The religious authorities and pundits are wrong: Technology is good for religion

[cbayer]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/the-religious-authorities-and-pundits-are-wrong-technology-is-good-for-religion/2012/05/31/gJQAsDHi6U_story.html



By Lisa Miller, Friday, June 1, 5:43 AM

Sikhs don’t make much religion news. They don’t go on TV announcing their intention to burn Korans; they don’t loudly forecast apocalypse; and they have not had to defend their faith as one of them races to be president of the United States. But the Sikh community caught my attention recently with the announcement of its FlyRight app, which, when installed on a smartphone, allows Sikhs to advise one another about airport security staff members who may be predisposed to harass or detain fellow Sikhs. FlyRight advertises itself as a “personal empowerment app.”

Information technology means the end of organized religion — or, at least, that’s what the opinion-makers say. The existence of Google, argued the atheist Hemant Mehta on the Web site of this newspaper, “is a death knell for religion as we know it,” because it enables people to instantly discover verifiable truths about the universe (evolution, the sex lives of clergy). In a pre-Internet world, they could have been kept in the dark. Last month, 40,000 Orthodox Jews met in a New York baseball stadium to bemoan the erosion of values in their communities thanks to the Internet. “It brings out the worst in us!” a spokesman for the event told reporters.

I would argue that the opposite is true. Technology can greatly enhance religious practice. Groups that restrict and fear it participate in their own demise.

Take the Sikh app, for instance. It’s cool on a practical level. It distributes pertinent information to a specific group in need of that information. But it also has perhaps unintended spiritual and religious consequences. It encourages among users a broad sense of community and mutual support, which is what good religion does. It abets religious affiliation, promotes action in the face of injustice or oppression, and welcomes outsiders, or anyone who experiences discrimination at airports, to use the app and see themselves, in some way, as Sikhs.


more at link

[Politicalboi]

1. Now the Poop can

Download his own child pornography, and chat with other pedophiles all while being anonymous.

[laconicsax]

2. Autocorrect?

[Adsos Letter]

3. Technology works both ways.

The technological breakthrough of Gutenberg fed religious growth in many forms, as well as the spread of Enlightenment ideals, and the development of an readily accessible body of scientific knowledge.

[cbayer]

4. The churches that might choose to eschew technology

are going to find themselves on the losing end of this.

Young people are leaving churches in large numbers, but not necessarily leaving their faith or beliefs. The churches that can adapt to and use technology are likely to speak to these people in a much more inviting way.

[Silent3]

5. I'm going to share this article with all of my Amish friends on Facebook.

Correction: What am I saying? Facebook? They're Amish. Probably still on Myspace.

[rug]

7. They'll get it.

http://amishamerica.com/do-the-amish-use-computers-and-the-internet/

[dimbear]

6. In the early days, much of the power and strength of religion came from a secret invention:

the religionists had a name for their secret way of transmitting information: priest writing, or as we now say, hieroglyphics. Over time it leaked out into the lay world, we now know a variation of it as the alphabet.

[rug]

8. Writing was invented to keep track of property long before religious writing.

"The advent of a writing system, however, seems to coincide with the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to more permanent agrarian encampments when it became necessary to count ones property, whether it be parcels of land, animals or measures of grain or to transfer that property to another individual or another settlement."

http://www.historian.net/hxwrite.htm

What implications do you get from that?

[dimbear]

9. The beginnings of writing are an area of much scholarly dispute. Most of the dispute

is merely semantic, questioning what does and doesn't represent a writing system.

The mud hen tracks of Mohenjo Daro come to mind, and before that the antler scratches from the Pleistocene. All that doesn't detract from the early religionists using their secret high-tech knowledge to promote their hegemony.

I have suggested before that this strange 'being able to write' explains the dominance of the Abrahamic religions. Of course by that I mean 'being able to write if you are a male and in the priestly caste.'

The actual history of how writing leaked out of Egypt into the rest of the world must be amusing. I like the theory that the first letters were simplified hieroglyphics of words that began with the letter in question. It's so reminiscent of kindergarten that it ought to be true.