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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?"
The Antichrist
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.
This has been going on in most Western countries since before the internet, mainly in the 60s and 70s. America is just late to the game.
So probably the biggest time-waster in human history is being supplanted by a new biggest time-waster ...
I have definitely become even more religious, but my variety has increased. Thanks to the Internet I am exposed to more faiths, and can see the merit in each one. For your information, I attend a Mormon church - as a non-member - when I'm near one, but am sympathetic to Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism. Each has truths to share with you; none should be a box for you to hide in. Remember what King Monkut of Thailand said to the Christian missionaries: "What you teach us to do is good; what you teach us to believe is silly."
Religion and it's many splintered (and violent) factions are one of the last remaining serious problems holding back the advancement of humanity.
The Riddle of Epicurus
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If God is willing to prevent evil, but is not able to
Then He is not omnipotent.
If He is able, but not willing
Then He is malevolent.
If He is both able and willing
Then whence cometh evil?
If He is neither able nor willing
Then why call Him God?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We should start taxing churches in this country as well. It's pretty clear religion has not stayed out of politics.
And they've really bent the tax free system we put in place that the church paid no taxes. Now they move everything under the umbrella of the church to enjoy tax free status.
It's gotten corrupt. Take it away.
We need the money and they have enough to build giant monstrosities used two days a week. It's wasteful. Tax them like anybody else.
Half a million churches spread across the country paying no taxes. It's bullshit.
While the internet did not make me an atheist, it did made me a better informed atheist with better arguments. It also showed me that I was far from alone.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Considering that the U.S. is dominated by 1) militant fundamentalist christian religion, 2) military-industrial complex religiously believing in U.S. geopolitical supremacy which happens to be quite lucrative, and 3) a money-power worshipping fundamentally cynical and corrupt wall street - lobbyist - political power complex which worships themselves as god on earth, I would say that taking away even a smidgen of America's religion would be a nice trick.
FWIW I personally have not changed in terms of belief despite being highly steeped in the Internet and science. I don't go to synagogue, but I have a little bit of faith that is inculcated deep down, that sometimes makes me feel communally connected to people, nature, the universe. I don't know the answer, whether it is some entity, brain linked to quantum reality, or just an artifact of our brain makeup that happened to be a good thing from a darwinian perspective. This has not changed since I was a child. I survived reading the bible, carlos casteneda, illuminati, etc. Probably science fiction affected me more than anything else. One thing I can say, I wish I had the Internet when I was little. It would have given me unlimited educational opportunity, whereas I wasted years languishing in public school and then spent years trying to find the Internet it having heard whispers about it (it was not in existence on a large scale then). I starting with bbs, compuserve, and some engineers who mentored me, but finally had to build my own ISP to start the Internet in the country I am living in now (I am an American living overseas).
The Internet opens you up to many views, which is having a good impact I think on society, but much of it comes from a willingness to hang out in communities that provide such views. In other words, you get more viewpoints by hanging out on BoingBoing (my other main site besides slashdot) than by just using search engines. You can use the net to prop up your own believes and find targets to rail against too. The net won't change fundamentalists, but it may change people who could otherwise be coopted by them, since fundamentalism is just power hungry cynical bastards using both ancient and modern mind control tools (biblical writings, political power structures, so-called miracles, vulnerabilities of the psyche, pseudoscience, etc.) on naive shmucks who don't have critical thinking defenses. In that sense the net might reduce fundamentalists in the next generation who disbelieve evolution, but it might increase scientologists which appear to be a destructive meme, a plague on society.
Humans obviously have a belief circuit that is exploited by organized religion. Whether that is just psychology or tied to something real, it has nothing to do with the state of utter fundamentalist chaos that is ripping the America to shreds, the shreds being preyed upon by cynical power-seekers. You only have to surf the offerings of typical American cable tv after reading zerohedge or even slashdot to get unbearably nauseated. So it would be a nice trick and any amount we can tone down religion in the U.S. where it is visible, will a very good thing, it would be an act of self preservation.
I still don't understand why people drop Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, but stick with Jesus. Hasn't everybody read The Emperor's New Clothes?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Whatever you do, the Internet speeds up personal development processes as huge amounts of information is readily available. Without the Internet you would have come to the same conclusion but it would have taken just a bit longer. Internet can feed both limits of the scale, atheist and believer.
(I attribute my becoming an atheist to myself. I stepped renounced my religion at the age of 8. Simply deduced that there is no such thing as a god from observations and reasoning. That was in the early 70s. Internet would have merely sped the process up.)
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
hardly surprising really, religion relies heavily upon ignorance and superstition. The more information and world views you expose yourself to the more likely you are to come out of the dark ages.
