Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
I think it's not so much access to unfiltered information as it is access to non-religious people. We have seen that people tend to seek out information that confirms their existing beliefs online, but what they can't control is how other people in forums and games behave.
Most regions rely on making themselves a big part of a person's life from an early age. Everyone in the community goes to the same church, attends religious social events and is friends with other believers. Then they get on the internet and are exposed to people with other cultures and ideas who don't make the same assumptions they do, and it makes them realize that there is another way of thinking.
The same thing happens with people who have never been abroad or outside of their home county/state. It happened to me when I first started visiting Japan and realized that there is a completely different way to look at the world.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
I think there's more to it than just being exposed to skepticism from existing atheists/agnostics too. You get much more exposure to people who are from different cultures and religions that you might in your own little neighbourhood, both knowingly and unknowingly, and when that penny drops, that's when the thinking part kicks in. Generally you are going to you realise that, hey, they are not that unlike us and we actually share many of the same views on life - most religions teach the same core principles wrapped up in some slightly different stories, after all. It's fairly well understood that major cities with cosmopolitan populations tend to be more open minded and their populations tend to have a less religious view than those from more rural communities, so I suspect this is just the same principle manifesting itself on a much grander scale.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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.
I concur. For me, religion died the moment someone told me there were several of them. I briefly asked around about them (there was no internet then) and they all seemed contradictory and presented equal proof to their claims (none at all), so I chose none. In my case, though, it was the internet that brought back my faith, when I found a good book in which all answers are contained. It is called tvtropes and it is my god.
Maybe this is just a clever ruse to trick fundamentalists into avoiding the internet, to reduce the troll count.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
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
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