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God in your pocket
00:21:24
Religion-based apps are growing. Can a smartphone bring spiritual fulfilment?
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Alex Jones
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
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Alex Jones
You don't look like.
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Rob Young
Please see.
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Kimberly Wiltshire
I'll take that as a compliment.
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BritBox Advertiser
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Stefan Peter
Mmm, I love ravioli.
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SAP Concur Representative
O tanta farm me.
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Alex Jones
Since when do you speak Italian?
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SAP Concur Representative
Since we partnered with SAP Concur. Their integrated travel and expense platform and breakthrough solutions with AI gave me time back to dive into our financial future. We expand into Europe in 2027, so I'm getting ready.
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Stefan Peter
Well, you can predict the future.
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SAP Concur Representative
I can predict you'll like that message.
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Alex Jones
What message? Oh, hey, we all got bonuses.
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SAP Concur Representative
You can save for college now.
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Nafeez Concur
I don't have kids.
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Rob Young
You don' SAP Concur helps your business move forward faster. Learn more@concur.com hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Rob Young. Looking at the boom in religion based apps.
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Nafeez Concur
Everything that the Muslim needs to do, we are just putting it on our app in a very user centric way, which makes life easier for our users.
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Rob Young
The faith tech industry is massive with its promise of spiritual fulfilment from your smartphone, often for a fee. But not everybody is convinced.
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Candida Moss
There's a sense that they're profiting off of people's spiritual needs and getting in the way between an individual and the divine.
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Rob Young
That's all in Business Daily from the BBC. The sound of the Muslim call to prayer heard from mosques around the world five times a day. But this sound isn't from a mosque. It's from a smartphone app called Muslim Pro to remind users it's time to pray. Here's one of the apps users in the United Kingdom, a woman who converted to Islam later in life.
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Kimberly Wiltshire
My name is Kimberly Wiltshire. I'm 43. I'm a hairdresser in a care home for dementia residents and elderly people.
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Rob Young
So tell me about your spirituality then and the role that apps play in that.
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Kimberly Wiltshire
So with regards to Islam, I didn't really have much knowledge. It's not what I was born into, it's completely alien to me. And having the apps with the Adhan times and everything helped. It just made life easier because the Adhan's going off, so I know it's time to pray. The Quran's easy to access. I've always got it on me because it's always within the app. Yeah, I've used it ever since I reverted.
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Rob Young
So it's something like an instruction manual then. It's a bit of a guidebook.
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Kimberly Wiltshire
Yeah, it's really helped me with my journey. Especially when you haven't got family that are Muslim.
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Rob Young
What's the difference do you think, when it comes to using the app versus going to the mosque, I think a.
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Kimberly Wiltshire
Combination of the both helps because I do think that obviously you can't solely rely on the app. The mosque, there's community. Obviously you can get community within the app, I believe, I think, I think you can connect with other people, but I haven't ventured that far. I've just used the app like surface based, basically like tracking my fasts in Ramadan, tracking my prayers, reading Quran. I don't speak Arabic, I am learning currently try all translated into English. So yeah, it's been really helpful.
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Rob Young
Kimberly's story is far from unique. She is one of the more than 170 million people worldwide, according to the company, to have downloaded Muslim Pro. The app can be used for free and there are premium features which require a subscription. In the UK that costs the equivalent of $130 a year.
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Stefan Peter
They loved power.
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Alex Jones
They killed the innocent. They did not fear a lie.
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Stefan Peter
They broke the treaty of peace.
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Alex Jones
They betrayed the sacred trust.
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Rob Young
Nafeez Concur is the chief executive of Bits Media, the Singapore based company that makes the app.
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Nafeez Concur
We make practicing their faith accessible. Everything that a Muslim needs to do, we are just putting it on our app in a very user centric way which makes life easier for our users. So we started with the basic utilities of prayer times and qibla direction. Then we moved on to Quran of course. Then we realized that there's a need for Muslims in this digital world to actually do a lot more. So then we became more of a lifestyle app. Today in our app we also have education, we have content where you can actually have. We have about 1100 hours of Islamic content on our app where you can watch videos, watch documentaries about history, comedy, drama, culture, you can watch different things.
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Rob Young
Is it possible, do you think, for somebody to no longer go to mosque but be regarded as a practicing faithful Muslim and purely practice their faith through the app?
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Nafeez Concur
Yes, actually if you really look at it, the only thing you really need to or you must go to the mosque is one of the prayers or jummah prayers on a Friday, which you have to pray in a zamat or pray together with other people, but most of the other practices actually you can do even without going to the mosque. While we don't say that we are replacing a mosque or we are replacing the scholars who are there, you can effectively actually perform everything at home or within your community. We even have AI based teaching models, AI based search engines within our app to ask any questions that you would generally ask, probably a scholar or someone else. Or if you want to know what the Quran says about something in particular, our AI engine will actually give you exactly what the Quran says and give you an answer.
