A DISCUSSION beneath a report that visitors to religious websites were more likely to catch a computer virus than those who trawl porn sites took a turn for the weird after one commentator – Muggins – said:
Well if someone believes in fairy tales then yes they are more prone to viruses.
“Kevintrs” – whom I assume has creationist tendencies – hit back with:
Strange, I tend to agree with you on this one. People who believe in evolution are far more likely to commit sexual immorality and have sex outside of a committed marriage to one partner of the opposite sex hence they are more prone to have sexually transmitted diseases.
He added:
As for getting viruses on one’s computer – it can happen to anyone – irrespective of whether they believe in the evolutionary fairytale or not.
“Lurker2358″ joined the fray with:
Religious people are probably more prone to real viruses too, since Catholicism forbids the use of a condom.
“Kevintrs” had an answer to this too:
Your logic does not necessarily compute: If Catholic people were to follow biblical principles in addition to the Catholic prescriptions they should abstain from sexual immorality and hence not have ANY sexually transmitted viruses.
If, however they didn’t follow the biblical precepts and had sex outside of a committed marriage to one partner of the opposite sex, why on earth would they constrain themselves to submitting to the Catholic idea of not using a condom? Doesn’t make sense.
The virus study was published earlier this week by the US-based anti-virus vendor Symantec and revealed that sites with religious or ideological themes were found to have triple the average number of “threats” that those featuring adult content..
Symantec said in the report:
It is interesting to note that websites hosting adult/pornographic content are not in the top five, but ranked tenth. We hypothesize that this is because pornographic website owners already make money from the Internet and, as a result, have a vested interest in keeping their sites malware-free; it’s not good for repeat business.
Does this site count as a ‘religious’ site? After all, it’s almost exclusively dedicated to the theme of God and religion.
No Ken, it doesn’t. The difference is in the level of intelligence demonstrated, and in the willingness to acknowledge reality without a security blanket.
I suspect almost all those here will have at some stage made the conscious decision to maintain their integrity rather than whatever unsustainable belief they grew up with. I recommend it, it realy is a very liberating experience and it frees one to act in conscience rather than in obedience.
Funny, I would have thought the various gods would look after the religious web-sites.
@Ken. The Freethinker is primarily an anti-religion forum, but we also expose and attack all sorts of woo from Homeopathy and spoon benders to “mediums” We are rather keen on evidence here, something lacking in most of your assertions.
Do try not to be so puerile, Ken.
Religion itself is like a computer virus. It corrupts the memory, severely restricts the ability to process information, drains the infected hosts bank account and makes it whine incessantly.
And, no matter how hard you try, it won’t ever save anything.
@ Ken,
Yes Ken it would count as a religious site because most of us here know more about holy books than those that adhere to the fantasies contained within them.
You might want to read the bible or koran cover to cover one day (a note pad would come in handy while doing so) and then write us a note to tell us how you make “rational” sense of it all…..we are particularly interested on beliefs in talking snakes and raising the dead.
Off topic on God and morality but probably worthwhile as religiots love this subject and continue to push it, here and elswhere, while getting it wrong. There is a review in this week’s New Scientist of “Moral Origins: The evolution of virtue, altruism and shame. The original moralists seem to have been late Pleistocene foraging societies living in Africa 45,000 years ago.
Seems our ancestors were “preadapted” for morality, like similar societies today, where there is a sense of self and of fairness and a tendency of the young to learn appropriate behaviour from their mothers. In arriving at this conclusion Christopher Boehm “dissects a large body of experimental and theoretical work on morality.”
My comment: God doesn’t play a part. Of course, as he is a fiction, not then invented, he couldn’t, could he?
Ken should take note of that first comment by “Kevintrs”. An assertion without evidence based on the commenter’s religious belief and therefore an opinion.
So, in a thread about goofy things folk say, you enter a tongue-in-cheek comment about this site really being ‘religious’, only to find it being taken a tad too seriously …..
Northern Light “we are particularly interested on beliefs in talking snakes and raising the dead”.
Assuming you are talking about the serpent of Genesis 3, have you really never considered what this readily meant to an ancient near east audience? The occultic/religious connections and wordplay, rather than what you might see at your local zoo speaking. And given the existence of God who animated man in the first place, why the difficulty with the dead being raised. It’s simply the re-impartation of life again.
Broga – now as to our ancestors who “were preadapted” for morality (the passive implies an agency who did this), do you have any evidence for when, in some ancient time, such ancestors suddenly decided to invent God? Hadn’t been needed up till then. Did it happen on a Sunday? Or is this merely conjecture on your part?
