World’s most common Mythconceptions debunked

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/common-mythconceptions-worlds-most-contagious-falsehoods/

AlterNet / By Amanda Marcotte

Why It’s Harder Than Ever for Religions to Con Their Followers

It’s more difficult for religions to control their believers’ access to information.

November 12, 2014 |

While the burgeoning atheist movement loves throwing conferences and selling books, a huge chunk–possibly most–of its resources go toward the Internet. This isn’t borne out of laziness or a hostility to wearing
pants so much as a belief that the Internet is uniquely positioned as
the perfect tool for sharing arguments against religion with believers
who are experiencing doubts. It’s searchable, it allows back-and-forth debate, and it makes proving your arguments through links much easier.
Above all else, it’s private. An online search on atheism is much easier to
hide than, say, a copy of The God Delusion on your nightstand.

In recent months, this sense that the Internet is the key for
atheist
outreach has started to move from “hunch” to actual, evidence-based
theory. Earlier this year, Allen Downey of the Olin College of
Engineering in Massachusetts examined the spike in people declaring
they had no religion that started in the ’90s and found that while there
are many factors contributing to it–dropping familial pressure,
increased levels of college education–increased Internet usage was
likely a huge part of it, accounting for up to 25 percent of the decline
in religious belief. While cautioning that correlation does not mean
causation, Downey did go on to point out that since so many other
factors were controlled for, it’s a safe bet to conclude that the access
to varied thought and debate the Internet provides is persuading people
to drop their religions.

But in the past few months, that
hypothesis grew even stronger when a major American religion basically
had to admit that Internet arguments against their faith is putting
them on their heels. The Church of Latter Day Saints has quietly
released a series of essays, put together by church historians,
addressing some of the less savory aspects of their history, such as
the practice of polygamy or the ban on black members.
The church
sent out a memo in September telling church leaders to direct believers
who have questions about their religion’s history to these essays,
which they presented as a counter to “detractors” who “spread
misinformation and doubt.”

While there are plenty of detractors who will share their opinions offline, there’s little doubt that the bulk of the detractors plaguing the church are explaining their views online, which is why this has become a problem now for a church that used to act like it could exert total control over believers’ access to information. One of the church historians, Steven Snow, openly cited the internet as the source of the
criticisms. “There is so much out there on the Internet ,” he told the New York Times, “that we felt we owed our members a safe place where they could go to get reliable,
faith-promoting information that was true about some of these more difficult aspects of our history.”

While the memo sent to church leaders strongly implied that
the
websites bothering believers are full of disinformation, the likelier
story is that they’re worried about all the historically accurate
information out there. The Mormons tend to be plagued more than other
major churches by historically accurate information, because they are a
relatively new church and the historical records on their founders like
Joseph
Smith and Brigham Young are intact and hard to deny. This
concern is reflected in the nature of the essays, which openly admit a
lot of information that the church used to spend a lot of effort in
minimizing, facts like exactly how many wives Joseph Smith had or the
fact that polygamy was practiced by many members long after the church
officially banned it. Not that they had much of a choice. If members of
the church learn this stuff from Wikipedia instead of from their own
religious
authorities, it will likely sow more anger and distrust of the church for misleading them.

The Internet generally gathered around
President
Obama for his recent comments endorsing an extremely strong version of
net neutrality that would make it very difficult for corporate internet
providers to give certain people preferential internet access over
others. His comments were seen as a victory for political activists,
everyday bloggers, and non-profits that would lose out on the ability
to compete with moneyed corporations and other institutions in the
free-for-all that is internet discourse. But
atheists and critics of religion also win out with net neutrality.
Giant, well-funded churches would probably love to pay for
better access to your computer screen than any atheist blogger could afford,
but if net neutrality becomes the law, they won’t have that ability.

The Mormons might be the most obvious example of a church
that
has had to deal directly with non-believers using the Internet to get
unprecedented abilities to publicize their critiques of religion, but
there’s good reason to believe that the feedback religions are getting
online is hurting other churches. Is it any coincidence that Pope
Francis is undertaking the monumental task of trying to make the
Catholic Church seem a little less forbidding in the age of the
Internet?

At a recent conference on technology held by the Archdiocese
of Los Angeles, Monsignor Paul Tighe expressed concerns that
the
Catholic Church is losing out by not being more aggressive online. “If
the church in some way is not present in the digital, we’re going to be
absent from the experi nce and from the lives of many people,” he said.

“If we withdraw, then we’re leaving those areas to the trolls. We’re leaving it to the bullies.”

Again,
it’s hard to believe that trolls and bullies, as irritating as they
may be, are the real issue here–trolling is aggravating, but it’s not
very persuasive. No, the real threat to the faith is people making
strong cases against the Catholic Church and religion in general. Some
of those cases are boldly stated and some are more polite and
accommodating, but either way, they
are real arguments and far more threatening to religion than some trolls saying stupid stuff that is best ignored.

It will be interesting to see how religions adapt to the fact
that
the Internet makes it that much harder for them to control their
believers’ access to information. Some will probably be adaptable, like
the Mormons, realizing that a little more information-sharing and
transparency is the only way to keep trust alive. Others, like Pastor
Mark Driscoll of the fundamentalist Mars Hill Church in Seattle, will
react by doubling down, trying to convince their followers to stay off the Internet rather than read persuasive cases against
their
beliefs. But the Internet’s beauty is it makes satisfying basic
curiosity as easy as typing some words into a search bar. Odds are
that’s a temptation fewer and fewer believers will be able to resist.

Amanda Marcotte co-writes the blog Pandagon. She is the author of “It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments.”
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