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Rob Young
How big is the potential market then, do you think, for your app?
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Nafeez Concur
Today we have about 2 billion Muslims all over the world and we have only about 170 million downloads from there. Also, we only have about 20 million active users, so we can grow a lot. Most of our users are actually between 18 and 35 years of age, so we believe that this will continue. These users will grow with us because more and more of these users will have their spending capability and they are all the smarter users of smartphones. We have just launched travel services on our app where you can provide Islamic travel or Umrah services. They can just go and perform that because they trust us. They do charity, they do zakat. They can provide those services through us. Now we are slowly launching some of these, so we believe that this market actually will grow a lot.
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Rob Young
The fees concur. The company says the app isn't making a lot of money as it has high costs. We'll return to the issue of finances later on.
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Alex Jones
It's that time of year again.
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Rob Young
Hey, buddy, you leading Lent on Hallow this year?
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Alex Jones
You bet, brother. Stay prayed up.
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Stefan Peter
Yeah, you know it. Hey, Father, you joining Lent again this year? Of course.
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Alex Jones
Stay prayed up.
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Stefan Peter
All right, Father.
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Rob Young
This is an advert for Hallow, an app from the United States for Catholics. It reached the number one spot in Apple's App Store in the US at one point last year, beating the likes of Instagram, TikTok and Netflix. The company behind Hallow says it has been downloaded more than 25 million times. Here's the chief executive, Alex Jones.
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Alex Jones
We started Hallow originally just for me. I had fallen away from my faith and came back to it. And really, through this kind of discovering of contemplative and meditative prayer, our vision for Hallow is just to be one very small part of your spiritual journey. So our goal is to lead you to church, to be something that you interact with outside of Sundays that inspires you to go to church and for Catholics, confession and all the beauty of the sacraments. And that's what happened to me. And we see it with our users. We have our lowest usage day is on Sundays. So most folks are using it throughout the week to really try to bring God into the rest of their lives and try to find peace amidst the, the busyness of life.
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Rob Young
Right. So you're saying in a way that success for you is if people don't use the app on a Sunday, they go to church. Which is the way that most app owners would not regard success to their app. They want people to use it as much as possible.
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Alex Jones
Yeah, we have maybe a little bit different version of success. My version of success is trying to do whatever the good Lord wants us to do, trying to do whatever God is asking us to do. And certainly in this he's very clear. I mean, the summit of your prayer life, church, it's not actually, you know, sitting on your couch and praying. It's going to church and praying together with your brothers and sisters. And, you know, there's a bunch of ways on Hallow to build community, to pray for people, to pray with people. But ultimately we believe there's, you've got to have an in person community, you've got to have a physical church community. And so what we try to do, and that's, you know, that's out of scripture, that's out of the Bible. And so what we try to do is lead people to that. So, yeah, our goal is to have our Sunday usage as low as possible and then have, have folks join us on Mondays.
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Rob Young
Like other religion apps, Hallow offers a free version. There are also premium features for subscribers who pay $70 a year. So is the company making any money? Chief executive Alex Jones.
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Alex Jones
Again, we're a startup, so we're burning money. You know, we have revenue obviously from a bunch of folks that we've been blessed to have subscribed to the app. But, you know, we're still investing a lot and trying to create content, trying to add new languages and trying to reach out to folks. Especially for us, the important thing is trying to reach out to folks who have most fallen away, the people who are in the toughest and most difficult places. We get notes every day from people who are struggling with addiction or depression or really hopelessness or loneliness. For us is trying to bring the peace and the love of God to those folks. And so we're investing a lot in trying to reach out to folks and create content to do that, and so we're still very much burning money, as you would say, in the startup world.
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Rob Young
Talk to me about how you regard the relationship between money and Christianity, given that it's very clear in the Bible that Jesus found some traders with tables in a temple on a Sunday and overturned them.
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Alex Jones
That is a very important question for us, and we take it very seriously. The worship of money, putting money first is one of, if not the primary evil that infects all of our hearts. So what we try to do on Hallow is to try to help people to discover that, recognize that, and then detach from that. You know, money and technology are tools. If you worship them, if you put them first, that is, you know, it's the road to hell, that's the road to destruction. It's exactly what Christ says you can't do. But they can be tools if you use them second. And you know, everybody, every nonprofit, you know, has some sort of money generating thing or some way to be sustainable. And as long as money is never the goal, as long as it's, hey, we're using this as a tool to try to, you know, do something good in line with Christian values. We're treating employees well, we're trying to treat customers well, and do everything with integrity and love and honesty, then it can be a very powerful tool to build up God's kingdom. You know, the church's view on business is that business and entrepreneurship can be very powerful forces for good as long as they are, you know, the second.
