Is the internet destroying religion?

[CapnAwesome]

In terms of access to information, I don't think the internet has given us the great shift that occurred with the moveable type printing press. If people are interested in knowledge then books have been a good source for the last 500 years, and perhaps encouraged a deeper knowledge than the often 'short and shallow' type of knowledge communicated on the internet. I tip my hat to public libraries before the internet.

So, no. If anything the internet just seems to have shortened attention spans and dumbed-down the discussion, present company excluded of course :-) I don't see it as greatly changing people's views, or at least not more than books and libraries used to anyway.

Am I sounding old? :-)

I think the internet blows the printing press out of the water in terms of widespread access to information. (The first thing printed on the Gutenberg was the bible after all.) When the printing press was invented the literacy rate amongst the general population was still low enough to basically be 0% So the initial effect was negligible. The only reason that we know the printing press was such an amazing invention is that through history we can see the major effect that it had, which was leading to widespread literacy, which took hundreds of years.

Comparatively the internet is still in it's infancy and already you can communicate with people from all over the world, something that was almost completely impossible even in my lifetime (I'm 31) Where as you deride the ideas presented on the internet as dumbed-downed and contributing to the short attention span of the public, it is more like the intellectually disinfranchised masses can now distill their ideas for the public. Books are far more limiting in that 99% of us don't have the motivation, means or indeed the attention span to publish a book. So for all of the previous generation of all of history the regular people had 0 outlet to express anything. Did you know that we have exactly 0 documents of any kind written by a medieval European peasant? 0. It doesn't mean that they had nothing important to say, but rather that they had no means to do so.

The reason that this is important to the downfall of religion (and subsequent rise of Atheism) is that for every previous generation ever they have never had the exposure to contradictory ideas about religion. There may have been books and arguments written about religion, but considering the strong social stigma placed on Atheism by most of the people in any given community in times past, they would be extremely unlikey to ever even pick up such a book. Now with the internet it is almost impossible to not be exposed to not just Atheism, but almost any number of ideas.

So where you deride the internet as being dumbed downed discussion, maybe you should think of instead of being digestible to the average person.