One of the things that "Just Marla" was trying to do, i.e., identify the religion of a given blogger, has been made unintentionally a whole lot easier by the ads that occur on a given site.

I noticed just now that apparently my use of the word "Mormon" triggered a whole slew of Mormon related ads showing up on my unlogged in visit to this site. Thus, reading the ads gives me a good idea of just what the Artificial Intelligence at the blog host thinks the site is all about. Of course you still have to do your own analysis to really pin it down, as this is not a very Mormon site at all, it just happens to mention them in one blog post. Of course now I've mentioned it again, so the A.I. bots will really go nuts posting Mormon related ads.

I saw the same effect the other day when looking up a newspaper article about a big local car wreck. Down at the bottom of the story were a whole bunch of ads about buying cars....

Now, if my theory holds true, on my next visit I should get a ton of ads about buying cars in Utah ! Lexus pray about this ??? Deo Volvo lente ? Watch the ads !! How about a Christler Chrysler ? PT Barnum would be so happy with this technology !

I was going to follow through on the notions of the bean counter aspect of the Marla Swoffer vs. Kathryn Young attitudes towards religion, but I think my original idea of using Excel to assign values to various parts of the Bible and other religious sources and then evaluate to net priority has been blown away by what I found at:

www.sevenrealms.org

Seven Realms

Here we have someone who has taken Anthropology 101, and integrated it with a somewhat Libertarian set of attitudes and his/her interpretation of the Bible, and produced the equivalent of a Christian Fort Knox, allowing for one way, and only one way of looking at the world. Hitler would be proud !

On top of that, this person has color coded it, and then plunked it on a white background, rendering about 1/6th of the content very difficult to read. Will it upset his apple cart too much to be told that he can cure the problem by going to white lettering on a black background, so that everything is just a little bit more understandable ? Or is the thought that maybe not everything is known to him/her too scary, to accept fresh input ? Do we have here a classic case of "not invented here" syndrome ?

What happens when this person meets up with another person with an equally elaborate but different system ? Nuclear war ????

Of late there's been a bit of a disturbance on the mommy side of the generally Christian blogosphere.

The key individuals are Kathryn Young, the Daring Young Mom, and Marla Swoffer of Just Marla. In a nutshell Kathryn was nominated for and won "best humor" in the "Blogs of Beauty" contest. Marla protested that Kathryn was not a "Christian" by the rules, as she was a member of LDS or the Mormon church. There was much flu/flu about this, and DYM decided to give back the award to end the controversy.

It might have ended there, but a friend of Kathryns then set up a new, but very similar contest, "Share the Love," but one explicitly open to all young mommys. This time there would be no problem with Kathryn winning something for being funny, something even Marla freely admits (that Kathryn is funny, even without a degree. Does George Burns have a degree ? Robin Williams ? Chris Rock ????? Comedy is an art and an attitude towards life.)

Marla was not happy to let this go forward, under a generalized stay at home mom (SAHM) Christian catagory. She apparently feared for the souls of the Christians with whom she identified, should they happen to unknowingly vote for an ersatz Christian, even though the contest was explicitly non-sectarian. As a public service Marla offered to compile lists of "real Christians" vs. non-so-real Christians, nominees, and that's when the sparks really flew.

It should be noted from the outpouring of support for DYM, and some for Marla too, that this was really a hot button.

So what does it all mean ?

Bean-counter, poker/bridge, consumer reports, vs. "I know what I like," approaches to Christianity are certainly a worthy topic for discussion, and one I will continue on with next time, same place, same station. Is it possible to put one's understanding of God into a spreadsheet ? How does your church reCalc Jesus ? OR: "God said it, I believe it, and that does it!"