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Rob Young
So you're saying then that if you never make a profit, that's not a problem for you?
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Alex Jones
It's not a problem for me. I think we will. I think that, you know, most likely Hallow is going to die. I mean, it's a startup, especially at the beginning. It's a 98, 99% chance of failure, but you have a chance to build something big. And so from the beginning, for me, you, yeah, Hala was almost certainly not going to work out. I think there's an opportunity to create tremendous value both economically and for users. And people are willing to pay for something that helps them to find peace and love and humility and patience in their life. And so I think you can do it in a way that creates real value. We have an opportunity. There's two and a half billion people interested in Christian spirituality. I think we have an opportunity to build something big. I don't care whether Hallow's valued it, whatever XYZ valuation, I don't care whether what revenue we have all I care about is trying to do God's will.
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Rob Young
Hello, Chief Executive Alex Jones. You're listening to Business Daily from the BBC World Service.
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Candida Moss
Hey, Ryan.
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SAP Concur Representative
That was a fast trip. It was like you teleported.
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Alex Jones
Yeah, just got in. I'll get all my expenses logged, I promise.
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SAP Concur Representative
Oh, no, you're okay. SAP Concur uses advanced AI, so your expense report will practically write itself.
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Candida Moss
Quite the breakthrough.
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SAP Concur Representative
It's like we've been teleported into the future. All right, so just curious, would you give us written permission to convert your matter into energy patterns and reassemble you at, say, random travel destinations?
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Alex Jones
Margaret, are you building a teleporter?
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SAP Concur Representative
No.
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Rob Young
Yes. SAP Concur helps your business move forward faster. Learn more concur.com. i'm Rob Young, and today I'm looking at the boom in the faith tech industry. None of the companies I've spoken to wanted to disclose specific financial information, and that's not unusual for privately held firms. The Hindu based app Srimandir says it has 30 million registered users. It charges devotees sometimes up to $60 to make an offering at a chosen temple, all ordered on the app. Prasant Satchan, the app's founder, spoke to me from Bangalore in India about its charging model.
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Prashant Sachan
When you go and order grocery from a store, you pay a platform fee and convenience fee. A similar model. That is what we follow here. We have a platform fee, we have a convenience fee. This is what we charge. It's essentially a way where can we create impact for hundreds of millions of people and a fraction of the cost that they'll pay will come to us as platform fee. And people are very happy about that. There's affordability. It's not a very expensive experience that you are taking from the platform and it creates this access to experiences that you might not go or you might go at a lower frequency for that matter. You should not look at me like a faith tech startup. You should look at me as a typical Indian consumer Internet startup, which is giving access to people. In this case, the access happens to be for devotional services and not food.
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Rob Young
There is often an uncomfortable relationship, isn't there, between faith and money? How do you, as a Hindu navigate that?
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Prashant Sachan
The way I think of this is, right. What is the kind of impact I am making in the lives of people? If you just go through the kind of feedback we have been receiving from people, it is overwhelming. This is the first time I am giving access to people, to things that they have been needing and not things that they have not been needing. When they do a transaction on the platform, they feel grateful, they feel happy. It makes them get this intense feeling of this well being and feeling blessed. Now these feelings are essentially important. Helps people cope, helps people do better in life. I think I'm doing public good and I'll not be able to create this without creating an economic structure around it. Temples will not participate, the priests will not participate. I'll not be able to build a world class tech team here. I'll not be able to build a platform which is available for free for people. Someone has to pay and the users are happy paying for this.
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Rob Young
Prashant Sachin Some apps use artificial intelligence to simulate conversations with religious figures or even with God. One app, Text with Jesus, lets users chat with an AI that replies in the voice of Jesus. Stefan Peter is the president and chief executive of the app maker Catclo Software, which is based in California.
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Stefan Peter
Internally, it's based on basically the OpenAI large language models and the way it is, it's basically it's instructions for the AI model to tell it to act as a certain character and there's a lot of guidelines on safeguards and things like that. Basically some rules to guide it, for example, how you quote Bible verses and things like that. When you put all that together, that's what makes it like a compelling experience for the end users who go there and get to have a conversation with what feels almost like a real person, even though obviously it is not.
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Rob Young
It's interesting you say, obviously it's not because I've used your app and I did ask it if it is Jesus, and it replied, yes, I speak to you as Jesus. Are you not concerned that some people may become confused that they think they actually are talking to Jesus rather than to an artificial intelligence product?
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Stefan Peter
I understand that's a common concern. At the beginning of every conversation, there's always a little disclaimer that says, this is an AI chatbot. Be careful of mistakes it may make. We're trying to balance a little bit the way we define a character, because on one hand we do want it to be like one. It's really pretending like it's the character in person so that it can act as that person, as Jesus in this case can respond in a way that feels authentic. At the same time, you have to balance that with the fact that it's an AI. In the end, I think we're trying to basically be clear about the fact that it's an AI, but in the end, it's kind of up to the person to stay Aware of that.
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Rob Young
And what do you hope users get out of it?
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Stefan Peter
The way I saw it at first was really more like a tool, like an educational tool really, because to me, it's a new way to interact, to learn things, to explore, an interactive way. Your faith, your scripture, you can really ask questions that maybe you wouldn't ask to a real person. Some people sometimes may use it for, like, personal questions. I cannot speak for all the responses you might get, but it tends to be pretty good at answering spiritual questions. Especially, like if you want to study the Bible, it has access to the entire compendium of every biblical book that's been out there that these GPT models have been trained on. So to me, that's a very good way to interact with this giant compendium of knowledge in a way that's fun for the end user because it feels interactive. It feels in a lot of ways like it's a person talking to you.
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Rob Young
And you can have a few interactions a day for free, can't you? But then it's a $50 annual fee if you want unlimited conversations. What about the criticism that some people have that apps like this are profiting off people's religious beliefs?
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Stefan Peter
It is a business for us. We're trying to price it in a way that's accessible. And this is why we have this free tier, so people can use it for free if they choose to. So it's not completely inaccessible to people. But at the same time, we do need to run the infrastructure behind this. So to be able to keep running this, we do need some type of income from it. In the end, a lot of this technology is run by big business, so everything is a cost as far as when you're a small developer account trying to put the product together. But I can understand how people would see it this way because there is a profit motive involved to some extent. But we're trying to keep it to a way that it provides value to people while still being accessible as much as possible, really. I think the basic level is enough for most people. I mean, if I look at just the usage, most of the people who use the app don't actually subscribe or buy anything. They just use it for a few questions here and there that the free tier is enough for them. I'm fond of that.
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Rob Young
That was Stefan Peter, the president and chief executive of Catloaf Software. Not everyone is comfortable with this digital devotion. Candida Moss, a theology professor at the University of Birmingham in the uk, says apps can't replace real spiritual connection.
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Candida Moss
Religion in The UK is on a decline, particularly Christianity. People aren't going to church as much. They're not as engaged with religion. And these apps are sort of giving people an opportunity to reconnect with their religious beliefs and that's surely a good thing. We've had books that have offered people the same thing for hundreds of years. It's sort of hard to navigate a Bible. You know, if I have a question and I want to know what the Bible says about X, it's quite hard for me, just as a regular user, to go and find the relevant passages. So in that respect, I think the apps are really great for helping people find passages in scripture that they want or giving them sort of a model for how to pray. I think the problem comes when people think that it's a replacement for prayer or a replacement for sort of being part of a religious community or actually talking to God, because that's not what you're doing. Just because something is disembodied and seemingly all knowing doesn't mean that it's absolute, actually a transcendent deity.
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Rob Young
A lot of these apps do offer services for free, but there are other elements which must be paid for. And there has always been a complicated relationship, hasn't there, between religion and money?
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Candida Moss
That's right. This wouldn't be the first time that people have profited off religious beliefs. But it is a little awkward to be sort of gatekeeping access to sort of a premium relationship with God in this way. And that raises problems. People who are building these apps often do have sincere religious beliefs themselves, but at the same time, there's a sense that they're kind of profiting off of people's sort of spiritual needs and getting in the way between an individual and the divine. And that's not ideal. And that's before we even get into the program problems of, you know, misinformation that you might get from an app.
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Rob Young
When any company sets up like app companies, they have massive costs initially, don't they? These companies in the main say they actually aren't making any money yet, they're just covering their costs. Is that okay?
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Candida Moss
Well, of course people do have to cover costs, but traditionally in religion, it has been a sort of charitable model. So, you know, you go to church, you put some money in the collection plate, you give what you can. And these apps aren't quite like that. Of course, anyone building an app have to cover their costs. People need to be able to feed their families and put food on the table. But at the same time, presumably the plan with all of these technologies is eventually to make money. And I think that's where lots of people would have issues with that.
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Rob Young
Theology Professor Candida Moss from the University of Birmingham. Have you tried a religion based app? Did it deepen your faith or leave you questioning it? We'd love to hear your experience. Do get in touch. World.businessbc.co.uk. thank you for listening to this edition of Business Daily.