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."

Comments

Re:Religion's Selective Science

[geoffrobinson]

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.

Re:Posting from my iPad

[DesScorp]

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.