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The Advent of Religious Search Engines
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)."
http://www.atheistsearch.net/
Search: creationism
[Click "I'm Feeling Lucky"]
Error: there's no such thing as luck!
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"that are not the droids you are looking for."
How do I know that the search engine really is religious and doesn't just claim to be a true believer? Does the search engine go to church regularly? Does it pray? Is it baptized? :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Now you can know all that you can see with a diminished field of view. Another way to look at how technology does not equate with 'progress'.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Does the real world contradict your religious views? Tired of getting (insert taboo here) and worried you'll (moralising afterlife disincentive here)?
"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you" (Matthew 7:7).
Due to extremely high traffic, the search index is intermittantly unavailable. We are working to have the problem fixed as soon as possible. Please accept our apologies.
The mission of SeekFind.org is to provide God-honoring, biblically-based, and theologically-sound Christian search engine results in a highly accurate and well-organized format.
There's a joke in there somewhere. Heck, there's such a plethora of jokes in there that I don't even know where to begin...
Oh, and for the record...Matthew would have used Google ;-)
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Jewogle just sounds weird. Jewgle sounds like google only with a soft g.
It's a funny idea, but I suspect it's pretty hard to customize the search for every kind of believer. Some Christians have far more extreme standards than others in what they consider appropriate, for example. And they have very different ideas on what's "consistent with the bible". I notice that this search engine only returns results from icr.org, cristiananswers.net, gotquestions.org and apologeticspress.org. Might be useful in some circumstances, I guess, but I think most Christians will just use Google for their regular search needs.
Like it happens with paper media, each consumer buying the paper that tunes with his ideas.
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...
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. Rather useful if you're looking up material to help you write a sermon, bible study, or for use in your own bible reading. There are also religious bookshops, selling religious books. So what a surprise that if there's a lot of written material around, someone's made a search engine for it. In other shocking news, there is a search engine exclusively for knitting. Clearly its users must only believe in woollen dinosaurs!
they're using Church Engines?
Well, just wait until all ISPs in your area block all uncensored search engines.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
there. i said it.
millions of people around the world are suffering because they don't have access to information that is freely available on the internet, and still there are idiots out there who want to have their search results filtered.
ok, you don't wanna see a naked lady by accident. I get it. there's tons of things on the internet that I personally don't want to ever see (and I would do my best to keep children from seeing them). but if you don't want to hear what people with other convictions have to say in reasonable scenarios, then I say you're an idiot.
go ahead. sick your gdodg on me.
new sig
too much information on the internets! my fragile, horribly narrow world view is being damaged! quick, shelter me, opportunists!
i'm pretty depressed after reading this story. i'll have to go have a smoke before i can get back to work....
weinersmith
Guess I won't be able to find God after all.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
"We're M.A.D and you're crazy".
top ten results
I don't know and neither do you.
Believe nothing, question everything.
There is no truth, only perception.
There is no such thing as infinity.
Organized religion is a bot-net.
You are responsible for your own actions.
There is no authority but yourself.
If you think otherwise, you've been hacked.
Give peace a chance: Nuke Jerusalem.
Death to the fidels!
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
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".
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Bah, the search engine of a true believer would be to type in a random IP address and rely on the hand of God to ensure it's the very one you're looking for.
It's important that we accommodate those who do not wish to have their walled-garden world view tarnished. Seeing the world unfiltered is not for everyone... Imagine if geocentrists find that the earth is not the center of the universe - most uncomfortable indeed.
First link for "atheism" points to Conservapedia, which says:
If you were a comedian, you couldn't come up with something better than that. Are these people really that stupid?
No search engines for buddhism? Or hinduism? Or pastafarianism?
I imagine that the Creationist version of Wolfram Alpha would be very easy to implement:
Q: [anything, really]
A: God did it.
The sites are not down. They are just self-protecting against the infidels. The true believers still can access them. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It's always smart to exclude search results that don't match your personal prejudice.
no, I don't have a sig
Server Error in '/' Application.
Jesus not found.
*DrugCheese rants*
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.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
http://search.slashdot.org/search
(I kid, I kid. I know fully well about diversity of opinions here, but you gotta admit there's still prevalence of some)
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
A kid writes from camp that they had gone primative.
Find a web filtering appliance and reverse the polarity.
