Well, we finally have a really rigorous answer to the question:
Did the Internet kill religion?
Yeah, it did.
When Internet penetration rose, religiosity declined in a dataset of 81 countries.
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Post hoc proctor hoc is a fallacy.
you could just as easily conclude that declining religiosity led to increased internet penetration or that both were caused by smart phones or that this is just a conicidence
I suspect the cause is more granular. I believe social media has fueled the personal apostasy. When we were young and spoke foolishly, only those within the sound of our voice on the school playground heard the nonsense. But now, social media allows Satan to inspire worldly
Fraud & abuse has plagued California for too long. It’s time to stop it. Michael Gates will fight the corruption in our Government and put Californians first!
The media could not be played.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichud_HaK
The Orthodox Jewish community has taken a pretty strong stand on this.
The exact type of technology you are willing to use/own serves as a shibboleth in many communities.
I assume the correlation with wealth goes back long before the internet. Maybe the internet is one of many technological / material conveniences available to those in wealthy nations, all of which contribute to religious decline.
Ryan you do not seem to be familiar with religion as beliefs that do not require anybody go to a meeting. Going to a meeting got killed. Religion as a belief system is fine. But I grant you without religion meetings the business of religion gets killed.
Did the internet also kill causal inference? Seems many on here don’t understand the limitations of observational research anymore
Correlation is not causation. It's not like the internet didn't change anything else.
Woke is Gnosticism which is a religion. The Internet has resurrected Gnostic religious belief at a global scale.
I knew this in 2001: "Until three years ago, we'd receive reports of two new ghosts every week, but with the introduction of mobile phones 15 years ago, ghost sightings began to decline to the point where now we are receiving none."
Yeah nah. It just replaced the established religions with with a new one ("the science") + a shit ton of cults.
Ppl don't function without a belief system, religions + cults aren't going anywhere.
I’m curious if it was more exposure to opposing world views or simple distraction that was the primary issue here.
The secularization thesis was obviously wrong by the turn of the century. Hence the classic article by Stark and Berger's repudiation. As Greeley pointed out, religious demand has a standard distribution. That is why atheism stays stable no matter what. Religion is permanent.
