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How the Internet Is Taking Away America's Religion
pitchpipe (708843) points out a study highlighted by MIT's Technology Review, which makes the bold claim that "Using the Internet can destroy your faith. That's the conclusion of a study showing that the dramatic drop in religious affiliation in the U.S. since 1990 is closely mirrored by the increase in Internet use," and writes "I attribute my becoming an atheist to the internet, so what the study is saying supports my anecdote. If I hadn't been exposed to all of the different arguments about religion, etc., via the internet I would probably just be another person who identifies as religious but doesn't attend services. What do you think? Have you become more religious, less religious, or about the same since being on the internet? What if you've always had it?"
access to unfiltered information will make people THINK!
who would have thought? :)
Great video by a Youtuber on exactly this topic: The Internet: Where Religions Come To Die. Religions simply can't survive on the open marketplace of ideas. Religions work by indoctrination, shaming and isolating subjects to get them to believe absurd shit and then try to shield them from outside influences to make sure they don't find out. On the Internet, this ploy simply doesn't work.
i've heard it said that "if you study one religion you can be absorbed for a lifetime. if you study two religions, you can be done in a day."
the Internet offers.
Learning about reality is a GOOD thing.
Learning that the silly myths and superstitions pounded into your head when you were a child are silly myths and superstitions, and NOT universal facts, is a GOOD thing.
I know it wont be in my lifetime and probably not in my children's either, but someday, humans will shed all religious superstition.
The church has always tried its best to keep people ignorant.
Imagine where mankind could have been by now, if it wasn't for that.
The fruit of knowledge. There was a reason the bible described things as it did. Knowledge isn't just the anti-christ, it's the anti-god.
Atheism is not new to me. The first time I questioned religion was when I was seven years old, asking my mother, "If God created the universe, then who created God?" Her answer, "God always was", did not sound at all convincing to me. At age 15, when I was finally allowed to choose for myself whether or not to attend church services, I immediately stopped doing so, having considered it a waste of time for as long as I could remember. A few years later I realized that I did not believe in God at all. That was over 30 years ago.
What the Internet did, however, was to introduce me to the writings of authors such as, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Their books describe in great detail how religion has caused so much more suffering in the world than it has ever managed to prevent, for example how wars may be started by people, but wartime atrocities almost always require religion to be involved. Ultimately, this is all caused by systems that tell us what to think, immunizing us to argument, so they should be recognized for what they really do: brainwashing.
What to do about it? Education, education, education. Mandatory up to age 21, but available to everyone at all ages and for free. Everyone should be scientifically literate. The best thing a society can do is to invest in itself, and religion just happens to be one of the first things we lose when we learn to think for ourselves.
If education can destroy your faith it's not God you're praying to, it's ignorance.
I knew this when I was 10, and that was in 1950, my total lack of belief in the mumbo jumbo of ALL religion began then and became a certainty soon after that. Family was catholic with all trappings, control, coercion etc....water off a ducks back.
Religion wants a closed ecology - you get your words from the priests, work hard and pray and, oh yes, give me money.
There is no difference between scientology, islam, catholicism or bantu spirit jabber - they are all mechanisms to live free and prosper at the behest of others.
I want the tax exemptions for reiligions stopped, I want them taxed, kick them in the ass.
And on top of that they all seem to thrive on child molestation. It is no joke the way Giles portrays clerics grinning after alter boys - many lives were harmed and criminals protected.
Should God wait upon you hand and foot, serving your every whim and desire, preventing any pain of any kind because not to, you would consider evil?
Yes. If got is omnipotent, he can do this for everyone and still do infinitely more. And why would you need to "grow" and "mature" in the ways you describe if there were no evil to worry about? It would be a waste of time, and good riddance. As for learning, that can still be done in a utopia.
== Jez ==
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If your 'knowledge' of the Bible only extends as far as an ignorant half-remembered version of Genesis, then yes.
Specifically, it's not "the fruit of Knowledge" - it's "the Knowledge of good and evil".
The Bible is actually quite encouraging of knowledge, even showing something of a kickarse attitude towards deliberate ignorance:
"An unfriendly person pursues selfish ends and against all sound judgment starts quarrels. Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions ... The lips of fools bring them strife, and their mouths invite a beating ... Before a downfall the heart is haughty, but humility comes before honor. To answer before listening - that is folly and shame ... The heart of the discerning acquires knowledge, for the ears of the wise seek it out."
-- Proverbs 18:1-2,6,12-13,15
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
But it can show you how stupid it is to believe in imaginary creatures and let you make an intelligent decision based on facts, not myth..
The "Internet" is really no different than a library in this case, only you dont have to get your lazy ass out of the chair and drive in...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
More apt than you might think.
Lucifer, as Satan is often called, can easily be translated as "he who brings the light" or "he who carries the light (to someone)", deducting from "lux", light and "ferre", carry, bring. His story is not too different from that of Prometheus, who served that role in the Greek mythology. And they're by far not unique.
In other words, they were "evil" enough to bring light and enlightenment to human, rather than doing as their bosses want and keep them in the dark.
Really makes you wonder who's the bad guy in the whole story. I mean, ponder for yourself, who'd you rather paint as the bad guy in a story? The one that gives you knowledge and information, or the dude that wants to keep you in the dark so you would continue worshiping him rather than going and finding your own way?