Do you or your partner snore? - Visit www.snoring.com.au
I'm sure you guys have seen the "Christian Debt Financing" spam emails to trap the gullible. Imagine an entire search engine trying to scam you by pretending to share your morality.
It may even start off with good ideals, but you can bet that after a short period of time that it's just there to shear the flock.
Advent? But it's not December yet!
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Anyone else find this could become a potentially deeply worrying form of censorship? A weapon to use against science.
Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.
Your God is not so powerful now, is he??
(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, 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).
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.
The word "believe" in religion is not about whether you believe in God. You have to believe because there is no solid explanation and evidence on why one religion is more correct than other religions. Hence, you need to have "blind faith" on that religion (not God) and hope that God really is how this religion describes. I came to realize when people ask me why I don't believe in God, reasoning like this is the best way to convince them, even though its not exactly how I think. Remember, never tell the believers "I don't believe in God because I'm a scientific person."
response.write("Click here");
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.
But this is the whole problem with organised religion. Once you give special status to a particular view (your own country, your own search engine) you alienate 1000 other interpretations of that religion. This is why the separation of church and state is a Good Thing. Its not bad for religion. Its bad for the little versions of it. Consider how happy the muslims in Saudi Arabia would be if the place wasn't run just by the Wahhabis.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Look for something awful, lets say goatse.
On ImHalal Link #5 has the image.
The Christian search engine seekfind is totally safe because it crashed under the load.
Jewogle seems to be just google with safe-search enabled. I didn't find much difference between those two.
Look no further: http://www.google.com/linux
Then you're agnostic.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Yes: Booble, NudeVista and the excellently named "Mr Stiff". You can Google them. ;-p
A thistle is a fat salad for an ass's mouth...
The only question is, how long until people who know how to play with Google's search engine page ratings turn their attention to this one, and find a way to dump their crap in there as well?
Fox News.
At that point, they'd stop being an atheists. Except for those who wouldn't believe that what they've seen was really god, and not e.g. some extraterrestrial, very advanced civilization which used their advanced technology to generate a fake god for us.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It's possible that the Russians set this up as an elaborate joke.
I actually think that would be a pretty funny joke. Thanks for the laugh.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
It really is sad and pathetic that people go to such lengths to shelter themselves from the world in order not to pop their preferred little bubble of unreason. Sure, being a parent I can understand wanting to keep unwanted and un-searched for porn from the eyes of your kids, but that's what a parent is for. By the time I allowed my kids to surf the web freely and unsupervised I had to simply accept that if they were old enough for me to grant that right to them, they should be old enough to handle anything they come across.
But this search engine is not simply a 'safe' gateway to protect kids from the evils of porn, it's a gateway to protect the fantasy's of their parents from the evils of reality.
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.
Can't fault him for the aesthetics though.
Then again, don't most search engines offer a filter function? I'm a Christian, and I still use Google. Oh no, I saw something about evolution! Big deal. I read a bit of the Koran the other day, and quoted a bit of the book of Mormon. Does this mean that I am going to burn in hell because I was looking at something that wasn't consistant with my religious views?
That being said, I got some older family members who are strict on their ways and lifestyle. Filtered search engines for a group of people are not a bad idea. That being said, my experience is that, outside of the big name search engines, most you find are paid advertisements, and many of the links you get may not even be relevant to what you are searching for. Truthfully, if these search engines don't use Google as a back end, they are probably going to be useless.
The other option, which I talked a few family members into, is filtered internet. Stuff like Net Nanny, Integrity Online, and stuff like that. You will be surprised how many people I have asking me if I can set up filtering on their internet. Normally, I just turn on the parental controls in Vista and Windows 7, and it seems to keep them happy. They seem to think that when they log into Facebook, some big, nasty Internet is going to come in and redirect them to some porn site. I gave up trying to educate, and just install the filters.
How would you test it?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
We could go round and round about evidence. However, I am not a scholar. I am not an archeologist. I am not a linguist or some other specialist of the sort. But I am a human and I have seen lives changed.
Well, the Bible does talk about Jesus changing people lives. You can still find that around today. Now, you might say that some natural psychological phenomenon is at work instead. Or you might point to a bunch of hypocrites or at the long list of personal failures by Christians and turn a blind eye to the change that does take place. Or perhaps you'll point to someone whose life changed without God by your measure. But, you asked for "some evidence". I point to that as some evidence - at least enough to warrant a thorough looking.
