Is the internet destroying religion?

[Fidel_Castronaut]

This is bullshit. It goes as deep as people want it to. The problem is people don't want to go very deep. That's society's fault not the internet.

It's real good at three articles on a subject. Want the treatise underlying the articles, find a book. In part this is because not all information is free. And as I said there are exceptions.

It depends. Search on google scholar and you can get tens of thousands of peer reviewed research instantly.

I'd even posit that modern academia couldn't function without the internet. As a research student I can get information almost immediately on topics that not even my university library holds, specifically current or new research that won't be released in a hard copy format for years to come.

[Napoléon]

It depends. Search on google scholar and you can get tens of thousands of peer reviewed research instantly.

I was going to point this out but I could only see myself getting into an argument. Truth is, the internet has millions of sources that a single library cannot hope to ever contend with. But, as I said, I still don't get why anyone would compare a library to the internet. They're just completely different things that fill completely different purposes for completely different people.

[Zidneya]

[Anomalocaris]

No. Naive.


Libraries choose what books are stocked on the shelves. The internet is far more democratic. Once the seed of doubt is planted anyone is free to seek books which will expand the idea.

No really. The internet is general provides very little really deep knowledge. It's more like have a super fantastic encyclopedia, universal news subscription, and the worlds greatest collection of trivia--yes there are exceptions including things like Project Gutenberg. But it isn't a substitute for a good library yet, though it can do many things the library can't.

If only 95% of the people would have gone as deep as a popular encyclopedia on anything before the rise of internet.

[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.

[Michael]

Cap'n. I believe you are looking at the wrong statistic. Don't look at the literacy rate at the time the printing press was invented. Look at the literacy rate afterwards!! The printing press drove remarkable literacy rates. And that was down to one thing: the bible. Look at literacy rates of the founding generations in America - all free people learned to read, and they learned to read so that they could read the bible, first the Geneva Bible then the 'King James' bible. And it then didn't stop at the bible. Once the people could read, they were open to all sorts of material. Just think of the impact of Thomas Paine's 'Rights of Man' in America. It was arguably the catalyst that drove independence and was a major stepping stone to the French Revolution. It certainly inspired Washington and Franklin to believe in independence. And then his 'The American Crisis' ("These are the times that try men's souls") enthused and galvanised Americans when all was looking lost.

The printing press drove remarkable literacy rates in all layers of society (we are not just talking about an elite; the printing press absolutely crushed the previous paradigm of reading only being for the elite classes), and drove huge political changes, and changes in world order that are arguably still reaching their conclusion. It opened up all levels of society to new knowledge; it empowered the working classes and even empowered slaves who could use the bible against their owners. I see nothing of that sort happening with the internet, certainly nothing on that scale. I can only imagine what George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine would make of the use we put a remarkable new technology to.

[Foxaèr]

Religion destroys itself. The internet is merely a popular medium by which that can be shown to people.

[Michael]

And the idea that we didn't know about other religions and views before the internet is just patent nonsense. Part of our school curriculum, before the internet was a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee eyes, was comparative religion. I then chose to read some more books about various other faiths. There was plenty of information readily available, and it was part of mainstream education in the UK. We weren't living in the dark ages before the internet.

[Tonus]

If only 95% of the people would have gone as deep as a popular encyclopedia on anything before the rise of internet.

Yep. Information has always been accessible, but few people make any effort to get at it. In the past it might have been a bit tougher to get to, but it was there. Today we have lots of good information available at our fingertips, but... compare the number of times useful information is accessed versus the number of comments left on sites like ESPN or YouTube (by people who obviously never accessed a piece of useful information).

[Mr Greene]

It isn't the information per se. Rather it's the ability to communicate anonymously. This allows people with doubts (that are usually instigated by the more rabid believers) to know that they aren't alone when society presents a homogeneous mass of of probable believers.
We can out-number believers 20:1 and yet remain near invisible whereas some believers will dominate any group with the inability to shut up.

Of course there is the hypothesis that we're reinstating the Egyptian beliefs in writing on walls and worshiping cats...