The Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation, you may remember them from the Green Bay Nativity case, is demanding that the Indianapolis Public School system change its current web access policy which bans access to “occult”, “Wiccan”, “Voodoo” and “mysticism”-boosting sites.

“The Freedom From Religion Foundation, responding to complaints from concerned Indianapolis taxpayers, has sent a letter of strong objection to the Indianapolis Public School system for its policy of censorship of web content that promotes or provides information about “atheistic views.” This policy, which also censors Wicca, Witchcraft, “voodoo rituals or any other for of mysticism,” is unlawful because it violates the Free Speech Clause as unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination, FFRF charges. This policy does not prohibit or even mention religious views such as Christianity.”

You can read the school’s web filtering policy, here. You can read the FFRF’s letter to school Superintendent Eugene White, here. FFRF is asking people to write to the Superintendent, Dr. Eugene G. White, and the local school board members, urging them to drop this discriminatory web site blocking.

While I certainly support the individuals and groups working to remove these arbitrary web filters, one has to wonder if the policy was put in place because the school officials were anti-atheist and anti-Pagan, or if they were simply lazy. The open secret about content filters, besides the fact that they can be easily hacked, is that many of the site lists used in these filters had their genesis with conservative Christian organizations. These lists are copied around and often added to by the churches many filtering companies also service, so when a seemingly secular company “implementing technology in the classroom” (in this case Education Networks of America) comes along they may be instituting a site filter-list written by people with a inherent bias against minority religions. Something that the clients may not even know.

“When local school officials select and implement a filtering product, they are provided only a list of potential categories to be blocked, with a short description of the types of material blocked in the categories. Filtering companies protect the actual list of blocked sites, searching and blocking key words, blocking criteria, and blocking processes as confidential, proprietary trade secret information. Therefore, local school officials have essentially delegated control to filtering companies to make decisions about the appropriateness of material for students when there is no vehicle to determine how such control is being exercised.”

So who knows what “content filtering product” ENA is using, but at least some of it most likely had its genesis with groups that were decidedly not unbiased or secular. In fact, almost all of the most popular Internet filters block Pagan sites, something that doesn’t seem to bother the secular groups servicing government and government-funded groups and services, until they get in trouble of course. Because if a public school is blocking student access to some religions but not to others, that could be seen as bias, and that is a no-no according to the Supreme Court. So lets hope that Indianapolis Public Schools change their filtering policy ASAP instead of stonewalling and preparing for litigation, and lets also hope that ENA stops offering to block access to minority religions in public schools.

“Focus on the Family announced Wednesday it is laying off 8 percent of its work force, casualties of the latest budget shortfall at the influential conservative Christian group … The cutbacks are necessary because projections show the group will fall 5 percent short of a $138 million budget for the fiscal year ending this month … The layoffs will leave Focus on the Family with about 860 employees, down from a peak 1,400.”

While I hesitate to cheer at anyone’s misfortune, I do find it hard to muster much in way of sympathy for an organization that has consistently fear-mongered the rise of Pagan faiths, and branded us as Satanic evil-doers. Perhaps now that they are slightly less affluent they will focus on their own families instead of ours.

The Santa Cruz Sentinel profiles John Bruno Hare, founder of Sacred-texts.com, a hugely popular online repository of rare, public domain, and out-of-print works about religion. Hare, who is battling cancer, is hoping to make Sacred-text’s parent company Evinity Publishing profitable so that his legacy can continue after his death.

“…his goal is to make Evinity Publishing, which he started this year as a parent company for his site and other products, continue to educate curious minds long after he passes on.”Essentially, this is my gift to the world,” he said. “I don’t want it to go away if I die. People consider it a world treasure.” … Today, Hare has two employees and four volunteers. As funding allows, he’d like to sign on more employees and volunteers to keep the site going and growing.”

In addition to more mainstream religious materials, Sacred-texts has also become an important online resource for Pagan, Heathen, and Wiccan materials, including the massive Internet Book of Shadows. Here’s hoping Sacred-texts not only survives, but thrives in the years to come. If you want to support the site, you can buy DVD and CD archives of the material found online (including bonus texts not posted).

In a final note, the Agence France-Presse (AFP) checks in with a former Nepali Kumari (living goddess) who has graduated from college, the first Kumari to do so, and is now working in the IT sector. For 29-year-old Rashmila Shakya going from being isolated and worshiped as a goddess to a life of computers, work, and a normal social interactions has been challenging.

“I was not prepared to live a normal life as I had grown up in a different environment,” she said. “Before, I was a goddess and everyone worshipped me and treated me with respect. “Living in society has been difficult, but I am getting used to it. My education and work experience have taught me how to deal with people.”

Despite her difficulties, Shakya doesn’t want the Kumari tradition to end, saying it unites Nepal’s Buddhists and Hindus, instead she wants the tradition to be reformed and programs set up to help former Kumaris adjust to normal life. This has already started, as the Nepalese Supreme Court has ordered that Kumari receive schooling, a major step forward in modernizing the tradition. The Kumari have received a lot of attention in the West recently in the wake of a recent documentary and the first-ever visit of a living goddess to America.

