| HN Mirror

As a 12‐year‐old I encountered this passage during my first complete read of the Bible and wasn’t bothered by it. It’s a colorful metaphor that uses sexual promiscuity to symbolize Israel’s religious impiety, a common theme that occurs elsewhere in the Bible (e.g., Hosea whose commitment to his unfaithful wife was used as a symbol for the love of God to an unfaithful Israel). These are basic theological ideas that were not hidden from me at church even at that age.

I encountered actual prurient material on the shelves of the school library, and heard far worse obscenity in the locker room during gym class. The most erotic stuff in the Bible, Song of Songs, is quaint by the standards of a century ago, let alone today.

If F‐Droid is trying to drum up opposition to the UK’s extreme suppression of pornography, they've muddled it. They could have defied the unjust restrictions, or they could have leaned into it and marked Wikipedia apps, Reddit apps, Mastodon apps, and Project Gutenberg apps the same way.

That they did neither indicates that they have chosen to specifically target religious content, and not just by marking it. F-Droid developers openly state (https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/252#note_2578531026) that (1) new NSFW apps will not be added, and (2) existing NSFW apps will be removed.

It's bad on principle: F-Droid is akin to a distribution package repo, and should not prohibit apps based solely on ideology (nor should Debian, Gentoo, BSD ports…); and it's also impractical: given the looming threat of government suppression of app stores, F‐Droid (already an underdog) should not be driving away supporters by taking up anti‐religious ideology.