Is the internet really killing religion in the US?
Is the internet really killing religion in the US?
The number of Americans saying they have no religion has risen alongside internet usage – but there is a simple explanation
Andrew Brown
Tuesday 8 April 2014 11.35 ED
... There certainly is something to explain. The number of Americans describing themselves as having "no religion" rose from 8% to 18% between 2000 and 2010. How much of this was due to the fact that the number of people using the internet regularly rose from negligible proportions to about 80% of the US population? At the beginning of that period, when internet usage was still fairly restricted, it was possible to believe that there was something intrinsically enlightening about the medium. Nowadays of course we all read the web and know it is full of tripe. If 90% of everything is rubbish, according to Sturgeon's Law, then online, 99.99% of everything is ...
Nor has the rise of irreligion coincided with a rise in what you might call rationalism. The self-conscious sceptics, opponents of homeopathy and credulity of all sorts, remain an angry minority. Faith in supernatural beings, however vaguely defined, remains much higher than church attendance. In this country it has hardly fallen at all in the last 20 years ...
There's also the more general point that online life has shown the spontaneous development of almost all the things that make organised religion obnoxious: cults of personality, mindless conformity, furious arguments over wholly unimportant trivia. These are on display on self-consciously atheist sites quite as much as anywhere else, and why shouldn't they be? As soon as you start using theological opinions as a badge of identity, you have stepped into the whirlpool.
But there is one blindingly obvious reason why being online might diminish religious observance and it has nothing to do with ideas. It's simply that every hour you spend online is an hour spent not doing other things. What keeps religious affiliation alive is practice, or ritualised belief. The strongest religions are the least visible ones, because they are so tightly woven into the symbols of every day life. And someone online is almost by definition not performing collective religious acts. Mobile technology might change this, but it hasn't yet. It is the social function of religion that weakens. Belief is an epiphenomenon. What kills American religion isn't argument. It's Facebook.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/08/internet-killing-religion-us
= new reply since forum marked as read
This is the famous increase in global warming vs decline in pirates as posted by the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
See http://metinmediamath.wordpress.com/2013/10/17/more-pirates-less-global-warming-wait-what/ for a writeup.