That’s all I have for now, have a great day!

“Since then, Facebook’s beliefs box has generated a staggering number of entries. So exactly how many users put down “beer” as their religion? How many “Catholic”? What correlations exist between religion and number of friends? Company spokeswoman Meredith Chin declined to answer such questions, citing user privacy. But Chin agreed to compile a list of the most popular religious identities and offered some tantalizing hints at what a full readout might show. Not surprisingly, the most popular faith professed is “Christian” and the various denominations associated with it. The category is so dominant that for this list, Facebook’s statisticians insisted on combining such other designations as “Protestant,” “Catholic” and “Mormon” under the “Christian” label. As a result, the second most popular entry on the list is “Islam,” followed by “Atheist.” “Jedi,” interestingly enough, makes an appearance at No. 10.”

There are so many questions about Facebook’s religion data that aren’t asked or answered in William Wan’s breezy little article. For instance, Facebook statisticians “insisted” on combining all the Christian variations, but did they do the same for other religious groupings? Were all the various Pagan faiths combined as well? If not, why not? Is “spiritual” a catch-all category, or is it just people who listed themselves solely as “spiritual”, and why include a Washington DC top-ten but not one for the USA as a whole?  Why only ten? If it isn’t a violation of user privacy to give us a top-ten list, why not a top twenty or fifty? Further, why did Wan classify “Seguidor del Wiccanismo” (follower of Wicca in Spanish, of which there are 2000 on Facebook) as “offbeat”, did he not bother to run it through a translator? Does the fact that this listing was given as an example of “offbeat” answers to the religion question (along with “Heavy Metal” and “Amish”) in fact prove that Facebook statisticians didn’t bother to gather the modern Pagans into an easy-to-count single grouping?

Instead of doing a real investigation of religion on Facebook, Wan focuses instead on how “hard” it is to fill in that text box, when all you want to do is hook up with some friends.

“It’s Facebook. The whole point is to keep it light and playful, you know?” said Heim, 27, a college student from Dumfries. “But a question like that kind of makes you think.”

Indeed, it does make you think, I just wish the Washington Post were similarly inspired. It’s “interesting” that Jedi came in tenth, but not interesting enough to probe a bit deeper into why it’s the tenth-most-popular faith category on Facebook. If only the The Force could spur some more in-depth journalism on these questions.

ADDENDUM: Get Religion and I seem to be on the same wavelength today.

“Yahoo! is hammering the nail in the coffin of GeoCities, a web site building service that hasn’t been updated in nearly as long. Yahoo! has already stopped accepting new account registrations, but existing GeoCities pages won’t be pulled down until later this year. The company hasn’t offered a simple path for migrating your data yet, but Yahoo! is suggesting users upgrades to paid Yahoo! web hosting accounts. There are no plans to offer a free web hosting service in the future.”

While this development will no doubt be met with wistful sadness by some, many web-savvy Pagans are no doubt wondering what took so long for this relic to be taken off life support. GeoCities did indeed offer an easy way for many Pagans to create web sites, but it was also a breeding ground for some of the worst tendencies within our online community. Rampant copyright infringement, blatant intellectual property theft, a haven for cranks bearing grudges in long-standing witch-wars, and some of the most eye-destroying web design ever to grace/curse the Internet. I think a recent blog post by Dianne Sylvan sums up the feelings of many on the subject.

“Good god, Pagan websites used to suck.  Remember MIDI files of Enya and spinning flaming pentacles?  Black star-flecked background with violent purple lettering in 20 point font?  Remember when cut-and-pasting Scott Cunningham was all you had to do to make your Geocities site popular?”

So rather than see this as losing thousands of Pagan web sites, you might want to frame it as a long-overdue Augean-like cleansing of our cluttered web community. Just think of all the bandwidth that’ll be saved from taking all those spinning flaming pentacles down! Personally, I’m ready for the Pagan web’s awkward adolocence to fade gracefully into the sunset. What do you think about GeoCities shutting down? Feel free to share your favorite GeoCities page, bad Pagan web-design horror-story, or general relief that it’ll all be over soon.

“The Vatican warned the internet address-making body of the “perils” of allowing new internet domains such as “.catholic, .anglican, .orthodox, .hindu, .islam, .muslim, [and] .buddhist”. ICANN, frequently accused of mission creep, could find itself having to decide who gets to represent an entire religion on the internet, His Holiness pointed out, in a letter from Monsignor Carlo Maria Polvani.”

That’s right, religiously-themed top-level domains have become a very real possibility, and the Vatican is concerned about who might end up holding the reigns of those new extensions.

These gTLDs could provoke competing claims among theological and religious traditions and could possibly result in bitter disputes that would force ICANN, implicitly and/or explicitly, to abandon its wise policy of neutrality by recognizing to a particular group or to a specific organization the legitimacy to represent a given religious tradition.

