The Atheist Blogger » internet

God Hates Spam

Alenthony — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 14:53:05 +0000

Prayer request sites… I’m sure this sort of thing has been around for a while. But I had no idea just how many sites there are out there that allow one to post to their prayer requests to the electronic world at large, for the purpose of having other people Retweet their petitions up at God.

(Let me make the disclaimer, of course, that I’m not going to rag on the good intentions of so many people that will take the time to try to help a complete stranger with their problems. The motivation for setting up a site to help people in need obviously comes from a good place. The problem, of course, is that petitionary prayer doesn’t actually do anything, beyond a placebo effect at best; and that if you want to help someone in need, they will quite obviously be better off if you actually take action of some kind.)

You’d think that if God was going to respond to a prayer, he’d just do it, without factoring in if there was a massive effort on the part of many people. If the person praying has great needs, the last thing he or she needs is to have to find others that will echo the prayer around. Is there some kind of threshold criteria God uses to determine how he answers, or if he answers? For example, suppose I want divine help in looking for a new job. Is twenty other co-supplicants twice as good as ten? Why would it matter?

These are the kinds of questions I asked myself as I perused a bunch of prayer sites. I found many to be dull, but a few were interesting or funny for one reason or another. What follows is my top ten list.

10. Requestprayers.com

Pretty vanilla site, this is run by the Baha’i organization. Seems odd that they’d give it a commercial rather than organizational extension, but that was true for most of these places. They have one page that purports to have the most powerful prayer ever devised. Testimonitals include:

The Baha’is have some of the most beautiful and powerful prayers in the world. Add that power to a million souls across the globe praying on your behalf from all the religions, and the Light is dumbfounding. Need immediate help? You were guided to this site, and nothing happens by accident!

9. Liveprayer.com

The extremely conservative minister behind this site claims to have started the entire business of online prayer requests, apparently. He also claims to have personally received and re-prayed 60 million prayer requests. Wow! If that was not impressive enough, the main page devotes much attention to President Obama, naming him “God’s Enemy”; plus, they feature a tasteful, if amateurishly photoshopped, portrait of him next to Hiter. There is also extensive advertising for something called The Jonah Project, an effort to better Christianize the U.S. (and the world).

8. CarmelTemple.org

Not just your typical prayer submission site where your request is simply posted to a page for others to dutifully recite. No, this is the Home of the Crystal Prayer Bowl! (Yes, they have pictures of it, too.) Here is what they do with it:

The Crystal Prayer Bowl is used to collect prayer requests sent to Carmel Temple. It is placed under the Blue-White Healing Light at the beginning of healing sessions in the Sanctuary. The prayer requests then receive the energy and prayers of those present. We encourage you to place into the bowl the name (even the initials will do) of the person, persons, or situations that need prayer or healing energy. This procedure has been very effective and that bowl has an excellent reputation!

7. Donjuddministries.org

You can send them your prayer requests, which they will compile with all the others that they receive. Then they will print the entire list out. Why? So that they can “lay hands on the list” as they pray over it. Why not just lay hands on the hard drive and save time, paper, and ink?

6. Prayerblaster.com

I had high expectations for this page, and I was disappointed. I was hoping it would be a bit like Pingmyblog.com. Instead it is just a pedestrian list of links. Not much of a blaster at all, as you’d have to manually go through the list and submit your prayer to each site individually. This page might have been made in 1992.

5. Prayer.la

The folks running this site seem proud to offer an exhausting 218 pages of prayer requests that are all less than one month old. Apparently they expire after that. No stale prayers! Would take hours to go through them all and pray for each one, I’d imagine.

4. Prayerrequestweb.com

Much like prayer.la, in terms of sheer volume, but at least you won’t have to click through 218 pages of prayers. They are all on one very long page that you can just scroll down.

Here is an excerpt that I found particularly pathetic and sad, yet somehow representative of what you’ll find posted. There is a compulsory tone to it at the end… as if the author meant to finish with “Or else!”

