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 ...
>> 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
Damn, you were drag racing at 8 years old? 1945 was a hell of a time to be alive, if that’s the case! :-D
Corellation is not causation.
Built my first flathead and taught myself to weld and channeled a friends 32 coupe but didn’t drive a car until I was 12 when I went 123 mph in a flathead dragster at Santa Ana.
There is absolutely nothing in this article that ties the drop in religious affiliation and the internet other than a correlation. Its not worth the paper its written on (or the pixels its written on . . . .).
Tower of Babel syndrome.
In truth, the writer could very well be wrong and it could very well produce the opposite effect, spread faith.
My personal theory is that Progressivism is a quasi-religion which has had its dysvangelists in education (at all levels) and among the elites for more than a century. Certainly a great many Catholics are really Progressives, and the Episcopal Church in the US has gone from the old jibe, "The Republican (or Tory) party at prayer" to the place where Progressivism finds liturgical expression.
Yollopoliuhqui wrote: (say that fast three times)
“Give the Internet another generation and there will be no Islam, New Age Paganism or any other religion to speak of. Christian Fundamentalists will have to sort this out on their own. Hopefully they won’t become Luddite technophobes. We need to become smarter faster, that’s all there is to it.”
Sorry to tell you, but Paganism is alive and well on the Internet, and among youTube users, a lot. Islam .... well, they are there too, but in this Millenium, the times of 700A.D., are best left for the History Channel!
>> We need to learn how to give every citizen a case of Asperger’s
>Boy howdy, I called that one.
LOL! So what’s your problem with being smart?
> I have interacted with and understood as many humans as you or any other career cynic on this planet.
>>No, you haven’t.
Have so. I’ve had more run ins with sociopaths, bad tempered Napoleons, scheeming bitches, welchers and back stabbing psychic vampires in my life than you have in a jute mill sack full of your worst nightmares.
>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.
I ain’t buying into your grizzled, battle scarred, fox hole weary script. You have suffered defeat and you are letting that defeat move your mouth.
>You know, like the Canadian career academic Marshall McLuhan.
Neither Canadian nor career nor academic are cause for a wave off on my boat. If you fear being swamped, break out the caulking iron, shred that surrender flag into usable bits and get to it.
>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.
Workplace politics, what else is new. Yah, it isn’t easy for men of integrity having idiots get promoted and tell you your job and it ain’t that easy swapping out jobs either. So you better get smart in a way that gives Patton goose bumps.
>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.
No argument here. But occasionally grant funded academia will field an original thinker. They can’t all be Eric Hoffer. Some of what McLuhan talks about is shite, no question, but he’s got some good ideas in there. You need to get off that all or nothing, on/off switch and figure out that the game often occurs on a 49%-51% Thunder Dome.
>> technophobes of all stripes.
>LOL! I’m a Luddite-Amish computer programmer & technician!
I’m a flat track Harley racer with a keyboard zip tied to the handlebars myself. Nice to meet you.
>> 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.
Nah, I admire people with real brains.
>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.
What does it take to be far thinking? How can that be judged without letting preconditions or preconceptions tell us whose mind is valuable and whose isn’t, without letting trigger phrases set off our hot button Avoid! panels?
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.
True, Abrahamic religions, yadda yadda. But they were all formed in an era of brahminic caste social hierarchies and served those theocratic hierarchies. Those hierarchies are now officially obsolete. Beyond that delusionaly idealistic (ringing a bell?) afterlife claptrap, religions have no patent on ethical behavior norms.
>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.
I’m not sure we’ll find many remnants of the Vandals or Alemanni wishing revenge upon the Roman Empire, since the Roman Empire no longer exists, along with said Vandals and Alemanni. But I’m afraid that victims of the Crusades, or European religious persecutions or indigenous tribesmen still bear a bit of a grudge against the Petrine oligarchs on Vatican Hill. I’m a bit amazed that latter day Huguenots are not screaming for the blood of the Bishop of Rome.
>It’s this group’s mantras that you seem to be parroting.
The only mantra I parrot, and I parrot it from my muse, Calliope, is “Get smarter faster”.
>The Progressive elite. Or as I like to call them, Gramscian Marxists.
