How the Internet Is Taking Away America’s Religion
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
Source/citation/justification? Seems just as easy to make the opposing argument, that mass media technologies are being perfected to the point where it'll soon be possible to use highly optimized Skinner boxes for disseminating propaganda, something like Zynga plus Fox News. The victims would be voluntarily opting in to their own brainwashing.
Case in point.
> We're in the golden age of critical thinking
What if we were to establish schools the same way they existed in the 1800s with the same rigor? Small, mixed classes, all in a single room, hopefully taught by the very well-educated.
I think history's greatest logical thinkers would beg to differ with you. The history books are always trying to be rewritten by someone BUT religious thought has driven this critical thinking and logic for millennial. Also explain why more people are Christians now then ever? Percentage and Numbers???
Good information has always taken work to obtain. The Internet cannot compensate for intellectual laziness, it can only magnify the effectiveness of the efforts of those willing to exercise discernment and look at things with a critical eye.
I live in the U.S. where the country was built by those that wanted freedom of religion.
That's a bit of a stretch. In Puritan New England, worshipping anything other than the Christian God was a capital offence.
Notice the word "especially". Scientology is based on the idea of what some might call aliens having superhuman powers. In atheism, a number of superhuman powers, i.e. things that humans cannot do, are ascribed to science- even though there is nothing that disallows that God could be involved in everything from the big bang to evolution, somehow the Big Bang and Evolution take on a life of their own, without full understanding of them.
Darwin takes the place of a prophet, although Darwin himself was not an atheist [1] and said, "Science has nothing to do with Christ, except insofar as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence."
Faith and science can co-exist, but atheism has a belief that they can't. They put up billboards, organize, take donations, have musical rallies at military bases with atheist songs, and pass out literature like evangelical religions. And they are as intolerant and unaccepting as well. I find them quite obnoxious, but atheism is a religion, therefore according to our freedom of religion, it must be allowed, but it should be allowed along with the free practice of any other religion in any place, at any time, in any public place.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Charles_Darw...
Of course they can co-exist, and atheism has nothing to say against religion: religion, by definition, is non-falsifiable, so atheism can not negate it.
Atheism is, nevertheless, very sceptical about the actual existence of a supreme being. It can't prove its non-existence, but still considers it as veeeery improbable. As "there are a million reasons which explain why we believe in god which are much more probable than the fact that god exists".
So yes, you can accept science and religion, but accepting the later can not be based on reason (because there is no logical method to disprove the existence of god)
As explained in the link, there are two kind of atheists: gnostic-atheists (strong-atheists) and agnostic-atheists (weak-atheists)
In my opinion, since proving the existence/non-existence of gods (and spaghetti monsters, and pink unicorns) is impossible, gnostic-atheism is untenable (in the same sense that gnostic-theism is untenable).
But, and I think this what matters for an atheist to identify as such, the fact that the non-existence of god can not be proved does not make it an important subject. It is just one of those things that can not be proved or disproved (by construction), and has no more relevance that the orbiting of a tea pot around the sun.
EDIT: actually, I stand corrected by this very interesting article and I will stick to the Sagan Plausability Scale for these discussions: http://www.skepticink.com/incredulous/2013/08/20/why-the-fam...
I guess that what I am trying to say is that a "strong atheist" (with judgements based on reason), can not really assert with 100% confidence that god does not exist. He can, nevertheless, be convinced that the likelihood of its existence is for all practical purposes 0.
It is not that he "believes that god does not exist", it is more that he thinks along the lines of "why should I care about this particular teapot?"
Reason doesn't rely on falsifiability (science does, but science is a subset of reason, not the same thing as reason.)
Wait, what?
As an atheist, I never realized I believe in and worship Darwin as a superhuman controlling power. Thanks for pointing this out to me! I'll make sure to put a Darwinian altar in my house and pray to it daily, for giving me food to eat and keeping my family members healthy!
Also, talking about the actions of a small number of atheists, as if you're talking about all atheists, is just as ignorant as calling out all Christians for the actions of the Westboro Baptist Church.
Well done, for confirming the prejudice of narrow mindedness that both your fellow countrymen and fellow Christians already have to deal with.
No it's not. Your entire argument is based on a false premise.
1. http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/04/21/303375...
I think it would be better to let someone submit the paper separately, or for us all to just upvote your comment.
Edit: Oops, version conflict. I was talking about a bit you edited out (about multiple links).
In a "merged thread" the title could have more than one link value (but still have a canonical (by mod standard) top ranked url.) And the discussion could be merged to one thread (or version controlled in correspondence with a particular top level link.)
I also think it would have some other benefits:
Whenever this is important to me I'll get the link from the comments.
Also given NPR also interviewed Downey so 'value added' I wouldn't have necessarily given Technology Review preference.
> NPR also interviewed Downey so 'value added'
Fair, but I'm doubtful many people here listen to the audio.
"I'm so proud. Structure of all responses to my paper: (1) New study says Internet is a tool of Satan, (2) correlation does not imply causation, so this paper is stupid, (3) here, on the basis of no evidence at all, is the real cause of religious disaffiliation."
The way the internet has contorted the original study to make sensationalist commentary is pretty hilarious.