Please pray GOD gives me all the desires of my heart that are righteous in GODs eyes.Pray GOD sends me on the mission He has for me now,Pray GOD raises me a mile above those used by Satan to glorify GOD,Pray GOD Blesses me financially now and always.Pray GOD heals my body completely now.Pray GOD brings me my soulmate now,the loneliness is tormenting me. In JESUS Name Pray.

3. Holylandprayer.com

Now this is a “dot com” that truly deserve that extension. Also fitting is the image of the glowing gold Jesus hanging on a cross that adorns their home page.

Here is what they offer, for some nominal fees: If you send them a prayer, they’ll have it prayed in Jerusalem, “steps from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the spot where Jesus was crucified, buried and resurrected.”

Or, they’ll light a candle for you there. Or do both together and get a discount!

Why would God care where the prayer originated from? Does it get more power coming from Jerusalem? Does that make it more bona fide, somehow? Or is God impressed that you are in dire enough straights that you’d send these people money? (Back in Dante’s time, accepting money for ecclessiastical favors was called Simony and earned one a very hot reward in the Eight Circle of Hell.)

Costs: $10 for a candle, $15 for a prayer. $20 for both.

2. Healinglifecoach.com Looking for something a little different from the same old prayer site? Then this is the place for you.

These folks offer special stones imbued with power because they are not merely prayed over, but “programmed.” Specifically, they tell us:

Programmed Stones can be effective and powerful tools for anything from Prayer, Freedom from Worry and Creative Visualization to Healing, Forgiveness, Gratitude and much more!

How are the stones programmed? They are cleaned and set in the Healing Sanctuary with your individualized and special requests with daily prayers being said over them for a minimum of 30 days. Then they are sent to you!

1. Ipraytoday.com

This was my favorite site because, beneath the name and prayer entry fields, it has a “capcha” device, so that you can prove you are a human being! To be fair, I suppose this is more to save the devout from being asked to repeat bogus prayers, but it struck me as hilarious to think of it as a spam filter for The Lord God Himself. I can only imagine Jehovah’s fury at realizing he was tricked into granting the request of a bot.

-S.A. Alenthony

www.blackburnianpress.com

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Using Spotify Links in Linux

Adrian Hayter — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:44:32 +0000

I’ve yet to officially start my tutorials on Linux, but I’ve been playing around with Spotify recently and I’ve been annoyed by the problem of getting Spotify playlists to load from my web browser directly into Spotify. For those who don’t know about Spotify, I suggest you read my previous post, and if you still want invites, I am getting them on a daily basis, so please apply. Spotify playlists can be shared easily in the form of a link, and there have been several websites set up to publish these links. The problem of using these links in Linux consists of two issues:

Getting the browser to recognize a Spotify link (in the form: spotify:user:jacken:playlist:5CUB76CWjf2vFxZymgO3cW).
Getting the browser to execute the link as an argument on a program running through wine, the Linux windows compatibility layer.

The first problem can be solved quite easily in Firefox, but it does involve messing around with the configuration a bit. Open a new tab, type “about:config” (without the quotes) and press enter. If you are running a recent version of Firefox, you should click the button accepting the “this might void your warranty” message. Right click anywhere on the page (which should have filled with a table of options) and create a new boolean. In the preference name box, type “network.protocol-handler.external.spotify” (again without quotes), and then choose the value true for the option. This has now enabled the spotify protocol in Firefox, meaning that whenever the browser is sent a request to open something with the prefix spotify: it will ask the user what to do with the request. Of course, the 2nd problem is getting Firefox to communicate to a program that does not run natively within Linux. To bypass this, we can create a simple script that Firefox can execute. The script will then do all the complicated bits that Firefox can’t do. Open up a terminal, and execute this command:

cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Spotify/

If you have installed wine with default settings, this is where all the Spotify files are located. Otherwise, you will have to modify the command to cd you into the correct Program Files directory. Once in the directory, you should find two files, spotify.exe and Uninstall.exe (use the ls command to check). Create a file called “spotify.sh” in this directory, and edit it with your favourite text editor. Copy and paste the following into the file:

1 2	#!/bin/bash wine "$HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Spotify/spotify.exe" /uri "$1"