Now you are walking your tracers up to the brain of the beast. Conservatives got their butts snookered by Gramscii and his students. I hear nothing but a chronic wail on FR about liberal control of the media, academia, govt bureaucracy, and culture in general, bleeding into the churches, law enforcement, the courts, ethics, the whole enchilada.
Yet at no time do I hear any conservative here admit that this indicates a defeat of, dare I say it, cosmic proportions. We are now fighting the Battle of Tours because or our intractable ignorance of what culture is, how it works and how it evolves. While we were still listening to “How Much is that Doggy in the Window”, tiny studios were recording Bill Haley, Gene Vincent, Carl Perkins. Then came the Beatles and Viet Nam and you know the rest. Revisit those helicopter views of the 2011 Tsunami that hit the Japanese coast. That’s what hit us on the Gramscian battle front and we didn’t have a clue, not a jack rabbit’s inkling of what was in store or even where it was coming from sociologically.
Smarter faster.
I remember when I was 12 I had to lie and tell em' I was 14 so I could get a daylight driving license to drive to my first full time job.
Of course, that's back when we had industries and people worked for a living but then again, we didn't have Unicorns and Rainbows; just jobs and an expanding middle class.
Yeah. Sure. The decades of divorce/cohabitation, man-hating, general trend toward immorality in leadership, officious robberies and consequent economic collapse had nothing to do with it.
Have fun. Enjoy the slide.
Children, by six or seven years old, have a conscience. One can see the conscience because before they have a conscience children can't blush.
It's something I learned when I taught children. I read all I could about the little ones, seeing as how I was going to teach them for a year or so.
Families, that is, families with BOTH parents and maybe even a scattering of relatives, form and maintain the structure of faith. Children, I also learned, generally end up following the father's faith or no faith.
Just an opinion, folks.
Catholicism has absolutes, too many for many Catholics.
The Protestants have it easy, fewer absolutes.
Protestants also have no obligatory Sunday Mass, no holy days of obligation, no first Holy Communion, no obligatory Confirmation, no Holy Communion at least once a year, no confession ever, no penances, no Lenten fast, no Advent time, no abstinence from meat, no divorce-remarry, no nuns, no rosary and no Stations of the Cross.
I agree with your reading of the Church of England.
Islam will be as strong as their families, not unlike any faith. I lived in Saudi Arabia five years with my husband, who worked for ARAMCO. It was quite an education for us. There were as many lukewarm Muslims as their were anything else. They HAD to do the prayers five times a day but God reads hearts, not obligatory prayers with no heart behind them.
Those are interesting stats, and at one level there may actually be a negative correlation between the internet and religion. But there’s another very real side to this coin that is positive for religion––at least the one true religion, the traditional Roman Catholic Church.
As a cradle-Catholic growing up in the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church, like most other Catholics of that earlier generation, I questioned nothing and accepted everything I was told as the truth. That was safe practice until Vatican II. Today I realize that I, along with millions of other Catholics, had been greatly deceived by the modernist bishops. I would have never heard of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre were it not for the internet.
When high speed internet made it’s debut in the late 90’s, for the first time in my life I was able to independently research and learn the dogmatic truths of the Catholic Church, and able to read about the role that St Thomas Aquinas played in shaping the teachings of that Church. I had never even heard of Summa Theologica, much less read any of it, until the intent came along. The bishops of the Church coveted all of this information for themselves.
Today I understand that there exists a Cardinal Mahoney and a Cardinal Burke, and the difference between the two men are great. Because of the internet we know today that the modernists of the Council promoted homosexuality in the seminaries that ultimately led to one of the greatest scandals in ht e history of the Church, not even to mention the harm that it did to so many young men at the time. Were it not for the internet many more of us would still believe that Cardinals like Bernadine, Dolan, Kasper and Marx (to name just a few) actually spoke the truth about the Catholic Church. Today we know they are hardly even Catholic.
I could go and on, but I think I’ve made my point—other than the fact that all of us, because of the internet, have had many opportunities to read and learn so much about our faith, simply by accessing this great Freeper site on the internet.
The long and the short of it as far as I’m concerned, is that the internet has helped a great many of those who seek the Truth, to have a means of actually finding that Truth.
