Cult of Ranganathan Busted by SonicWALL

Aaron Schmidt of Walking Paper (rightly) grumbles that he was unable to access his own site at Panera, where they have WiFi.  The reason?  It had been blocked by Panera's content filter service, SonicWALL, as "Cult/Occult."  Never mind that it's a case of not only gross overblocking and just plain wrong (unless they've heard about Aaron's Ranganathan cult).  Why in the world would a Panera, or any business that offers WiFi to individuals who are using their own machines, filter content in such a broad manner?  A google search of  panera sonicwall will reveal lots more grumblers.  In fairness, WiFi is free at Panera--maybe they need to add employees who can make baguettes and configure crummy filtering software.

According to the SonicWALL filtering standards:

Sites sponsored by prominent organized modern religious groups that are identified as "cults" by three or more authoritative sources. Sites that promote or offer methods, means of instruction, or other resources to affect or influence real events through the use of spells, curses, magic powers or supernatural beings.

Such sites include satannet.net and churchofsatan.com.  That Ranganathan musta been some evil sumbitch.

Comments

[slinky]

what is this talking about?
any brief sumary available?

[Psychenaut]

I'm so glad info like this get's out to the public! This is one person, who knows plenty of other folks who will not be eating at an establishment that uses that service. I've tried my best over the years to be tollerant of christians and remember they are also my brothers and sisters. . .actually tollerant of religion in general but they keep doing crap like this it becomes hard to be polite to such an annoying RASH.

Their truth is just as relative as any other, and that is putting it nicely.

If the universe had AIDS religion would be a big bottle of caugh syrup no need for a cure now, we got us some symptom supressor for the problems we have created out of our own interpersonal perseptual ignorances. This bottole of suppresant sure is full of itself. Then they wanna act supprised when people get tired of their crap, like they are innocent or something. woohooo

Boycott socially accepted insanity!

Psyche's rant has ended.

[Bill Baker]

Well, Satanists can't hurt anyone anymore through ANY of their rituals{many don't believe in literality of magic and just use it as psychollogical catharsis} than a Christian praying for the gov't to be headed by Christian people{which they do ALL THE TIME} which would be a curse towards any whom are not Fundamentalist/Evangelical Christian, do they get blocked?
Satanists, such as those that belong to the "Church of Satan" are merely rationalists whom enjoy using satan as a symbol for ethical hedonism and relativism,individuality,responsibility,moderated indulgence, rebellion against hypocrite herd mentality and tyranny,amongst other things. Just a "symbol".

Also, the movement I myself belong to called "Universism"{not to be confused w/Universalism} has been apparently blocked and called a "cult/occult". Universism is a reason-based movement to unite Athiests,Agnostics,Deists{beleif in god based on reason rather than faith; many U.S. founding fathers were such},Pantheists{the universe and god are the same thing},and Trancendentalists. There is no beleif in magic at all w/in this movement, it is religion of philosophers basically. It does not deal w/the "occult"{as defined by any definition of it}-and it is only a "cult" is that it is a relatively small{though rapidly growing, it has been around for two years and has over 8000 members globally} religion of faith-free philosophical freethinkers. It's highly indivudalistic, and there is no authroity or dogma other than co-ordinators whom promote and advance the movement and the dogma of individualistic faith-free reason.Hows that bad?
Even Christianity,Islam, and all the so-called "major" religions that are not blocked were once called "cults" based soley on size or on beeing different than the so-called "norm". Cult is the root word for "culture", by that EVERY nation,peoples,religion,etc, is a "cult"-just of different sizes is all.

Funny thing is that white light magic workers such as 'Wicca.org" have been accepted , they beleive in and work "magic", but philosophical reasonists are a dangerous cult somehow, how does that work out?

To better understand "Universism" and that it is NOT occult, nor doe sit really fir most modern baised definitions of "cult" for that matter, visit the site and see for yourself
www.universist.org
and perhaps chat w/some of them about what it's all about at their public forums at www.faithless.org

In Reason:
Bill Baker