Save the file and exit the text editor. What does this code mean? Well, the first line (known as a sha-bang!) tells the system what type of file our script is, and which interpreter to use when executing it. In this case, we want to run the script through the bash shell, so we give it the location of bash on the system (which is 99.9999% always /bin/bash, but you can find out by typing which bash into a terminal and alter accordingly). The next line is the command we want the script to execute, which calls on wine to run spotify.exe file with the argument /uri and the link url given by Firefox when executing ($1). $HOME is simply a shell variable that stores your home directory location (usually in the form: /home/username). Now all you have to do is make the file executable:

chmod +x spotify.sh

Now try it out on a spotify link! If spotify is already open, the playlist should appear on the left, otherwise spotify will open up and display the playlist for you. When you click on the link, Firefox should ask you what you want to do with it, and all you have to do is select the spotify.sh file we just wrote. If it doesn’t ask when you click on a link, you will need to go into Edit -> Preferences -> Applications and find “spotify” in the list, then select the file using the “use other” action.

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This Blog Is Quickly Becoming All About Spotify!

Adrian Hayter — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 19:25:38 +0000

I really didn’t want to create yet another post about Spotify invites, but they’ve just given me an extra 5 invites to use. Due to the popularity of the service, and the fact that I don’t know how many invites they will eventually give me, I am going to start regulating stuff.

From now on, I won’t be accepting people’s requests from comments. If you want to be put on the waiting list, please use my contact form, specifying the “Reason for contact” as the option: Request Spotify Invite. The current waiting list is compiled from comments in date order (so if you have already requested an invite through the comments, please don’t contact me again!).

Due to blog reader indieboy86’s research into the matter, you can use Spotify outside of the EU! Simply use a proxy server with your browser. The server with HTTP Proxy: 217.112.93.9 and Port: 6654 seem to work for most people, but there are several available on the web.

As I get new invites, I’ll simply send them to the first people on the list. If the invites don’t work for some reason, please inform me and I’ll send them to someone else (this keeps the system fair). Also, if I notice someone hasn’t accepted their invitation within a week, I’ll give it to someone else.

So as of this blog post, 5 new invites have been sent to readers: Fake_Brasilian, griffon8, Tone, Jake Collyer, and Paul Klipp.

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Spotify Invites (Take 2)

Adrian Hayter — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:30:47 +0000

It seems I had a bit of a misunderstanding with Spotify’s release area, and so currently people in American and Australia cannot use the service. So far two people out of the five have given back their invitations, and I have had one confirmation of a successful install, so until I hear back from the other two, I have a couple of invites going spare.

Same rules as last time, first come first served, only make sure you live in Europe! I know there were a few people on the original invite list who were in “waiting” but since I have no way of knowing where you are located without contacting you, I’m going to have to do it this way.

So just to clarify, only ask for an invite if you live in Europe!

Of course there are still no guarantees the service will work for you, but so far it works in England, Belgium, and Luxembourg to my knowledge, so I don’t see why it wouldn’t work elsewhere on the continent.

Again, apologies for this! Hopefully all remaining invites will *eventually* make it to people who can use them!

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Spotify Invites

Adrian Hayter — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 22:08:51 +0000

I spoke about Spotify a few weeks ago, and today I got given 5 invites. Soooo…anyone want them? Just leave a comment (fill in your real email address) and the first 5 people shall receive them.

Remember, this isn’t a standard music player, nor does it allow you to download music. It’s an online music player (like an online radio) but where you can search for specific songs and play them in the order you want. Every 30 minutes of play, there is a 30s advert (that’s how they make money).

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Spotify: A New Era Of Digital Music Has Arrived

Adrian Hayter — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 10:00:07 +0000

As I write this, I’m listening to random tracks in Spotify. The quality is great, the music choice is vast, and the program is lightning fast (literally). So what is Spotify?

Spotify is an online music player that you can download and install on your computer. I’m prohibited to post any screenshots by the TOS of the beta, but I can tell you what it does. Once installed (yes, it runs through wine as well), Spotify allows you to search for music. I type “The Killers” hit Enter, and 0.5 seconds later, my search results are returned. To put this is perspective, I’m on a relatively slow network (3MBit), my laptop is using wireless (that slows down the connection a bit already), and my search has to go through 9 hops to get to the server in question. When my search reaches the server, it has to process it and get the list of results and then send them back to me to be processed in the program. Considering the amount of music Spotify has, this is amazingly fast.

