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Technology For the Masses: Churches Going Hi-Tech
theodp writes "More and more, reports the Chicago Tribune, churches are embracing the use of tablets and smartphones during services. At Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago's South Side, the Rev. Otis Moss III preaches from his iPad. 'There was a time in the church when the Gutenberg Bible was introduced,' notes early adopter Moss. 'There was a severe concern among ministers who were afraid the printed page would be such a distraction if you put it in the hands of people in worship.' Tech-savvy churchgoers are also on board. 'In the service, when they say to pull out Bibles, I pull that phone out,' Ted Allen Miller said of using his Android smartphone at Willow Creek Community Church."
I know this article will generate legions of flamewars and hostility. However, i would like to mention that belief in a God is not mutually exclusive with belief in science. Many religious worshipers don't think the world was literally created in 6 days, nor is 6000 years old, nor discard evolution.
Maybe we're all just really high tech, but my pastor has been using his laptop in services for ten or fifteen years. Rather than carrying a Bible and notepad, many of us in the congregation have been using laptops with Bible software for following along and note taking. One of the first things my wife did when she won an iPad was to get a Bible program and set up her note-taking system with it. Somehow I'm able to avoid the urge to check my email; I think in part because I have a close network of friends who won't hesitate to call me out if I'm goofing off.
Carrying a digital Bible has many advantages; quickly changing to another reference, access to different versions, cross referencing and Strongs lookups...I'd have trouble going back to paper.
The iPad and such might make it easier (especially when it comes to the really big books, as it definitely saves bulk in many cases), but I do have one nitpick with the summary...
re: " 'There was a severe concern among ministers who were afraid the printed page would be such a distraction if you put it in the hands of people in worship."
Err, the vast majority of a given population back then couldn't read, so on what rational basis would that concern be placed?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The church has historically been an early adopter of mass communication technologies, the best example being the publication of the Gutenberg Bible which marked the start of the mass-produced book printing revolution. One Bible mobile app that I think is really notable is the YouVersion app (youversion.com): multiple translations, reading plans, bookmarks, notes, social networking; it has it all. An excellent example of a learning tool.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Err, the vast majority of a given population back then couldn't read, so on what rational basis would that concern be placed
The ministers were afraid people would become curious with all those pretty printed symbols and tried to learn how to read them. Then they'd lose their minister jobs. Ignorance and superstition are close friends.
I go to church and do not believe in God. One of our two main ministers is a Buddhist. The other is Christian (of a near-Catholic variety). We publish the sermons weekly as an audio stream, are working on video, and have considered live streaming and tablet-formatted newsletters.
Attending a church, using a given technology, holding a particular belief, and being a member of a website are all independent events, with their own independent causative situations.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
The primary concern the clergy had with the laity having Bible's in their own language was that they might actually read it and compare what it said to what was being taught from the pulpit. Christianity has had almost 2000 years of significant forks - its history is rife with individuals trying to make their church more popular by blending in local non christian concepts, softening the tone of unpopular language, and removing or changing phrases that might offend. My favorite data point - God's name appears almost 7000 times in the original texts, yet most modern translations have dropped that to between three and zero! Why? Because 'its tradition not to use it', and 'it might confuse people who should believe that Jesus is God', which is hard to make people accept if the Bible is left in its original state as referring to Jesus as the Son of an Almighty God with a different name that most Christians have been told they should not even pronounce.
The power of the clergy came from them telling the people that the Bible was best left in Latin, they should believe what they were told, and follow what the King said. Their telling people to obey the King kept their comfortable relationship with the ruling classes. For a long time anyone in possession of a Bible in English would be executed, most often because they quickly realized the Trinity was a false teaching. For example, the last person officially burnt alive for this in England was a medical student in 1612.
Fun quote: "Canon 14. We prohibit also that the laity should not be permitted to have the books of the Old or New Testament; we most strictly forbid their having
any translation of these books." - The Church Council of Toulouse 1229 AD
1) No all people who read and study the Bible are deniers of science.
2) Using 21st century technology (iPad) to study the Bible is just as strange and unusual as using 15th century technology (printed books) to study a set of documents written between 1200 BCE and 100 CE.
Now that purely secular authorities are in charge, I'm sure we'd never see them enhance their power through the ignorance of the populace! 2,000+ page bills, anyone? "We need to pass the health care law so that you can see what is in it."
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I would say the same thing as a theist.
Isn't interesting how doing science requires believing in induction, that the future will be like the past. But if you don't assume that the reason why the future is like the past is due to God sustaining and creating those rules, you have laws of physics resting on nothing. There's no reason they won't change.
Or the fact that atheists trust their own rationality. I mean you have your thoughts being due to brains that weren't designed for any particular reason. Why trust your own rationality? As JBS Haldane wrote:
"If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true ... and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms."
Or that materialists like to use immaterial laws of logic.
Funny goes both ways.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Your comment about modern translations is also confused. The Jews have a taboo on the pronunciation of the Name in Hebrew. This is why Jews may cheerfully say "God forbid" or "from your mouth to God's ears" - the word "God" in English isn't forbidden. (and I wouldn't directly print even a transliteration of the name on Slashdot, despite being an agnostic.) The nonexistent word "Jehovah" arises precisely because pointed versions of Torah used to point the name with the vowels of Adonai to remind the reader to substitute Adonai instead, and insufficiently educated Christians thought that it was a real word.