@Broga: New Scientist? Filthy, godless, irreligious lying deluded Scientist? How on earth are we expected to take that seriously? It doesn’t acknowledge the lordship of Great Jehovah, so they’re bound to be spouting all sorts of unholy, insidious, dangerously Satanistic misinformation.
No, I’ll stick to my Holy Bible, thank you very much, where it distinctly states that Knowledge of Right and Wrong was born of these two guys eating a magic apple they weren’t supposed to …
Okay, then, let’s get serious. So if morality comes from god, how come, in the very first bit in the holy book, does it state that the very first inkling of moral awareness arose from humanity’s disobedience?
That is: god didn’t want mankind to have an independent moral awareness, because it makes people question what they’re told.
So, in answer to all that pigshit about how “morality comes only from god”, I think it needs to be recognised that that is the place where it most definitely does not come from.
Ken: If you have to ask the question you won’t be able to understand the answer. I have some sympathy for you with your unformed mind denied development by its religious straitjacket, your pseudo intellectual (and so obvious) posturing and your desperate rationalisations. These are futile attempts to fit facts to what your superstitions have already decided for you. You really ought to stop embarrasing yourself.
Matt: Spot on. These New Scientist types have no shame. They should spend more time reading their bible. (KJ version for God’s holy word.) To add insult to injury they even have a short piece by that devil incarnate Richard Dawkins. Where will it all end.
Ken
Giving you the benefit of the doubt, here, I think it’s fair to make you aware that ‘atheism is just another religion’ is a much-touted put-down in some of the more fundamentalist religious circles. You might not have known it, but you touched on a bit of a sore point.
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Regarding the OP, I almost found myself agreeing with Kevintrs about completely observant Catholics not catching STDs, ’til I noticed the flaw. It assumes that your eventual partner has no sexual history that they’ve not told you about. Oops!
I wonder if the viruses on religious sites are deliberate or just due to many being owned by people who are too trusting (not sceptical enough, in other words) or whether techy stuff is just uninteresting and unimportant to many of them, and they consequently don’t keep up with basic precautions.
@ Ken, “And given the existence of God who animated man in the first place”
That is a pretty huge given isn’t it?
http://youtu.be/v1PBptSDIh8
@nelmonster: What Ken won’t want to discuss is: if God created man, who created God?
@Broga. Agreed. The resemblance is more akin to a religious politician. Happy to answer the question they wanted you to ask about the unprovable ‘scripture’ with more unprovable scripture, ad infinitum. Never daring to think, just following the party line.
@Barriejohn. Scary, scary man. haha.
@Daz: ” …they consequently don’t keep up with basic precautions.”
No, the reason why they don’t “take precautions” is because the Poop told them it was immoral.
After all: “God will protect my website.”
@barriejohn: Aha. *Now* I believe in God.
Muggins is completely incorrect – religious belief (or any kind of belief) has no correlation with computer viruses. It can’t. They’re just not related – computer viruses come from all manner of material online and even solid anti-malware programs can be circumvented by them. It’s a complete non-sequitur.
Kevintrs is also in large part correct that those who are not so fundamentalist they think god made the world in seven days are far more likely to have had multiple sexual partners and thus at higher risk for sexually transmitted diseases. Of course, he rather spoils it with his judgmental tone and couching it in terms of ‘morality’, as well as pretending that evolution is some kind of article of faith rather than just how biology works. Still, logically at least, he’s not wrong about that or the condom issue, if we are to assume that both partners are good Catholics and not just one. And that nobody got raped.
@Matt Westwood – fantastic point about the tree of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. I do look forward to an answer to that.
@ Ken,
The events on which the bible is supposedly based and who the target audience was.
From Jesus Christ Superstar
Voice of Judas:
Every time I look at you I don’t understand
Why you let the things you did get so out of your hand
You’d have managed better if you’d had it planned
Why’d you choose such a backward time and such a strange land?
If you’d come today you would have reached a whole nation
Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication
Don’t you get me wrong – I only wanna know
If an all seeing (including the future) all knowing god is supposed to have created us don’t ya think that he/she/it might has considered that over time we would develop the intellect to figure out that the all holy books are bullshit.
@ Ken,
“And given the existence of God who animated man in the first place, why the difficulty with the dead being raised. It’s simply the re-impartation of life again.”