So now I have a list of results, and I click on a song, “Mr Brightside”. The most astounding part of Spotify is now presented to me. I thought the search was fast, but the song starts playing immediately after I click on it. The delay is so minute I could swear that I am playing the song from a local file on my computer, but I’m not. The song is streaming across the internet and playing on my computer, without any delay or lag. What is even more astounding is that the program doesn’t seem to buffer the songs at all, because I can click to the last 10 seconds of the song in question and it will play that part immediately, with no delay.

When my friends and I started using it, everyone in the room was astonished, and considering we are all Computer Scientists and know how networks work, that is saying something. We were absolutely convinced the program relies on magic to operate, because networks simply do not allow that kind of speed and efficiency. Florian, the guy who invited me into the beta, swears blind that he ran the program without any problems on a 56k modem in a crappy hotel, where the internet was so bad Google was taking it’s time to load.

We were so impressed by this technology that I phoned up the company to say so. They revealed nothing about how it worked though, so I have to go get a job with them now.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, this program is entirely legal. They pay the licenses for all the music by putting in 30 second ads every 30 minutes of music you listen to. If you pay a fee though, you can remove the adverts completely. This program has everything it needs to head the new era of digital music; unlimited songs, speed, usability, and freedom.

At the moment it’s invite only, so if I get some invites I’ll let you know! Until then, you’ll have to sign up to the mailing list which will tell you when Spotify becomes public.

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If Hemant Can Do It, So Can I

Adrian Hayter — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 22:30:09 +0000

Hemant Mehta of Friendly Atheist recently started a new meme where you listed your last 20 emails and what they say about you. I’m starting a new one, only this time it’s with current browser tabs. The reason? I broke my own record today, with 100 tabs open in Firefox.

Taberrific!

The tabs open were as follows:

17 Google Searches.
10 Wikipedia Articles.
9 Facebook.
7 of this site.
3 Slashdot.
3 Gentoo Wiki Articles.
2 YouTube Videos.
2 Amazon.co.uk Items
2 Problogger Articles
2 Chicken Girl
2 Atheist Forums
2 Discomforting Ignorance
2 Amiable Atheist
2 Splendid Elles
1 RichardDawkins.net
1 Google Video
1 Atheist Experience
1 Barefoot Bum
1 Southern Electric
1 Least I Could Do
1 Joy Of Tech
1 ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH…MY EYES!
1 xkcd
1 Comedy Central
1 The Daily Show
1 Explosm
1 Times Online
1 Friendly Atheist
1 Pharyngula
1 Daily Mail
1 Royal Holloway University of London
1 Conrad Koppitz
1 SSH reference site
1 Revver
1 Perl Reference Site
1 Division By Zero
1 Raytractors
1 Powers of 10
1 Google Android Mobile
1 Atheist Stats Site
1 Rapture Ready
1 Java API
1 Dmitry Brant
1 Gutenberg.org
1 BBC News Article
1 My Blog Log
1 Sanity Project
1 Hot Chicks Dig Smart Men
1 Government e-petition

What did I learn?

I use Google, Wikipedia, and Facebook way too often, and I need to learn how to use the “close tab” button on Firefox.

What next?

If you are as geeky as me and use a browser with tabs (sorry I.E 6 users) then write a blog post with your tab list. It was fun to see which sites I visit most, and I get to link to my favourite ones!

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My Last 20 Emails

Adrian Hayter — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 10:00:37 +0000

Friendly Atheist has got a new meme which involves categorising your last 20 emails and working out what they say about you. Here goes.

My Last 20

5 emails from Second Life stores confirming stuff I bought.

3 messages from the WordPress mailing list.

2 messages from Atheist Nation confirming T-Shirt purchases.

2 messages from the CompSci department of RHUL.

1 person requesting a link exchange (Nico Raj)

1 friend sending me a photoshopped image for the new student newspaper “Atheist Column”.

1 message from my online bank telling me some money has been sent successfully.

1 message from Linux Format magazine with some special offers on courses.