>> LOL! So what’s your problem with being smart?
Asperger’s != smart. Asperger’s = autistic. Autistic != smart.
If you were smart, you’d know the difference without me having to explain it like I explained arithmetic to my toddler son, who is now 23 years old with a mechanical engineering degree. Who also has been diagnosed with Asperger’s, which has nothing to do with his intelligence, but everything to do with his early sociopathic behavior.
>> I ain’t buying into your grizzled, battle scarred, fox hole weary script.
Good, because I ain’t sellin’. I’m keeping it, it’s all mine, I earned every damned bit of it.
>> Have so. I’ve had more run ins with sociopaths, bad tempered Napoleons, scheeming bitches, welchers and back stabbing psychic vampires in my life than you have in a jute mill sack full of your worst nightmares.
And yet these are the people you’re relying on to be the much bally-hooed global villagers. And then amplify the voices of these fools and give them more deviance and power.
There’s a distinct disconnection here, if you’ll forgive the wordplay.
>> Neither Canadian nor career nor academic are cause for a wave off on my boat.
I wave Canadians off because (until recently) they’re so lame that they need to talk about the U.S. to get any excitement going on in their lives. Their snipers and actors are pretty good though, I’ll give them that.
I wave off career academics (at least the non-STEM ones) because they can live out their entire lives without dealing with reality; they only have to deal with other softheaded academics. Sokal taught us all we need to know about that.
At least community organizers have to rub elbows with the proles every now and then. Not so with the ivory tower denizens.
>> Now you are walking your tracers up to the brain of the beast. [...]
Despite your paste-thick prose, we’ve found some common ground.
Your solution to the Gramscian Marxists, who (strangely enough) express the same goals that you have, is to go McLuhan (I guess Kurzweil is too far a step).
I mentioned Stephenson’s sci-fi novel “Snow Crash” in my first response to you. The reason is because Stephenson explored some of the concepts you’re talking about, but used some observations of the nascent networking technologies and extrapolated from them.
He contrasts the utopia of humans acting almost exactly as you describe (in a version of the Sumerian era) with the dystopia of the way things turned out (in a proposed early to mid 21st Century). The humans in the utopia in question gave up thinking for themselves in order to be connected to a sort of hivemind, controlled by a master intelligence (a God-queen) at the “mental BIOS” level, to interact with their fellow humans in the correct way.
By thinking that the Internet will eliminate all religion/theism, you don’t even recognize the need of all humans - even in yourself - to worship SOMETHING. Which was the point of another of my earlier responses to you.
Whether it’s another human, a collection of other humans, the Internet, sex, money, purple toy ponies, or hot rods, there is a need. And until you somehow rip the human out of the meatsack, put it into a machine, and strip out the emotions, this will be the case. But then you aren’t left with anything truly human, are you?
Three words...
Poor adult catechesis.
A word so uncommonly used in the English language it is identified as an error is many spell check programs including the one on FR.
“Religion” doesn’t matter a bit. What’s important is a life pledged to serve Jesus Christ. The internet can’t touch that.
“History is replete with the blaming of outside sources...The outside has been there for millennia and can be overcome.”
Preach it! Whoremonging, idolatry, paganism, gambling, et al, have been with us long before the internet made it where we didn’t need to get off the couch to indulge. Money, weapons, the press, the internet, all tools, used for better or for worse. I have found the internet quite useful in my Christian walk, and I mean as a VERY LARGE factor.
“Protestants also have no obligatory Sunday Mass, no holy days of obligation, no first Holy Communion, no obligatory Confirmation, no Holy Communion at least once a year, no confession ever, no penances, no Lenten fast, no Advent time, no abstinence from meat, no divorce-remarry, no nuns, no rosary and no Stations of the Cross.”
As coincidentally, neither does the Bible.
The Bible doesn't have anything on birth control, anabolic steroids, hallucinatory drugs, in vitro fertilization and a host of other "modern" things but the successor of Peter still has the authority to "loose" and "bind" on earth and in heaven.
Some Christians marry, divorce and remarry. That isn't allowed by the Bible but it's still done. It's still not allowed by Catholicism.
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