What Bing thinks about Methodists and Baptists

One of my favorite blogs is Remy's World written by Mark Remy at the Runners' World website.

Last August, Mark Remy posted a blog about Google. One of his favorite things about Google is the way it anticipates what you might be looking for as you type it, and makes suggestions.

This, he suggests, provides a clue as to the kind of questions people are commonly asking (and thinking) about whatever subject it is they are doing searches about.

Since his topic is running, he began to type a query and got these results:

I decided to try something similar. Using Bing, I began this search to see how Bing would finish the sentence "Why are Methodist ..."
.

Bing users think Methodist churches are dying?  Or that we are a cult? Or that we are unusually liberal?

Mark Remy did a search that began "Why does running ..." to see how Google would finish the sentence.  You can find the results here (warning -- includes at least one indelicate word).

 So I decided to do a search that begins "Why do Methodist..." 

This is very interesting. I wonder what percentage of Methodist church buildings have two steeples? I wonder how many Methodist congregations still say the Apostles' Creed regularly? And are there still Methodist churches where the ministers move more often than is the case in other denominations?

I decided to see how Baptists would do on the Bing test by comparison.

Not so well. The first one is "Why do Baptists hate Methodists" which I do not believe is true. (By the way, I also don't think the 5th and last lines are true either.)

Christians in general fared the worst of all ... even worse than Methodists and Baptists. 

I wonder if we could change the image of Christians if we all did a dozen searches every day to change the way Google and Bing finish searches about us?

What if we did searches like these: Why are Christians so generous? Why are Christians so forgiving? Why are Christians so accepting? Why are Christians so nonjudgmental? Why are Christians so friendly? Why are Christians so open-minded? Why are Christians so much like Jesus?

The other option would be to so clearly live this way that no one could doubt it.