Now that mobile phones and the internet have altered the epistemic selective landscape in a revolutionary way, every religious organisation must scramble to evolve defences or become extinct.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults.
I don't subscribe to organised religion. I've travelled enough to see that adherents of organised religion often attack adherents of other religions.
Countless religious innovators over the years have played the game of establishing an identity for themselves by accentuating their otherness.
Religion often partakes of the myth of progress that shields us from the terrors of an uncertain future.
Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with.
Over the centuries, religion has become institutionalized, and in the process encrusted with elaborate hierarchies, top-heavy bureaucracies, highly specialized roles and reflexive routines.
True religious movements prosper and flourish under tribulation.
There is something almost sacred about the Internet. I'm trying to secularize it.
The big challenge our society faces is that we live in an increasingly open world with increasingly closed communities. This is also due to the evolution of the Internet, where people only read things that won't challenge their beliefs.
The great myth that many social scientists want to encourage is that there is an incompatibility between modern technology and traditional religion. This is absolute nonsense. If anything, it's the reverse.