Here is one of my favorite programs. It is a radio drama of true life stories of people whose lives have been changed by Jesus. I personally know at least one person who had their story told by this radio drama team, so I can vouch that this isn't just made up. Or you can just investigate the stories yourself.
unshackled archive
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
I just did a search for "evolution" and got a blank page.
There are a lot of facts in religion. For example, for each Christian confession, it's a fact which version of the Bible they accept as the true one, and then there are lots of facts about what it written in them, and what is not. And yes, those facts are even testable: I can open a bible and check whether at the given position there's really the text claimed to be there.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
No. Sounds like reality.
google.cn, google.de, google.fr all censor results with google.au joining shortly.
It is only a matter of how much is it pushed. I suspect that if one of the Gulf countries twists its arm to do a halaloogle it will promptly do so.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
if she whacked you with a hammer for suggesting a BJ. (Change GF)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Bumper sticker: "Everybody is an athiest. I just believe in one fewer god than you do."
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I'm so atheist, not only do I not believe in life after death, I don't believe in life before death! This is due to a very simple mathematical test; divide the amount of time you'll be alive by the amount of time you won't be alive. The number you come up with is so close to 0 that you may as well just round it down to 0! Therefore if I were doing an atheist search engine it would have 0 content because obviously none of that stuff exists! HAH!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
While there is no proof of a benevolent god(s), the long career of Keanu Reeves would certainly offer pretty conclusive evidence of a satan.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
There are a few spots where the original documents were damaged and some minor errors in translation have occurred. Some translations have silently fixed these errors and others have let them stand as is. Some translations of the Bible are simply bad and introduce problems where there were none in earlier translations. This is the fault of the translators and not the original Author. There is also controversy, even in religious circles over some of the symbolic language that is used that can be construed in a way that appears inconsistent for those looking for inconsistency but can also be interpreted in a consistent fashion. In many cases, the passages in question reflect future prophecy that we won't know for sure about them till the events happen.
Other than that, it is remarkably consistent in its purpose of showing the relationship of God to man and His expectations and requirements of man toward Him considering it was written by multiple authors over a period of several thousand years and spanning many cultures and peoples. You won't find any other extant document that meets those criteria for publishing that is any where near as consistent as the Bible.
Its instructions to individual groups of people were consistent for their times and claiming inconsistency in His instructions to people living centuries apart is wrong. The Bible truly only has a couple of main purposes - to illuminate the path to Christ, to show our sinful state, to show that there is nothing we can do on our own to cure that, and explain how to be reconciled to God through Christ. There's a lot of recorded history and recommendations for how to live and act, but that is the main theme to grasp and the Bible does a very good job in its presentation.
You can pick it apart and rail against it for minor things you think are wrong. That is your right and any student of the Bible should do the same. But if you pick it apart by each jot and tittle in its text and don't read it at a high level and see the scope of the book, you're missing the big picture.
I'm currently reading the last couple of books in the Dune series made from Herbert's notes. There are typographical errors in it as well. That doesn't mean I can't enjoy the work and appreciate its completeness.
Find a web filtering appliance and reverse the polarity.
The FAQs for DansGuardian used to tell you that you can't do that. Now they tell you that if you want to build a whitelist or greylist of ONLY hardcore than sure!
http://contentfilter.futuragts.com/wiki/doku.php?id=faq
Mhh is it me or do they have issues tracking the sessions? When I search for "maria nude pics" it works most of the time but when I keep clicking the search button I appear to get the search term and result from other users.
Everyone who buys Wild Hunt will receive 16 specially prepared DLCs absolutely for free, regardless of platform.
My problem with God coming down and saying "Hi" is that I find the odds of that happening to be statistically lower than the odds that I have gone insane. After all, people go insane all the time, but in pretty much every currently active faith God very rarely comes to earth.
Maybe people going insane is God's way to come to earth :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
However, what disturbs me about Seekfind is its apparent narrowness in what they deem as "Christian-enough."
And there, in a nutshell, is why religious people should be as alarmed by religious censorship as non-religious people: once they're done with the infidels, then they come after the heretics. And as each batch of heretics are dealt with, the deviations necessary to be considered a heretic become smaller and smaller.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Archeological expeditions of the Holy Land depended largely on the Bible. Often, nations thought not to exists were eventually found there. So that there are facts in the Bible is indisputable. What they mean, what evidences they pose to the existence of God is up to the hearer.
