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 ...
Good point.
No, the corrupt politicians in Washington have done that. Trying to make a perfect world by controlling everything they have turned America into a cesspool of evil.
I think I most agree with your assessment. The problem has been that the internet has come at the worst possible time. A cultural ebb, a time of great wealth and security. We actually may have been far better off if the internet had been invented during the Civil War, or the Great Depression. People have access to more information, but they are accessing all the wrong information typically. Either the propaganda of the statists (HuffPo, Slate, Politico) or they’re wasting time on Youtube, Facebook, and porn.
This is actually more of a Buckminster Fuller, Marshal McLuhan approach.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
An architect and a pie-in-the-sky “global village” theorizing Canadian intellectual? I’d rather have a society
structured by bus drivers and burger-flippers. At least the latter doesn’t want to turn humanity into an insect colony. With fancier anthills, of course.
Marshal McLuhan is the guideon here. His observation that technology is inherently democratizing is overlooked by technophobes of all stripes. We wouldn’t have democratic republican governments and their subsequent societies on this planet were it not for the Industrial Revolution which was a derivative of the Florentine Renaissance.
Technology, or better said, the method of mind that allows it to flourish, is shaping society in many ways that society does not detect. For the first time in human history there is mass access to virtually all data; very little control over who accesses what. The Internet is in its infancy.
I have interacted with and understood as many humans as you or any other career cynic on this planet. You simply need to see how much worse it could have been without the Nikola Teslas or DaVincis or hard working farmers or soccer moms of the world. Cynics think they see things clearly, without illusion. So do paranoiacs. You need to realize that ANY sense of what might happen in the future, even your planning what to have for lunch, is fundamentally an illusion. Illusions are the essence of creative invention. Read a biography of Nikola Tesla and see what he did with illusions.
Treat Asperger’s? You don’t want to treat Asperger’s, you want to harness it like a Niagra Falls. I’d vote for a candidate with Asperger’s before I’d vote for a machine politician any day of the week. We need to learn how to give every citizen a case of Asperger’s
>>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?
Easy to snipe with glib patter over authors you have the Cliff’s Notes take on. That’s what we need here, glib patter with a nice jaundice sauce and a musty bottle of Vituperation. You’ll head the guest list at my next undertaker party.
>>An architect and a pie-in-the-sky “global village” theorizing Canadian intellectual? I’d rather have a society
structured by bus drivers and burger-flippers. At least the latter doesn’t want to turn humanity into an insect colony. With fancier anthills, of course.
Religion is one of the most popular searches on the internet.I ran a few sites and now have a blogs and people flock to it.Also on Facebook we have a little prayer forum with people from all over the world and I don’t know most of them.It’s a comfort to many souls.
the Lord uses the internet to speak to us via his servants, Apostles and leaders every six months. It makes moving the word even faster.
https://www.lds.org/general-conference/watch?lang=eng&cid=HPTU040114644
It is streaming right now. I double dog dare you to watch.
Never one to resist a double dog dare, lol! But I didn’t hear any surprises. We’ve had Christianity on this planet for 2,000 years (religion for 10,000 years) and the Industrial Revolution for 200. Which has caused more transformation towards human well being and rational processes of mind? Religion does not hold the patent on ethical codes of conduct.
>>the Lord uses the internet to speak to us via his servants, Apostles and leaders every six months. It makes moving the word even faster.
https://www.lds.org/general-conference/watch?lang=eng&cid=HPTU040114644
It is streaming right now. I double dog dare you to watch.
And now both the Russian Orthodox Church and the Soviet ideology and form of organization (”both”, interestingly) are coming back strong under Putin. Is that because there is now -— compared to 1989 -— less digital technology in Russia, or more?
Primary cause is family disintegration. Multifarious causes for that.
But he is onto something. It is a reasonable premise that greater accessibility of a distant culture can undermine a heretofore closed cultural community. Exposure to other religions and to irreligion can undermine false religions. But just as much it can strengthen religion when the religion has truth in it. Further, it is the truth-seekers in the religion that are strengthened, forming a firmer core. The fellow-travelers in the religion might fall off.
I can give one example. In the not distant past young Catholics were exposed to their religion through their parents and their pastor. They became most familiar with the core dogmas of the faith and the practices of the Church that were required of them. If such young Catholic lacks intellectual depth, an exposure to the numerous anti-Catholic websites might convince him of alleged internal contradictions of his faith and he might lose it, especially since Catholicism demands a serious degree of obedience, is design to deeply penetrate every aspect of one's life, and may become practically a burden with all the church-going, abstinence and fasting.
