How the Internet Is Taking Away America’s Religion

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/526111/how-the-internet-is-taking-away-americas-religion/

by icpmacdo • 12 years ago

50 73 12 years ago

icpmacdo2• 12 years ago

I think that there is much more of a culture of admitting to things these days that would be more socially unacceptable than even back in the 90's. I also think that they are low balling it saying "Downey predicts the most likely changes between now and 2040 are that the percentage of people without a religious preference reach 25 percent. " I expect that number to be reasonably higher in the united states, it would be very interesting if it was 25% of the worlds population with out a preference in 2040.

jmspring2• 12 years ago

I think there will be regions where it will be much higher (the south, bible belt, etc), but there are parts of this country where it will also be much lower (New England/the west coast). If immigration is opened up at the farm labor/blue collar end of the skill spectrum, there will likely be an up tick in religious observance in areas that might otherwise trend downward (California).

jaredsohn• 12 years ago

I think you switched lower/higher around (the GP was talking about people _without_ religious observance.)

betterunix• 12 years ago

Could be the Internet, could be the phase-out of TEL...

(For the uninitiated, yes, this is trolling.)

ds9• 12 years ago

It is intuitive that exposure to a wider range of ideas than found in one's home area undermines religious faith, but interesting to have this confirmed. Anecdotally I have noticed signs of this worldwide.

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.

JackFr• 12 years ago

What's intuitive to you could also be called confirmation bias. And I don't believe this article really proves it at all.

bdcravens• 12 years ago

Would issues of faith - by definition, those things you can't see or prove - require homogeneity? Pinpricks of doubt would likely erode such delicate beliefs. In a connected world, where you can interact with those who don't look like you or have your experience, it seems those pinpricks would be easier to come across.

gwern• 12 years ago

Really weak result. One factor over a short time period in a single country without throwing in the dozens of other variables? This is exactly the sort of result you expect to go away in subsequent time periods. (Also, the OP's confusion about correlation/causation in the hilarious bit about logistic regression certainly doesn't increase my confidence in this result.)

Alex39172• 12 years ago

I agree, though I wouldn't be surprised if it were true right now. The Internet is undoubtedly the greatest tool that has ever been created for spreading religion, but in the short term it probably just magnifies whatever the larger social/religious fads are, e.g. new atheism.

mullingitover3• 12 years ago

It's also the greatest tool that has ever been created for destroying superstition and myth. We're in the golden age of critical thinking, something that is very destructive to religious belief.

azakai2• 12 years ago

The link appears to have been edited - the current link does not mention logistic regression at all, and gives a very valid description about the relationship between correlation and causation.

dang5• 12 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7625435

dang5• 12 years ago

I changed the url from [1] to the article it cites, which is more substantive. But should we link to the actual paper [2] instead?

1. http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/04/21/303375...

2. http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.5534

raldi2• 12 years ago

No, it's confusing enough already that this post is filled with obsolete NPR and NPR-quoting comments. (Though I appreciate that your change wasn't done invisibly!)

I think it would be better to let someone submit the paper separately, or for us all to just upvote your comment.

dang5• 12 years ago

People say this a lot, but it isn't clear to me how this would work. Would you like to discuss it? Email to hn@ycombinator.com is probably best so we don't disrupt the thread.

Edit: Oops, version conflict. I was talking about a bit you edited out (about multiple links).

icpmacdo2• 12 years ago

Thank you :) . I think linking to the paper would be best.

aaron695• 12 years ago

I'd say most people definitely don't have time for the extra effort of reading original papers.

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.

dang5• 12 years ago

That's how I personally use HN too, which is why I didn't make the paper itself the primary link. Good point about it almost always being referenced in the thread.

NPR also interviewed Downey so 'value added'

Fair, but I'm doubtful many people here listen to the audio.

danbruc3• 12 years ago

But what of the other 50 percent? In the data, the only factor that correlates with this is date of birth—people born later are less likely to have a religious affiliation. But as Downey points out, year of birth cannot be a causal factor. “So about half of the observed change remains unexplained,” he says.

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.

pradocchia• 12 years ago

Increasing year of birth means increasing human knowledge.

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?

azakai2• 12 years ago

And the improved access is likely mostly due to the internet.

danbruc3• 12 years ago

Good point, raw increase in human knowledge is probably not a good explanation. But it is almost a quarter of a century since 1990, the rate at which new knowledge is obtained is constantly increasing, the Internet made access to this knowledge easier than ever before, people have - I guess - more time available to spend on such topics, the Internet enabled discussions in a way not possible before, ... Therefore a better explanation is probably easier access to knowledge than raw increase in knowledge.

crag• 12 years ago

“Thou art god, I am god. All that groks is god.”

pastProlog• 12 years ago

When my mother went to Catholic schools in the US in the late 1940s and 1950s, every teacher was a member of a religious order.

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.

sjwright3• 12 years ago

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?

prawn2• 12 years ago

In some cases, maybe a secretive minority willing to die for the incredible belief in their cause and not enough moderates to criticise their behaviour?

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?

sjwright3• 12 years ago

The more fascinating question is why the widespread availability of knowledge and information hasn't done a better job of overcoming provincial superstitions.

sjwright3• 12 years ago

To the downvoters: what did you find objectionable about my contribution?

notastartup2• 12 years ago

I remember reading a piece about how Catholic church is trying to ban people from using condom and thought it was pretty ridiculous that they were against safety. A fellow Android developer was catholic and started a long rant about how condoms promote infidelity and adultery -_- and he literally sat in front of the screen for hours writing a huge rebuttal to what I have said.

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.

joeclark773• 12 years ago

So... did he make money on the mutual funds? If so, joke's on you, right? Evidence and hard facts seem to support his position on the other issue, now, don't they?

notastartup2• 12 years ago

I think he's divorced now so it probably doesn't matter.

keerthiko• 12 years ago

Allen was my professor at Olin. In a facebook comment to when another prof posted an article about this "study" he did (which was purely for computational statistics purposes, not to really make a theological statement), his response:

"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.

baldfat5• 12 years ago

Myth: Less people go to church now then in the past.

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

Retric2• 12 years ago

Your ignoring population growth. As there is around 50 million more people in the us now than there was in 1994.

"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.

daveqr• 12 years ago

"The numbers show that more people attend church percentage wise then ever in history of America."

gwawr• 12 years ago

Correllation != Causation

donkeyd3• 12 years ago

This reminds me of the graph correlating a decrease in the number of pirates to global warming.

How the Internet Is Taking Away America’s Religion

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