1 message from the Secular Student Alliance.

1 confirmation from 10 Downing Street e-petitions.

1 message from Douglas Whaley thanking me on plugging his book (and telling me he has sent me one for free!)

1 message from the Royal Holloway Humanist Alliance inviting me to a preliminary meeting (which was great fun and we are discussing merging our groups).

What did I expect?

More emails from lecturers possibly. It is the first week after all!

What did I learn?

I spend too much time (and money) on Second Life, I subscribe to a WordPress mailing list that I rarely read, and I’m a geek…oh wait, I knew that ages ago.

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Atheist Emoticons

Adrian Hayter — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:26:45 +0000

The popular Christian blog Stuff Christians Like had an article containing some Christian emoticons”. For those who don’t know what emoticons are :O, you missed the internet era :P, please go back 10 or 15 years :D. Ok, so lets see what a few atheist emoticons would look like.

(?) = We’re not sure what created the universe, but it probably wasn’t a god.

*.oO = Having said that, the Big Bang is our best possible explanation at this point.

<<>> = Aliens seeding Earth with life is a neat idea, but it doesn’t explain where the aliens came from.

>>>8 (E) = A meteor colliding with Earth and creating life makes a bit more logical sense.

\…V…W = In any case, the diversity of life is best explained by Evolution.

($#@^!&*) = Despite what you may think, I’m not a nihilist.

oo—[A] = I read atheist blogs regularly.

[:::::]~~[A] = I’m such a hardcore atheist, I even write an atheist blog.

OO—(( RC )) = I read Ray Comforts blog and have an irrational fear of bananas.

(( < X## = All things being equal, the pineapple pwns the banana.

oo—[PZ] ~00~ .:| (/) = I go to Phyrangula for my daily fix of octopi, poll boosting, and occasional cracker desecration.

Any others you think should be added to the list? The floor is open…

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Birmingham Bigots

Adrian Hayter — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 18:24:53 +0000

According to the BBC, Birmingham City Council have decided to ban websites about atheism, witchcraft, the paranormal, sexual deviancy, and criminal activity. Every other site is allowed (especially Christian, Islamic, Hindu sites) but the new system has effectively outlawed any sites relating to satanism or the occult, which apparently now includes atheism. Strangely there is one section of the Birmingham Councils software description that stands out.

or any other form of mysticism

Hold on a sec. Mysticism is defined as “a direct, intimate union of the soul with God through contemplation or ecstasy”^[1], and as “the pursuit of achieving communion, identity with, or conscious awareness of ultimate reality, the Other, divinity, spiritual truth, or God through direct experience, intuition, or insight”.^[2]

It seems that every single religion practices this. Prayer, whether it is Christian or Muslim, is a “pursuit” of some form of communication between God / Allah and the believer. So already all Christian and Islamic websites which advocate prayer should be out of the loop. So should all evangelical websites that call for believers to have a “personal relationship” with Jesus. The last time I checked, a personal relationship is a union of sorts, but is definitely a direct experience. Indeed, many Christian denominations have a mystical theology called theosis, and the Muslims have a similar one known as Irfan.

In fact the Wikipedia page lists a few mystical practices for both Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as one for Jainism. If this software is really meant to block any other form of mysticism, then it should rightly block every religious site on the web.

I’m fully in support of atheist sites being banned from work, as well as Wiccan or Satanistic sites. The National Secular Society are considering legal action to let atheist sites be viewable, but they have the entire thing backwards. They should instead be harassing the council to block all religion based sites, or even better, block the entire web from work altogether.

The council issued this statement about the value of internet access for staff:

The aim of this is to provide greater control for individual line managers to monitor internet usage, and for departments, such as trading standards and child protection, to gain access, if needed, to certain sites for business reasons.

I can think of something that would be easier to manage internet access. Instead of having a blacklist, have a whitelist (like China). Instead of banning sites that have certain keywords or names, block every single site and then start compiling a list of allowed websites. When a staff member needs to view a specific website, simply add it to the list. It would take literally two minutes at most to do, and you would get staff actually working instead of logging into MySpace and Facebook all day.

Thanks to The Amiable Atheist for the link!