But at the same time a serious Catholic can come to fuller understanding of his faith also through the Internet. For example, much of the justification for the Catholic Church is in her historical continuity from the first communities of Christians. But to prove than to yourself you would have had, in the past, to get a whole library of patristic literature, gain some knowledge of Greek and Latin (perhaps of Hebrew as well), -- generally, become a historian, a biblical scholar, a theologian, and a linguist. You would have also needed a guidance that your local pastor may not have.
Today, with the Internet, a wealth of historical, theological and patristic material is available free; one can find his own level: from accessible arguments by fellow amateurs on popular sites to homilies, and to profound articles on the Catholic faith, and to the diverse translation of the Holy Bible. While someone without much motivation will find all this still too difficult and boring, and as a result choose some easy religion or irreligion, the Catholic core grows also thanks to the Internet.
A sampler of Catholic resource on the Internet:
unbound.biola.edu -- Bible translations and the original
www.newadvent.org/fathers -- a library of the Church fathers from the first formative centuries of the Church
www.earlychristianwritings.com Early Christian writings of every descriptions, saints and heretics together
www.ewtn.com/new_library -- EWTN library, a good reflection of the life of the Church today
www.catholic.com -- a Catholic Answers polemical site dedicated to the controversies regarding the Faith, with a vibrant forum.
>> We need to learn how to give every citizen a case of Asperger’s
Boy howdy, I called that one.
>> I have interacted with and understood as many humans as you or any other career cynic on this planet.
No, you haven’t.
I used to be a naïve little thing like you, believing everybody could work everything out if they just talked like adults to one another.
You know, like the Canadian career academic Marshall McLuhan.
30 years in the workforce, with the last 5 of it being underemployed with reality beating me in the face, slowly made me realize that I had indeed been a naïve fool. Humans are nasty creatures who, if not checked by any higher authority, will take every opportunity to dehumanize, demoralize, and dominate their fellow members of the species.
McLuhan, much like our current President, never had a real job. Great work, if you can get it. One’s pragmatism tends to suffer in ivory towers, though. It does, however, leave one free to propose all sorts of hogwash that would never work in real life. Like Marxism, or Randian utopias where radical individualism turns all basement dwellers into Der Ubermenchen, or what have you.
>> technophobes of all stripes.
LOL! I’m a Luddite-Amish computer programmer & technician!
>> You simply need to see how much worse it could have been without the Nikola Teslas or DaVincis or hard working farmers or soccer moms of the world.
People with real jobs! Huzzah! Amazing that you actually admire some people with real jobs.
I love Tesla and Leonardo DaVinci, by the way. Absolute geniuses. They had their mistakes, of course, but they were very far-thinking men. Even before the Internet could grab them and assimilate them Akira-style.
BY THE WAY,
The elimination of Islam is not a Christian goal per se. Muslims, unlike many New Atheists these days, believe that there was a historical Jesus.
There IS a group in America, though, that wants to eliminate Abrahamic religion in general; Christianity and Islam in particular. That group right now is using Islam (as well as many other growing social movements) as a grinding stone to chip away at Christianity, because Christianity is their biggest threat.
It’s this group’s mantras that you seem to be parroting.
The Progressive elite. Or as I like to call them, Gramscian Marxists.
Humans will start gathering data, analyzing data and drawing their own sentient, independent conclusion on issues and events free from from fear and emotional extortion.
ROTFL
>> Easy to snipe with glib patter over authors you have the Cliff’s Notes take on.
Maybe if I read ALL of that Dianetics book, instead of just enough to get the gist of it, maybe that Scientology stuff will make sense! LOL!
Codswollop is codswollop, no matter how much whipped cream you put on top.
>> You’ll head the guest list at my next undertaker party.
You don’t like me? Awwwwww...
Now imagine your feelings multiplied by several million.
There’s your utopian global village, where insults can not only travel vast distances in nanoseconds, but where they are naked, unvarnished hatred protected by anonymity.
My parents took me to Sunday school when i was a kid but in 1945 when I was 8 I kicked religion for hot rods and drag racing and split early Sunday morning and never went to church again except when we got married in 1958.
As far as i’m concerned religion is nothing but a crutch for weak minded people and so much BS with just about as much relevance as Aesop's Fables.
DING DING DING Thread winner here!
He’s read history! ALL of it! He knows all abouts that there Buck FullerMinster and that Mulligan McDonalds dudeguy! LOL!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.