Your friends tells you about this thing which he believes in and tries to convince you. But you're not sure.
Do you:
a) Go along with them, get absorbed, spend hours listening to their arguments, ask around a circle of friends that you share with him about their opinion? (i.e. imagine pre-Internet generations where if you didn't know someone personally, or were a part of a group, you didn't even get to meet them, let alone communicate extensively)
b) Go to your social network online, look up vast resources, have the arguments for and against in front of you, find out all the dirty secrets, cliques, etc. hear tell from friends-of-friends-of-friends about things they do and believe in?
It's just a product of information availability. And it works both for and against us now. It's now harder to quash rumours started by a random person with no basis from spreading but it's much easier for such rumours to reach the ears of the interested - even if subject to court order in some cases!
And it's not just religion. It's products, services, celebrities, charities, you name it. Before, you didn't have a source of information likely to know both sides and the in and outs of everything that you could consult confidentially and extensively and get THOUSANDS of peoples opinions in a matter of minutes. Now it's a click away and you're taught to use it for school research before you're able to write.
On a personal note, I'm agnostic, so it's no great surprise to me that the more facts people have available to consult, the less seriously religion is taken. "Faith" is something I see as laziness - "I don't want to check this fact, I'll just trust it's true" isn't the best principle to live by. In fact, it's that exact principle that is being eroded by the simplicity of fact-checking nowadays (even if not perfect, there are still good sources of actual fact rather than common belief out there).
Religion has been on a bit of a death-spiral for years. My country is pretty much turning churches into nothing more than pretty historical buildings that you visit and feel obliged to drop a coin in the box to pay for your nice photos of the stained-glass. My father-in-law is religious and bemoans the complete lack of religion in his local area - he visited dozens of churches before he found one with any kind of active services, and they didn't suit his preference.
By contrast, he says that the US is a much more faithful country and you can still draw crowds of tens of thousands at certain churches.
But I think that's more about celebrity, and the older generation, than anything to do with religion itself.
Religion is dying a little, but to be honest we were in a kind of renaissance of religion the last couple of hundred years anyway.
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."
However, we do know that religion is transmitted through contact. Both social contact and personal contact. See e.g. [Alderman, Derek H. 2012. "Cultural Change and Diffusion: Geographical Patterns, Social Processes, and Contact Zones." 21st Century Geography: A Reference Handbook (Vol. 1), SAGE Publications (edited by Joseph Stoltman), pp. 123-134.]
This is born out by the empirical data that people who're born in Muslim society tend to take Islam as their religion, whereas people who're born in devoutly Christian, Judaic, Shinto, or Animistic society tend to adopt those. In particular, the hypotheses of "Divine intervention" and "Very Personal Contact With God" aren't needed to model this kind of data. Social proximity (for which spatial proximity is a proxy) does the job adequately and is by far the simpler hypothesis.
Hence it's very reasonable to hypothesize that as social interaction patterns tend to shift to the Internet, transmission of religious beliefs follows suit. This hypothesis is not contradicted by, and dovetails nicely with, the survey data the article refers to.
Another data-point that fits this theory are examples of young or otherwise easily influenced people embracing fundamentalist Islam because of the websites they hang out on. Which incidentally is one of the reasons why organisations like the NSA and GCHQ are so interested in the Internet.
So all in all, the article is somewhere in-between an-interesting-idea-presented-in-a-blog post (it doesn't do any literature review, it doesn't place the question or the data within a recognised theoretical framework (even though suitable and persuasive frameworks such as the one sketched by Alderman exist), it doesn't present the data or the estimation results) and competent research.
But the one thing it's *not* is "Pseudo Science", simply because it (wisely) doesn't make any pretense at being scientific. Note the difference please.
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 internet may kill religion, but it doesn't kill faith. Religion being defined in this instance as cultural observances, unquestioned metaphysical assumptions and ceremonies, and faith as things one deeply believes and part of who you are, not merely what you do (to fit in).
And, I suspect, most people of faith who have thought about it deeply have no problem with that. I'd much rather people were sure of what they believed, and actually thought about it, argued about it, and made a real statement about what they believed, rather than just accepting what they are brought up with.
I think that the internet - and in fact any meeting with outside ideas - is the best way to kill nominal 'religion'. However, I'd make a guess that many people actually find a new faith, or find their faith hugely challenged or restructured. I know formally agnostic people who got into 'new age' mysticism and became (in some form) Buddhist through reading and learning online.
