New US phone network for Christians to block porn and gender-related content(technologyreview.com) |
New US phone network for Christians to block porn and gender-related content(technologyreview.com) |
Suddenly they were both leaping around him, shouting ‘Traitor!’ and ‘Thought-criminal!’, the little girl imitating her brother in every movement.
It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gamboling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters."
– George Orwell
Hebrew wiki: https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%A1%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%9C%D7%A8...
It has restricted internet, and allows calls and messages only to / from other "Kosher" lines and specific whitelisted numbers as approved by a rabbinical committee.
They also have some bastardized support for Whatsapp with a limited ability to join groups (not sure how that's implemented)
In behavioral therapy it's called stimulus control.
However, religious people are probably more concerned than the general population that their teen boys and girls not watch content that degrades human dignity.
I'm in support of anything that helps remove the temptation for us. I assume that majority of Protestants feel the same way, which is why we these initiatives garner support from all.
That being said, I certainly wouldn't advocate for imposing the will of Christians on others by _force_.. that would be the opposite of what Christ teaches us.
Looked into the profile of the guy doing this and there isn't anything remotely "Christian" about him, he's just your average sleazy media exec trying to milk a specific demographic of gullible customers. He even admits it himself. So he's the last person in the world I'd trust to deliver something "Christian" for Christians.
Similar how the dating app Christian Mingle isn't owned or run by Christians, which should be your first alarm bell in case you were looking for such a thing.
Not a bad idea really if you have kids, as the alternative is basically spyware on your kids phone, and today it's somewhat trivial to build your own MVNO off a mainstream network like this. Would I ever trust it? About as much as I'd ever trust a priest around my kid, which is never.
However, school systems also try and avoid teachers and kids being alone together. A pedo in a room of 30 kids isn’t likely to do anything.
I'm not sure why anyone would get this.
Some UK providers do[0]
[0] https://www.broadband.co.uk/broadband/help/parental-controls...
That does not add anything of interest so you might as well leave it out unless you use it as an identity flag.
There's plenty of 'special' mobile subscriptions with all sorts of filtering options. Most target parents who want their children to be able to do A but not B or C, some - like this one - target other groups.
Why can't religion coexist alongside societal progress? From my (limited) understanding of the Bible, as it was translated and translated over the years to our common, modern languages a lot of it has been adjusted, and these adjustments don't align with the original text. Perhaps it needs to be changed further.
I would love for people to have a religion to believe in, which does fulfill them without going against current and future societal values and norms.
Truly a serious and spiritual company. Maybe you can chat with AI Jesus instead of going to PornHub.
However, a lot of those people could benefit from not being in a faux Christian echo chamber, just like their tv on Fox News 24/7 already.
Religion is the world's oldest con --- and this is yet another example of how it can be used to fleece the faithful.
The only thing that prevents me from getting involved in something like this is my non-Christian morals.
"hey mama, [some sort of transgressional statement]."
" aahh, where did you get such ideas! just for that i want you to memorize 3 chapters of the bible!"
"mama, the bible is where i got that idea!"
Affinity groups using technology to reject social norms is absolutely the future
The techno-balkanization will be televised! The follow on compression will be really crazy.
The current, past, and future values and norms that are decided by societies are fleeting, old tomorrow, always changing.
You can also look at new religions, denominations, or sects popping up. The purpose of religion is at its core supposed to be spirituality.
This is explicitly what every epistemological framework is intending to compress, and is precisely the reason why these affinity groups exist.
If a group of people have fundamental unshakable belief that is so different than someone else’s fundamental overarching belief and they require different sets of actions in order to realize them, then there is no possible way to align them.
If I act based on my belief that Zeus creates thunder and lightning and I should do sacrifices in order to prevent my house from being burnt down from lightning, and you have an anemometer and a weathervane and forecasting and predicting models for wildfires and lightning and do preventative maintenance based on experimental results…
Those are two completely incompatible lifestyles and there is no coexistene between them. If there’s a storm coming and there’s only one goat left in the neighborhood and I believe that sacrifice in that goat is absolutely necessary for us to survive then I’m gonna do whatever it takes to sacrifice that goat. That’s the situation you find yourself in in the world.
You may be able to avoid each other long enough to not have conflict, or even collaborate temporarily to manage some kind of shared threat, but there’s never been a historical example of long term cooperation between two groups that embody functionally different world models.
There will eventually be a point where one will dominate the other, Universal vector alignment, what you’re asking for, is impossible.
Ironically, the only people victimizing Christians are grifters like this dude, who promise and sell them something they don't need and that won't work. This phone network grift is no different than those TV pastors who own private jets.
The better question is, why are these fundamentalists so successful at co-opting the word “Christian”? Why does “Christian phone network” mean one that blocks homosexual content rather than one that donates 10% of revenue to feed the poor?
I would prefer to do business with such a network but one does not exist. Apparently, people do not believe there's much market demand for any but the first of these.
This is similar to the church itself, which tends increasingly towards alignment with one faction or another. In turn, it becomes blind to the sins of its own and focused wholly on the sins of its schmittian enemy. The conservative church will tell you of the sins of homosexuality but not obesity nor wrath; the liberal will tell you that insufficient love is sinful while ignoring transsexuality. I find neither particularly Christian.