Why should anyone care whether or not there's a religiously-inclined search engine? I mean seriously. This has turned into an issue on /. only because anything "religious" is immediately attacked whether it has anything to do with anyone here or not.
Don't use it. It really doesn't hurt.
How would you test it?
You walk across it. If you get wet, it wasn't really parted.
As the air to a bird or the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible -W.B.
And those are just the "little lies."
As Pratchett pointed out: there is not a single atom of truth or justice to be found in the universe. Without "belief" there's just a great ball of flaming gas that appears over the horizon - the sun does not rise.
You cannot test that the red sea was parted millennia ago by walking through it today. Otherwise I'll prove the Pangaea claim wrong by not being able to go from Australia to Europe without crossing the ocean.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Why are atheists concerned by what religious people do to themselves, including creating their own search engine filters is beyond my understanding.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
That will only happen if someone is forced to use a religious search engine, but disallowed from using others.
More importantly, the post and every comment I've seen here about it is starting from the false assumption that people are making these search engines to censor reality. It's much more likely that they're simply trying to find relevant information for their needs. Try searching for the words god and... well, any other keyword really. The results aren't exactly a distillation of relevant canonical or even scholarly texts. And going to google scholar wouldn't necessarily help, as you'd get information from academics in that case, not from leaders of faiths.
Let's face it, if everyone used the word linux as a swear word, and a lot of people were asking linux-irrelevant questions online, like "How do I format my system drive using control panel?", Linux users would probably build their own search engine too. Oh, wait... they did.
Something is lost and must be found!
St Anthony, patron saint of lost car keys and unmatched socks, is a favorite name for RC search engines.
Thank God I'm an atheist.
Infidels? Where in the tcp header is that flag?
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
Atheism isn't the disbelief in a god, but the disbelief in any god. Christians don't consider a Zoroastrian an atheist; they consider him someone who believes in a god... but the wrong one. And it'd be mutual. So your argument that their disbelief in Ahura Mazda makes Christians "atheists" of some kind is invalid.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Amish search engine
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Couldn't this be considered a good thing? If fundies have their own search engine, won't they be less likely to try to force censorship on Google? Same goes for Conservapedia....if they weren't writing their crazy articles there, wouldn't they be spending that effort trying to manipulate Wikipedia?
In some ways, it's probably a good thing that they've decided to cloister themselves in their own world and leave the rest of us alone.
hackers have taken over the christian site, but not the muslim and jewish ones are still online! You insensitive clod!
I don't want a search engine that filters out all the porn-related results... I want a search engine that filters out all the non-porn related results! Why should I have to wade through all that G-rated crap to get to my delicious, tasty porn?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Atheists lacking any organizations to defend their group, are unable to constantly clarify and define the term Atheist. The major religious have enough troubles doing this with their name and image; however, they have the organization and power to maintain a general sense of their terms. Some are zealots about maintaining this stuff because its quite damaging to lose control of one's terminology and image.
Atheist means so many things it is not that useful and often is as bad as labeling yourself as a pedophile or satanist. I've met people who thought it was some satanic demonic type thing that worshiped evil and would have felt more comfortable trusting a drug dealer or pimp than an Atheist. They probably got their misconceptions from their church...
Atheists don't believe. Yet many define them as believing there is no god - undermining their whole position greatly right from the start.
Now some people, they think that god is irrelevant because there is no real impact - anymore than santa clause does. So the question of existence is a pointless exercise because the answer does not matter either way. These people are not really Atheists by almost any definition - they are outside the taxonomy used in this area.
BTW- BBC is reporting the Pope's numbers in the UK are down significantly since the last visit in the 80s... maybe things will change as we get more Atheists?
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Now I see that there is not enough done on Slashdot to confront "not-sane" religious folks.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
But you can only use it for rhetorical questions like:
"Soda and Pop Tarts - you call that breakfast?" or "This is thanks I get?"
Unless it's just a page that says "Quick, look away!!!"
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?
Infant baptism and sprinkling are what is practiced in the Methodist Church (2'nd largest denomination in the USA) and most other "mainline" churches as well. It appears that this is yet another attempt by a small minority to promote their radical brand of Christianity as the only way Christians believe.
OK, I've put the battery around the other way... Now it just wont turn on.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.