One of the things we often hear about the Internet is how it is absolutely rife with pornography. And yeah… there's an awful lot of smut out there. But recently, I got to wondering about the proliferation of another type of site… a much more offensive type of site, to me… the religious site. Because it seemed to me that there were an awful lot of Christian sites out there, never mind sites devoted to other religions.
So today I decided to do a bit of a comparison. Naturally, it's pretty impossible to do an accurate count of either type of site. But I went to my most trusted search engine, Google, and went to their Directory. Here's what I found.
To find the porn, I went first to the Adult section, then to Computers, then Internet, then WWW. What came up? A total of 87,227 sites, out of which 85,105 were listed under Image Galleries.
Then I went to the Religion and Spirituality page (under Society). A big long list of subcategories cropped up. The grand total? 101,756 sites. Out of these, 73,330 were under Christian. Now, there were some subcategories that shouldn't be included, such as Agnosticism, Atheism, Opposing Views and Yoga (spiritual, okay… religion, no). But whittling it down to just the ones that are obviously pro-religion sites, you still come up with more than 98,000.
Okay, actually, I wrote this original article about two months ago. Both categories were smaller by a few thousand sites, so I'd venture to say that by the time many people read this article, the numbers will be much higher again. But as of today, they're accurate.
At least, as far as Google's Directory is concerned. I'm sure there are far more sites of both categories out here in Internetland. But it's one method of comparison, anyway.
So I think all the Christians out there who are complaining about smut should basically shut up. They're out there polluting the web with their often highly offensive beliefs. They certainly have a right to do so. They can take advantage of the First Amendment every bit as much as the webmasters of porn sites. And they're free to use software programs to filter out the smut from their computers.
Anyone know where I can buy such a program that'll exclude their drivel?