In other words, what if an organization headed by a schismatic or Independent Catholic group got control of ‘.catholic’ (not that I see the Vatican letting that scenario go down without a fight), or, what if a rogue Subgenius had control over ‘.pope’ (charging twenty dollars per domain obviously)? More likely, what if control over religious top-level domains went to the groups with the most money?

“You have the right to contest any of these extensions by spending the  $50,000+, it will take to object to each and every religious domain extension that might be applied for. Just  ask the churchgoers to dig a little deep in their pocket to put more money in the collection plate, so they can fight each new extension religious extension. Seriously the many nightmarish problems and issues are just starting concerning these new extensions. What if multiple groups apply for a  .god extension, who gets to play god? Well I guess the highest bidder, according to the ICANN’s Guidebook.”

To say this is a potential minefield is a huge understatement. So long as you have groups that insist they hold the only “proper” or “correct” way of administering legitimacy regarding a faith, tradition, text, title, or teaching, your going to run into serious problems. Worse, what would happen if enemies of a particular faith controlled the keys to its top-level domain? After all does the Pagan community have hundreds of thousands of dollars to challenge an evangelical group from running ‘.pagan’ or ‘.wicca’? So in this instance, and perhaps not for the exact same reasons I have, the Pope is right. Religious-themed extensions under the current system would be a potential nightmare. Without the promise of an affordable and open challenge mechanism, or the certainty that religious extensions would be controlled by ideologically neutral parties, ICANN should stay out of the God(s) business.

“The problem is that it lists organised religions such as Christianity, Islam and Judaism in one group, while relegating less mainstream – but recognised and perfectly legal – faiths such as Wicca and Paganism to an “Alternative Spirituality/Occult” group. Rather oddly, it lists atheism both in the latter group and under Politics. And a company spokesperson couldn’t explain what the difference is between “unconventional religious or quasireligious subjects” (listed under Religion) and ” alternative religions” (listed as Alternative Spirituality/Occult).”

You can read a run-down of Bluecoat’s filter categories, here. The dirty little secret of the web filtering business is that the categories are mostly cribbed from conservative Christian-backed programs and services. These programs are then sold to schools, libraries, and government institutions, which can lead to controversy and litigation once individuals realize the bias inherent in the filter.

“Alternative Spirituality/Occult: Sites that promote and provide information on religions such as Wicca, Witchcraft or Satanism. Occult practices, atheistic views, voodoo rituals or any other form of mysticism are represented here. Includes sites that endorse or offer methods, means of instruction, or other resources to affect or influence real events through the use of spells, incantations, curses and magic powers. This category includes sites which discuss or deal with paranormal or unexplained events.”

The National Secular Society, who calls the current filtering scheme “slightly deranged”, is hoping that the negative publicity will be enough to change their filter policy, though they will take the matter to court if they have to. In the meantime, followers of “conventional”, “unconventional”, and “quasi-religious” faiths will have full access to the web, while the “alternative/occult” adherents will be treated as second-class citizens by a government agency. Something, no doubt, will have to give soon.
]]> http://wildhunt.org/blog/2008/08/conventional-unconventional-alternative.html/feed 0 http://wildhunt.org/blog/2008/07/protecting-adults-from-occult-and.html http://wildhunt.org/blog/2008/07/protecting-adults-from-occult-and.html#comments Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:32:00 +0000 Jason http://wildhunt.org/blog/2008/07/protecting-adults-from-the-occult-and-atheists.html In England, the Birmingham City Council is coming under fire for a new web-filtering policy that blocks access to atheist and Pagan sites, but allows free access to mainstream Christian, Islam, and Hindu web sites.

“The authority’s Bluecoat Software computer system allows staff to look at websites relating to Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and other religions but blocks sites to do with “witchcraft or Satanism” and “occult practices, atheistic views, voodoo rituals or any other form of mysticism”. Under the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003, it is unlawful to discriminate against workers because of their religion or belief, which includes atheism.”

Bluecoat Software manufactures K9 Web Protection, which, like other cyber-nanny programs, is designed to protect children from “unwanted” Internet content. Some of these programs have an “occult/cult” option which blocks sites that Christian parents might find troubling. It looks like Bluecoat and the Birmingham City Council may have decided that their employees were children as well, or simply didn’t care what got filtered so long as they can easily “monitor internet usage”.

“We are currently implementing new internet monitoring software to make the control of internet access easier to manage. 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.”

The National Secular Society has called the new filtering software “discriminatory”, and said that they would “consider legal action” if steps aren’t taken to correct the issue.

“National Secular Society president Terry Sanderson said the city council’s rules also discriminated against people who practise witchcraft, which is also classed as a legitimate belief. He said the society would initially contact the council and ask for the policy to be changed, and otherwise pursue legal action. He said he believed he would have a “very strong case”. Mr Sanderson said: “It is discriminatory not only against atheists but they also are banning access to sites to do with witchcraft. “Witchcraft these days is called Wicca, which is an actual legitimate and recognised religion.”

A “very strong case” indeed considering the fact that this is a government-run facility, and beholding to stringent anti-discrimination policies. Either all access to religious sites need to be banned, or the infantilizing software must go.
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