It puts a lot of features at the fingertips of the faithful, including the ability to filter whole neighborhoods by religion, ethnicity, “Hispanic country of origin,” “assimilation,” and whether there are children living in the household.

Its core function is to produce neighborhood maps and detailed tables of data about people from non-Anglo-European backgrounds, drawn from commercial sources typically used by marketing and data-harvesting firms.

training videos produced by users show the extent to which evangelical groups are using sophisticated ways to target non-Christian communities, with questionable safeguards around security and privacy.

In one instance, he points to the sharable note-taking function and suggests leaving information for each household, such as “Daughter left for college” and “Mother is in the hospital.”

increasingly popular among Christian supremacist groups, prayerwalking calls on believers to wage “violent prayer” (persistently and aggressively channeling emotions of hatred and anger against Satan), engage in “spiritual mapping” (identifying areas where evil is at work, such as the darkness ruling over an abortion clinic, or the “spirit of greed” ruling over Las Vegas), and conduct prayerwalking (roaming the streets in groups, “praying on-site with insight”).

newly arrived refugees might well find a knock on the door from strangers with knowledge of their personal circumstances distressing—and that’s before these surprise visitors even begin to attempt to convert them.

placing people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds on easy-to-access databases is a dangerous road to go down

  • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Funny you should mention that.

    In the mythology of the bible, 2 Samuel 24 talks about how King David took a census of Israel, and it pissed god off so much that he killed 70,000 completely uninvolved Israelis over it, and would have killed more but he stopped when he got to Jerusalem.

    And these modern day chuckleheads are doing it on purpose, lol. If only they believed a fraction of their own holy book, I would have the best time gladly explaining to them via scholarly biblical exegesis how and why they’re gonna DIE a nasty death if they do this.

    If only. -sigh-

    • dynamojoe@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      That’s such a weird passage. I can’t be understanding this correctly. God tells David to count the people. David sends his generals to count the people. They report the count back to David, who apologizes and says he sinned for doing what God told him to do? IDGI