I realize you may have been joking, but I wonder how most atheists and other nonreligious people here would feel about selling a product or service targeted specifically at religious people or churches. To me, it feels dirty, like I would be saying, "I know that religions are false and even harmful, but I'm going to milk those less enlightened believers for all they're worth."
What difference would it make? Religious institutions, writers, horse-traders, scuba divers - a market is a market.
If you go into any business harboring that level of disrespect for your customers then you're probably going to fail to provide a product they'll be willing to use. Although there is also an argument to be made for domain experience - if you're going to sell a service to religious groups wouldn't you be more likely to understand the market without having a bias against religion?
There is actually something to be said for not being personally/emotionally invested in the market you're in, it can help you to see things more objectively.
On the other hand, if you're emotionally invested in atheism, in the sense that you actively want to see religion gone (as opposed to just not believing as a personal choice), you're emotionally invested in religion by extension.
I've never heard "emotionally invested in atheism" mean "you actively want to see religion gone". In fact, I find that idea quite disrespectful. That's just as bad as a religious person trying to push their religious ideals onto you.
I know a large number of religious people who would consider themselves "emotionally invested in their religion" but I would never describe any of them as "actively wanting to see all other beliefs gone".
"New Atheism is a social and political movement in favour of atheism and secularism promoted by a collection of modern atheist writers who have advocated the view that "religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises.""
This is actually startlingly true - it would make a lot of sense for someone to steal OP's idea and capitalize on it. I hope, however, that no one does. It's a great thing he's done.
Yeah, capitalizing on such an effort might spoil the fun but...
The code has been licensed under an Affero GPL v3 license so anybody using it in production must release any modifications done. So it's not really stealing the idea or the code, only the business model, which the OP apparently doesn't want to pursue anyway.
A non Affero license (or MIT, BSD, Apache) would have shut him off from his code (I can't decide if those using those licenses are masochists or just extremely kind). With this choice of the license the OP will get fixes and improvements and probably be happy with that. Furthermore he could be hired to do them, regardless of the license.
As an atheist, I would feel great about taking money, house keys, login passwords and encryption keys from religious people, to take care of their pets, servers, possessions and left behind loved ones after the rapture. http://www.aftertherapturepetcare.com/http://eternal-earthbound-pets.com/
Then what exactly is your definition of religious? Does it somehow exclude the hundreds of millions of Christians who believe in the rapture (41% of all Americans, 52% of Americans in the South)? If so, then that's some creative gerrymandering and I'd love to see your rationalization and sources!
In the South, a full 52 percent of those polled predicted that JC's return is imminent. Those figures come from a June 2010 poll from the Pew Research Center for People & the Press.
Think Only a Few Fools Believe in the Rapture? Think Again.
In other words, a substantial portion of the American public—more than 4 out of 10—disagrees with the May 21 Rapture freaks only with respect to the date and some of the details of Jesus’ return. Think of that stat the next time you’re assured by some liberal theologian that the arguments of contemporary atheists are directed against targets that no longer exist.
I remember media reporting a survey of children which "discovered" that a full 1/4 of children under the age of 12 had been involved with committing armed robbery in the UK.
There were some methodological flaws including asking children in groups what were their experiences of crime.
Turns out kids like to maintain social standing with over kids through exaggeration.
Who knew.
Yes there are morons out there who think God is personally going to save them first as they will be closest to the altar. But most of my problem with religion is not religion - it's lying and power grabbing and manipulation and deceit and murder and social entrapment and the inertia of crowds.
Religion corrals this behaviour but it's humans not religion that does it. If you want to convert others beware of your own motivations. They won't be different to those of religion. Because you aren't different. And that's my point.
I guess it is the difference between selling a bad product with the intent of exploiting people and just selling a good product to a market one has little affinity with.
As an atheist I do not feel contempt or superiority with anyone religious - indeed most religious people I know I respect greatly for their integrity and community minded committment. (Most religious people whom I disrespect I would disrespect if they were atheists too - it is I guess "by their actions you will know them")
Put it a different way - this project looks like an excellent product / saas to sell to the Mosque and Synagogue market as well as Protestant Church market. I expect there are some hard coded assumptions that would need pulling out to a config file, but just as I see common behaviour between religions as decent, honest, community minded and "good" I think the common needs of decent honest community minded organisations seem to be met by this product.
As an atheist I would have no qualms selling this to different markets. I suspect however that the story behind this (7 years, Christian coder) is too good for one market and a disability in the others. Would be interesting to know.
Anyway, good luck and I still suggest partnering with a hustler to build a non-profit org to sell saas on the back of this
"To me, it feels dirty, like I would be saying." It would be quite a few orders of magnitude less immoral than how immoral some of us Athiests consider the institution of church and how they "use" their followers. (For info, look at some of the big church networks and churches)
But I have no moral qualms with it as long as no one is being scammed. If people knowingly want to part with their money, and you're not mis-representing things in order to convince them of it, then no amount of "moral" arguments will make what you're doing dirty or immoral. It's not up to you to make moral judgements about how other people wish to spend/throwaway their money.