The real problem with the laity reading the Bible without sufficient education turned out to be entirely justified. The fear was that, through lack of scholarship, they wouldn't understand what they were reading, and would start up deviant sects. The existence of the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons, which began in exactly such a way, makes the point. The really weird thing to my mind is the fundamentalist Evangelicals who combine the non-Biblical overemphasis on Jesus to which you (in my view correctly) allude, with a ridiculous misunderstanding of the way to understand Genesis.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
LifeChurch actually wrote one of the most popular Bible apps out there. My pastor at my church has started telling people to pull out their phones and tabletts for about a year now. I went with a friend to a very traditional church at one time, and the pastor there, in his 70s, was preaching from his phone. It's still the Bible, no matter what form it takes. The electronic form makes it easier to make notes, cross reference, post to Facebook and Twitter, look up stuff online, and easier to carry. I actually find myself reading it more as I can easily carry it with me in my phone. It is probably the greatest advancement to the Bible since the Guttenberg press, with the NIV and other translations being the second greatest advancement (which you can also get in the Bible apps)
I've been living in relatively small towns (pop. 50,000 and 20,000) for the past fifteen years, attending convservative evangelical churches. Two of them make extensive use of multimedia presentations, which I have to admit was a bit of an annoyance to me -- I stop seeing the worship as a sincere expression of faith from the heart but instead it starts looking as you said, iike a Vegas performance.
I have tried using my Kindle when we're told to pull up a specific chapter, but the interface is so tedious I'm just getting to the passage by the time the preacher finishes reading it. Much faster than to grab a dog-eared print copy and flip to the right section. My wife likes using her smartphone, though, and I've even seen smartphones among folks I wouldn't have expected. This particular congregation is largely older ranchers.
It's also pretty old news. Preachers have been broadcasting sermons and hymns on TV for decades, on radio before that. What church doesn't list a phone number?
Is there still a church that lacks an internet presence? Even the tiny, poor church I attended (in the poorest neighborhood in town) over five years ago had the computerized large screen. The one I attend now is very large, rich, high-tech church, with two giant screens, professional stage lighting, electric musical instruments, all computerized. Flat screens all over the concourse.
You're right, churches (except perhaps the Amish) have embraced technology before I was born, and that was a LONG time ago.
Free Martian Whores!
After 3000+ years, religion has finally finished with hides, scrolls, codices and books, and moved back to tablets?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
The ministers were afraid people would become curious with all those pretty printed symbols and tried to learn how to read them. Then they'd lose their minister jobs. Ignorance and superstition are close friends.
Once again, the old "educate them and they'll lose faith" saw.
Except... it's not true, and never has been. The spread of literacy and Christianity went hand-in-hand in the West. You're more likely to be deeply faithful if you can read your own scriptures, not less. And especially in the case of Americans that are religious, they tend to be especially more so the higher their level of education:
"
Many in the pundit class identify religion as something of a regressive tendency, embraced by the less enlightened, the less skilled, intelligent and educated...Some might be surprised to learn that religious affiliation grows with education levels. A new University of Nebraska study finds that with each additional year of education, the odds of attending religious services increased by 15%. The educated, the study found, may not be eschewing religion, as social science has long maintained, even if their spiritual views tend to be less narrow, and less overtly tied to politics, than among the less schooled.
I've noted here in past posts that the 9/11 hijackers were all educated, and that the London bombers were British-born, with a lifetime of Western liberal educations and economic and political opportunity. Their immigrant parents were poor and uneducated when they came to the UK, and were much more moderate. And yet their Westernized, educated children chose Jihad.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Isn't interesting how doing science requires believing in induction, that the future will be like the past.
Living requires the assumption that the future will be like the (apparent) past. If the future is unrelated to the past, then memory and experience and choice and action are all meaningless. For there to be such a thing as choice, one must be able to predict the effects of one's actions. The point of choosing an action is to have a certain effect on the future. If the future does not follow from the past, experience is useless, and memories may well be arbitrary—after all, they're being remembered in the future compared to the time those memories were supposedly made.
You can't choose to believe that the future does not follow from the past without contradiction. Perhaps it doesn't—but there is no point in entertaining that possibility. It can never form the basis for any action or belief.
But if you don't assume that the reason why the future is like the past is due to God sustaining and creating those rules, you have laws of physics resting on nothing. There's no reason they won't change.
And if you do assume that, then you have the laws of physics resting on an unfounded belief, and there is still no reason why they won't change. Since the result is the same, one might as well choose the principle with fewer unnecessary assumptions.
Or the fact that atheists trust their own rationality. I mean you have your thoughts being due to brains that weren't designed for any particular reason. Why trust your own rationality?
You are attempting to make a rational argument against rationality. This is a contradiction. If your argument against rationality were well-founded, it would invalidate itself.
One trusts one's own rationality—within limits—because one has no choice.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat