About a month and a half ago, I created a twitter bot, @tweologian, that searches the Twittersphere for religious-oriented tweets and retweets them. I've always had a fascination with religion and thought it'd be interesting to see how people talked about faith on Twitter. For example, here are some retweets from the last 24 hours:

• RT @crispysea: Religion IS Restriction - http://tinyurl.com/yf5plye #atheism #NoGod #Ismal #IranElection
• RT @GODB4NE1: **NEWSFLASH** #JESUS didn't hang with perfect people.
• RT @khansanabil: RT @SaskiaAnindya: RT @ayarosnakgnip I Love Allah, I Love Muhammad, I Love Islam and I Love My Dad ♥
• RT @fatpet: Christianity-The First Two Thousand Years http://bit.ly/aB81do
• RT @Re_Click: RT @Evolve4u2: BuddhaNet Audio: Buddhist Meditation http://tinyurl.com/2rlppf

People are pretty open on Twitter so there have been some really interesting tweets. But another interesting part has been the response!

After creating it (with this PHP bot framework) and setting it to auto-follow any new followers, I took my hands off and let it run. I didn't expect to attract too much attention but almost immediately, people started reacting to the tweets.

Most were positive: I've been been retweeted, recommended on Follow Friday, blessed and engaged. But there's also been some negative ones: I've been questioned, accused, cursed at (again and again and again) and even threatened. Don't shoot the messenger!

After about 3,900 tweets, I have close to 500 followers and have been added to a handful of lists. I'm going to continue running the bot in the same, hands-off way while studying the reactions, but for now, I've gotten a couple of key take-aways:

1. People are still very vocal about their faiths and Twitter makes it easy to share their beliefs with the world.
2. The best way to get someone's attention--for better or for worse--is through a retweet.