I am a follower of Jesus, who I believe is the son of God. ("Christian" being a very loaded term, especially in the USA). Many of my friends and others who believe the same as I do have been strengthened in their faith by discussions and videos online. Many churches don't bother actually exploring scripture in a critical or even structured way - but plenty of people online do. Video serieses by John Piper, Rob Bell, Nicky Gumbel, John MacArthur, and many other "thinking preachers" have been instrumental in my building a faith which is able to accept alternative viewpoints without freaking out.
C.S. Lewis was an Athiest, but became a Christian at university, and encountering views which challenged his view of the world so much he had to re-examine his own philosophies. I know plenty of others who came to faith at university, and a few who did online.
So. I'm a believing, 'born again', totally convinced Jesus-freak, with friends who are Athiest, Buddhist, Muslim, Agnostic, straight, gay, married, divorced, rich, poor. Their views do not destroy mine, and I will not try to destroy theirs. And I accept the fact that my views can only really be solid if I can engage with them in civilized discourse, and can understand and appreciate (even if I totally disagree with) them.
To those who call themselves Athiests here - how many of your friends hold views as strongly as you do, but which are completely contrary to your own?
The internet isn't "taking away" anything. Stop trying to make it sound like an aggressive action. People can't be forced to give up their religion. Even if you beat it out of them, all you can really do, at best, is prevent them from practicing it when people are looking at them. But I suppose "How the internet is convincing people to be less religious" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
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.
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.
At the moment we are just seeing what is happening when a formally almost monopolistic marketplace is opened up: The former monopolist loses market share and the competition gains market share. But this does not mean the former monopolist is going to disappear, it will just shrink a lot. And while Christianity has decreasing market share in the US and Western Europe, in other place with a former monopoly of state mandated Atheism, Christianity and other religions are gaining market share. E.g.: In China and Russia.
Jan
I've noticed that religion has affiliated itself more and more with the right wing political party (in the US). During that period the ideas coming from that political party have often designed to pander to deeply religious people, have become nuttier and nuttier. The Republicans recognized that there was a large group of people who were used to doing what they were told by an authority figure and targeted that group to perpetuate their existence, hence the religion/right wing party affiliation, in spite of the fact that the right wing party promotes ideas that are often in direct conflict with the religious- ideas and attitudes about caring about the poor, sick, etc.
It seems that while the original goal might have been for the republicans to insinuate themselves into the religion (Xtianity in its various forms), the opposite has also taken place the religious leaders saw an opportunity to get more control and power and impose their beliefs on a larger population by insinuating themselves into the Republican party. Recently it appears that the Republicans have been trying to distance themselves from their more religious affiliations by making a show of standing up to the Tea party (the religious parasite that is sucking the life blood from the Republican party), but the two are now hopelessly entangled and if religion goes down, they will drag the Republican party down with them.
The next 20 years are going to be interesting.
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 ----
I became an atheist when I was about ten or eleven years old. I was sure of myself at the time.
Twenty years later, I have some serious doubts about it, and have retreated to agnosticism. That's partly because the Internet has given me easy access to all sorts of information about philosophy, religion and politics. I was able to read what the other side actually thought, not what my side said they thought.
I could say that the Internet destroyed my faith in atheism, but I know that you guys really hate the implications of statements like that, so please take it as a (trollish) joke!
What I would say, not as a joke, is that the Internet has not stopped people believing weird and/or stupid things. In fact it has strengthened all sorts of weird beliefs, some weirder than anything in the Bible.
You're an immobile computer, remember?
It appears some people have rushed to assume that the primary causation in the drop of religious activity is knowledge. However, the researcher says that the internet accounts for about 25% of the drop and theorizes that of that 25%, knowledge could be a large factor. But there is a another factor that was not mentioned that is common on the Internet and I suspect also in the larger but still unknown region of 50% causation. Entertainment. I suspect that entertainment correlates not only to a drop in religious activity (particularly among the more easily distracted) but the measured drop in friendship depth, increase in loneliness, violence, etc. I think we need to figure out our mental health in the same way we are figuring out our physical health. Then we can measure the effect of certain types of recreation in a similar way to how we measure the effect of eating unhealthy or not exercising.
The internet can be a dangerous place too.
Just like religious services can put you in an "information bubble", so can the internet.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
I'm wondering if you intended for your statement to be this broad:
seems like you're targeting one of the world's many religions here...
is Knowledge also "anti-buddah" and "anti-allah"
what about "anti-confuscious"?
science is not "anti" anything....it is a method for consistently and comparatively observing the universe & sharing what we learn
Thank you Dave Raggett
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.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... :
Epicurus is generally credited with first expounding the problem of evil, and it is sometimes called "the Epicurean paradox" or "the riddle of Epicurus":
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?" - 'the Epicurean paradox'.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
...there's just God when he's drunk." -- Tom Waits
Koans and fables for the software engineer