You said — True, but there are plenty of “barf alert” articles on FR. And it is fun to watch the members tear them apart. Some are hard to tear apart and that is where real reasoning and learning happen on this site.
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Yeah, sure that happens and I can learn a lot that I didn’t know before, even if I didn’t believe what an article was saying, from what some people post about it. And that’s one of the good things about Free Republic, in that one can get several different viewpoints on it and see how well they hold up.
But still..., I do think that we all self-select various Internet sites and/or viewpoints that we’ve already come to the conclusion on, and we’re going to use them as our “authoritative sources” too...
And so, I’m not necessarily talking about a liberal versus conservative viewpoint, but let’s say (in religious circles, for example) one viewpoint of prophecy versus another..., we’re going to self-select the one that represents what we’ve individually found to be what we think...
Thus, the Internet is *favored* by many — because of this kind of mechanism at work. So, it’s not all all simply “black and white”, liberal versus conservative that we’re talking about here.
I think you see what I mean as to why the Internet is “favored” in this regard....
People have always self selected their sources. The internet just gives them more sources. And it is actually quite easy to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Heck, when I first became a Christian I was STRONGLY a pre-tribulationist for several years. Then I read some interesting contrasting opinions, did some research and became mid-tribulationist. I did a lot more studying and became STRONGLY mid-tribulationist.
And the internet constantly solidifies my viewpoint, often due to the arguments made by the pre-tribulationists.
The internet really just impacted us in the same way the printing press did, except a hundred fold. And it is so big that, unlike ink and paper, nobody can control it.