The phrasing "blame on the internet" (along with college, apparently) implies a bias for religion over more agnostic views, but I guess this is NPR reporting the religionists' interpretation rather than NPR's.
Increasing year of birth means increasing human knowledge. While it was convincing a long time ago to have a god for thunder, for fire, for love and a thousand other things, we learned that thunder works without any god. And now people learn that the universe works without any god at all, i.e. monotheistic religions are no longer as convincing as they used to be.
What, since the 1990s? No, don't be silly. There may have been a bump due to improved access to basic human knowledge. Is this what you mean?
Really weak since more people go to church now then they did in 1994! :) The numbers show that more people attend church percentage wise then ever in history of America. Don't even look at World Wide church attendance because it might make your mind explode on how much Christianity has grown.
It is always shocking how people report the death of religion without the numbers. I think people who are religious are the origins of this myth.
Look at this one look at USA http://hirr.hartsem.edu/research/fastfacts/fast_facts.html
Worldwide (Based on CIA world facts and few others http://fastestgrowingreligion.com/numbers.html
"In 1990, 20.4% of the population attended an Orthodox Christian church on any given weekend. In 2000, that percentage dropped to 18.7% and to 17.7% by 2004. Olson explains that while church attendance numbers have stayed about the same from 1990 to 2004, the U.S. population has grown by 18.1% — more than 48 million people. "So even though the number of attendees is the same, our churches are not keeping up with population growth," he says." http://www.churchleaders.com/pastors/pastor-articles/139575-...
http://fastestgrowingreligion.com/numbers.html. Global Christian growth rate 1.36% is below the population groth rate of 1.41 %. Which is a sign of a slow death, Islam at 2.13% on the other hand is well above that.
"Q: How many people go to church each Sunday? A: For years, the Gallup Research Organization has come up with a consistent figure — 40 percent of all Americans, or roughly 118 million people, who said they attended worship on the previous weekend. Recently, sociologists of religion have questioned that figure, saying Americans tend to exaggerate how often they attend. By actually counting the number of people who showed up at representative sample of churches, two researchers, Kirk Hadaway and Penny Marler found that only 20.4 percent of the population, or half the Gallup figure, attended church each weekend. As added proof for the accuracy of this smaller percentage of churchgoers, if 20.4% of Americans (approximately 63 million in 2010) attended the nation's 350,000 congregations weekly then the average attendance would be 180 people per congregation which is almost exactly the figure that numerous research studies have found."
Care with studies. Most Christians "just know" Christianity is falling away and pay big money to people who predict the death of the faith (George Barna AKA father of Christians divorce rate is the same or higher then non-Christian divorce rate though the one issue is his numbers were all a lie). The truth is that it has grown in mind blowing numbers and really hasn't slowed down except in Mainline denominations and Catholic Churches. The vast majority of stats are if people were honest to the question did they go to church. The surprise is most people are dishonest that they attend church weekly. Case in point East Sunday attendance is huge compared to normal weekly attendance.
I think people are just being blind to the meteoric rise of Christianity in the past 100 years. In 1910 more then half the Christians in the world were European.
Here is a good academic study. http://www.gordonconwell.edu/resources/Center-for-the-Study-...
When I went to Catholic schools from the late 1970s to the 1980s, about half the teachers were in religious orders, half lay people.
My cousin goes to Catholic schools right now. None of his teachers thus far have been religious, all have been lay people.
Such a shift in the past half century, along with other trends, is bound to affect religious devotion.
The Internet probably has an effect. I think the effect it has is one of degree. Years ago, people seemed to be divided into fundamentalists, and those who might doubt, say, that Joshua made the sun stand still in order to prevent sundown so that the Israelis could defeat the Amorites, or that the pope as Vicar of Christ speaks infallibly on matters of faith, and so forth. On say Reddit's /r/atheism there are so many secular people, that doubting people become complete atheists as opposed to moderate or liberal Christians. Those who doubt stop believing things completely, whereas in the old days they may have stuck around and been part of a church's liberal/moderate wing.
There also seems to be a counter-trend where those who stay in the church become even more fundamentalist. Michael Harrington wrote about this in "The Politics at God's Funeral". It creates a cyclical effect - as the moderates leave, the fundamentalists make the churches more and more fundamental and fanatic, driving out the moderates still left, which gives the fundamentalists even more power and the church drives out those moderates still left and so on.
That's a fascinating point. The question is, as this circular process reaches a new equilibrium, what are we left with?
Bit like what you can see with friends who push their partying too hard. They alienate more conservative friends but find agreeable social partners elsewhere, gradually re-filling their social circle with other hard partiers. Over time, perhaps what was normal seems boring and the behaviour gets worse?
Another time I advised him against purchasing mutual funds because as a Economics/Finance major, we learned that mutual funds have many lot of questionable hidden costs and their market performance aren't the most sound vehicle for investing one's salary but he basically told me that he trusts the sales person because he is also Catholic. He was newly wed, living with his parents, had a baby on the way, and made the same salary as me which wasn't much. I didn't feel bad though.
What I got from this is that even with the face of evidence and hard facts, some people are just that attached to religion, an old artifact for a time when science and logic were persecuted and laughed at, it was just shocking to see it continue so rigidly.
(For the uninitiated, yes, this is trolling.)