Posted on 04/06/2014 7:35:23 AM PDT by Yollopoliuhqui
Back in 1990, about 8 percent of the U.S. population had no religious preference. By 2010, this percentage had more than doubled to 18 percent. That’s a difference of about 25 million people, all of whom have somehow lost their religion.
That raises an obvious question: how come? Why are Americans losing their faith?
Today, we get a possible answer thanks to the work of Allen Downey, a computer scientist at the Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, who has analyzed the data in detail. He says that the demise is the result of several factors but the most controversial of these is the rise of the Internet. He concludes that the increase in Internet use in the last two decades has caused a significant drop in religious affiliation.
(Excerpt) Read more at technologyreview.com ...
It’s that heteronomy has deliberately raised autonomy above its station in order to smash patronomy and now theonomy, and now we have an autonomous culture. But rest assured, tyranny follows, because autonomous culture is unsustainable.
Religious affiliation doesn't mean that the good news of Jesus is being preached.
**That’s where the Internet comes in. In the 1980s, Internet use was essentially zero, but in 2010, 53 percent of the population spent two hours per week online and 25 percent surfed for more than 7 hours.
This increase closely matches the decrease in religious affiliation. In fact, Downey calculates that it can account for about 25 percent of the drop.**
Comments?
ALL the isms, including the ones in academia (leftism) will eventually “wither away” before the power of choice over what one puts into ones mind as a free, sentient individual. The battleground has ALWAYS been located in the realm of human volition, the control of individual will. Anyone who truly practices free will with a LONG TERM view should be open to this hypothesis about the action of the Internet upon society.
>>Asking this question here is the same as asking why fewer and fewer people in Russia declared themselves religiously affiliated after 1920. As the Eich incident shows, if you openly declare yourself of a viewpoint contrary to left wing academia, you suffer, and they make sure of it. There has been a concerted effort to destroy all religion in public life for at least 60 years in this country. What do you expect?
I'm skeptical. Open debate benefits the truth.
You’ll also find people have gradually become more retarded thanks to the internet. Yes, they have college degrees, but they can’t tell you who was president during WWII. I’d also like statistics on how many kids are now on some form of permanent medication.
Yeh I don’t think internet usage has anything to do with your religious zeal.
Being the Old World, Europe achieved higher population density much sooner than the USA. High population density is strongly correlated with both socialism and losing religion. Big government is required to make high density living possible. In an all out world war, a few nukes would change the popularity of living in a nuclear target zone overnight. During the last world wars very few farmers were bombed or fire bombed into oblivion. It was mostly the godless snotty urban city slickers that got it.
We live within the constraints of time and long term planning will put limits upon the sustainability of autonomous culture. Autonomy has heretofore been a reaction to excessive control and tends towards a backlash of over indulgence when freedom arises. The tendency towards hedonism and short term thinking will iron itself out as the mental requirements for a free being are better learned and applied.
>>It’s that heteronomy has deliberately raised autonomy above its station in order to smash patronomy and now theonomy, and now we have an autonomous culture. But rest assured, tyranny follows, because autonomous culture is unsustainable.
True. I was in the USAF in Germany from 80 to 84. I was able to see how secular the Germans were. I was amazed at how anti God most of them were. It was not good.
Methinks somebody has been reading too much “Snow Crash”. This pipe dream of his is a hyper-Randian fantasy with a Neal Stephenson flavor.
Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated by the Interwebs. For individuality!
The third factor is the rise is the rise in stupidity as demonstrated by his own.
This is a temporary growing pain of a technology in its infancy. As I mentioned in a previous reply, the first tendency of the freed slave, or the release from any state of deprivation, is to indulge in what one was deprived of, to backlash or over compensate. Have a look at the Makers movement, or student robotics on YouTube. This is the nascent positive aspect of the Internet’s lateral connectivity and its destruction of top down, hierarchical data flow control.
>>You’ll also find people have gradually become more retarded thanks to the internet. Yes, they have college degrees, but they can’t tell you who was president during WWII. I’d also like statistics on how many kids are now on some form of permanent medication.
This is actually more of a Buckminster Fuller, Marshal McLuhan approach. Ever read them? You should. Better maps to the future.
Methinks somebody has been reading too much “Snow Crash”. This pipe dream of his is a hyper-Randian fantasy with a Neal Stephenson flavor.
Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated by the Interwebs. For individuality!
You sure have a lot of... FAITH... in the global electronic network.
You obviously believe the Draper/White nonsense and that the... SAVIOR OF MANKIND... is the Internet.
I’m with lepton. You haven’t really interacted with - or understood - many humans.
What do they treat Asperger’s with these days, anyway?
Too much prosperity and leisure time without discipline destroys human character. The loss of religion is both a symptom and a cause.
Indeed. I am also always thinking back 15-20 years ago, when it was constantly being heralded that this explosion of alternative outlets would supposedly break the liberal monopolies and strangeholds in the media, and benefit conservatism. A whole new era of “common sense” returning, which would set America back on the right path.
Yet, I’ve only seen the opposite. More statism, more rabid PC-insanity, more cultural deviancy, and a populace that has gotten more and more jaw-droppingly stupid.
!
Since this is a 20 year study, it would be intersesting to see if the change happens to people in the same age group (20s in 1990 vs 40s in 2010) or if the change comes from older religious people dying and younger non-religious people being brought up.
Remember in your predicting, that though man prefers liberty, he is much more disposed, historically, to tyranny, by about a 95% margin.
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