anxious because their religion teaches them that they're one false move away from burning in hell for all eternity. In fact, in many religions there is an attempt to reject our animal instincts, things that feel very natural for us to do, and threaten unimaginable punishment for those unable to resist our natural urges. That tends to cause a bit of anxiety and unhappiness.
Re:Atheist (Score:3, Interesting)
Never go to a dictionary for a philosophical definition. It's sloppy, and the definition will always be wrong. In this case, the definition seems to have been deliberately slanted (I suggest you find another dictionary.)
As just about everyone else here has mentioned, gnostic atheism is very rare. However, most atheists consider the existence of God to be a highly unlikely proposition, because of the complete lack of evidence even though billions of people have been highly motivated to seek proof. In the absence of any evidence for a belief, the only fact left to be explained is the belief itself, and there are a broad range of explanations sufficient to the task of explaining religion.
Doubting the unlikely is an example of what we call the Null Hypothesis. It is entirely possible that someone has put a cobra under my bed, poisoned the food in my refrigerator, put a bomb in my car, or is waiting outside my door with a gun. But all of these are unlikely, and I simply do not bother worrying about them. A person unable to dismiss unsubstantiated and unlikely possibilities would not be able to function (an extremely severe psychotic episode can cause this.) So what does it say about belief in God that it requires you to discard a principle that you must use hundreds or even thousands of times a day, just to keep yourself sane?