Perhaps the Benedictines could run an MVNO. I am no catholic but they'd probably do a much better job.
Same for Islam and Judaism, though the last one has the roles reversed.
The problem you're trying to identify here is how the public and historic narrative almost completely ignores any positive aspects of these religions and focuses exclusively on the actions of terrible people using religion as cover and justification for terrible acts.
In large part it's relative to location and culture. In the US, if you ask any random person their opinion of Islam, it will be overwhelmingly negative. Vice versa in Islamic societies about Christianity.
There's also a lot to be said of the last era of colonialism wreaking unthinkable damage and actual literal genocides under the name of Christianity, and the damage that Christian "missionaries" still do in the modern day. In recent history, a lot of very, very bad things have been done very loudly in the name of Christianity. Under that banner, Europeans destabilized and destroyed huge swaths of the world. The consequences of which will still be around for generations yet to come. That kind of thing leaks into public and historic sentiment, no matter what. Turns out that the public doesn't really like genocides.
Before I get replies, yes, other people have used other religions to also do terrible conquest and genocide. European Christian colonialism is just the largest and most recent example relevant to Western common knowledge. You should study foreign religions and form your own opinion, it's quite enlightening.
On the other hand, the narrative of the modern era is completely and totally dominated by sensationalism and all the problems that capitalist media bring. Stories about Christian groups donating money don't sell news subscriptions or ad time. Ragebait does, and many religious groups of all flavors are happy to oblige.
1. It wouldn't be posted here or anywhere else, it wouldn't even be reported on.
2. It would just be called a charity phone network.
3. Generally you don't need to self-segregate unless the outer world is opposed to certain values you have. When something is a Christian alternative, it's an alternative against some societal trend (porn being common). If it isn't incompatible with society, it doesn't need to segregate, so wouldn't; it would just be a phone network that donates to charity and it would attract all kinds. So an X phone network is automatically about the parts of X that are not commonly shared values among society, not about any arbitrary value X holds.
You could define the product according its proponents' values, rather than focusing on where they disagree with yours. Then it'd be less polarizing. But I suspect you'd argue that it's less informative to do that, perhaps even outright misleading.
Helicopter parenting is at an all time high. The same parents are loading Life360 onto their kids' phones and expecting them to keep it installed after turning 18.
It's not as if anyone is going to chain them by their ankles to the back of a truck and drag them to death for being straight over it.
Are we allowed to ridicule the things Jews and Muslims do to segregate themselves from western society, or just Christians?
I've always known people involved with the Christian community to be opposed against all extreme political parties, left and right (and long ago against anarchists, mostly against greens, ...). If they are rightist, they won't be nearly far enough right to support Andrew Tate and the like.
You don't know and can't know if being Christian and voting rightist overlaps or not. Only the general area is known. Nothing more.
I know how your neighborhood did; I know how evangelicals (and Asians and Jews and people in certain age and income brackets and dozens of other data points) voted.
The more evangelical an area, the more it voted for Trump. We know this.
Talking to my evangelical friends here in Europe, they also voted for the most hardcore extremist populist candidates who turned out to be corrupt liars, just like Trump, who didn't give a flying fuck about the "Christian values" they preached, they just exploited them for the votes while doing the most non-Christian things ever in private.
I think the reason they fall for candidates and apps like these, is evangelicals and devout Christians as a whole, are too trusty and naive, which makes the easy marks for the most unscrupulous predatory politicians and businessmen out there.
https://www.propublica.org/article/andrew-tate-investigation...
What does this mean?
Why would a properly Christian cell phone network block homosexual content? Even if we take it as given that Christianity forbids homosexuality, that's a prohibition on behavior, not observation. There's nothing in there which says you're not allowed to read about gay people, any more than you're not allowed to read about Hindus.
It presumably blocks it for the same reason it should block traffic concerning first-person shooter games, or content adjacent to self-harm and violence; the latter two were mentioned in the article as additional targets. It is not good to put certain things in one's brain. I along with others don't believe in reading certain things, watching certain things, and listening to certain music for the same reasons. I view it as best as intellectual junk food and at worst as corrosive; we should seek things that glorify Him and content pertaining to violence, homosexuality, and self-harm plainly don't.
Matthew 19 is interesting to bring up, though. The end is all about how rich people don’t get into heaven. Would you say that this service should block depictions of wealth? It can be very tempting, after all.
I think things like "flexing" influencers who idolize material wealth are pretty toxic and blocking them would be good, yes.
You should engage with what I'm saying, rather than nitpicking, or say nothing.
To directly answer your question - yes, a very strong yes. But that also applies to all religions, and all of anti-religion. Anything else is disingenuous and hypocritical
This isn't just a random aside. My point is that you're focusing on the wrong things. For what I'd see as proper Christians, homosexuality and influencers just aren't very important. Homosexuality has zero temptation for the vast majority, and influencers are just jesters for the modern age. If the goal is to stop Christians from straying, there are much more important things to look at.
I don't see homosexuality as a particularly important issue, as I'm not a member of a denomination that believes it constitutes a Godly relationship. I am, for example, less concerned with it than I am with widespread gluttony and resultant obesity. However that doesn't mean that it's not of any concern, and Christian ethics don't easily accommodate a utilitarian-style ranking of units-harm-done. It was, however, the topic of this particular company and the article about it.