Well it is surely odd that in all the time since the death and raising of JC there has been no other being that has inhabited the planet in the past 2000 years that a god has seen fit to raise from the dead again.
The bible states that JC died for our sins.
Today, May 4, in Holland they honour those who died in WW2 to free the Dutch from Nazi Germany…..do ya think your god can raise a few of the Canadians who died on Dutch soil to free people 60000 km from Canada…..is that not a good enough deed to die for Ken….or do you need to be more god like say Thor or Zeus to get raised up?
@remigius – That made me cackle! thx =D
In case anyone is actually interested, the reason religious websites are more likely to be infected at any specific time is that they are more likely to be run as a hobby and only updated every so often. Thus if they do get a virus, it stays around for much longer because it’s not spotted as quickly. Porn sites will be fixed by their next update which is often five times a week or more.
Back on topic, the higher proportion of religious web sites having malware, could it be because the operators of those sites assume they have divine protection?
I wonder what a creationist sys admin does for system security… Are there prayers to prevent system failures and perform backups?
And what’s all that technology based on, anyhow? Science? Of course not.
This article is really misleading (though mildly entertainging for us atheists).
The study counted ‘drive by’ infections, the majority of which are placed there by third parties with no knowledge of the website owner. There have been many cases of a host server at a commercial hosting company being infected and every website on that machine becomes a ‘drive by host’.
Even the popular association of viruses with porn sites is probably more of an appeal to moralists sense of karma the a reality. A very common way to get an infection is price shopping. As price engines drop you into one website after another, it’s only a matter of time till you hit one that has been infected.
Maybe the religiots are just to thick to use a virus checker, luddite/stone age values and beliefs dont mix well with high tech.
Then again, perhaps the viruses were put there to test the faithfull, by the great anonymous god of the internet!He sure works in mysterious ways….Woo!,Anyone who posts viruses to religious websites,your doing the great god of the internets work, rejoice and rofl.
Daz “Ken Giving you the benefit of the doubt, here, I think it’s fair to make you aware that ‘atheism is just another religion’ is a much-touted put-down in some of the more fundamentalist religious circles. You might not have known it, but you touched on a bit of a sore point”.
Personally, I’ve never considered atheism just another religion, though I do consider all men ‘religious’ in the sense of having some object or person whom they in effect ‘worship’. I do know atheists can be very sensitive to the accusation that they ‘deny the existence of God’ as opposed to having ‘an absence of faith in a God’, though I have never understood why, as in the end, doesn’t it come out at the same place?
@Ken. ‘deny the existence of God’ This statement implies the existence of gods and that we atheists choose to deny their existence.
‘an absence of faith in a God’. Again implies gods exist and we choose to ignore them.
OK, you may suggest I’m arguing semantics but your statements are the sort of mendacity practiced by the religious to suggest that the default position is that your god exists. There are no gods.
” …your statements are the sort of mendacity practiced by the religious to suggest that the default position is that your god exists. There are no gods”.
I don’t see where you get any mandacity from. The default position of Christian believers is that God does exist. There is to my mind little distinction between denial or absence of belief in this regard, you end up with your second statement, except better ‘there is no God’.
And isn’t that the default position of atheists?!
@Ken: My default position is “There are no gods”. Saying “there is no god” gives far too much importance to your particular superstition.
@Ken: My default position is “There are many gods”. All of them imaginary.
Depends how you define ‘God’. As I think of the creator or supreme being, you cannot have a plurality of supreme beings, pantheism is in this respect self-refuting. It also doesn’t follow that because one particular deity or set of deities doesn’t exist, no deity exists.
And, incidentally, Evolution is the atheists imaginary friend ….
“And, incidentally, Evolution is the atheists imaginary friend …”
I think Ken just likes attention.
)
@Ken, “And, incidentally, Evolution is the atheists imaginary friend ….”
You really are displaying your ignorance now, there is overwhelming evidence to support evolution – only a fool would ignore it. Study some biology!
No. The default position of most atheists I’ve heard/seen mention it is that they see no evidence strong enough to justify considering the idea of gods as anything but fiction.
Shorthand, yeah, I’ll say there is no god, but if you want to nitpick, I’ll say I’m 99.a string of 9s percent sure that there isn’t a god, based purely on that lack of any evidence.
And, incidentally, evolution (why the need to capitalise it? It’s not dogma or scripture) is a fact. Details of the mechanism might be debatable, but the bare fact of evolution is just that: a fact.
@Ken “though I do consider all MEN ‘religious’” Lol