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)."

Comments

Atheist

[nacturation]

http://www.atheistsearch.net/

Search: creationism

[Click "I'm Feeling Lucky"]

Error: there's no such thing as luck!

Re:Atheist

[maxwell demon]

Atheists believe in the power of citations. :-)

Re:Atheist

[Xtifr]

Every atheist accepts that there is no deity on blind faith and without further investigation.

Nope, absolutely false. Many atheists are simply skeptics who refuse to accept the existence of the Gods unless you provide irrefutable proof. No blind faith required, any more than blind faith is required to not believe in unicorns or the tooth fairy. Furthermore, many atheists have investigated various religions in great depth--quite a few became atheists only with great reluctance, when their search for a plausible faith turned up empty. I say this as an agnostic, not an atheist, but one who knows many atheists. There are probably some atheists who are as you describe, but in my experience, they are a rare minority.

Re:Atheist

[rainmouse]

Every atheist accepts that there is no deity on blind faith and without further investigation.

Nonsense! Rejecting superstition on the grounds that there is no scientific evidence is not blind faith, it is purely logical. Would religious people accept being labeled as blind faith atheists of other deities such as Thor or Zeus? As an example, Christians reject belief in countless deities, is it really so unreasonable to merely subtract one more deity from that list without being labelled a blind faith fanatic of atheism?

Re:Atheist

[ConfusedVorlon]

---"atheist accepts that there is no deity on blind faith and without further investigation"

not true at all. allow me to present myself as someone who has studied the synoptic gospels in far more detail than (and I'm guessing now) 98% of people who call themselves christian.

Re stating 'I Know', Richard Dawkins has a great thought experiment on this.

-Statement: There is a perfect Victorian china tea set orbiting the sun in an orbit about half way between the sun and the earth.

My position: I'm willing to say that I know this statement is false.

Nope, I haven't been to look and I don't think any rockets have gone to check. However from my understanding of the field, I am willing to take a position.

I could say 'I don't know'. It's possible that the Russians set this up as an elaborate joke. However at some point, saying 'I don't know' just becomes fetishism. It is useful to take a position when the opposing one is vanishingly unlikely.

The same applies to god. If you show me some evidence, then I'll change my mind. But from an examination of current evidence, I say that the existence of some involved creator is vanishingly unlikely.

Therefore I say that god does not exist and declare myself an atheist.

Re:Atheist

[Anne_Nonymous]

>> there is no Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny and no Tooth Fairy.

You jackass, how about putting --SPOILER ALERT-- in your title. Thanks for ruining my life.

Re:Atheist

[chrb]

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.

What about Space Unicorns? What observation tells us that they do not exist? Well, we haven't seen them, and nobody we know has seen them, but given their scope, they could be literally anywhere, in (or even outside) an extremely expansive universe. We haven't found any Space Unicorns occurring naturally in the universe, but then again, the Space Unicorn that is claimed to exist by believers isn't exactly claimed to be common.

What about Thetans? What observation tells us that they do not exist? Well, we haven't seen them, and nobody we know has seen them, but given their scope, they could be literally anywhere, in (or even outside) an extremely expansive universe. We haven't found any Thetans occurring naturally in the universe, but then again, the Thetans that are claimed to exist by Scientologists aren't exactly claimed to be common.

What about ghosts? What observation tells us that they do not exist? ......

What about Flying Spaghetti Monsters? Or Norse Gods? Or Mbaba Mwana Waresa? What observation tells us that they do not exist? ...... ....(This could go on forever)....

Vertical search is fairly old

[williamhb]

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!

So one might say...

[pi8you]

they're using Church Engines?

Search engine for true believer

[noidentity]

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.

imstupid.com

[yyxx]

First link for "atheism" points to Conservapedia, which says:

Unlike Christianity, which is supported by a large body of sound evidence (see: Christian apologetics), atheism has no proof and evidence supporting its ideology.

If you were a comedian, you couldn't come up with something better than that. Are these people really that stupid?

Re:How customizable is it?

[somersault]

Pah. Real Christians just use prayer for all their search needs.

Thoughts on Seekfind from a Christian perspective

[Micah]

(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).