Godly Gigabytes.

Christianity generates a lot of business activity, especially in the US.  You can fnd all sorts of Christian oriented products, ranging from the expected, like numerous Bible printings, to the surprising, like Christian sex toys.   So when I noticed an ad over on a couple of the Freethought Blogs blogs today for the Puritan Hard Drive my curiosity was piqued.  Was it someone's clumsy attempt at selling computer parts to a captive audience?  Clicking on the ad revealed that the Puritan Hard Drive is actually a hard drive filled will all sorts of religious material.  The producers did go to rather more effort than simply rebranding a standard hard drive and selling it at a markup.

I do wonder about a couple of things.  Firstly, what would the actual Puritans think of computers?  Assuming you could convince them they weren't some form of magic would they think them an appropriate tool for the faithful?  Even their usefulness for Biblical scholarship might not be enough to convince them.  A more imporant question may be whether any of the material on the Puritan Hard Drive is under copyright, and did they get permission to use such material?  Some people may feel they deserve to be properly paid for their hard work, no matter what the intent of the creators of this product might be. 

As for why ads like that pop up on the atheist oriented Freethought Blogs it's simply a result of the keyword algorithm used by the ad service that provides their ads.  Certain words and combinations of words will result in certain ads appearing, even if said ads seem at odds with the editorial stance of the site's conttributors.    In the end it still benefits the site, and non-believers clicking on the ads doens't help sell the product.