When you look at it that way, the Christian God feels more and more like a Goa'uld in Stargate. He sure shares a lot of ideals with how Ra is depicted in the movie.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Apparently you know a thing or two about the bible, maybe you can solve something that has puzzled me for a while now.
God punished Adam and Eve for eating from the tree when he forbade them. I.e. for breaking his law. So far, so good. But why did he put the trees in there in the first place? He's God. He's all mighty. He could have put the trees wherever he pleases. Especially since, being omniscient, he must have known that they will break his law. Being omniscient, he must have known that they will not heed his law. So he punished them for doing what he knew they would do, which he himself could easily have avoided.
Essentially, that makes God a really king size asshole.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I know too many smart highly-educated Christians to think that religion is merely some lack of applied thought.
It's a choice they made, knowingly and subjectively, to have religious faith.
I don't happen to agree with them, but that is their decision.
Especially since, being omniscient, he must have known that they will break his law. Being omniscient, he must have known that they will not heed his law. So he punished them for doing what he knew they would do, which he himself could easily have avoided.
You are missing something: If God is all knowing and all powerful, it follows that God intentionally created Adam and Eve so that they would break the divine commandment. In effect, Adam and Eve may not have followed the word of the law, but they did follow the intention of God. Given how meticulously theologists have been studying and considering the Bible, I would be surprised if someone had not already followed this line of thought and come up with some conclusions.
As I remember it, there are two creation myths in the Bible, and the myth of Adam and Eve is believed to be the older of the two. There is the possibility that the myth of Adam and Eve predates the Jewish switch from many gods to just one (who may not have started out as being almighty), so it is likely that the story was written to be taken at face value.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
Christian zealots. Muslim zealots. Atheists zealots. Maybe it's the "zealot" part that the major problem, since I'm quite sure that nobody has all the answers, yet zealots of all stripes presume to enforce their particular delusions of understanding.
There would be no atheist zealots if the religious zealots didn't exist.
-g
I know too many smart highly-educated Christians to think that religion is merely some lack of applied thought. It's a choice they made, knowingly and subjectively, to have religious faith.
Skeptics seem to have this assumption that humans are inherently rational, and it's only those who are intellectually weak that let bad/illogical ideas into the mind. I'd argue that this is a bad model because we are forced throughout life to rely on incomplete/inaccurate information from a wide variety of sources... our senses, our emotions, our peers and society at large, etc. Our brains are a very muddy place that was never tidy and logically "clean" to begin with, but we make do (more or less). A purely skeptical species would go extinct questioning the need to plant crops, etc.,
The way I see it, rationality (and the engineered pursuit of it, science) is a skill that must be developed and subsequently imposed on various facets of our worldview. How we select those facets (and how vigorously we investigate them) is a strategic question ("what is my biggest blindspot?") that we're not well equipped to answer (they're called "blindspots" for a reason). And we ALL have blindspots of various topic and magnitude.
In the case of religion, it's particularly hard to investigate these blindspots because adherents have been strongly conditioned to self-identify with the cause. Their parents, friends, community, and everyone they trusted as a child told them "this is what we believe, it is the only way to live a good life, and everything outside of it is corrupt and destructive". Like Tevye says in Fiddler on the Roof, "tradition tells us who we are and what G-d expects of us".
Analytically re-evaluating one's faith as an adult requires a tremendous amount of courage and vigour. To do so, they must overcome:
This is not the only way people leave their faith, but it's relevant to skeptics because it's the "rational" route. I suspect that those who use "emotional evidence" as their primary waypoints for evaluating complex situation have it easier... they see the history of Christanity's/Islam's treatment towards women or they consider how wholly abhorrent the concept of hell is, and then they proceed to reject the system that generated those ideas.
Instead of offering mockery (a tempting practice), skeptics would do better to (1) humbly remember that we all have blindspots, (2) that every population has smart and dumb individuals, (3) that believers make many valuable contributions to rationality/science, (4) and that social and emotional arguments against a faith can compliment their existing intellectual arguments.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
Or, you know, he could have made child birth easy.
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Perhaps being an atheist requires blind faith as well. If you are an atheist you have a belief that all hell won't be applied to you for adopting your belief system.
No. You just have to believe that none of the 20 different afterlifes posited by religions is true, instead of believing that one of them is and the other 19 are false.
Even science itself rests upon articles of faith. For example assuming that the laws of physics are the same all over the universe is irrational and arbitrary.
No. Its just the simplest explanation in the absence of evidence to the contrary. Support for it comes from everything we observe of distant stars and galaxies, which seem similar to our own.
That being the case the entire cosmology presented by science becomes very fishy. Quantum mechanics hints that physical reality is not actual and quite an illusion in itself.
No, Quantum mechanics says that at the realm of the very tiny or the very fast, our everyday model of physical reality is not accurate.
We can postulate that all science does is falsely attempt to decode segments of the illusion. It suggests that a rabid, backwoods, Baptist, in a fever of religious excitement and an atheist are as far as logic goes equals.
That must make the rabid, backwoods Baptists very happy.
Atheism isn't a faith. Though religious types like to believe it is. Just another of their false beliefs.
...there's just God when he's drunk." -- Tom Waits
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